Lurker > transience

I'm actually really neutral on it which is the one place I never thought I'd be. I figured I'd either really love it or think it's absolute garbage. instead I'm just kinda eh.

the pacing is really awful due to dragging out every single section of midgar to the nth degree - but there are parts where it absolutely sings. I think I was really into it when I was at chapter 4 but by the time I got to chapter 7 or 8, I was less enthused.

wall market, though. wall market.

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xyzzy

I had a nice Silent heart kill on a20 last night. runic pyramid was the heart of the run, with a number of 2 cost poison cards, tough bandages and two footworks for scaling. nothing super crazy, but the heart went down pretty easy.

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xyzzy

nah, I'd say FF7 is a much bigger one than Samus. Samus was a "...huh" moment, but it didn't really impact anything since it was just an action character in a game with no dialogue and not much backstory (maybe there was something in the manual, but eh)

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xyzzy

I just had the most broken defect run ever.

https://i.imgur.com/3vZiFmh.jpeg

the key here is bottled echo form, letting me play my first card every turn twice. I have an absolute boatload of power cards and bird-faced urn which heals me for 2hp each time I play one. I also have self repair so I can heal for 20 each fight if I play it first. I took 50 damage to the jawworm pack on turn 1 and was at full hp by the end.

I also have two biased cognitions, panacea+ and core surge which lets me boost my focus up to about 25 with no downside thanks to all the artifact charges. I also bought the artifact relic too. sometimes I was rocking 5 or 6 artifact charges which seemed wild. I swapped cracked core for frozen core so once I had my focus in place, the game played itself.

my biggest fear here was awakened one, because my hand is entirely power cards.. and I got him as my second act 3 boss. I played my power cards anyway and just outscaled the fuck out of him. he was hitting for like 130 by the end but I was blocking for 350 a turn at my peak. I eventually just stopped taking turns and let a dark orb power up to 350 (only took two turns thanks to focus and all my Loops) and killed him in one hit.

the sword and shield was scarier than the heart, and I knew that going in since they hit hard right at the start. I managed to beat that at full hp though thanks to skipping echo form and just going wild on focus since it's a short fight. the heart's beat hit me a few times, but other than that, no big deal. I finished the fight at full hp.

fun stuff!

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xyzzy

I just helped bail my son out on a defect run (he plays on normal because hey he's 7). he had this goofy run that had 3 storm+'s which are innate. his strategy was to play them, play electrodynamics and his other power cards to channel tons of lightning orbs, and then finish it off with thunder strike. it was crude but it worked!

...except that he unfortunately drew awakened one so I had to help him show restraint on just dumping all of his power cards immediately. some carefully played glacier, consume, charge battery and go for the eyes and we barely eeked out a win. vulnerable potion and thunder strike+ with that setup is a fun 200 damage though!

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xyzzy

android's coming, supposedly

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xyzzy

oh nice. I had a silent a20 clear today - a nice synergy with tough bandages, hovering kite and tools of the trade for free energy/block every turn. I had 3 prepared cards for free block/cycling my deck and found a second wraith form in the act 4 store to make the heart trivial.


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xyzzy

I play entirely too much Slay the Spire, especially now that there's a mobile version. anyone else play on ascension mode?

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xyzzy

I have my issues with the contest over the years, but less Mario and Zelda games is fine by me. I felt the same in 2004 with one nom per generation. sure, FF8 and Majora didn't make it, but that's okay. the bigger issue is that they were replaced by games like Adventure and Phantasy Star that had no chance against anyone.

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xyzzy

yeah I'm not convinced that Smash is actually stronger

but we'll never know

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xyzzy

I mean, Xenoblade has to be neck and neck with Skyrim for Smash to beat Witcher 3. and... maybe? but that's not encouraging.

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xyzzy

I was more interested to see Smash against 'real' competition than Mario. that game felt so fraudulent. it would have been nice to see both Smash and Mario on neutral ground given that Witcher looked to be on par with both.

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xyzzy

Leon is making me want to rank contests

that can be my next year project. I have a few other contest ideas but I do them like once a year

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xyzzy

it's hard to say. Sonic would seemingly lose to like 15 guys now. but Mario is a unique matchup for sure.

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xyzzy

1. What if we actually got Mario vs. Sonic?

It has to be the most common refrain across 18 years of contests. We've been asking it since 2003, when Shadow the Hedgehog took the form of a Sonic clone against Mario and put up an improbable 45%, overrating Tidus and himself in the process. Mario went under the Oracle prediction by a full 15% here. What happens if the most famous rivalry in video games actually happened?

Let's talk about how improbable it is that this never happened. There are 36 possible combinations of Noble Nine matchups, and of those, we haven't gotten... 2. One is Sephiroth vs. Crono, and one is Mario vs. Sonic. It almost feels intentional. Remember: one of the most popular nominations of the Rivalry Rumble was Mario vs. Sonic, and even that got denied by the administration.

What happens if we get this matchup? Well, Mario wins now, in 2020. We got Mario World vs. Sonic 2 and that may as well have been a SFF matchup. But as characters? That's a whole different ballgame, and Shadow proves it. If Shadow, a fairly unlikable Sonic side character, can get 45%, what does the OG get?

It's much too late to resolve this now. But it has to be the biggest open question in contest history.

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xyzzy

2. What if the 2000s game contests didn't do division by era?

This has to be the greatest mistake in contest history. Division by era has made the contests significantly more predictable. It's a lot easier to predict, say, Mario 3 vs. Zelda 1 than Mario World vs. Twilight Princess.

I actually don't mind it too much in 2004 since, like 2007, it's the first contest of its kind. It was already unpredictable enough to throw a bunch of games into a bracket. Besides, division by era did manage to give us a few good clusters of matchups, especially division 128. Starcraft probably doesn't go on its run if it had faced a classic as opposed to lukewarm titles like Halo, Kingdom Hearts and Wind Waker. But did we need to see Phantasy Star vs. Contra or Donkey Kong vs. Duck Hunt? Sure, the latter was a really close matchup. But it's more in line with the kinds of matches we see these days, where they're pretty competitive but not actually contributing to the later rounds in any way.

But 2009. That contest is an unforced error. Not only did we have fourways, but we also have division by era. Pokemon RBY almost made the list on its own because of how bad this was: here we had a newcomer that was suddenly a top 5 game without any external forces, and it gets put into the worst bracket position possible: riding alongside another Pokemon game against Majora and Metal Gear, winning that and then having to deal with Ocarina the rest of the way. It managed to make the quarterfinals and nearly the semifinals despite a completely hopeless matchup with Ocarina, Melee and FFX. What would have happened if we had gotten Pokemon RBY in a fourpack with, say, Final Fantasy Tactics, Mario RPG and MGS3? It could have really broken some brackets.

There are so many examples of wasted potential in 2009. Super Metroid gets fed to LTTP again, Goldeneye still can't get an honest matchup, a goofy LTTP/FF7/FF6/Mario 64 matchup that is so much less than the sum of its parts. We never got an honest game contest during the site's prime and it's honestly a contest tragedy. What wins, Melee or Mario 3? Does Zelda 1 beat Metal Gear Solid? Does FF8 beat Metroid Prime? These things wouldn't be answered until 2015, and even that contest has integrity issues for obvious reasons (not to mention how much time has passed since those games were in their primes). It sucks! Game contests should be the dominant contest here, and character battles are just better because we didn't have dumb restrictions on them.

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xyzzy

hmm, I wonder which is correct. GameFAQs says 8/25.


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xyzzy

3. What if the site doesn't go down during Link/Draven?

This one is just a bummer. Even in a rally, you want a fair fight. Link/Draven wasn't a contest match, it was an internet war. What do you do during an internet war? DDoS, of course. The site goes down for something like 90 minutes during the peak hours of Link's comeback against Draven, something that would be a gigantic coincidence if it was anything but intentional.

Link lost this match by 765 votes as Draven just simply ran out of votes. Would the 90ish minute downtime have given Link the time to mount his comeback? It depends on how you look at it. I think the numbers suggest that yes, Link could have made the comeback given how he was cutting. But at the same time, what happens if Link does take the lead here? Does the push get even stronger on the Draven side? We saw that with Undertale, when Melee tried to push ahead and Undertale just swatted it away like a fly. I think Draven wins this one regardless, but it's a great what if.

What's more interesting, perhaps, are what could have happened if Draven lost here. Do we get the biggest antivote in contest history next round as people go out of their way to destroy Link? Do we still see some of the utter madness of the last few days, where Cloud loses to Squirtle and Mewtwo bombs Sonic? Perhaps Snake wins the contest over Link? Something would have happened and it's hard to say what. Once the box is opened, you don't just stuff it back and pretend nothing happened. It would have been nice for the GameFAQs hero to win here, but it's still funny that we would rally behind the destroyer of competitive balance of all things. I guess we prefer our conqueror to someone else's!

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xyzzy

4. What if the universe doesn't conspire against Cloud on August 26th, 2002?

We all know the history here. Mario/Cloud happens the day after Mario Sunshine releases in the US. There was an offsite rally that led to this poll getting like 20,000 more votes than any other match this contest, something that feels unthinkable for 2002. I don't totally believe the explanations of some Gamecube fan site bringing in 20k votes because that defies logic, so you can perhaps throw in cheating or whatever else you want. What happened, Cloud somehow loses the night vote vs. Mario and drops a match that he absolutely should have won.

But what happens if Cloud does win? I'd argue that the contests are significantly worse off for it. For one, we don't get Mario/Crono in 2002, which honestly cemented the contest's greatest rivalry. Crono's entire underdog act is because he went toe to toe with Mario after Cloud lost. Cloud's loss is really important there. The 2003 bracket is set up for a rematch because of it, and we probably don't get that without the 2002 match. Sure, we would most likely get Mario/Crono eventually, but Crono was only competitive with Mario until the Nintendo boost hit in 05. Cloud winning deprives us of our contest's best match.

The other thing to wonder is how Cloud would have done vs. Link. Sephiroth got 43% - maybe Cloud gets to 46? Does the 2003 final feel like such a shocker if Link doesn't have the same aura of invincibility that he had after the 2002 contest, where no one could even get 45%? I think things worked out for the best here. But, I would still love to know exactly what happened in the Mario/Cloud match, because that is the biggest unexplainble contest anomaly we've had. Starcraft, Draven and Undertale are very easily explainable. Mario/Cloud? That one's just bizarre. Super Mario Sunshine was disappointing before it came out and no other major release coming out mid-contest has ever had a fraction of the impact that this one supposedly had. And Planet Gamecube isn't exactly twitter or reddit, you know?

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xyzzy

5. What if there were no rallies in the 2015 game contest?

2015 is our first and only chance for a traditional, 1v1 game contest without any restrictions like seeding by era. It was well past our prime, but because of no restrictions, it was a great contest. We got some really good matches that we never got to see in the 00s, and ended up with some pretty interesting old/new splits, none more pronounced than Super Mario RPG making the semifinals due to being packed in with a lot of mid-00s games.

But there were also some pretty wild rallies. Undertale is the big one, but there was also Melee which ruined a truly great Chrono Trigger run due to a rally. Chrono Trigger was a monster in 2015, most likely due to the site shrinking. Let's drop some comparison matches, eh?

Chrono Trigger 65.52%
Final Fantasy X 34.48%

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 64.96%
Final Fantasy IX 35.04%

Final Fantasy VII 65.29%
Super Smash Bros. for Wii U 34.71%

You can make the case that CT was the strongest game in 2015, which is wild. But there's a lot of caveats there, too. We've seen many games go big against lesser competition before failing against the king. In my opinion, this isn't enough to definitively say anything. But it's a fact that Chrono Trigger outperformed Ocarina on a stronger Final Fantasy game.

Final Fantasy VI 39.95%
Final Fantasy VII 60.05%

Final Fantasy VI 38.34%
Chrono Trigger 61.66%

The FF6 polls are a bit suspect: the FF6/FF7 match takes place on Melee/CT day, though FF7 was up 56/44 before it hit and would likely have risen after the first hour anyway. The FF6/CT match is a bonus match, taking place the day after the Undertale/Ocarina finale. You can also call SFF in both of those matches if you want, and maybe in CT/FFX if you're a skeptic. You can definitely disregard results if you want.

But the bummer is that we never got to see it. There's more than just CT to consider: what could have happened with Pokemon RBY now that it has some breathing room away from Ocarina? What is the strongest Mario game between 3, World and 64? Where does FF7 lie against other big games? We'll never know.

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xyzzy

I think about the monotony of a single match a day a lot, and kinda miss that. but then, when it's contest season I have to write up 100+ matches in 2 months, so I feel like that's a big part of it too

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xyzzy

6. What if the 2007 contest was 1v1?

A lot of people's minds will instantly go to L-Block, and I get it. But I'm actually not thinking about L-Block here, or not exclusively L-Block anyway.

I think of this site's prime is from 2002-2007. 02-07 is the Clinkeroth era, when our pecking order was clear and our site wasn't deep into the past quite yet. A lot of people here think of this as our golden era. After 2007, we start getting weird as FF7 gets to be 10+ years old and we move into the HD era which lost a lot of gamers here. JRPGs go away and get replaced by games like Assassin's Creed and Oblivion, Mass Effect and Portal. Everyone kind of shrinks into their holes. Even the 2008 contest feels like we're past our prime.

So it's weird that we get this bizarro fourway format in 2007, where, outside of the top dogs, every matchup is more about who you're riding with than how strong you are. A lot of matches here left us scratching our head and it's hard to parse out the format vs. the character. The best example here is Master Chief. Master Chief was clearly a monster in 07, probably a near-elite like Squall or Ganondorf but also maybe not? It's so hard to say, and it feels like we got cheated out of the one time he could have impressed since people can dismiss it by saying it was a product of the format. He demolished Yuna and nearly made the final over Solid Snake post-Brawl trailer. We have this weird noble nine breaking match with Crono and Vincent where they're fighting for scraps next to Link. Does that happen with 100,000 votes? Probably, but who can say? We get a fascinating Leon/Dante/Amaterasu/Pikachu match where Pikachu just wrecks shop before going down easy next round. What happened here? The only thing we know is that the noble nine hierarchy was still mostly in place from 2006. Once you get below that, you get a lot of shrug emojis.

We can loop back to L-Block now. L obviously changed the face of the contests going forward. The next year we start seeing Companion Cubes and Sandbags and all sorts of other things like them. Glitches and Draven and other memes followed. A lot of that is due to the format, but an underrated part is just expanding the pool. Nowadays we can't do a contest without like 150 entrants and we end up taking on some pretty terrible matchups in the process. 2007 really changed the way we did things.

I like the 2007 contest a bunch, by the way. I think the format change was a good way to mix things up once, even though it birthed the joke era that a lot of users decry. Unfortunately we did it 3 times. It would be interesting to see what would have happened if we kept the sanctity of a 1v1, 64 entrant contest. It probably would have been a lot more boring! But it would have been interesting to see from a historical perspective.

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xyzzy

7. What if Sephiroth faced Link in 2003?

One of the easiest things to forget -- for me, anyway -- is that Link/Cloud 2003 was a semifinal match, not the final. Another weird thing that's lost to history is that Sephiroth was thought to perhaps be stronger than Cloud thanks to 2002, where he was the only one to break 40% on Link. The Oracle pick for the 2003 Cloud/Sephiroth final was Sephiroth with 50.01%. Seems crazy in retrospect, right? Heck, Sephiroth had the early lead on Cloud, which seems absolutely impossible given how bad that early vote has been ever since!

It's fully possible that Cloud is seen as the contest's savior only because it's sheer dumb luck that he got to Link first. Here's some results to consider:

2002

Mario 37.47%
Link 62.53%

2003

Mario 38.4%
Sephiroth 61.6%

Link 48.39%
Cloud Strife 51.61%

Sephiroth 48.11%
Cloud Strife 51.89%

Stats-wise, it's 51/49 for Link at the absolute most, and given how crazy strong Square was in 2003, it could have happened. Thinking about that feels like a completely different contest reality. What would it have felt like if Sephiroth beat Link in 2003 with Cloud waiting for him in the final? It's fascinating to speculate on.

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xyzzy

8. What if Super Smash Bros. Brawl didn't get anti-voted in 2010?

The biggest match of Game of the Decade 1 wasn't the final. It didn't have anything to do with the B-tier Zelda/Final Fantasy dance-off in the semifinal that feels slightly controversial in its own way. It's the battle of Smash games. Everything came down to if you sided with the pure fast gameplay of Melee or the new hotness of Brawl. The internet was really hot to pit these two against each other, not just on GameFAQs but everywhere.

The match itself was really anticlimactic - a sad, 12 hour affair during the night hours where Brawl slowly rose from losing the power hour to comfortably putting Melee fans out of their misery. There was surprisingly no controversy here, probably because of it being a 12 hour match in the night. Once the diehards went to bed, the more popular Brawl just took over.

And the internet remembered. From that point on, Brawl was a different game. It had cleanly beaten Twilight Princess the year prior in a weirdo four-way, but could only get 52% in the 1v1 rematch. That one was explainable since you don't beat a mainline Zelda down too hard, but the next match against Fallout 3 was a 24 hour affair. Brawl had a pretty long history with Fallout 3, from a decent win in the 2008 GOTY poll to absolutely decimating it in 2009. In 2010, Brawl started out in the high 50s and just bled percentage all day, going under 55 in the end. Fallout 3 is a decently popular game, but Smash doesn't go even in the daytime to a Bethesda RPG. I'm pretty sure that Fallout's side of the bracket has been overestimated ever since, though Fallout 3 never had a fair shake again because, yeah, Undertale.

The final against Majora's Mask just felt off. Majora started really strong -- like a upstart bandwagon game would, as it grew into over the contest -- and never looked back. Brawl had a decent comeback during the day but couldn't get close enough to make it interesting.

It's really weird. Brawl isn't a game of the decade type of game. No one looks back at it and says "you know what game was genre defining and really changed things? Super Smash Bros. Brawl." That game defined hype cycles and mastered the art of the teaser trailer, but when you talk about something like game of the decade, you want a game that made a splash when it came out. Brawl came out and it was fun to spin dash Mario with Sonic, and.. that's about it. I think voters realized that as it went on and said "nope, we need to audible here before it's too late. what about that Zelda rom hack?"

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xyzzy

oh man if I cared enough about the years contest, the 1997 controversy is up there

I lost money on that one

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xyzzy

9. What if we actually knew who won 2003's Mario/Crono match?

Mario 50.05% 66571
Crono 49.95% 66434

Look, I don't know what happened here and that is a problem. 2003 is generally thought of as our peak contest and its most anticipated match is a mess due to starting early and ending late. Mario pulled ahead right at midnight but Crono was ahead after 24 hours. Given Mario's contest history, and the fact that Mario's biggest surge is during Crono's best time, it's easy to cast him as the contest villain.

I'd love to just have a crystal ball and say who won here. It's probably the biggest debate in contest history. But, at the same time, I'm not sure what it actually changes. Instead of Mario getting crucified by Sephiroth, Crono gets it instead. Crono gets his due, and the 2004 match is a rubber match that Crono most likely still easily wins (though maybe not by as much, given how villainous Mario was perceived to be?). Mario still destroys him in 05 and never looks back. It's more of an "I need to know" than "this changes everything". But, sometimes that's all you need.

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xyzzy

reposting for new page

10. What if the semifinal matches were flipped in 2008?

First, let's recap the 2008 contest. 2008 is a four-way contest and the star of the contest is Solid Snake, who takes a ride down the LFF slide for a spot in the finals. Let's recap his journey:

Quarterfinals:

Solid Snake 29.14%
Weighted Companion Cube 19.18%
Cloud Strife 38.41%
Mewtwo 13.27%

Semifinals:

Cloud Strife 30.5%
Solid Snake 30.74%
Sephiroth 16.1%
Kirby 22.66%

Cloud had no problem beating Snake without Sephiroth in the poll, but add him in and Snake pulls off one of the most intense wire to wire wins in contest history. Snake starts out the poll on fire and gets up to a 650 vote lead by 1:30. It's basically the highest point of the match - Snake breaks 800 for a short time around 3pm, but Cloud cuts and cuts until he runs out of time, down 300 votes. There are screenshots out there of the board celebrating. Yes, it was a fourway, and yes, Snake had beaten Sephiroth a couple of years ago. There's a difference between coming in third place and beating Cloud, our clear contest #2, days after going down easy to him.

The VERY NEXT DAY is the contest final, with people still buzzing about Snake's performance. Cloud gets another chance here, but with Crono in the poll instead of Sephiroth. And the result is.. well, it's pretty similar on paper:

Link 33.68%
Crono 12.23%
Solid Snake 27.76%
Cloud Strife 26.33%

Snake was actually battling Link instead of Cloud at the start of the poll. Snake was somehow leading Link for six full hours before the sun came up. Cloud wasn't even in the conversation. Snake went up 3000 votes on Cloud by morning and pushed it to 3600 before school let out -- at which point Cloud immediately ripped off 1500 votes to make it look more respectable. That's more in line with what you would expect from a 'normal' match, but this was the final.

But what if there was some breathing room there for people to cool off after that dramatic semifinal victory? Here's the first semifinal:

Link 38.45%
Mario 19.56%
Samus Aran 16.71%
Crono 25.28%

Does Snake still do this with 24 hours inbetween? Cloud got his revenge in the 2010 1v1 semifinal, beating out Snake by 5000 votes. He also had no problem on truly neutral ground in the 2008 quarterfinal, before the last days of the contest caused a shift. Snake's win over Cloud is certainly legitimate, but is it a transient result that only happened due to the circumstances? We'll never know.

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xyzzy

yeah, some of these come down to "what if Link won again?".

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xyzzy

I can tell that this is going to be the biggest 'eye of the beholder' list I've done from reading the comments so far. some I'm completely on board with, and some I didn't even think about!


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xyzzy

It's time for another one of my contest lists! I spent some time looking at old results over the last few days and started thinking about what could have happened, and made a list of my biggest questions. These are larger-picture questions about the contests and not just 'what if Magus got more votes and beat Knuckles?'. You can make those up all day. Changes in circumstances, timing, controversies, etc. For example, what if FFX hadn't gotten a Tidus picture vs. the entire SSBM roster in 2004? Things like that. (That's not on here.)

Feel free to speculate, and I'll be back later tonight to kick this off.


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xyzzy

I'll read anything Xeno related and love it but I felt like this article was trying to sell a narrative of Takahashi's failures to eventual success and I just don't agree with that. Xenogears was a pretty huge success story and a lot of people liked the Xenosaga games even though they fell short of their grand ambition.


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xyzzy

yeah, I feel like the biggest issue with the dragon is that you're a little slower, to the point where I feel like you're almost intentionally playing from behind at times. even the AD can sometimes feel like it's hard to keep up, if white plays really aggressively. but I really like the dynamic play on the flanks, and I am a total sucker for bishops on the long diagonals + pawn structures that let you take advantage of them.

it's sometimes more fun to play a reverse sicilian as white, with ideas like c4 Nc3 g3 Bg7 etc.

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xyzzy

changmas posted...

My knowledge of opening theory is relatively weak, so I'm out of my opening theory pretty quickly most games, but yeah, I do play 3. Nc6 typically. A lot of times my games will go something like this:

1. e4 c5
2. Nf3 Nc6
3. d4 cxd4
4. Nxd4 g6
5. Nc3 Bg7
6. Be3 d6
7. Bb5 Bd7
8. O-O Nf6
9. f4 O-O

(sometimes I play a6 on move 7 instead of Bd7 and the position will look different, but overall these two problems still happen for me)

So at that point, I really start to struggle with two problems in this position:

How do I stop the white f-pawn from opening up my kingside?
And where is my Queen supposed to go? So often I want to put the Queen on b6 but that's such a horrible square with white's dark-square bishop always on that diagonal, but I can never figure out how to make my queen useful in this line at all, or at least until a bunch of pieces are traded off.

I play this (the accelerated dragon). you have to be really precise once you get out of the opening because a slow move against a well prepared player can really overwhelm you. a good strategy, in general, is an a6/b5 expansion and trying to achieve counterplay. if you just stay waiting in a solid position, you can end up getting broken down before you know it.

the position that gives me the most trouble is the maroczy bind, which is an early c4 that clamps down on the d5 square. I still don't know a good way to handle that...

edit: some other comments. I would look at swapping your move order here, playing Nf6 before Bd7. the ideal here is to trade off your knight with white's dark square bishop which as I'm sure you've figured out is white's best piece. if you can, play your knight to g4 with the intention of trading on e3. in my opinion black is better if you can pull that off. I usually see white throw in f3 after Nf6 just to shut down that idea. I actually struggle to play Bd7 in the first handful of moves because I feel like it's a wasted move, but you need it if you want to get your rook to its ideal c8 square. just my thoughts... I'm an intermediate player but I do have some background with this opening.

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xyzzy

I can't tell if they're setting up for some kind of crazy 5 player trade or if they're signing a g league team with nba money

they have like 19 guys

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xyzzy

just swinging by to lol at the Pistons who are somehow doubling down on every type of team simultaneously

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xyzzy

glitches are fun. fortunately there's that expert mode where you can lower your level.

https://twitter.com/necta_rines/status/1268954571843330049
https://twitter.com/necta_rines/status/1268914378834710528


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xyzzy

yeah, that's what I'm going to do if I go back - just turn all that nonsense off. I thought, well, I've beaten this a couple of times so I'll try to get as much of the quests done as I can to mix things up and man was that a mistake. Xenoblade is at its best when you're wandering around Satorl Marsh and just enjoying what might pop up in front of you. when you're racing to the next icon, it feels more like a checklist and that's not fun.


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xyzzy

I'll go back and evaluate it for real before the next list! (probably in 2022 so I've got time!)

Xenoblade Switch added all these QOL improvements for quests, and that means that I spent way more time doing quests.. which is the worst part of that game. I have all these obnoxious icons all over my screen that distract me from doing the good stuff. I'm still at the bionis leg, having been there for like 5 hours doing stupid stuff like collecting 4 pelts or whatever other MMO trappings that game has.

also I got to level 50 in Tephra Cave which may have impacted my enjoyment somewhat. at least I took those levels away to make it a fair fight!

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xyzzy

oh yeah you're a ways in. glad you're enjoying it! it's super easy to like.

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xyzzy

congrats! how far and how are you liking it?

I played like 6 hours of the Switch version and dropped it. I think Xenoblade 2 just made me retroactively like 1 less.

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xyzzy

just stopping in for a few minutes. anyone got anything interesting going on?

I don't have much. games-wise, I got a new 2ds so I've been replaying some ace attorney on that, and then dying every which way in Spelunky 2. been watching the next gen wars with mostly apathy, though I think I'm more on team xbox than ps5 this time around just because of game pass. I don't think I really want either one right now though.

in other media, I just watched Boston job to the Heat again in the closing minutes, and I just finished a nice long Lost rewatch with the wife a few days ago. that was really fun to revisit, especially given the quarantine world these days.

other than that, just hanging out doing virtual school with my kids and trying to balance work in there somewhere too. how are you all?

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xyzzy