1 billion means you only earned the first score extend right? I’m very impressed you survived to stage 5 yet didn’t score even close to the 2nd score extend. I think if you figure out how to do a little scoring in the first 2 stages the game will really come alive and you might also pocket the extend at 10billion sometime in stage 4 or so. You clearly have the skills to dodge/bomb/hyper when necessary.

I only played black label (steam version and also an arcade near me has a DFKBL pcb) but the second score extend is basically mandatory for me to get to the end of stage 4 or have a chance of going to stage 5. And before that, getting the first score extend would get me to the hidden extra life in stage 3 etc. Scoring is good for survival and I think it’s fun to play for score even at the level where we can’t currently 1cc. Gives a goal/benchmark for how I’m playing

(cont.) Guild wars 2 is another mmo that is worth trying to see if you like the feel of the action combat. You can again play a whole lot free, but you do have to pay if you want the expansion content (which i feel is kind of diabolical to lock mounts behind max level expansion content). I also do not like that you can buy in game currency with real money, and then buy legendary (best in slot) weapons off the trading post with in game currency.

Theres maplestory which is mainly singleplayer, just make sure you make your char on the reboot (non-p2w) servers. Scratches the itch.

Honorable mention to private/classic servers like tera classic which i’ve been meaning to try out. The population being tiny is the most obvious factor but it is nice that the game has been preserved at all for people to play.

Ffxiv has a lot of content available in the free trial but it is not really a “free mmorpg” since if you want to do content that released less than 6 years ago, or join/use FC guilds or linkshell chats, or trade, have any significant quantity of gil, get housing, or use player markets, then you have to buy the game and pay a subscription. Mahjong is free though and it’s quite a good mahjong client.

That said, it is a good way to figure out if you like the basic gameplay systems: the UI and menus which are very customizable, controls (switch to legacy if using M&KB), tab target combat and global cooldown, main scenario questing, instanced dungeons and normal mode bosses, unlocking multiple jobs to try out.

All this with the caveat that basically all jobs at level 70 feel like an empty shell of the combat rotation of level 100, and high end content is only available and populated for the most recent patches + the 6 ultimate raids.

Any time they give a reason that there’s some technical thing they can’t accomplish, just remember mahjong. The devs programmed a fucking mahjong client into FFXIV (and it’s quite a good one too, on top of being free trial accessible, apparently some people get the free trial primarily for mahjong). If they have the technology and budget to do something as irrelevant and orthogonal as that, they can put in anything (as long as the devs are interested in making it). So basically it’s all bs, plus there are mods and plugins that do every QoL and visual upgrade imaginable already implemented as a third party tool.

FF14 is basically unplayable at resolutions below 1080p. There’s simply not enough pixels to display all the detail needed for serious play e.g. hotbars, buff/debuff bars, target/focus target, party list, castbars and enough empty screen space to see the boss. It’s also complete ass trying to raid at below 50-60fps. If your framerate is low enough it starts to become a dps loss since the time you can queue your next skill is delayed until the next frame is drawn, effectively increasing your global cooldown. On top of that no access to 3rd party programs on PC that would help alleviate these issues e.g. framerate locking, zoomhacks. Only way this works out is that the new nintendo switch is a 1080p+ 60fps+ capable machine with specs equivalent to a midrange PC from 3-4 years ago. Or Yoshida is talking out of his ass giving a japanese PR response, which is pretty typical

Feels weird to review an expansion before 90% of the content has been released. We have the main story, main story dungeons, and 2 “hard mode” trials so far? And one of the EX is hot garbage, probably the worst fight released in the past 4 years or ever (subject to personal opinion). There’s still 12 raid bosses, 5 more EX trials, large scale field content, a deep dungeon i think, and an ultimate raid or two on the way. Still remains to be seem whether they are going to continue with good fight design, or endwalker fight design. Music has some good points for sure, and story as always is a non-factor. It’s really nothing special as far as JRPGs or even previous final fantasy games are concerned.

Midrange systems from 3-4 years ago are the ones that are struggling a little bit. It’s playable but noticeably slower. It can mostly be mitigated by turning all the bells and whistles off though, and I guess if we really wanted the extra frames we could turn down the resolution. But playing the game at 720p for instance is a serious disadvantage, theres not enough pixels to see your hud elements and the fight mechanics without a super ultrawide monitor or a zoom hack. 1080p is ok but 1440p or 4k are ideal

The progression is absolutely time gated, and they definitely calculate the travel time to make each zone take some given amount of time to complete. When they need to pad out the zone a bit longer they add one of the trailing quests (autoscroller). It’s the business model and the same reasoning for why they don’t increase the weekly tome cap and also why there’s a weekly loot lockout during the raid tier, if players could grind out all the gear they need for a patch in 1 week, they would. That said if all you want to do is the msq and normal content, you can probably beat that in 30-40 hours watching cutscenes if you can dedicate a weekend to it and unsub until the next patch. I finished the msq + all aether currents in about 16 hours after launch with a couple friends, skipping all cutscenes, and the leading edge progression groups were probably done in closer to 10-12 hours so they could hit the EX trials.

word of advice for anyone thinking of buying soda for the promo event

Dont

Instead, consider waiting a couple years for when all the rewards are gonna get put on the mogstation. And it’ll probably be cheaper than however much mountain dew you would be pouring down the sink. Really, think about what you’re missing? “Mountain Zu”? Think of your favorite mount, is some random zu any better? Zu is a regular enemy, you can go out and fight one anywhere, its not some Bajamut Blast or anything, the mount is just a fuckin regular green bird. If you don’t participate in the promo then you aren’t missing anything spectacular.

This has been a cynical XIV PSA

Pretty crazy for a program to have that egregious a vulnerability, but also the version of the emulator with the ACE exploit (1.6) is more than 12 years old at this point. As the video states, the modern releases are freeware-nagware anyway so everyone is better off switching to a different (+open source) emulator entirely. I like the “virus” shown off at the end of the video too, that was fun

The joke is that the article doesn’t list a single name.

The name of the company that produced many of the greatest shmups of all time, starting with donpachi, is CAVE, unrelated to the indie game Cave Story

Fall Guys event is stupid, but good, because the rewards from it are worthwhile. They put a whole lot of effort into making the emote, mount, and glamour. The hoodie dyes well and has some cool particle/glow effects, you can get a cute hat, etc. I’m not sure what they were going for with the 100 wins achievement title though, that just seems miserable. If it was 25 or something I would go for it.

Aloalo variant is a good experience the first time through, but it does get a little repetitive having to fight the same mid boss 12 times and each other boss at least 3 times to get your mount. Mount again is really good though it will work better with some character models than others.

I haven’t done the criterion but I’ve heard people like it. The trash isn’t as involved but from what i’ve seen the first boss is very difficult. And the savage upgrade item is a joke, everyone doing crit savage has bis anyway so it’s basically equivalent to an ultimate weapon glamour. I’m glad it at least gives a glow. Really it should be a complete weapon drop however, or trade in totem for weapon.

Good patch overall especially for x.x1 content wise

My recommendations are Dodonpachi Resurrection, Mushihimesama, and Deathsmiles. They’re all on sale, they’re all made by CAVE. One more CAVE game, Akai Katana, is also listed but it’s not on sale. They are all extremely difficult if you have never played the style of game before (Japanese arcade bullet hell / scrolling shooter). Heavy emphasis on learning bullet patterns and doing precise dodges. It feels so good when you manage to dodge a pattern, or time a screen cancel/hyper just right.

If you only try one, Mushihimesama is 6 dollars right now, has an awesome soundtrack and a cool fantasy forest and insect theme. It’s relatively beginner friendly but you will definitely notice a sharp difficulty spike going from stage 3-4-5. I got to play it on an actual cabinet at PAX west, definitely my highlight of that weekend.

I don’t know how far you got into the first one but they are pretty similar games in my opinion. Everything that was good in Octopath 1, got better in Octopath 2. So: music and sound design, still amazing. Art, it’s the same HD-2D style that’s popular nowadays and Square is good at it. Character storylines are still mostly separate and not extremely complicated. The endgame scenario of Octopath 2 is more fleshed out than the hidden/True Last Boss of Octopath 1. I had a lot of fun in the endgame but in my opinion it was still too short.

The battle system is even more broken than Octopath 1 and largely revolves around setting up a team that can generate lots of BP, stack all your buffs onto a single character and maybe a debuff on the boss, then break it and deal 10k or 100k damage in a single round with your strongest attack. I think with certain setups it would be possible to deal 2 million damage in a single break. No boss has that much HP, though.

You still get powerful by exploring the map for gear and stealing/path-actioning good items from the end game cities. Grinding isn’t really necessary to beat the game but there are multiple setups that can turn trash encounters into 1-button wins.

The sub-job system is more flexible in Octopath 2. In addition to Break, characters have unique Latent Power “limit break” skills. There are so many ways to build a team that works well and part of the fun is figuring out what skills you can spec onto your characters and combine in order to win the game. That was also the case in Octopath 1.

Takumi Shu… will you write another game? I’m begging. Ace Attorney 7. DGS3. Ghost Trick 2. New IP? Anything, I want it so bad.

I am partial to Apollo Justice, the first one on DS. I personally loved the storytelling and this ominous aura of mystery that begins in Case 1 and looms over the entire game. Also Trucy. It was also the first time I remember that I, as a kid, was challenged to think about why we believe certain things to be true. And it has a great soundtrack and art / character designs which on their own are enough for me to love a game to death.