Quaze

On 5/6/2024 at 4:35 AM, SNESNESCUBE64 said:

Saw Sabaton and Judas Preist over the weekend. Pretty dang good show. I was particularly hyped for Sabaton.

I honestly can't tell you how awesome it is to see "Yakuza Operations Support His Income" still in your sig after all this time. Honored lol

12 hours ago, D~Funk said:

Finished Eiyuden Chronicles Rising. This game was pretty wack overall. Kind of grew on me a little towards the end but i hated on it for the first half. Been really excited for Hundred Heroes being a big fan of Suikoden but i think this game was a big misstep. Will probably just hurt Hundred Heroes sales in the end if it hasn't already. I just imagine the people picking this up not knowing anything about the games & then skipping Hundred Heroes because this game is so boring. Nothing but fetch quests & retracing the same 3 areas over & over for 20 hours. Wack! Only positive thing i have to say is the environments looked aight. 

Dang I completely forgot about the Switch completion thread from NA. Maaaaan, I could've contributed SO much to this thread already. So many unbeaten games I could've checked off the list. Welp, no time like the present to get on board.


@D~Funk, how did you like Undermine? I know you've been listening to me rant and rave about Wayward Souls for 10 years now, but Undermine is totally near rip-offishly inspired by it. I loved undermine and put like 140 hours into it but it's totally the Wish dot com version of Wayward Souls.

Aw, this is such an interesting thread idea, my hopes were set way too high for honest replies lol.

16 hours ago, Daniel_Doyce said:

"If I Did It" was one of the ballsiest book ideas in human history.

As my dad used to say, "that man has more balls than brains". I don't know if that book idea was ballsy so much as brainless. Don't forget, we're talking about the guy who, at the height of a murder controversy, thought it would be funny to jokingly jump out at a reporter with a banana and pretend to stab her to death. Which, in the Juice's defense, was hilarious in the darkest possible way, but also powerfully stupid. Haha 

New pack in the air, this gas or what  

5 hours ago, RH said:

I've barely kept up with the WWE in the past 18 months and I've only checked in on news of releases and what belts have changed over.

I watched the two Roman Reigns matches.  As a character, he's fine, and I like Joe as a person.  That said 1,500+ days with a title belt makes the run get booooooring.  I was glad to be there to see him finally lose, and seeing The Rock come back was fun too, though I know that was set up months in advance.

 

I don't think we'll see any insanely long title reigns in the next little while, it was clear that people were getting tired of the Roman and Gunther 50-year title reigns, and it's time for a change of pace. If I were a betting man, I'd say that Sami Zayn and Cody Rhodes will hold the titles for a fraction of the amount of time that their championship predecessors did.

On 4/8/2024 at 1:17 PM, DarkTone said:

Mania thoughts?

I liked it. It was basically exactly what I expected, but that's not a bad thing. Anything else likely would've been "a swerve for the sake of a swerve" Lot's of title changes, lots of unexpected little cameo appearances, lots of expected "surprises" (seconds before Damian Priest's music hit and he cashed in his Money in the Bank, my brother said "now watch, Damian Priest will cash in his Money in the Bank and win the title")lots of over-the-top stuff that wouldn't make sense in any other context. I thought it was fun.

I see a lot of fans complaining about how it all went down, and how this and that didn't make sense, why was ____ or _____ there, why wasn't ______ or ______ there, etc etc etc. To those people I say "who cares, just enjoy wrestling".

It was the best post-pandemic Mania in my opinion for sure.

This is the most niche thread ever lol

I knew what this thread was going to be before I even clicked on it. lol

On 1/6/2024 at 5:25 PM, Tyree_Cooper said:

throw all in a big fire when you feel your time is coming

That's what I'm doin'. I have nobody to leave it to, throw it all in the lake or set it on fire the minute I kick the bucket. lol

On 10/20/2023 at 7:13 PM, JamesRobot said:

Pumps and a bump

Free bump for the MC Hammer reference.

He included a free crack pipe? Wow, he must've known what you were paying for TG16 games and assumed! 

On 1/31/2024 at 2:34 AM, Brickman said:

I need to finish an indie game for my backlog challenge so gave this a go. I'm loving it so far. It really is a mix up of heaps of different genres. It's a bit overwhelming at the start with everything you have to learn about but I'm getting the hang of it. The story is funny and quirky and the ocean looks really nice. 

Yes, it has a very unique learning curve. It's extremely steep and front-loaded, and then.....that's kinda it. It drops off a cliff and leaves you to your own devices for the rest of your play time. I'm still playing it 20+ hours after the credits have rolled.

The game I've been glued to the last few months has been Dave the Diver. Dudes, I'm telling you, it's definitely my 2023 indie gem of the year and you're robbing yourself of a great experience if you don't give it a go. The game isn't easy to describe, as it's probably the biggest (and most successful) mish-mash of totally different genres I've seen since like, Actraiser. But while Actraiser really only had two genres to juggle (action-platformer and city-builder), Dave the Diver has many. The game is all at once a:

• Metroidvania
• Diving/fishing/exploration game
• Restaurant management sim
• Farming sim
• Visual novel
• Idle clicker
• Minigame compilation

And honestly many more little genre cameos such as racing, casino/card games, and puzzle games.
 

The core gameplay loop is pretty simple: Dive into a magical fishing hole that refreshes with different types of marine life every day, and use whatever you catch to create dishes for the sushi restaurant you operate at night. At first I heard of the genre mashup and thought "ehhhh, a sushi restaurant? Pass", but then the online hype for the game just became too much to ignore, and boy am I glad I finally caved and gave it a shot.

So yeah, if you've got $20 burning a hole in your eShop or Steam account and you're looking for a super solid game that'll keep you busy for around 30-50 hours until the credits roll (and indefinitely forever after that), give Dave the Diver a shot. I friggin' loved it.

1 hour ago, wongojack said:

Your reasoning here is 100% valid and makes sense, but back in the 80s I once learned about a time when they built a whole city on Rock n Roll and from that point, I just knew that sometimes these things obey some different rules when it comes to reasoning and logic.

 

Yes, the structural engineers for the city in question need to have their professional designations revoked. There's simply no way rock n' roll would have the foundational stability on which to build an entire city!

5 hours ago, Sumez said:

All of those would be badass titles though! 

I've missed my calling as a video game titler!

On 1/24/2024 at 11:50 AM, TDIRunner said:

I've never heard of it and I somehow missed this thread the first time it came around.

The name sounds more like the name of a band rather than a video game.  When this popped up in my unread list, I thought for sure it was a music debate.  

The title of the game is fuckin' terrible and makes no sense at all. The title actually stopped me from playing it for the first couple of years. 
"Slay the Spire" makes absolutely no sense. You cannot slay a spire, it's.....a spire on top of a tower. You can slay things on the way to the spire, but you cannot slay the spire.

This makes as much sense as naming a racing game "Race the Finish Line", calling a fighting game "Punch the Championship", or calling a card game "Deal the Casino". That English just ain't Englishing. lol

26 minutes ago, Sumez said:

I can't remember if I've gone on on this tangent on VGS before, and I probably have...

But one thing that really stood out to me when I played Hades... is how well it both fits into the modern interpretation of what a roguelike/roguelite is, that dominates so many indie games released these days, and yet how little it has in common with even the broadest definition of the actual roguelike genre - to the point where I feel a new genre name would be fitting outside of just "roguelite".

Look at Binding of Isaac. It's doing its own thing, but you can very clearly see the tie to classic roguelikes, in terms of its overall structure, mixed with the zelda-ish shooter dungeons, and it pretty much opened the floodgates for these genre-bending rogue-inspired indie games, anything from Rogue Legacy and Spelunky, to FTL or Slay The Spire - all vastly different games, different genres even, that all share at least the overall experience you get from exploring a roguelike dungeon where anything can happen, and a wrong turn means all progress is lost.

But just around Hades is where I think we reached the point where if Isaac and those other games hadn't existed, no one would have even thought to liken Hades to something like roguelikes, berlin interpretation or not. The dungeon is stringed together by random rooms, but you typically end up going through most of the same ones every run, and there isn't any exploration since you can only go forward through the game, and very rarely even get a branching path - which is only a decision between potential rewards, since you can't tell what kind of place you are going anyway.

In fact, outside of the generic hack and slash arcadeish action game that Hades is, the only thing that really ties it to those other games, is the randomness of the potential rewards you can get from the olympian gods. But having gone this route, and having played so many of those games, I can see why you'd group them all together under the same broad umbrella. Roguelike or -lite just really doesn't cut it at that point.  It's something new.

 

Also, the concept of "permadeath" in a game with a single playable character is kinda curious. Doesn't every game without a save feature have "permadeath"? It seems to me that nowadays some developers like to steer towards the "roguelite" definition, just to be able to sell the idea of an arcade'ish structure where failing actually means game over rather than a checkpoint reload. Returnal or Monolith come to mind.

Great post explaining how all of these games are loosely tied to the same base genre. It's not an easy thing to explain and you've done an admirable job of it here.

I had a really good year in 2023, but this is easily my favourite item added to the collection in 2023.

I'm at like 3000-3500 games, and pretty happy with where it's at. Most of my collection budget goes towards displays, signs etc these days, but definitely happy with the state of the collection. Only picking up the most-wanted games these days, no room for filler. lol

On 1/16/2024 at 3:18 PM, JamesRobot said:

But if not for the Greatest Video Game Player of the Century Billy Mitchell, who's celebrity hot sauce would we buy?

His hair is the perfect hoodie in this pic.

On 1/4/2024 at 9:48 PM, Estil said:

I wonder if there's any reason why cats, man's REAL best friend, are so popular among gamers?  Even AVGN has at least one!

Because most gamers are anxiety-cases and need the independence of a cat who will match their cagey energy. They can't handle the deep emotional connection and dependence that comes with owning a dog.

On 1/17/2024 at 8:45 PM, Link said:

If the true selling price is lower, via accepted offers, than what vgpc says, how does that justify the presumably higher prices you are offering? I don't want to argue, I simply don't understand this logic. 

You're reading it right. The reason it seems confusing is because it doesn't make sense.

Do you have any higher quality pics? These uncropped screenshots ain't doin it for my garbage-tier eyeballs.

On 12/21/2023 at 11:23 PM, fox said:

We all know the next Nintendo system is in the works, but we don't know that much about it yet, or do we? 

That's right it is guessing time.  9 questions for 9 points.  Let's see who is clairvoyant.

Apparently I'm clairvoyant, I picked all the top answers lol.