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Darros

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About Darros

  • Birthday 02/24/1996

Retained

  • Member Title
    Bugger. And I didn't make any time for pillow talk.

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  • Pronouns
    He/Him
  • Location
    Canada

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  • Favorite Fire Emblem Game
    Genealogy of the Holy War

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    Minerva

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    Jugdral

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  1. Interesting read for a game I've virtually never heard of. You encapsulate exactly why I've never heard of it, and tbh I have no impression to make myself more familiar beyond what you wrote LOL. That's just something about early-gen games where like. Some of them are really interesting historically, especially when it comes to putting down roots (ask me about FE1 any time) but like. There are so many that are just "eh" where the series didn't take off until later. Tbf at least this game has some decent predecessors to it. One thing I do notice as we're 6 games in, is that the "Sonic Games Identity Crisis", for lack of a better phrase to describe how the gameplay loop changes frequently and wildly in the series, seems to establish itself early. Like, sure, not to the point where some of the later games really diverge, but fundamental aspects of level design and gameplay seem to be morphing from game to game outside of things like "quality of life" or strict upgrades. It's fascinating to me.
  2. Darros, you exist!

  3. Whoops, I knew I was going to talk about Sonic Generations so I put Generations in when I meant 1. Now my mistake is immortalized on the internet forever! 😧 That's an interesting way of thinking about it. I see what you're saying but I still think Star Light Zone is notably slower than Green Hill Zone, in a stop-go type of way whenever you have you use the seesaws to build yourself higher. To be honest I think Star Light Zone is a bit misplaced in the order altogether but they probably didn't want to put Labyrinth Zone right before Scrap Brain Zone (especially when SBZ3 is basically LZ4..) - if they were even that cognizant of game design at the time anyway. It's not like much precedent existed in 1991. Momentum is interesting too especially when you think of Spring Yard Zone because some of those springs launch you pretty quickly when you touch them, giving you a pretty instant boost. Yeah I'm inclined to agree. It's also compounded by the fact that the Labyrinth Zone boss is. Hardly even a boss. Eggman just runs off. You can hit him a couple of times but nothing happens of it.
  4. "Sonic Generations is like warm tomato soup" isn't the simile I was expecting to read today but it's somehow also completely correct, I love it lmao. Do you consider the classic segment of Sonic Generations to be one of those "Classic Sonic games", even if it's only half the game? I can't think of much difference between how it handles and how Sonic in Sonic 2 handles, but it's been a while since I've played either of them. You raise a good point bringing up the level design and how it drastically changes after Green Hill Zone. I'm not actually sure I agree. When I was much younger (I think there's even an old post on SF about it) I really really hated Marble Zone and wasn't too fond of Sonic 1 - I think what I didn't realize at the time was that Sonic 1 is very much a pure platforming game, where 2/3K/Mania are more "speed platformers" (I'm making up new terms on the fly here), you can take your time if you want but there are encouraged ways to go quickly. I think Green Hill Zone being able to be cleared quickly and speedily is more a function of "it's easy and it's the first level" than "it was designed that way". When I played Sonic 1 with enhancements to the game that add spin dash, it just kind of doesn't fit in at all. Looking at Sonic 1 as a platformer closer to the Mario series rather than something like... every other Sonic game makes me like the level design a lot more, including Labyrinth Zone. And it's not like the Sonic series had foresight before Sonic 1 to know what the rest of the series would be like at the time.
  5. Just post. Not like forum space is a limited resource. And imo also ignore e2, I crave your opinions on golf with your friends. Even if you DM me them anyway, everyone should see them
  6. Hi, it's me, noted Serenes Forest poster Darros, again. Overcooked! 2 rules. I have some things to say about the solo experience and the achievements as well. I've had this game 100%ed as of May two years ago, and went through it again with Ike so that he could do it too. Because it's a fun game to play with others, and because I have the DLC and as long as one person has it, it's accessible to everyone. While I don't think that Overcooked! 2 is necessarily designed for a single player experience, it still functions well enough as one. In multiplayer, all players are present on each map. Simple as that. When you're playing single player, you instead get multiple copies of yourself. This requires more focus, but less communication, so it evens out to about the same amount of brainpower to play single player. There's a designated "swap copy of yourself" button, and if you're doing a task while you swap, the copy of your avatar you just left continues doing the task until it's done. It sounds chaotic, it takes about two or three maps to figure out in practice. All the maps that suck single player suck in multiplayer too. For instance, here's 6-2, a level that essentially requires use of the d-pad: The gimmick of the level is that the center of the level floats up and down, and if you're on it while it goes under, you drown and lose whatever you're holding. It sucks. It is the worst level in the game. But honestly, that's just me harping a bit on one level which is very unfortunately designed. I can only really think of maybe four or five levels that are outright Bad, most of them contained to the Carnival of Chaos DLC. Most maps are good and end up in one of two flavors: 1) Fully cooperative maps where your two (at minimum) characters are completely separated by a barrier, forcing each player into a particular pre-determined role 2) Open maps where the players have to decide what they're doing, quickly, and stick to those roles to get a good score. The scoring system for this game is based on point thresholds for one, two, or three stars. You pass the level with a one star minimum, which is usually simple to get. Three starring levels ranges from sort of difficult to braindead easy. Once you complete the game, you unlock "New Game Plus", which isn't actually a New Game Plus at all but rather a fourth star for each map, which is usually unhinged, as Ike said. There are some exceptions, because whenever the game teaches you a new recipe or mechanic, that level doesn't actually start the timer until you hand something in. This makes some of the fourth star scores completely cheesable, but there's no real incentive to get them other than "it's kind of impressive", but other people have already done it and I can just watch them on YouTube instead of bothering to do it myself. The DLCs for this game are largely standard fare. A couple of character packs and four level packs: 1) Surf N' Turf: a summer themed DLC where you make smoothies and kebabs. Introduces the bellows and the squirt gun, a new way to clean dishes and put out fires 2) Night of the Hangry Horde: a spooky themed DLC introducing the guillotine, coal, and horde levels. The guillotine and coal aren't particularly interesting, horde levels have potential but in practice and up being way too long with many waves, many of them lasting nearly 10 minutes (the average level ranges from 2:30-4:00). 3) Carnival of Chaos: a carnival themed DLC introducing cannons and condiments. There are no problems in theory with this DLC, but some of the maps in it are quite bad and require d-pad movement, which is always unpleasant. 4) Campfire Cook-Off: my favorite DLC by a mile, which adds campfires (use wood to cook instead of always-on burners) and backpacks (pull items from another player instead of a tile on the map). If you want One DLC to get, get this one (they're all good though, despite what I say about Carnival of Chaos). There are also seasonal FreeLC packs, two winter themed, one beach themed which is essentially a free preview of Surf N' Turf, and three for Chinese New Year. They are all fun as well. Ike has already touched on the DLC achievements being completely fucking baloney though. Other than perhaps the condiments achievement, every single one of these has a very high threshold to pop the achievement where it easily becomes an unreasonable grind to do so. I believe the vision is that people who nolife this game and put in a bunch of hours get rewarded, but I've put 79 hours into this game and I can say for certain that if I had not gone out of my way for these achievements, I never would have gotten them organically. I will say that getting them alone was much more irritating than hosting so that Ike could get them. At least there were some cooperative actions to do there, and the company is nice. I do want to fully disclaim though that Overcooked! 2 is an amazing game, and I'm only nitpicking parts of it because I've essentially run the 100% gauntlet twice now and have put so many hours into it. The few poor maps are not enough to distract from the quality of the rest of the game, and if you're not an 100%er yourself, and are just here to read Ike's commentary, the annoying achievements won't really actually matter.
  7. Hi, it's me, noted Serenes Forest poster Darros. I'll latch on for a couple of comments on Monster Hunter world. This isn't my thread, but it was Integ and mine's shared experience. For me, World was my first Monster Hunter and I enjoyed it so much after a very strange journey. Monster Hunter is a very opaque game, and doesn't quite tell you how to play it. I first tried to play it about 4 years ago, and didn't make it very far, getting insanely frustrated at not knowing how to do anything and not really finding the resources to learn. Here's the first achievement I got: The end of 2018. I poked at it a bit over the next year or so in very tiny intervals and kept getting annoyed. I was playing with some IRL friends at the time and remember completely giving up when I was fighting Jyuratodus with them in the Wildspire waste because I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to stop doing 1 damage to monsters with attacks that I would learn later were being deflected. So I gave up, and picked it up again this summer when I started a fresh file and took the time to truly learn the game. Both Integ and another friend of mine noticed me playing, but were very patient with me as I told them I was not playing any multiplayer until I understood enough to do so. And look how far we've come. My playtime wasn't as long as Integ's, but I still clocked in at a whopping 702 hours by the time I finished Monster Hunter World 100%. And I enjoyed nearly every second of it [we're not going to talk about Scarred Yian Garuga (hell monster), or Kulu Ya-Ku (easy monster that wouldn't spawn crowns for the life of me)] I'm early on in Rise and I'm finding it Different, in a way that's neither really better or worse but is best compared as somewhat of a sidegrade to World. I say I'm 50/50 on whether or not I'll go for 100%ing it, but if Integ does I'll probably join him again. The discussion here is achievements though, so I'll weigh in: Something Integ forgot to mention is that, beside the non-standard "you will do this anyway" achievements, is the absolutely grind-heavy in a different way "Nowhere to Go but Up" achievement for completing 50 arena quests. There are only 16 normal arena quests from Low Rank through Master Rank, and then an additional 37 "event" arena quests bringing the total up to 53. Several of the event quests have the same monster and conditions attached to it, however, and some of them are quite difficult and miserable fights, meaning it's a boring, repetitive slog that's largely held outside of the main gameplay loop. I believe it was Ike who described the arena as a "relic" that Capcom hasn't really gotten rid of, which is fine, but tethering an achievement to completing 50 quests (the only other arena achievement is for completing 1) is an unnecessary chore. You need the Iceborne DLC to 100% the game. It's fairly common in Steam games to have achievements based on DLCs and expansions as part of the "base game core", but half of the achievements are straight up tethered to Iceborne that you cannot get without it. The Iceborne DLC has the weird artifact of making some of the original achievements "obsolete", in the sense that while they may have required some work originally, they're now completely trivial. The ones that immediately come to mind are the armor and weapons ones: there are achievements for making 5 pieces of what was the original endgame armor and 5 original endgame weapons. In the game, these pieces are signified by weapon rank. The Iceborne DLC houses all of Master Rank, and endgame-grade High Rank armor and weapons are quickly made obsolete by Master Rank's existence. Versions of these original achievements now exist for endgame in Iceborne, but the old versions of the achievements are basically freebies now if you play the game through all the way. It isn't much to say at the end of the day, but I've dusted off my SF account for this specifically. I've really enjoyed doing this with you, brother, and I've had an absolute blast doing it. I'm extremely thankful that I've picked this game up again.
  8. HAPPY BIRTHDAY CANADA! this thread needs more enthusiasm and i am here to provide it
  9. Because its on topic I'm also going to post the streamable here because it's fun. https://streamable.com/9gp15
  10. Likewise, you also can't prove that he didn't say it. We have no mic evidence. I don't think that a black man would lie about a racialized insult being directed towards him, and I believe that Rudolph's personality and background makes him the type of person who absolutely would say something like that. It's not objective who was in the right/wrong here with how much information is flying around, and just as I can't prove anything, you can't either. How do you know Rudolph isn't lying out his ass? It comes down to what I believe vs what you believe at the end of the day, but Rudolph's agents denying it means nothing at all. He'd never admit it in this situation, it would be a PR disaster and possibly the ruin of his career.
  11. I believe Garrett. Of course Rudolph and his agents are gonna deny it, who is gonna go in front of the NFL and say "yeah I called him the n word"? Especially not MAGA Rudolph. He ain't a good guy, and I have no reason to believe him and every reason to believe Garrett. It's a shame there are no mics or anything, because you can't speak up unless you heard it yourself, right? The cards seem in place. The video to me makes it look obvious that Rudolph was pulling the helmet too.
  12. Honestly I don't like the idea of straight up monsters the way its worded. The monsters have never been shown to have any shred of humanity to them and it doesn't feel right to suddenly have them on your side. Plus, there's some merit in having a certain subset of classes be enemy only. If you recruit monsters, how do we know that the ones we're fighting are supposedly the bad guys? I just don't see the narrative working this out. It seems more or less random in a fire emblem game which generally presents itself super seriously. Another thing is that the way you bring it up, I don't know how that would work statwise. Sure, the different stones boost stats in different ways in their current implementations, but having so many drastically different forms just doesn't sound like there'd be consistency to the unit's state, rather it would be primarily based on the boosts/reductions of whatever form it's taking on.
  13. I was tagged a bit ago but I can't change the title because then it's not a forum game. I'll change the tags.
  14. Bazinga!!!! It's been three weeks but I'm not dead, just very busy and stressed. I put in my notice for moving out, and have to find a place to live for October, and that means I have to deal with a lot of shit at home. I've also taken on more responsibility at school and have to work on a major paper for the end of August. It's a hoot, but it's no excuse for not posting at least small progress. With no further ado, here we go: No preview here because I need to nickname this man and I don't know what to go. Open to any and all suggestions, reply with anything you find interesting. (I don't know if this guy evolves to Kangaskhan or not!)
  15. Yeah I really didn't like that article. I remember reading it though and seeing some stuff at the beginning which was pretty clearly virtue signalling which made me suspicious in the first place, but it was absolutely bait.
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