Reality

Team 17 put out a demo for "Moving Out" today - I played it and it has 4 Player local co-op ! Pretty fun and as an Overcooked fan I'll probably go and pre-order off of this.

Some indie rougelike called Armoured commander 2 linked me off of twitter https://www.armouredcommander.com/blog/2020/02/27/beta-1-release/ My thoughts: I wonder why the 2018 screenshot of the game from earlier in its development has a 6 tile in every direction battlemap when this beta has only 3 tile far and seemingly more advanced camoflauge/spotting mechanics? Played through the entire Battle of France, which turned out to be 17 battles since you don't get deployed on every day of the May 10 -June 16 All 4 French tanks are basically heavy tanks (within the context of 1940).. it seems like a bonus campaign, maybe it'll even be made into the tutorial. I tried all of the light fast tanks for a few battles and quit out of their campaigns - MUCH more fun, and the bigger risk of death helps the game from dragging on so long. My game did glitch out later on (attempt unbog command stopped appearing at all even when I needed it / Game crash when you use close combat against non-infantry / Commander's sight range went down when he took light wounds but did not go back up when he recovered) It might have been my individual save file, because none of these have come up when playing countries other than France. I'm waiting to judge the game - the French experience (and I assume other heavy tanks) is a fun power fantasy but kind of overstays it's welcome and isn't too tactical - I'm hoping that the game will change a lot when I take a deeper dive into the light tanks.

This isn't battle for Wesnoth. I don't know if the intent is to justify more frequent enemy healers, or just to increase unit cycling.

Basic Weapons - Training weapons helps a lot in Maddening earlygame to prevent being doubled - Normal mode no reason to go below Iron. - Steel has a noticeable break point of risk/reward that makes it come in over iron (sometimes with a babysitter to trade him after his action for steel PP >Training EP.) Effective Special Weapons - Against generic armors/horses, not really, but good for boss ones IN COMBINATION with arts. Meaty people like Dimitri can whack non effective generics with them and pretend like they are steel and then get the effective bonus on the actual horse/etc in the same group. Special Weapons - Javelin/Hand Axe = No - Killer/Brave = Yes Magic Weapons - They work okay if you got the ranks up on a magic charather, but not to the point that it's more than a nice bonus. Reason Faith - Clearly imbalanced, but the enemy design makes it tolerable since ANY earlygame mage including absurd ones like felix is good due to kinda bad enemy-res till chapter 11ish.

Mike Hommel's two Demos for Dr. Lunatic - first Spooky Castle and then the Dr. Lunatic demo itself (Lisa Keck level set). I forget the chronology, but I know that Spooky Castle is essentially a single "Dr. L" world made as its own game but it shows screenshots and store pages of Dr. L when you beat the game or exit the game. - The Dr. L demo itself is just Dr. L with most content cordoned off and 4 Lisa Keck worlds (of higher quality than some Dr. L worlds) His other demos feel too small (except Loonyland 2 which was accidently the fullgame except with 2 tactically placed rocks on certain map transitions that you could glitch through)

Too much about Macro, too little about on the field strategy. It's a personal preference thing. Combing a game good at one with the other is a pipe dream that's been afflicting both strategy games and tactical games for a decade and a half.

Is banjo&kazooie supposed to be played as a rush down charather? I feel like I'm surprising people in my locals, and I get the impression that they think he's a campier zoning charather for some reason. It's worked out pretty well in my favor so I can't complain.

I'm glad you like the series and hope you enjoy the community. I always wonder if it's better to try a sample of every game in a subgenre or to play one series straight after you like one game in it. I used to always tell people to play their first fire emblem, then play final fantasy tactics, disgaea, and shining force, before playing their second fire emblem. However, these days I feel like this would be too much to put-upon new people to the genre since most of these SRPG competitors didn't continue to modern consoles. I am more open to the idea that I just do it because I personally would like to see cross-pollination of gameplay ideas between the different ways people have made SRPGs and that single franchise loyalty is a more natural way to approach things. I think my favorite charathers in three houses were the minor Blue Lions charathers like Felix and Annete, I guess the more plot-centric people blew-over my head on my first passes through the game.

Thracia's generic enemies are only dangerous in the 2 maps with Cyas leadership bonuses (which includes massive crit rate) and when dark-mages poison units are placed to overlap with each other. Case in point - you can wall up and "rout" the Manster escape maps - which gives you masive quantities of rapiers for the rest of the game Thracia has some really absurd enemy phase potential because of how automatic critical hits works, and even when using the worse characters, you can chew things up. Definitely loses out to DS FE 's higher difficulties

I don't play Fire Emblem expecting it to be Advanced Squad Leader.... I think the Agrro lines of Three house makes the game more into a puzzle-tactics game than an SRPG, but it isn't as well thought out as something like Into The Breach (which I have my own problems with). I do think that Puzzle Tactics is a promising direction for Fire Emblem which I see as FEH's main appeal. The information in "classic" FE is just as easy to streamline as a veteran player just by focusing on "open slots" - you don't need to fully mind-control and predict the computer's moves as long as you know at least what they are doing with the 3 spaces per player unit. The only slight trick to it is getting attacked by the same slot multiple times because of enemy designed to do do damage and die on the counter attack to increase their slot-economy and give another enemy room for the slot (practically why steel weapons exist, especially in the GBA era) My complaint with FE being "gamey" is that it rewards the most basic tactic of "tank and spank"...…. being game-ified vs historical has nothing to do with it. I also think that having a small number of "systems" also has nothing to do with it (eg compared with Jagged Alliance or Battle Brothers) -- I think there is a GOOD place for a low-mechanic, but still intense map design SRPG, which would play a lot faster, but than what should be standard for the genre but still be tactical

Kill Boss : Layout of # - Enemy has Rescue Stave Bishops everywhere, who are equipped with 5 durability "glass" weapons for the purpose of trading to the main boss - who will use this ad-hoc mobility to restock, attack you, and escape all in the same turn - Gimmick for the player is either trying to isolate him in one big turn or break the psedo teleport network by killing the bishops first

Genealogy Gen 2 is a let down compared to Gen 1 and not just in Rising Action > Denoument way ---- For me it has always had a terrible tone problem. Calling Julius himself a Sautrday Morning Cartoon villian is an exaggeration but also kind of fair... We are given alternate presentations of him as A: evil for evil's sake and B: weirdly childlike and disconnected from reality - with the examples of the latter being the scenes with his Ishtar in both Genalogy and Thracia - in the one where they decide to play a "game" instead of leading their armies, and in Thracia the "let's walk in the garden > let's go shopping scene" … Honestly although he's been placed into power by the Lopytr cult he doesn't really seem interested in actually being an emperor or anything. Gen 2 also kicks off Lewyn as god of exposition - he literally has half of the lines for the entire generation, and it's suually delieverd in semi-monologues with very little narration - Lead retainers like Jeigan/Marcus/Seth/Frederick have traditionally had the most non-lord dialog, but not to this extreme of a degree. I think that the idea of this being the dark future and an apocalpyic landscape doesn't come through properly - I feel like you fight profiteering generals more so than "pawns of the new darklord" kind of thing langobolt and leptor were more interesting villians than most in gen 1, but how are their houses rewarded when they didn't fully go along with lopytr in the first place, and examples of misrule through text mentions of child hunts are too sudden and extreme to be emotionally believable. 6-7 =profiteers kind of low stakes 8-9 Thracia which is admittedly the highlight 10-Final where child hunts are mentioned most often and therefore the dumbest chapters. I mean I get annoyed in general that people will weight story>gameplay enough to say it makes up for it... but it's only Gen1 so when people say the love it enough to overlook the gameplay... do they just love that first half of it ? Enough that every other FE story is bad by comparison? Really?

Amazon Prime, Netflix, Nintendo Switch Online, Subscription to the Brown Theatre - Used to have subscription to Cincinnati Shakespeare company and the Know Theatre, but I don't live in Cincinnati anymore. I did one year to Actor's theatre as well, but I had something embarrassing happen at one of the performances attended.

Hubert … cause he's like a Machelevian, but his supports with the comedy character's has him like shrug his shoulders and just exasperatedly live with them. I like them even more than his supports with the actual plot charathers.

Wizardry 8 - Had never experienced such "party banter" before - You use literal generics, in this game but Chaotic female voice 1 and Aggressive Male voice 2 have more personality than most characters in full RPGs - It got me real excited for Jagged Alliance afterwards, but even though JA and JA2 are better games by the same studio, they don't quite have the memorability of my first character ever dying in a party only to be met with "The dead guy, what was his name again?" Worms Armageddon - playing the game without planning and just having a chain reaction of guy going flying, hitting a mine, going flying again, killing someone else during their death animation, that second guy flying down a cliff and landing next to one of my own guys, and then drowning my guy during his death animation - MDK 2 - This game will save your health on a per-checkpoint basis, so I got put in a situation somewhere (I think 7D-7E) where I had to go without taking damage because I could only load that save file with minimum health. Monaco: What's Yours is Mine - multiplayer speedrun = good memories. I always tell people Prestige and Red Carpet were the most fun. Ace Combat 5 Mission 3 - this level sold me on the franchise due to the Osean Fleet radio chatter. I have a lot of woahmo ments, but that usually more to do with game-design than a full-on memories.