Reality

For some reason, I'm playing Buck Roger's Countdown to Doomsday - I needed something "short" to take intermittent breaks from the MMO grind (holiday missions). It is a game that uses the SSI Goldbox engine (normally reserved for fantasy settings)… The Gold box series, ESPECIALLY pool of radiance are some of the most "rest spam" happy D&D related stuff to ever be made, but the sci-fi setting kind of helps Buck Roger's avoid that... on the other hand... Having "grenades" that functionally do the same thing as fireballs kind of gives you as much (if not more) ability to blitz things without running out of "slots". I think the tone of the game is better than expected with its pulp sci-fi action hero setup - you have to dive on a grenade in the tutorial dungeon! The game seems like it will continue to reward "brave" dialog choices and punish "self preservation" dialog choices. The combat seems to have some major problems compared to the D&D things the engine is usually saved for - "spellcasters" are not a rarity that is tactically hidden behind melee enemies, since anything with grenades is basically a spellcaster.... and when a whole gang of pirates or robots grenade you.... you can tell why the enemies in Dragonlance and Pool of Radiance weren't given fireball on a routine basis.... The game does give you "chaff" grenades so you can hide in smoke clouds for temporary immunity... but for the most part it's a matter of grenading them before they grenade you.... The game's different weapon types are halfbacked, but unlike the 2nd E D&D sword > other melee, it's a bigger problem - Robot enemies have outright immunity to most of the ranged guns.... making specializing in the needler top everything else. Melee isn't as fun as in goldbox because stat requirements take away the fun of backstabbing (even with no AoO to worry about in this game). The Guard command now has overwatch esque properties, but is kind of useless. I feel like I'll knock this out pretty quick, but it's kind of leaving me hungry.

People arguing that you must face the ledge for ledgegrab to activate (ala melee) … This annoys everyone in the room compared to the modern ledges, and the chars that benefit are mostly ones that Shouldn't - the ones that already have good aerial mobility, and Doctor / Mario's Cape.

I want to go through the main city builder series made by Impressions … Casear 3 > Zeus > Middle Kingdom I want to see Temple of Elelemtnal Evil's Temple+ mod and Jagged Alliance 2's 1.13 mod. I shouldn't risk the burnout of "seeing the CANON" of CRPGs the same way I did marathonging SNES and PS1 JRPGs to see their "canon" but.... I've played through so many gold box games that I might as well finish those up... Might and Magic shouldn't hurt me because I LOVED every minute of Wizardry 1,5,6,8 (although the others...) and finally the big 3 Roguelikes... despite their importance... should be short game from what I know of the sub-genre.

puyo puyo or lemmings - RCT when I need a break from EVERYTHING, but puzzle games are my short term go-to

Eyrios > Olwen if real

Decade Forza Horizon (2012) (Bless the whole sub-series, but playtime for personal lists) Overcooked 2 (2018) Monaco : What's Yours is Mine (2013) Stephen's Sausage Roll (2016) Ace Combat 7 (2019) World of Tanks (2010) Halo Reach (2010) Fifa 16 (2015) Call of Duty: Black Ops (2010) Spider Man (2018) All Time Roller Coaster Tycoon (1999) Worms Armageddon (1999) Mario Tennis (2000) Puyo Puyo Tsu (1994) Playtime I go PPT > GBA > Champions >Tsu > Fever - but it's the Tsu ruleset to the physics that I always use and it is fun to fire it up via 3DS mostly. Battle for Wesnoth (2005) Pokémon (1998) Wizardry 8 (2001) Donkey Kong Country 2 (1995) Banjo Kazooie (1998) Doctor Lunatic: Supreme With Cheese (1998) All time hurts - so many great couch multiplayer games I still play to this day, I could have weighed grade school games higher (Creatures and Majesty), then Wesnoth/Pokémon are just there because of their undeniable hold over my high-school years. I also want to meme and Puzzle game master race (mostly to give PlayStation its just dues) but that's not a "your' list. My modern games - Overcooked 2 and Monaco are actual Multiplayer crack - Fifa/Call of Duty / Halo - for me represented like a throwback to multiplayer games you could play with strangers without having to teach them the game - it's why I almost put things like NBA Jam / wrestling / Bomberman on my All time list

Consumable item healing can drastically speed up gameplay because all the games are balanced around fully staff-based healing - less relative in 3H because lol Psychic, but old games for sure - Healer's don't understand the movement stat master race.

First game - Dig-Dug on a Namco Plug and Play (the other 5 games were Galaxian/Pac-man/Ms.Pac-man/Bosconian/Rally-X)N64 was my first video game consoleMy first videogame love would have to be Banjo Kazooie, but Roller Coaster Tycoon and Majesty came like the same year or early the next year.My first Fire Emblem game would be Sacred StonesMy first MMORPG would be World of TanksMy first handheld console is the Gameboy ColorMy first PC game is King's Quest The first game I did speedruns in was Monaco:What's Yours is Mine The first arcade game I did a 1CC was 1943:Battle for midway The first time I deleted a sibling's save file was for Cubivore

Issac / Any Golden Sun charather - I found the series to break down into boring mash A to win RPGs---- I think the game's "hoard djinn for stats or burst them for damage" is a cool mechanic up to a certain point in every game (in GS 1 about Trent) but afterwards the advantages of stats gets a little too overbearing and you can play at least the 2nd half (if not even earlier) of every game just bulldozing through. Also Mute protagonist with choice of 4 facial emotes based conversation lol. (I don't like many assist trophy conversion ideas either) Ray Mk 1 / Saki (Sin and Punishment) MAYBE if they get a new game in their franchise on switch next year, but otherwise not even though.

@DragonFlamesThere's a special stat in Thracia called PCC (pursuit crit critical) that only applies to the second hit - the first crit only uses regular formula. How much PCC each charather has it is set in stone on a charather by charather basis though. https://serenesforest.net/thracia-776/miscellaneous/calculations/ (PCC for each charather is on the charather base stat page as well) Anywany with at least 3 can get into automatic critical range and the 1-2 can do it if their skill growth is loaded.

I bought Company of Heroes 1 and Mount and Blade : Warband over the Black Friday sales. CoH 1 I got because everywhere I looked people said CoH 2 is for people who want to do multiplayer all the time, but CoH 1 has an actually good Singleplayer Campaign (I like multi in this genre, but my timeeeeeeee) Mount and Blade snuck onto an RPG list that someone I follow put up and I was confused because I thought it was a Dynasty Warriors clone, so I bought it as part of an investigation.

I agree that it's difficulty is overated for a blind-play for someone with other FE experience - there are actually a lot of great Enemy-phase super-units in this game - and if it's TRULY a blind playthrough you should fail the requirements and therefore never see, the harder Gaiden maps - I feel like when it comes to the non-gaiden maps there is only 2 that are really problematic, and you can make them comfortable by - ignoring the level up growth" part of scrolls for that level and splitting them up to make multiple units immune to crits, and if really necessary, intentionally triggering their "capture AI" and then fighting them while their stats are halved.

I played Star Control 3 - Now I can claim that the combined videos speedrun the franchise in 6 hours - I'm happy considering that 3 of them are adventure/hybrid RPG. As far as SC3 being a bad game / black sheep of franchise - I actually think it's writing is entertaining a lot, there are obvious execution fails later on, but given the tight deadline it was made on, most of them aren't too bad - The real problem with the game is that it's inconsistent event triggers- they're divided into "immediate" 1 day 10 day, and "special" 7 specific event triggers ( 5 of which are needed to complete the game) have delays of 90, 100, 110, 150, 100 again, 70, and one more 100 - These create incredible confusion - both for casual players and me while planning the speedrun - while waiting for certain of them to resolve, you can probably finish all available non-timegated content in 25-30 In-game-days, and then the game will seemingly be locked, while actual progress is, technically still possible. There are also a couple really dumb dependent dialogs - the game wants you to get information from the Spathi for 4 unrelated aliens (very nonunintuitive) and more flagrantly, you can ally aliens such as the Owa, who will have 0 dialog branches, unless you leave and resolve pre-requisite dialog branches with other aliens - The game also has TONS of non-standard game-overs you can get through dialog - some of which are serious non-sequitors - Exquivan and Owa again - Combat is a hot mess - I REALLY like SC1 and SC2 combat, but SC3 gives you freebies in story mode, and in the full combat mode --- 4 new ships are broken compared to old ships, while the other 6 new ships are various degrees of junk - The game supports 64 angles instead of the classic 16, so a couple ships benefit from the new physics. The main problem is that the average health of the new ships, even the bad ones, has increased into the 20 range, so the old balance between fragile speedy ships and cumbersome slow turning ships is kind of lost. If you want to use all old ships you can steamroll everything from the begining of the game with the Utwig / Chmrr combo, which you weren't allowed to build in SC2 until there was nothing left but the final boss.

Going over my posts at the time I don't seem to have had any enthusiasm for it. I would say that looking at it now, I think it's too tacky and out there.

It was a blip compared to last year (especially for PS4), but there are enough thing in development for 2020 to make up for it. Ace Combat 7 was my favorite game this year - I also feel like it's a big year for HD re-release of old games, but that's mostly considering crash/spyro with the other notables mostly being RPGs (old DQ games, more version of the PS1 final fantasy, Grandia, etc)

I think an FE 4 remake could stomach gameplay changes as far as "pursuit being universally available" - I see the constant defense of the original game's balance on this and other things - but FE4 Is actually pretty easy - I think the reaction to Three Houses - Normal/Hard - showing that the Fandom actually can pick up on games being a too easy nowadays - An faithful remake of FE4's design whatever people's feelings on it being boring and/or unique - would definitely be an EASY one both for its fans and its critics -

Nephenee and all other Halberdiers - bench them all.

Now playing Star Control 1 Dos. Pro The Turn Based Strategy format and starting resources make you need to play as every ship - I always had a problem in Star Control 2 since you only got the alliance ships, and even of them, you would play 70% of story with the one's recruited nearest earth (earthling, spathi, pfunk > arilou, orz) It didn't help that the AI was most easily kitable by 3 of these ships. When you finally added in later ships, their was barely any combat left, and things like the utwig jugger and chmrr avvatar are basically "sa matra only". I really love the combat physics of star control 2 in super melee, but I think the way it's represented during the story really sells it short. The Stronger gravity makes me play a few ships differently Con The Hard Ai's input reading - like in SC2, their raw decision making let's you weather them down, but the "crackerkjack aim" returns, and then there's the special case of the arilou and their "if bullet is approaching me in 1 frame I immediately teleport" The reaction time is terrifying - and they are only killable because the transition between the 1/16 and 1/8 angles causes "weird movement" which they technically don't include- but as far I'm concerned they're the most terrifiyng enemy in any space-genre game. The broken sound effects - If Umgah or Ilwrath kill something (and very rarely Chmmr) then you have to put up a minimum of 7 seconds of audio clipping (and it can go MUCH longer) The sound effects aren't punchy - a lot of iconic sounds like the Spahi' B.U.T.T. missles just don't come across - the one positive is that the victory jingles ARE pretty close to sc2 though.