Reality

I'm now playing Doom the Roguelike - It's a fangame that's been developed over 9 years (the dedvelopers made a commercial game on a similar engine just this August called Jupiter Hell) It's very fast-paced, has tons of nods to id software. It's pretty much all combat, but interesting in that they implemented "dodging" in a turn based system. Feels really good after being disappointed by things like recent mystery dungeon games. I've beaten it once with a mix of weapons (plasma rifle and rocket launcher), and about 4 times with melee (chainsaw is just blessed). The game has lots of challenge type mutators you can start a game with, but I don't feel very confident with them. I want to say the nicest difficulty on Ultra-VIolent, like actual Doom, but I kinda prefer Hurt Me Plenty, mostly because randomly starting a level and getting the tiny cave map full of anachrotrons is scary. The game has graphics, but I think they're ugly so I'm using the option to switch to the original Ascii.

Star Control : Origins It's a shame this game is known more for the lawsuit than on its own terms, because it really is a nice little game. That said, I don't like the combat nearly as much as SC2.... The main problems are Too much homing, and Too much (Circle based) AOE - it really puts a damper on using fast ships and maneuverability, and emphasizes raw HP. I also don't like the light deceleration, since I prefer the full momentum and inertia/physics thing. I went through the story in 18 hours (20-24 is reported as average). I went on to put up a speedrun of the game. In SC2 I always used All follower ships for combat, but in the speedrun, it's Flagship time all day. I did use all follower ships in my blind playthrough. Majesty: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim Still as fun as ever. Coming back because... Someone showed up to speedrun it. I'm showing them what I know.

Growing up - Between the Lions Today - Mister Roger's Neighborhood

Seth Alois Jagen Marth Dagda Garcia August Dimitri Calill Dozla Hubert Annete Takumi Arran Kellam Charathers I thought about - Leaf, Othin, Halvan, Saleh, L'arachel, Mordecai, Gregor, Gunter, Kagero, Felix, Hanneman

The RPGs and Hybird games I played immediately before Three Houses - Grandia 1, Persona 5, Battle for Wesnoth, Into the Breach, Wargroove,) More than anything else, I think about the enemy preview (which evokes Into the Breach heavily) This makes me feel like Three Houses presents itself more as a puzzle game than a as a (SRPG)whatever that is. No Fire Emblem game other than Heroes really comes close to such a feeling. I feel like this is a real positive within Heroes, but a net negative within Three Houses, although perhaps nice on the first playthrough. Within a "main" FE title it kind of half-painful to have the (always present with the series) tag-based enemy priotization overtly visible to the player. Even in the few games (bonus difficulties) where enemies are on parity with player charathers, the fact that you can borderline mind control them plays too large a part on the strategy. Anyway, TH isn't strictly more guilty than the FE games before it, but the way it presents itself leaves the impression that it is. Maddening for me was the biggest disappointment because it's basically plays out with Player uses more turtly- playstle than usual Chapter 1-5 > Same as Hard mode 6-11 A brief one-off hard bit for Chapter 12 at beginning of time skip > Same as Hard mode 13-2nd last > one last stat inflation jump for the endgame map. --- I liked the game overall, but I didn't have as much tactical fun with it as the DS and 3DS games. It reinforces my opinion that FEH's (Infernals and Chain Challenge) are the actual peak of the series when it comes to giving the player the ability to express themselves with rag-tag combinations of very different unit/movement compositions.

Flayn in the battle of Gronder field as Blue Lions - I remember using the strode gambit to kill the original ballista user right at the start but when they sent Petra up I just ran away (I didn't know Gambis bypassed Evasion at that point). I didn't realize that Petra qualified for the ballista, so she smashed Flayn. (Then next turn Lysithea disintegrated Petra from full health, which was even more terrifying). I only had Flayn deployed because I had done no recruits and didn't reach the deployment limit. No one else died in the part 2 maps, although Ashe and Sylvain probably would have if I hadn't benched him and just used 6 BL + random Teachers.

I don't see how it couldn't be AW - Felix is almost as silly an earlygame advantage as Dedue and RallyAnnette. You have extra 1range delete options because Dimitir is a high strength tempest lance and Ingrid has a +3 on it with her personal(although her enemy phase combat is garbage until reclassed).

Low concept. I feel like I see deconstructionism go too far a lot these days in a lot of fantasy material - I don't like slipping into the point of tackiness. I also think that a honest to goodness use of the most vanilla fantasy can be Refreshing - It's uplifting to see chivalry treated straight every now and then - and what's more it can be FUN. I also don't think it is as "creatively stifling" as people make it out to be, and I think even in cases of freely borrowing and widespread use of stock charathers (Fabilau come to mind) that there is a lot of room for voice.

I complete forgot Close Counter. Probbably an Uber skill in itself even if it's "just" for archers. I think you can make the case that in Maddening you might want to keep it unequpped if you learn it really early because a charather that doesn't counter can turtle more safely (probably stuff like the Miklan map), but I feel by chapter 9 on that it is as worthy as it is on Hard mode.

I consider Beginner and Intermediate Class mastery skills to take about 6-7 level ups to earn. I consider practical weapon skills to be A+. I consider practical non-weapon skills to be B+. I do like things Alertstance+, Quick Riposte, but even in a playthrough where I make 6 Wyverns or 4 war masters, Like only 1 of them actually learns the skill. These go to NU Uber Deathblow - you are dying to level up strength as much as possible from lvl 10-q9 anyway so learning time doesn't cost you much. Fiendish Blow - Alert Stance - The C rank version is what you will be working with, and it's good enough. OU Sword/Lance/Reason etc - you learn these anyway, and having hit and avoid is a no brainer Authority - you probably want these in the C range even unequiipeed for the Battalion stat stick, but in the interim period before learning other abilities the + MT to gambits is nice, especially since you want to use them a lot more than normal on maddening. Rally Speed - Comes at lowish ranks for 2/3 of people who learn it (Crimson Flower can forget about it) Magic +2 - - The movement combat art is more important for 4 move till lv 30 and you tend not to miss being 1-2 levels behind for your lvl 10 class Weight-3 - More learnable than "spend 5 levels in a beginner reclass" thanks to study and point-free group activity. UU Strength + 2 In my experience it kind of takes ~7 levels as fighter rather than the ideal 5 levels for the immediate level 10 intermediate class, but it does come pre-packed with a movement combat art (shove) that you can use forever. I also qualify everyone for fighter since I make everyone in maddening get D bows for curved shot anyway. Defense + 2 Like the above except it comes packed with Reposition as the combat art - might not ever be replaced. Rally Charm - Gives one charather per turn 100% accuracy with Gambits on everything except the House leaders in Gronder levels. Only for Manualla and Dorothea. Battalion Wrath - learned by a decent amount of people, kind of usuable (don't need to start map without replenishing in my experience) RU HP+5 charathers have a high chance of learning it in the process of getting to level 5 anyway, and sometimes it gives them enough bulk to cross a survivability threshold Speed+2 - Just isn't as practical in maddening, but if you try for not getting doubled thresholds instead of doubling thresholds its okay outside of othe ~5 levels of investment Rally Strength - I wouldn't go out of my way to recruit Raphael, but it is kind of nice if playing Golden Deer anyway. Rally Defense - I do actually think Seteth / Gilbert as practical charathers in Maddening - Gilbert only needs two months of study to Wyvern Rider Baseline>< Its effects are also easy to reach 1 turn tanking benchmarks with. Rally Magic - Lower Authority requirements, one on a char (Ingrid ) who you might recruit out of a house for the weapon. Special Dance - only one charather, but they won't turn it off NU everything else I don't consider mastering lvl 20 or lvl 30 class skills except by accident Alertstance+ Mov+1 MIGHT be reached, but even times when I make 6 Fliers, usually it's by 1 of them and not 3+ of them. Wrath (from Warrior) and Quick Riposte (from Warmaster) can sometimes come online for ~2-3 maps at end of a route Things like the Faire Skills and Range+1 skills are great as reclass passives, but unpracticall as equipped skills since you won't learn them.

I play stuff on MAME all the time and before that I always got the PS2 era "genesis collection, Capcom collection, midway collection, etc) My absolute favorites though- Dig Dug - One of first things I ever owned was one of those plug-n-plays that Namco puts out and unlike everyone else, Pacman/Galaxian wasn't my favorite on it. Gauntlet Legends - Played this on a physical arcade and it I thought (and still think) it is the hottest thing. I have a brother who loves Capcom-style 2D beat em ups and the Warriors series, but personally I've always preffered this game (and Dark Legacy) over all of them. It does have obvious flaws, but it's worth coming back to over the console versions - Console's Ice world is an abomination (as long as half the game combined) compared to the Swamp/Desert of the original. The original also retains timer based health and doesn't emphasize buying up stats by letting you "toggle off" powerups and then selling them. So it feels like a real arcade experience instead of a bad psedo action RPG. Smash TV - I can play this for hours and it still stomps out all the popular indie twinstick shooters. Rampage: World Tour - I love this extremely. It was also somewhere in my first 10 n64 games (good conversion only real change is to the health bars). Has a slightly weaker sequel (universal tour) and a Gamecube sequel (total carnage) but the original is still the best because it acknodlledges itself as a time waster and keeps you away from worrying about "progression" since you have to go out of your way to actually get to the moon and finish the game. I also feel like the "mini games" and cycling level challenges makes competition among players more fun than in the other games. If you asked a couple years ago, I really love Daytona and even more Ridge Racer, but I barely manage to think about cars in videogames without going to Forza these days. I feel like it would be cheating to put Puyo-Puyo Tsu, so I won't - but it overqualifies, I just mentally think of it as a Genesis game before an arcade game.

Kind of encompasses too much. A turn based competitive game sure - I think most positive in a war-game or maybe RTS context, but even a turn based game RPG or deckbuilder it's beneficial... mostly because I think it de-incenvitizes setting up "engines" with "draw engines" being the most boring and spectator unfriendly example. The main competitive thing I care about is puzzle games and it's good to have variation to avoid guaranteed perfect clears lol. I could go on about how block and color generation is beneficial because it makes the timing aspect of VS puzzle games possible as opposed to a raw contest of mechanical skill/speed, but that's something I could go on about forever.

I expect the next Paper Mario game to release before the next Fire Emblem game tbh. FE4's media footprint is still kinda small outside of the niche FE community, despite increased exposure in Heroes, etc. Don't see it on the horizon anytime soon. Spinoff and The a new FE17 make the most sense to me, but I think at most that the franchise will maintain a release every 2nd year rather than picking up the pace further.

Remaster Eye Toy Play 2( Or straight Eye Toy: Play Trilogy) I still think it blows every party game from the Wii/Kinect era out of the water, the main weakness is that it wants a very specific level of light, I almost exclusively played it in a garage and had to physically move lamps arounds and the only times I got it to work in an actual living room was by making everyone wear bright shirts. Rocket: Robot on Wheels The most impressive physics of the N64 platform games, had a fairly unique themeing Charlie Brown music and developed by a company that went on to become famous on PlayStation afterwards. Main touch ups would be camera related, maybe tweak some of the bomb-grapple puzzles. SSX Tricky / 3 - The Second most important Extreme sports game after Tony Hawk and it's still relegated to slumming it out on PS2 - No excuse not to have a closer presence to THPS, and be available for everyone. Remake Steambot Chronicles - Hard to explain it, but you can think of a an open world GTA/Bully type of a game, but with an early industrial revolution steampunk hybrid setting. The optional content and town part of the game is glorious. The weakness of the original game was combat.... The steambot's themselves used tank controls, and also caused enormous slowdown, and additionally, most ranged weapons were garabage, so you had to use an awkward targeting system and melee things to death with tank controls. The game's loading screens were also too slow, especially the 5-6 that would be used to combine segments of a town (although the vignette text intro was cool). Won't be remade because Irem software got rid of it's videogame division. Going to work ATM, but will probably say something like Wizardry 8 / 3DO Battletanks

I went something like Byleth - Assasin Claude - Barbarossa Lysithea - Gremory Lorenz - Dancer Marriane - Bishop Hilda - Wyvern Leonie - Wyvern Raphael - Started War Master and then changed to Fortress Knight for a change of Pace Ignatz - Benched, would have gone bow knight, but I took shamir to get 4 supports out of the way.

Mario PuyoPuyo Donkey Kong Banjo NBA2K Wizardry Unreal Tournament Descent Ace Combat Star Wars: Rogue Sqaudron Worms Gauntlet Roller Coaster Tycoon

I went BL > GD > BE > Church. I found BL most fun, and GD second most fun. I feel like their is a strong implication especially at the beginning of Part 2 that the teacher's taught students from all three houses (regardless of which you lead) and it's brought up in dialog a lot, but you don't really get a feel-for this in-game during the actual Part 1 - it's mostly due to only having cutscenes with your own house, and the lack of sidequests / etc requiring you to talk to other students unless you want too. Much more often this part of the game rang hollow because I played the game pretty partisian. Some Paralogues felt more fleshed out than main maps, with things like Annete/Gilbert standing out (the only other time you ever go west of the monastery in BL is for Red Canyon despite that assumedely being the front line of the Alliance/Kingdom conflict)' I liked BL and GD supports a lot, even though a lot of GD supports seems to start "badly" or their C (Lorenz/Ignatz/Raphael feeling more Awakening esque-than any BL chaarathers. TWISIT being a villian feels really out of place when the game is otherwise a Edelgard / Rhea conflict - even in routes where they completely disappear they still compete for "emotional resources" since you still have Jeralt's death and end of part 1 maps regardless of route. Recruiting for BL/GD feels okay, but for BE I seems to cause a story disconnect imo. The cast is also polarized into REAL hippie peace lovers who feel like they want out of the war even for their own country's route and real die hards who I guess are supposed to look like fighting for anyone for one support before inverting at higher supports. The game's "it's for proffersor > override chareriztiion" kind of flip flops strongly or terribly depending on no-support / C level / B level. ' I kind of think Rhea's Grey vs Grey charecitzation is a little heavy handed, especially on routes where you don't fight her like BL. I like that it exists but you should find out about it from people a couple more steps removed from her I feel like the non-protaganist issue with Byleth comes up the most in BL because the first half of the part 2 maps will have Dimitri asking you if you want ot reinforce their Kingdom or charge blindly forward, and no matter if you support or oppose you end up doing the Dimitri. Other route's don't really present options so repeatedly so it's less noticiable, and I guess you don't mentally think it's an option since the entire cast doesn't oppose the lord's decision lol. On my first blind play I used multiple save spots because I was SURE their was branching.. I feel like too much is done offsccreen (just how good is rodrique and edelgard's generals when they're on your side) and wish the game was called out for being shorter than Sacred Stones for individual routes.

A full on tactics game fog of war system like in SIlent Storm would be amazing innovation for Fire Emblem. I don't think it's necessary, but if using existing fog of war mechanics with map design changes only I prefer harder fog of war levels to easy ones.

Wizardry 8 - Started one heck of a binge into CRPG history - I do have the unpopular opinion putting the best Greenberg games > Bradley games, but Wiz 8 is my favorite despite feauturing neither of the core designers. Puyo Puyo GBA - Played it for possibly hundreds of hours, got me into better puyo games (Puyo GBA's pointblocks and hardblocks kind of reduce difficulty) Colony Wars - Got me to play all 3 CW games, and then to follow the publisher Psygnosis around, then to play the separate Descent/Freespace franchises.

I liked Ashe when I played BL but dropped him entirely for Shamir when Part 2 started. He just feels kind of bad as a Bow Knight or Bow Wyvern Lord once stats start climbing. If I do the route again I might think about making Ashe the dancer to keep him in the game. I also feel like Flayn is overated, but especially for Blue Lions, since Mercedes staff range is so high, and most chapters will be over in 4 fortifys, going to 6 by doubling up with dancer flayn is never going to see use. I kind of hate non-dancer Flayn's terrible movement and I only used rescue in a couple paralogues. I don't see it nearly as awesome as warp or even reposition tbh.

Looking at my list of games- Overcooked 2 > ALL I loved this game so much I bought Overcooked 1 for more levels, and then bought it on PC so I can play it with my local multiplayer AND my online multiplayer group. PuyoPuyoTetris Possible to hold off until the next Puyo game especially for online-puropses but my impression is that it won't be as good of an "entry point" as this one.for me both are neccesary Smash Bros Golf Story I thought it was overhyped, but I actually think it's in the top 3 best comedy story games I've ever played. It also does a surprisingly well translation of a hot-shots golf esque engine into 2.5 D (although you don't need to play Hot Shots golf to enjoy it). For people really afraid of Golf, it isn't too scary - you spend more time on Golf themed challenges than "real" golf, and at worst it'll only put you through 9 holes. Pang Adventures A really nice arcade reboot. I have fun doing it in score attack. Super Mario Odyssey Lode Runner Legacy Everyone should play through Lode Runner in some form at some time. I personally don't like this one graphic/presentation wise (Legend Returns PC beats this by a mile) NES Collection A lot of people forget about this coming free with Online, but I've spent more hours in in that all actual switch games. The KING of the games here is Super Dodgeball. play that if nothing else and you won't regret it. Cadence of Hyrule I recommend this WITHOUT playing Crypt of Necrodancer first - CoN gets more frustrating to complete and the overworld w/ dungeons feels more complete than the 3 floors+boss formula. The map seeding and enemy design are more generous here than in CoN Snipperclips This is a ton of fun, but especially as a multiplayer game, it's also cheap by switch standards. Into the Breach This is really a puzzle game, and is necessary for everyone to get a new impression of the Fire Emblem AI. Fe I bought it for the Meme, but it's a relaxing atmospheric game. As a platformer, it's very simple, with main jumps being from contextual (tree) to (tree) so you can fudge it since it's generous with the really wide range your charather has. Wargroove There are a couple of things I found OFF about it, but it's a above average game that partially succeeds in making a Fantasy themed Advanced Wars spiritual successor. Mario vs Rabbids This is genuinely a very funny game. Tactically it's a possible to kind of brute force a lot of the story, but the final chapters and the postgame challenges kind of evolve into a squishy vs squishy meta, which helped me to renew my interest. My AVOID List Chocobo's Mystery Dungeon, Yooka Laylee, Yoshi's Crafted World, Unruly Heroes, Starlink Battle for Atlas - I really wanted to like Chocobo and Yooka Laylee, but both have serious problems compared to the games they are inspired or the immediate previous game in Yoshi's case. -Unruly Heroes is great visually, using the Rayman engine for a Chinese setting, but the gameplay bores me to tears. Only if really interested in local Multiplayer Screencheat, Astro Bears, Lovers in Dangerous Space Time, Super Mario Party, and Crawl Screencheat is a novel gimmick FPS, but I think it works well. Astro Bears is a 4 player 3D "Snake" game, Lovers is a free roaming Space ship game, but you have to juggle who is using turrets and who is driving in real time, And Crawl is a streamlined VS version of Gauntlent.