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Post by bbg95 on Mar 23, 2024 11:47:59 GMT -5
I started playing Marvel's Midnight Suns. I didn't realize you got the choice of a male or female character. When given the option, I normally go with a female character. I'd heard that the character is kind of a boring cipher, but she seems fine so far. Now, the Marvel characters...I think I have to agree with the criticism that they're poorly done. They're not absolutely awful, and they've had a handful of decent lines. But overall, it's not great. The gameplay has seemed pretty fun so far, though I've only played the first couple missions, so they haven't been that challenging. We'll see how it goes.
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Post by mikegarrison on Mar 24, 2024 16:55:39 GMT -5
LOL BG3:
1) There is a summon you can get named Shovel, who is pretty funny. She yells out stuff like "It's murderizing time!" or "Time for the fisting!". However, in one fight she was injured down to 1hp and screamed out, "It's only fun if Shovel does the fisting!"
2) When you "long rest", you have to select "camp supplies" to use up. These are all sorts of food and drink items that you find along the way. Anything from fish heads to "potato scone platter". But you can select all alcohol if you want. When I did that, I woke up with everyone in the party suffering 10 turns of hangover.
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Post by bbg95 on Mar 24, 2024 23:33:43 GMT -5
I played some more Midnight Suns, and my overall impressions haven't changed much. The gameplay is fun. I spent about 10 minutes on one mission trying to figure out how to complete an encounter in two turns instead of three. I wasn't able to kill all the enemies with my three card plays, even with some free actions. When I finally figured it out (using another resource called heroism to use an environmental hazard to kill the last one), it was very satisfying. The writing remains meh. There have been a few good lines but also quite a few cringeworthy ones. I wish that part was better, but I'm having fun overall.
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Post by mikegarrison on Mar 26, 2024 11:42:48 GMT -5
Even though I've played through this part of the game at least 20 times, I continue to find new and amusing things in BG3. The latest is that I had Shadowheart, a cleric of Shar, read a book about Selûne. Selûne is the goddess of the moon, while Shar is the goddess of darkness, and they are mortal enemies. Shadowheart is thus not impressed by Selûne.
After she read the book, she had this droll comment: "Moonlight, guidance, tides... how fascinating. Consider me converted, Selûne." "Tides" was heavily emphasized by the voice actress, in an ironic manner.
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Post by mikegarrison on Mar 26, 2024 14:53:37 GMT -5
Another BG3 encounter:
You can meet someone called "He Who Was", who is looking over a dead body. He wants to find evidence about a murder, and he says the dead body is the murderer.
You can find the evidence he needs, and come back to him. Turns out the dead woman was a bartender who informed on some of her patrons. The authorities killed them by forcing them to stab themselves to death.
He Wo Was channels her spirit, and you can get her to admit her guilt and then stab herself (ie. stab the body of He Who Was). If you do this, you then get a chance to tell her to stop after a light stabbing, or to keep going.
If you stop after a light stabbing, he then stops channeling the dead woman. He compliments you on breaking her spirit, and rewards you, but admits he would have preferred not quite so much of his own blood had been spilled. This is basically what I did every previous time.
However, this time I decided to see what would happen if you tell the woman to keep stabbing yourself. If you do that, he stops channeling her, but now he is extremely angry at you for doing so much damage to his own body. Then he goes hostile and you have to kill him. Eh. He wasn't a very nice person anyway.
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Post by mikegarrison on Mar 26, 2024 16:56:33 GMT -5
Yet another little detail:
In Act 2, you spend your time in the "Shadow-cursed lands", where anyone without magical protection or a light source is subject to a curse that will quickly drain them of health and turn them into undead.
You can infiltrate the main enemy base (which is protected from the curse). There are many things to do there, but one thing I never knew I could do is to talk to a guard who is looking over some new recruits. He expresses that "every batch of new recruits is more worthless than the last". You can suggest to him that he simply get rid of the recruits. He will then order them to patrol outside the protected area. They are scared to do it, but they follow the orders.
Later, where you usually find a bunch of shadow-cursed undead, you now find those same undead plus the four recruits, who have also been killed and turned undead. (They are trivial enemies, much weaker than most of the undead in the area.)
I thought it was a nice touch, because I had expected to just never see them again. Instead, the game remembered that I had sent them out and showed me the consequences of my choice.
(There will eventually be a showdown battle in the main enemy HQ, and every enemy that you kill or otherwise dispose of before that happens is one fewer that you face in the main battle. So finding ways to get rid of them a few at a time is actually quite useful.)
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Post by bbg95 on Mar 26, 2024 23:31:22 GMT -5
I played some more Midnight Suns and got to the point where side missions are now available. Apparently, there are infinite side missions, and unlike something like XCOM, you're not racing against a clock. In fact, some people apparently have maxed out their characters before even completing the next story mission. I don't think I'll go that far (for one thing, I at least want to recruit Captain America, who is the best tank in the game and joins after a few more story missions), but it's interesting. I do think it's worth doing at least a few side missions to upgrade my characters a bit more. The enemies scale to the level of your characters, but you can get better abilities than the ones you start with, some permanent stat upgrades, and other stuff in the meantime.
This is most important in the deck building part of the game. Each of the three characters you take on a mission has eight cards that go into your overall deck of 24. You then draw six cards for your starting hand. Of course, some cards are better than others, and some are more situational in their application. You can redraw two cards a turn, which will replace them with a random card from the deck. Dr. Strange in particular has two cards in his starting deck which are just useless. He's apparently the best character in the game besides the main character (known as the Hunter). But in order to unlock his potential, I need to do enough missions to get some better cards for him. Some of his starting cards are great, but I end up redrawing the two terrible ones every time.
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Post by mikegarrison on Mar 29, 2024 12:23:48 GMT -5
RPG gamers have been conditioned to do some strange things.
Like, I see people on BG3 forums all the time asking for help when vendors are annoyed at them for constant pickpocketing. Like ... uh ... if someone steals from you a lot, wouldn't you be annoyed at them too?
There is so much loot available in the game that usually my problem by even mid-game is how much it weighs to carry around all my gold coins. I can afford to buy literally anything I want in the game, except right at the start. And yet, people see that it is possible to steal from vendors, so they do it. Reflexively. Over and over. Like some kind of pack rat hoarders.
And then they complain when there are consequences!
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Post by mikegarrison on Mar 29, 2024 12:57:15 GMT -5
There is some consulting firm out of Montreal called "Sweet Baby Inc." that will look over game scripts and offer advice on whether they are problematic in terms of diversity and inclusion, etc.
For the usual reasons this seems to incense some right-wing gamers, and there is now a sort of "Gamergate 2" thing going on where the same old "games should only be for straight white right-wing males" crowd is harassing them, doxxing them, and compiling lists of games they claim have been influenced by them.
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Post by bbg95 on Mar 29, 2024 13:09:43 GMT -5
Lol, I'm playing Midnight Suns, and a Russian member of my team literally just said, "I must break you." I didn't realize that Ivan Drago was a Midnight Sun. Honestly, the overall writing in this game is better and funnier than I expected. I feel like SkillUp misled me with his review. It's subjective, and there have been a few cringy lines, but overall, I like these versions of the characters just fine. Maybe it's because I'm not a huge Marvel fan anyway.
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Post by mikegarrison on Mar 29, 2024 13:14:46 GMT -5
a Russian member of my team Piotr Rasputin?
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Post by bbg95 on Mar 29, 2024 13:20:28 GMT -5
a Russian member of my team Piotr Rasputin? It was his sister Illyana, aka Magik.
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Post by mln59 on Mar 30, 2024 15:09:10 GMT -5
lies of p
i got stuck on the king of puppets + romeo boss fight. decided to hook my PS4 up to the internet and get the newest version of the game and that paid off big time. was able to get through the fight and can now move forward
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Post by mikegarrison on Apr 5, 2024 14:04:19 GMT -5
OK, so I know there are games where you clean things, like "PowerWash Simulator" and games where you tidy up, like "Unpacking", but I just saw a game on the Steam store called "Crime Scene Cleaner". Apparently you work for the mafia and you go to crime scenes and have to erase all the evidence.
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Post by mikegarrison on Apr 5, 2024 20:10:36 GMT -5
A couple days ago I decided I hadn't played Gloomhaven in a really long time, so I started a new campaign. I had forgotten how BRUTALLY UNFORGIVING Gloomhaven can be. It took me something like four or five attempts to clear the very first level (which, admittedly, is notoriously hard for a first level in any game). Two or three times I got down to within one turn of killing the last enemy, but exhausted. I had forgotten a lot of the tricks to keeping yourself from running out of cards. I had also forgotten how brutal it is to have no undiscarded cards in your hand and have to burn two discarded cards to keep from dying -- especially if your character takes multiple hits and has to discard two cards for *each* of them.
I have the "Jaws Of The Lion" DLC, and those scenarios are a lot easier to survive. JotL was written as sort of "Gloomhaven Light" when it turned out that Gloomhaven was really hard for people to learn cold. JotL is a much more limited game that essentially serves as a playable introduction/tutorial to the full Gloomhaven.
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