What are you playing?

[Bobito]

I haven't play the previous games but after VC4 for sure I'll try the old ones if my psp is still alive.

[Kugelfisch]

Inspired by Carrion I decided to check out the dev's previous game Butcher.



I've seen it before but decided to give it a pass. I've let stupid opinions saying it's way too difficult or that you don't have enough ammo sway my opinion. It's currently on GOG for pocket change so I just went for it.

It is difficult but FAR from unfair or frustrating. Stay mobile and take out enemies efficiently, using the room to block line of sight so you don't have to deal with a dozen guys at the same time and you'll be fine. Maybe you'll die and try again a few times but it's very fun overall.
The levels are short, there are no checkpoints and when you die you instantly respawn at the beginning. Nothing is random. So it's pretty much difficult in the way that Super Meat Boy is difficult. Unless you suck you should be able to clear the first few levels on your first try and as you go on you'll take a few tries per level to learn it.

Unlike SMB nothing is just very difficult to execute with next to no room for error. You can take a few hits, you can mostly play on reaction and instinct. If you get hit it's because of something you weren't prepared for - you will be next try - or because of a new enemy type. Or maybe your strategy for a room just sucks and you should try something else.

About the health and ammo. You have enough. Sure, even fully armoured and at full health you're minced meat after three point blank shotgun blasts or two contacts with a chainsaw jetpack guy. So just don't have that happen. All enemies take a good second to react to you. By that time you should've already shot at them, killed them or gotten into a better position to avoid fire.
Ammo is enough. You'll never have an abundant supply and you have to switch weapons. But if you find it's way too little ammo your aim is too garbage and you'll die from being overwhelmed anyway.

There has been an update that implemented an easy mode that gives you 400% health, 2x enemy reaction time and more ammo drops and some faggots still find it too difficult. That's amazing to me. I play on Hard (the original lowest difficulty) and it's quite chill.

The music is awesome, the ultra violence is great and over the top and the pace is amazing. The story is fun as well. You're just some mindless, mass-produced kill drone sent out to exterminate humans. That's it.
The tutorial sends you through "drone calibration" and then fires you off to some space station to start the slaughter.

There's a demo out there and it's like four bucks on GOG. Alternatively, it's a small game without DRM so you know what that means. Very fun for short murder death kill sessions.

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

Been playing some valkyria chronicles 4. It's fun and all. I played a lot of VC2 on psp years ago. It's basically animu xcom. Only thing I don't like about the series overall is the bosses are mega bullshit. They disregard tactics entirely. A boss will run directly into like 5 different soldiers who all shoot them, but because they're a boss, they're nigh-invincible. They 1-hit any squad member they want and only go down to about 12 turns worth of concentrated fire from your heaviest hitters. When they do go down, sometimes they come back about 2 turns later because of story reasons.

I think my "favorite" in VC1 was that valkyrie lady in that one fight where you can actually defeat her. She may have ditched her lazor beam spear, but instead she picked a machine gun with the range and accuracy of a sniper rifle so she can shred your guys anytime she has any sort of line-of-sight to them
I also appreciate the occasional tank bosses that can two-shot your own tank and have put several layers of armor over their only weak point.

I intend to go back to VC1 and beat it, especially now that I understand how to use snipers in the more open maps. The main use of the sniper is to take out high value targets that can be one-hit by headshots. They won't do anything against armor and die faster than scouts, but they can be a very efficient way to kill enemy commanders without risking health loss to interdiction fire. I never used snipers in VC2 because the small map size renders them obsolete.

Snipers kinda suck early on because everyone has shite aim, but man are they ever good later on. The only ones they can't one-shot are those named officer dudes that dodge everything, but that's what you use your glowing grenades on.

But even Snipers don't matter once you've learned how to buff a single Scout up the gills so you can just speedrun most maps.

[rabidtictac]

But even Snipers don't matter once you've learned how to buff a single Scout up the gills so you can just speedrun most maps.

That only works if the map has no bosses and is based on capturing or reaching specified points. Even then, VC4 stops you from rushing by placing turrets everywhere.

I'd argue that the best class in VC4 is probably Grenadier. They can't return fire after being shot, they have low defense and their interdiction fire is too slow to tag an enemy running right at them, BUT what they do is lay down an insane amount of interdiction fire at medium and long ranges. They're kind of like explosive snipers. They lob artillery at angles that allow you to bypass buildings and most forms of cover to strike enemies that would otherwise be impossible to hit. If you equip them with anti-tank artillery, they can also shred tanks.

The existence of grenadiers also seriously counters some of the other classes. Snipers are never safe on buildings, Scouts can be one-shot if they accidentally enter grenadier range and engineers are too squishy to move up in support of tanks while artillery is flying. Best part is that bosses can't dodge artillery outright.



If you put a shocktrooper in front of these dudes to prevent bum-rushes from enemy scouts, nothing is getting through here. Even heavy tanks will get hit with AP down artillery shells over and over and be unable to advance.

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

They're also pretty fun on the enemy's side. Nothing too unfair, but they really force you to keep moving.
I also like how they buffed Lancers by letting them not only trigger support fire with fellow Lancers, but also with your tank (and vice versa).

[mad bum]

You lads made me do it and I started playing BOF 3 again, but I found a rom hack to play and its mostly underwhelming, but I'm approaching the desert and to far into the game to go back. Don't get me wrong I love the game I just mean the mod itself nerfed a lot of shit like masters and the skills they give and they simped for Nina and made her really really strong since a lot more enemies are in battles with double the HP.

[Le Redditeur]

I'd live to play some BOF3 on hard mode, but this particular hack doesn't seem to be that, unfortunately.

[mad bum]

I'd live to play some BOF3 on hard mode, but this particular hack doesn't seem to be that, unfortunately.

The only hard thing about it is bosses which are mostly downright unfair, my breaking point was with the dragon zombie where they expected you to have kyrie (the one shot kill move for undead) otherwise the boss would heal 3000 HP's a turn with no effective way to "end" it. Stupid shit like this is why people don't take modders seriously.

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

Finall got around playing a bit of Final Fantasy Nein.
This game certainly had one of the more fun openings, what with the crazy heist going on and the game seemlessly switching from one character to the next. Also Garnet is like the superior Yuna in terms of White Mage / Summoner waifus.

And this is probably more of a hindsight for me after later titles like Dissidia memed Cloud and Squall into insufferable Spoonys, but Steiner comes across as a parody to the serious bloke with the big sword.

[Guest]

I thought emo cloud started with KH.