A PS4 Thread: Because You Had to Play "Knack"

Yeah I'll definitely give DSIII another shot one day. I think it's the unrelenting grimness + difficulty level + (so far) linear gameplay and lack of tangible story that puts me off. It's a really well made game, but I feel a bit like a machine carrying out thankless tasks sometimes. Never was into bondage. Yes, all games boil down to this, but the illusion of a good game is that it tricks you into believing you're doing more than this.

i always thought the secret of the souls series is that they're basically puzzle games

execution-heavy puzzle games suck ass though so i don't think that's the right way to think about it. if something's actually a good puzzle the satisfaction should come from figuring it out and stating the solution, executing it is unnecessary busywork

souls games are just action games

i always play them like they're puzzle games and i always enjoy them! Sekiro and Bloodborne were much less puzzly an more action oriented.

The "puzzle" in Souls is how best to beat each enemy, even the basic ones. Which can get frustrating. (Like, Batman right now, most baddies take nearly no thought or effort, which is a nice balance to the grim design.) The real puzzles in the Souls games are fewer and far between, but there is lots to discover and explore on the journey, and as you get used to the lonely bleakness (even Batman is super chatty by comparison) there is an odd beauty to it all.

Or avoid each enemy, more often. Or discover new terrain. Or understand how room x or door x or ladder x or enemy x or item x help provide an easy answer to move forward.
you can absolutely brute force your way through any DS game but there's almost always multiple elegant solutions to each issue if you want to think laterally.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1Ek7AsO-og

Still enjoying Batman, but it lacks (for better or worse) much on the way of boss fights. The same was true for the last few games I played, iirc, which def. cuts down on the challenge. Which, tbh, is non existent in this game so far, which is admittedly fine.

One of the fights in New Game + might change your mind on that.

given the ongoing Souls talk, has anyone tried out Mortal Shell as yet?

spelunky 2 comes out today mother fuckers

I've never played anything in NG+ yet. So far when I'm done, I'm done, give or take the DLC. NG+ modes are generally just the same game but the baddies take 7 hits instead of 4 or whatever, right?

I don't remember that much content to Asylum after the story conclusion. (Very different for City and Knight, lots of post-game content). Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
If you like the story/lore, I'd do all the Riddler trophies, there's a lot to uncover.
If you like the combat, I would do the combat challenges that (iirc) you have to access through the main menu, outside the main game. The score-chasing is often some of my favorite parts.

I should prob try mortal shell

thinking of NG+ing Witcher 3 as I've pretty much exhausted everything except the Gwent, horse racing challenges plus a couple of ?s in the middle of Butt fuck, Ard Skellig. Still, not sure if I'm quite ready to relive the story I've been playing for nearly a whole year yet

I know I've accumulated a lot of Riddler challenges, but so far I'm not sure what to do with them. It still looks like I have I guess inadvertently solved a bunch of them though.

Oh, wait, they're just collectibles, like the question marks, teeth, interview reels, etc? Yeah, I've just been, well, collecting them as I see them but not really looking for them. They kind of seem to be all over the place.

They are yeah, they unlock the Gotham City Stories text pieces in the menu.

spelunky 2 comes out today mother fuckers

i was there at midnight to download, only to realize that it came out 2 hours later (midnight PST i guess).

will be playing tonight though motherfuckers!

i got up to try and play early this morning and it doesn't come out until 8am PACIFIC TIME. what is that.

that's a logical thing to do, that's what it is. it's spelunky 2 day

This looks harder than 1, which I am terrible at

i only played the original on keyboard + no mouse, so i am expecting to do a lot better with a gamepad this time around

xp polyphonic: I'm terrible at the original too, never made it near the end. I'll still probably get this sooner or later

Our PS4 Pro fan has been making more noise than the washing machine recently. Dismantled it yesterday, cleaned out all the fans and heat sinks, put some new thermal paste on the cpu etc, took ages.

Switched it back on expecting either “well that made no difference” or “now it’s not working at all”, because those are the most common outcomes I get from projects like this. But it’s worked perfectly! It’s running almost silently now and nothing’s making the fan spin up! I’m amazed!

OK, finished Arkham Asylum. It's a good game, but I stand by my original assessment that the boss battles are just not that challenging. And most of the other fights are little more than button mashing (like, button, singular). It's still fun and well designed, and if it's a little too easy on "normal" mode, well, you *are* playing as Batman. Can def. see this as the template for the Spider-man game. Batman: Archetypical Asylum?

Play Arkham Asylum on Hard for a while before moving on imo

I'm not moving

hehe "in my opinion" i mean

:)

Maybe I will! Which would be a good bridge to Bloodborne ...

Or you can just barrel on to City

I was tempted to do that as well, but I'm worried I would burn out on it, since the combat seems repetitive. Then again, I am in the zone, so if I move on I could just as easily not return. So maybe I will give it a shot on a more difficult setting, then try a bit of city and see what I think.

still working through Control. It's such a fun, unsettling game. I love being able to rip furniture and rubble and throw it: it feels so satisfying. The difficulty level is pitched just right, so that nothing feels particularly easy, but I always seem to be able to get past the challenging parts after a few goes. Plus it's a really imaginative game with absolutely its own vibe. I do find it creepy AF though.

My only gripe is the long loading times, especially when I'm on a tricky part where I die a lot. I also don't like how a lot of structures and furniture don't seem to have any weight behind them. you can brush past a chair and it will just fall over as though it's made of paper. I guess this makes sense in the context of being able to throw stuff around.

I also found that there are parts in the game where I get stuck and have to look up a guide online. in one part, I killed off loads of enemies only to find my way blocked by a red wall of Hiss. It's really not obvious that you have to shoot some red cubes around and near the wall (same colour as the wall itself) in order to progress. Felt like this was completely unnecessary and that the wall could have just revealed itself after killing the bad guys.

ha, i remember getting stuck once or twice on that too, i think it happens a couple of times. there's not much indication what to do and the infected red cube blocks just kinda blend in with everything else

i do like how a lot of things just aren't really explained at all. stuff like Board Countermeasures, materials etc will just appear in your menus and you've just got to work out what they are. the red blocks were super annoying though because as you say, they aren't even very visible.

BTW Control released an assist mode to help with its difficulty, allowing you to be immortal, among other settings.

Ok, Batman question. Arkham Asylum does not have much in the way of post-game content, and even if it did, it apparently doesn't allow you to change the difficulty level, so I would be stuck on normal, anyway. With no more enemies I am thinking of moving on to Arkham City, but do I start that game on normal or hard, with the knowledge that whatever I pick I guess I'm stuck with? I'd hate to find myself in a situation where normal is too easy, and hard is too difficult. Or normal on City is harder than normal on Asylum.

I would suggest either doing a new game on hard, or ... isn't there a challenge mode in that game with waves of enemies? That's how I remember getting my bearings with it. Maybe that was in city.

Definitely at least start the next game on Hard. It seemed like Normal was too easy for you

at the least would get me in shape for Bloodborne.

I find myself 'missing' games. Even though I've been playing Witcher 3 frequently and with only a few breaks since I got my PS4 last year, I'm currently getting weird nostalgia pangs and feeling like it's time to NG+ it. Wonder if it might be too soon though, like rewatching a TV series too close to having finished it. Also feels like a shame to restart when I've spent so long clearing almost all the ? marks except for a few boring sea-based ones in Skellige; oh, and Gwent (which I never played but am open to trying) and horse races (which had me rage quit one time too many).

Looking into it a bit, it seems like Arkham City on hard is supposedly more challenging than Arkham Asylum on hard, mostly less room for error and sloppiness when dealing with crowds of overpowered thugs. I'm all about error and sloppiness, but I think I will start the new game on hard and see how it goes. If it's too frustrating or not fun to have to just hit everything more times, then I'll just restart on normal.

Never understand why some games don't let you change difficulty mid way through

Many do, and it's great! In fact I want to say the last several that I played all allow you to change mid game. Last of Us, God of War ...

Oh, wait, I read your post with the wrong emphasis. Yeah, it seems like that's generally the standard, so I agree, I don't know why some games don't let you change it. I totally understand certain games with one difficulty level, like Dark Souls, but a game like, say, Doom, a set difficulty level would be pretty gratuitously unforgiving for the over ambitious. If I played a game stuck on a hard difficulty and hit a spot that impeded progress, I would be more likely to quit the game than try over and over again above a certain threshold.

My 10yo was getting quite frustrated with Spider-Man but we lowered the difficulty and now he's having a blast - up to something like 88% completion.

He probably would have just quit if he'd had to start from scratch

Similarly annoying: I started Arkham City on hard, and was surprised to immediately be in the guise of Catwoman. And then I kept getting my ass kicked over and over and over again, and thought, boy, this is much harder. So I quit the game and started again on normal, only to discover as best I can tell, I am *supposed* to get my ass kicked and maybe didn't necessarily need to start over again on normal.

Anyway, even early game everything about this one seems to be a step down from the first one, from the design to the writing to the fights. But I'll stick with it a bit.

Much as I am loving Control, I've hit a bit of a tricky part which seems unnecessarily cruel in these tough times. I found myself going to bed with images of mutants, gunfire and desolate offices in my head.

Historically I'm a Nintendo gamer and there is a noticeable difference between Nintendo's light, playful games and the darker, more sinister vibes of Sony. Some days, I just find the experience of playing even something as benign as Celeste a little haunting, lonely, tough.

I miss the colourful storytelling of things like Chrono Trigger, Earthbound, Final Fantasy etc but the cyber/anime looks of their modern-day equivalents look a bit naff and young adult-y for me. I guess this is the problem when you move from 16Bit pixel based graphics to a more 3D style. Whereas previously the basicness of the graphics meant you could map your own image of what these characters and scenarios look like, suddenly it becomes very-much a distinct vision, and if you don't like the visual style, then you're screwed.

So after a bit of searching, I've decided to try out Ni No Kuni - Wrath Of The White Witch as a break away from guns and zombies. Yeah, it's anime, but not the 'hair-gel and hoverboards' type of thing. It's a Studio Ghibli job with music by Joe Hisaishi. Possibly a bit 'kiddy' but the visual style is amazing. Only given it a very quick go, but impressed so far.

They put in that invincibility cheat / difficulty adjustment in an August patch for Control - can you change it mid-game? (Sort of an acknowledgement that their difficulty balancing was off)

I haven't seen it, but it's possible I haven't looked. kind of don't want to feel like I'm cheating but at the same time I've hit a wall where I can't get past a certain boss and I've completed all the side quests I can for now