GRcade

Dragon Quest III on iOS. I spent ages over the last day or two grinding for cash to buy equipment from a really expensive vendor you had to haggle with in one village only to find out the items were all available for half the price or less in the next major town

Resident Evil : Umbrella chronicles

Sat playing the special stage.
How is it these zombies have the reflexes of a cheetah. As soon as you aim the gun at them they disappear. Not only that, they run like Usain Bolt.

Thank Frank that the nightmare that this game is, is nearly over.

Edit: you can’t even pause the game.

My current game of They Are Billions is going quite well, I've handled 2 big enough hordes handily enough. and right now I'm confident that all sides of my settlement could with stand a small horde. The main problem is the massive one that comes on day 120. I'm currently on Day 45 so there's a long way to go but I'm in a kind of bind. I'm running out of space fast and I'm going to have to expand but It's going to take a lot of wood and a lot of patience to set up more defenses.

Currently my walls are 2 sets of 2walls deep but I need to mine more stone. I suppose I could have a 2 ringed situation in that I'll (hopefully) have stone outer walls and keep the wooden inner ones as a kind of fall back. I must say I'm really enjoying it, not sure wtf I have to do to get an achievement though, I've put about 6hrs into this already and haven't gotten one.

I still love PUBG, my mates don't play it anymore so I play with randoms and solo. The performance (onX1X) has improved massively with the last 2 patches and with Erengal being the map of the month you can play it over and over. Got a nifty kill yesterday as 2 guys fought in the woods, one blowing up the other with a grenade that blew up a buggy then I shot him. the SLR is god Tier.



Played some Sea of Thieves with mates for a little bit and it was excellent. 1 of my mates is definitely sold on it now with all the new stuff added so we should be sailing a lot more in the coming weeks. It's one of the best looking games on X1X. Mate killed skelly with a cannonball before I could which was pretty cool.

I'm getting rather lost in Dragon Quest III. Much like the previous game it starts out very linear but once you obtain the boat virtually the whole map is suddenly open to you but with little indication of exactly where you should be going.

Stardew Valley.

I was totally addicted to Harvest Moon on the GBA and can already tell this is going to be just as addictive.

If I suddenly stop posting it's probably because I'm playing this.

Still slowly chugging away on They Are Billions.

Latest Horde wasn't too bad.

I've hit a bit of a brick wall in Dragon Quest III, the boss of the dungeon I'm in just wiped the floor with me.

Anybody familiar with bosses in Dragon Quest will know they tend not to fight fair often attacking multiple times per turn, firing off debuff spells with almost 100% accuracy, hitting multiple characters per attack and not least of all they hit like trucks. All of which means they can decimate your party in a mere couple of turns.

I think a little grinding is in order.

I haven't played DQIII so I'm not overly familiar with the classes, but have you maybe tried respeccing a few characters to find a more suitable role?

I was getting my stuff rocked by a boss in DQXI the other day. Twice in a row I spent half an hour plugging away at it, only to have it pull some BS and have about eight attacks over two turns, completely wiping out my party as well as the backups.

After grinding two levels and reshuffling my party's ability boards, I came back and knock the stuffing out of it in like five minutes. It made the previous attempts look a complete farce.

Chocolate-Milk wrote:I haven't played DQIII so I'm not overly familiar with the classes, but have you maybe tried respeccing a few characters to find a more suitable role?

I was getting my stuff rocked by a boss in DQXI the other day. Twice in a row I spent half an hour plugging away at it, only to have it pull some BS and have about eight attacks over two turns, completely wiping out my party as well as the backups.

After grinding two levels and reshuffling my party's ability boards, I came back and knock the stuffing out of it in like five minutes. It made the previous attempts look a complete farce.

Couple of level ups plus the right spells and I beat him.

If you change class here you revert to level 1, your current stats get halved but you retain all spells you’ve learned.

IAmTheSaladMan wrote:

Chocolate-Milk wrote:I haven't played DQIII so I'm not overly familiar with the classes, but have you maybe tried respeccing a few characters to find a more suitable role?

I was getting my stuff rocked by a boss in DQXI the other day. Twice in a row I spent half an hour plugging away at it, only to have it pull some BS and have about eight attacks over two turns, completely wiping out my party as well as the backups.

After grinding two levels and reshuffling my party's ability boards, I came back and knock the stuffing out of it in like five minutes. It made the previous attempts look a complete farce.

Couple of level ups plus the right spells and I beat him.

If you change class here you revert to level 1, your current stats get halved but you retain all spells you’ve learned.

Ooh wow, how're you liking the iOS version? Want to play more of the Dragon Quests sometime (only really played IV, on DS, at length), but it's one of those series where it's not always clear what the definitive version of each entry is. We could do with Steam+modern console ports of a lot of them

Jazzem wrote:

IAmTheSaladMan wrote:

Chocolate-Milk wrote:I haven't played DQIII so I'm not overly familiar with the classes, but have you maybe tried respeccing a few characters to find a more suitable role?

I was getting my stuff rocked by a boss in DQXI the other day. Twice in a row I spent half an hour plugging away at it, only to have it pull some BS and have about eight attacks over two turns, completely wiping out my party as well as the backups.

After grinding two levels and reshuffling my party's ability boards, I came back and knock the stuffing out of it in like five minutes. It made the previous attempts look a complete farce.

Couple of level ups plus the right spells and I beat him.

If you change class here you revert to level 1, your current stats get halved but you retain all spells you’ve learned.

Ooh wow, how're you liking the iOS version? Want to play more of the Dragon Quests sometime (only really played IV, on DS, at length), but it's one of those series where it's not always clear what the definitive version of each entry is. We could do with Steam+modern console ports of a lot of them

I'm liking them, the touch screen controls work perfectly for the simple gameplay of a JRPG. The iOS ports of 1, 2 & 3 are based on the SNES versions with some tweaks like more experience awarded for victories, a higher level cap in DQ2, revised place names and a few other things. I assume 4, 5 and 6 on iOS are ports of the DS versions.

I discovered a handy exploit in DQ3 last night that lets you farm a potentially infinite amount of XP via a weak enemy that mostly calls for backup summoning in a much stronger opponent. As long as you don't kill the original enemy it keeps calling in help so you can accumulate as much XP as you want.

On my 40 minute commute to work this morning I managed to gain about 70,000 XP which was worth a couple of levels for all my party. It's kinda tedious but more reliable than farming Liquid Metal Slimes who are rare, hard to hit and tend to flee as soon as the battle starts.

Much to nobody's surprise, Final Fantasy XIV.

Shadowbringer is honestly so good. Finished MSQ on my Chaos DC character, so I'm taking it easy on my main (Crystal/Balmung) levelling my combat classes and re-learning everything since combat system has changed once again.

Also, being Hrothgar is great. I thought I'd miss being Roegadyn but Hrothgar is fun to be.

Made quite a bit of progress in DQXI over the past day or so. I get the feeling I’m approaching the end of the first half of the game.

Thoroughly addicted to Stardew Valley, the gameplay loop is just so satisfying and relaxing.

Currently coming up to the end of year 1 and using the winter downtime to gather resources and upgrade my tools.

It really is a superb game.

Been playing a bit of DR Mario on iOS.

It’s fun & that music is infectious. Will be a matter of time before it starts getting to the point where it forces me to pay to win, then I’ll delete it.

JediDragon05 wrote:Been playing a bit of DR Mario on iOS.

It’s fun & that music is infectious. Will be a matter of time before it starts getting to the point where it forces me to pay to win, then I’ll delete it.

I see what you did there

I've been trying to put a bit of time into some of the games that have been given away with Twitch Prime as I seem to be just collecting them but never really playing them at all.

First up I gave recent addition Yookah Laylee a run out. This is so similar to the BK template circa '98 that it's almost embarrassing. I always liked but never loved Banjo back in the day (it could never compete with M64!) but to just take that and transplant it 20 years into the future doesn't really do it for me. It's achingly slow and tedious to get going, drip-feeding things to you in quite a boring fashion and making you sit through some truly cringe-inducing cut-scenes. Seriously, whoever writes this stuff has no idea how to achieve either narrative development or humour through their story-telling, let alone doing the two together!

In terms of how it plays, I couldn't think of a better game to hold up as a definition of "perfunctory". It happens, you do the things you usually do in these games, time passes, you collect more gooseberry fool and use it to open doors etc. to allow you to collect even more gooseberry fool. There's is just no charm, finesse or wit to anything that happens.

The controls in particular are just entirely devoid of the level of polish that makes a platformer truly shine. 3D Mario games (culminating with the sublime Odyssey) give you a superb set of moves which allow for an almost unprecedented amount of expression and creativity on behalf of the player, it is ludicrous amounts of fun just to arse around pulling off those moves. If all the game wanted of you was to move across a fairly dull set of spaces it would still be a joy as a result of this moveset, but they then top it all off by giving you a staggering array of interesting and inventive challenges which stretch your expectations of how to use those moves and the whole thing just sings. Yookah Laylee just dumps you with a fairly laggy set of trite run, jump and shoot commands which lack the freedom of expression to do anything new with them or find ways to use them in more interesting ways. And then gets you to do a bunch of dull things with them.

Admittedly I've only done so much of the first two worlds (although I believe there are only a handful of them anyway?!) so there is time for it to improve I guess...

It does look nice, and some of the music is quite cute, but again in a "HEY LETS MAKE IT SOUND JUST LIKE BK!!" way - it doesn't seem to know how to expand this or find something new to do/say.

FAKE EDIT: I accept that this was a KS game and that in fact most people just wanted another Banjo and therefore what I'm saying is probably a bit harsh and those people got what they wanted!

I think you're being harsh in comparing Banjo Kazooie to Yooka Laylee - Banjo is way better!

OrangeRKN wrote:I think you're being harsh in comparing Banjo Kazooie to Yooka Laylee - Banjo is way better!

Banjo is indeed way better! I was just hoping that even if they failed to deliver something that learned from the ~20 years of development in the genre between Banjo and now they would have at least been able to give something that was as good as it!