I wanted to start with a review of a more recent game before going into some of my childhood favorites later down the line. Payday 2 is the most recent addition to my list of favorites.
Payday 2 is a four-player co-op shooter based on the heist movies of old (ex: Heat, Scarface etc) where you and up to 3 other players worldwide play as 4 of a cast of 17 heisters who will be committing crimes to make as much bank as possible. You do this by taking contracts through the Crime.net system where you can either join a lobby with other players or create your own lobby through the random contracts popping up or using some in game money to buy a contract that you want.
There are currently 5 currencies in-game; spending cash, offshore money, continental coins, skill points and xp. When you and your team complete a contract the whole team will get xp and money for doing so. All players get the same amount of xp and money (Its not split among players all players get the full amount of money for completion.) Money you get from completing a contract will be split between spending cash and offshore money. Spending cash will be used for buying weapons and equipping them with mods to affect their stats. Offshore money is used for buying contracts you want to play when the random ones appearing on crime.net don't appeal to you and as benchmarks for raising your status among thieves. Continental coins are a bonus for completing cretin challenges and can be used to either buy weapon mods or upgrading your safe house.
Payday 2 has a leveling system where you gain xp to gain levels so you get more skillpoints to go further down the skill trees. This is where we come into the replayability of Payday 2. Max level is 100 but, once you reach 100 you can Infamy to reset your level and gain a level of infamy which goes up to 25. Raising infamy also nets you an infamy point to use on a web of rewards. Playing with many different players around the world
The skill trees are broken into 5 main trees with 3 sub trees in each main tree. Finding what skills best suit your weapons, perks, and armor is what separates good players from bad ones. Teamwork is key however for harder difficulties. Difficulties go from normal to hard to very hard to overkill to mayhem to deathwish to one down. Once you learn the game mechanics however all difficulties below mayhem will become super easy and ypou will probably never even play normal, hard and very hard after you have learned the games mechanics enough.
Now to the elephant in the room.the almost $180 of dlc. This may sound off putting at first but, I would only suggesting getting dlc once you know you like the game enough to play it on a regular basis and even then i would only recommended a few of the dlcs. See overkill had a great idea on how the contracts work. Any player can join any lobby even if a player is joining a dlc contract that they don't have they can still play it. So right off the bat if you aren't going to be hosting a lot of lobbies the dlcs that add contracts are less valuable. Further there are a great number of variety packs that add a good amout of varied content. For those who end up liking the game enough to want to play regularly I would point you towards Connor Shaw's video What DLC to get as i agree with his list of what dlc you should get once you are committed to playing Payday 2 regularly.
Now to the other major problem a lot of people have with Payday 2. the gun skins. Payday 2 has the same skins system as CS GO with skins that have variable rarity and conditions. They went a step further and skins can have stat boost on them that can be as minuscule as 4 stability or accuracy to as good as 3 extra concealment points. A lot of the community blew up when this hit but, in all honesty I don;t think that this system was a bad addition but, the way the large minority self destructed over this was embarrassing to watch.
Payday 2 features 2 styles of play Loud ans Stealth but, some contracts can only be done stealth and some can only be done loud. Stealth is as it sounds you sneak around avoiding detection to complete your objectives. To me stealth is boring and deeply outdated compaired to loud so i won't go deep into it (Jamesblack47's video pretty much sums up my thoughts on stealth.) Loud is more what you would expect from a co-op shooter. You're committing crime after all so the police come in waves to try and stop you. You and your team have to fight off waves of cops while trying to finish your contracts objectives so you can escape into the distance and reap in your rewards.
There really isn't a main story to Payday 2 each contract has pretty much just has a reason for you to be doing it and that's about all for story aside from a few exceptions. Overall, I really enjoy Payday 2. It's endless replayability means i rarely go a couple days without playing it for a good couple hours. The modding scene adds even more to the game to the point where I've put in 1767 hours into it at the time of writing and still will probably be playing it for years to come.
Monday, April 10, 2017
About What I do.
I'm just an average gamer who has decided that I wanted to leave a mark on the internet with my opinions about some of the games I've played through out my time as a gamer. A lot of the games i will be posting my thoughts on will be either childhood favorites or older games I played later in life.
I'll attempt to update this blog at least 1 to 3 times a month with my thoughts on the games I'm playing now and/or will be replaying for a renewed perspective of a favorite.
I'll attempt to update this blog at least 1 to 3 times a month with my thoughts on the games I'm playing now and/or will be replaying for a renewed perspective of a favorite.
What triggered this blog?:
I'm creating this blog as an attempt to mitigate the occurrence of long posts in the youtube comments (like my comments on Ggamesoup's GBA castlevania video that occurred on 2/22/17 and a few days later on 2/24/17 where i recounted my experiences with Castlevania Circle of the Moon.) I intend this to be an outlet for avoiding future occurrences of essay long comments.
First comment:
I gonna be that guy and say that I actually really like Harmony of dissonance (HoD), never got lost once (without using any guides/maps), and really didn't mind the two castle system they used in it. But, I'm more than willing to admit bias in that HoD is probably the gbavania that i played the most to the point where I'm pretty sure I've played it at least 6 times (3 normal playthroughs 1 on Maxim mode, 1 on Hard mode, and 1 on no spell mode.) I pretty much entirely dislike Circle of the moon (CotM.) I had a recent playthrough where I was having a hell of a time getting through it. I think it's generally because i approached the game like other metroidvanias. I went through each area no grinding from entrance of the area to the boss. Problem was you NEED the cards for the DSS system to get through the game reasonably. Items like potions and other curatives don't heal for shit, the only thing getting me through bosses was face tanking bosses and just out damaging them using the cards but, it got to a point where i was going through the underground waterway where the enemies did around 1/10 of my health with their attacks and i would die about halfway through the area between the two save points in the waterway because i used all of my healing items getting to the first save point. Couldn't get deeper in and couldn't get out to go get healing items. As an additional annoyance I hadn't gotten any card drops outside of the ones at the beginning that i think are scripted. I just gave up at that point because before i left for the waterway I had grinded for healing item drops for at least 3 hours only to use all of them halfway in because they don't heal for shit. Potions heal ONLY 20 hp, meat heals 50 hp, spicy meat is rare drop only and heals a measly 100 hp, high potions are they only reasonable healing item at 250 hp but, its common drops are in the battle arena (a post Dracula area) and the rare drop is wind armor (which is only available after the waterway) and legion which are placed in area's where you need the roc's wing which is guarded by Camilla the boss of the waterway. As for perspective as to how much hp you have at that point of the game at lv 50 without hp max ups is 570 and I was around Lv 30-35 and had probably a good amount of the max hp ups. Aria of sorrow is by far my favorite of the three. The soul system was interesting and added a lot of variety to the game. Soma himself is a really well developed character and his struggle with his true self are a really neat way for the story to go. TL;DR Screw Cotm, HoD was pretty fun for me, and AoS was unquestionably the best of the 3 for me, and i spent over 30 minutes thinking and typing all of this shit.
Second Comment:
Figured i would do a part 2 to this seeing as how after my tirade against CotM I decided instead of trying to continue the playthrough i mentioned i would just restart from the beginning and instead of being almost entirely blind I researched EVERYTHING plus i wanted to mention a few other gripes i have with CotM.
First i want to start with some complaints i have that i left out of the previous part. There is no shop or gold in CotM. I don't know why this omission was made for CotM but, the game could desperately use one. No shop means all curatives need to be dropped from an enemy which means if you want them you need to farm enemy drops. This means either knowing from experience which enemies drops the curative you want or using google which back in 2001 probably wasn't very effective. The next thing is there are no static armor drops (outside of the armor rewarded for beating the battle arena.) Which again means getting any armor requires knowing and grinding monster drops... again. Props to the strategywiki though, wouldn't have beaten the game without it.
Now for the new complaints from playing through it WITH researching everything. TOO MUCH GRINDING. I could just end it there by mentioning the above points about monster drops again but, I have a great example of this point that happened the day I posted this. I was in the observatory tower (the last area) and started to notice that the enemies damage had ramped up immensely from the underground waterway (the area before the tower.) So i took a look at the armor i was using which was the platinum armor (which i had farmed for a rare drop of a holy armor in the Warehouse.) The platinum armor was out of date and no longer enough protection from incoming damage so i looked to see what other options I had. The rest of the armors better than the platinum armor were all dropped by monster either on par or stronger than the enemies in the tower and all of them (except for the magic robe) were rare drops ONLY.
So since they were all rare drops instead of going from 1 slight upgrade to another i decided to just go for the objectively best armor from the drops. I had no idea what i had gotten myself into. The best armor from a monster drop is the dark armor which is dropped from a Lilim which is a monster that just randomly appears in a hidden wall area of the machine tower after beating Death (who by the way HAS NO SIGNIFICANCE IN COTM. You just kind of walk into the boss room get a few seconds of dialog and then you fight.) Small edit: If it wasn't obvious I didn't really like this game despite loving the rest of the GBA and DS metriodvanias. To just add another nail to the coffin i confused Death with the necromancer in a section down below. Death has ZERO dialog or build up he just kind of shows up you kill him and that's it. So i went there and It took like 9 whip lashes to kill her with my best equipment on. Meanwhile its flying through the air surrounded by orbs that it can shoot at you and she did so much damage that I would die to her in 10 hits. So after fighting her just once she had almost killed me so, i had to sit there and use the card combo that gives a small regen hp effect overtime for standing still.
So i looked up some advice for killing her without spending almost 2 minutes fighting her once and almost dying. So i read on strategywiki that they recommended using a specific card combo that lets you summon a thunder bird to do a thunder element screen wide AoE. I had the thunderbird card but i didn't have the summon card so, as you can probably guessed I went to go get the summon card which is a rare drop from a scary candle which is another case of an enemy randomly appears after getting past a certain point(thankfully it is also in the machine tower so it wan't to far from the Lilim). So after grinding for that card (which took roughly about a hour) I ran back to the Lilim to use the combo to beat grind her. EXCEPT that for whatever reason I couldn't figure out how to use the summon. So back to google and i found out that to use the summon you have to input from down a half circle( down, down forward, forward, up forward, up) and then hit the attack button.
Summoning the thunderbird killed the Lilim in 1 cast so that was great but, summoning the thunderbird cost about 1/4 of my magic and there is only 1 Lilim in the room which is the only place where Lilim spawns. This created my grinding cycle for the next 4 HOURS. Enter the room, get to Lilim, summon, kill Lilim, wait for the rest of the summon animation to finish (because it usually killed Lilim about halfway through), exit the room, repeat until running out of mp, then stand there at the exit of the room to refill mp. If i was lucky every once in a while Lilim would drop a mind high which restores 50% of mp which alleviated some waiting for mp regen.
The final nails in the coffin for this is that while I grinded for 4 hours to get the damn armor upgrade. I went from level 42 to level 58. Want to guess how that affected the rest of the game? Well the high level plus the thunderbird summon combo BROKE the rest of the game. I beat Hugh and both forms of dracula without even taking a quarter of my health in damage. There was ZERO effort left for me to put in, all i had to do was just chain summons and win. I felt empty. I felt that i had beat the game because i had spent an arbitrary number of hours grinding to get the items and stats necessary to beat the game instead of just playing smarter.
The only thing unlocked from beating the game by the way is using a password to play as a different class (not even another character you still play as nathan he just has different stats.) Beating that playthrough would unlock another, and beating that would unlock another etc. Oh and 1 last thing... The playtime i had at the underground waterway for the first playthrough with no grinding (outside of the 3 hours of potion grinding) was about 5-6 hours. They playthrough where i grinded to make sure i got enough card drops and armor to make sure i got through the game. At Dracula's door-step i was at 15 HOURS and at least 8 of them was grinding for drops. FUCK COTM.
TL;DR Even going through CotM with researching and a wiki in a tab at all times, the constant grinding for card/equipment/curative drops, the lacking of a store/static item drops, the almost non-existent story, and clear spike of power from getting that damn summon card i walked away from CotM completely unsatisfied, annoyed, and just overall pissed off that i spent another 15 hours on this waste of time.
First comment:
I gonna be that guy and say that I actually really like Harmony of dissonance (HoD), never got lost once (without using any guides/maps), and really didn't mind the two castle system they used in it. But, I'm more than willing to admit bias in that HoD is probably the gbavania that i played the most to the point where I'm pretty sure I've played it at least 6 times (3 normal playthroughs 1 on Maxim mode, 1 on Hard mode, and 1 on no spell mode.) I pretty much entirely dislike Circle of the moon (CotM.) I had a recent playthrough where I was having a hell of a time getting through it. I think it's generally because i approached the game like other metroidvanias. I went through each area no grinding from entrance of the area to the boss. Problem was you NEED the cards for the DSS system to get through the game reasonably. Items like potions and other curatives don't heal for shit, the only thing getting me through bosses was face tanking bosses and just out damaging them using the cards but, it got to a point where i was going through the underground waterway where the enemies did around 1/10 of my health with their attacks and i would die about halfway through the area between the two save points in the waterway because i used all of my healing items getting to the first save point. Couldn't get deeper in and couldn't get out to go get healing items. As an additional annoyance I hadn't gotten any card drops outside of the ones at the beginning that i think are scripted. I just gave up at that point because before i left for the waterway I had grinded for healing item drops for at least 3 hours only to use all of them halfway in because they don't heal for shit. Potions heal ONLY 20 hp, meat heals 50 hp, spicy meat is rare drop only and heals a measly 100 hp, high potions are they only reasonable healing item at 250 hp but, its common drops are in the battle arena (a post Dracula area) and the rare drop is wind armor (which is only available after the waterway) and legion which are placed in area's where you need the roc's wing which is guarded by Camilla the boss of the waterway. As for perspective as to how much hp you have at that point of the game at lv 50 without hp max ups is 570 and I was around Lv 30-35 and had probably a good amount of the max hp ups. Aria of sorrow is by far my favorite of the three. The soul system was interesting and added a lot of variety to the game. Soma himself is a really well developed character and his struggle with his true self are a really neat way for the story to go. TL;DR Screw Cotm, HoD was pretty fun for me, and AoS was unquestionably the best of the 3 for me, and i spent over 30 minutes thinking and typing all of this shit.
Second Comment:
Figured i would do a part 2 to this seeing as how after my tirade against CotM I decided instead of trying to continue the playthrough i mentioned i would just restart from the beginning and instead of being almost entirely blind I researched EVERYTHING plus i wanted to mention a few other gripes i have with CotM.
First i want to start with some complaints i have that i left out of the previous part. There is no shop or gold in CotM. I don't know why this omission was made for CotM but, the game could desperately use one. No shop means all curatives need to be dropped from an enemy which means if you want them you need to farm enemy drops. This means either knowing from experience which enemies drops the curative you want or using google which back in 2001 probably wasn't very effective. The next thing is there are no static armor drops (outside of the armor rewarded for beating the battle arena.) Which again means getting any armor requires knowing and grinding monster drops... again. Props to the strategywiki though, wouldn't have beaten the game without it.
Now for the new complaints from playing through it WITH researching everything. TOO MUCH GRINDING. I could just end it there by mentioning the above points about monster drops again but, I have a great example of this point that happened the day I posted this. I was in the observatory tower (the last area) and started to notice that the enemies damage had ramped up immensely from the underground waterway (the area before the tower.) So i took a look at the armor i was using which was the platinum armor (which i had farmed for a rare drop of a holy armor in the Warehouse.) The platinum armor was out of date and no longer enough protection from incoming damage so i looked to see what other options I had. The rest of the armors better than the platinum armor were all dropped by monster either on par or stronger than the enemies in the tower and all of them (except for the magic robe) were rare drops ONLY.
So since they were all rare drops instead of going from 1 slight upgrade to another i decided to just go for the objectively best armor from the drops. I had no idea what i had gotten myself into. The best armor from a monster drop is the dark armor which is dropped from a Lilim which is a monster that just randomly appears in a hidden wall area of the machine tower after beating Death (who by the way HAS NO SIGNIFICANCE IN COTM. You just kind of walk into the boss room get a few seconds of dialog and then you fight.) Small edit: If it wasn't obvious I didn't really like this game despite loving the rest of the GBA and DS metriodvanias. To just add another nail to the coffin i confused Death with the necromancer in a section down below. Death has ZERO dialog or build up he just kind of shows up you kill him and that's it. So i went there and It took like 9 whip lashes to kill her with my best equipment on. Meanwhile its flying through the air surrounded by orbs that it can shoot at you and she did so much damage that I would die to her in 10 hits. So after fighting her just once she had almost killed me so, i had to sit there and use the card combo that gives a small regen hp effect overtime for standing still.
So i looked up some advice for killing her without spending almost 2 minutes fighting her once and almost dying. So i read on strategywiki that they recommended using a specific card combo that lets you summon a thunder bird to do a thunder element screen wide AoE. I had the thunderbird card but i didn't have the summon card so, as you can probably guessed I went to go get the summon card which is a rare drop from a scary candle which is another case of an enemy randomly appears after getting past a certain point(thankfully it is also in the machine tower so it wan't to far from the Lilim). So after grinding for that card (which took roughly about a hour) I ran back to the Lilim to use the combo to beat grind her. EXCEPT that for whatever reason I couldn't figure out how to use the summon. So back to google and i found out that to use the summon you have to input from down a half circle( down, down forward, forward, up forward, up) and then hit the attack button.
Summoning the thunderbird killed the Lilim in 1 cast so that was great but, summoning the thunderbird cost about 1/4 of my magic and there is only 1 Lilim in the room which is the only place where Lilim spawns. This created my grinding cycle for the next 4 HOURS. Enter the room, get to Lilim, summon, kill Lilim, wait for the rest of the summon animation to finish (because it usually killed Lilim about halfway through), exit the room, repeat until running out of mp, then stand there at the exit of the room to refill mp. If i was lucky every once in a while Lilim would drop a mind high which restores 50% of mp which alleviated some waiting for mp regen.
The final nails in the coffin for this is that while I grinded for 4 hours to get the damn armor upgrade. I went from level 42 to level 58. Want to guess how that affected the rest of the game? Well the high level plus the thunderbird summon combo BROKE the rest of the game. I beat Hugh and both forms of dracula without even taking a quarter of my health in damage. There was ZERO effort left for me to put in, all i had to do was just chain summons and win. I felt empty. I felt that i had beat the game because i had spent an arbitrary number of hours grinding to get the items and stats necessary to beat the game instead of just playing smarter.
The only thing unlocked from beating the game by the way is using a password to play as a different class (not even another character you still play as nathan he just has different stats.) Beating that playthrough would unlock another, and beating that would unlock another etc. Oh and 1 last thing... The playtime i had at the underground waterway for the first playthrough with no grinding (outside of the 3 hours of potion grinding) was about 5-6 hours. They playthrough where i grinded to make sure i got enough card drops and armor to make sure i got through the game. At Dracula's door-step i was at 15 HOURS and at least 8 of them was grinding for drops. FUCK COTM.
TL;DR Even going through CotM with researching and a wiki in a tab at all times, the constant grinding for card/equipment/curative drops, the lacking of a store/static item drops, the almost non-existent story, and clear spike of power from getting that damn summon card i walked away from CotM completely unsatisfied, annoyed, and just overall pissed off that i spent another 15 hours on this waste of time.
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