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Elemental Hero

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Posts posted by Elemental Hero

  1. Emblem Marth is bonkers. I have no idea what his skills are trying to convey.

     

    If I'm reading the Engage mechanic right, it's like a Pair Up boost that actually applies to more than just Allegiance Battles, and like a Sacred Seal which you can freely move to other characters. It's like the Attuned mechanic but you don't have to commit to just one unit to inherit. So that makes Emblem Heroes the most valuable summons we've ever had.

     

    So I guess IS has already forgotten about Attuned Heroes. And they've definitely forgotten about Ascended Heroes. Why even bother?

     

    Anyway, Marth's extra cooldown acceleration opens up SO MANY new strategies. Instant Galeforce if you have Time's Pulse 4 and passive acceleration. Godlike Reflexes and the armor specials become 1 CD, so you no longer need dedicated weapons to use them reliably.

  2. I didn't see anything inside the console, and definitely not the cartridge reader. But still it won't read anymore. :(

     

    Sometimes I get Contra to kind of turn on, but it just plays the title screen glitched out for one second, continually resetting just as it starts to scroll into view.

     

    Well, then I complain about it online and Contra works fine when I turn it on one last time. All I did was pop the cartridge slot up and push it back down again. Is there some arcane trick to inserting the cartridges which I don't understand? The games I got from the store still don't work except for Mario that one time. I got Wheel of Fortune to start up with the visuals freaking out, raised the slot, pressed it back down, and now it doesn't read at all again.

     

    I think the problem is that the console's connector has somehow gotten warped. If I adjust the cartridges slightly, I can eventually get 4/5 of them to work. But I can't get directly to the connectors. The screws on that part of the internals were too tight and I feared my screwdriver was just stripping them.

  3. Oh no, it's getting the blinking red light on every game now. That's the only time it ran Mario & Duck Hunt (whose visuals started glitching out toward the end). Wiping the cartridges isn't helping (although the ones from the store were indeed rather dirty).

     

    Considering that some games worked at first, I think the "control deck" has gotten contaminated with something I can't see from the outside. Weird considering that this NES is basically in pristine condition because it was only lightly used. I'm going to open it up to get a closer look and clean, but a most unhelpful insect apparently crawled into one of the screw holes and died thirty years ago, so... I'm trying to clean that first.

     

    HOW ARE THE CONNECTIONS FOR THIS SYSTEM SO FINICKY? THEY HAVE 72 CONNECTORS TRANSMITTING LIKE 1 BYTE/HOUR.

  4. It's a shame that meme characters don't get more votes. I voted for Alfonse when I remembered, because he deserves more love. It'd be awesome for him and Sharena to both win in the same year. I intend to hoard orbs to +10 whatever kingly version of him comes, which should be easy because of how overpowered units from the past few months have been. Legendary Elincia, Wind Tribute Claude, Christmas Dimitri, and Christmas Byleth can all solo stuff.

  5. And I'm not talking about my ex-husband Nestor. Heyooo!

     

    You know that one box in that attic that's way in the back? And none of the other boxes had anything good, so this one's not worth the cobwebs? Well apparently it was the NES which I had one vague childhood memory of seeing, which we'd assumed had just vanished into the ether of the ages. Contra was in there, so the brother and I are trying to beat it. Who knew it had more than one level!? (Not the 4-year-olds who played it back then.)

     

    Maybe it's just that I'm tired and bewildered these days, or the fuss of cables, a lousy TV, and cartridges not reading, but I wasn't as stunned as I expected to be.  Still awesome though! One of the coolest Nintendo treasures out there... when it decides to work. I wish the boys could see how hard I've been blowing tonight.

     

    Coincidentally I'd recently bought a NES controller just as a little Nintendo treasure. I couldn't believe it was only $8 at a retro game store. Same with the games I just got for $30--Super Mario Bros, Jackal for more co-op, and Wheel of Fortune with the original box and manual. I want to get The Legend of Zelda with its original packaging, and beat that and every level of SMB. I've beaten them on the 3DS Virtual Console, but beating the original games on their original consoles feels like a rite of passage to me.

    Snapchat-657061748.jpg

  6. Yeah it's rough when almost all of my best units are also my newest units, despite being a creative player since launch. Christmas Dimitri in particular can solo all of the game's content, including most Aether Raids defenses I've come across. The vast majority of units go obsolete within a few months now.

  7. I tried the demo, because I saw that Nintendo Life was making a big deal of it. In the first five minutes:

     

    • This seems to be some kind of digital or high-tech world, except nothing about any of this tech will be mentioned again.
    • This story is about a girl on a ruined island in 2005.
    • Now let's flash to the 1940s for a prologue about different characters in a different place. There is some action, but we have no idea who or what or why, so it's a meaningless detour.
    • Now let's flash to 1994 for another, different prologue. There's just enough information to understand that her mother was murdered, but we have no reason to care because we know nothing about her, her family, or their enemies. We have no context for any of this.
    • We're back to the present and the narrative now involves fairies!? One calls out to the protagonist, but this will not be mentioned again.
    • "Guess there's no going back," she says as the road is blocked by small boulders. If only she had a Pokemon which knew Cut, she could find a way through this impassable roadblock.
    • The player is stopped three times to "guide" them along a straight path.
    • The protagonist does not recognize a sign's mention of the "Edward" family. This is a mystery! ... Even though she and the player both know that we are on Blood Edward Island, so obviously the Edward family owned this island.
    • Even though nothing has happened, we now stop to flash back to "a few hours ago".
    • Except this is actually a flashback to 1994 again.
    • Then we're back in 2005, now with whiplash.
    • Loud gasps and heavy breathing every time the protagonist looks at something. She is utterly shocked to see the totally normal-looking island which this unremarkable ferry is approaching. Who could've guessed that the ferry she contracted would indeed go to the island she was invited to??????????
    • She monologues about having some storm of emotions, despite thus far being an entirely passive character with no emotions or goals.

     

    Instead of receiving any relevant information about the protagonist and her apparent struggles, we're shuffled around a bunch of random prologues. Whoever designed the story wanted to get some cheap "action" to hook the audience, but gives no context for that action and it comes at the direct cost of establishing the protagonist--thus none of the actual, present-day action can have any weight to it either.

     

     

    Maybe this is all building up to something decent. But when the introduction is this incompetent, forgive me for having doubts.

     

    Storytelling in many video games is real bottom-of-the-barrel stuff. If Another Code was a novel, it would be literally laughed at by every editor and publisher it was shown to (and swiftly rejected--do not revise and resubmit).

  8. On 12/6/2023 at 2:41 PM, DLurkster said:

    @Elemental Hero: I am curious what this some metric by Melee standard is?

     

    I ask cause tho reception is important in massive sales but in the end what matters is what was sold not who it was sold too.

     

    This latest iteration of Smash is the closest to Melee compared to the last 2 Smash releases. (Obviously, that is not saying much...)

     

    Ultimate has sold over 30 million copies, I believe so let's say a quarter of that sold are to competitive players. That is less than 10 million copies.

     

    So again, reception is important but comparing that number vs wholly sold. Latter will always win out how good. (Yeah, the install base of the Switch helped but Smash is 2nd most popular IP with other IP's from Nintendo and 3rd party so it will always sell good with a decent install base or great reception)

    Of course Ultimate sold well--I'm talking about reception in the competitive fighting community. When I was checking in previous years, Ultimate's Twitch viewership wasn't far from fighting games which had drastically lower sales and review scores. Sometimes Melee was getting higher numbers. And in Smash Bros tournaments, while attendance did grow from Ultimate, it didn't grow anywhere near in proportion to how much bigger the sales were.

     

    Basically Ultimate's had an extremely low conversion of sales to competitive players, including by comparison to other Smash games. Even though this is the Smash game which tried the hardest to convert casual players, paired with Nintendo's official initiatives to boost Smash tournaments (which have backfired several times).

     

    I've been working on a big video script about this for years, but I never get around to making it because it's too daunting.

  9. Melee HD definitely would cut into the next Smash's sales. Ultimate especially showed how hard Sakurai is trying to get people off of Melee, but it's not working. I've looked into this deeply in recent years: Ultimate has performed rather poorly in the competitive scene, considering its install base and sales. It's actually done worse than Melee by some metrics. Melee HD would make for fabulous short-term profits, but it's reasonable to assume that it could result in greater damages for future Smash sales by giving the core audience an official platform for isolating themselves from newer releases.

     

    Smash players just really want carpal tunnel syndrome.

     

    (Or they could take the route we thought Game Freak was taking with Let's Go: Having two separate product lines to appeal to casual and hardcore audiences, without the risk of reaching for both and getting neither. Future Smash games would be less competitive and thus easier to make.)

  10. Fae Farm is the newest Game Trial. It feels like the director and UI designer quit six months in and none of the other developers noticed. The zoomed-out camera, sonic-speed avatar, and microscopic font are rather disqualifying for a game trying to be "cozy".

     

    The input for naming my house allowed 500 characters, so I typed out a full paragraph, but only the first two words are displayed anywhere. Biggest disappointment of 2023.

  11. A Highland Song looks amazing. With BOTW I learned that I've already played all the cool, challenging games--I know I can beat them--so now I want relaxing, interesting, unique experiences. Playing Wandersong (the greatest game ever created) has opened me to the world of third-party, narrative-focused games.

     

     

    So A Highland Song is an instant buy for me, plus some of that developer's other games. Whatever Thirsty Suitors is is an instant buy (by FAR the most culturally flavorful and over-the-top game I've ever seen).

     

    Planet of Lana would seem really cool too, except the protagonist is way too over-animated. Why have your character simply jump when you could have them spontaneously combust into a wacky waving inflatable arm-flailing tube man to show how big your animation budget was.

     

  12. On 9/16/2023 at 8:05 PM, Elemental Hero said:

    oh my god there is already so much swordfighter peach fan art and i am HERE FOR IT

     

    i can't speak for all twinks but masc peach is an instant icon

    YEAH I'M A MONTH LATE but I channeled my love/lust for Peach Swordfighter into a vlog and also filled it with more of that fan art. And also I found AI-generated Peach Swordfighter hentai somewhere in that Google search. So that's a thing that exists now. Safe Search on, y'all.

     

     

  13. I just got around to trying Quest for Camelot, which was apparently added a while ago. WOW does this game feel like it was made in a week. Wish I could've been an adult when making games was this easy. It is definitely not an experience worth its time.

     

    I'm surprised that it's a tie-in game for a Warner Bros. movie. I wonder what the approval process is for which games get added to NSO, because right now it's feeling totally random.

  14. 2 minutes ago, purple_beard said:

    Do you want to?

    Not really--I have other things to do. The passion just isn't here tonight, Purple Beard, and that means it wasn't meant to be. Maybe we should considering Smashing other people.

  15. My giddiness over Legendary Elincia + Wind Claude + Gatekeeper has had me replaying Legendary challenges so much that I went to Summoner Duels for new content. Added Mark to the team so it's a big ol' wall of NOPE. No BS allowed (except mine). I've cruised to a 92% win rate with that combo.

     

    ... So when I look at Anna & Anna, now I just see how they are Timerra are Summoner Duels counters for the new stuff like Gatekeeper and Claude.

     

     

    EDIT: After using Anna & Anna, they're not as fun as I'd hoped. Her skills are only compatible with armors and melee infantry, and she wants an ally who shares bonus effects (although Rally Spectrum won't give a cooldown boost to Miracle users). So probably a team with a save armor, a dancer, and someone else. Or you can remove Gambit for something else and enjoy her as an instant Galeforcer. But right now, in any mode, I only want complements to my Elincia + Claude + Gatekeeper core!

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