darkness35

Fickle enough that when the first time he exiled himself on stream and returned, he had about 380k viewers, and then coming back from this ban he had 80k concurrent views. Considering how buying subs/bits directly gives profits to Twitch and then the streamer, you'd be surprised at how much profit that nets.

This isn't just some no-namer streamer that goes to stream on hitbox or w/e the alternative was.

I'm just coming in here for my once in a blue moon nihilism here.

God, the last few levels were awful.  :\

@Biggie Really dude?

Also, Twitch won't (completely) ban him.  He provides too much passive revenue to them.

It's not that I have an issue with this system.  I'm hoping for a revision model so there's more power in the system (ideally no sacrificing performance undocked), but this isn't what I'm looking for.

It's a great price point, and in terms of profitability, this will definitely get parents to buy a switch.  It's... eh for me?

3 minutes ago, Spork3245 said:

 

Taking IGN as serious lol

Better off seeing anilist/MAL scores if anything LUL

On 7/7/2019 at 5:16 PM, SFLUFAN said:

The film will be about the superiority of the Han culture over that of the barbarians (everyone who is not Han).

Reading this in context of the BS I've been reading about China lately kills my hype levels a bit.

2 minutes ago, Spork3245 said:

 

You’re kidding right? Boros had no build up in-terms of character development and neither did any other villain in S1 unless unless you consider the Sea King beating up some heroes before being killed an episode later as “build up”. 

Honestly not kidding.  Again, probably due to the adaptation, the only development that was noteworthy was just Garou.  Anything else season 1 did it in one episode, minus the Sea King and Boros arc, minimally but concisely enough to see why specific instance was a threat to non-Saitama (and maybe Tatsumaki) characters.

To be fair, like @Ghost_MHsaid, Saitama is the series focal strength and weakness, and I'm probably just going to concede and agree to disagree here.

4 minutes ago, Ghost_MH said:

 

If you view OPM as a spoof/dissection of the shounen action genre, just picture Genos and Garou as your typical shounen leads. Genos just always falls short and Garou is fighting to protect the honor of the wrong people...things? ...monsters. 

I mean.. sure?  But at that point you could just take Saitama out and call it something else, and at least that would be moderately fine.

My point being is that I'd rather watch OPM for Saitama, not OPM for Garou and Genos and friends.

Just now, Spork3245 said:

 

That would be a one note boring thing. It needs to build a proper villian.

.... And who was Boros then?  And even before him, the villains from the first season still had a proper build-up and villain that had destructive and menacing elements.

Garou, so far, has been treated as a joke.  There's no momentum, no build-up, only a slap-shot humor that makes Saitama just a side-character of not giving a damn, which the first season emulated perfectly WHILE providing that tension and buildup. 

Just now, Spork3245 said:

 

Stronger disagree. S1 focused on building Saitama, this season focused on building other heroes, villains, and the world itself. The animation was fine, not omgwtfbbq, but fine.

If I'm going to watch a season that's not specifically focused on Saitama and how he interacts with the other characters, villains, and world, then don't call it One Punch Man

I'm okay with more Garou to be honest.  He was the only saving grace for OPM S2.

Just now, Ghost_MH said:

 

Yeah, this should have been a 24 episode season. Elder Centipede would have made a perfectly fine half-way point battle. I think the main reason it feels so anticlimactic here is because Saitama doesn't get to end the season in a huge battle like with the first season. 

 

I did say back in April that this season would either be overly-rushed or end in a weird place. I guess weird place is what we got.

It's a shame to be honest.  I tried my best to like it, but that fucking tournament arc was god awful.

Just watch Attack on Titan 3 Part 2 and Demon Slayer instead of this for the Spring 2019 season.  You'll find better satisfaction there.

1 hour ago, Spork3245 said:

 

Season was actually great, though. It just decided to end when it was at it’s highest ramp up.

Hard disagree.  The quality and fight scenes overall suffered significantly, although J.C. Staff by no means could have compared to Madhouse at all.  This season didn't focus much on Saitama but instead focused more on Garou, which is upsetting considering I expected more Saitama over a villain that I now find myself preferring to (and specifically, Saitama). Whether if it's the issue with Murata/ONE and the source adaptation, the overall quality just felt "safe and content," and I find this season just disappointing.

Season was meh.  If anyone watches Gigguk, he puts an interesting perspective of why this season is different in comparison to the first season.

3 hours ago, GameDadGrant said:

@darkness35

 

Well, he got one thing right. The "Shard" system is *exactly* like the Soul system in Aria/Dawn of Sorrow. Honestly, Ritual of the Night has more in common with the "Sorrow" games than Symphony of the Night - which is what many consider this to be a spiritual successor to. 

 

Which is still fine, I suppose. Soma's games are often acknowledged as some of IGA's best work. 

Minus the exception of the random art change and the forced touchscreen controls.  I do agree the soul system was good in both the Aria and Dawn of Sorrow.  Although, I still thought Portrait of Ruin was better of the three DS games, although I haven't really finished Ecclesia?  But besides that, I sent another friend of mine the article as well, and he came a similar conclusion that he just wanted to find a reason to hate the game completely.

But besides that, the article is just god awful.

1 hour ago, GameDadGrant said:

How many Castlevania games have you played?

I still need to beat Symphony one day.  :\

This whole forum is full of fuckwits, and yet I don't know why I still associate with the majority of you.

I guess that makes me a fuckwit.

You know I normally don't go IRL tangents typically but seeing this first fucking paragraph on a review from Kotaku is pretty pathetic.

Quote

Joshua Rivera

 

Genre is mostly bullshit. It’s useful for discussion and for imagining where a certain game exists on the continuum of innovation and progress. These discussions are important, and for them, we need genre. But genre doesn’t do a lot for games, especially once they start to borrow from each other, forcing us to come up with new genres to collect them under. Genre can never really keep up.

Congrats, my former high school classmate.  You clearly demonstrated your 10 years of writing experience as a former Kotaku intern and GQ contributer with this pretentious and edgy tone that would otherwise be acceptable on a 17 year old's Wordpress site.  Instead of attempting to be the next Jason Schreier, you've instead become the next Patricia Hernandez; a complete joke.

Quote

Spoiler

 

Genre is mostly bullshit. It’s useful for discussion and for imagining where a certain game exists on the continuum of innovation and progress. These discussions are important, and for them, we need genre. But genre doesn’t do a lot for games, especially once they start to borrow from each other, forcing us to come up with new genres to collect them under. Genre can never really keep up.

 

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is a genre throwback, here to bring us back to the halcyon days of 1997, when Castlevania: Symphony of the Night debuted on PlayStation. It took a series of games in one genre—the action platformer—and borrowed from another to codify something that felt new, a genre that, over time, was collected under one of the worst colloquialisms in games: “metroidvania.” Decades later Koji Igarashi, Symphony of the Night co-director and Castlevania franchise steward during the 2000s, has decided to reclaim this genre with Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night.

 

Bloodstained is Igarashi’s return to the style of game that made him famous. Kickstarted in 2015, Bloodstained was pitched alongside a new portmanteau: Igavania, defined by Igarashi as “a gothic, exploration-focused action platformer, designed by one of the godfathers of the genre.” For this, Igarashi received $5,545,991 from 64,867 backers eager for Symphony of the Night, but with the serial numbers filed off.

 

To his credit, Igarashi and his collaborators have done exactly this. Bloodstained is what was promised four years ago—and that’s also where its problems lie.

In Bloodstained, you play as Miriam, a woman who, through alchemical experiments, became a shardbinder—part human, part crystal, and capable of wielding the powers of demons found in the crystal shards they leave behind when slain. This power comes at the cost of her humanity. The more shards she collects, the less human she becomes.

 

Following a disaster that precedes the events of the game, Miriam awakens from a coma to learn that she is one of two shardbinders left. The other shardbinder is her friend Gebel, who is now leading a demon invasion of Earth. To that end, he has summoned a demonic castle from which he will wage a war against humanity and challenges Miriam to enter it and stop him.

 

After a brief prologue aboard a galleon where Bloodstained teaches players the basics and introduces the game’s small cast of characters, you’re free to roam the castle as Miriam on the hunt for Gebel. Almost immediately you notice platforms you can’t quite reach, doors you cannot yet open, and obstructions you cannot remove, shunting you back for another lap through the maze-like castle until you find the ability or key that lets you clear the obstacle you saw before—usually after a boss fight.

 

It takes some adjusting to how resolutely Bloodstained chases the specter of Symphony of the Night. Its structure is nearly identical, putting players in a seemingly-open 2D space that they can’t fully access until they spend some time exploring. But games in this genre have evolved, with games like Hollow Knight taking heavy inspiration from Dark Souls to tell richer stories or the Rogue-inspired runs of a game like Dead Cells. Bloodstained ignores the modern conventions of these games, as well as their conveniences, like swift, speedy movement and the ability to strike in directions other than right in front of you. Their absence makes Bloodstained feel like Symphony of the Night, but also reminds you that Symphony of the Night is 24 years old.

 

That isn’t to say that Bloodstained doesn’t take other games into consideration. They’re just other Castlevania games. Its shard system, by which new abilities are acquired from defeated enemies, is a rework of Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow’s Tactical Soul system. Like in that game, just about every foe you face in Bloodstained has a chance to drop a shard that gives Miriam either a new active or passive ability. Most abilities let you replicate the basic attacks of the enemies you get them from. Bone Toss, for example, lets you toss a damage-dealing bone, much like the Bone Morte enemies do. Some shards boost your proficiency with a weapon, or buff stats like strength or luck. Others allow you to summon a familiar that can attack foes and occasionally defend you.
 

The wealth of shards in Bloodstained, in conjunction with the extensive amount of weapons available (many of which have their own unique special attacks that can be performed with the right button input) allows for endless experimentation, to the point where it’s almost a detriment. You can’t possibly try out every shard and weapon combo while steadily exploring. There’s just too much, and on normal difficulty—which is fairly easy, barring two required bosses and the extra-hard bonus ones—sorting through combinations introduces far too much tedium when it’s easy enough to find one build and stick with it. Experimentation feels more necessary on higher difficulties, where tougher foes make builds matter more and new strategies mean the difference between progress and frustration.

There’s also a crafting system in Bloodstained, which lets you craft powerful new weapons, armor, items and food using raw materials you find throughout the castle. On the one hand, this means you often have something to show for the times you get lost or have to backtrack through the castle. On the other, it feels like obtuse bloat, with a lot of time spent in menus parsing upgrade trees. There’s just so much, and while a lot of the weapons you can make are extremely cool, tinkering until you find which you like best takes time I’d rather spend exploring.

 

Bloodstained, like Symphony of the Night, is partly about choosing to do the harder thing. In both games, the ostensible goal—confronting the antagonist—is achievable fairly early on. You can, and likely will, stumble across the room where Gebel is waiting for you after a handful of hours in Bloodstained. You will also probably be strong enough to beat him. Doing so, however, yields an unsatisfying, abrupt ending that does nothing to resolve any of the plot threads the game hints at via characters you meet, all of whom suggest something more sinister lurks behind Gebel’s threat to humanity.

 

To truly get to the end of Bloodstained, you have to ignore the fact that your goal is right there, waiting for you, and commit to exploring. This is easy enough to do, because the fundamental pleasure of Bloodstained, like in every game of its ilk, is in hasty cartography. Filling in a map as you explore the space it represents, surviving its dangers long enough to get to a place where you can save and make your more complete map permanent. As nonsensical as the game’s castle is, I only got lost a handful of times, forcing me to scour the map from the beginning for things I missed or didn’t try.

That’s not to say it’s a smooth ride. The game’s 3D art style on a 2D plane is often incongruous and strange, particularly in the way that Miriam is given a cel-shaded, cartoony look that clashes with the environs she runs around in. All of the lush, gothic scenery’s pursuit of grandeur feels at odds with how the characters are designed.

 

It also doesn’t help that the game sometimes struggles to perform well on the PlayStation 4 version I played. Frames would occasionally drop, and the game would briefly freeze if things got too busy. Close-up character models used in dialogue scenes all looked strangely fuzzy. All this is tolerable, but beware the Nintendo Switch version for now—my brief time with this week’s Switch release worked, but movement felt just a little thick, as if a frame was missing every second. Reports from Switch players online also note crashes and missing text from dialogue boxes. The developer says fixes are coming.

These rough edges didn’t turn me off, but I still came away from Bloodstained feeling dissatisfied. I chafed against the way the game set out to recapture the feeling Symphony gave players over two decades ago without offering anything new. It has a built-in defense for this, of course: Bloodstained exists because it is what backers were pitched and what they asked for.

 

The story that Bloodstained conjures up is not delivered with the conviction its design seems to have. As spare as it is, it’s got more than a few interesting ideas worth pursuing. It’s about a woman coming to grips with a body altered by a patriarchal clergy desperate for a weapon to ward off their fading influence, a group that uses her powers to clean up their mess even if it costs her humanity. It’s about stopping a cycle before it has the chance to become one, about self-determination and letting former titans fade away. But these ideas are done a disservice by the single-mindedness of the game they’re draped against. They’re also ideas that undermine Bloodstained’s existence—or at least, its existence as the Symphony of the Night redux it is.

As designed, Bloodstained is a celebration, a declaration that this style of game—Igavania, metroidvania, whatever you call it—is immortal and undying, like the romantic nightmares of gothic horror. Bloodstained’s story, however, is about breaking cycles. It’s about change.
 

 

Bloodstained is tethered to video game relevance by its influential creator’s desire to continue doing what he has done. Clearly, that’s something fans want, and it’s something Igarashi and the team at his studio, ArtPlay, do well. Bloodstained is fun to play. It’s also fun to take in, full of amusing touches like the demon that doesn’t attack you with claws or axes or swords, but by standing in a red dress and playing guitar riffs so sick flames come out to torch you. Or the haunted portraits that assault you, bearing the faces of Kickstarter backers.

 

Those backers now have the game they wanted, the game that they were promised, and that’s great. Bloodstained is a job well done, but it’s also hermetically sealed. It’s a work that oxidizes the moment it’s exposed to the atmosphere, where the modern games inspired by its lineage have changed the genre it’s out to reclaim.

 

Bloodstained can be read as an argument that legacy matters, but only in one direction: from Igarashi to the twisted castles he has helped bring to video games over the years—hence the word “Igavania.” But this view of legacy overlooks the conversation that’s happened since Symphony. The original game is not influential because it is perfect, but because it started a discussion between games that came before it—Metroid, Zelda, the previous Castlevania games—and those that came after, like Cave Story, Metroid Prime, and Yoku’s Island Express. Maybe that conversation has been missing the gothic stylings of the now-dormant Castlevania series, but, by bringing them back, Igarashi seems content to ignore the rest of that conversation.

 

That’s fine, of course. Throwbacks have their pleasures. Bloodstained is, in Igarashi’s words, exactly the kind of game that he wanted to make, exactly the kind of game he’s been making for most of his career. The exceptional success of its Kickstarter suggests that Bloodstained is also what everyone wanted to see. But video games have been chasing Igarashi’s work for an entire generation, adding to it and carrying it further the way he did when Castlevania: Symphony of the Night arrived in 1997 and codified a genre. It would have been something to see him rejoin that conversation. Instead, he has chosen to haunt it.

 

 

Jesus fucking christ.

42 minutes ago, Keyser_Soze said:

 

Just play Underlords, items only drop after creep rounds.

I really don't give a shit about the Auto-Chess genre tbh.

Played Team Fight Tactics, and I legit don't like it, particularly the RNG issues with items not dropping at all. 

13 minutes ago, Spork3245 said:

 

What? 

*sigh*

Remove the extra vowels and it says "fetch quests"

FeelsWeirdMan

23 minutes ago, Spork3245 said:

... how can Saitama even be a playable character?

FEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEETCH QUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESTS

Ending spoilers

Only the Nvidia drivers and GeForce experience.  I thought that would fix things, but unfortunately that didn't do much to help.

39 minutes ago, Nokt said:

I had this happen when I updated my Nvidia driver recently. Destiny went from a super solid 120fps to 80-110fps with some hitches. I might downgrade back two patches and see if it goes back to normal. 

 

There is also the new Windows 10 update that has been causing some serious issues. Go into your theme settings, select color, and make sure the "automatically select color based on background" is unselected. 

I'm still using Windows 7.  I never was able to get the free update sadly.