I have recently finished my Dark Souls III no shield dual wield playthrough and it got hard as balls, especially towards the end. When I played the first Dark Souls, I went giant armor or Havel's stuff, greatshield and Zweihänder all the way. It's the easiest, cheesiest way to beat Dark Souls. And I felt a little guilty, because according to the various comments sections of the interwebs, using a shield means you suck. Using powerful gear means you suck. Everybody can totally beat this game at Soul Level 1 simply by "gitting gud" and Dark Souls is actually super easy unless you suck at it, blah de blah. Yeah, about that...
The fun thing (to some) about the internet is how you can talk shit all day without ever having to back it up. I've seen invaders, phantoms, sunbros, the reflections and bloodstains of other players and you know what they all had in common? Fucking shields. Lots of greatswords and other cheesy setups, too. Lots of them also summon friends and AI buddies to help with the difficult boss battles. Why? Because it fucking works and because Dark Souls gets so much harder if you actually play the way you pretend you do on the internet.
This joke gets put down near every single butt in the entire game.
The Souls community is a bunch of whiny bitches, whose high-pitched cries make the communities of games like Call of Duty or League of Legends almost tolerable by comparison. One feature in this game is that you can invade other players' sessions to kill them. Monsters won't come after you or hurt you when you invade - all you do is run after the guy who fights all these enemies and stab him in the back, ideally while he is distracted and cannot defend himself. This is the basic idea of pvp in Dark Souls. Ironically, people who love to invade have made up this stupid honor code. Because invading people against their will to kill their characters is somehow honorable now. You are expected to play a little bow animation at the beginning of a fight you never wanted and you are not allowed to heal or summon a friendly player to help you. Doing so earns you the eternal scorn of the pvp community or something.
You suck if you use certain items the community deems too powerful. You suck if you play with friends. You suck if you use a shield. You suck if you heal in a pvp match you never wanted in the first place. Oh and "Dark Souls was never supposed to be cheesed with powerful items and co-op, this is not how a Souls game is meant to be played", yada, yada, yada. Because the fact that all of these items and features exist clearly shows they're not meant to be used, apparently. Here's what the Steam forums have been like since day one:
If you equip weapons and armor or defend yourself in unwanted pvp, you suck!
Of course it's also possible to "flag" yourself for voluntary pvp. You put down a pvp sign and anyone who wants to fight you gets to summon you and then you can be as fucking "honorable" as you want. But people don't want a fair fight, they don't want to duel somebody who is prepared for them. They want to invade the session of somebody who is ass-deep in monster hordes and can't fight back, then bitch when the invaded player heals, summons friends and does whatever it takes to make the invader's life miserable. Because it's only dishonorable when the other guy does it. Sounds like a social experiment more than a video game.
Having finished the game without a shield and using mostly the relatively crappy dual claws, I believe that the Souls games don't even reward "skill" or fast reactions that much. It's more about memorizing the game. I didn't breeze through certain areas or defeat bosses after a few failed attempts because I'm oh-so talented. I did it because I memorized shit. Attack patterns and monster positions. Go down that corridor and something drops down on me from the ceiling, stay away from the boss lady when she arches her back like a cat, because she will grab and oneshot you, that sort of thing. There used to be a time where games were heavily criticised for that kind of gameplay (i.e. you keep dying until you memorize everything) and Dark Souls gets praised for it. Funny. :D
And still just winning by the skin of my teeth.
The next time you feel like throwing the controller through your screen or strangling your cat in frustration at one of the many boss fights in Dark Souls, just remember that the vast majority of people who brag about how easy they thought the game was, how they could solo everything on the first try with no gear and no level-ups, are full of shit. Dark Souls means learnin by dying. And if you feel the need to cheese it by summoning helpful players or using an ultra greatsword, just go for it. Most people do - and that shit wouldn't be implemented if it really was against the spirit of the game in some way.
And following my own advice, Claire and I have decided to co-op all the way through with each other on NG+! Well... that and the way of the dragon, because fuck soloing that shit. Besides, I am clearly overestimating the range of my melee weapon. A lot.
So prepare those hate posts on the forums, get ready to start bitching, because if you invade us we're gonna gank the everloving shit out of you, we're gonna heal as much as we want, we're gonna sit and wait in a spot that doesn't have any traps or monsters for you to use against us and the only gesture you'll get in the end isn't a bow, but a fucking golf clap when your dead ass gets sent back to your own session. And if we're being perfectly honest, there's a 75% chance you won't get to see any of that, because the shitty netcode makes it impossible to see animations in the first place.
The original Dark Souls is one of those rare gems I have bought, installed and never uninstalled since. It's still sitting right there, I'm on my 8th or so New Game + and I still fire it up every now and then, just because I'm scared I'll end up going full noob again. To me, this isn't like swimming or riding a bicycle. You don't just get the hang of Dark Souls and remain good at it forever. I stop playing, dick around in other games for a bit, come back to Dark Souls a few months later and immediately suck again.
No matter how much I love the first one, I never bought Dark Souls 2. The game looked like total ass upon release, nothing like the awesome preview footage shown off by From Software (I refuse to buy Ubisoft crap for the exact same reason) and then everyone who bought the original Dark Souls 2 had to buy the enhanced version that looked a little less awful just a few months later. And while I'm sure that part two is a good game in its own rights, I was still perfectly happy with the first one and simply didn't feel ready to move on. And then this happened:
Dark Souls 3. Holy shit. I didn't even wanna play it at first, because first every fucking Youtuber out there got the stupid preview release ages before the game came out. Then every moron, their mothers and their dogs went and bought the Japanese version, which also came out before the western release. Great. There are fucking walkthroughs all over the internet, most secrets have been revealed, all I'm getting here is sloppy seconds and I can have my session invaded by assholes, who have been playing this thing for weeks. Then again, that doesn't even matter, because From Software just love to keep things simple for cheaters. Savegames are still stored locally. Heck, tweaking your soul level is as simple as firing up Cheatengine. Because having some asshole with infinity hit points invade my game to kill me is so much fun! Sure, I can just play offline, but... sigh. And I could have just stolen the game and played online? WTF?!
But that's pretty much it. That's all I can find to bitch about right now. Yeah, yeah, bonfires can crash your game if you crank up the lighting settings, there are some FPS drops here and there, fuck you, it's a brand new game, patches and driver updates will fix most of it before too long... it's not exactly Arkham fucking Knight, is it? And Dark Souls 3 may very well be the most beautiful game I have ever played.
I don't mean beautiful in the "Oh it's so pretty, I want to live there" kind of way, but the aesthetic, the artwork, the whole thing is absolutely breathtaking. This is a game world at its end, everything is utterly fucked, it's all rotted and dusty and falling apart in such a stunning, melancholical way. You can wear a knight's heavy plate armor, but it's battered and bruised, your cloak is little more than a holey rag. The people are all insane and/or turned into people jerky, some of the undead will turn on each other if they don't get to kill you... and through all the dirt and grime you catch the occasional glimpse at the past. At how awe-inspiring and glorious the world must have been at some point.
Disneyland
I'm enjoying this game a lot. It plays, sounds and feels like Dark Souls, but it looks a million times better. Yes, there's some texture pop-in, some textures aren't super detailed, eat a dick! The art style is absolutely incredible and draws me right in. And I don't even care that, for the most part, it's really just rehashing previous Souls games, because that's what I want. Yes, the high wall of Lothric is the undead burg, featuring most of the same fights and even the fucking dragon. Yes, some of the bosses look cool and pose next to no challenge to anyone who has ever played a Souls game before. It's some of the best parts of previous games mashed together and presented with some of the most stunning visuals I've seen in any game.
What makes the game even more fun is the combat system. Combat works a lot like it does in the first Dark Souls, plus added weapon arts. But enemies feel faster, (somewhat) smarter, more aggressive. And you get paired weapons for sweet, sweet dual-wielding action. I started off playing Dark Souls 3 just like the first one, inching forward, hiding behind a shield, wearing enemies down one hit at a time. I did so for about 30 minutes. Then I've put the shield away and I've been using dual scimitars ever since, hacking baddies to bits in a furious hail of strikes. It's a whole new way to play for me, something I never managed to pull off in the previous game, but it feels incredibly satisfying this time around.
And they look so damn sweet!
Difficulty... blah. So many articles out there about this, some of them more awful than others. Yes, it's tougher and a bit more unforgiving than most modern "let's place a checkpoint everywhere and make it impossible to fail" games. I'd go as far as saying some parts are simply a bit unfair, because shit attacks you from every single angle, sometimes in a way you couldn't possibly know until it happens. There are parts here and there where you are almost certain to fail, so you'll have to learn from that, come back and be prepared. With all that said, it's not the brutally difficult game some people crack it up to be.
Blindly rush in, play the game like your average brainless hack'n'slash title and you'll die. Lots. But if you take your time, use your brain, fight enemies one at a time where you get the chance, wait for them to make their attacks before you move, it's all perfectly doable. Most enemies, including bosses, telegraph their attacks quite clearly, you'll have enough time to prepare a dodge roll and with the right timing you won't take any damage at all. Of course that requires practice, of course mistakes still get punished, but lots of deaths can be avoided simply by being patient.
And I don't need health or estus to destroy a boss. The magic pixel is my friend.
In other news, the miniatures finally got here. The paintjob is okay-ish, nothing stunning, but I suppose you can only do so much when you're a six year old Chinese kid who only gets ten minutes per miniature.
Hoo boy, what a week it has been! Can you believe that in the six years I've been living here we never had a chance to go to London? And it sure wasn't for lack of trying! Whenever I bring it up, people would tell me I may as well ask for somebody to mug me, which would leave me in every way as broke and disappointed. Turns out London is actually relatively affordable if you do it right.
The most difficult part was getting there without spending our entire allowance on travel tickets. I tried to book train tickets online to save some money, but the cheapest ones started somewhere around 40 Quid (per person, single trip!) and went all the way up to 140! So it could have cost us nearly 300 Pounds just to get there from Nottingham - return tickets not included.
Instead, we opted for a much cheaper (albeit waaaay slower) coach ride. Booking website claimed it was gonna be 5 Quid per person, but they slapped on so many fees and other crap that we ended up paying 15 per ticket. Which is a lot more than the amount they advertised, but still not anywhere near the ridiculous amount we'd pay on the train.
London looks 100% the way you picture it in your mind.
Going by coach ain't soo bad. They're nice and comfy and you can do all kinds of fun, sneaky stuff on there. Huehue. And a three hour ride is perfectly fine and not significantly longer than going by car - they all get stuck in the same traffic after all. Then you grab the all day tour bus ticket for 30 Quid, get carted around all the sights, have them all explained to you in 12 different languages and there's even a journey on the Thames included in there.
Hmm... moisture.
We've checked out all the sights they force you to learn about in English lessons and went on our merry way. Because apart from the usual attractions, every city is the same now, anyway. Fucking Starbucks, Subway, McDonald's all over the place, same food, clothes, touristy souvenir shit wherever you look. I'll admit London was a little more pretentious and up its own ass with the whole organic food places and fucking yoga advertisements. Look, nobody gives a shit about your hip vegan lifestyle if all you get at your organic grocer is a fucking coffee to go with a plastic lid on top, you pretentious cunt. And "yoga" the way it's practiced today isn't some ancient mystical art from thousands of years ago, but really just started somewhere in the 1860s. In a way, the people and shops in London were a lot like the stuff you see in Los Santos. Which is sad, as Los Santos isn't even based on London. But like I said - you see this dumbass wealthy, stupid, decadent first world behaviour pretty much everywhere today. I think I prefer remaining a poor, uneducated asshole for now.
Oh hey, our Paizo miniatures for Pathfinder got here! Well, "here" being the local post office until Monday, because the parcel ninja left a note saying he couldn't reach us. On a Saturday. Where we've been up since 9am. Sigh.
The Pathfinder starter kit thingie comes with a crapload of really incredible cardboard miniatures. They contain pretty much everything you could wish for in most campaigns and the artwork is nothing short of stunning. Alas, they're not very cat-proof. Our first adventure ended when the cat jumped on the board and ran off with my fighter. You can actually see the bite marks all over his face now. Grrr!
So being the special snowflakes that we are, Claire went with a D&D kenku sneak to represent her tengu rogue. Paizo tengus are hard to find, because they're not one of the core races and reeeeally pretty damn optional. Even the advanced rulebooks only cover them in a few small paragraphs about tengu society. Lots of people prefer their human characters or they won't go any further than your usual dwarves and elves and the like. Which is fine, but we like things to be a little more exotic, so...
They get to peck and glide and do birdy stuff.
It was even more difficult to find a gnoll in heavy armor which doesn't look like total ass, so we weren't entirely successful on that front. The figure looks big, heavy and scary enough, but it also sports one of the shittest paintjobs I've ever seen:
Because painting teeth is hard, so let's paint that whole area black!
I lack the tools, talent and money to fix that guy, so he's really one for the "eh... close enough" category. He's still better than my little cardboard dude who smells of old catfood!
Kitten Jr. spent the day here yesterday and he's naturally good at Golden Axe coop and eating pizza. You see, Golden Axe multiplayer is designed in a way that makes you hate other players. You can attack one another, steal food and magic potions and the freaking mounts, which usually results in a whole lot of revenge-kills and in-fighting. Growing up, my brother and I killed each other more than we fought the baddies. But for some reason it all worked incredibly well yesterday. Boss monsters were kicked back and forth between us in really well-played sessions of baddie-tennis, items were distributed depending on who needed them the most at the time and we didn't kill each other by accident (or deliberately, for that matter). Fun stuff!
And then came the pizza. Delivery guy brought him two pepperoni pizzas instead of one. The kid sat there clenching both pizza boxes like Gollum protects his precious ring. He chomped away one slice after another until the first pizza was completely gone. I tried to take the second box off of him, so he'd have more space whilst gaming, but he held on to it and started eating the other freakin' pizza. o_O
He killed half of it, then took the other half with him when he left. I don't think I ever ate two pizzas in one sitting when I was 13 years old. Fuck, I don't think I've ever done it now that I'm in my 30s!
Oh well, it's all back to the usual business now. I've got quests to write (for work! How cool is it that I can say I write videogame quests for work?) and there's translating to be done. The more work I get done, the better. We gotta bring the kid's computer fund to a level where he can afford a decent gaming machine, so we can play some Warframe, GTA and all those other glorious multiplayer games, which require more than a potato to run. I'm hoping to introduce him to my friends at some point so we can all play together like Haggy did with his nephew. Multiplayer gaming is awesome, because it really brings people together. To think how many times I got told off by my teachers and my own stepmother because gaming is oh so antisocial. Ha!
I grew up in a strictly Segan household and was never a fan of Zelda. So when people played Zelda on the NES, I had Phantasy Star on my Master System. It was basically this...
Yuck!
compared to that...
Rawr!
And yes, in the SNES era Zelda fans had this...
Yawn!
But I had this here...
Fuck your Zelda.
Spare me the lectures on how I'm comparing apples to Phantasy Star - both games were console JRPGs available at the same time on their respective system. And I happen to prefer Phantasy Star, which was eventually punished by Sega for changing the entire franchise into something completely different, because they hate their fans and love to shit on the childhoods of everyone who loved Phantasy Star, Shining Force and Sonic, to name just a few.
I did have an N64 and played Ocarina of Time back in the day, which was absolutely amazing and nothing short of breathtaking for its time. It also had the worst fucking water temple in any Zelda game ever, which is why I never completed the damn game. I beat the temple, mind you, but I had absolutely zero motivation to ever touch this game again when I was done with that bit. So, while the Zelda games are certainly all great and well-loved by their fans and what have you, I simply didn't play most of them and completed zero. Just not my cup of tea.
Anyone else sense a butt?
But then I ran out of stuff to play on my 3DS. The Terraria update is still not here, I've finished the first Fire Emblem and refuse to buy the second one three times in order to get the complete story, I'm done with Bravely Default and Bravely Second bores me to tears. And then everyone went a bit nuts over Hyrule Warriors Legends, which is a huge Zelda-Allstars hack'n'slash thing, so I figured, eh, why the fuck not and grabbed it. It's got some pretty sweet music, too!
I've put a ton of hours into this game and it simply doesn't end! It has some 24 or so playable characters, a ridiculously long story mode and tons of additional game modes and features, so you can probably play this thing for as long as you live. Granted, every level is pretty much the same, but with some changing baddies and scenery, but the mindless button-mashing action is extremely satisfying on the go. It's quickly turning into one of my favourite games, even though I know next to nothing about most characters and I reeeeally don't care.
Okay, I won't lie - I probably had a boner for Midna and I don't give a fuck if you judge me. I know someone who flicks it to Star Trek porn fics, another acquaintance of mine dresses up in a bunny costume before sex and one of my friends wants to fuck a cartoon hedgehog. Looks like absolutely everybody is into weird shit and apparently potbellied midgets do it for me. Anyhow.
Claire watched me play Hyrule Warriors for awhile until she decided to have another go at Twilight Princess. Alas, the ol' Gamecube is at her family's place, so we had to fire up Dolphin in order to run the game. Twilight Princess has aged fairly well for a decade-old game, though most textures are incredibly muddy, even if you crank the game resolution all the way up to 4k. A low-quality texture is a low-quality texture, no matter what resolution you play on. So I looked into emulator texture modding and one thing lead to another and....
I used Dolphin quite a bit over the years, but my biggest concern was always running stuff like F-Zero GX and Smash Bros. at acceptable speeds. Or playing the Metroid Prime Trilogy with mouse and keyboard, which is actually pretty awesome when you get it to work. It's also a huge pain in the ass, because one configuration may be perfect for one game and totally break another, so I never spend any massive amount of time trying to actually finish any of these games.
Today, Dolphin runs on DX12 (kinda), it's faster and more stable than ever and there's even support for all sorts of post-processing effects. And yes, apparently you can insert custom textures into all your games to make them look a little less dated. Twilight Princess may not look "next gen" by any means, but it still looks hell of a lot better than it did back in the day.
And now I wait for the content strike from Nintendo.
So now I get to enjoy this old game with ambient occlusion, depth of field and all sorts of other fancy shit I won't pretend I understand, which all helps make the game a little less ugly. It's a bit of a mixed bag, as some of the more photo-realistic textures clash heavily with the surrounding lower-quality stuff. But it's still a big improvement.
The tree bark looks amazing, but that fern in front of it looks like total ass.
I'm also not a huge fan of how the whole thing is limited to 30 FPS even when you emulate it, but that's what I get for being a spoiled PC gamer. For what it counts, I'm enjoying the whole thing a little more than I enjoyed Ocarina back in the day. Though Midna is a total cunt, so far. Shame. She's pretty awesome in Hyrule Warriors, so maybe she'll become more likable in Twilight Princess as one progresses through the story. I'll give her the benefit of the doubt and hang on to those rule34 bookmarks for now.
Speaking of all things gaming and HD, it looks like Youtube finally supports resolutions above 1080p at 60 FPS. In the past I could only choose between 60 FPS and resolutions greater than 1080p, but never both. Now I can have both, which should be a cool feature for upcoming Warframe videos. Bit rate still isn't ideal, there are some annoying artifacts and footage never looks as good as the actual game, but it's better than it was. Look!
In other news, Haggy beat me for the first ever time (well, first three times, really) on Street Fighter V. Counting all our matches in Street Fighter IV, King of Fighters XIII and SFV I've probably won 100 or more fights in a row. He switched characters to Laura and I have absolutely no idea when it's safe to attack, when I should defend or how to defend against Laura's attacks. Which is great, because this will finally force me to improve and learn something new. The first time we all played together in a lobby with 7 people I constantly had to queue back up at the end of the line after beating everybody, because people were getting tired of fighting me. Maybe this is finally gonna change things a bit. I'm happy he kept on practicing long and hard enough to finally get the hang of it. In a perfect world we'll get this friendly rivalry going where we'll take turns at who gets the upper hand, constantly forcing each other to learn new tricks. It's how I used to play Street Fighter 2 against my brother and it's really the best way to play any fighting game.
I only ever play one character, because I'm lazy. I could try and pick something else for a change, surprise him a bit and mix things up a little, but that's just not my style. I'm just gonna dick around with Ken some more until I get the upper hand again. This may take a while and I'm okay with that. It's about time I get a challenge and something to master. Wiping the floor with everybody is fun, but you learn nothing that way. This is where the real fun begins.
