Maybe it's the fact that my life's been a downward spiral for almost a decade now, but I've been reminiscing a lot lately. Over the course of all that I remembered one of my first video games, Raider Wars, a game that doesn't exist anymore but was an amazing experience for me as a child. I added it to my review list and it easily got an S-rank.
I also tried to find an old-school JRPG to play, since I played a bunch of those growing up. I decided to give the Suikoden series a try and I'm currently done with the first one and near the beginning of the second. If I review them, they'll be one entry, so I'll hold off giving my opinion until I finish Suikoden II. I will say that I'm currently trying to think up a name for my faction and my inability to come up with a name is actually stopping me from continuing in the storyline. This isn't an isolated thing, either - when I write fiction, naming the characters and locations is always the most difficult part. Here's a list of names I considered but then decided against (I don't know why I'm writing this either...):
Anyway I guess I'll ponder this moving forward whenever my brain isn't being a brick. I don't remember what I was doing, but something reminded me of this obscure game I got when I was a kid called BattleTanx. I wrote a review of it just because it was on my mind, but I honestly don't think anyone knows this game exists - it was never that popular and, at least in my opinion, it was pretty bad.
Something else that was on my mind after making plans to see Infinity War with some friends: the Sokovia Accords from Captain America: Civil War. Iron Man's my favorite superhero, but on this topic I totally sided against him (on the other conflict in the movie, I sided with Iron Man). Here's why.
So far, the point is that without the Avengers, Earth would be dead. Blaming them for collateral damage is silly. Going forward,
The second point is that even if Avengers-related collateral damage is a problem, putting a government leash on the Avengers will not solve that problem. It would probably just make that problem worse. Well life went to hell again for...basically the same reason it did last year, but unlike last year I'm going to try not to abandon my site for months. To start, I've written 2 new reviews - one on Path of Exile, which I started a year ago, stopped because of RL, and decided to finish this year because I don't like leaving things unfinished. The other is on Tales of Phantasia, which I played years ago but recently decided to review since my friend got me into Secrets of Grindea and I've been on a classic-JRPG nostalgia trip lately.
If you read my PoE review, you'll see I gave it a D, one of only 2 games I've reviewed with that dubious distinction. As I was writing about how terrible the game is, I asked myself why no Diablo clone has managed to garner the widespread acclaim Diablo II did, so I wanted to write about that here (it's kind of tangential to PoE, so I didn't include this in my review). Let's start with D2 when it first came out. It was groundbreaking. D1 was groundbreaking - it basically began the ARPG genre - but D2 blew it out of the water. You went from 3 pretty straightforward classes exploring the basement of a church to 5-7 classes with 3 skill trees each exploring rainy plains, the desert, the jungle, Hell, and snowy mountains. Its sheer innovation and novelty blew many people's minds. Anything that tries to imitate D2 isn't going to have that for the precise reason that it's imitating something that came before while D2 broke (a lot of) new ground. It's a primary reason people playing D3 weren't as impressed - they wanted to feel what they felt when D2 came out, and D3 just plain didn't have that novelty. The next major reason I came up with has to do with how gaming has evolved to be online-oriented. D2 had Battle.net, but the developers didn't really step in all that frequently. I played D2 from middle to high school and I remember 1 major patch (1.10). When the developers did step in, they didn't make massive, game-changing nerfs. To give you an example: the Barbarian's Whirlwind got nerfed a few times, but it was still a top-tier skill. Nerfs back then meant bringing skills down a notch. Today, developers step in frequently and when they nerf, they nerf hard. Anytime I hear about a nerf it's followed by "into the ground." Skills go from top-tier to absolutely useless. It makes the game seem unstable and it discourages players exploring in their own way in favor of what the developers intend. In D2, I was around when people first started playing the Hammerdin. They took the melee knight in shining armor class and made him a mage that did nothing but summon spinning magical hammers around him. Guess what - the Hammerdin is incredibly strong. I highly doubt the developers intended for the paladin to be played that way, but D2 was set up such that people were free to figure this sort of stuff out and then the developers did pretty much nothing. They didn't go in and be like "well we didn't intend for this so ENJOY YOUR NERF LOL". When I was playing games the players weren't worried about games being too easy because people found ways of challenging themselves. People turned on hostility and ran content together so they needed to deal with friendly fire on top of PvE. People did naked runs through Hardcore. You had the broken-powerful builds but nobody cried about balance because they could just choose not to play those builds. I never made a Hammerdin and I still had a blast. The mentality of developers today would never allow for that sort of game - and that's one of the aspects that made D2 what it was. Nobody played D2 looking for a challenging PvE game, but if they wanted to, they could make it as hard as they wanted. Compare that to PoE, where when I returned to it about a month back energy shields just got done being rendered completely useless and the developers decided their game wasn't enough frustrating bullshit. Or with Marvel Heroes back in the day, when each time a major patch loomed the forums blew up with people worried that their characters would get gutted (and despite the lead developer's beginning promises, nerfs weren't rare at all). TLDR: that feeling we had when playing D2 ain't coming back. |
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