VideoGame_Discussion

SupremeSarna wrote:

Sketch was always a Russian Roulette move. Will it affect the enemies? Will it affect you? Will it wipe your save? Good luck!

I continue to fail to line up what I am playing with the current month, but at least I knocked out another previous option: Castlevania II.

Foxhack wrote:

Can it actually wipe your data? That’s terrible!

SupremeSarna wrote:

Apparently


https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Sketch_bug

@Renaissance2K May I suggest a GOTM for April? It’ll become much harder to acquire when the eShop goes down in a few days (unless you emulate, anyway), so now would be a good time to say it.

SupremeSarna wrote:

Go for it.

April 17 is the 10th anniversary of the North American release of Pandora’s Tower . Y’all should really play this game—it’s like 12 3D Zelda dungeons with a gothic horror theme, a romance with a sweet young maiden, a booming soundtrack, weapon crafting, lore to uncover, and memorable fights against vast beasts. Highly, highly recommend!

Like I said, it’s on the Wii U eShop for a little while longer, has physical copies, and can (presumably) be emulated. It’s a steal at $20… for now.

I've never heard of Pandora's Tower, and it looks great, but I'm worried it won't get much traction. We've had three quiet months (though the issue with Final Fantasy VI seems to be less that people aren't playing it and more that it just takes so damn long).

What does everyone else think? At the very least, it's the first nominee for April.

I'm always happy to spread the good word of it. Just bringing it to people's attention makes me happy, so I hope users will consider it before the affordable eShop version disappears. I'm definitely playing it next month even if it doesn't get the vote.

I think we should just take nominations as usual. I doubt too many would play that, especially if it isn't on sale. I should have played it more when I had it though. Same with Last Story.

I just meant to nominate it early, since nominating it as soon as it leaves the eShop wouldn't be very effective. We'll vote as always.

We're in the last third of March, so let's look back on the badges we've earned:

Kommie {imgt}https://i.imgur.com/wCPZEqH.gif 64 96{imgt} Renaissance2K {imgt}https://i.imgur.com/XBpdSHe.gif 76 76{imgt} {imgt}https://i.imgur.com/twpkmhK.gif 76 76{imgt} {imgt}https://i.imgur.com/hkrXRms.gif 76 76{imgt} {imgt}https://i.imgur.com/GxlNufM.gif 76 76{imgt} {imgt}https://i.imgur.com/ul5SL0O.gif 76 76{imgt} {imgt}https://i.imgur.com/opBFe5N.gif 76 76{imgt} {imgt}https://i.imgur.com/z87bp7l.gif 76 76{imgt} SupremeSarna {imgt}https://i.imgur.com/wCPZEqH.gif 64 96{imgt} Yoshi {imgt}https://i.imgur.com/iKZyry3.png 79 75{imgt}

Many thanks to everyone who's working through the Retro Talkshop Thread backlog this month. Keep those playthroughs coming, and we'll keep stuffing your face with badges.

Let's start taking nominations for the April Game of the Month. SupremeSarna already started us off by nominating Pandora's Tower, which is about to disappear from the Wii U eShop forever. What else should we have in our lineup?

We'll start voting on March 26 and call the winner on April 1.

Let's hear some nominees!

I’ve been seeing Pandoras Tower being a valuable game on here for awhile.
I think even before the pandemic.
The idea the way you describe it sounds great though.
Other than buying a physical copy and making sure one of my wiis works
I have no real way to play it. It doesn’t use motion controls too does it?
Because fudge that. I can’t remember the last time I had one of the wiis
set up but the motion controls are not fun.

The rear box art says it supports the Classic Controller. You'll still need a Wiimote, but you won't need to use motion controls.

Excellent, thank you! Maybe it would be worth the purchase.

The game’s awesome, so definitely look into it! You won’t be sorry. The Classic Controller is supported, but I think the pointer function of the Wiimote and Nunchuk is pretty efficient, myself.

I beat Metroid Fusion for a previous month's badge. And I'll nominate Red Earth for next month.

BloodPuppetX wrote:

Doesn't look like we had a badge for that yet, so you're the first.

{imgt}https://i.imgur.com/aeKEQL9.gif 66 72{imgt}

Wheeeeeee, look at 'er go.

Finally finished Virtua Fighter with Jacky. It was a pretty easy playthrough - he has some easy combos - but I got trounced by Dural on a whole other level than with other characters.

image

Case in point.

Sarah

image

Nice! Was that Saturn or Astro City? Looks like the former.

Lunar wrote:

Yesterday's theme was "Things Not Going As Planned."

I booted up the Saturn port with the intent of doing a Dural playthrough. I quickly discovered that I'm not very good at doing the Dural code; probably a 1/10 success rate. When you fail, you enter a match as a normal character - usually Akira or Pai - and then have to suicide before you can make another attempt.

Even when I was successful, I'm still not good enough at the game to 1CC it (even with a secret character) so the whole process would repeat a few matches in. 45 minutes and 5 rounds later, I had to give up. I booted up Virtua Fighter Remix just to see if the code was a little more forgiving there, but I had the same result.

I started looking around for other options. Virtua Fighter 10th Anniversary has Dural implemented but not unlocked, if that makes any sense. Turns out there's a patch, however, which sent me down the rabbit hole of creating, patching, and serving a PS2 disc image. My office is a big mess of PS2 consoles and parts right now, so this was more of an ordeal than it needed to be, especially when OPL decided it didn't want to read from my network share anymore for absolutely no reason.

I did eventually get it up and running, though. Dural, as expected, is an absolute beast. It didn't take longer than a few minutes to smash Arcade Mode and get the credits to roll.

image

Back to Final Fantasy VI...

I don't usually have time to complete more than one dungeon a session, but I plowed through Triangle Island really quickly and decided to take a shot at the infamous Fanatics' Tower, which a lot of us have been discussing and lamenting in this thread. It's the last side quest I have left (other than maybe seeing Shadow's dreams) before the final dungeon, Terra had learned Ultima, and I'd kept Phoenix locked to one of my mages since obtaining it with the goal of learning Reraise to deal with the tower boss' "fudge you" end-of-battle attack.

Somebody else in this thread mentioned "abusing Ultima" and yeah, that's definitely the way to go. I fought two matches trying to align weaknesses, reflect statuses, etc. to cater attacks to who I was facing, but Ultima ignores barriers and has no elemental alignment, so it just wipes the screen clean when you use it once or twice. By the time I made it to the top of the tower, my other two characters had learned Ultima as well, and the fourth was Gogo, so I made quite the mess.

Tower boss appears. Battle starts. He starts flinging big spells at me, nearly all of which get thrown back in his face because of Reflect Rings. I start scrolling through my spell list looking for Reraise and... I can't find it. Hit X a few times to switch to my other mages, and... nope, they don't have it either. Did I seriously not learn Reraise? I could have sworn I saw the end-of-battle confirmation. Oh crap. Oh crap oh crap oh crap.

So, I start the long, long, long process of draining the boss of its MP so it can't flip the table at the end of the battle. I cast Berserk on the boss to keep it from blowing itself off and start casting Rasp like it's the free chips at a Mexican restaurant. I cast it non-stop for what feels like an eternity, use Libra to check the boss' status, and... I'm only about 1/5 of the way there. This is going to take a while.

I've now blown past the hour "soft cutoff" point for my gaming session, and I'm still Rasping like Harvey Fierstein's larynx. The boss is now down to about 1/5 of its total MP. His pitiful forced physical attacks have slowly worn down my poor heroes, especially Old Man Strago, so I open up his spell list looking for Drain to get some of his HP back.

And that's when I saw it.

Reraise.

It was sitting there the whole time. I just missed it.

gosh darnit.

Strago casts Reraise on himself. Terra, Celes, and Gogo find their itchy Ultima triggers again. The boss returns the favor. Strago pops back up, flips the boss the bird, the battle ends, and I go into the menu to cast Teleport and GTFO of this hellho-

Oh wait, Teleport doesn't work here. Right. Fudge. What time is it? Fudge again.

And I swear, every two floors I hit another random battle, and it's those weird ballerina monsters that require two casts of Ultima and counter with curative spells because why not.

By the time I reach the bottom and save, I look like the Titanic "It's been 84 years" old lady.

And that's what I get for thinking to myself "HEY, THIS WASN'T SO BAD" as I approached the top of the tower.

I'm in Kefka's Tower. A bad combination of levels means Gau is the last wolf boy standing, and he's using the Magic Urn rage. High defense, weak attacks, and big cure spells.

He's been going for about 12 minutes now, and 1/3 enemies are down.

I'm going to walk away and check in later.

Edit: Good boy, Gau. Good boy.

@Renaissance2K I had a moment like that in the Floating Continent. The boss wiped out my team and knocked Poroso (Mog) down to a tiny bit of HP. He was using dances, and his final move was a wind-based dance that did just enough damage to finish off the boss. I was shocked but grateful.

And that's all she wrote.

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Shadow's segment of the ending always gets to me.

I’ll nominate

Stormlord

Available many places but I only ever played the Sega Genesis version.
It would also be the only version I could play currently. Since I don’t
Play games on old obsolete computers anymore.

I played emulated 32X version, I'll try to hook up Astro City before the months end.

Any other picks for next month? We'll start voting tomorrow.

Uhhhhhhh Golden Sun

Shadow Hearts

Lunar wrote:

Don't tempt me to replay it again! I might..... even though I did it last year.

I got VF beat - but totally blanked on grabbing a picture/screen-shot.
I beat it with Jacky and stunningly breezed through just about everyone (after looking up some moves to help me out) and even beat Dural 3-2. I also beat it with his sister Sarah, though she was a TON more difficult for me and I had to switch to Pai to beat herself. Akira wrecked my day as Sarah and I did try to beat him with Pai but that didn't happen. I eventually got him with Sarah and did okay against Dural but lost 3-1.

I beat it on my RaspPie4 playing the 32X port - that was interesting as a few times the game struggled and slowed down, and I paused it once to look up some of Jacky's moves on my phone and afterwards the camera was 'stuck' in this off-angle view that made fighting rather challenging. Even after losing it stayed there until I paused for a little while again and it corrected itself - strange. But the camera position had some issues, especially if I got knocked down and my opponent went for a high-jump ground slam but I rolled away in time, then the zoom-out and pan around caused some issues. Oh well, I had not beat a game for this thread in a few months, so it's good to get back into it.

VF2 is SUCH a better game than this, surely the Saturn's power helps, and maybe my brain doesn't accurately recall how they really were back in the late 90's on my Saturn, but owning them both I barely touched the first title but put a lot of hours into 2, with Lion as my go to and Shun my #2 choice.

I’ll nominate Dragonball Advance Adventure

Here are the six nominees for April 2023's Game of the Month:

Nominees
Pandora's Tower
Red Earth
Stormlord
Golden Sun
Shadow Hearts
Dragonball Advance Adventure

Either publicly in this thread or privately in a PM to me, give each nominee 0-5 points. Omitting a nominee is equivalent to giving it a vote of 0. The game with the highest score by the end of the month will be the April 2023 GOTM.

Here are my votes:

Pandora's Tower - 3 Red Earth - 5 Stormlord - 4 Golden Sun - 3 Shadow Hearts - 3 Dragonball Advance Adventure - 4

Voat!

Pandora's Tower: 5

I would've considered Golden Sun: The Lost Age if that one specifically was chosen, but I beat the original last year and don't need to return to it now. As it stands, I'm going all in on the Tower.

Golden Sun - 5
Shadow Hearts - 4

Golden Sun 5

Shadow Hearts - 5
Golden Sun - 5

Red Earth 5

Another previous month knocked out: Maniac Mansion.

Yoshi wrote:

Looks like we already had an ancient badge for that one. OP should be updated.

Astro City is where it's at.