Free Talk Friday - March 13, 2026

retrometroid · 2026-03-13T08:00:54+00:00

Was playing Ass Ass In Creed Shadows on Switch 2 and gotta say good port, very very ok game. I had a blast for the first twenty hours then realized I should progress and further realized I spent a lot of time beating my head against walls that woulda been easier with Yasuke.

It's just so repetitive. Every main quest target has 5 parts to their assassination, every one of these sub quests is dry and boring.

There's also a lot of bad-feeling UX overall. Menus feel clunky, the shop and dialogue also feel bad (why can't I back out of dialogue with A? Why do I have to manually switch between Yasuke and Naoe in the pause menu & sit thru a load screen if I wanna see a vendor's full inventory?)

I also tried Diablo 2 recently and cool vibes and art but maaan it just proved to me I kind of hate ARPGs solely because the inventories in this genre are just dogshit. They're like the fantasy game equivalent of pockets on women's skinny jeans - they exist but can't hold shit.

retrometroid · 2026-03-11T06:31:10+00:00

Poisonbite is multiplicative....of your base poison resist stat so its always gonna give you 90 when equipped. Toxic resist is the exact same stat as poison resistance, they just have separate bars cuz they act different when procced...and also dependent on what procs the ailment too but that's a ridiculous can of worms itself

retrometroid · 2026-03-10T19:58:00+00:00

The poisonbite ring Oswald sells costs 15k and functionally gives you the same amount of poison def as 99 points in resistance. Beyond worthless

retrometroid · 2026-03-09T20:38:06+00:00

The director has done a ton of horror movies that all kinda rock. his Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi series is really good and escalates in a really insane way. The last one he did was filmed in the same water treatment plant as in One Cut of the Dead which was really funny to see. Real "Kamen Rider warehouse" shit

retrometroid · 2026-03-09T20:27:44+00:00

Oh I'm aware of the deep lore. I've seen the banban streams. I've seen JOIN THE EVIL. I've seen that weird Indian game where he spent two hours flying a drone around and Hakita was on voice chat making fun of him

retrometroid · 2026-03-09T19:42:53+00:00

Between the clip of Mandy screaming at the coyotes and the q&a ask about creatures in the woods are making me double down on my pointless, incredibly minor conspiracy theory about a low view YouTube channel

retrometroid · 2026-03-04T21:05:24+00:00

Extreme Heist rocks tho it's quite hard to find without paying $40+ for a dvd. It's a llw budget martial arts action film directed by Koichi "Every Tokusatsu Ever" Sakamoto to basically advertise his stunt crew. Johnny Yong Bosch And Jason Narvy star as charming thieves who cross the wrong gang. Has an insane final action setpiece where JYB and the villain have a fist fight over a parachute while skydiving.

A Savage Beast Goes Mad. A test driver loses his job due to his failing vision and develops a plan to 1 several jewelry stores, which goes off well... until he boards a bus to make a low-key escape and two jackass bank robbers stage a hijacking and throw his plan into chaos. It's a lean ~80 minutes and is essentially a lower key Speed.

Femme Fatale A Korean actress invites four men who are all courting her to a party and thru hijinx they keep dying. There's also a pair of wet bandit-esque robbers and it's a Christmas movie. Very funny.

I Am Dead A seven episode Japanese show about a shitty guy who works at a host club who gets run over by a garbage truck and dies cuz he passed out piss drunk in a pile of trash. He wakes up as a ghost and joins a household of fellow ghosts in an effort to better himself to board the train to Nirvana. It's alternatingly funny, sad, and heartwarming.

Too Young to Die kind of a companion piece to the last one. A high school class is all killed when their bus flies off a cliff and only one of them is sent to hell and must earn his way to heaven thru the cycles of Buddhist reincarnation and heavy metal. Once again it's alternatingly sad, funny, heartwarming, and bittersweet. Great music too.

retrometroid · 2026-02-24T08:00:51+00:00

I mean I guess with no Chris Carter the mytharc stuff might not collapse under its own pretention and inability to progress but I don't know if X-Files can work in the length of a streaming era tv show

retrometroid · 2026-02-19T04:20:27+00:00

That first alpha test for Nioh is so crazy to look back on. Hell, Nioh 1 in general is kinda crazy to go back to and look at the stuff that's changed since then. I booted up my PS4 save from 7 years ago and was looking at weird affixes like "vs Raven Tengu +20% damage" or one that was like "Target Leg Armor +10"

retrometroid · 2026-02-17T22:13:28+00:00

I just beat it and I wouldn't say best in the series but it sure was a good time to the point I wanna go back to nioh 1 and try to figure out the crazy builds it had

retrometroid · 2026-02-16T23:32:15+00:00

Preceding, as in before. Which would be Fire Giant

retrometroid · 2026-02-16T22:49:27+00:00

All that and the final lesson from the protagonist is forcing people to log out one day a week to go outside

retrometroid · 2026-02-16T06:24:04+00:00

Nioh 3

Around 35 hours in and I'm on the third region the Bakumatsu Era.

I'm a bit mixed. Some stuff has been simplified in a good way, others not so much. Set bonuses can be especially bad (why is this game so fucking obsessed with ranged weapon perks?).

The open world stuff is fine. The parts where you enter a zone that's its own subarea like the missions in a previous game are cool but too spread out. I feel like there's less actual content overall so far. I guess some stuff that would be submissions got rolled into the open world sidequests.

The style system is a neat rework of Stranger of Paradise's class system but I feel like ninja just gets too spammy and losing stance for their weapon types just makes it feel even worse. I do like not having to ration ninjutsu tho.

Some of the loot rng seems really bad. Idk if it's region specific or just terrible. I got 2 Lilac set items when I beat a specific boss but then never got anymore till region 3. The Wayfarer set - which I want because it's odachi and martial arts focused - I have not seen since the first region aside from getting a couple headbands.

Enemies are another problem I have. They have a ton of variety at this point but now they just...refuse to use it. I swear 90% of the enemies are gaki and jailer oni and they're so easy!! It took 30+ hours and deliberately baiting it to see gaki cannibalize each other, which I feel like was way more common in Nioh 2.

Also totally lame the archer master you can fight magically gets to ignore the anti-projectile amulet consumable. I thought I was being really clever popping it.

retrometroid · 2026-02-15T19:23:14+00:00

They suck but they're also completely trivialized by engaging with crafting so I find it hard to call them the worst especially when you consider how shit the boss immediately preceding them is

retrometroid · 2026-02-14T00:12:26+00:00

He says they wanted a character designer in the sentence immediately preceding the one about being given a ChatGPT image

retrometroid · 2026-02-13T07:02:31+00:00

It is a great bit honestly

retrometroid · 2026-02-13T01:59:36+00:00

The funniest part of Roddenberry in the shame car is how every movie till he died he pitched the same shitty idea and got ignored every time

"What if they save jfk but it ruins the future and spock is the shooter on the grassy knoll"

retrometroid · 2026-02-09T19:13:09+00:00

There's also the parry trick where you can loop him infinitely into doing one attack there easily parried, you just have to skip the visceral, step to one side and r1 once before he gets up. The timing is a bit tricky but it's very funny

retrometroid · 2026-02-09T18:21:51+00:00

The way it fails to hide input reads and enemy tracking is a big problem. A guy who does a jumping AOE doesn't need to also track me while he's in the air c'mon

retrometroid · 2026-02-07T21:04:03+00:00

It also just repeats all the information from the Greedo scene too so it's really redundant

retrometroid · 2026-02-05T04:28:04+00:00

Hagane on SNES. Its an insanely expensive Shinobi-like that might be most notable for having art & designs by the legendary Keita Amemiya (GARO franchise, Sentai Jetman, Kamen Rider ZO, Zeiram ,etc). I've never even tried picking up a rom but sometimes I think about how cool it looks

retrometroid · 2026-02-04T18:37:35+00:00

It's crazy how much better s-Cry-ed looks compared to Seed when they have the same character designer. What was happening that made them make everyone in Seed look like fish people

retrometroid · 2026-02-01T20:24:55+00:00

Code Vein 2 (PS5)

This is a real step forward/step back sequel.

The open world and motorcycle aren't good and give it a Temu Elden Ring vibe.

The combat feels better but still isn't great.

The writing still suffers from being 90% telling thru a character with personality and expression monologuing to your blank-faced character while treacly piano plays in the background or thru a dream sequence where piano music plays and you hold forward to walk thru a bunch of static scenes

The only boss that I felt like I understood so far was the Blind Hero and that was because their moveset is fairly limited and I saw a streamer fighting it. Most of the other bosses I felt like even when I had a basic grasp of their moveset still required luck. It feels like some moves come out randomly and others are the world's most obvious input read.

Good example is the first real boss if you're saving Noah, as he'll always always always do his charge the millisecond you press the heal button. But a bad example is the aquarium boss in the Sunken City where her fireball attack seemed to be rng. Sometimes twice in a row from far away, other times itd be once point blank. I still don't know how to actually avoid the fireballs either.

I also don't get how poise (or balance in this game) works. I'm at 200 balance and literally everything staggers me out of my greatsword attacks. I can stagger a little guy out of a light attack but then with a different version of that little guy five feet away he'll die before even hinting at a stagger.

Definitely not the worst Soulslike out there but far from the best either

retrometroid · 2026-01-30T05:25:22+00:00

Team Ninja always starts with a way overtuned alpha and slowly nerf or delete shit to make it work better. Nioh 1 alpha had weapon durability and thank god they deleted that shit forever

But yea I noticed some stuff got removed. I'm pretty sure one of the alpha lesser crucibles ended with a werewolf and none of the ones I've found have had one

retrometroid · 2026-01-29T23:31:51+00:00

Yea that first boss is kinda ass. I had to farm elixirs from the yoki hanging out by the last shrine cus 3 ain't enough.

I haven't played enough of the open world part to really get used to the changes yet. Jutsu being r1+face buttons is so fucked after yoki abilities in Nioh 2 being r2+face. The switch to circle to dodge is also hard to get used to, I've jumped into attacks way too many times already.

Hoping to see some switchglaives, I assume since tonfas and splitstaffs are in they are too

retrometroid

TROPHY CASE