Thanks. I read that Sephiroth gets arguably stronger when the player is at Level 99 but wasn’t aware that it scales at lower levels.
It’s possible my Materia were underleveled too, apart from missing certain ones.
I still have the saves so I might have to try again if I get some time.
I think they have become more popular since the release of 7/Like a Dragon. I love them! Was converted when 4 came to PS+ and have kept up ever since. There’s a show coming to Prime Video.
I’ve been switching between Shin Megami Tenseii V: Vengeance and the Elden Ring expansion. I’m enjoying both, though I think FROM expansions are filled with tanky enemies who rarely flinch, which I often tire of before they end.
Vengeance is so much better than the initial release of V.
The RGG games are waaaay better known today than they used to be. The first game on PS2 had full localization but the modest sales led them to release the second (also on PS2) with “just” subs instead of a dub. The third almost didn’t even get a release outside of Japan, and when it originally found its way to America there was a bunch of cut content. The fifth entry originally didn’t even get a physical release in North America.
Going from where every time a new game came out it was an open question whether or not we’d get it in the US to now getting releases on multiple platforms, getting remasters of the older games so they’re available for modern systems, and even localizing older titles that were passed over the first time (Ishin!) is a major improvement.
Still waiting for an official localized version of Kenzan (the other historical title) and the Kurohyou games (a spinoff series for the PSP) though. A remaster of OF THE END/Dead Souls would be cool too, although it would really want a full remake with better mechanics and it tanked bad enough that’s unlikely to ever happen.
I’m playing LucasArts’ “The Dig.” I did the infamous rat puzzle — with a walkthrough of course. The puzzle is much-hated but also very clever in each of its core concepts.
A real, working tracking device to put on the rat? Good idea, except you might not have found it earlier, and the tracker orb only works in the general vicinity (ie. the surface of the planet). And it’s described as a bracelet instead of a collar.
The game containing most of the things you need on a single screen? Good idea, except they’re the same color as the background, so you need to pixel hunt.
A rib cage serving as a cage? That’s a good idea and a clever pun, except the inventory icon is upside down and red and looks nothing like a cage. You’ll probably remember it as “ribs,” not as “rib cage.”
Positioning yourself so that the rat doesn’t escape? Thankfully, this is clued by the game. Too bad the engine barely supports what it asks you to do.
I’m convinced that this is puzzle is hated not just because it’s hard, but because it had the potential to be good.
The more I comment on these boards, the more I repeat that I’m not great at puzzles. I still enjoy the ones I manage to pull off though. I’m enjoying the machine puzzles in The Dig, and I’m mostly managing to solve them without help.
I remember solving The Dig without aid, but it was so long ago I’ve forgotten most of it.
I’m really into Emio - The Smiling Man: Famicom Detective Club right now. For a Japanese visual novel, it’s surprisingly not as filled with anime cliches as I expected. I kinda figured out the central ending twist way too early, but it was pulled off so well that it still managed to move me. Maybe it’s because I’m a little sister too.
Okay, it’s not a video game, but it’s a game, it’s off-topic, and it’s my favorite.
Also a little off-topic, I have had another surge of really getting into pinball. I am going to post this link, which lets you (at least in the US) enter an area and see what pinball tables are near you. As somebody who sometimes needs an excuse to go for a drive, this has been great:
There are four or five manufacturers of games now and they must be keeping their factory assembly lines going, because it seems like every couple of weeks a new game is dropping.
Re: Pinball, sadly the only one near me is closed. I live in a pretty small city and I wasn’t aware there was one open in the last few years, but apparently there was.
Any RTS/RTT recommendations for someone who has played almost none of them?
I’m playing Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak right now. I’ve heard it’s easy, and I’m getting the hang of doing things the right way (with elevation and strengths/weaknesses), but the performance is awful and sometimes I don’t feel like trying to fight the lag, so I don’t always try my best.
The first few missions were intense due to scarce resources and limited unit classes, but I’m almost finished and the game has given me enough that I can just brute force most things. (It seems like if you run out of resources, the next mission gives you a base amount, but I’m not sure. Maybe this depends on the difficulty level you choose.)
I played Bad North two years ago and really enjoyed it. I thought the difficulty was just right, but there isn’t much like it that I know of. Tooth and Tail is on my list.
I’m also a big fan of Commandos- and Desperados-likes, etc. though those only really share an interface with RTS games. They’re more like process-of-elimation puzzles with limited solutions that you can take at your own pace — the key thing being that they rarely throw continuous enemy waves at you. They’re also stealth games.
Empires of the Undergrowth is an excellent RTS for anyone who dislikes the tedium of micromanaging individual units.
You manage an economy and base structure, organize egg groups into teams, and set goals for each team. The team units then put those goals into action in whatever way they can, but it’s explicitly not up to you.
This forces you to ignore a lot of the tactical elements and focus on maximizing your strategic work.
I can make other recommendations, if you’d like.
Empires of the Undergrowth
I just looked it up…interesting. I don’t have much preference for base building vs team control - I’m open to anything as long as it’s not too complex.
I’m both enticed by the graphical style and a bit put off by my aversion to bugs, but I can probably get over it. I’ll add it to my list.
I can make other recommendations, if you’d like.
For sure!
For what it’s worth, if you have a strong aversion to spiders in particular, the game offers a varying degree of arachnophobia accessibility, where all spider get silly hats, and the greater your indicated arachnophobia, the larger the hat becomes, until the spider is entirely obscured by the hat.
Similar to Empires of the Undergrowth, Grey Goo takes a focus on base building. Each faction has a different approach to base building, economy management, and upgrade management.
In Grey Goo, however, the player does get direct control over individual units. The primary theme here is that the individual units only take player orders for general tasks, such as moving, attacking, patrolling, etc.
The community is rather sparse, largely organizing on Discord, as the original devs have basically forgotten they made this game. Luckily, it does have singleplayer, which is a pretty fun experience. Given the small community, the visual quality is surprisingly excellent, if that matters to you.
The classic Brood War game is now available for free, and a small graphics modernization patch can be applied with a paid fee.
Brood War has an even balance between base building and unit control. Units often have special abilities, which need to be individually called for, and can completely change the balance of power during an engagement. In particular, this game can become very intense, and the player is expected to be quick-thinking and dynamic.
This game is also infamous for its difficult interface, which is embraced as a crucial facet of its design by the community. The “clunky” controls require the player to juggle a large number of tasks at once. This increases the probability of mistakes, which in turn require the player to spend time putting out fires and knowing how to recover from mistakes.
Game critics would be fair to call this bad design, but this design makes the competitive scene work entirely different from that of its sequel game. In particular, the entirety of a faction’s tech tree is more likely to be used in Brood War, while only the early unit types get a spotlight in the sequel.
The singleplayer story is enough to make this game worth playing. You don’t even need to poke multiplayer at all.
I’m only adding this for completeness. I have a lot of grudges against this game.
StarCraft 2 is the sequel to Brood War, and has a large number of quality-of-life features to make unit control a lot easier. In return, the game is much more demanding on the player, and both singleplayer and multiplayer require the player to control their faction like an extension of their own body at times.
The multiplayer scene is also a bit stagnant (in my spectator’s opinion), as so much of the competition hyperfocuses on the early game, making the rest of the game effectively obsolete.
StarCraft 2 also comes in three chapters:
Story-wise, these three chapters provide a satisfying ending to the grand story.
Gameplay-wise, these three chapters are very different from each other.
Wings of Liberty is essentially Brood War with more quality-of-life. The factions each have a few interesting gameplay changes from Brood War, but otherwise work much the same.
Heart of the Swarm is a lot more tense, as there is a greater focus on sabotaging the enemy’s economy and unit cohesion.
Legacy of the Void is what happened when Blizzard saw the success of League of Legends, and wanted to try (and fail) taking over that niche. There is much less focus on base building, and a lot of the strategy is driven almost entirely by the abilities of individual units.
Have you ever played an RTS, made a mistake, felt disappointed in yourself, and wanted to try the encounter again?
Well, as a time-traveling “achron”—a computer intelligence which communicates with itself across the past and future—you can!
Achron uses a time-wave philosophy for time travel, and allows players to travel across the entire timeline of an active RTS game, allowing collapsible paradoxes, experimental attacks, and the revising of strategies to win.
Each faction has an extremely different approach to base building and unit creation.
The developer has abandoned this game to work on military contracts, so it’s been held together entirely by the community on Discord.
Thanks! Achron sounds particularly interesting. Is it really 70 hours long, as HLTB suggests? It’s based on the report of just one person.
I have not completed the campaign, but—from what I’ve heard—the campaign is also a lot longer than I first suspected, and some of the missions are pretty difficult!
If you run Linux, then specifically look for the Linux version on the website. The Steam version is for Windows.
I’m playing the iOS port of The Stanley Parable (now it’s the Ultra Deluxe version, ha), which is a game I’d heard of for years but never played because I only play graphical games on my iPad. And to my delight, it’s IF! Not IF adjacent, but IF. I’ve found about 10 endings, and my feelings are very mixed. On the one hand, I laughed until snotty a few times. On the other hand, it can be very boring occasionally.
If you’re going to play this, I highly, highly, HIGHLY recommend that you play the free trial first because there’s a simply delightful bit in there where the narrator gives you a sales pitch for the game that is hilarious. And since the game costs $15, that was the thing that got me to pay.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and recommend Factorio, and only for the reason that it goes as complex as you want it and the enemy aggression only triggers from the pollution you create from your factories. It’s like an RTS version of Minecraft. You can also turn off the enemy aggression altogether because the game is all about designing factories. It can be very chill to play. Turn up the aggression and you have to defend your factories, basically. It’s you versus the environment and you can play cooperatively online as well.
→ https://www.gog.com/en/game/factorio
You mine raw materials and layout factory designs to process them into usable components. Make stuff that allows you to make stuff. It sounds a little boring on the surface, but the satisfaction comes from seeing your ideas in action. You can blueprint complex custom designs so you don’t have to build them from scratch and can replicate them with ease in other locations, if you have the resources.
There are insane pictures of very complex factory designs, but it doesn’t have to be like that at all. That’s just one interpretation of how to build a factory when you have a min/max personality. Casual playing minds can still make factories that are satisfying to see all the materials being shuttled around by robot arms, on conveyor belts, by flying drones, by bullet train. Heck, at the beginning, you have to carry stuff by hand. Eventually you create a system that feels like a living organism. You can dial down the graphics for performance and the game still looks great.
There are lots of wikis, mods, and you can download and share factory designs online. I don’t really play for the end goal of building a rocket ship to get off the planet… I play it like Minecraft where I explore and design bases of sorts and just try to make the next cool transport vehicle or factory machinery. Warning though, if you start to try and make things very efficient, it can burn brain cells. It’s a puzzler on a whole different level, which is also the appeal.
Anyway, there’s nothing else quite like Factorio. 
Edit: There are also very interesting self-imposed challenges, like trying to make a completely green factory. You start off burning coal, but can develop solar power and nuclear power, effectively having a zero-pollution footprint. It’s very hard to achieve, because everything needs power to operate and there are day/night cycles, but it can be done!
Factorio looks so boring at first, but it’s one of the most addictive games ever.
Do you mean: Dwarf Fortress
EDIT: Okay but seriously: Factorio is really fun, but I’m still grappling with the learning curve. Yes, Dwarf Fortress also has a learning curve, but I’ve handled that one already. I found Factorio years later.
Constantly feeling like you’re not doing it right, is what Factorio is all about! 
Dwarf Fortress is scary to me. I don’t know if I could ever start playing that game.
