Sunday, October 30, 2016

Dark Souls III: Ashes of Ariandel

So, the DLC starts out quite a bit like the Painted World of Ariamis from Dark Souls. I absolutely love the references, just like they had the throwback to Anor Londo.

I played it with my endgame character, level 95. I didn't get a single level the entire run.

Boss boss fights were epic, and really rewarding to beat. We got a more circular lore, and a PvP arena, woot!

It probably took me a solid 8 hours to beat the whole thing. I didn't use a guide until I beat both bosses, but I might have talked to Luke... and brought in a couple of summons... I didn't manage to get any boss fighting screenshots, because I was usually dying repeatedly.

Overall really enjoyed it! Sorry for the lack of epic words, this is the second game I managed to beat on my birthday.



Friday, October 28, 2016

AM2R (Another Metroid 2 Remake)

So I really love metroidvania games. They're amazing.

When I picked this up, I was super excited to play a Metroid game I missed, but without having to play on the old game boy system. In my brashness, I choose to play on the hard difficulty. This was a mistake.

It was brutally hard. Like - backtrack to a save point every time you kill any boss-like creature, so that you don't utterly die to the second one - hard.

The entire game is setup like spokes off an elevator. You have central saves, a bunch of branches with boss creatures to kill, then when they're all killed the elevator mechanic in the middle lets you go further down. All the while you're getting new powers, and equipment, and the E tanks. The E tanks are much more scarce than any other Metroid game I recall.

Enemies hit really hard on the hard difficulty. You will lose half an E tank in 1-2 hits from a normal enemy. By the time you get to that really hard boss, that is placed strategically 10 screens away from the closest save point, you will lose your mind.

One minor relief is that the death/reload time is pretty quick.

Most of the bosses I ended up having to kill in a somewhat cheesy way. Kneel in a corner and shoot in a locked upward angle in a spammy fashion until the tender un-armored underbelly is destroyed. Later on this is replaced by the trusty hide in a tiny hole, pop out for a strategic sucker missile shot, go back to hole. this last strategy held for quite some time.

For boss fights, you need to learn the tells of when/what attacks are coming, and you need to take very strong advantage of the portion of the boss fight where you are expected to shoot something that is not the boss to potentially get your life/missiles topped back up. If you neglect this, you will die.




I mostly collected things that were obvious on the map.

She is the worst. 10+ screens from the save point. Hits like a truck. Very little maneuvering room.