dr_st wrote on 2025-01-10, 20:12:

Finally mustered the courage to play The Witcher. Long games make me nervous, and the Witcher series more so - because I'm a bit of a completionist type of player, and as far as I understand, in all the Witcher games, it is not really possible to see everything without playing the entire game multiple times, because of all the branching plotlines activated by your in-game choices.

Having at times forgetting that I started the game, I've finally came back to it, and only now completed Chapter 1. It took me a bit to get a hang of the game's rhythm in terms of quests, NPC interactions, combat and alchemy, but now that I "feel" it, it flows much better and I expect will go faster too.

A key decision for me was to abandon the desire to complete as many quests as possible, and just do the main ones, and the side ones that feel obvious or that I happen to stumble upon. I already know I missed a few in Chapter 1, but I don't care.

Last night I was exploring the southeastern edge of the map in Kingdom Come Deliverance II when I saw a plume of smoke going up into the sky in the distance. As I got closer, I kept hitting the edge of the map where Henry would mutter something like, "No, I have to go back" and you couldn't move him any further in that direction. So I kept trying to find a different angle to look at this smoke. Finally, with a little help from the game's built-in Photo Mode, I got an idea of what was causing the smoke.

edit: I changed this to a Spoiler in case you want to discover this for yourself.

clueless1 wrote on 2025-05-31, 11:00:

I got an idea of what was causing the smoke.

I love these sorts of nerdy shenanigans 😂

Started playing Lost Odyssey on my Xbox 360 a few days ago. I'm about eight hours into the game, and I have very mixed feelings about it. The story revolves around characters who are essentially immortal (having lived for over a thousand years) and how they deal with the loss of friends and family. Interesting premise, and I'm definitively getting some Highlander vibes from that. The setting is also intriguing, with the world currently going through a "magic fueled industrial revolution" as they call it. Combat is fully turn-based, and relies on the "rock, paper, scissors" mechanic, where different elements counter each other (e.g. water is strong against fire and so on). There's also an "aiming" feature for melee attacks, which depends on various magic rings that your characters might be wearing.

While this setup looks great on paper, in practice, the game doesn't play very well. First, the frequency of random encounters is too high in some areas, and getting in/out of them takes too long. The game also caps your level to a certain value until you progress further into the story. Meaning, you can't XP grind for the harder boss encounters, which is different from most JRPGs. Some bosses also use cheesy abilities which can paralyze your entire party, unless you have (rare) equipment which protects you from that status effect. Later enemies can also block your physical attacks (taking no damage), while reducing your health by half with a single hit.

Then we have the forced stealth sections, which are absolutely atrocious. Get spotted even once, and it's back to the last save point, which was like 5 minutes ago. Granted, I've only encountered one of these so far, but it almost made me drop the game entirely. From what I've read online, there are more stealth segments later on, which is a major turn off. Doesn't help that save points are few and far in between, so if you fail a stealth check or if your party gets wiped out in combat, tough luck. And while I don't normally judge Xbox 360 games too harshly on their graphics, some of the textures in Lost Odyssey look like they belong in the PS1 era. The "depth of field" effect is also vastly overused, making everything look way too blurry.

Lastly, the developers force you into mini-games during some completely inappropriate moments. For example, there's a scene where someone very close to the protagonist dies, and you have to make arrangements for their funeral. This consists of pixel hunting for certain items across ten screens or so. And it's followed by a crappy mini-game, where you light a bunch of torches by mirroring the movements an NPC. To me, this felt very out of place during such a sad and somber moment. I think I'll keep going for a while longer, since the story is very good, but honestly, I'm not sure if I have the patience to finish this game.

I briefly played some GTA VC and SA, very briefly - but its fun to be there in those places again. I watched some gta related youtube videos. I think there must be an almost continuous creation of videos on the same topics being make on all gta games, it seems like there are videos on "Why GTA4 is better than GTA5" and "Why GTA:SA is the best GTA" being made all the time, it's like a river you can dip into at any time! It seems to have been that way for 10+ years. Same with videos about half life, oblivion, doom and other best sellers... Not complaining, just observing

Shadow warrior
screamer 2

Getting into the hang of editing and successfully initialising the soundcard in dos environment on my kt266 (k7t266 Pro-R rev 1.0) + voodoo 3 3000 agp + athlon xp 2000+ build. swapped out the ymf744 as I dont know how to change the cd audio volume which is really low, also its a very noisy card. currently got a SB PCI128 (5507 - which is actually an ensoniq es1370) installed and works dandy. screamer 2 auto configs it as an ensoniq soundscape. was also able to burn shadow warrior and screamer 2 using philscomputerlabs vids as a guide ( although it runs in expanded memory) from gog using a winxp machine. set waveblaster and synth volumes to 20 and cdvol to 127 in sndscape.ini to get somewhat balanced volumes.
havent had a chance to recover my 2 aureal vortex 2 cards floating around in builds cellowrapped in the garage. the SB PI128 is behaving well atm both in windows and dos environment and has nice clean sound. also plays well with my roland sc55 gs.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2025-06-01, 06:18:

Started playing Lost Odyssey on my Xbox 360 a few days ago. I'm about eight hours into the game, and I have very mixed feelings […]
Show full quote

Started playing Lost Odyssey on my Xbox 360 a few days ago. I'm about eight hours into the game, and I have very mixed feelings about it. The story revolves around characters who are essentially immortal (having lived for over a thousand years) and how they deal with the loss of friends and family. Interesting premise, and I'm definitively getting some Highlander vibes from that. The setting is also intriguing, with the world currently going through a "magic fueled industrial revolution" as they call it. Combat is fully turn-based, and relies on the "rock, paper, scissors" mechanic, where different elements counter each other (e.g. water is strong against fire and so on). There's also an "aiming" feature for melee attacks, which depends on various magic rings that your characters might be wearing.

While this setup looks great on paper, in practice, the game doesn't play very well. First, the frequency of random encounters is too high in some areas, and getting in/out of them takes too long. The game also caps your level to a certain value until you progress further into the story. Meaning, you can't XP grind for the harder boss encounters, which is different from most JRPGs. Some bosses also use cheesy abilities which can paralyze your entire party, unless you have (rare) equipment which protects you from that status effect. Later enemies can also block your physical attacks (taking no damage), while reducing your health by half with a single hit.

Then we have the forced stealth sections, which are absolutely atrocious. Get spotted even once, and it's back to the last save point, which was like 5 minutes ago. Granted, I've only encountered one of these so far, but it almost made me drop the game entirely. From what I've read online, there are more stealth segments later on, which is a major turn off. Doesn't help that save points are few and far in between, so if you fail a stealth check or if your party gets wiped out in combat, tough luck. And while I don't normally judge Xbox 360 games too harshly on their graphics, some of the textures in Lost Odyssey look like they belong in the PS1 era. The "depth of field" effect is also vastly overused, making everything look way too blurry.

Lastly, the developers force you into mini-games during some completely inappropriate moments. For example, there's a scene where someone very close to the protagonist dies, and you have to make arrangements for their funeral. This consists of pixel hunting for certain items across ten screens or so. And it's followed by a crappy mini-game, where you light a bunch of torches by mirroring the movements an NPC. To me, this felt very out of place during such a sad and somber moment. I think I'll keep going for a while longer, since the story is very good, but honestly, I'm not sure if I have the patience to finish this game.

Man, I have the weirdest recollection of playing Lost Odyssey. I was on an alcohol fueled bender due to life events in my 20's, and just sort of drunkenly went through the motions in Lost Odyssey until I got to a boss fight in a cave where I had to defeat a boss and minions in a specific order or they respawned? Got frustrated, passed out, and never went back to the game again. I remember virtually nothing about it, just a vague sense of going through the motions in a drunken haze, and a short story about being locked in a pitch black jail with someone who goes blind when he's finally released. I've always meant to try it again somehow, because it's supposed to be good?

Namrok wrote on 2025-06-04, 13:32:

Man, I have the weirdest recollection of playing Lost Odyssey. I was on an alcohol fueled bender due to life events in my 20's, and just sort of drunkenly went through the motions in Lost Odyssey until I got to a boss fight in a cave where I had to defeat a boss and minions in a specific order or they respawned? Got frustrated, passed out, and never went back to the game again.

Yeah, that sounds like the second boss. The big snake that absorbs magic from its respawning minions, unless you take them out quickly. It's a very gimmicky fight, as most boss battles in this game seem to be.

I've always meant to try it again somehow, because it's supposed to be good?

Well, I picked it up because it's an Xbox 360 exclusive made by the creator of the Final Fantasy series. It also gets a lot of praise in the JRPG fan community. But honestly, I'm just not feeling it.

So far, the game presented some pretty interesting concepts, but it feels like it needed another 3-6 months of polish to be on the level with the mainline FF entries. The story is the only consistently good thing here, including those dreams/memories that you mentioned, like the one with the imprisoned old man. Everything else like the combat, puzzles, camera controls and even map traversal feels very clunky to me.

I loved Lost Odyssey

It's the game that made me purchase a Xbox Series, to get way shorter loading times, and significantly sharper graphics (thanks to upscaling).

There's only one stealth section. It's fairly short.

The game looked fine to me, typical Unreal Engine 3 graphics. Even great at times, depending on the location.

That 'mini-game' got me stuck, but the tone is consistent with the overall section... ?
It was frustrating, however. It's barely explained.

The game limits your XP gains per area but it's part of the way the game makes grinding a non-issue. When your are new to an area, you get levels quickly. When you get to the appropriate level, the XP gain is limited again. This eliminates level grinding. Except "secret" / optional dungeons, if you pay attention (and the first boss will wipe your party. It was the same for everyone), you *can* at any point, overcome the challenge. But you have to make the systems of combat your own. Like prepare and look into rings, make elements (fire/water/whatever) work for you, understand defense systems, put combat people in front, and the magicians in the back row, prepare your trips with comsumables...)

It's the real FF13, the good one. I'd say it's the last classic Final Fantasy experience (except the tone of level grinding, which is absent by design), and the only one with 'modern' (at the time) graphics and a modern engine. All from the old band from Squaresoft, exclusively for the Xbox 360, with Microsot's backing. 😀

The soundtrack, story, and the ton of bonus content, make it worth it. The absence of the soul crushing grinding is the cherry on top.

I'd suggest to get the official guide. There's a ton of content you can miss. If you are a completionist, that is.

I was one, but only for the memories, which were written by a renowned and very talented Japanese author.Their presentation is so unique, too.

Needless to say, I'd highly suggest for you to continue. It's worth it. The game had a lot of commercial success, and it's justified, despite the flaws.

xcomcmdr wrote on 2025-06-04, 18:04:

There's only one stealth section. It's fairly short.

Ok, that's a relief. Some old forum posts implied that there would be more stealth gameplay later on.

xcomcmdr wrote on 2025-06-04, 18:04:

The game looked fine to me, typical Unreal Engine 3 graphics. Even great at times, depending on the location.

I think the excessive "depth of field" use may have negatively impacted my perception of the game's graphics. It blurs everything so heavily, that it sometimes makes floor/wall textures near the edge of the screen appear super low-res. Even character models look like ass when covered by that crappy effect.

xcomcmdr wrote on 2025-06-04, 18:04:

That 'mini-game' got me stuck, but the tone is consistent with the overall section... ?

I don't know man, Lost Odyssey basically implemented "press F to pay respects" years before CoD. 😁 And it lasted for like 5 minutes straight.

xcomcmdr wrote on 2025-06-04, 18:04:

The soundtrack, story, and the ton of bonus content, make it worth it.

I forgot to mention this. Uematsu's score is superb in this game, as expected of the JRPG soundtrack tzar. In particular, the songs that play during some of the more emotional scenes were very fitting.

xcomcmdr wrote on 2025-06-04, 18:04:

I was one, but only for the memories, which were written by a renowned and very talented Japanese author.Their presentation is so unique, too.

Yeah, each short story (dream/memory) that I've read so far has been fantastic. It's clear that they were written with much care and dedication. They are definitively one of the highlights of this game.

xcomcmdr wrote on 2025-06-04, 18:04:

Needless to say, I'd highly suggest for you to continue. It's worth it.

I'm still playing it, just not as enthusiastically as before, but I will complete it eventually. By now, I've invested too much time and effort to leave it unfinished. The excellent story keeps driving me forward, but the gameplay is just kinda meh.

Kingdom Come Deliverance II

So it's obvious I'm completely in love with this game. IMO it's the best game I've played since KCD 1. But since I'm all fanboyish lately in my posts here, I thought I'd post all my criticisms of it for once.

For a high realism game, there are several areas where "compromises" were made. Some of them are actually kind of funny.
1. The whistle command calls your horse. No matter how far away you are from your horse (literally many miles across the map), after whistling it'll take only a few seconds for it to walk up behind you. No matter which direction you are facing, it walks up from behind. Except, if you can physically see the horse, it will approach from the front.
2. You can pause the main quest pretty much without limit. From what I've read, it normally takes 20-30 gaming hours to get to the wedding (a pivotal event in the main plot). I played about 80 hours before finally starting the wedding. NPCs continually talk about how the wedding is coming up soon, yet I wandered the map for weeks of in-game time and was never in any danger of "missing" the wedding. Basically, the wedding waits for you. I just checked, and the world-time that has passed since I started the game is 56 days.
3. Inventory space is limited, but does increase as certain stats (like strength) grow, increasing your carrying capacity. However, the amount of items in my inventory clearly couldn't possibly be carried all at once, and viewing Henry from the 3rd person does not show bulging pockets, etc. Also, your horse has inventory, and you can transfer items back and forth at will, even if your horse is miles away. And again, the horse doesn't visually appear to be carrying multiple suits of armor, etc. I know, pretty much all games with an inventory are like this, but it's still funny.
4. If your character is dirty, NPCs can smell you coming. But if you're clean, you can easily sneak by them in their line of sight, if your stealth rating is high enough.
5. You see bandits down the road. They will try to attack you no matter what if you try to pass them. But, if you veer off the path and pass by them in the woods (you can clearly see them, so they should clearly see you), they will leave you alone.
6. Some conversations between two NPCs are on a loop. Most of the time, you don't notice because you're walking by them and just hear snippets of their conversation. But if you stop in front of them and wait, their conversation will eventually conclude, then start over.
7. If you're sneaking up on or past someone and your dog Mutt is following along, the NPC won't take notice of Mutt. It's as if your sneak perk makes Mutt invisible.
8. Mutt often passes through solid objects in his wanderings. Also, if you're walking along a cliff, he might sometimes fall off the cliff, but will then reappear next to you in short order.
9. NPCs on a scripted path will try to walk around obstacles, but if there's no room, they'll just walk through. I've seen this when my horse is at a trough. The horse is in the NPCs way. The NPC bumps into the horse (as if he couldn't see Pebbles until he walked right up on her), tries to veer around, but the horse is too long, so the NPC just ends up walking through it.
10. Arguments and fist fights sometimes happen between NPCs outside of taverns (they're actually quite entertaining to watch!). If there is a guard standing 30 feet away, he acts like nothing is happening. Then when one of the NPCs gets knocked out, he'll suddenly take notice and run up to him saying, "Are you alright? What happened to you?"

Tyranny
I've had this one in my library for some time but never really spent much time with it. It's a party-based isometric RPG with real-time combat, and having now completed a bunch of similar games, I decided to give the game a shot. So far, it's pretty good. The most interesting thing about the game is the setting; basically, the evil empire has conquered the world and you are a high-ranking cog in the machine. Even so, you have a lot of leeway in how you approach each situation, as well as several factions to ally with, so you can roleplay everything from a loyal enforcer to a rebel.

I'm not sure what to think about the combat so far. I'm finding it more difficult than either of the Pillars games, but it might be because there's far less combat than those games, and nearly every battle is basically a boss battle. The game has a really cool spell crafting system that sort of brings Morrowind to mind, and even early on you have a lot of options to create cool spells.

It's very focused on story so far. You quickly pick up your first three party members just by following the story, and they are all definitely pretty unique. My favorite so far is a soldier who's had his suit of armor fused together around him. In some ways, it really feels like a better spiritual successor to Planescape: Torment than the cargo cult mediocrity Torment: Tides of Numenera.

So far, so good! I'll probably be focusing on this one for the time being.

clueless1 wrote on 2025-06-07, 14:09:

I thought I'd post all my criticisms of it for once.

Ha yes no game is perfect that's for sure. Something that bothered me a lot about the first game were the NPC reactions when I wandered into their farms, etc. They never really seemed to see me. They'd be saying "who's there" when I was standing behind them, etc. In other games NPCs would turn to watch you.

newtmonkey wrote on 2025-06-07, 17:58:

Tyranny
My favorite so far is a soldier who's had his suit of armor fused together around him.

Do they address how he goes to the bathroom?

badmojo wrote on 2025-06-07, 21:16:

clueless1 wrote on 2025-06-07, 14:09:

I thought I'd post all my criticisms of it for once.

Ha yes no game is perfect that's for sure. Something that bothered me a lot about the first game were the NPC reactions when I wandered into their farms, etc. They never really seemed to see me. They'd be saying "who's there" when I was standing behind them, etc. In other games NPCs would turn to watch you.

Ha. Yes, that's another one. I usually strafe back and forth while jumping like I'm saying hi to a friend who logged into my UT map.

clueless1 wrote on 2025-06-07, 21:19:

Do they address how he goes to the bathroom?

They actually do, though only briefly and not in any depth (thankfully)!

Finished Lost Odyssey. The gameplay did get slightly better after picking up more party members and learning their abilities, but it never really felt great to me. Just barely adequate. I did find a few of those secret dungeons, which helped a bit with leveling. One of those also had additional backstory elements for the main villain, and some cool info about the world that the immortals originally came from.

Overall, the game was ok, but it didn't really strike me as the masterpiece that everyone online claimed it would be. The story was great, to be sure, and the music was nice too. Other than that, nothing else really stood out to me. But that could just be due to my personal preference. If I were to compare Lost Odyssey to other contemporary JRPGs, I would say that I enjoyed Persona 3 a whole lot more.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2025-06-10, 11:23:

Finished Lost Odyssey. The gameplay did get a bit better after picking up more party members and learning their abilities, but it never really felt great to me. Just barely adequate. I did find a few of those secret dungeons, which helped a bit with leveling. One of those also had additional backstory elements for the main villain, and some cool info about the world that the immortals originally came from.

Overall, the game was ok, but it didn't really strike me as the masterpiece that everyone online claimed it would be. The story was great, to be sure, and the music was nice too. Other than that, nothing else really stood out to me. But that could just be due to my personal preference. If I were to compare Lost Odyssey to other contemporary JRPGs, I would say that I enjoyed Persona 3 a whole lot more.

you got through that pretty quick considering its a massive 4 disc epic, never really appealed to me as its not by square enix 🤣, one xbox360 RPG i'd recommend is Infinite Undiscovery, its a pretty short game by square enix standards at about 35hrs, it has a good story and good balance between gameplay/story/FMV's, imo its one square enix's best, im surprised it hasnt had a pc release.

DudeFace wrote on 2025-06-10, 13:13:

you got through that pretty quick considering its a massive 4 disc epic

My playthrough clocked at 56 hours, per the in-game time tracker.

That said, I likely missed most of the optional content, since I didn't find the gameplay particularly engaging. Meaning, I rarely bothered with exploring non-plot related areas. Also, I started playing Lost Odyssey a few days before first posting about it here, and I had almost completed disc 1 by that time.

DudeFace wrote on 2025-06-10, 13:13:

you got through that pretty quick considering its a massive 4 disc epic, never really appealed to me as its not by square enix 🤣, one xbox360 RPG i'd recommend is Infinite Undiscovery, its a pretty short game by square enix standards at about 35hrs, it has a good story and good balance between gameplay/story/FMV's, imo its one square enix's best, im surprised it hasnt had a pc release.

It pretty much is. It's the pretty much the same team as the old Final Fantasy titles (ie. FF6)

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2025-06-10, 11:23:

Finished Lost Odyssey. The gameplay did get slightly better after picking up more party members and learning their abilities, but it never really felt great to me. Just barely adequate. I did find a few of those secret dungeons, which helped a bit with leveling. One of those also had additional backstory elements for the main villain, and some cool info about the world that the immortals originally came from.

Overall, the game was ok, but it didn't really strike me as the masterpiece that everyone online claimed it would be. The story was great, to be sure, and the music was nice too. Other than that, nothing else really stood out to me. But that could just be due to my personal preference. If I were to compare Lost Odyssey to other contemporary JRPGs, I would say that I enjoyed Persona 3 a whole lot more.

I'm glad that you got through it. 😀

The real ending is this fascinating video about how it came to be:

Lost Odyssey | Review & Retrospective