The Bard

Man I miss being in Walthamstow and getting the two of you too drunk to go to work the next day . Have a particularly fond memory of us drinking a liter of Vodka, a bottle of port and playing Rock Band until 4am. Will have to get you and Anil down to my crib for a hang when I'm back in the country!

I joined back in the Cube-Europe days. I well and truly miss this place, and sometimes, once or twice a year I'll type n-europe.com into my browser and sit there staring at the title page. It's much like going up into the attic of your childhood home and seeing the boxes full of memories, photographs, toys, and trinkets that you never use but you can't ever discard. More than any other thing on the internet, this site feels like a real, living place to me - it's gone through so many coats of paint, add-ons, consolidations and visitors, some transient, some that stayed for a season or two, and I really have it to thank for helping me through my school years. I'm 31 now, and many of the people I really liked from here, I ended up becoming friends with in real life. I doubt there will be a forum culture like it again, honestly. There was something amazing about having a sizeable, but contained group of people that you'd respond to on a daily basis, whose viewpoints you internalised over the course of years, and that you could have meaningful conversation with, rather than what I tend to do these days - mostly doom-scrolling through my Twitter or Facebook feeds. I feel like in the times of the 'rona, a lot of us could use this place as much as we did a decade ago when we were all teenagers or young adults. Anyway, I hope you all are doing well! I'll try to post some more, and hopefully get into fewer arguments than before - can't guarantee it though ;).

I can tell From Software had a lot of fun designing the Guardian Ape boss. I have never felt quite as fucked with in one of their games before. I adore the combat though, it takes a lot of its mentality from fighting games, and I feel like all the bosses and minibosses have such great, fleshed out movesets that they could be their own characters in a FS fighting game. It reminds me of playing fighting games before the internet just gave you all the frame data, where you'd have to figure out what moves are plus on block, correct spacing versus specific characters, and looking for animation tells by eyeballing it and playing the matchup again and again.

So like, where is Persona 5 Arena? P4A is still a game I back to from time to time, and a modern update to that series would be killer.

I watched the whole run of Hi Score Girl in one sitting. I don't know what to do with myself, but this feels bizarre, wrong, but oh so right in every way.

I really wish there was some sort of free roam practice mode where I could learn the map and mess around with the guns free of any hazards. My biggest frustration with Battle Royale style games has always been that there's an artificial steepness to your learning curve at the beginning because you have one life and most of it's spent looting rather than in enemy engagements. It creates a sense of panic when you do encounter enemy players in a way that a traditional FFA multiplayer mode doesn't because you have such a limited timeframe to learn the rules of engagement and put them into play.

I think it's very easily the best battle royale game I've played. Guess that follows from Titanfall 2 being my favourite multiplayer shooter ever made.

No, that debate was to do with Nintendo saying that the console would sell 20 million units in just the financial year between March 2018 and March 2019. So far it's only made about 7 mil of that figure, but who knows, Holiday sales could make up a chunk of the remainder.

Shit, didnae thing of that. Well it works

Spot the odd one out.

Oh I mean the digital copy, I'm not in the country at the moment and physical copies are going to be hard to come by at the moment.

Deciding whether to get it, but is it full price £53 level good? Used to cheap PC prices so unused to that kind of price.

Many things (almost everything) need to be changed from Brawl, but not that. Why can't you just do a series of safe pokes to get the shield radius down and then spike them with a low smash? Also shields aren't immune to grabs. Down throw the dude, and smash attack on bounce. Maybe don't use predictable blockstrings as often? Maybe I'm not understanding correctly, are you saying that if you get someone to the edge of the stage, a blocked attack should cause enough pushback to force someone off the ledge slightly, or do you mean that they should straight up take the full force of the attack as though it wasn't blocked in the first place?

It just needs more combo opportunities. They did improve things after Brawl's clusterfuck by just reducing frame recovery universally on landing, but that also meant that the game very tightly controlled the types of combo runs you were able to execute, and there just wasn't the level of player expression that you see from Melee pros like Hungrybox or Westballz. Some equivalent of cancelling really needs to be brought back. I'm fine with leaving wavedashing out, because while it was fun to do, it wasn't ever as integral to the way Melee played as the shffl.

Ok so I cancelled my preorder. Then I bought it again after playing more of the beta and figuring out there's a universal parry and a pushblock mechanic. That really changed the game because before, the game was just one player or the other sitting there eating blockstrings and waiting for an opening. Now I can punish predictability as well as push frame advantage. I'm not typically into tag fighters, so I can't tell how deep the combo system is, but it still feels a little featherweight compared to GG or even Persona 4 Arena.

Ok I played a few matches and I think I'm going to have to cancel my preorder. This thing is far too simplistic for me to dish out full price for. It's like a fisher price Ark Sys game. I still have Persona 4 Arena and Guilty Gear to play through, maybe I'll pick this up when it drops in price.

Huh. No beta for the PC version. Welp.

This is pretty much everything I've ever wanted. My desert island game so long as I get phone wifi tethering. I'll whup your ass over a one bar connection. This better have GGPO based rollback netcode. It would be criminal if you could get better versions of these games for free on fightcade.

Bruh, I love Soul Calibur a whole lot, especially 2, after which Namco commenced to fuck both the art and the mechanics almost beyond repair, but that whole series is the most wonky, broken ass set of games you can imagine in terms of balance. From messed up shit like lizardman's infinite combos in the first game to the fact that there were a grand total of about 4 tournament viable characters in SC2. Things that could have been fixed with a post launch patch or more through QA such as the fact that Voldo can't actually do any forward facing grab attacks on Nightmare or that Xianghua not only has one of the smallest hurtboxes in the game but also the best range, damage and speed. I love the games because there aren't many others like it, but I seriously hope they do something to make this something you'd watch at the Evo finals rather than something you'd mash buttons on after a few drinks with your pals. Whatever they do though, I can see from the footage they've presented already that it isn't going to be a shitfest on the level of SCV. Meterless guard impacts are back for a start, so I'm there day one. Soul Calibur's always been something I can get people who aren't into fighting games to play, but it's always come at the price of a lowered skill ceiling for the games because most of the game is to do with spamming target combos. I'm really hoping they make this one something special. Edit: Also, best Cameo in a fighting game is Akuma in Tekken though.

Yeah dude, that's more of a comment on your ability to perceive visual differences than on the quality of the port. Maybe go see an optician? There's an absolutely colossal difference.

Well at least we're getting one more Titanfall out of the deal.

My problem with the first game is pretty much my problem with most JRPGs; they're so fucking grind heavy. I got to the final battle with Cassiopeia and couldn't beat it because I was a measly level 59 and would have had to go and grind for days before being able to take her down.

I'm buying this probably the day it comes out, but having to explain to friends who aren't up on what's happening in fighting games that you're super hyped for a goddamn Dragonball game is one of the most awkward experiences you can have as a human being. I kind of wish something like this had come out 12 years ago when I was 16, out of my Dragonball phase but only just, and really getting into my competitive fighting games phase. Wouldn't have been hard at that point to rope friends into playing this with me. As it stands I'm fairly sure the only competition I'm going to get is random online battles.

My dude, if I could install Titanfall 2 before the OS I would do it. It's the GOAT.

Wait, Titanfall 2 is Origin exclusive non? Either way, I'm Audioserf on everything apart from XBL which I only use for Gears 4.