Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.


Messages - broodwars

Pages: 1 ... 3 4 [5] 6 7 ... 456
101
Even though I feel bad for Taylor, I do have to wonder why she hasn't done any voice work in 8 years.  It's kind of like how some times there's actors that were all over TV and movies for a few years and then just disappeared.  Then you read years later this person was so difficult to work with eventually all the studio's had enough.

According to her website, Hellena Taylor previously lived in Los Angeles but moved to London. If you want English voice work, you live in Los Angeles; New York; or Austin/Houston Texas. You don't live in the United Kingdom. I suspect her unwillingness to live near production studios has a lot to do with how little work she's done. Some productions will go the extra mile to get a voice actor they really like to do remote work (such as the case with her 1 episode role of Hellsing Ultimate, a dub that had several UK actors), as a lot of high-profile voice actors have their own personal recording studio, but most of the time you have to live where the work is.

https://hellenataylor.co.uk/bio/

102
A woman claims bad faith negotiations, and you're demanding proof? Do I really have to explain how problematic that is?

Taylor could release the email from Kamiya. We really should be past this though. She has nothing to gain from this besides shedding light on a decades old problem.

I don't see the "bad faith negotiation" here. In Taylor's scenario and using your math, Platinum wanted to hire her, so they made an offer that complied with Union standards. She tried to negotiate a higher salary, so Platinum made a 2nd, higher, offer that she declined so they decided to go with a different actress. There's nothing "bad faith" about that. You can argue that gamers and game developers should value the contributions of voice actors more than they do (and I would agree with you), but she just flat out lost the negotiation. Taylor makes no claim that Platinum deliberately low-balled her in an effort to get someone else to play the part, just that the pay they offered was not to her liking.

Yes, I am asking for proof of her allegations, something I would also ask for if someone like Troy Baker had made a similar claim. This is a business negotiation, not a sexual assault claim. She could provide a copy of the offer contract likely in her possession. She's already breaking NDA and possibly committing defamation by airing all this in public, so the damage to her career has already been done.

This matter is something that Taylor should have kept behind closed doors. She has a union and probably an agent that handles situations like this on her behalf. Development costs are rising across the board, and everyone has less money than ever thanks to sky-rocketing inflation. She didn't help her career and she certainly didn't help her fellow voice actors by putting all this into the public eye in such an unprofessional and, frankly, petulant manner.

Incidentally, I noticed you side-stepped her comments on Jennifer Hale, which also wouldn't win her any favors with her colleagues and prospective employers.

103
I have some fundamental problems with Taylor's video, as someone who does NOT have any emotional attachment to the character or her performance as said character.

To be frank, her response comes off as incredibly unprofessional, and the more I hear of her the more I understand why Platinum recast the role. Setting aside her coming out of her own accord to likely shred an NDA she certainly signed, she provides no proof of her claims as she defames her former employer. I have no doubt that Platinum cuts corners wherever they can, but without proof I'm inclined to believe Kamiya on this one.

On top of that, she goes out of her way to attack Jennifer Hale, who did absolutely nothing wrong. She auditioned for a role, and she got the part. Yes, Taylor, you originated the role. You do not own it, any more than any actor in the history of human performance art has ever owned a role. Actors get re-cast all the time, so to come out and essentially say "Jennifer Hale doesn't have the RIGHT to say she's the voice of Bayonetta. I'm the ONLY voice of that character" is, once again, incredibly unprofessional. You do not attack a colleague, especially unprovoked.

I also have severe doubts that Jennifer Hale, one of the best-known and most prolific voice actors in the last 30 years and apparently a champion of higher VA pay, was cheaper than re-hiring Taylor.

This video comes off as a rant from an entitled actor who's pissed that she didn't get a part, something you would think someone her age would be beyond at this point.

104
General Gaming / Re: Shocktober III: Season of the Witch
« on: October 04, 2022, 01:12:49 PM »
Didn't pick it up with this in mind, but I've been making my way through Infernax the past few days. It's an exceptionally gory 2D sidescrolling horror action gane in the model of Castlevania 2: Simon's Quest. So far, I'm quite enjoying it, though I wish that dungeons had checkpoints so you didn't have to claw your way back out to save every time you made significant progress and needed to restock on healing items and lives. The music is...well...it doesn't exactly live up to its inspiration. The pixel art is fantastic, though.

Made it through 3 of the 1st 5 castles as a "Good" character. You can enable essentially god mode at any time, and perhaps I'll do that if I do a replay as an Evil character. Grinding XP and gold via quests and drops to level your character up is fun once, but I'd rather skip that on replays.

105
The Jazz have traded Bogey to Detroit in exchange for trash, inexplicably. Sounds like a salary dump.

https://www.slcdunk.com/2022/9/22/23367270/utah-jazz-trade-bojan-bogdanovic-to-the-pistons-for-kelly-olynyk-and-saben-lee

106
Me rooting for Pat Bev:


Saw a rumor that the Suns are trying to trade Jae Crowder for Bojan Bogdanović. Resident Jazz fan, thoughts?

That's an upgrade for the Suns, though not a huge one. You're trading a guy who will fight in the paint for rebounds and can shoot a 3 for a guy who can drive to the basket and hit a 3 better but has way less energy. Crowder's a guy I wished we could have kept around the last few years since we really needed a high energy guy who will fight in the paint (a "junkyard dog", if you will). I'm not sure you want to give that energy up just for a guy who has better stats. Still, Bogey would probably get the ball more as a Sun than he ever got as a Jazzman.

107
Curtain Call probably got more hours out of me than any 3DS game.  I've debated getting the Kingdom Hearts rhythm game to try to fill that void but I don't know the series or its music so I haven't bit on it.  And I'm glad I didn't because now I can get this instead!  My backlog has now become hopeless because I will spend 90% of gaming time on this.

I actually recently completed Melody of Memory and quite enjoyed it. That said, if you have no familiarity with Kingdom Hearts and its music, I can't say you'll get anything out if it.

While it's nice to see Theatrhythm again, I find its lack of presentation underwhelming after having played Melody of Memory. It's just the 3DS gane again, but you can buy more songs separately now. Yay.

108
Can't say I'm familiar with TrueTrophies. I generally use sites like PlayStationTrophies or PSNProfiles, which will list completion time if someone creates a guide for it but otherwise don't. And I'm finding less guides these days than there used to be, in which case Google is your friend. I do appreciate that PSNProfiles will tag certain trophies explicitly for being "grindy."

109
Well, there it is. We traded Mitchell for garbage, Collin Sexton, and picks Danny Ainge seems to have no intention of using. Let the tank begin.

https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/34502825/sources-cleveland-cavaliers-trade-3-first-round-picks-two-swaps-utah-jazz-star-donovan-mitchell

110
I tried to get into Hades last year, and it just didn't click with me. I'm sure with enough time I could eventually acquire enough upgrades to beat the game, but I just don't have that kind of time or interest. I've made it to Hades himself exactly once on what was an usually good run, and he stomped me in seconds. I kinda lost all interest in the game after that, especially since I know you have to beat the game many times to get what passes for an ending.

Me and Roguelikes just don't click. The only one in recent memory I liked was Returnal.

111
I played through the 1st NES Turtles game last night, as I'd never gotten past level 3 on the NES.

My god, that game is bullshit. Ambitious, certainly, but bullshit. Healing items are rarely available, and while they are farmable they're tucked away behind waves of enemies who sap your health away with cheap hits on the way in AND the way out that I don't think it's viable. You don't get health back after stages, so when you end a stage with nearly your entire party dead your only option is to suicide to get a free continue heal. But you lose all your subweapons, all stage progress, AND you only have up to 4 continues with a code. It doesn't help that movement is so stiff and unreliable that NES Simon Belmont looks like DMC Dante by comparison.

The sheer amount of enemy spam in that final hallway before Shredder is insane. This game reminds me a lot of Battletoads, in that everyone bitches about the Turbo Tunnel/Dam levels, but the games have SO much more egregious sights to show you beyond them. I think it's an achievement clearing this game even WITH rewind and save states. Glad to finally have it out of the way.

Really wasn't prepared for how stiff the movement is on the NES games, and those are some wonky hit boxes in TMNT 2: The Arcade Game. At least you can tweak the dive kicks so their timing better reflects Turtles in Time.

112
Perhaps this is a stupid question, but I gotta ask, if doing things like this is such a terrible experience and you hate a game, then why do it?

I'll tell you why I've done it before as I've wondered that myself. Part of it is stubbornness. I don't want the game to beat me as it were by the challenge. Then there's the time factor. I feel that if I walk away from it then my current skills at the game may be rusty so if I'm ever going to do it then now is probably the best time while my mind is still well in sync with the game and what its systems and controls are like. There's a little bit of a personal pride or "bragging rights" mixed in with knowing that most players probably won't have finished this challenge but you conquered that mountain. And there's still a sense of some satisfaction that you can mark off and consider the game fully beat and complete. When you look at the game or see its title, you don't think about how you never finished this or that. There's no niggling feeling in your brain about it. That itch has been scratched.

Just to add on to this since Khush touched on some of it, I've always been a completionist with my games, long before there were achievement systems. Just as an example, I have a Wind Waker save file on my GameCube memory card with all the statues unlocked, and you get absolutely nothing for doing that. It probably stems from my family being extremely poor for most of my childhood, so when you got a game you played the **** out of it. You squeezed every last drop of enjoyment and intrigue out of every game you played, because outside of rentals you wouldn't be seeing anything new for a while.

I find that you don't really know what a game has to offer until you've explored all its systems. Sometimes that's for good, like when I beat the original Bioshock on its hardest difficulty with the Vita-Chambers turned off (something that was a lot harder in the PS3 version than it is now in the remasters). That really caused me to experience a game I loved in a whole new way, where I had to really learn the environments and how to manipulate it and the enemies to my advantage.

Sometimes that's for bad, like when a charming little turn-based RPG like Ni No Kuni was absolutely ruined by trying to get all the familiars and their variants. But you don't KNOW going in how these things are going to shake out. You don't KNOW going in that NNK's method of managing familiars is utterly tedious and that some familiars have absolutely ridiculous spawn rates. You don't KNOW going into easy-going World of Final Fantasy how utterly grindy it is to clear all the monster ability boards, or how bullshit the post-game dungeons are.

Going back to Kingdom Hearts, you don't know what an utter clown show Dream Drop Distance's design is until you veer off the critical path. You don't know how the portals are tied into the drop system, because the game NEVER explains how the Forecast system works or how portals rotate between drops so you have to keep swapping characters. I played the entirety of the main campaign preventing the game from swapping characters until I cleared each world with one character. The game ENCOURAGES you to do that, so you don't realize you're actually punishing yourself by skipping content. You also don't realize till late in the game how poorly the Dream Eater system is designed, as the their mechanics are only very loosely tied to the main combat and exploration mechanics.

And you know what? Sometimes grind isn't a bad thing. Melody of Memory was an utter grind killing 100,000 enemies across all the songs, as well as beating all 150 songs on every difficulty and Full-chaining at least 50 of them on every difficulty. Despite that, I found the grind relaxing, because you're really just doing what you do in music games: replaying songs to improve your skills and shoot for higher scores. I found grinding for levels in Yakuza quite relaxing. Just throw on a podcast or movie and run around killing high-value targets, same as players have been doing in games for decades. Just don't actively annoy me while I'm doing it.

One final thing worth noting is that with the way modern games have been designed to appeal to anyone and everyone, there just isn't as much joy in merely rolling credits on a game as there used to be. Modern games roll over. They WANT everyone to complete them. I find achievement systems allow developers to still give their game a bit of teeth for those that want just a little more out of their gaming experience. They push me to explore outside my comfort zone a bit. Within reason, of course.

113
Things are looking grim. Backlaugust is winding up with the traditional day long meeting I'm obligated to attend. Metroid Dread is very close to completion but I might not be good enough at games to finish it! I don't know.
Consider Overland, Ori and 100 Days abandoned at this point.

Gotta respect Broodwars for aiming for 100% trophy collection. God I'm just credits and done. Imagine 100%ing Pokémon Black 2. Crazy talk.

Well, I certainly don't try it with everything, but I do try to do it with games I'm already devoting huge time commitments to. Funnily enough, though, I have Platinumed several Pokemon clones: Ni No Kuni 1 and just this year World of Final Fantasy. And yes, they were both wretched experiences to 100%.

114
It's been a long...long road, but I finally did it. After 110 hours of play, I finally Platinumed Yakuza: Like a Dragon.



It's an exceptional RPG, but man that game is a huge time commitment. I can finally delete that game from my PS5's HDD.

And yeah, My hands were shaking so hard by the time I beat the last rival in Dragon Kart.

115
Figured with a week left until Soul Hackers 2 came out, I would throw a little bonus round in and try to finally finish my Platinum run of Yakuza: Like a Dragon, a playthrough I started last year but put down upon running into 2 post-game roadblocks: Dragon Kart and the True Final Millennium Tower, a completely bullshit ultra hard dungeon that was originally DLC in the Japanese version of the game. It's a dungeon designed to test players who not only have hit Level 99 with all characters, but also maxed out at least one if not multiple Jobs.

I spent all weekend level-grinding up 2-3 more jobs with each character, and tonight I took on the dungeon. How'd it go? Well...



Mostly smoothly, actually. Most of the enemies went down fairly easily to repeated lighting attacks. I only had a few fatalities on my way up the tower. Joon-gi Han was by far the MVP, his Agility stat being so high that he pretty much had 2 attacks per turn the entire tower. So he was just nuking enemies to death with wanton abandon.

I did have two incredibly scary moments, though, and they were both in the final boss fight: Amon pulling out his Orbital Space Cannon, which I was prepared for with the Masochist Poundmate. However, even WITH the half damage reduction, he still nuked both my mages and nearly killed Joon and Ichiban. It took me quite a while to recover from that attack, but I killed Amon before he got to do it again. Then I whittled away his minions until Kiriyu was the only one standing. He then pulled out HIS ultimate Poundmates move and almost party wiped me. He died the next turn.

That was a victory long in the planning and preparation. Now that just leaves one...insurmountable thing: the Dragon Cup in Dragon Kart. Ordinarily, that would sound like fun, but the Go Kart Minigame in Yakuza: Like a Dragon is complete ****. The Karts control terribly, the track layouts are ridiculous, and the AI rubber-bands worse than Mario Kart 64 (despite having no Blue Shell equivalent). It's just an absolutely wretched side mode, and the Dragon Cup starts with a track based on hairpin turns. -_-

116
I have accomplished my goal. Kingdom Hearts: Dream Drop Distance HD is now fully complete as well, with my 3rd KH Platinum (KH3, Melody of Memories, & now 3D).



When I first beat this game, I found it to be incredibly frustrating, but with redeeming value. Now that I've seen the godawful, tedious-as-hell side content, I hate this game. Seriously, it's sheer, unadulterated grind getting the Dream Eaters leveled-up via dozens upon dozens of play of the same Water Barrel & Balloon mini-games. I don't understand why they have the battle portals randomly generated on a once-per-drop rotation per world per character. Seriously, what is even the POINT of that?

And don't get me started on the monotonous trudge that is Flick Rush, which apparently constitutes 50% of the in-game journal.

At least the game's secret boss is cool (it's Julius from Mickey's Runaway Brain, a 90s Mickey Mouse short Disney refuses to admit exists nowadays for some bizarre reason), even if he is ridiculously cheap (to the point that the only real way to beat him is to be equally cheap and spam the balloon spell continuously to infinitely stunlock him.

I think I'll take it nice and easy now until Soul Hackers 2 comes out on Friday. I've more than accomplished my mission this month.

117
Finished off the Platinum in Melody of Memories, so that game is well and truly out of my backlog now.



It's funny...now that I no longer needed the Proud Mode Full Chains, I just started pulling off a bunch of them today while grinding away the 100,000 enemy note kills.

I'm quite happy with the game overall, though I wish it had more tracks and whoever picked the concert piano tracks has absolutely no musical taste. Those "songs" not only sound abysmal on their own, but the pianist makes absolutely no attempt to follow the beat. So you end up with notes in the game that have only the vaguest relation to the song as heard, played by someone with only the vaguest sense of what the actual song sounds like

118
Closing in on the Melody of Memory Platinum. My last big challenge after clearing Vs. mode was to full-combo (aka "clear a song without any misses") 50 different songs on the hardest difficulty level (Proud). After much practice and even more swearing, I finally managed that tonight. At this point, I just need to complete the probably 30-ish  remaining songs I haven't beaten already on Proud difficulty, and that's it for the completion trophies.

Then there's the final grind for the final trophy: "killing 100,000 enemies across all songs". I've nearly beaten every song in the game on every difficulty, and my current count is...just shy of 60,000.

Yeah, that's going to take some time and a lot of repeated songs to clear out. Man, though, games like this are really starting to make me feel my age. I don't know how many more insane tests of reflexes like this I have in me, hence why I'm trying to get stuff like this out of my backlog now.

After that, I'll double-back to Dream Drop Distance to finish all the side stuff off there. That should fill out the rest of my schedule until Soul Hackers 2 releases on 8/26.

119
Mario + Rabbids is a weird one for me. I quite liked the game, but my completionist nature meant I was dedicated to clearing every block of stages with the bonus objectives in play (i.e. clearing with X number of turns with no one dying). Because the Bonus XP meant more leveling opportunities. About halfway through the 2nd world IIRC, I hit a solid wall on that and lost all interest in the game.

I then played the DLC and hit the same issue about halfway through.

120
Last night, I rolled credits on Kingdom Hearts: Dream Drop Distance HD and today I rolled credits on Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory, meaning I've now completed all the Kingdom Hearts games you can play on the HD consoles. I'm finally caught up with this damn series, though I still have replays to do of several games before I've played all the HD remasters.

Dream Drop Distance is an incredibly frustrating game. It plays extremely similarly to Birth By Sleep, one of my favorite KH games, and yet it changes just enough to be incredibly annoying. Instead of the rapid-fire character progression of Birth By Sleep via Command Melding, you have to level-up and maintain dozens of knock-off Pokemon. And the fastest way to level them up? Playing incredibly annoying and repetitive mini-games. And only certain abilities are permanent character unlocks, the rest going away when the Dream Eaters are no longer in your party. I had MAYBE half the permanent character unlocks by the end of the game, and I was constantly maxing-out Dream Eaters and swapping in new ones.

Combat is especially tedious this time because they've designed all the enemies in this game to sleep; stun; and juggle you at any moment, often from off-screen. I've never seen a Kingdom Hearts game so eager to stunlock the player, especially the final series of bosses. I eventually had to give in and rebuild my deck around Balloon and Curaga spam just to get through the final few stunlocking bosses. I especially love how every time you die and restart a fight, your Command Deck has to slowly reload. This means the boss that just stunlocked you to death now gets to start the fight with one of their 50-hit stunlocking combos, and there isn't a fucking thing you can do about it.

Oh, "just guard", you say? Great idea. The problem is that because KH maps so many commands to a few buttons, the Guard button's doing triple-duty as the dodge and slide attack buttons. So you go to spam the Guard button while waiting for your command deck to load, and the game will just arbitrarily decide you're moving and put you into a roll you CAN get hit in. In comes the stunlock! And it's not like this is the fault of the combat system. It's the same combat system as Birth By Sleep, and I beat that on Critical without too much trouble.

Dream Drop Distance is not a good game, mechanically. From a story perspective, it's the game that definitively established that death doesn't matter in this series, and time travel is now in play. It's one of the worst-written games in the series, if not THE worst. That said, I did have a decent time with it when it wasn't being one of the cheapest games I've ever played.

As for Melody of Memory, it's quite an enjoyable little rhythm game that's refreshingly lenient on things like button presses so long as you're pressing SOMETHING to the beat. I look forward to spending some more time with it clearing out the remaining songs on the higher difficulties. I do wish there were more songs, since quite a few notable songs didn't make the cut (particularly licensed songs). The story is essentially a teaser for KH4, and literally doesn't show up until the final song of the final world.

Now for the Platinum clean-up, which is rather substantial for both games.

121
Nintendo Gaming / Re: Happy 20th Birthday Eternal Darkness
« on: August 05, 2022, 10:26:39 AM »
On a side note, I was hesitant to mention this game in this context since it's more of a Silent Hill successor, but if you like Survival Horror games, I highly recommend Tormented Souls. It looks fantastic, it has the same dynamic camera system Eternal Darkness has, and its puzzles are outstanding.

Plus, I haven't played that version, but it is on Switch if you are so inclined and it's usually pretty cheap digitally.

122
My goal this month is a simple one: to at least finish, if not Platinum, another Kingdom Hearts game, and there have been a lot of them in my replay backlog over the years because I barely touched the HD Collections outside of Birth By Sleep. Been in a Kingdom Hearts mood ever since I pushed myself to finally finish KH3 a week or so ago after having it on hiatus for 3 years.

For the better part of the last week, I've been working my way through Melody of Memories, and I'm pretty far along in that one but it's the kind of game where it's best played in shorter sessions w/ other games buffering it. Right now, I'm looking at possibly finally finishing Dream Drop Distance HD (I stopped playing at Prankster's Paradise all those years ago); finally finishing my Platinum cleanup on Birth By Sleep HD; or finally doing my "real" replay of KH1 HD on Proud mode (I'd previously gotten burnt out doing a "Starting Equipment + No Death + 15 hour speedrun" run).

Been feeling pretty good about my backlog clearing this year, so I'd like to knock at least one of these out before Soul Hackers 2 and the Cowabunga Collection releases later this month.

123
Nintendo Gaming / Re: Happy 20th Birthday Eternal Darkness
« on: July 27, 2022, 06:36:47 PM »
For you Eternal Darkness fans - are there any spiritual successors that come to mind? 

Well it's already been 10 years, but I really wish Shadows of the Eternals had got funded.

I'm pretty sure if it had been funded, it would have been one of those projects that died anyway...or turned out like Mighty No. 9. Dyack's inability to put a team together and keep them there since Silicon Knights is pretty well-documented at this point. Considering all the projects that came after Eternal Darkness, Dyack doesn't seem to be an altogether competent game designer and project lead.

As for Eternal Darkness successors, there aren't really any other combat-focused cosmic horror games that aren't really about combat (aka "Not Bloodborne"). Probably the closest I can think of in tone is a PS4 & PC game I recently played called Song of Horror, which is a puzzle-centric horror game with an unkillable dark presence that randomly comes after you as you try and break a curse. The game is genuinely unnerving you explore, solve puzzles, and deal with the Presence as it stalks you. I should get back to that game at some point.

124
After multiple attempts to get through Xenoblade 2 to no avail, I finally broke down and forced myself to get through its Torna DLC expansion.





I maxed out all my Blades & gathered all the Community members except the final one, who requires that you kill 4 superbosses. There's no way in hell I'm ever grinding my characters up to Level 100 to take on a superboss who will probably pull some party-wiping bullshit out of his ass halfway through his healthbar (like seemingly most of the Unique Monsters do in this game), so that'll have to do.

Overall, as the Nopons would say, "meh". Combat and character progression is considerably more enjoyable than what I've played of the main game (which I've put a similar amount of time into) just by virtue of ditching the Waifu Lottery and implementing the Vanguard system. I don't have to constantly roll the dice and restart the grind every time I run into a field effect I want to use, which does so much in terms of making Torna so much less tedious than the main game.

However, inventory management is still a total clusterfuck of managing a constant stream of vendor trash with stat effects so inconsequential that I just gave up on even bothering with it until the end of the game. The game features 2 Titan landmasses, and one of them is just recycled from the main game so exploration got old fast. Side quests are particularly generic and uninteresting, which is particularly unfortunate since this game is nearly entirely based on them.

As for the story, it's...well...mostly inconsequential and not altogether compelling until literally the last 5 minutes. It seems largely concerned with setting pieces up for use in the main game without actually establishing them in Torna itself, leading to an odd scenario where the Setup isn't itself actually setup. It's just assumed that you know who these characters are, presumably from the main game. Malos in particular feels undercooked and shoehorned in just to give you something to fight at the end. Gotta say, he is the master of attacking you with single digit framerates in that final battle.

Overall, I enjoyed exploring the one new Titan and seeing how Xenoblade 2 might have played if it didn't rely on mobile game gacha mechanics to pad out its run time. Torna is better then the main game in some ways, though that's really not saying much considering how tedious the main game is.

125
General Gaming / Re: Final Fantasy VII Remake or Final Fantasy XV
« on: July 19, 2022, 02:18:14 PM »
FF7 Remake, if only because FF 15 is such an utter mess of half-completed storylines and barely thought-out features Square Enix tried to bandaid together for years before finally giving up.

I'm not the biggest fan of FF7, but at least this remake series seems to have some idea where it's going.

Pages: 1 ... 3 4 [5] 6 7 ... 456