TAFAE

@flstyle: Player power levels are pretty different between Souls games/Bloodborne and character action games. I haven't played the Bayonetta games, but generally you are vastly more powerful than the majority of the enemies that CAGs throw at you, the only real threats to you besides bosses are huge mobs of enemies. I won't say that every enemy in a Souls game is a serious threat, but the games regularly pit you against enemies for which you are an even match, will kill you in ~3 hits, and sometimes even have your same moveset. Then, they start to send more than one of them at you at a time and you have to improve to move past. The bosses (or the good ones, anyway) stack the odds up against you pretty heavily, with monsters that are some combination of much larger than you, faster than you, more damaging than you, or more numerous than you and you're left to figure out how to deal with it.

I liked Ninja Gaiden on the original Xbox a lot because of the fact that most of the enemies you fought were threatening and not just a nuisance on the way to the boss.

On topic - I would stress that upgrading your weapon as much as possible is generally the priority over pumping any stat for damage, you will get a much better return for souls and materials invested.

Did they make it any easier to get Titanite Chunks in SotFS? Having to keep 2 weapons upgraded with the most current materials sounds a little tedious, though I usually use strength weapons (that tend to have higher durability) in these games anyway.

I like Vinny and Alex together, but I wish there was a little more variety to it sometimes; it does feel like all of their Quick Looks follow more or less the same script. I think finding the GBEast newsperson will help shake up some of their videos and keep the Vinny/Alex dynamic fresh. It's like it was around 2.5-3 years ago when like 85% of Quick Looks had Patrick in them and like 40% were Patrick/Brad. It's not that I don't like Patrick or Patrick/Brad, it's just a bummer when that's the only thing on offer at a site that has a bunch of good personalities.

I did exactly this, played about 10 hours on my original, small 3DS and then transferred over to a New 3DS XL. No issues transferring the game data over, but you do have to follow the arcane system transfer process which took me about an hour to do even though I did the fastest method of using a PC to copy data from my regular size SD card to a microSD. Even though I originally just wanted to play on a larger screen, I have to say that the C-stick nub is a revelation. It makes control feel so much smoother and I can have quick access to a few more items on my bottom screen now that the virtual D-pad isn't taking up that space.

I'll just echo what everyone else already said, Magic is probably the best "true" TCG/CCG out there and has a ton of different ways you can play solo or with other people, physical or digital cards. That said, most of those options (basically anything besides DotP, the ~$15 yearly video games) have the potential to cost hundreds of dollars pretty quickly! If you want a duel-style card game that (theoretically) doesn't cost as much, Netrunner is supposed to be really good. You basically have to make sure that there is a local scene or you have a sparring partner to play with though, otherwise you can't get anything out of it.

I wouldn't buy Star Realms, it's a deck builder and not all that great, but you can try the phone app. If you want a deck builder, Dominion is my recommendation.

@tits_matador: I don't know if this is staying true to Ric Flair's backstory since my only wrestling exposure is through this site, but I thought Dan was making him more plausible as a first level character by having Sir Ric be a disgraced champion who is recovering from an injury (which made him take a heel-turn as well). If he's playing it the way I would, his level advancements will be Ric regaining his old strength or discovering new moves he can use without agitating his injury. That sounds like an a-okay way to roleplay that kind of character!

I may be the only one, but I will never stop laughing at Brad forgetting to give the site's email address. Forgetting to copy names less so, but oh well.

You are correct that white bordered missions mean that you haven't done them. When you complete a white bordered mission, you unlock any locked mission adjacent to it. So basically, to progress through a planet, you have to cut a path through the missions until you get to the boss mission. Finishing the boss mission gives you the Nav Segment for the next planet. If you complete all of the missions on a planet you unlock a couple of additional things there (namely Nightmare Mode and the ability to deploy extractors on that planet).

What platform are you playing on? If you're on PS4, I'll be happy to get you through some missions and give you a rundown of the game systems.

What do you think they'll play? The 5E Red Box seems like an obvious choice since most of them probably don't have a lot of D&D experience, but maybe they want to make their own characters. I can only imagine how dumb Dan's creation would be. Pretty cool either way!

Duder, thank you so much for this. I have been trying to make sense of this game for a week and finally made some headway yesterday after straight-up asking a nice, high-mastery-level player about basically everything I didn't understand in the game. Said player was also kind enough to walk me through a bunch of missions, which got me the blueprints for Nyx and Trinity and my Archwing, which I'm making now!

I want to spell this out for the new players like me who were able to do most of Earth and Mercury, but are getting wrecked on Venus and Mars. Here's how you get to a point where you can fight enemies effectively:

Shoot dudes -> Level up gear -> Get more space for mods -> Level up mods for more damage/survivability -> Shoot tougher dudes

The mods are the spot where you actually improve your character, not the gear leveling! If you aren't putting good mods in your gear, you won't able to progress. The most important thing is getting good, leveled up mods, everything else is just helping to get you to that point. To this goal, I've found that the best missions to do are the Defense ones, as you will usually get a mod reward every 5 waves and a ton of gear experience and shots at more mod drops. There are usually people running them all too. Go to 20 waves every time if you can, you get better rewards for reaching wave 15 and even better ones for 20.

You can make this process go faster by getting a reactor/catalyst which will double the mod capacity of a piece of gear, they're each like $0.60-1.00 worth of platinum. You also get more mastery from leveling up your gear, which gates you from getting weapons. Are those weapons better? Sort of? From what I've been reading, it sounds like there is a weapon power curve until about mastery level 6, then most things are sidegrades.

What I think I've learned though, is that since each faction has different damage types they're weak to and since for the most part you only fight one faction on each mission, what you should really do is get a weapon loadout for each of the factions where your weapons deal, for instance, primarily Puncture damage in your Grineer loadout. (You want Slash for Infested and Impact for Corpus.) These weaknesses are based on the types of armor class that enemies fall into so there are exceptions, but as a rule to start, those weakness types will probably (hopefully?) serve new players well. There are also elemental weaknesses, but I don't have as good of a handle on those. I think you want Heat for Infested and Frost/Electricity for Corpus. I may make a list of recommended first weapons to get started with each faction if I have some time later.

Hope this helps someone out!