@gerrid: Counter seems really good at first, and does work well for big groups of small mobs, but I think every time it procs it resets your attack timer so attack speed probably is a bad pairing unless you can more than double the enemy speed.
It seems like the percentage bonuses scale worse as the loops increase. Counter struggles a lot without high defence and/or vampirism as it only triggers when you're already taking damage.
I did have a very good evasion build though, with a perk that gave me additional chance to counter on evade and that was super fun.
@humanity: I know it's been said a million times, but I don't think "It's a kids game" is a good excuse for something like Balan, if they were charging $10 as a babysitting timesink then maybe that'd be passable, but it sounds like the whole thing is gonna be $60. It looks pretty clear to me that the game was built with phones in mind. The one button control scheme and huge UI is a giveaway, but I reckon that the world curvature is a draw distance thing primarily.
Even young kids are pretty smart. If they're old enough to understand switching characters, then they're probably old enough to understand having different buttons to different things.
@fisk0: For me, the "Spirit of Roguelike" is the deeply ingrained meta-game aspect, specifically the way that improvement comes largely from thinking about the game systems and the ways they interact with each other to be exploited, rather than just improving in technical or tactical skill.
Permadeath and run-based are important qualities too I guess, but I don't think they're as fundamental as the systematic meta-game. Being grid or turn-based don't feel important to me at all, but maybe that's because Spelunky was my introduction to the genre.
Chiming in to say, I'm surprised, but I actually agree that Demon's Souls looks kind of "ehhh". It's very technically pretty, but it has a strange doughyness to all the character designs. It feels a little bit like it's missing some of the weird grimy aesthetic that was so appealing about the original.
@ssully: I watched the whole video before I posted that comment. Not saying it's not fast, but just that 2 second fade to black is the same kind of thing you've seen in well optimised PC games for years. Nice tech, but "no loading screens" is marketing hype.
Also FWIW it looks like most of those fast travel points are behind the "fog gate" tunnel loading zones I was talking about. I'm curious to see what devs can do with the guaranteed speed when it comes to bigger open world games though.
It feels really weird to keep hearing "no load times" when this game has very clear slow-walk segments between levels. It's smart use of progressive loading using a fast disk, but having multiple "fog gates" and tubes really highlights how it really is just marketing and it'll be up to devs to make use of the SSD.
It would be cool if video sites could recognize the device and act accordingly. Like with this, it would be a full screen portrait video. Similar to, say like Instagram. I wonder how hard that is to do. Probably harder than I imagine. Kind of interesting to think about though.
IIRC, Youtube does actually support arbitrary aspect ratios and will display vertical videos correctly on phones. With modern web tech it's not that hard to display whatever. Unfortunately this video was rendered in landscape 16:9, so the black bars on the sides of the screen are actually encoded into the video itself. Which I assume is a side effect of the way GB's video rendering pipeline/tricaster scene composition stuff is set up.
I love the idea of this game, and I've been waiting for it since it was announced, but man...
I dunno, it's cute at first, but most of the tasks are incredibly uninspired, and much of the game boils down to stacking a list of objects in one place while people try to grab them back.
@y2ken: @totalhenshin:FWIW: When I went to high school here in Australia I only ever knew BIMDAS, and we generally called everything round, square or curly brackets, but we still pretty much exclusively used parenthesis for order of operations.
I didn't do a dedicated maths degree, but I did quite a few maths units from a few different perspectives; physics, engineering and computer science, and we continued to use just parenthesis for order of operations. Square brackets were generally reserved for matrices, but also arrays in computer science. Curly braces in my experience were exclusively used to define sets, and it drives me kind of crazy that someone would think to use them for order of operations.
For whatever reason in my physics study we would *very* occasionally use large square brackets for order of operations when working with large equations, but the non-relativistic Schrodinger equation is the only one that comes to mind.
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