Keyboard Geniuses Leaderboard! [Link]

You didn't finish Nanako's social link? Truly you are history's greatest monster. D:

There aren't many straight up whiffs in the Final Fantasy canon between numbers 4 and 10, and the series is pretty much unparalleled in terms of reinventing itself from entry to entry. Sure, a lot of names and ideas get repeated, but the settings can change a lot, and they've never met a mechanical system they weren't…

The saving grace of the FF9 backgrounds, I think, is that I haven't been distracted by them during play since my eye is naturally drawn to the movement of the models & dialog. Them being grainy is still not great (especially since the background art is often really interesting) but it definitely works better than…

His name was Benedict VI, and you're literally over a thousand years too late to save the poor bastard. :(

The thing with Thedas is that it's only arguably even grey. It's so desperate to come off as dark & mature that it often becomes almost parodic edgelord fantasy. If you start to feel like you're playing a game set in the Asshole Dimension, your first reaction isn't to get sucked in and relate to the people and places,…

Only caveat to the tough-but-fair refrain I'd offer is that (at least in DS 1) enemy attacks are allowed to clip through walls, whereas yours are not. I imagine that it's to prevent (arguably degenerate?) strategies like kiting enemies back to tight corridors where they're unable to attack, but there are at least a…

Kotaku ran a piece on this a couple days ago, and in there they mentioned that the cue's actually been listed on GameFAQs guides for years. This is just the first time it's gotten a lot of exposure.

Serious Sam! I need to know the true experience of a headless guy with bombs for hands sprinting at me.

Guardian Forces help us! Sure one of our Keyboard Geniuses has an appropriate background in Keyboard Anti-Trust Law!

Final Fantasy is decisively more popular than cats, so welcome to an all-high school themed week of the Keyboard Valedictorian Leaderboard! [Link]

Totally agree with the Call of Juarez enemies being tough to see sometimes, especially in the forest levels where the colors mush together and silhouettes are harder to make out. And both of those are plausible (ideal, even) in reality but sit uncomfortably next to the lighthearted arcade-iness of the game.

If it's any consolation, the first Mega Man game is kinda terrible. They even left a notable NES glitch in the collection in part because the Yellow Demon boss fight is close to unwinnable without it. You would not be remiss to skip straight to MM2, which is one of the highlights of the entire series.

More Dishonored DLC for me this weekend. I'm just about done with the Dunwall City Trials, which has been… fine. The biggest hiccup has been that it was crazy dumb of me to pick up a game for the first time in a year and dive straight into a challenge mode. And on the one hand, the variety of challenge modes is a cool…

Controller design is a finicky, finicky thing, and that's a great illustration of why. My go-to has always been the PS & PS2 design, which works just fine unless a game requires simultaneous use of both L1/L2 or R1/R2. It seems like a small thing, but needing both your index AND middle fingers on the shoulder buttons…

The summons are made even more obnoxious by the Boost ability, which lets you increase their power by mashing buttons during the animation. That makes their interminable length a benefit in a twisted way, and it also means that you spend the entire time wearing out your arm.

The moon being covered in monsters is just regular crazy. FF4 had that. The moon being covered in monsters who plummet to earth in the form of giant tears? That's wonderfully crazy.

Then I accept the deal and pray they don't alter it any further.

No Maester, no deal.

My life is a lieeeeee