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Jaybird

Jaybird is Birdmojo on Xbox Live and Jaybirdmojo on Playstation's network. He's been playing consoles since the Atari 2600 and it was Zork that taught him how to touch-type. If you've got a song for Wednesday, a commercial for Saturday, a recommendation for Tuesday, an essay for Monday, or, heck, just a handful a questions, fire off an email to AskJaybird-at-gmail.com

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19 Responses

  1. Nevermoor says:

    I finished my vanilla XCom 2 game and immediately started a Long War 2 game. It’s amazing how much more you get (for free!) in LW2.

    I also added a mod called “True Conceal” which makes it so your mission timers don’t tick down until the aliens know you’re there (I.e. You can sneak around in conceal as long as you want). It’s a bit of a cheat, but far more logical, and trades off some of the “sprint across the map” stress for tactical “how can we ambush this whole group” stressReport

    • Fish in reply to Nevermoor says:

      I’m just not good enough at this game to deal with an alien Ruler showing up during a timed mission, so “True Concealment” was a gift from the gods. Then I discovered “Moddable Ruler Turns” and “Rulers Take Normal Turns” and I was able to pretty much nerf the rulers right out of the game without losing the other stuff (mostly cosmetic) that came with Alien Hunters. I’ve been playing with the Long War mods Laser Pack, Perk Pack, and Alien Pack for ages because I want some of the stuff LW2 offers but even on the easiest difficulty LW2 is just too damn hard for me.

      I really love that Firaxis embraced the mod community for XCOM2, which gives us the freedom to pretty much turn the game into whatever we want it to be. And I see that War of the Chosen is now available for preorder on Steam, too!Report

    • Jaybird in reply to Nevermoor says:

      That sounds like a really good mod!Report

      • Nevermoor in reply to Jaybird says:

        Yeah. I’m generally opposed to the “mods that make life easier” category, but there’s a fundamental nonsense to the idea that my squad somehow snuck into an area where the aliens are about to blow up valuable technology even though they don’t know I’m there.

        That, and setting up for the initial salvo is one of my favorite parts of the game, but so few missions are actually untimed.Report

  2. James K says:

    I’m about 30 hours into The Witcher 3 now.Its a good RPG, the combat is a bit fiddly for me, but with the difficulty turned down that’s not a problem.

    I really see what Extra Credits were getting at by describing it as a Hard-Boiled detective story set in a medieval fantasy world. In that regard it has a bit of a Dresden Files / Burn Notice feel to it.Report

    • Nevermoor in reply to James K says:

      I loved the original Witcher, but I didn’t get into W2. My problem is that with kids, it’s hard to guarantee the chunk of time I feel like an RPG generally needs to get rolling.

      My Steam sale purchase came down to XCom 2, one of the Fallouts, or W3. Is it amenable to playing in smallish chunks?Report

      • James K in reply to Nevermoor says:

        @nevermoor

        I couldn’t get into Witcher 2 either, the combat system required better timing than I have, and the first compulsory stealth section was a deal-killer for me.Report

        • Jaybird in reply to James K says:

          Yeah, the first time I played Witcher 2, I did the combat test thing and lost quickly. The game recommended that I play on “easy”. I said “okay, fine!” and did some research and learned the mechanics and this time I lasted several rounds and managed to beat a good, solid number of guys.

          The game recommended that I play on “easy”.

          I thought “You know, I never got around to beating the first one…” and then never got around to playing the 2nd one.

          I approve of the third one but haven’t bought it based on my experience with that.

          If you can get into 3 when you couldn’t get into 2, that’s kind of a good sign for me… that and all of the stories I hear about Gwent just might be enough to push me over the edge the next time the GOTY version gets on sale…Report

  3. Brandon Berg says:

    The sequels that ruin everything. Legend of Zelda 2 is probably the best old-school example of a sequel that said “let’s change everything that everybody loved about the first one!”

    I call revisionism. Zelda II was actually a pretty solid game, and was received extremely well at the time. It wasn’t just the critics; all my friends liked it, too. It even inspired a clone in Battle of Olympus.

    Back in those days, in the Nintendo world, at least, we didn’t really know what to expect from a sequel. Super Mario Bros. 2, which was nothing like the original, had just come out, and Zelda II was released on the same day as Castlevania II, another radical departure from the original. Nowadays, people expect it to be a bridge between the original Zelda and Link to the Past, and dislike it for not being what they expected, but back then it was a cool new thing that in many ways improved on the original, and AFAIK nobody really questioned its legitimacy as a sequel.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to Brandon Berg says:

      Hey, I remember sitting down to play it and thinking “WHAT THE HECK IS THIS” at the time.

      Personally, I think that Super Mario Bros. 2 captured the Marioish je ne sais quois. Zelda II felt like they said “let’s make a Castlevania kinda game”.Report

      • Brandon Berg in reply to Jaybird says:

        Ah, all right. Your opinion is valid, but it wasn’t the consensus at the time. Personally, I think it’s held up better than the original. The “puzzles” in the original were just tedious trial and error, made worse by the fact that bombs were consumable and until 2/3 of the way through the game you could only burn one bush per screen.

        The sequel is still a fairly enjoyable action-adventure game, though.Report

        • Jaybird in reply to Brandon Berg says:

          Zelda felt rich and *HUGE*. Remember the original Might and Magic? It felt somewhere around *THAT* big. Every map felt like an excavation. “How will I ever beat this?”

          (I just googled. They came out the same year.)

          Link felt dinky. It felt like Castlevania.Report

  4. Kimmi says:

    There’s a fourth category of sequels:
    The ones where everyone’s bloody forgotten the first.
    Persona 3
    Star Control 2
    Wing Commander 3.
    School Days.

    The first of a ton of series’ were completely forgettable, in comparison.Report

  5. Nevermoor says:

    I’ve been thinking more about the framework for this post. I wonder where the Civ series goes. Some are definitely #3. I certainly couldn’t–and didn’t want to–go back to Civ once I’d played Civ 2, but I think some are a fourth category: where the previous installment is just a tutorial, but you wish it was a tutorial for a different game. I don’t think you can play Civ 2 after Civ 3, for example, but that didn’t mean it was, necessarily, better.Report