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Ross's Game Dungeon (from Freeman's Mind guy)

Morpheus Kitami

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While it's very probable that this game is still bad, Ross is definitely getting worse at the games he covers. When he complained about the kick's effect worsening, he's visibly kicking the monster into a wall. Seriously? It never occurred to him that might be the reason why the kick isn't sending them as far? At least with that Diablo-clone/adventure game you could get the stun animation confused with any random pain animation if you weren't paying attention. (which he should have) This is just not caring. (not that I should expect much on survival horror from Mr. It's Supposed to Suck)
 

deama

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Admittedly this episode was more on the iffy side for me, not exactly sure why but the game was kinda meh. It was a similar problem I had with "the chosen well of souls".
I think Ross should start going into more interesting genres and games instead of trying to find some 90s or 2000s old game that may or may not be good and resembles something he's kinda already done.

E.g. I'd really like it if he covered some sort of interesting JRPG, he never done those, what's his opinion on those? Would the combat still suck for him if it was more like the newer FFs with more actiony? E.g. xenogears?

What about devil may cry type games? What's his opinion on those? In Kubus episode he actually mentioned he never played DMC before! That's a good excuse.

What about Civ games? City builders? What about some more strategy games? Or weird hybrids like sacrifice? Or giants citizen kabuto?

I just don't wanna see him waste time reviewing some resident evil knockoff with not much going for it even though you have some real interesting games that actually tried something different and ended up working out decently (I thought at least).
 
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Zariusz

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I dont think there is a high chance for him to cover some JRPG, quite often you can hear from him that he just doesnt like TB combat system.
 

deama

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I dont think there is a high chance for him to cover some JRPG, quite often you can hear from him that he just doesnt like TB combat system.
Yes but there's JRPGs without TB combat.
 

NwNgger

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While it's very probable that this game is still bad, Ross is definitely getting worse at the games he covers. When he complained about the kick's effect worsening, he's visibly kicking the monster into a wall. Seriously? It never occurred to him that might be the reason why the kick isn't sending them as far? At least with that Diablo-clone/adventure game you could get the stun animation confused with any random pain animation if you weren't paying attention. (which he should have) This is just not caring. (not that I should expect much on survival horror from Mr. It's Supposed to Suck)
I lost a lot of faith in Ross's ability to play games when he did his Secret World review. And said the enemies were spongey when he was blatantly undergeared and had XP to spend which the game warned him about with great big flashing icons several times. (To be honest he wasn't alone in that. A lot of Games Journalists seemed to ignore the big flashing warnings saying they were undergeared and hadn't spent their XP.) Then there was his Dungeon Siege review where he just refused to engage with the magic system to the point of giving the magic characters melee weapons when they're absolutely shit at melee.

Sometimes his opinions are insightful but he's gotten into this bad habit of refusing to engage with a game's mechanics properly. In fact this is becoming a depressingly common trend with content creators in general.
 

Axel_am

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I think Ross should start going into more interesting genres and games instead of trying to find some 90s or 2000s old game that may or may not be good and resembles something he's kinda already done.
I don't think he's that good of a gamer to comfortably branch out to different genres like that. I've watched his stream and he seems to be very laid back when playing. He also comments that there is no shame in finishing the game on the easiest difficulty as well. Very casual approach. He also chooses games that people don't talk about so having a Game Dungeon on something like DMC is very unlikely.
Sometimes his opinions are insightful but he's gotten into this bad habit of refusing to engage with a game's mechanics properly.
This is what inspired me to play and finish Fallout 4. I just ignored every system they had, stacked most of my points into luck and off I went into the world making baddies explode into coins. Pretty fun.

The thing is that Ross loves adventure games and they seem to be his forte. Some of his most interesting Game Dungeons have been about adventure games. And guess what. They don't have any mechanics in them at all. And neither do his beloved car/racing games.

I watch him for the atmosphere he is able to create with GD and not for the games he plays on it, for the most part. I'm not sure when but at some point his videos became a retelling of what he was doing in the game and that's it. He used to branch out more often in the past. Talking about people he knew, conspiracy theories or just interesting trivial stuff.

Videos like the ones for Kabus, Sin or Echo don't really cut it for me. But at the same time he can't make a channel solely about adventure games as there are hundreds of them.
 

deama

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I don't think he's that good of a gamer to comfortably branch out to different genres like that. I've watched his stream and he seems to be very laid back when playing. He also comments that there is no shame in finishing the game on the easiest difficulty as well. Very casual approach. He also chooses games that people don't talk about so having a Game Dungeon on something like DMC is very unlikely.
It may not be fun to watch him play it, but he could do a quick video about it, not an hour long one, or even half an hour, maybe just a 20 minute of what he thinks? Even if he plays casually, his opinion still matters, and there are other people like him who play things more casually (I know a guy who plays everything on easy difficulty).
 

Axel_am

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I get that. But I think Ross values the time and energy he puts into his videos on a different level. If there isn't anything new he can say about the game he probably won't make a video about it.

Besides I'd imagine that he is pouring everything he's got into Game Dungeon, Freeman's Mind and of course The Movie. His schedule sounds very time intensive.
 

Dr Skeleton

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
While it's very probable that this game is still bad, Ross is definitely getting worse at the games he covers.
That was never his strong side. You just need to see him struggle and resort to cheats in Revenant of all games. Or how he defaults to easy mode in Veil of Darkness because it's a 90s RPG, so he assumes it will be impossible for him. I have to admire his dedication to getting some of these games running at all and completing them despite bugs and crashes, I would've given up many times over with something like Armed and Delirious regardless of nonsensical gameplay, but he was always pretty bad at actually playing the games he covers.

Kabus 22 is the first video of his I didn't finish, the game looks very rough, and not interesting rough, just ugly, clunky and barely held together.
 

deama

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I don't want Ross to cover JRPGs because I have zero interest in the genre.
He hasn't covered them at all, at least 1 game dungeon would be nice to have. He's done fps, diablo clone, strategy, adventure, mmo, racing, fmv, resident evil clone, shootmups, rpg, etc...
 

Axel_am

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I don't want Ross to cover JRPGs because I have zero interest in the genre.
He hasn't covered them at all, at least 1 game dungeon would be nice to have. He's done fps, diablo clone, strategy, adventure, mmo, racing, fmv, resident evil clone, shootmups, rpg, etc...
The Majuular guy that was recommended a few posts back is pretty good. I watched his Weird West review and enjoyed it a lot. He has some long ass videos about JRPGS on his channel you'll probably enjoy them.
 

deama

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I don't want Ross to cover JRPGs because I have zero interest in the genre.
He hasn't covered them at all, at least 1 game dungeon would be nice to have. He's done fps, diablo clone, strategy, adventure, mmo, racing, fmv, resident evil clone, shootmups, rpg, etc...
The Majuular guy that was recommended a few posts back is pretty good. I watched his Weird West review and enjoyed it a lot. He has some long ass videos about JRPGS on his channel you'll probably enjoy them.
I'm mostly interested in what Ross thinks about them, at least one of them.
 

Axel_am

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I'm mostly interested in what Ross thinks about them, at least one of them.

Here he comments how he despises turn based combat in games. I guess that includes JRPGs as well. It's in the 15 seconds where I marked the clip.
 
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Neuromancer

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Admittedly this episode was more on the iffy side for me, not exactly sure why but the game was kinda meh. It was a similar problem I had with "the chosen well of souls".
I think Ross should start going into more interesting genres and games instead of trying to find some 90s or 2000s old game that may or may not be good and resembles something he's kinda already done.

E.g. I'd really like it if he covered some sort of interesting JRPG, he never done those, what's his opinion on those? Would the combat still suck for him if it was more like the newer FFs with more actiony? E.g. xenogears?

What about devil may cry type games? What's his opinion on those? In Kubus episode he actually mentioned he never played DMC before! That's a good excuse.

What about Civ games? City builders? What about some more strategy games? Or weird hybrids like sacrifice? Or giants citizen kabuto?

I just don't wanna see him waste time reviewing some resident evil knockoff with not much going for it even though you have some real interesting games that actually tried something different and ended up working out decently (I thought at least).
I think all of your questions could be summarised to the extent, that these genres are simply just not Ross' cup of tea.
So he neither can say anything new or useful about these games, nor can he judge them fairly.


For example: Personally, I find Civ or City Builder games extremely boring.

I remember, when I first started Sim City (I think, it was Sim City 2000), because people were praising it a lot.
At first I started playing normally, but got bored pretty fast. After that I just loaded a premade city and called monsters and earthquakes to destroy it. ;)

So personally, I can't recommend it. But of course, this doesn't make it a bad game.
For people who like this genre, it is very well made and engaging.
 

deama

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I think all of your questions could be summarised to the extent, that these genres are simply just not Ross' cup of tea.
So he neither can say anything new or useful about these games, nor can he judge them fairly.


For example: Personally, I find Civ or City Builder games extremely boring.

I remember, when I first started Sim City (I think, it was Sim City 2000), because people were praising it a lot.
At first I started playing normally, but got bored pretty fast. After that I just loaded a premade city and called monsters and earthquakes to destroy it. ;)

So personally, I can't recommend it. But of course, this doesn't make it a bad game.
For people who like this genre, it is very well made and engaging.
Those were just examples, I've no clue what Ross has to say about city builders, for all I know he used to do part time construction work and fantasied about being a mayor or something, who knows.

I bet he'd have some stuff to say about giants citizen kabuto or sacrifice though.
 

Morpheus Kitami

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The thing is that Ross loves adventure games and they seem to be his forte.
Really? Because to my knowledge he sucks at the genre. He abuses the absolute hell out of walkthroughs in every adventure game review I've seen of his. He refuses to experiment on puzzles. He constantly complains about their difficulty. If anything, the one genre he seems to be good at is strategy games, since the ones that give him trouble seem to be actually difficult to play.
That was never his strong side. You just need to see him struggle and resort to cheats in Revenant of all games. Or how he defaults to easy mode in Veil of Darkness because it's a 90s RPG, so he assumes it will be impossible for him.
Revenant of all games? Was there something beyond the combo system? IIRC, in a follow-up video he showed that it was just as slow to advance through a dungeon with combos as the method he was doing, because now he has to worry about stamina regenerating too. (I have no idea about it since I don't care for ARPGs like that) Although that said, he really shouldn't have had to have been told that. On Veil, yeah, of course he assumes that. If he played one of the other games from the devs of that or one of the many DM-clones he'd never get anywhere. Even something like Arena or it's contemporaries would cause him no end of stress with how hard they can be at the start.
 

HansDampf

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He was never good at any of the games he played. The issue with his modern GDs is that, over the years, they turned into simple, "blind", narrated playthroughs of mostly mediocre games. Whereas in his earlier GDs, he was presenting old or obscure games from his childhood and also went off on related tangents a lot. His Deus Ex videos are still the best, even though he is mostly clueless about the gameplay (for example, he says there is no silent takedown of MIBs because they always explode, or that HR "didn't dumb down the RPG complexity"). But he has lots of interesting things to say about story, themes, world design, etc.
 

Dr Skeleton

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Revenant of all games? Was there something beyond the combo system? IIRC, in a follow-up video he showed that it was just as slow to advance through a dungeon with combos as the method he was doing, because now he has to worry about stamina regenerating too. (I have no idea about it since I don't care for ARPGs like that) Although that said, he really shouldn't have had to have been told that. On Veil, yeah, of course he assumes that. If he played one of the other games from the devs of that or one of the many DM-clones he'd never get anywhere. Even something like Arena or it's contemporaries would cause him no end of stress with how hard they can be at the start.
I don't remember the follow up video, but in the Revenant review about halfway through the game he decides that it's unfair and impossible and has to use cheats to beat it. Which is weird because Revenant isn't a super difficult game, regardless of its other problems. It's a slog in some areas but far from the worst of its genre, he likes Dungeon Siege for example, and I couldn't force myself to finish it because I was bored out of my mind playing it, I'd rather replay Revenant than attempt to slog through Dungeon Siege again. The combo system might seem like a small thing, but it's still ahead of the vast majority of the ARPG genre that never goes beyond picking a skill and clicking.

It's been years since I've played Revenant, so I'm hazy on the details, but I remember just learning the game by playing it, doing whatever seemed good at the time and I breezed through most of it, maybe with a couple difficulty spikes in boss fights. Combat was pretty fun and engaging for the most part. His video is otherwise a good overview of the whole game and its positives and negatives, I just can't take his opinions of game difficulty very seriously, he seems to fixate on certain styles of play and refuse to try and find things that work better or can be abused in specific situations.
 
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Morpheus Kitami

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Revenant of all games? Was there something beyond the combo system? IIRC, in a follow-up video he showed that it was just as slow to advance through a dungeon with combos as the method he was doing, because now he has to worry about stamina regenerating too. (I have no idea about it since I don't care for ARPGs like that) Although that said, he really shouldn't have had to have been told that. On Veil, yeah, of course he assumes that. If he played one of the other games from the devs of that or one of the many DM-clones he'd never get anywhere. Even something like Arena or it's contemporaries would cause him no end of stress with how hard they can be at the start.
I don't remember the follow up video, but in the Revenant review about halfway through the game he decides that it's unfair and impossible and has to use cheats to beat it. Which is weird because Revenant isn't a super difficult game, regardless of its other problems. It's a slog in some areas but far from the worst of its genre, he likes Dungeon Siege for example, and I couldn't force myself to finish it because I was bored out of my mind playing it, I'd rather replay Revenant than attempt to slog through Dungeon Siege again. The combo system might seem like a small thing, but it's still ahead of the vast majority of the ARPG genre that never goes beyond picking a skill and clicking.

It's been years since I've played Revenant, so I'm hazy on the details, but I remember just learning the game by playing it, doing whatever seemed good at the time and I breezed through most of it, maybe with a couple difficulty spikes in boss fights. Combat was pretty fun and engaging for the most part. His video is otherwise a good overview of the whole game and its positives and negatives, I just can't take his opinions of game difficulty very seriously, he seems to fixate on certain styles of play and refuse to try and find things that work better or can be abused in specific situations.

Here's the relevant part. (12:20 if it doesn't automatically work) It seems like he cheated less because he finds it super difficult and more because he finds it too tedious to play legit. I do note he mentions finding blocking to be random, which makes me wonder if that's like the other Diablo-clone he played one Halloween, where he didn't figure out he could stunlock enemies, or if it's truly random. Not using magic, either, is there not a healing spell? Or is this just you being really good at the game? He quotes some guy who liked the game, but also broke his keyboard playing it.
Dungeon Siege seems like something he enjoyed only because he could play it successfully in a way he really wanted to. I've only played the sequel, but IIRC, even if it's not the most effective way to do it, you can easily respec characters to whatever skillset you want them to have.
 

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