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      Welcome!   03/05/2016

      Welcome, everyone, to the new 910CMX Community Forums. I'm still working on getting them running, so things may change.  If you're a 910 Comic creator and need your forum recreated, let me know and I'll get on it right away.  I'll do my best to make this new place as fun as the last one!

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Welp. Couple days late. Oh well.

I keep posting news and observations rather than actual game experiences. Shows you how much gaming I've actually done lately and how I'm really just trying to keep this thread from dying and having to be replaced.

Closest thing to gaming I've done is Pokeclicker. I've finally beat the Kalos Champion, and I just need two more Pokemon before I can go to the next region. There's a few other things I'm trying to do first, such as grind up my Pokemon's attack, try to get something that will let me get a few Mega Evolutions, and beat a few quests. It's...a grind, to say the least.

 

So, regarding Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, the new gimmick is called the Terastal Phenomenon, use of which is called Terastallizing, which enables your Pokemon to change from whatever type it is into a new, single type. When you catch a Pokemon, its Tera Type usually matches one of its original types, but you can get Pokemon with completely different Tera Types by finding ones in the overworld that are glowing or beating one in a raid battle. When you change a Pokemon into its Tera Type, that Pokemon loses its default types and becomes its Tera Type, losing the defensive weaknesses and resistances from before and gaining the new ones for its current Tera Type. It also gains the Same Type Attack Bonus (STAB) for its new type. When a Pokemon uses an attack of the same type of the Pokemon itself, it gains a 1.5x damage boost thanks to STAB. One fun thing about Terastallizing, however, is that you don't just gain the STAB for the new type; you also keep the STAB from the previous types. So if you have a Charizard (Fire/Flying) with a Dragon Tera Type, you get STAB on Fire, Flying, and Dragon moves. But if the Tera Type matches one of the Pokemon's default types, STAB increases from 1.5x to 2x, so Tera Fire Charizard gets double damage from STAB for using a Fire move while keeping the 1.5x boost for Flying moves.

As mentioned, Pokemon with differing Tera Types can be found in raids. Tera Raid Dens respawn at midnight (IRL, according to your Switch's clock) and are a mandatory 4v1 battle against the Pokemon in question (NPCs are provided if you have no internet or friends). Tera Raid Dens are ranked from 1 to 5 stars, increasing in difficulty, giving better rewards for higher star raids. Once you complete the post-game, an NPC will tell you that there are now 6-star raids, and he explicitly tells you not to do them since they're too powerful. Heh. And guess what? Nintendo is also releasing raids online for Pokemon not normally found in the new region. Some of which are 7-star raids. Such as a level-100 Tera Dragon "Charizard the Unrivaled".

Running around the world hoping you find a roaming Pokemon or raid with the Tera Type you want would be a pain, however, and very heavily RNG-dependent. Plus, any gift Pokemon such as the starters or box legendaries won't appear in the wild, so you're stuck with their default Tera Type. So, the solution is to change a Pokemon's Tera Type. How? Items called Tera Shards, which come in 18 different types. Collect enough of them, and you can use them to change your Tera Type. Tera Shards are obtained by beating Tera Raid Dens, which is your incentive to try those out. Clearing a Tera Raid gives you a few shards of a few types. So... How many Tera Shards of any single type do you need to change a single Pokemon's Tera Type?

Fifty.

Yeah, that's...incredibly grindy for the region's new gimmick that they want everybody to use. 300 minimum if you want to cover your entire team? Thousands if you want a lot of options with the entire PokeDex? That's a lot of grinding.

So, what kind of fun can you have with Tera Types?

First of all, there's the move Tera Blast. It's a somewhat decent Normal-type move by default, but it changes type to match the user's Tera Type, so a Terastallized Pokemon will always get STAB on Tera Blast. It can be taught to literally everything except Magikarp and Ditto, so you always have this as an option. This provides good type coverage that otherwise wouldn't happen with the rest of their moveset.

Offensive type coverage is one of the keys to this whole thing. Pokemon that learn strong moves of other types or just want to hit more Pokemon with super-effective damage can benefit significantly. Staraptor learns Close Combat, so it benefits from being Tera Fighting, while Toxtricity learns Boomburst and has an ability that buffs sound-based moves, so Tera Normal gives it STAB on top of that. Electric-types like Jolteon could also benefit from an Ice-type Tera Blast as well.

Boosting your existing offense is also good, such as Tera Fire on Torkoal to buff Sunny Day + Eruption, Tera Ghost on Houndstone to buff Last Respects, or Tera Electric on Pawmot to let it spam Double Shock.

Defensive type coverage is also good, changing what types your Pokemon is weak to and resistant to. For example, anything with a x4 weakness to any given type will benefit from suddenly resisting or being immune to that. Water/Flying Gyarados fears Electric moves, so becoming a Ground-type shuts that down entirely and buffs Earthquake.

The Levitate ability grants the user immunity to Ground-type moves. Anything that has it will benefit from being Tera Electric, as it now has no weaknesses, but if you have Dark-type moves, Tera Poison is also good as that combo is only weak to Psychic, which is itself weak to Dark.

You don't even need to have moves of the new Tera Type if you're just using it defensively. Tera Poison on Krookodile or Tera Flying on Magnezone are good defensive types with their original types already covering things offensively. Or if you just wanna switch your weaknesses and resistances to last a bit longer without giving up a move slot for coverage.

Taking advantage of the weather is a great option. Sunny Day buffs Fire-type moves, so Torkoal, Leafeon, and Sunflora benefit here. Rain Dance gives a similar buff to Water moves, so try that for Golduck. Rock-types get a Special Defense buff during a Sandstorm, so Tyranitar and Hippowdon get a lot of mileage out of this.

The Steel type is probably the best Tera Type, as it has ten resistances and an immunity. Few Pokemon will hurt from being able to become Steel. One reason for not wanting to be Steel type is if you're already weak to Steel's weaknesses and would rather resist those instead.

On a side note, nobody wants to be Tera Psychic. Psychic's resistances aren't very useful, and what Psychic hits strongly, other types do it better. Anything you have that's Tera Psychic, change it to something else. Anything else. Like Steel. Or Bug. Bug, of all types.

And Frosmoth (Ice/Bug) wants to be literally any other type. Try Water or Electric.

A competitive player compiled a list of the best Tera Type for every (fully-evolved) Pokemon in the new games, with some of them getting multiple options (Tyranitar could work for either Tera Rock for Sandstorm or Tera Ghost for immunity to Fighting, and some of his other observations I've listed above). But people are already finding some alternatives; he said Dragonite's best Tera Type is Steel, but Tera Normal also works really well due to Dragonite learning Extreme Speed and some other good Normal-type moves. He also says Mismagius is good for being Tera Fighting or Tera Dark, but Mismagius has Levitate and benefits from being Tera Electric as a result, so that's a good backup option.

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Pokemon Go seems to be popular in my area, still. I walk in a park a few miles away most weekends. Once a month, they have Pokemon Go in the park, and it gets fairly crowded.

Not my thing. I enjoyed the blue and red game when one of my kids was into it, but that was plenty of Pokemon for me.

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On 12/18/2022 at 4:22 PM, Zorua said:

I keep posting news and observations rather than actual game experiences. Shows you how much gaming I've actually done lately and how I'm really just trying to keep this thread from dying and having to be replaced.

The forums are so quiet these days that I doubt an occasional necro would be an issue.

I've actually played a lot of games this past year, I just rarely think to post about it. Of course, with one exception, they range from "a few years old" to "a few decades old".

This summer, I beat the original Tomb Raider for the first time. The controls were awkward, and I'm not a fan of the combat in it, but when it was focused on puzzle solving and exploration in ancient ruins, it was incredible.

I almost immediately started in on Tomb Raider 2, and was soon quite disappointed. There's a more heavy focus on combat (despite the combat system not having been improved from the first game), and the second stage wasn't even an ancient ruin. I haven't given up on it yet, but (as happened to me many times trying to get through the first game), I got distracted by other games and haven't gotten back to it.

Over the past decade or so I've been slowly playing/replaying through the Castlevania series in story order. This fall, I replayed Dracula X and Rondo of Blood, and played Symphony of the Night for the first time. All of them were fun, but I was a bit disappointed by Symphony - so much of what it did became standard for Metroidvanias that it winds up feeling almost generic.

A couple years ago I started playing through the Mario games (including spin-offs) in as close to "story order" as I could determine. (I was surprised to realize when I first looked into it that the Mario timeline is extremely complicated, with a great deal of disagreement between fans as to the order of the games. And unlike the Zelda timeline, Nintendo has never stepped in to clarify things.) I started by playing the Yoshi games as they're prequels (my favorite of them was Yoshi's Woolly World; the original Yoshi's Island and Yoshi's Crafted World were also quite good). I then played the old arcade Donkey Kong series & Mario Bros. (via the "Arcade Archives" on the Switch), then the Super Mario Bros. "trilogy" (including the original Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2 via the WiiU virtual console), Super Mario World, Super Mario Land 1 & 2, and now I'm playing Super Mario RPG. (The preceding was just a summary of my play-through; there were a bunch of games I didn't bother to mention - a full list would be quite long.) I don't have a lot to say about them, other than it's impressive how such a huge series has managed to have so many great games in it and so few bad games in it.

I started playing Breath of the Wild for the first time early last year, and finished around September of this year, I believe.  It was quite an experience. I know there have been games since that imitated its formula, but I've never played them, so I was able to appreciate it for everything new it brought to the table. I loved how much there was to explore, and that you were pretty much free to do whatever you wanted whenever you wanted. I also loved climbing all over everything. (I wasn't so fond of how easily most of the weapons and shields broke, though. I think it would have been better if most of the proper non-rusty weapons & shields held up longer, and there was a way to repair them. I also think if they wanted lots of weapons in the game, there should have been proper weapon shops.)

This spring I started playing the Kirby series (starting from the beginning, because I always like to go through series in story order, and as far as I can tell story order and release order are the same for the Kirby series, barring remakes). The first Kirby's Dreamland was fun, but too short. I had a hard time getting into Kirby's Adventure (or it's GBA remake) and Kirby's Dreamland 2, but their final boss battles were really cool. I absolutely loved Kirby Super Star Ultra (which I played instead of the original Kirby Super Star); it's my favorite game in the series so far.

This past October & November I played through all the TMNT Cowabunga Collection. Most were really fun, though the first game gets unfairly difficult at time (particularly near the end) and I didn't like the Genesis Tournament Fighters. Of course, the games were all rather average for their era, and probably hardly anyone would remember them if they weren't based on TMNT.

Once finishing all the old Turtles games, I started in on Shredder's Revenge. It lives up to all the hype I heard; it manages to capture all the fun of the old TMNT beat-em-ups while adding in a ton of additional content, depth, and replay value. It's actually in the running for the title of my favorite TMNT game. So far, my favorite part was playing as Splinter; I've always liked him as a character so it was nice to play as him for once.

So that summarizes the games I've played recently; perhaps I'll talk more about the games I play in the future.

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So I've still been playing games a fair amount, but I haven't really had much to say about them until now. However, I've recently been playing a couple different versions of the game known in the US as Super Mario Bros. 2, and I felt like talking about them.

First, over the past couple of months I played a fan translation of Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic (the game that was remade to create the US Super Mario Bros. 2). I already knew about the most obvious change: the fact that the main characters originally looked different and were entirely unrelated to the Mario franchise (despite one of them sporting a mustache very similar to Mario's). However, it was interesting seeing all the other differences.

One thing that I though was pretty neat in Doki Doki Panic that I'm disappointed they dropped when they made SMB2 is that between worlds you are given a chart of all the levels, which keeps track of which levels you have completed with each character; this also serves as a character and stage select screen. I suppose the reason they dropped it is because the NES version of SMB2 had no save feature (or password system), and beating every level four times in a single play session would be a bit much to ask. Still, I don't understand why they never brought it back for the later versions of SMB2.

Another interesting change is that originally the story was about a family that jumped into a book to save two kids who had been taken into the book-world by the evil frog Mamu; this story is told through sprite-animation at the beginning, rather than the text used for the backstory in SMB2.

There were also a lot of visual differences beyond the main characters. For instance, instead of mushrooms, mushroom blocks, and giant bird-head-gates, there were lots of masks of various styles scattered around the world. Also, the grass, cherries, and vines didn't move, while the waterfalls flowed much faster than in SMB2.

Over-all, I really enjoyed playing it, though I think that other than the lack of a stage-select, SMB2 feels more polished.

After beating that, I moved on to the most recent remake of SMB2, Super Mario Advance. The changes made for that version feel just as drastic as the ones made when changing Doki Doki Panic into SMB2. There are new "giant" Shyguys, a new boss, new potion/mushroom locations, and the occasional change to the landscape. You start with only one bar of health (thus starting as small Mario/Luigi/Toad/Peach), but thanks to the new mushrooms can build to a higher max health. And of course the graphics and music have been given a huge overhaul relative to the NES SMB2 (though I think they're pretty close to the SNES version).

I think SMA is probably the best version of the game so far, but there is one change they made that really annoys me: they replaced the NES/SNES title screen and in the process dropped the section telling the story of the game. So in an era when it was no longer common practice, you had to read the instruction manual to find out the story -- a fact which is particularly ironic since this was the first version of the game not to include the story in the game itself!

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18 hours ago, ChronosCat said:

I think SMA is probably the best version of the game so far, but there is one change they made that really annoys me: they replaced the NES/SNES title screen and in the process dropped the section telling the story of the game. So in an era when it was no longer common practice, you had to read the instruction manual to find out the story -- a fact which is particularly ironic since this was the first version of the game not to include the story in the game itself!

Someone got sloppy and missed it. Perhaps they were directed to, management feeling the US market would buy the game anyway, so don't take the time to move the story. I agree with you, that's pretty messed up.

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So since I got it this winter, I've been trying to play through the main story-mode of Hyrule Warriors: Definitive Edition. However, I might have to give up on it, as I'm not enjoying it all that much. It's clearly a well made game (the music in particular is great), but I find the way it gives you multiple time-sensitive missions you have to juggle extremely stressful.

More recently, I've been playing Final Fantasy 1 (PSP version) with the team of two Thieves/Ninja and two Monks/Masters (I named them Leon, Raph, Don, and Mikey). It's an interesting challenge; I had to go into each dungeon with far more healing items than I'm used to since none of those classes has healing magic, and near the end of the game I'm running into the problem that none of the healing items you can buy are strong enough to keep up with the damage output of the end-game bosses. I had initially planned to skip the bonus dungeons so the main game would be more challenging, but after getting trashed by the final boss several times in a row I decided to tackle the bonus dungeons after all, rather than wandering around the final dungeon level grinding.

In gaming news, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is out. I'm excited to play it, but my money is tight and I'm in the middle of a bunch of games already, so I think I'm going to wait a couple months to get it.

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And I just beat FF with the above mentioned team. I wound up only doing two of the bonus dungeons before giving the final boss another try; a few more experience levels and the more powerful healing items you get in those dungeons made a huge difference. I'm not sure if I'm going to bother doing the rest of the bonus dungeons; they really aren't nearly as good as the original parts of the game.

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So I've beaten the GameCube and Wii versions of Metroid Prime multiple times before (including on Hard difficulty) so this isn't a huge accomplishment for me, but I just beat Metroid Prime Remastered with 100% on Casual difficulty. I only died once (and that time was deliberate); while I was looking for a relaxing play-through, I wasn't expecting it to be quite that easy!

I have to say it's by far the prettiest version of Metroid Prime yet, though it was annoying how dark some parts were (it was sometimes hard to make out my surroundings when it really shouldn't have been). Also, I like that there are multiple control schemes, but I was disappointed by the motion controls - they aren't nearly as good as the Wii version's controls.

I definitely recommend it for any Metroid fans (or potential Metroid fans) who don't have access to the earlier versions, but I don't think it's going to replace the Wii version for me...

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Playing Endless Space (original, not v2), trying for the achievements that didn't come in casual game play. It takes planning and set up prior to starting the game.

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So, there was a Nintendo Direct earlier this week. I didn't watch it, but apparently highlights include:

  •  A remake of Super Mario RPG.
  • "Super Mario Wonder": a 2D platformer where you can play as the Mario Bros, Princess Peach, Princess Daisy, Yoshis of several different colors, and Toad.
  • A not-yet-titled Princess Peach game.

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On 6/16/2023 at 11:28 AM, Darth Fluffy said:

Playing Endless Space (original, not v2), trying for the achievements that didn't come in casual game play. It takes planning and set up prior to starting the game.

I have done fairly well with this. I had over thirty left to go, and am down to twelve.

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So I decided to finish up the bonus dungeons in Final Fantasy PSP with my Ninja/Master team after all. I had to move on to the fourth bonus dungeon to build up enough strength for the end-dungeon bosses of the third bonus dungeon (who are probably the toughest bosses in the game). After that, the final bonus dungeon was pretty easy (save for a few frustrating puzzles that I wound up using a guide for because I didn't have the patience to figure them out myself), if a bit time consuming.

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