Dead Space 2 first play through impressions

I beat this game a few days ago and have put off writing about it for a bit just because I really wanted to let the game sink in and help me figure out where my final standing was on it. It felt like a good game, more polished than the previous one but for some reason something just didn't quite feel right and made me feel like there was an issue I had that I couldn't figure out what it was.

Controls

It was nice of them to switch the reload to square which is the norm with basically all shooters so it did take a couple minutes to get use to going straight from the first game to this one but in the end it was nice. Being able to heal by just pushing a button compared to going into the menu was a bit of a let down since you could much easier heal mid battle where as before it was a risk and more intense trying to bring up the menu while dodging. The melee mechanics seemed greatly improved, they didn't feel so clunky and slow and felt like you could actually use them at times, but I guess they had to improve the stomp if they honestly wanted you to stomp each and every body for your loot.

Dead Space 1 first play through impressions

I went into this game with rather unsure expectations. I had high hopes for F.E.A.R. 3 and was worried that this game was going to let me down. Turns out I was completely wrong.

This is probably the first 'survival horror' game I've played and beaten on my own. I've always had a bit of a fear when it comes to horror games but generally have no problem battling it out with a partner in some sort of co-op game. I really had no idea what to expect so I played the game on medium but may go back one day to battle it out in impossible, mostly because this ties into my only flaw I personally had with the game. I just found it to be a little too easy. Of course without knowing how hard the other higher difficulties are personally I'm not going to give that flaw much weight, but for now, that was really the only problem I had with the game.

Controls

Don't think I had any problems when it came to the controls. The one thing I did notice though was that I seemed to have problems at times rotating my cutter from the horizontal to vertical or vice versa. Nothing major but it was sometimes annoying in the heat of battle trying to adjust my shot and it just didn't seem to want to at times.

Resident Evil 6 first play through impressions

Me and my friend went into this game with a very hesitant feeling just based off of peoples opinions and word of the game. Seeing as how we had played through Resident Evil 5 and found it to be an okay game we picked this one up for $5. I have to say we were both surprised, not only because we found it undeserving of all the hate, but just that it was really a fairly good game.

Controls

I felt like the controls were pretty well done, although there was a bit of problems I had. Firstly I found the cover system to be pretty terrible, we both had troubles with accidentally putting ourselves in cover when we didn't mean to or sticking to a wall when we just wanted to look around a corner but it wasn't so bad that it ruined the game. Other than that I feel like everything was pretty good. I enjoyed the dodge mechanics with either the rolls, slide, counter attack or being able to jump onto your back and attack from the ground. The small "communication" controls were a little silly and not necessary but I guess if you're like us, you just don't use them other than for spamming the thumbs up at your partners face.

F.E.A.R. 3 first play through impressions

Just as a disclaimer, I went into this game completely blind of what to expect, never played the first 2, was playing it for the co-op so didn't really touch the multiplayer modes and we played it on the medium difficulty.

Going into this game I really didn't know what to expect. I had heard the series be praised and just based on the name alone I expected a pretty dark horror. What we got instead was pretty far from that in my opinion, although it wasn't a bad game in the end.

This time around my teammate was my very lovely girlfriend and we decided to go with this game as her introduction and learning of shooter games. I actually didn't know that the 2 characters played differently, one (me) being a more typical shooter playstyle while player 2 had the psychic and psychotic powers to play with. In the end I think it worked out well being that 2nd player's playstyle was an easier one with not having to deal with reloading, recoil and crosshair spread.

Hunted: The Demon's Forge first impressions

Before I get started, just know that this is some very early first impressions in that this is only after the first chapter of 5 (about 2 hours of gameplay) and from a couch co-op perspective so my opinion is prone to change once we finish the game.

Right off the bat, we usually meet up at my friends house to do our couch co-op plays so we did that as usual, popped in the game and updated his PS3 and got ready. Well after about 10 attempts, each resulting in a disk read error we gave up. Although we did buy the game used, the disk itself looked perfectly fine and we tried cleaning the disk and his PS3 before giving up. My friend went and exchanged the game for another copy the next day and so we met up again and had the same results. No idea why this was happening, he has a top loader so we thought just in case to bring my PS3 which is an older slim build and the game worked fine.

Transistor first play through impression.

I decided to do a bit of stream testing this past week and I started off just streaming some Everquest and once I realized it was at least doable, although not the greatest stream at all, I wanted to do a game I had yet to play. So I went with Transistor, a new game by the studio who did Bastion which is another great game.

The playlist for the whole thing can be seen here: Transistor playlist

If you find the game at all interesting I recommend checking it out on steam now as it's on sale for 25% off, down to $15 as of 6/28/14.

The Big Bad Guide to Stamina Recovery

**Edit added on Nov.2nd 2015**

Welcome to my guide on stamina recovery. I've been studying and testing a lot about it for a while now and figured I had gotten as much info as I can think of and can finally compose it into one big guide.

First off, stamina recovery comes down to 3 factors. Base stamina recovery, equipment load and bonus stamina recovery. There is 3 different forms of bonus stamina recovery as well, the consumable item Green Blossom, the Chloranthy Ring +0/1/2 and 3 different shields. (Shield of the Insolent, Blossom Kite Shield and Slumbering Dragon shield.)

Dark Souls 2: Chloranthy Ring

Just a really quick video, more so to have something to back up my claims but basically these are the results of how effective each Chloranthy ring is compared to having no stamina recovery on.

The results can vary slightly, I'd say you could give or take 1% maybe even up to 2% from what I've written but these seem to be the approximate range they are.

Chloranthy Ring + 0: ~12%
Chloranthy Ring + 1: ~18%
Chloranthy Ring + 2: ~20%

Dark Souls 2: Studying Stamina Recovery

Alright I went a little overboard on this one and there was no way I could fill up almost 30 minutes of video with me talking when the majority of this video is pretty self explanatory with what you can see. I apologize for the length, I start with showing both tests as I tested everything twice but realized the video was going to be way too long that way so I cut them done to only showing the 1st or 2nd result, depending if there was an error in the 1st.

Dark Souls 2: Chloranthy Ring Vs Royal Soldier's Ring

For a video version of this post, check my youtube upload here.

I had this theory that maybe the Royal Soldier's Ring +2 might just be more effective for stamina recovery compared to the Chloranthy Ring +2 because of how your stamina recovers faster when you have a lower equip load. I decided to test this theory out the best I could here. Keep in mind that there is room for human error as I was doing this the best I could but definitely couldn't be perfect.

From this you can see that the Chloranthy Ring beats out the Royal Soldier Ring each time. Although the Soldier's Ring does only fall behind slightly and there is a chance that it does increase roll distance. I had trouble being able to accurately show this in the video but just based off of my feeling while comparing the 2, the less weight did seem to add a small amount of distance.

I feel like although the ring didn't perform as well as I had hoped, I will definitely be trying it out in a PvP environment and see if I notice an impact on the rolling and if that slight stamina regeneration will be worth it.

As a side note, through this testing I noticed that it seemed to take a flat 3.5 seconds to be able to sprint again after draining it all. This is most notable when I have the life ring on while sprinting and my stamina does not fully recover before I sprint again where with the Chloranthy ring, even after it's full it takes almost a half second to start again.

If you see any error or suspect error in my results, feel free to call me out and I will double check and update my results. Thanks for watching/reading.

Dark Souls 2: Bleed mechanic research

So I decided to try to see just how viable bleed damage was in this game so I took my my character and dropped a soul vessel to pump it's stats.

Now the enemy I chose to test on was the big red phant scythe weilder in the lost bastille at the no mans warf entrance since they had light armored, skin exposed and high in health.

My stats here were as followed: