If you mean the Halloween update, I've already watched those. I think he may not have gotten all the new content in it, though, and have been debating whether to find someone else who played it in found it all.

Question for jack: would you consider Dark Souls (Prepare to Die Edition) worth getting for $5 on Steam?

I seem to recall you having a lot of troubles getting it to run correctly, though I don't know what platform you played it on for sure.

YES. Assuming you are willing to deal with the difficulty of the thing.

90% of my troubles getting it to run correctly had to do with GFWL, which it no longer runs on.

Edit: ONLY IF YOU HAVE A CONTROLLER. Playing Dark Souls with pc controls is 10x worse than playing Super Meat Boy with PC controls.

I know the biggest selling point of Dark Souls is the difficulty (although I'm more interested in the atmosphere and environment if I'm honest), and I'm kind of looking forward to it. I have a PS2 controller with some .ini and .dll files for Xbox controller interpretation of said controller and also JoyToKey, so I'm good for a controller. I actually only got the PS2/USB converter recently, so this is the first time I've seriously considered getting the game.

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Also, have you ever played Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons?

Some quick tips to the Bloodborne DLC. This is just general stuff that could make your life easier, if you so choose to use it.

1) I would recommend joining the League before doing this dlc. The League is a global patch for all players that released a little bit before this came out. The easiest way to join the League is to go talk to the covenant leader in the shortcut near the first lamp in the forbidden woods. He will be on the right wall. There are two other locations, but I don't know them.

This, along with a new bell the messengers will give you in the hunter's dream, will let you summon npc hunters. A large number of main game bosses will now have these, but more importantly the DLC BOSSES will have them available. <- Valtr himself was almost crucail for me beating the first dlc boss.


2) The BIG guys can be run past with no penalty to you. You will meet your first big guy at the ancient equivalent of Amelia's boss room. You need to run past him to get a key you will need to access a later, mandatory area. Don't worry. It is not a boss.


3) Most of the important stuff you can find here is found either on the ground (almost all of the armor sets and some of the new weapons) or drops from specific npc hunters.

4) There is a lamp to the right of the area where the last two big guys are, across from Ludwig's boss room. If you have joined the league, you can go down the stairs here to summon Henrietta OR you can go across to right before the boss room, where the two crows are, to summon Valtr. Valtr is 10x better and more recommended if you want help.

Henrietta seems to die in the first half of the fight, while I've seen Valtr survive attacks that can one-shot me at level 178 on NG+.

5) Getting behind the boss is VERY valuable. In both phases of the fight. Ludwig's attacks (no AOE) all seem to hit in front of him in his horse phase, while in his standing phase only his aoe can hit behind him. While he can turn around quickly, you will have about a second of breathing room vs he just smacks you.

Notably, his most dangerous attack is in phase 2 where he will do a massive all consuming wall of fire in front of him that would make Ragnaros slightly jealous. Um.. don't stand in front of him when he is going to do this. This in fact is like 90% of the reason to bring Valtr along. It lets you get behind the boss for attacks like this, where he can survive them but you can't.

6) You can kill Ludwig after the fight for his weapon.

7) The most important tip of them all: All of the dlc weapons in the first area do not scale with SKILL. If you bring your skill character, you will be sad.

I have never played Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons.

On a side note for Bloodborne, you know some of the dlc hunters are wee bit overtuned when the Blood-Starved Beast in the next room goes down far easier, without you dying, but you took an hour to kill the **** gatling gun hunter.

The Gatling Gun and Whirligig Saw are going to be troll weapons in pvp. I can see it now.

I recommend it. It brought me to tears. It's even on sale right now for like $2.50 or something like that.

My backlog is... big. Very big. I don't want to spent $3 on something I won't get to ever.

Once you've beaten the first boss of the dlc, you are eventually going to come to an elevator where you will use the eye pendant to get a cutscene. If you ride it back down afterwards, and then send it back up, you'll get to see another platform with a skull on it. If you then ride it down (using the lever and then stepping on), you can also go down to get the church cannon.

The skull will let you do a "Secret" Boss fight where you got the Eye Pendant (ancient Amelia's room), with the reward being a new covenant rune that gives you the "full beasthood" effect. Um.... try it with the beast claws and find out.


On that note, this guy is kicking my *** so I have not gotten to try it yet.

Edit: O um..... for the two ladies, it's worth mentioning that they can be stunned by anything? Lure the black-dressed one into the stairs, where the magic user won't follow, and just stun-lock her repeatedly with a fast weapon, healing in between cycles. I did it on my first attempt.

The second one is much easier by herself, and they don't respawn.

So something that happens, when you get far enough in Bloodborne, is that your damage output kind of gets capped and your health pool kind of gets capped and the game just gets harder without you being able to buff your stats up any more to deal with it.

The reason this happens is that the soft caps for everything are at 40 (endurance) or 50 (everything else), and putting any points in anything after that is not a waste of time per se.... but not very valuable compared to putting points in something that isn't "capped". So I'm at 50 VIT, 50 STR and SKILL, 41 Bloodtinge, 25 Arcane, and 16 Endurance. I am on NG+. It takes like 250K souls to level up once. And.. it's not a fun time. I've done everything but the 3 bosses that are available to me.

Pthumeru Ithyll Chalice, Layer 1, Pthumerian Descendant

^ The most frustrating part of the whole thing is that this thing still does the most damage. There is NO WAY to do this dungeon with this boss being a lower difficulty, and at 50 VIT he can 2 or 3 shot me depending on the attack. It's so great isn't it? Well, the best way to fight him is obviously parries. But I suck at the timing for that. So it's just..... it seems to be a thing where I get close every so often but I just run out of health restoration items and die. The boss is also a bit too spastic for me to get good (so far) after a couple of months of trying on and off? One day boss. One day you will go down.


Lawrence:
The "optional" hidden boss of the dlc, I'm fighting him on NG+ and like the other dlc boss I'm stuck at I really do feel like I could take him on NG. But on NG+ he hits almost as hard as the above guy and it just feels like I got hit by a truck. Everything 3 hits, and in his second phase that's kind of... problematic. It's notable that an npc hunter can be brought into this fight, but he's an idiot in this particular one.

Maria:
It's basically NG+ Gehrman fight on crack. Very nice fight, but I always lose in phase 2 or 3. I've by far spent the least time trying on this one though. It's like the pthumerian descendant, where if i "got gud" at parrying the fight would be easier.



^ So... um based on this, my recommendation for the dlc is to only buy it if the layer 3 chalices do not particularly scare you. .... The layer 4 and 5 chalices scare everyone.


Edit: The funny part of this whole thing is that I've beaten the defiled chalice. That's like.... harder. I just have a mental block on parrying.

Also, I wanted to ask you about this, but you wouldn't be opposed to me starting my own review/discussion thread about video games, would you? Most of the time if I write more than a paragraph or two I'm copy/pasting the thing from (or to) my googlebloggerblog, so I thought I might copy your style in your anime thread, with an index in the OP and everything. It might get me motivated to actually write more of these review things I like doing.

I really don't care either way. I'll probably start posting in it and let this one die off.

Coolio. I'll probably decide on a format once other people post.