I decided to try Magic the Gathering: Duel of the Planewalkers after trying to get back to Magic and realizing how long and tiring the physical version of the game actually was. For $10 Magic is a pretty good deal, and you can pay extra to have foiled cards which I have no idea why you'd do that, or to unlock all the cards in decks even though it only takes about 10 games of comp stomp to unlock all the cards in one deck. I didn't even bother lowering the difficulty, just fight the guy with the worst deck (the mono green non elf one seems easiest) over and over again. I think it's pretty stupid you don't get to see what's in Nicol Bolas or Karn's deck (boss for single/archenemy mode). Really their deck should be usable because I had a harder time with the guys before them (though Karn's deck has at least 2 Mox Sapphires, which isn't even legal in any format). In all likelihood the boss's deck probably sucks because throwing 4 Mox Sapphires doesn't let you get away with playing a 4 color deck or whatever they're doing with the boss characters. The archenemy mode is pretty fun, though winning is more luck than skill since if the other guy ever draws the 'control all nonland permanents you don't control' scheme card you're probably all dead. You should be allowed to play as the Archenemy too, even though it'd probably be ridiculously easy to win with any halfway decent deck, but overkill can be fun.
The decks seem to be designed on purpose to be lacking in certain areas (creature removal, enchantment removal, whatever) and some of the matchups are just really tough to win. I have the biggest problem against the artifact deck (mainly because if you can't get rid of a Steel Overseer the turn it comes out you probably lost the game) and the deck that has like 3 Eldrazis and massive land drawing potential.
I also picked up Touhou 13: Ten Desires. It is a very uninteresting game as none of the new characters are remotely interesting or memorable. The music is also pretty bland for a Touhou game. The final boss, Toyosatomimi no Miko, has the distinction of having the second most syllables for a character of Japanese descent (Tanaka Yubiseiharukana from Ever17 has more), and that's about all you can say about her. The new system is confusing and you're likely to die while trying to pickup the powerups that you need to survive assuming you're not some kind of shooter game god. Even more so than TH12 this is a very heavy suppression-type shooter. Even on Easy it makes a huge difference whether you can kill stuff early, preferably before they even fire, or not. The bullet hell genre is not supposed to be like this, since the whole point is to dodge all this stuff rather than just memorizing where stuff shows up and kill them before they fire. If you take some of the harder Touhous like TH6, they start off pretty easy and on stage 5 or 6 they start to beat you down, especially on the bosses, but you're not supposed to die badly on regular enemies except the ones that are clearly like minbosses. In TH13 even the final boss is pretty easy but around stage 4/5 expect to die a lot because it is difficult to tell the difference between a power up, points, a bullet, background, or somewhere the enemy is teleporting in. Since you only get 3 lives if you don't go get the powerups, unless you're already awesome at some point you got to take some chances to get the items that give you more life, and unless you've the order enemies teleport in memorized you're likely to get hammered when you try to do that. The earlier Touhous may be much harder overall but you never get hammered by teleporting enemies while trying to get a 1UP.
That said at least the game lets you continue at where you died instead of beginning of the stage, so it's actually possible to beat the game for normal people like me. Overall I think the game is one step forward and two steps back. It's probably trying to address some of the difficulty concerns but the cheap deaths from the nonboss battles are really frustrating and basically forces memorization of the entire level.
The decks seem to be designed on purpose to be lacking in certain areas (creature removal, enchantment removal, whatever) and some of the matchups are just really tough to win. I have the biggest problem against the artifact deck (mainly because if you can't get rid of a Steel Overseer the turn it comes out you probably lost the game) and the deck that has like 3 Eldrazis and massive land drawing potential.
I also picked up Touhou 13: Ten Desires. It is a very uninteresting game as none of the new characters are remotely interesting or memorable. The music is also pretty bland for a Touhou game. The final boss, Toyosatomimi no Miko, has the distinction of having the second most syllables for a character of Japanese descent (Tanaka Yubiseiharukana from Ever17 has more), and that's about all you can say about her. The new system is confusing and you're likely to die while trying to pickup the powerups that you need to survive assuming you're not some kind of shooter game god. Even more so than TH12 this is a very heavy suppression-type shooter. Even on Easy it makes a huge difference whether you can kill stuff early, preferably before they even fire, or not. The bullet hell genre is not supposed to be like this, since the whole point is to dodge all this stuff rather than just memorizing where stuff shows up and kill them before they fire. If you take some of the harder Touhous like TH6, they start off pretty easy and on stage 5 or 6 they start to beat you down, especially on the bosses, but you're not supposed to die badly on regular enemies except the ones that are clearly like minbosses. In TH13 even the final boss is pretty easy but around stage 4/5 expect to die a lot because it is difficult to tell the difference between a power up, points, a bullet, background, or somewhere the enemy is teleporting in. Since you only get 3 lives if you don't go get the powerups, unless you're already awesome at some point you got to take some chances to get the items that give you more life, and unless you've the order enemies teleport in memorized you're likely to get hammered when you try to do that. The earlier Touhous may be much harder overall but you never get hammered by teleporting enemies while trying to get a 1UP.
That said at least the game lets you continue at where you died instead of beginning of the stage, so it's actually possible to beat the game for normal people like me. Overall I think the game is one step forward and two steps back. It's probably trying to address some of the difficulty concerns but the cheap deaths from the nonboss battles are really frustrating and basically forces memorization of the entire level.
