Yakoob on 20/4/2025 at 01:14
So I finally got Balatro for my tablet and after 3 days I beat my first run. I thought "well that was nice" and thought I'd leave it at that, as I'm not usually a fan of roguelikes or replaying. And yet, something about it made me wanna go back, and I now beat the game with three decks. Gonna try to beat it with at least 5 to unlock all the challenges.
That being said, I find myself falling onto the same strategies each run. Perhaps I just haven't unloced the right jokers yet, or perhaps I'm not thinking in Portals enough, but I kind of feel there's only two viable strategies: either go ham on upgrading a mid-tier hand (like a straight or a flush) and just get it powered up to breeze thru most blinds in a single hand, OR get the pants joker that increases mults every time you play two pairs and strategically groom it over the course of the game where two pairs is your winning strategy.
A lot of the top tier hands (like royal flushes) are too rare/hard to pull off that it's almost a waste trying to upgrade them (I can easily upgrade a regular flush to be more powerfu). And the lower hands (like single pairs or three of a kind) just don't have enough cards and base multipliers to ever be powerful enough to survive later blinds. Only way I can see them working if you hit just the right combo of jokers (like counting all cards in deck + extra mults), PLUS upgrade them with celestial cards, PLUS have enough tarot card upgrades that the single pairs/threes will have insane multipliers on themselves.
Since everything relies on RNG, the odds of having that sweet combination of factors is incredibly rare, so just going with the above two strats feels a lot more reliable.
Thirith on 22/4/2025 at 06:24
After finishing Aliens: Dark Descent, I decided to do a quick playthrough of Mirror's Edge, with all the PhysX bells and whistles activated, as they're unlikely to work on future GPUs - unless savvy modders manage to find a way to fix the issue caused by Nvidia dropping PhysX 32-bit support on their new cards. As always, there are things about Mirror's Edge I find frustrating - mostly the horrible combat, but also the start-stop nature of some of the levels -, but the vibe of this game remains impeccable. I'm more okay with Mirror's Edge Catalyst than some people here, and I even like some of the open-world stuff (less the side activities than getting to know the place and getting better at navigating it through repetition), but its city is so much less believable, tactile and atmospheric than Mirror's Edge's city with its concrete, glass and metal. The original game's location feels like a place that could already exist now; Catalyst's city of Glass feels almost entirely like a video game location.
Aja on 22/4/2025 at 17:15
Quote Posted by Yakoob
So I finally got
Balatro for my tablet and after 3 days I beat my first run. I thought "well that was nice" and thought I'd leave it at that, as I'm not usually a fan of roguelikes or replaying. And yet, something about it made me wanna go back, and I now beat the game with three decks. Gonna try to beat it with at least 5 to unlock all the challenges.
That being said, I find myself falling onto the same strategies each run. Perhaps I just haven't unloced the right jokers yet, or perhaps I'm not thinking in Portals enough, but I kind of feel there's only two viable strategies: either go ham on upgrading a mid-tier hand (like a straight or a flush) and just get it powered up to breeze thru most blinds in a single hand, OR get the pants joker that increases mults every time you play two pairs and strategically groom it over the course of the game where two pairs is your winning strategy.
A lot of the top tier hands (like royal flushes) are too rare/hard to pull off that it's almost a waste trying to upgrade them (I can easily upgrade a regular flush to be more powerfu). And the lower hands (like single pairs or three of a kind) just don't have enough cards and base multipliers to ever be powerful enough to survive later blinds. Only way I can see them working if you hit just the right combo of jokers (like counting all cards in deck + extra mults), PLUS upgrade them with celestial cards, PLUS have enough tarot card upgrades that the single pairs/threes will have insane multipliers on themselves.
Since everything relies on RNG, the odds of having that sweet combination of factors is incredibly rare, so just going with the above two strats feels a lot more reliable.
The more I watched (
https://www.youtube.com/@drspectred) Balatro University, the more I realized that RNG shouldn't be much of an impediment if you're playing carefully and strategically. As he shows, basically all hands are viable in the right circumstances, but the trick is knowing how to maximize the odds of getting what you need, usually by amassing money early (he calls it "getting your economy online") and then manipulating the deck into being more likely to give you whatever hands best suit the particular combinations of jokers you receive. So in that sense, yeah, having all the jokers unlocked is important although some are only useful in very specific scenarios. And he's also great at knowing when to pivot, when to abandon an early game strategy to something more lucrative later on.
After winning a few rounds and feeling like Balatro was good but was maybe not grabbing me like it was supposed to, watching a few of his videos really opened my eyes to the depth and elegance of this game, and it kicked off a sort of second phase, where I started to play more deliberately. And that's the main reason I kind of bristle at the common claim that it's all about dopamine-fueled rushes of numbers going up. At higher levels in fact it plays more like a strategy game although I'm not math-minded enough to truly excel at it. I've won every deck on white stake and have even earned a few golds, but gold on every deck for me probably would end up being more RNG dependent because I'm not good enough at reading the cards and planning ahead. Still, that's not the game's fault.
Jason Moyer on 23/4/2025 at 02:19
Quote Posted by Thirith
mostly the horrible combat
The non hand-to-hand combat is bad on purpose, like it is in Thief, and like Thief you're not supposed to be engaging in it often if at all. Being able to use a gun is more of an "oh I fucked up" card than something you're supposed to be doing regularly, and if you're really good you can usually deal with guys without using the actual "disarm" function. In Thief your power comes from the shadows, in Mirror's Edge it comes from running and jumping. Like, one of the best bits that everyone seems to hate is the part where you have to destroy the servers, and you can deal with that objective and the guard at the top of the stairs purely by running and using the environment to vault onto that guard and hustling to the exit.
The only mandatory combat in the first game (the sequel literally locks you into areas until you defeat guards, which is one of the many reasons it sucks) is with what's-her-face, which is your basic dodge and parry or if you're feeling fancy you can use the environment but even on hard you can just dodge and parry and it's over pretty quickly.
ME should have really had a difficulty level like Expert in T1/2 where you can't kill people, and it would make sense in the context of the story since you're dealing with your sister being accused of murder and probably shouldn't be building a body count of cops.
Thirith on 23/4/2025 at 06:02
That's true, but some of the areas and encounters are designed pretty badly in that respect: the boat, the atrium stairs, or the rooftop bit where in order to continue you need to climb up a pipe, but there are a bunch of guys with guns that will shoot you while you're climbing. Even if you can succeed without fighting, it's less about playing well and more about being lucky with where AI end up going: as soon as you've got two or three bad guys in the same place, you're getting shot while you're pouncing on or disarming the first of them.
I'd be totally on board with the game doing what you describe well, but it doesn't do so consistently enough for me, making these bits frustrating rather than challenging. I'd probably just need to git gud, but the levels aren't designed in those instances to let me practice gitting gud.
Pyrian on 23/4/2025 at 16:27
Yeah, Mirror's Edge is clearly designed to have fights in it, even if you can avoid a bunch of them easily, and more as you get better. ...You can also turn around a few of the chase sequences and defeat enemies you're not supposed to, lol.
demagogue on 23/4/2025 at 23:19
I think it's really geared towards obsessive repetition for speed runs, and when you play it like that, then you optimize the take downs so they still flow smoothly and fast. But even still it's comparatively awkward and when you mess it up it really messes things up.
I was okay with it all things considered, since I tend to be democratic with games, liking when features or flows are mixed up, it did need some conflict element, and I got decently good at instinctively taking guys out. But for the life of me I don't understand why they double-downed on it for the sequel, playing up the worst part and denigrating the best part of the original.
Jason Moyer on 24/4/2025 at 03:00
Quote Posted by Pyrian
Yeah,
Mirror's Edge is clearly
designed to have fights in it, even if you can avoid a bunch of them easily, and more as you get better. ...You can also turn around a few of the chase sequences and defeat enemies you're not
supposed to, lol.
I can't argue with that, although I think I'd say the same thing about T1/T2. You're not ghosting those games on a first playthrough, and if you're good you can use the clunky combat to directly confront enemies. A skilled player can ghost them even though parts feel like the designers expected confrontation. I don't think you're meant to kill anything in any of those games though, and ME even gives you an achievement for not shooting anyone, which means they must have designed it with that in mind.
Thirith on 24/4/2025 at 08:42
Can't say I agree with that. In my experience with the Thief games, sure, you don't start off ghosting every level, but it's not a ghosting/fighting binary. Even while I was crap at Thief stealth, if I got seen I'd end up running, not fighting. (Killing spiders doesn't count.) And I don't think the games pushed you into fights either, which Mirror's Edge definitely does. And, differently from Thief, those times when I did end up using a weapon and killing the bad guys, it was due to those encounters being designed so frustratingly that grabbing a gun and shooting the goons felt like a "skip combat" button. It felt like a relief, for which I gladly missed out on an achievement.
As I said: I'd totally be on board with these encounters if they're designed better. There are bits in Mirror's Edge where you can avoid a fight altogether by taking a different route, and some where you can remain in the flow while taking out the bad guys, but there are others where that's just not very feasible (though I'm sure there are speedrunners that have figured out ways of doing it anyway). There are times when the encounters maintain the flow better, but the level design is too inconsistent in this regard, and the fighting mechanics are simply not well designed. IMO Catalyst was better at this (though not by much), but it squandered this by making its combat encounters too numerous and some of them mandatory. The perfect Mirror's Edge-style game that does a good job at integrating combat into its core mechanics but especially gives you enough wiggle room to avoid it altogether doesn't exist - and, sadly, is unlikely to ever exist.
Tomi on 26/4/2025 at 21:03
Quote Posted by Jason Moyer
You're not ghosting those games on a first playthrough, and if you're good you can use the clunky combat to directly confront enemies.
That has always been my main gripe with the original Thief games. Sure, the stealth action in Thief is still simply awesome, but that awesomeness quickly vanishes as soon as you get caught. They've clearly tried to make the combat fun by introducing all kinds of weapons and a block button that no one ever uses, but it seems like the first instinct for most of us is to hit the quickload button when we're caught, instead of actually trying to deal with the situation. To make things worse, most of the enemies are pretty easy to beat, but I'd still much rather just quickload because it's more fun that way. And that's a shame.
I don't think I ever really even tried fighting in Mirror's Edge.
