What games are you playing?

[BobisOnlyBob]

Might go back Into The Breach

100% Achievements on Into The Breach! Shifting that onto the 'replayable' list and now looking for something new to play...

Also Copy Kitty added two new Beta Achievements, breaking my perfect 100% on that, again! Oh well, guess I'll have to play it when it updates ~

[BurntTenda]

I picked up MGSV: Definitive Edition.
The Phantom Pain is pretty fun, and I like how sandboxy the missions are.
It doesn't feel quite like a Metal Gear game, but I enjoy it still.

[Alice]

Been playing Ys: Memories of Celceta. It's interesting to finally see some of Adol's past from before he became an adventurer. Oh, and the game's pretty good too. The upgrading system is fairly different from other Ys games but not necessarily in a bad way. My only complaint about it is that the basic type of upgrade for weapons/armor makes them do more damage/defend against more damage but other than the upgrade rating for that type ranging from 0-9 it doesn't actually reflect exactly how much of an improvement it is which makes it a bit difficult to tell if a new un-upgraded item is better than your current upgraded one just because it has higher stats.

[Bean]

And the PSP version of Symphony of the Night is beaten. Got all three endings along the way since I forgot the best one's tied to map completion percentage. Kind of glad about that. Still one of the best in the series. Mm-hmm.

[Ashan]

Ended up impulse buying Mega Man X Legacy Collection for Switch, and hopped straight into Mega Man X4 because I've never played anything beyond X3 before. I'm playing with Zero who I assume is more the easy mode because his sword is pretty damn strong? It's been a lot of fun though. Managed to find all the heart containers, 2 subtanks, and I guess a weapon energy tank(?) without really trying.

It's not 100% blind because raocow did play it not too long ago but I kinda only passively watch those videos and don't remember much (didn't remember any boss weaknesses, especially since the abilities Zero gains are so different from typical boss weapons).
For context to how little I know about this game -- just last night while I was in the stage for my second to last maverick I tapped jump in the air and suddenly realized I had gained a double jump at some point. I literally didn't realize that I had that ability, I'm not sure if it came with the air dash or what but it would have been helpful on plenty of occasions.

[BobisOnlyBob]

now looking for something new to play...

Played Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice over the weekend. Potent. Impressive stuff. Would recommend to many. 7/10 Action game with a 10/10 story.

Started SOMA, but an irritating relative ruined the atmosphere so I saved and stopped before the plot really kicked off.

I continue to add games to the queue to push Warframe's inevitable claim on my soul back.

[Bean]

For context to how little I know about this game -- just last night while I was in the stage for my second to last maverick I tapped jump in the air and suddenly realized I had gained a double jump at some point. I literally didn't realize that I had that ability, I'm not sure if it came with the air dash or what but it would have been helpful on plenty of occasions.

For X4, reading the weapon descriptions will help, but they should've just kept the preview demos to make things easier. You get the double jump after beating Split Mushroom. It's called Kuuenbu or Air Waltz. It lets you also do the circling spinning sword strike thing, too.

Guess my Street Fighter kick's not completely gone because I decided while I'm borrowing the PSP to play Street Fighter Alpha 3 MAX.

[Ashan]

For context to how little I know about this game -- just last night while I was in the stage for my second to last maverick I tapped jump in the air and suddenly realized I had gained a double jump at some point. I literally didn't realize that I had that ability, I'm not sure if it came with the air dash or what but it would have been helpful on plenty of occasions.

For X4, reading the weapon descriptions will help, but they should've just kept the preview demos to make things easier. You get the double jump after beating Split Mushroom. It's called Kuuenbu or Air Waltz. It lets you also do the circling spinning sword strike thing, too.

Good to know. As I was playing through I was having little to no recollection of what came from where or even what all my abilities were.
Managed to finish off the game though. Really enjoyed the final boss, (first couple phases anyway, I feel like I mostly tanked the final phase).

Now onto an X playthrough.

Also,
ENERGY VINEGAR

[underFlo]

dug up my 3ds and got warioware gold and man what a fun game

the main menu theme fucking rules and the challenge modes are super neat too

especially gamer which is great to have here, split screen for its faster iteration times, wario watch for the hectic gameplay it leads to and i bet wario interrupts can be fun

[Crow]

been playing la-mulana 2 and thus far it absolutely is more la-mulana
except it controls better and has all these little quality of life fixes and feels at least a bit more player friendly from the start
but not "easy" or anything as much as just, less obtuse mostly. digging it tbh.

[Bean]

Street Fighter Alpha 3 MAX wound up being great. I liked the new characters and better loading times from the PS1 version of the game. Since I'm not a competitive multiplayer dude, just fighting the computer through the Arcade and World Tour modes was enough for me. Basically, my favorite traditional fighter got even better on the PSP. Ha-ha.

[BobisOnlyBob]

I continue to add games to the queue to push Warframe's inevitable claim on my soul back.

Momodora: Reverie was surprisingly easy! I got the True Ending and Pacifist achievement together at the same time on my first run. Gonna finish up the map and the bonus boss tonight, probably a bit of achievement hunting.

Scalak is a relaxing little puzzle game. Not much more to say than that - kind of feels like a child's toy extended for the bored adult puzzle aficionado.

I am too much of a chicken-wuss for SOMA, even on Safe Mode. Also I do not like physics objects that are scattered everywhere and easy to trip over and bump into and you're expected to pick up and rotate and throw. I could've sworn it was the Source engine from the way it felt, but apparently it's this thing.

[Alice]

been playing la-mulana 2 and thus far it absolutely is more la-mulana
except it controls better and has all these little quality of life fixes and feels at least a bit more player friendly from the start
but not "easy" or anything as much as just, less obtuse mostly. digging it tbh.

I feel that the early game doesn't have quite enough guidance though. LM1 already didn't have a huge amount of guidance in the early game but it feels like there's less guidance thus far while having more areas available for you to explore if you're decent at the game. I've only beaten the first guardian and I've explored large swathes of like 4-5 fields and parts of one or two others. And I'm not even certain if I'm going about things right or not because

I've already obtained the app to warp to backside fields and been to one of them.

Also they didn't change the whole "get useful messages after they would actually be useful" thing which resulted in me spending about an hour fighting

Nidhogg

before realizing I was supposed to finish the puzzle and just leave the room.

[HatKid]

I started Ys Origin a few days ago. I like it a lot so far! It's a nice change of pace from the traditionalish JRPGs I've been playing.

[Crow]

been playing la-mulana 2 and thus far it absolutely is more la-mulana
except it controls better and has all these little quality of life fixes and feels at least a bit more player friendly from the start
but not "easy" or anything as much as just, less obtuse mostly. digging it tbh.

I feel that the early game doesn't have quite enough guidance though. LM1 already didn't have a huge amount of guidance in the early game but it feels like there's less guidance thus far while having more areas available for you to explore if you're decent at the game. I've only beaten the first guardian and I've explored large swathes of like 4-5 fields and parts of one or two others. And I'm not even certain if I'm going about things right or not because

I've already obtained the app to warp to backside fields and been to one of them.

Also they didn't change the whole "get useful messages after they would actually be useful" thing which resulted in me spending about an hour fighting

Nidhogg

before realizing I was supposed to finish the puzzle and just leave the room.

Nidhogg

wasn't even very hard for me? Only took me a few tries but I mostly used shurikens to fight him.
I had two guardians down within like 2.5 hours or so of playing & then haven't fought another since, though. But I have two ankh jewels sitting around :V

[Alice]

Nidhogg

wasn't even very hard for me? Only took me a few tries but I mostly used shurikens to fight him.
I had two guardians down within like 2.5 hours or so of playing & then haven't fought another since, though. But I have two ankh jewels sitting around :V

Who knows, it might just be me then. I kept running out of shuriken during the fight. Iso won it fairly easily too. (Though he then proceeded to die to the other miniboss in the area which I didn't struggle with at all so who knows if the comparison is valid, lol.) It also really didn't help matters at all in my case that there's a trap door on the path to the miniboss where there's a carbuncle constantly running over the door and not triggering it so I fell prey to that like 2/3rds of the time on my way to retry the fight which kept irritating me.

I do feel like this early part of the game is a little bit too open though. Unless you really know what you're doing, you can only really access three possible areas you can make progress in right off the bat in the first game. It's definitely much more open in this one. You can get to the place past

Nidhogg

fairly easily (if you're not me, lol), there's another few areas off the same area, one of those areas has a few itself too. (

Annwfn and the Divine Fortress I think it was. Or was it Yggdrasil->Divine Fortress->Valhalla+Annwfn? I actually forget off the top of my head.

) To me at least it feels much more like the midgame of La-Mulana guidance-wise, which is fine for the midgame but really confusing for the early game.

[Crow]

i've sort of reached a point where it feels like the majority of the game is now locked behind one specific key item & i know what it is too, just that i haven't quite figured out how to get it apparently

this is after accessing and exploring like somewhere around 10 different areas tho
but i can't really say i've ever felt "lost" yet? i am over 9 hours deep atm so i expect it's coming at some point as i'm pretty low on places to explore now i feel but the flow of this game feels a lot better than the first one. heck, i didn't even get a few hours deep into the first game without a guide so

[Bean]

Mega Man X Legacy Collection here. Booted up X4 first and just flew through the game as X. Getting that one Sub Tank in Jet Stingray's stage is still the hardest thing for me in that game though. Oops!

[pholtos]

Finished all of AC4 but still have some things to collect and do for 100%.
Made it to world 3 of Gen-san the Carpenter (japan only title for gbc that I got in a gauntlet)
Considering resuming FF8, although I forget how far I've gotten.

[Alice]

i've sort of reached a point where it feels like the majority of the game is now locked behind one specific key item & i know what it is too, just that i haven't quite figured out how to get it apparently

this is after accessing and exploring like somewhere around 10 different areas tho
but i can't really say i've ever felt "lost" yet? i am over 9 hours deep atm so i expect it's coming at some point as i'm pretty low on places to explore now i feel but the flow of this game feels a lot better than the first one. heck, i didn't even get a few hours deep into the first game without a guide so

To be fair, a decent amount of it may just be me. I usually only focus on a single game at a time but Ys: Memories of Celceta released recently then before I was able to finish it, La-Mulana 2 released and Iso started his lp. (Then I have Monster Hunter World releasing some time soon but that's a far lower priority than LM2 and Celceta.) So I'm trying to wrap up Celceta while staying ahead of Iso so I don't get spoiled on much. La-Mulana is a series that tends to require your whole focus after all.

[Ashan]

Played through the 8 mavericks of Mega Man X5. The game is alright I guess but MY GOD, Alia interrupting every 3 steps to explain the most basic of platforming challenges to you is absolutely infuriating.
"Hey, that's a platform. You can step on it."
"Jump over the hole to not die."
"Be careful not to touch spikes cause spikes are bad."

And despite their ridiculous tutorializing of the game, they pull some absolute bullshit moves where you basically just have to die once before you know what to do, a la I Wanna Be The Guy (except that's the point of that game). Like, one stage Alia interrupted to tell me "be careful of the hole below you." I jump in the hole cause it's the only way forward and below is a wide open area, mostly bottomless pit, with some land off to the left. You have no way of knowing this for first try, you just have to die once then you know to go to the left on your next go.
Another example is Volt Kraken's stage. You start on the hover bike and literally before the "Ready?" text for the stage has gone away, practically before you can even realize that you're on a hover bike and get your bearings, the game just throws a hole at you which you will immediately fall into, as documented here in my first attempt:


The lives system means less than ever because they either throw so many lives at you in a stage from "rescuing" robots that you're basically always capped out, or you're in a trial-and-error stage like the beginning of Volt Kraken where you basically just continually game over and it means nothing. I was drained from my 7 lives and then probably continued 10 times before I was able to complete the intro section of that stage (while getting all the energy ball things), so what's the point of lives? Just get rid of them.

[Bean]

Aw... I was hoping they fixed Alia's constant interruptions for that version. Guess not.

[pholtos]

So I resumed FF8 for like 15 minutes, and I'm completely lost.

I start out in a hotel as some sorta awkward guy, I then talk to a woman and they talk for a long time.
Suddenly I'm on a train waking up with the trio that I sorta remember but no one was really that memorable. All I remember was one was punchy and one used some sorta sword thing. I arrive at a place and have to give a password, and naturally I don't remember said password so I see a weird scene and then go onto another train.
Then I talk to this lady who I get to name, and her dog... is also namable. All righty then, new character to use I guess, although I don't see a point in changing party member in this game so eh. I always have trouble with rpgs that contain more than a parties worth of people in your party.

So yeah uhh... that happened.

[Bean]

So I resumed FF8 for like 15 minutes, and I'm completely lost.

You're on Disc 1 getting ready for your first official mission as a SeeD graduate with Squall, Zell, and Selphie. You met Rinoa on a train in Timber and are getting ready to do that mission for her. You totally should let other people keep up in levels with you, but it's not imperative early on, and it's not hard to level up anyway in this one. There you go! FF8. It's the greatest.

[Ashan]

Finished X5. It was alright I guess. The final boss was kind of just frustrating. The first phase, when Sigma teleports to the right side of the room and throws the shockwaves at you that take up 3/4 of the screen, the ones that just take up the top or bottom of the screen are fine as long as you stick to the wall on the other end of the room, but if he does the split one where you have to jump through the center, the hitbox on those are not accurate to what is being shown AT ALL. I disagreed with being hit by it almost every time it happened.
And the second phase was pretty frustrating because the fists sometimes just wouldn't let me stand on them and I'd just fall through them and get hit multiple times. And then there's the undodgeable purple square attack. I managed to kill him using 2 E-tanks but it was a pretty close call. Probably will do another run through the game with Zero (i was mostly playing as X except for Dark Necrobat where I decided to play as Zero for some reason) but I have to say I enjoyed X4 a lot more (as a reminder, before getting X Legacy Collection I had only previously played through the first 3 X SNES games)