(shouting)

What games are you playing?

do you like them video games? what about those there romhacks? well pop on in here and talk about them then! what are you waiting for?!
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Emral
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Re: What games are you playing?

Post by Emral »

After 5 days of usage I can confirm that Ring Fit Adventure is just about as good as everyone praised it to be when it came out. I went from dying to undying within days, and am looking to tackle the World 3 boss tomorrow. For the 110 or so days before, since the release of Jump Rope Challenge, I was playing that, but 40 minutes of jumping in place proved to be not nearly as effective as 15 minutes of squatting and other activities (but mostly squatting. my legs suck)
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HatKid
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Re: What games are you playing?

Post by HatKid »

After a little silly mishap, I started reading Robotics;Notes Elite today. Like any Science Adventure VN it's real slow at the start so there isn't too much to comment on. The 3D models are decent (and since Elite improves them, I wonder what they looked like in the original version) but I can tell now that 100% will be a thing. At least there's a guide because apparently R;N is like the worst SciAdv VN to play completely blind because of it's arguably bad route structure which results in potentially skipping a few chapters because you didn't respond to Tweeps (get it, it's a Twitter parody) correctly.

Been making headway in Ys SEVEN! Last time I played I got to Kylos Villages. I'm not really into the game. I'm not a huge fan of the party system and liked the older ones' with just Adol in the "party." I know that this is the system going forward (I did play Memories of Celceta earlier) unless they change it. I hear Ys VIII is really good so I plan to get it someday, but not for a while because I'm starting to feel Ys fatigue lol. The music is nice, but the bosses are not all that fun. At least in Normal you can just kind of go full aggro and heal when necessary and whittle down the bosses' massive HP bars. I hear on Hard bosses are just ultra tedious and very not fun at all so I'm glad I am playing on Normal.
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Re: What games are you playing?

Post by raekuul »

I've picked up Disgaea DS again. I have yet to get through the 3rd chapter, though a large part of that is I don't like forced grinding (which is why I haven't started Advance Wars Dual Strike back up - getting level 10 COs across the board is equal parts tedious and boring and I want those alternate costumes) and from what I remember I need to have a certain amount of combat prowess before I can start Chapter 3 proper due to needing a level 10 item (which means Item World).
Games Beaten In 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024
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Alice
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Re: What games are you playing?

Post by Alice »

HatKid wrote: 3 years agoI'm not a huge fan of the party system and liked the older ones' with just Adol in the "party." I know that this is the system going forward (I did play Memories of Celceta earlier) unless they change it.
Unfortunately that's going to be the case going forward. (Including the upcoming Ys IX from what I've seen.) Though unless you're on the higher difficulties you can largely get away with ignoring switching between party members. That's what I do on anything easier than nightmare difficulty and it works fine for me.

Also I highly recommend playing Lacrimosa of Dana. The original pc port was total garbage (it's been fixed now by someone actually competent thankfully) but the game itself is easily one of the best in the series. The way it's more open world is pretty neat and the village system is kinda interesting as well. Though if you dislike having to juggle multiple party members you'll be somewhat disappointed. There's reasonably long sections in the game where you don't have the option of playing as Adol at all. (Though the character you do get stuck with has multiple combat modes, one of which is fairly similar to Adol.)
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Re: What games are you playing?

Post by Ashan »

I've been playing a bit of Mario Odyssey for the first time since it came out.

I really don't know how to feel about this game. I remember loving it when I came out, but there was something holding me off from playing it again for 3 years, so clearly something doesn't quite work with me. There's a lot of great ideas, fun platforming stuff, and the movement tech is probably the best of any Mario game out there, but despite all that I never feel that much of a pull to play it again.

I think the issue with it is I usually want a "here and now" goal with Mario games. Generally that's "go right" or "get the star at the end" but here it's like this big world that's fun to explore the first time, but after that I'm just overwhelmed with decisions about where to go next and keeping track of areas I missed and need to get back to, and I don't really feel the need to explore any more cause I've basically seen anything, so it's just like "run around until you've done enough stuff to go to the next place."

The game's flow doesn't seem to offer much after the first playthrough. You can go back and play Mario 64 and get the same accomplishment of defeating King Bob-omb in the first level because you did a small but meaningful task that contributes to the greater goal. But it's hard to say I feel much when I see a shiny spot so I walk over there and ground pound or throw my hat at it and it gives me a moon. I didn't really work for that payoff, I just kinda noticed it and dealt with it during my aimless wandering.

There are kind of goals at the beginning of each level, where it'll highlight a few places to get to that eventually leads to a boss fight, but it doesn't feel quite as significant when you're constantly getting sidetracked with other things. If there's no urgency, it doesn't really feel like a goal.

Anyway, there's some thoughts
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Re: What games are you playing?

Post by Alice »

Finished Paradise Killer. It was overall pretty interesting but I still stand by my previous criticisms. I also feel that the trial at the end is a lot more linear than it feels it should be. Once you've gathered your evidence during gameplay, all that remains at the trial is accusing the correct people and presenting your evidence. There's no twists that come up like in Danganronpa or Ace Attorney which was kinda underwhelming. I'd basically had the right idea about who was guilty from fairly early on in the game as it turns out.

That said, though, piecing together what really happened was pretty fun.
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Re: What games are you playing?

Post by HatKid »

Alice wrote: 3 years ago Also I highly recommend playing Lacrimosa of Dana. The original pc port was total garbage (it's been fixed now by someone actually competent thankfully) but the game itself is easily one of the best in the series. The way it's more open world is pretty neat and the village system is kinda interesting as well. Though if you dislike having to juggle multiple party members you'll be somewhat disappointed. There's reasonably long sections in the game where you don't have the option of playing as Adol at all. (Though the character you do get stuck with has multiple combat modes, one of which is fairly similar to Adol.)
I see. I do plan on playing it someday! I feel like I'd be doing myself a disservice by not, especially since I have heard nothing but endless praise for the game (setting aside initial PC version troubles.) More open world does sound nice. I'm sure I'll manage, but thanks for the heads up. I imagine one can just switch between each mode without too much trouble, which doesn't sound all that bad.

I tried resuming my Fire Emblem Genealogy of the Holy War replay I started ages ago. I was on Chapter 3 and I had to speedrun it because Tomodachi Life paired Brigid and Fin. I could just use cheats (and I had to when my brother had me do this same pairing) but I'd like to at least try to do it legit this time. It was going well until RNG decided that everyone must not evade 40s and that Papilion's squad will fly towards Silvail instead of Madino like normal when I've done that chapter. I was getting frustrated and I was looking through my savestates and loaded an earlier one so I will have to redo the fight with the Cross Knights but whatever, it wasn't a big deal. The game really doesn't want my cursed pairings (thanks to Tomodachi Life) to come to fruition apparently.
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Bean
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Re: What games are you playing?

Post by Bean »

Ashan wrote: 3 years agoAnyway, there's some thoughts
I prefer the get to the goal Marios myself since I grew up with the 2D games. 3D Land and World were basically what I wanted when the series first went to 3D. It's literally 2D Mario in the third dimension. The Galaxy games were great in that regard, too, just that it was more like Sunshine's FLUDDless levels more than anything. Either way works. I never cared for the more adventure style Mario games like 64 and Odyssey even though there are some great bits in both. It's just I want to run and jump while getting to a goal, not walk around an open field or something.

Haven't been playing much but Animal Crossing lately. Kind of wanted to spend my time editing vids or voice work stuff the last few days.
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Re: What games are you playing?

Post by thatguyif »

Ashan wrote: 3 years ago I think the issue with it is I usually want a "here and now" goal with Mario games. Generally that's "go right" or "get the star at the end" but here it's like this big world that's fun to explore the first time, but after that I'm just overwhelmed with decisions about where to go next and keeping track of areas I missed and need to get back to, and I don't really feel the need to explore any more cause I've basically seen anything, so it's just like "run around until you've done enough stuff to go to the next place."
You know, this is one of the reasons I tend to dislike the Rare "Collectathon" style games. They're very much just these meandering "explore the area for trinkets" situations that get boring quickly. It often doesn't feel like you're accomplishing much, and there's never really a clear sense of progression. When it does happen, it always seems sudden and unexpected.

Anyway, I'm both really loving and really hating Old World Blues. I love it because its narrative is super fun and hilarious. Seeing these brains in jars go about like complete buffoons and showing utter ineptitude at social things is hilarious, and the whole story feels like a fun parody of 50s sci-fi shows. (Plus the fact that two of them are perverts is great fun) The weaponry is fun, and the music you get to listen to on the radio is far more...robust than the Rat Pack/Country radio that you hear in the Mojave.

I hate that it's really difficult. I think this was one of those rush-job situations where they didn't balance it well. The enemies (especially the Roboscorpions) are bullet sponges. But more importantly, they do instant spawning, which is so dumb! Just when you think you clear out an area, 5 or 6 more guys suddenly show up, and then when those are killed, another 5 or 6 show up. On top of this, unlike Dead Money and Honest Hearts, you don't really have a companion for most of it, so you're basically fighting alone. I die a lot because I get so overwhelmed, and I'm maxed out at Level 50 with some top gear on hand.

Hopefully, I can finish it this weekend, then mop up some quests (including resetting the Archimedes quest because I will probably never return to this game and I want SUN BEAM) before entering endgame.
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Re: What games are you playing?

Post by BobisOnlyBob »

BobisOnlyBob wrote: 3 years ago April:
[..]

Mega Man: Battle Network 3! I've started this, and not gotten too far - the Zoo scenario was both hilarious and awful, such a dumb concept for a dungeon - but I look forward to picking it back up shortly. More opinions later!
Time flies, huh?

May:

Mega Man: Battle Network 3! After finishing up Doom Eternal, I went back to MMBN3 with the eager encouragement of my MM-obsessed sweetheart. Overall I think the battling is a marginal improvement over MMBN2, but the internet structure is worse than 2 - especially some of the long round trips to get into the Undernet. The endgame got far too twitchy for me, I had to rely on a savestate between Bass.EXE and the final boss to see it through to the ending, and get real clever with my deck construction to stand a chance against both. Honestly, overall, I enjoyed the MMBN "first trilogy" but it'll be a good long while before I play the latter half of the series, if ever.

Astral Chain! Behold, my coppersona. Actually that's just a silly screenshot of one of the holo-masks, but the game does provide a surprising amount of customizability for your protagonist, and I spent most of it wearing fully face-concealing goggles and a gasmask. It's a Platinum Action Game, like Bayonetta and Nier: Automata before it, but with additional investigation and slower sidequest activities. The key draw of the game, besides being a dimension-warping police officer, is your dimensional monster on a leash that acts as your combat partner, and is controlled independently using the right stick while holding down a shoulder button. You have combat buttons, it has combat buttons, you're a tag-team duo and the titular chain can snare and trap enemies for you to beat down. The plot is nothing special - it may as well be set in Tokyo-3 fighting against Angels it's so bloody Evangelion, the twists are visible from a mile away and the writing is average at best - but it definitely filled an action craving.

June:

Helltaker! Yes, I played the saucy demon meme game. It's free, c'mon! A solid hour of block-pushing shenanigans, not too taxing, genuinely fun. 100%ed it because why not for the price?

Super Crush KO! A cute platformer-brawler that lasted me a full evening - 5 hours on the nose for 100%. Not particularly deep but definitely fun and with some cute art. Enemy variety was a bit lacking, all being variations on a boxy robot design, but the bosses weren't bad at all.

Rhythm Doctor! Played the demo of this long-in-development rhythm action game with its distracting visuals, solid core rhythm, irregular time signatures and strange little storylines, from the creators of the equally odd A Dance of Fire and Ice. Clocked about two hours with it. Definitely returning to that some day, if it ever releases! I know they have an active community and a lot of music and creations already, but they're still introducing improvements to the editor and types of rhythm that can be used.

XCOM: Chimera Squad! Oh goodness I tried to like this. Maybe it's the theme of SWAT-style policing in this year in particular, maybe it's the chatty roster of fixed characters as opposed to expendable goons, or maybe it's the huge array of little UI bugs and issues, but something about this just did not click the way XCOM and XCOM2 before it did. Maybe I'll return to it, if it gets some love and attention... I somehow suspect it won't, unfortunately. I just really struggled with it. I dropped it around the end of the first major syndicate, when the difficulty suddenly spiked and I felt entirely caught-out on top of an aggravating chain of missions. The Breach system is pretty good, but having to often play what amounts to multiple small maps in succession instead of a single map felt off somehow. Just wasn't feeling it.

Final Fantasy VII Remake! Goodness. So, FFVII was literally the first RPG I played - not just the first JRPG, not the first video game RPG, literally the first RPG I ever played. It left a significant impact upon me. I've often joked that it's "tattoo'd on my heart". The weight going into this was immense, but... I feel like they pulled it off. They made the Midgar of my childhood imagination in the fact, far removed from the pre-rendered backdrops and lego-like characters of the original. They brought the slums to life, in multiple ways, and fleshed them out with a lot of new side-activities, a lot of which I genuinely enjoyed. Some parts of the story are a little padded, but frankly it works for me. The combat system was a harmonious blend of lessons learned from the fast particle-effect maelstroms of Kingdom Hearts and FFXV, and the classic turn-based menus. Party combat worked well - special love for the Hell House and other large boss fights, but the system really shined in the solo battle on the Shinra HQ rooftop. Square and Nomura proved they could remake Final Fantasy VII...

and then they gave me a whole host of misgivings, right at the end of it all. So the game constantly has these anomalous elements sprinkled in, suggesting this is a sequel rather than a remake - Sephiroth (as hallucinatory psychic presence) and Aerith both seem to know a lot more about what's going to/what has already happened, events are coerced to go the right way by "Whisper" spirits, Barret gets fatally wounded and saved by a Whisper spirit, and the game's last chapter... all the characters start talking about Fate in a very disjointed way, throw themselves into a pocket dimension and fight a Whisper Sephiroth, supposedly 'breaking the chains of fate' in the process. Huh? Is this how they're saying from here on out, they're diverging from the original plot? Or is this just Nomura attempting to satisfy his fetish for cloaked figures? It doesn't inspire hope for the second part, whenever that happens... but I'm probably in for the long haul anyway. Suffice to say, it's left me as anxious leaving as I was going in, despite everything else being damn-near pitch perfect. Quite the feat, really.



A Short Hike! A charming little 3D indie game about ascending a mountain on a rural vacation island as a little bird-person. The mountaintop is the only place you can get phone reception, and you're waiting for an important call, so it's up you go, spiralling around the surprisingly large environment and gliding from place to place, upgrading your ability to jump and fly with collectable feathers, doing little chores and playing games with the locals and other visitors. It has an atmosphere akin to Animal Crossing but with more direction and purpose, as you climb walls like a softer, kinder Celeste and pick up items to mess around with. The inventory system feels a little awkward, but the overall atmosphere and presentation is so delightful and the fundamental feeling of jumping and gliding is great - even once you reach the top of the mountain, you'll likely re-ascend it a few more times just for the joy of doing so with more feathers, ascending fast and descending in a glide reminscent of Super Mario 64's Wing Cap. A lovely warm hug of a game. I picked this one up through both the Epic store and the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality, so if you're reading this you probably have it for free too.

July:

The Void Rains Upon Her Heart! A side-scrolling boss-rush shooter that is also a roguelite, and that one emotional indie game about feelings and depression and overcoming trauma through the healing power of love. Shoot those bosses with love! It's like Undertale's symbolic combat mixed with Gradius. Really enjoyed this, but it's also in early access, so despite the fact it already has an impressive array of bosses to experience and unlock, and a pair of final bosses to encounter, it doesn't actually have closure for its narrative beats yet, which are surprisingly interesting. The setting is a somewhat alien and exotic setting, focusing on the outcasts of a cherub-like race of creatures, surviving in the wilderness far below their civilization's cities. The music and boss designs in particular are very enjoyable. This damn game has almost 400 achievements on Steam, and they're actually tangible - every Steam achievement matches an in-game challenge that unlocks permanent progress and varieties of enemies and weapons and abilities for your heart-shaped ship/soul. Definitely one I'll swing back around to when it has some more major updates, even though I already clocked 30 hours with it!

Outer Wilds! My stars. What a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful game. A descendant of the legendary Myst for sure, but set in a tiny-scale clockwork solar system, where the planets and their movements are relevant physics to you as you jet between them in your boxy one-man wooden spaceship, looking for clues as to the previous civilization, what texts and technologies they left behind, and to solve the mystery of why

the sun explodes every 22 minutes, sending you back in time to right before your launch

. Every celestial body is its own remarkable little puzzle-box, some containing pieces for others or guiding you onto the next - or back towards something overlooked. Piecing together the mystery, unravelling the history of the Nomai civilization and your connection to them, learning the quirks of the game's spaceflight and tools - your probe launcher, signal scope and translation tool - come together in a beautiful harmony. And speaking of beautiful harmony... just listen to the title screen music. If that doesn't set your heart astir, I don't know what to tell you. This game is indescribably wonderful, reduce-me-to-tears beautiful. Maybe it's just me, but it resonated down to a core I didn't know I had.

Escaped Chasm! A very short Yume Nikki-style RPGMaker title about wandering around a house as a poor girl with anxiety, whose parents haven't returned home, as strange events begin to occur. Literally less than 30m long, it's a cute first attempt at an atmospheric RPG by Temmie Chang, of Undertale fame, and the music is composed by Toby Fox. Largely simple graphically, but also contains some more involved animated sequences. Charming, but also very familiar. It's also the prequel to...

Dweller's Empty Path! Another in the same vein as Escaped Chasm, with a much more involved scenario and larger world. Still no combat or mechanical systems besides some items you can pick up and deliver to other people or read, it's clearly laying the groundwork for a much larger story, building a fantasy world of kingdoms and monster-people, against a lovely 8-bit Gameboy aesthetic. Check the trailer, it's got a lovely relaxed retro vibe and more of Temmie and Toby's wonderful work - now joined by Camellia, too. It's a real charmer, has lovely vibes and it's a good way to while away a lazy afternoon.

August:

Into the Breach! Wait, I played this to completion a long time ago. Why'd I dig it back out? Azure Lazuline, creator of Copy Kitty, made these Voltaic Constructs based on the Copy Kitty enemies as playable mechs and I wanted to try them out. They're a blast! If you like ITB, play these!

Phantasy Star Online 2! I want to love this game. I loved PSO1 on the Gamecube. But it's clearly a 10-year-old MMO, drowning in systems and events and currencies, with a UI that makes PSO1 look elegant and streamlined. There's just so many menus, tabs, systems all fighting eachother... it's just too much for me. Even with a veteran and my girlfriend alongside me, it just didn't hook me like Pioneer 2 once did. Real shame. Took a few hours one rainy sunday and it was a nice jaunt, but... I can't really see myself coming back to it.

Sayonara Wild Hearts! This is a playable pop-album, and can either be seen as Runner game with QTEs, or a very relaxed rhythm game - maybe more of a groove game! Yeah, I like that. This game is groovy. It's a bisexual-lighting :bi_pride: festival of girls in suits on motorbikes, travelling through trippy mindscapes and fighting to the wonderfully chill beats. Check the trailer, because showing you any one specific level would feel like robbery of the experience. The whole album is about an hour long, and theoretically you could beat the whole game in that time, but if you're like me and seek to do the challenges and get Ranks and try the continuous playback mode, it'll be a solidly fun 10 hours or so which'll leave you humming the tunes for weeks after. What a delight.

Fall Guys! 👑 My current crown count as of writing is 21. I made it to Rank 40 just in time for the end of Season 1, and I have been enjoying Season 2 quite a lot. I'm Fall Guy 1200, and I currently look like Sonic the Hedgehog. I'm a pro at Slime Climb, and Fruit Chute is my personal nemesis. This is probably gonna stay on my active-play list, like Warframe and Ring Fit have this year. It's just a damn fun game.

September:

Dicey Dungeons! A chance-heavy roguelike by Terry Cavanagh, eclectic indie creator of Super Hexagon and VVVVVV. Heavily draws from boardgames with its primary mechanic - you have equipment cards, and you socket them with rolled dice to activate them and deal damage to your very silly opponents in one-on-one battles as you explore a very simple gameshow-themed dungeon. Emphasis is on tactical use of equipment, changing the dice that don't work for you to your favour, and building a set of equipment that'll take down the more challenging enemies as you ascend floors while managing your health. Runs are usually short and sweet, capping out at about 20 minutes per run for the basic classes and peaking at 30m per run for the Witch with her complicated spell-equipment system. I managed to beat 35 of the 36 in-game chapters, only Witch 4 eluding me, and beat the final boss in the unique chapter dedicated to them - after over 60 hours in it!! This ended up comparing to FTL and Into the Breach for how long it hooked me, but the plasticky gameshow aesthetic and goofy enemies didn't quite have as much charm to my nerd sensibilities as those sci-fi delights. Definitely worth a roll of the dice.

Disco Elysium! Welcome to Revachol. A spiritual successor to Planescape: Torment made by the quixotic european worker collective "Studio ZA/UM", chooses a much more mundane setting than its precursor - a postwar harbour district, Martinaise, wracked by revolution and occupation, scarred by its history, where drugs and petty crime are rife. And instead of the Nameless One, you're just a nameless guy - a guy who just woke up after the bender to end all benders with acute retrograde amnesia, with no knowledge of where he is, who is is, or much of anything until you try and get him dressed and head out of his trashed hotel room. Turns out you're a cop of some kind (man, what is it with all these cop games on here in this year of all years) and you're supposed to have been investigating a murder. Except the murder ties inexorably into some extremely tense local politics, some urban mysteries, a doomed commercial area and maybe even your own drug-and-drink-blitzed past. The conversation system in this game is excellent, with each of your 24 skills automatically rolling and chiming in to you with their own takes on situations, suggestions on courses of action, and even arguing with eachother about what to do and what to say. A skill left undeveloped takes minimal presence and form, while one you invest points into will begin to assert itself over your personality, even potentially shaping your political beliefs and ability to not piss everyone else off. I naturally elected to be an intellectual, logical commie who occasionally showed empathy and insights into the nature of the world, a superstar cop who was nonetheless trying to recover himself and his reputation - and I absolutely bungled my way through the whole thing, made a farce of myself and barely kept my shit together, the payoff being one of near-complete failure where I somehow still managed to keep a desk job at the end of it all. It was a bloody great time, both funny and tragic, and I'll happily play it again - maybe as a jackbooted fascist, or as a new romantic, or a stuffy Moralist... the potential here is vast. One for people who like reading grim european and russian fiction about miserable screwups in depressing malaise - Kafka, the Strugatsky brothers, that sort of thing - or maybe for people who really love Planescape and esoteric tabletop RPGs where failure is more interesting than success.

October:

ZeroRanger! A vertical-scrolling shooter with the iconic premise: Aliens are attacking! You're a lone air supremacy fighter! Go! Destroy the alien commander! This one took a while to grow on me, and there's a little more to it than the simple initial concept. There's a lot of Buddhist symbolism and subtext in this, as well as some rather clever lore, but it might take some digging to get to. It's a relatively entry-level title for shmup fans - touhou veterans will blitz it - but it has a generous continue and start-from-level system that is intended to be used to make progress. It's rich with cute references to classics of the genre, even getting to fight Vic Viper and the R-Type as midbosses. The strangest element of it visually is its limited palette - by default, the game only uses green and orange, but it works surprisingly well, in an Ikaruga-like way of contrast. Even the enemy, the alien fleet, is named Green Orange. Yes, in exactly that way. A bitter start but a sweet end for this unusual fruit. Take a bite, give it a try, but it's not for everyone.

The Solitaire Conspiracy! A short game from Bithell, creator of Thomas Was Alone and the Circular games. It's... literally solitaire. As in, the card game. Like Freecell? Yeah, it's Freecell without cells. And the cards have cool spy gang themes, and there's FMV movies inbetween games about heists, and each game is presented as a heist or robbery or infiltration or breakout... but it's literally still solitaire. Very, very pretty solitaire but... you can finish it in two hours, and it doesn't have the narrative richness of either Circular title. The mystery and twist is obvious. The payoff is satisfying but predictable. Pick it up if it's on sale and you absolutely love playing solitaire, for some reason! I bought it because hey, Bithell, I love these games, but... eh. I shoulda waited. It's nice, but not the best by far.

Lucah: Born of a Dream! A 2D, top-down, dark and scribbly soulslike. A short stamina gauge rules your ability to attack and dodge, and you can parry by precision-timed dashes. There are bonfires - here, crosses that act as campsites - and limited healing opportunities. Like its genre-cousin Blasphemous it's a grim fable about religion and trauma, but rather than a gore-soaked journey of penitence, you're a scribbly... angel? demon? abused child? manifestation of a churchgoer's guilt? Who must journey across bleak, surreal, nightmarish landscapes fighting vast and strange monsters with your ability to manifest waves of energy as a weapon. In search of what? Redemption? Freedom from the slowly-creeping Corruption, a displayed percentage that raises slowly with every second and by whole percentages every time you die, with no indication of its meaning? Death? This game is abstract and deeply unsettling, but its themes of trauma and church abuse and religious imagery is clear as day - a rival character you must fight multiple times is named Christian - but the specifics are left vague, distorted and dark, literally and figuratively. Gonna have to sleep on this one and think about it some more. What a dark little fable. Definite strong content warning for this one - it doesn't just deal with abuse and faith, it has strong references to

suicide

and I definitely interpreted some scenes as resembling

rape and/or child abuse

. Not exactly a sweet little game. All that said, the combat is surprisingly compelling and very configurable with light and medium and shot attacks, a good dodge/parry mechanic, and a surprising number of "Mantras" (primary weapon types), "Virtues" (passive abilities) and "Familiars" (support shot types). The most interesting aspect is the healing - you have at most two full-heals which must last you from rest to rest, but you can "Rewind" a limited number of times if a combat that goes sideways, preventing death but also restoring all enemies too. Lucah does have some small UI and control issues, but they feel like a simple lack of polish rather than something meriting condemnation. I suspect I'll be thinking about this one for a while yet.

...caught up again. I think. I hope I didn't miss anything... too many games...

Edited to add Escaped Chasm, Dweller's Empty Path, and A Short Hike!

And of course, I still play Warframe (although intermittently, taking a break right now) and Ring Fit Adventure (less than I should).
Last edited by BobisOnlyBob 3 years ago, edited 3 times in total.
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Ashan
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Re: What games are you playing?

Post by Ashan »

BobisOnlyBob wrote: 3 years ago Mega Man: Battle Network 3! After finishing up Doom Eternal, I went back to MMBN3 with the eager encouragement of my MM-obsessed sweetheart. Overall I think the battling is a marginal improvement over MMBN2, but the internet structure is worse than 2 - especially some of the long round trips to get into the Undernet. The endgame got far too twitchy for me, I had to rely on a savestate between Bass.EXE and the final boss to see it through to the ending, and get real clever with my deck construction to stand a chance against both. Honestly, overall, I enjoyed the MMBN "first trilogy" but it'll be a good long while before I play the latter half of the series, if ever.
I remember as a kid the first time I finally beat Bass and then found out that wasn't even the final boss and was immediately murdered I almost snapped my GBA in half in frustration.

Protip I was given by a kid at school that I've always used for that final boss: throughout your playthrough wait until you get a wood-type style change and take that with you all the way to the endgame. The buster charge shot is a rapid multi-hitting tornado 2 spaces ahead of you, which is perfect for Alpha since the biggest annoyance with him is the regenerating barrier around his core, but one shot with the tornado takes it out again.
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Re: What games are you playing?

Post by thatguyif »

BobisOnlyBob wrote: 3 years ago
Astral Chain! Behold, my coppersona.
ABAB

I kid I kid

So I finished Old World Blues last night. Very interesting way to end this story, when you come to face the villain and find that

he's a Ritalin/Adderall junkie who made himself the heel to protect the world from his former friends, and that he practically programmed himself and the others to go senile

, and that the vast majority of his announcements were

pre-recorded on an amphetamine trip

.

Again my beef stands with the difficulty, especially with the end fights. First the half dozen or so robo-scorpions in front of the Forbidden Zone entrance, which are a pain in the ass to kill and can cut you up good even with Power Armor. Then the X-42 itself, which has WAAAAAY too much HP, plus it's only weak to a couple of my weapons, which aren't particularly strong. While the game does give you some freebie damage boosts, it almost feels like if you play this late-game, you're practically expected to disable it because you cannot take it on directly.

Anyway, today I'll clear two of the remaining quests I wanted to clear, and then finish the first ending if I have time? We'll see.
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Re: What games are you playing?

Post by Whimsical Calamari »

Finished my practically blind Mario 64 run. An interesting experience overall - dated, seemingly unfinished, bizarre lack of polish in certain key spots. Fun overall, though. I see no reason besides nostalgia why anyone would put it in a Top 10 list, but it was enough that I at least enjoyed myself for the first 100 stars.
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Re: What games are you playing?

Post by KobaBeach »

hacked my 3ds and vita in the same day (not in that order) and christened them with mario maker 3ds and blazblue continuum shift respectively

blazblue cs is a really fucking good weeb fighter, played two arcade mode matches as bang shishigami and man i'm very bad at this game but i'll try to learn the ropes on occasion. im gonna try to play through the story modes of the blazblue games to get my weeb on

mario maker lowkey sucks because you can't share levels but just as a little timewaster to make levels in and play when you're feeling bored, it's superb. started making a pipe maze cave level, ofc ill make it short and also each pipe leads to a different chamber instead of it being like a weird open level where you dont know which pipe allows for progress cough cough lost pipeline
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Re: What games are you playing?

Post by thatguyif »

Found out to my dismay after clearing Mr. House's ending that Fallout: New Vegas suffers the same issue from Fallout 3 before the Broken Steel add-on that the game flat-out ends after the final quest. My hope was to make Lonesome Road the ending of my playthrough of this game, since it really sounds like a conclusion to the entire saga, with one final score to settle. Now that's thrown out the window. Sigh.

I guess at this point my plan is to play out Caesar's and NCR's routes next. Then, either I'll go into Lonesome Road after NCR is done, or go through the remainder of Yes Man's route up to the final quest and then do it. If I play every night for the remainder of the week, I might be done next weekend.
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Re: What games are you playing?

Post by Ashan »

Still playing Mario Odyssey, been having more fun the last couple sessions. I find if I throw on a podcast to split my focus a bit, I spend less time stressing about all the stuff I'm missing
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Re: What games are you playing?

Post by KobaBeach »

Started Suikoden 1 on the Genso Suikoden 1&2 collection, just so I can have Suik on the go.

Spending yesterday and today trying to get back where I was, as of this writing I'm at the Elf Village and of the towns I've been to I still have to recruit Gaspar, Meg and Antonio. Trying out Lorelai and she's like unironically good? Pahn is at the early 20s and he might get to 30 long before

Milich and Teo

, also been trying to explore runes and finally found out what the "Holy Rune" (Divine Transportation Rune) does. oof

Fire Rune is best
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Re: What games are you playing?

Post by thatguyif »

Finished Lonesome Road. I lament that this wasn't an epilogue DLC, because it would've worked so well as such. A final story to fully understand not just what happened in the previous DLCs, but to define you, the Courier, and who you are, and representing the final message you deliver. While Ulysses' voice got grating at times, and he was often vague about what was going on, he was still a very interesting character. I felt compelled to understand why he was after me all these years, and what sins I supposedly committed. Gameplay-wise, I had few complaints, other than maybe the new big weapons (the Red Glare and the Shoulder-Mounted Machine Gun) aren't all that useful, and this DLC seemed very particularly linear (though I don't necessarily see it as a bad thing). Overall, probably the best of the four DLCs.

That said, the real great thing about Lonesome Road was ED-E. He was so adorable! You really wanted to help him out.

So sad he never made it home

:cry:

I was almost foiled from finishing this DLC because my sound card suddenly decided to run all games on surround sound mode, and I don't know why.

Alas, tomorrow we finish Fallout: New Vegas.
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Re: What games are you playing?

Post by KobaBeach »

Made it to Shasarazade. Just have Sonya left to recruit in Suikoden. Game's addicting.
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Re: What games are you playing?

Post by HatKid »

Finished Ys SEVEN! i'm glad the game got better because the first half was so boring. Overall I liked it decently, but there were some things that annoyed me. The biggest one is the bosses. Even on Normal they felt like they had way too much HP for how much damage you do. Sometimes it wasn't a big deal, but most of the time bosses felt tedious. Also, I totally died inside when I saw how much HP the

Root of All Existence(TM) part that Adol fights

, but luckily it wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be. I liked the music.

... And after SEVEN, I journey through a game of much lesser quality, Assassin's Creed Unity. I played a small chunk of it a few years ago, but now I'm back with a vengeance to rush through the game as fast as possible so I can say I played it and uninstall it from my poor computer, freeing up 50GB of space. The biggest problem I've encountered other than some silly, typical bugs, are the extremely unresponsive controls. Sometimes I really have to press the dang buttons multiple times before Arno decides to do anything. It's not my controller. Playing Unity kinda just makes me wanna go back and finish ACII because I still haven't despite getting near the end.
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Re: What games are you playing?

Post by thatguyif »

Finally, it is done. 163 hours later, I'm finished with Fallout New Vegas. And in keeping with the spirit of the game, it crashed during the credits.

I loved this game, despite its many flaws. It's a far superior game to Fallout 3 in many ways. In particular, rather than making a janky case of faux-patriotism (which was deeply embedded in FO3 for somewhat obvious reasons, and from what I understand is prominent in FO4 to some extent) and cliched cinematic storytelling, the narrative actually puts a more realistic lens on the post-apocalyptic world and puts you in the midst of long-simmering tensions rather than being a hero. It's not stuck-up about morality the way Bethesda's main writer Emil Pagliarulo (someone please #MeToo that shithead so he can be thrown to the curb with Avellone) is. There's no clean good ending, as you're bound to piss off somebody for siding with one faction on another or how you get to that point. Characters from and references to FO1 and FO2 felt less strung in than Harold was, and they were given respect. Exploration felt rewarding for the vast majority of the game as opposed to only a minority in FO3. Places felt connected to sidequests and the main quests more often than not. Fighting was cool, especially when you had fun weapons to play with. The climax to the game, the Second Battle of Hoover Dam, was wonderful to play on all 4 paths. All the dialogue checks were fun too.

Main beefs:
  • Game is buggy as hell. The main issue being loading/saving. I'd suffer so many crashes on load I'd sometimes just quit for the night because I was tired of restarting the game (and early on, restarting my computer before I figured out how to access Task Manager in that state). But there were other issues as well, such as mods not really working (this game has a light number of mods just because I couldn't get graphics mods to work and such). I understand Obsidian had to put this out for the 2010 holiday season, but still...
  • Early game was kind of sluggish, in part because you're so weak, but also because there weren't a lot of weapons to really use. It only picks up when you have both a human and non-human companion, which helps mitigate most attacks against you.
  • I didn't really invest much time in any of the crafting elements because it was too broad and complicated. But it also didn't really matter once you moved into mid-late game, because by that point you have enough supplies to handle most issues.
  • Up until

    you confront Benny

    , you basically have to play nice with the NCR to have an okay time, which means a good third to half of the game. The Legion only has a couple areas they actually control, and you get into the Strip just when you hit that spoiler point. It would've been nice to have more depth to the other factions pre-spoiler. (Also, I didn't know/like that the game gives you a rep reset button after the spoiler point.)
  • The weapon mods are incredibly expensive, and it's not really until you get to late-game, and arguably completing Dead Money, that you can afford them or purchase special-grade weapons.
  • The Legion feels incredibly stubbed. You can't actually explore Legion territory outside the two edge villages they control (the Fort doesn't count), so you can't really see for yourself what they are outside of what others tell you. It makes siding with them harder to justify.
Still, I loved this game. That said, I don't see myself returning to this game. I played a shit ton out of it, and I got what I wanted from it. Outside of

saving Cass in the main game and sparing Dean Domino in Dead Money,

there's little I would do different in a second playthrough, save maybe focusing on a more melee/unarmed/explosives build to start (since those I essentially ignored). Hardcore Mode sounds way too much a pain in my ass to play. Getting mods working would be great, but I just don't have the patience for such cosmetic things.

Not sure what I'll do next. Probably go back to Starlink to just run through the main game and finish it. Or I might just muck around with the demos I've piled up. I will say that I won't play such a big game for a while, maybe until next year. Probably GTA IV would be next in this regard, or Hyrule Warriors (I know that game's like, what, 300+ hours to complete?).
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Re: What games are you playing?

Post by KobaBeach »

Beat Suikoden. Terrific game, definitely on my top 10! The

Golden Hydra

final boss felt very sudden, but that's because I was expecting a longer play session earlier this morning, still lasted like two hours. Didn't have too much trouble with it since I polished my weapons and brought a lot of healing items. The sequel is even better so I'm hype.

Continuing a playthrough of FFI PSX. It's just the GBA version with the Vancian Magic which makes it the definitive version in my eyes. Can't grind as easily on the peninsula of power (my monk Max (まっくす, yeah hiragana suck my whole ass) kept eating shit). Party is Warrior/Monk/White Mage/Red Mage (Takeru/Max/Viktor/Andrei). Made it to Melmond and taking a break on my PC before continuing.

thatguyif wrote: Emil Pagliarulo (someone please #MeToo that shithead so he can be thrown to the curb with Avellone)
im down with complaining about bethesda's terrible writing (at least listening, still have to play post-oblivion stuff to experience the assness) but i'd rather not wish the role of a sex pest on someone. that kind of undermines the struggle people go through when sexually harassed

not mad just be careful with your words

fuck avellone and his salty /v/irgin rpg codex asskissers though yolo
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Re: What games are you playing?

Post by raekuul »

Taking a quick break from Disgaea DS to play through Ocarina of Time 3D again. Man this is gonna be weird without sound cues to rely on.
Games Beaten In 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024
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Re: What games are you playing?

Post by thatguyif »

KobaBeach wrote: 3 years ago im down with complaining about bethesda's terrible writing (at least listening, still have to play post-oblivion stuff to experience the assness) but i'd rather not wish the role of a sex pest on someone. that kind of undermines the struggle people go through when sexually harassed

not mad just be careful with your words

fuck avellone and his salty /v/irgin rpg codex asskissers though yolo
I mean, how else do you get rid of someone like Pagliarulo these days? A careerist whose fuck-ups in writing are tolerated because he's in a somewhat insulated position? Seems someone with that much power only falls when they do something that particularly egregious/offensive/criminal. (And honestly, I feel like #MeToo itself has kind of undermined the struggle for victims of sexual harassment and sexual assault while at the same time enforcing the social status quo here. But that's another matter.)

And for what it's worth, Bethesda has plenty of awful folks. This guy I know started working for their TES Online studio last year, and I know him as being racist (of a certain kind).
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Re: What games are you playing?

Post by Nast »

Heyyyy I finished God of War II, it only took me over half a month to finish a 10-hour game, what of it

The last third of it really took a turn for the obnoxious, but otherwise it's a fairly decent game, definitely gorgeous and super well-polished for a PS2 title. Compared to the first game it's basically more of that, with some quality of life improvements and some added mini-games that aren't all that fun. If I had to pick one out of the two, I'd probably have to say I prefer the first, though it's been like a year since I last played it. This one's enjoyable moment-to-moment but those last levels really brought the whole thing down for me. I like how it ended on a cliffhanger but I don't own a PS3 so I guess I'll never see the finale lol
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