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Oh yeah I forgot to mention...Morter posted:Okay, you know what? I admit it. I have a loving problem.  
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Jan 26, 2019 22:28
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Well done, that game is pretty hard so that is truly an "achievement".
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Jan 26, 2019 22:33
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Not only do you have a problem, you have a solution.
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Jan 26, 2019 22:45
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Morter posted:Oh yeah I forgot to mention... They're masterworks all, you can't go wrong!
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Jan 27, 2019 06:10
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BEATEN - Dust An Elysian Tail (PS4): I'm ambivalent about this game; It has a great art style, flowing combat, and a nice old-school platformer feel. I dig the pseudo-Metroidlike components, but I don't think everything gels together completely. By the end I was ready to be done. I don't care for crafting in a game like this. Some of the checkpoints were a little too far apart, and weren't treated like checkpoints. If I ended up crafting a bunch of stuff then dying, i'd have to redo everything unless I ran back to the checkpoint and saved again. Minor complaints, I guess. It's still a fun game with some cheesy dramatic moments. PLAYING - King's Quest (2015): KQV is the first game I recall playing on PC. The whole series has a special place in my heart. Ive heard some mixed things about the new series. Guess we'll see. TheHoosier fucked around with this message at 15:05 on Jan 27, 2019 |
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Jan 27, 2019 15:02
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 New: Leisure Suit Larry 1 Leisure Suit Larry 2 Leisure Suit Larry 3 Leisure Suit Larry 5 Leisure Suit Larry 6 Leisure Suit Larry 7 Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude Celeste Life is Strange: Before the Storm Life is Strange 2: Episode 1 Friday the 13th: Killer Puzzle Distraint I have a problem.
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Jan 28, 2019 16:06
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Why not Leisure Suit Larry 4? Why was that the bridge too far?
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Jan 28, 2019 19:02
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Skwirl posted:Why not Leisure Suit Larry 4? Why was that the bridge too far? 4 doesn't exist actually. Wikipedia posted:Leisure Suit Larry 4: The Missing Floppies is the name for a never-made fourth installment, often regarded as an in-joke. The name, used by official sources and fans, refers to rumors that the reason for the cancellation of the game was the losing of the game's original production floppies, after which the developers refused to remake the game from scratch.
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Jan 28, 2019 19:29
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Been a long while since my last post in this thread so this is going to be a bit of a brain dump... CrossCells: Good but probably not quite as good as Hexcells, although it's been long enough that I don't recall why. The Cat Games: A few casual minigames featuring cats. Cute for half an hour. Alwa's Awakening: This seems underrated. A sorta Metroidvania? Not sure if that's a fair description. Retro-style 2D action adventure? Whatever it is, it's good. Cally's Caves 4: A very easy and mildly grindy budget action platformer. I had fun mowing down enemies. Voodoo Garden: The first clicker I played and probably my last. Plonked it on the second monitor and tended to it every now and again, it was all right. Geo: Okay, another sorta-clicker. But there is a lot more gameplay here, although it's pretty unpolished. Warp to planets, dig down to the core, collect stuff on the way. It's incredibly grindy but I admit I sort of got extremely addicted to this for a while. Regency Solitaire: Great to relax with. Under Leaves: A hidden object game with pleasant wildlife scenes. Cosmic Express: This is a superb puzzle game. A few of the puzzles absolutely murdered my brain. MURI: NES-inspired retro action game from Ludosity. Not one of their best, but still enjoyable enough. Princess Remedy in a World of Hurt: Another Ludosity game. This one is one of their best. Princess Remedy in a Heap of Trouble: More Princess Remedy! cityglitch: Pretty good puzzle game. Open Sorcery: Excellent interactive fiction. Nakawak: A pretty faithful mini Metroid-like but the keyboard controls are real clunky. Anodyne: Zelda-inspired adventure. Lots of fun. Firewatch: Finally got around to it and found it really compelling. I thought the ending was poignant and appropriate. Mini Ghost: And another mini Metroidvania, but this one's super solid and well-made. A Good Snowman Is Hard to Build: From the same devs as Cosmic Express. Challenging and fun but not quite as good in my opinion (although the puzzle type is different anyway). Magicians & Looters: Relatively old Metroidvania where you control three characters, each with their own abilities. I thought it was pretty good. Maybe a little wordy, though, and the humor's a little corny. Dungeon Warfare: Didn't enjoy this as much as I thought I would, though I still finished it. I can't put my finger on why that was, exactly. Maybe the traps weren't visceral enough. I think the most fun here is using a spring trap to catapult dozens of enemies into a pit at once. Orwell: Maybe the writing's a little clunky, but still an interesting game. Oxenfree: Loved this enough to immediately start a NG+ run, which was very cool. Toki Tori 2+: Elegantly designed puzzle game. Legend of Hand: Unique art and a compelling setting. Sadly overlooked but absolutely worth playing for fans of point-and-clicks. AER Memories of Old: A chill exploration/adventure game. Really enjoyed flying around the world and finding cool stuff, fragments of lore, etc. It's pretty undercooked all things considered but still fun for what it is. Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight: Well-made combat-focused Metroidvania. Undertale: I knew it was special when I reloaded after the first boss fight. The Lion's Song: Choice-based adventure. Beautiful art and unique setting in early 20th century Vienna. Really quite lovely. Shuyan Saga: VN set in ancient China. I enjoyed the story bits but there is lots of 3D martial arts combat thrown in as well, which is cumbersome and unresponsive. Probably works better on mobile. Songbringer: Turn off permadeath in my opinion, it's completely unnecessary. An enjoyable Zelda-like adventure. Dive into dungeons, get items, explore overworld, etc. Each seed randomizes the world (though not sure to what degree since I only did one run) so if you do enable permadeath you can turn it into a roguelite more or less. Avernum 3: Ruined World: I have now played through all six games in the series and since I almost never replay games, this was effectively my farewell to the land of Avernum. I will miss it. A Story About My Uncle: First-person platformers are sometimes dubious, but this one worked well enough. It gets a little infuriating in the final level, however, which is also twice as long as it should've been. Skelly Selest: Action roguelite from the dev who made Straimium Immortaly and I think I love it just as much. You can beat a run in under 10 minutes so it's perfect for quick breaks. Multiple game modes and lots of stuff to collect and unlock. Slay the Spire: When I finally burned out it was seven hours short of overtaking X3: Terran Conflict for the second spot on my longest played games. 340 and 347 hours, for the record. Card City Nights 2: I love this as much as I did the first. The card game is even better. ...yikes.
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Jan 28, 2019 21:03
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Completed: Hitman Absolution : This is the black sheep of the Hitman franchise and it is basically a watered down Hitman experience. Levels aren't open with multiple paths, a lot of the levels are gated into different sections which makes the game feel more linear. They also tried to make it way more cinematic when the best part about Hitman was always the free form murder simulation. They also included a mechanic called instinct which basically lets you become superman. You can go into slow motion bullet time or just pass by if you are wearing the same costume as them to avoid suspicion. In general it is really badly utilized, it also tells you the path of the ai. If you are playing more loosely(using guns) instinct is good and even if you are going full stealth, it just feels too powerful and it's super easy to regain the instinct meter after using it(kill someone then hide them = free instinct refill). I think on the harder difficulties there is no instinct but seriously some areas are designed to have instinct used because there is no way to get through some areas without using it's ability to increase your disguise's credibility. Another weakness is the level design. I remember the winter resort, the wine farm, corporate building, the bayous. There were so many great levels in Blood Money. Absolution has no memorable levels, the most open ended one is the Chinatown one but imo it is not good even though a lot of people remember that because of the E3 demos. Anyhow the core gameplay of assasinating people in cool ways is still there even though the level design and instinct bring the rest of the game down. Also it probably has the best story in a Hitman game even though the Super Assassin Teen basically got retconned by the reboot. I was hoping for some Kick-rear end like daughter/father team up by Agent 47 and Victoria but ah w.e. The story is interesting but the bullshit twist at the end is kinda weird with how Agent 47 basically is motivated to fulfill a promise to a dead friend who actually isn't dead and he knew she wasn't dead the whole time. So this was my only completed game since June last year. I did play other games this month like South Park The Fractured But Whole, my save corrupted on that so I will probably retry it some other time. I tried Catherine as well but it wasn't recognizing my controller on pc and it is unplayable with kb+m. Other than that I am currently playing Wolfenstein The New Order and Bloodborne. I think should finish both this coming month.
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Jan 30, 2019 06:46
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BEATEN - King's Quest Chapter 1 (2015): I didn't realize that I didn't have the full game. I did enjoy the first Chapter. In my opinion it retains the spirit of the old games with a bit of a goofier tone. I enjoyed the characters and the puzzles, with the exception of Graham. Again, a little goofy for my taste. The game itself is solid though and I will definitely keep going when I have shaved down my backlog a bit. I file this one under BEATEN due to only completing the Kindness path. PLAYING - Final Fantasy X Remastered: lol what the gently caress have I done
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Jan 31, 2019 01:59
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TheHoosier posted:PLAYING - Final Fantasy X Remastered: lol what the gently caress have I done You started playing one of the most highly-acclaimed RPGs of all time?
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Jan 31, 2019 11:57
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Just two more games in January as my long game marathon continues #8: Starlink (15 hours) - Surprisingly solid game, even without the toys. There's a recipe here for a good Star Fox game, and a recipe for a good IP on its own in future iterations. It'll just depend on what Ubisoft wants to do for the sequel (and historically Ubisoft IPs have a fantastic sequel almost every time) #9: Ni No Kuni 2 (30 hours) - One of the top RPGs Level 5 has made. It's true that the finale is a little half-baked, but this is one of the very few Level 5 RPGs to not run out of steam halfway through (the first certainly did!). The worst chapter actually is maybe Chapter 4 when they're first introducing you to a lot of stuff (Kingdoms, Army Skirmishes, etc). But this game is far and above its predecessor in all but story/characters. The kingdom building, while obviously influenced by mobile gaming, is super addictive, the action combat is simplified and not overstuffed so it stays consistently solid the whole way through. The skirmishes which play similarly to NintendoLand's Pikmin game are a decent diversion. The sidequests lean a little too much into fetching or fighting, but there's never a reason to go out of your way to fetch, because you will get all the items you'll ever need for sidequests just from playing the game and building your kingdom. If this ends up being the last traditional RPG from Level 5 (as it seems like the company has no concrete roadmap right now), they went out on a high note. Currently Playing into Februrary: Dragon Quest Builders (chapter 3), Iconoclasts (about halfway through), Kona, Mario & Rabbids (world 2), Hollow Knight
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Feb 1, 2019 02:03
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Level-5 has Yokai Watch 4 which looks closer to NnK in design and probably running off the same engine, and a horror RPG that has been in and out since 2008 but looks kind of cool.
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Feb 1, 2019 06:59
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Almost all of what I've been playing since I put down Dragon's Dogma is Nioh, slowly chipping away at missions whilst listening to podcasts. I've slowly become more confident and i'm not wanting to flip my table every time a boss cheaply kills me.
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Feb 1, 2019 07:47
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Kanfy posted:You started playing one of the most highly-acclaimed RPGs of all time? I bounced off it pretty hard when the game first came out. My comment was more about having time to actually finish it. I only managed to finish BG2 because it can be played on my phone
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Feb 1, 2019 13:17
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TheHoosier posted:I bounced off it pretty hard when the game first came out. My comment was more about having time to actually finish it. I only managed to finish BG2 because it can be played on my phone I hated the mini-game bullshit in FFX. No, I do not want to dodge 200 lightning bolts or play Blitzball.  Oh, while I'm at it. Completed: AiDol It's an OK little visual novel. Ebi-hime does interesting little worlds and is pretty good about representation and satisfying stories. Ok. I won't be beating it today. I just found out there's 4 "chapters", each chapter is a total run of the "Game". A lot of my stuff is gonna be visual novels and smaller games since I don't get to play much. I'm working through Tales of Berseria and Timespinner right now on my chances to play. 
Irritated Goat fucked around with this message at 22:13 on Feb 1, 2019 |
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Feb 1, 2019 16:48
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Morter posted:Almost all of what I've been playing since I put down Dragon's Dogma is Nioh, slowly chipping away at missions whilst listening to podcasts. I've slowly become more confident and i'm not wanting to flip my table every time a boss cheaply kills me. drat son you have good taste. Irritated Goat posted:I hated the mini-game bullshit in FFX. No, I do not want to dodge 200 lightning bolts or play Blitzball. Ya Blitzball is definitely a love it or hate it type of minigame. IF you like it you can easily 100% everything in blitzball. To be honest FFX is one of the best games to 100% and I have maybe 100% 3-4 games EVER. Ok ya it is super grindy like any JRPG but a lot of the side stuff like Ultimate Weapons, secret summons are all worth it imo. Maxing out the grid sphere and completing the monster arena are the hardest part but if you have time it's a good fun even though its a bit grindy. The monster arena bosses are harder than any story boss. I think for most people they won't have the time to 100% but unlike many other games where you 100% and just a get trophy, FFX actually has a lot of hidden stuff.
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Feb 1, 2019 16:54
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Mostly but not entirely console stuff over here. Console stuff first. BEATEN: Paper Mario. It's at least as good as everyone says. I played through a bit of it years ago and it's what got me back into accepting RPGs as games that can be fun. Now I've finished it and it stayed wonderful all the way through. I came to the N64 library late, and at the point where that whole era of games are kind of faintly embarassing—I'm pretty sure Paper Mario has secured a position as my favorite N64 game. Finishing this clears out my WiiWare/VC backlog. COMPLETED: The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks. This hooked me hard last March and was pretty much the only game I played that month... until Celeste snapped me out of it, anyway. Really enjoyed just poking around in the world messing with stuff and grabbing treasure, even if I wasn't advancing the plot, but then the endgame turned me off hard enough that I put the game down and didn't pick it back up. Said endgame involved four consecutive multiphase bossfights, with only limited ability to preserve progress along the way, the first and third of which were extremely poorly-designed, and the last of which starts extremely poorly designed. It ends very well, at least, and Spirit Tracks Zelda is so far my favorite iteration of Zelda (full disclosure: I have played neither Wind Waker nor Breath of the Wild, but this Zelda is WW Zelda's granddaughter, so feel free to assign some indirect credit to grandma if this is me being Wrong On The Internet ZOMG). As part of putting off the endgame and enjoying the main game, though I got every upgrade, collectible, technique, everything, and also maxed out my train, which I concluded requires aggressively playing in-game lotteries to do because treasure drops are slanted on a per-save-file basis to encourage you to trade treasures with others. (See also: a game with some very poor design decisions.  )The weird part is that despite having more total fun with this than I did with Phantom Hourglass, and despite it making many fewer horrible mistakes than Phantom Hourglass, I still feel like Phantom Hourglass is the better game. I think that's because my second attempt at Phantom Hourglass managed to do things that let the good parts of the design really show up, and those good parts intrinsically produced all the really terrible parts too. In conclusion, the DS Zeldas are kind of weird and polarizing to me, while more broadly polarizing games in the series like Skyward Sword I enjoyed all the way through. I got a Switch for Christmas, so Breath of the Wild is on-deck, but first... BEATEN: Super Mario Odyssey. That's just beating the base game, with 150 moons or so. The postgame is obviously enormous and I'm not willing to put this one down until I've at least taken another grand tour and fully unlocked the postgame itself. CONSOLE ON DECK: Trauma Center: Under the Knife; Phoenix Wright: Spirit of Justice; Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door; Metroid Prime; Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. An embarrassment of riches here. Trauma Center is my last unbeaten DS game, Spirit of Justice my last purchased 3DS game, and then 1KYD and MP are the only GameCube games I've acquired that I really care about, and BotW is... well, the last time I was talking Zelda in this thread I was told BotW was aimed right at me. A year of extra reviews and rumors has done nothing to dissuade me on this. But that's consoles. On the PC side I took stock of all the stuff I actually had in my Steam and GOG accounts that wasn't on the Backlog, and flipped through it to see if anything was worth adding. Let's start at both ends and move inwards, shall we? You see, I grew up with the 8-bits. I have few fond memories of the 16-bit era, even, and the early 3D systems like the N64 and PSX are mostly cringeworthy to me when I look at them now. But I'm getting older, and we're now at the point where that stuff can be nostalgia fuel. We've remade a bunch of games from the era to make them look less awful, but sooner or later we're going to get to an aesthetic that invokes early 3D the way we get stuff doing big chunky pixel art in 2D. I wasn't looking forward to it. Well. It's here. And it turns out I'm just fine with it. If we're going to do this with lots of relatively high-polygon models that are nevertheless aggessively flatshaded and extremely smoothly animated, sign me up. EDIT: As for the game itself, now that I'm done with it, it unfortunately doesn't really manage to add up to much. With no combat, a small and sparse world, and a set of dungeons where no puzzle is more complex than "stand on this glowing spot to make another spot glow, or to make a previously glowing spot now be accessible to stand on", there isn't much left for it to hang a hook on. If I didn't own it by accident I suspect I'd be a bit vexed. UNBACKLOG: Zuma Deluxe. With my console games all being Big, what PC gaming I had went to casual games, for the most part. I put several hours into this and got much further than I ever previously had. Some of this was because I figured out a way to cheat so that game-overs would not destroy my progress—but even with that I ended up getting brickwalled by level 9-4. Nevertheless, I had way more fun with this than I expected to. PC ON DECK: Apotheon, A Hat In Time, Sunless Skies, Dark Souls III. Probably Dark Souls III, really, because I'd like to get that done before Sekiro comes out. ManxomeBromide fucked around with this message at 06:07 on Feb 7, 2019 |
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Feb 5, 2019 09:47
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BEATEN: Red Dead Redemption 2 Where do you even start with a game like this? I was genuinely planning to avoid RDR2 until it was either on PC, I got a PS4 Pro or I had a lot of free time coming up. However, a friend got me this for Christmas and it felt wrong to keep it sitting around. It doesn't take long before you realise just how big of an achievement this is: every inch of the game feels as if it was created with the philosophy that money was no object (given the reports of the hellish crunch that's not necessarily a good thing). It's difficult to pin down, but there's a really clear design philosophy in the game that stands apart from regular open world games and avoids the feeling that the various gameplay (and graphics and audio) systems are independently developed modules Frankensteined together into a whole. If I had to summarise what RDR2 is trying to convey in a word it'd be 'effort'. Life for the main characters is hard, cold and violent; civilisation struggles to assert itself over nature; your character sweats, becomes filthy, loses weight from hunger, coughs and splutters; guns become gunked up with filth, horses become dirty and must be cleaned; the outlaw way of life is under constant assault from the Government. I can totally see why having to deal with all this is not everyone's cup of tea - the game is purposefully trying to get the player to slow down and put yourself in the boots of someone who scratches out a living in the wilderness. But what some write off as archaic design I see as an intentional plan to get players to approach RDR2 as more than a checklist of stats to maximise and boxes to tick off.  There's also a real sense of melancholy throughout the game. This is a prequel to RDR1, so if you've played that it's not hard to work out where the story is going, and it takes an almost indie-game approach to emotions. The core gang (and especially Arthur Morgan himself) are probably the best-written characters in the medium and the sheer length of the game means they get a lot of time to develop , with the majority of their stories being deeply miserable tales of damaged people living harsh lives. That sadness is contrasted against a stunningly beautiful world that's always teeming with life and environmental details. Simply the way it's all lit is absolutely jaw-dropping, with the diffuse light at sunset and sunrise looking like the Rockstar has gone beyond aping the visual style of Sergio Leone and more towards late Turner paintings. I enjoyed every single minute I spent with this game. Now that it's over I genuinely miss hanging out with the characters and exploring the world. I kinda wish I could scrub all memory of it from my brain and do it all over again. BEATEN: Street Fighter X Tekken  My long list of Capcom fighters is finally coming to an end, but SFxT was one I wasn't exactly anticipating. At first glance it looks like a cheapo way to re-use SFIV assets and given that the last Tekken game I played was Tekken 3 in the 90s I don't have much of an emotional connection to the characters. Plus there's this lingering odour hanging over the game after players were rightly miffed about having to pay for on-disc DLC and the whole GFWL debacle. Fortunately, someone advised me to install the awesome community patch, which strips out the GFWL stuff and adds all the DLC characters (including the PS3 exclusives!). Once all that's out of the way, SFxT is a surprisingly fun fighter, essentially combining elements of the Vs. series with Street Fighter IV. Most of the Tekken cast don't have projectiles so they've made it much easier to combo and juggle players than in SFIV. That's probably a huge turn-off to fighting pros but it enables regular Joes like me to feel like badasses and do flashy poo poo, so I dug it. There's also a gem system bolted on top that gives you modifiers during matches, but it looked fiddly so I mostly ignored it. The Community Patch locks off online multiplayer, but fortunately, the Arcade mode is actually pretty great. Characters are paired up for stories and there's a tonne of goofy trivia-based fan service based on the history of both franchises, and every duo gets animated cutscenes and a (generally deeply bizarre) CGI ending sequence. By the time I'd finished it with all teams, I'd really warmed to the Tekken cast and am considering a playthrough of that series once I'm wrapped up with Capcom. I also had some good fun with local multiplayer with friends, with the accessibility and low skill ceiling making most prefer this to USFIV. A nice surprise. BEATEN: Sonic CD  I wanted to play this so bad in the early 90s. I had a Mega Drive but never a Mega CD and being a huge Sonic fan this was built up into something special in my mind. Flash forward 25 years and Christian Whitehead's port is everything you could want in making this game available to modern audiences. Buuuuut, after having played it it's absolutely the worst 2D Sonic game and the level design is way below the standard of the 2D games. Part of it is a shift from speed and momentum to exploration, with the player expected to travel into the past and find two objects to get the true ending. This means there are four versions of each stage (Past, Present, Good Future, Bad Future), but as far as I can see if you're ever in the future version of any stage you've hosed up. Some stages are okayish, but then you've got poo poo like Wacky Workbench, which is by some degrees the most infuriatingly designed 2D Sonic stage ever. I finished it with a good ending and while it's nice to finally cross it off a list, it can't hold a candle to Sonic 2 and 3&K. BEATEN: Hacknet  A hacking simulator that requires you to either know or quickly learn UNIX terminal commands. These are stuck in my brain due to my high school having ancient 1980s computers for IT lessons, so it really felt like a blast from the past. There's no real graphics other than a GUI and the meat of the game is working out ways to break into systems and retrieve information. So, you probe your target's security, overload its proxies, hack through the firewall and then gradually bust open ports until you find a vulnerability that gives you admin access. I know it bears about as much similarity to computer hacking as Ridge Racer does to driving a car, but you really do end up feeling like a l33t hacker dude (the 90s techno music helps). The stand out mission is the one where someone requests to be euthanised, and you have to hack their pacemaker to kill them. It's one of the harder missions in the game, but worth it for the sheer creepiness of executing a broken firmware and watching his vital signs bottom out. BEATEN: Resident Evil  I'm incredibly tempted to pick up the Resident Evil 2 remake, but I am trying my best not to buy games when I have a backlog to get through. To scratch that itch(y tasty) I decided to finally conquer my demons and beat the original RE. I had this on the Saturn on original release but... it kinda gave me nightmares and I gave up before even reaching the first boss. Going back to it, time has blunted a lot of its edge and it's difficult to be terrified by the low-res models but the score and atmosphere are still quite effective in creating tension (though the voice-acting does a lot to dispel it). In addition, my memory of it was incredibly obtuse puzzles, so I was surprised to find out that most of them are pretty logical (they now remind me a lot of playing real life Escape Rooms). Anyway, I beat the Jill campaign without a walkthrough and so got the worst ending (sorry Barry  ), but hey, I finally saw the credits. BEATEN: Surgeon Simulator 2013  What if Minnie Driver from Jurassic Park: Trespasser was expected to do complex surgery? Annoyed the hell out of me to begin with, but soon you get a feel for how the controls work, what the game wants you to do and how you can be precise with your tools. It is still a game that very much expects you to gently caress up, be it accidentally buzzsawing through someone's head or losing a transplant organ out of the back of a moving ambulance. There are five operations and five environments to do them in (plus a couple of bonus levels), with the hardest by far being outer space where all your stuff is floating around in zero gravity. I beat them all, got my medical license and went on to conduct alien surgery. Really enjoyed it once I got the hang of it. BEATEN: God of War: Ghost of Sparta  Nearly rounding out my God of War series playthrough and I think I am finally tired of the formula after six games. It's a technical marvel for the PSP and better than Chains of Olympus, but I am just burnt out on fighting hordes of baddies and cyclopses and whatever with this combat. The most interesting part of the game was when you get a really brief sequence in which you're walking through a non-demon infested, non-burning town - which is a first for the series. Next up is the 2018 God of War, which I have learned has next to nothing to do with the previous games. Oh well, I'm glad I got through them all - God of War III was the highlight. BEATEN: Polybius  gently caress yyyyyeah Jeff Minterrrrrr! I have a huge soft spot for Minter as a person and for Llamasoft in general going way back to the Amiga, so finally settling into clock Polybius was way overdue. The game is absolutely phenomenal. Boiled down its fundamentals it's a shooter in which you zip through various levels trying not to get shot or crash into obstacles. But that's like describing Street Fighter as a game where you punch people. What it actually is is a full sensory experience in which you have to very quickly decipher chaos. In VR. With pounding rave music banging away. With weird cow sound effects honking in your ear. With every conceivable particle effect blasting you in the face. Actually explaining it makes you sound like you've gone nuts (and the sole instruction the game provides is "Do what comes naturally"). The trick is to keep between the bull's horns, keep an eye out for the fried eggs and flip the yolk, avoid the bad pills and try and stay as airborne as you can. After ten easy levels to get you into it, Polybius starts cranking up the difficulty until you're mentally juggling about five different concepts at once while feeling as if your eyeballs are being microwaved. Getting from level 43 to the end took me about two hours of solid play, after which I could see the game burned into my retinas. One of the best VR experiences I've had. BEATEN: Beat Saber  One of the other best VR experiences - a lightsaber rhythm game about chopping blocks in time to dance music. Incredibly intuitive and works beautifully with the PSVR move controllers. I finished all the Expert songs on free play mode without modifiers and feeling my skill levels gradually increase along the way was hugely satisfying. Sure I managed to punch a friend in the face and smash a bottle of wine while I was doing it, but those were necessary sacrifices on my way to Beat Saber excellence. The only real downside is the campaign, which features head-scratching challenges that require you to intentionally make mistakes during play, or not move your arms very much. If you do get hold of this my advice is to skip the campaign and stick to mastering Free Play. There's a moment of Neo-like zen when you realise you're way past thinking about what you want your arms to do, and they just do it. You think 'how the gently caress did I do that'? I crave that moment in games and this provides it in spades. BEATEN: Amplitude  What Beat Saber does for your arms, Amplitude does for your fingers. Back in the day, I was enormously into Harmonix's FreQuency and Amplitude on the PS2 and while I also adored Guitar Hero and Rock Band, they just weren't quite the same. The closest I got to scratching that itch was Rock Band Unplugged on the PSP, but that also lacked that FreQ goodness. That said, this remake pretty much passed me by on its 2015 release, so it was nice to get it on PS Plus this month. I was worried my skills would have deteriorated in the time since I'd last played Amplitude on PS2, but it turns out I've actually gotten better through experience with other rhythm games. Strolled through the campaign on Expert (which has a weird brain surgery plot) and eventually unlocked the whole library (also beaten on Expert). For monetary reasons the tracklisting is almost all in-house rather than licensed, but it's decent enough stuff. I miss Bowie and Orbital etc, but what's here does the biz. My only complaint is that it was over too fast - but that might just be that I'm so drat good at this poo poo.
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Feb 11, 2019 14:19
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BEATEN: The Room I was 1 puzzle away from finishing and didn't realize it. I finished and have to say, I thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing except the perspective puzzles. I'll be grabbing #2 when I have some spare cash. BEATEN: Another Lost Phone: Laura's Phone This was given away free by IndieGala so I went through it. It's pretty good for a "you found a mobile phone, figure out what the deal is" style game. I did have 1 stumbling block but otherwise, a good little quick puzzle game to knock out. I know there's 1 more in the series so I'll check that out too later.
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Feb 11, 2019 21:03
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Irritated Goat posted:BEATEN: The Room I have on my phone The Room, 2 3 and 4, can't wait for 5, I have 1 and 2 on the pc as well. again can't wait for 3...
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Feb 12, 2019 11:43
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TheresaJayne posted:I have on my phone The Room, 2 3 and 4, can't wait for 5, I have 1 and 2 on the pc as well. again can't wait for 3... One of my dream games is Fireproof doing a VR Room game - it'd be incredible.
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Feb 12, 2019 12:04
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Beat: Just Cause 3 XXL. I played 1 and 2 when they were new and loved them both. 3 is incredible. The story is rather pointless (liberate an archipelago from a dictator through explosions and shenanigans) but the physics and the execution of it all is so beautiful and fun. I first got this for the PS4, but I just have the regular old PS4 and unfortunately it meant extremely long loading times. Well, not extremely long, but when your game is all about explosions, one imagines there will be lots of deaths and loading screens. The PC version is great, with short loading times, allowing me to strap a bunch of jeeps to a battleship and invade a small village with it without having to stare at a loading screen every time it fails (which it will.) I've heard JC4 is kind of a let down, though.
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Feb 13, 2019 05:42
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February's a little busier than January, although it's a shorter month. Here's the first half! #10: DQ Builders - My chill podcast game of the year to date. I finished the main campaign and.. well, it was a game on disc. So back it goes on the shelf. If I had it digitally maybe I'd come back to it. #11: Iconoclasts - Fun but flawed Metroidvania... I do think the time spent waiting for this was worth it, but it definitely is something that's cooked in the oven for too long. #12: CROW: The Legend - This was billed as a "VR movie" in the PSN store, but it was really just a 360 degree video with no positional tracking. And it wasn't a very good movie either. #13: Prey VR - This, however, was an actual VR thing. Although it's like a lot of free VR experiences in that it's guided and not very exciting. You do Prey-ish things in various environments from the game. Not really anything in the way of puzzles and no action. #14: Psychonauts in the Rhombus of Ruin - A really fun and cute mid-quel tying together the plots of Psychonauts and the upcoming Psychonauts 2. A lot of brain hopping, telekinesis, and psi blasting, and all the quirkiness of the original game but in a new setting. #15: Xenoblade: Torna the Golden Country - I enjoyed this, but not as much as Xenoblade X. I'll say this, though. I'm glad it was only 20 hours long. If I had to play this for 60 hours, there's no way I'd finish it. So I guess I wont get Xenoblade 2. #16: KONA - Walking sim/survival game in the frigid cold. Ending was surprisingly abrupt and I thought I'd get to explore more of the map than I did. #17: The Evil Within 2 - Just as up & down as the original games. The highs are really high and the lows are pretty low. Some really creative and fun ideas in terms of visual storytelling, and cool monsters. But man the action is just not very good!
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Feb 15, 2019 12:09
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Nulled (For Now): Uncharted 1 I like the set pieces and the platforming well enough. However, the characters are wildly unsympathetic, and the combat is rear end. Even with a very strict critical path approach on Easy, I'm having a hard time caring enough to keep going with this, so I'm stepping away at about 65% completion according to my save file. If the characters felt worthy of any investment (assholes fighting other assholes to get some poo poo nobody deserves) then I'd want to slog through the combat but I don't. I have been told that Uncharted 2 is better so I may look to that game for some more bullshit hopping around pretty scenes. Not yet though. I may go for God of War (the new one) next in my PS4 used game backlog. csm141 fucked around with this message at 23:35 on Feb 16, 2019 |
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Feb 16, 2019 23:27
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Chief Savage Man posted:Nulled (For Now): Uncharted 1 I actually did the same, I remember renting Uncharted 1 and not enjoying it at all. It has some good set pieces but the gameplay is the worst in the series. The shooting doesn't improve much but the setpieces in the next games are incredible. Like every chapter has an insane moment like a Mission impossible scene. Uncharted 2 has a bigger budget, so sound, visuals everything is better. IF you don't like Nathan you won't really like the series though. He is kinda a big part of the fun. Still maybe get the ps4 collection if you have ps4. I am thinking of getting it since I haven't finished 3 or played 4.
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Feb 17, 2019 02:50
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I've got at least 40+ games in a backlog. A lot of it is because I get stuck at some point and get too annoyed at the game to continue playing. And now I have a full time job so I don't have a lot of time to play games. My plan is to try working on the shortest games first, then work on the longer games with some kind of mission structure (MGS V, GTA 5, etc.) Current plan: Orwell: Sunny cyberpunk dystopia. Not sure why I dropped this, but it's not too long so I can probably finish this first. Observer: Moody cyberpunk setting was cool, but there's a forced stealth section and its so annoying that I dropped the game. The Missing: Got stuck in the sawmill. The Sea Will Claim Everything: Got stuck making a recipe some point early. Which is a shame, because it's a great game. Resident Evil 2: Currently stuck in the first run after the helicopter crashes.
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Feb 17, 2019 22:15
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BEATEN: Final Fantasy X Remastered: Now having played this, I regret not giving it a fair shot earlier. I ended up really enjoying it! There were things I didn't like, both gameplay-related and QoL-related, but overall I'm glad I played it. I clocked in more hours than I initially thought I would. I gathered all of the Celestial Weapons and optional Aeons. Superboss-wise, I beat Dark Valefor, Dark Ifrit, and Omega. I couldn't really justify putting even more time in to fill out the sphere grid completely to kill the rest of them. I know I could have just Jimbo'd then, but meh.
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Feb 17, 2019 23:51
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Chief Savage Man posted:Nulled (For Now): Uncharted 1 It's an unpopular opinion but I maintain that the only mainline Uncharted game worth playing in TYOOL 2019 is the 4th one. The first three are almost literally the same game when it comes to story beats and the gameplay sucks. You don't really need to play the first three to play the last one, either. The characters are definitely unsympathetic like you said and for me it's because of the incredible difference between gameplay and how the characters are portrayed outside of it. I know it's a common thing in games but in this specific case I just couldn't get over the fact they're trying to get me to like someone who mowed down hundreds of people and it all goes by without a single word of commentary. I wish devs stopped tacking shooting onto games that are a poor fit for it or own it up completely. lordfrikk fucked around with this message at 22:25 on Feb 21, 2019 |
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Feb 21, 2019 22:19
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BEATEN: Orwell I had a good time playing this, but the plot is a bit goofy, and there's a twist at the end that's kind of forced, like they needed a twist for the sake of one. I also wish you could undo uploading data, but I guess that might be the point.
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Feb 21, 2019 22:46
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PLAYING - Final Fantasy IX: Playing through X and enjoying it put me in a mood to play the FF games I've either never played or barely remember. IX is held in high regard around here and amongst people I know, so IX it is!
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Feb 22, 2019 00:53
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SardonicTyrant posted:The Missing: Got stuck in the sawmill. Hah, this is exactly where I've stopped also. Not because I'm stuck, but just because the game is juuuuuuust frustrating enough, and hearing a young woman screaming horribly every time she has to get mutilated by environmental hazards to pass a puzzle (which happens frequently) left a bad taste in my mouth. The plodding movement speed and crummy spacing of saves and checkpoints didn't help. beaten: Slay the Spire: I killed the Heart with all three characters (twice in a row with the Defect, somehow), so I think that counts. It is great, and I'll probably keep plinking away at Ascension runs here and there, but I'm ready to focus on other games. Shadowhand: It's fine, if you're looking for a puzzle Solitaire game, but it felt like it dragged on longer than it needed to, and the duels were kind of irritating. There's a reason why two player Solitaire never was a thing (besides the obvious). Thronebreaker: Starting to notice a theme here. Pretty good, also kind of easy even on the hard difficulty, although I ended up dropping it down to easy for the last real battle after a couple of lengthy rounds that ended in frustratingly close losses. Having played the Witcher III I shouldn't have been surprised when some of the choices I made came back to bite me, but it hurt more in a few instances than it ever seemed to in its big brother. The choices you made in Witcher III primarily impacted the story, but the choices in Thronebreaker ended up with some character cards I had developed an (admittedly overpowered) combo with being removed from my deck permanently. It's kind of an interesting move, since it forces you to adapt, but the first time it happened it was a definite gut-punch. nulled: The Council: Ugh. Not good. My wife and I were playing through it together, and by the end of the second episode / opening of the third episode the combination of bad writing, worse acting, and pointlessly convoluted and unnecessary skill tree pushed us to our breaking point. Also, the third episode opens with a length discussion about the Louisiana Purchase. Who thought that was going to be a good idea? Book of Demons: Starting to realize that this genre isn't my cup of tea, but even if it was I feel like it wouldn't do much for me. It's a Diablo-like ARPG, but you're essentially on rails as you progress through a dungeon, which means that you can easily stumble into a bad situation and only have one way back out of it. Also, the card aspect of it just seems like a gimmick they included to add a bullet point onto a list of features, because the cards are indistinguishable in purpose and function from regular equipment in any other ARPG, which made me feel like they were trying to get me excited about ALF being in pog form. ALSO also, the game opens up with this cinematic about the seven worlds in their universe, which initially made me think I'd be doing dungeon crawling through seven unique environments. NOPE. They have plans for seven games in this universe, apparently, and each time you start the game you're presented with seven pedestals to choose from, all of which are empty aside from the one the titular Book of Demons is resting on. It's like, I appreciate your ambition, but it felt kind of presumptuous. currently playing: God of War (2018): It's great. Nadia Was Here: Very neat, so far. It's a retro-styled RPG with active-time battles where the enemies will attack whichever character they're directly in front of. You can always see what attack the enemies are going to use next, and you can move your characters at any time, so it's a sort of a juggling act of making sure your more vulnerable characters don't get hit by powerful attacks but positioning them to steal or exploit enemy weaknesses. The dungeons are starting to get a little longer than they feel like they should be, but I'm really liking it so far, and the story has been interesting enough to keep me invested as well. an owls casket fucked around with this message at 15:31 on Feb 22, 2019 |
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Feb 22, 2019 14:46
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Okay so it took me... *checks watch* ...3 weeks of almost exclusive non-stop playing, but I finally got from 'somewhere in the middle ish' to BEATING NIOH, WOO! But now I'm conflicted: On the one hand, there's such delicious nutritious New Game+ and DLC which is packaged in the steam release, that I didn't even touch. The game is legitimately very fun. So while I technically beat the game, I haven't done the hurdles that would engage NG+  So, I sincerely wonder if I should put my nose and samurai sword to the grind stone and get past these jerks? Or should I be content with this and play other things? Edit:  Never mind! It was actually only gate-kept by one more lovely mission with a couple more bosses in it, which I beat, NG+ here I come
Morter fucked around with this message at 19:24 on Feb 22, 2019 |
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Feb 22, 2019 16:44
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Morter posted:Okay so it took me... *checks watch* ...3 weeks of almost exclusive non-stop playing, but I finally got from 'somewhere in the middle ish' to BEATING NIOH, WOO! *also checks watch* Hey, high five, this has been my story with COMPLETING SUPER MARIO ODYSSEY, going from "technically beaten the game, with 125 or so moons" to "actually finishing all the levels and finding all the documented secrets with 999 moons". I've put about an hour now into Dark Souls III and have finally managed to beat the tutorial boss.  I've got a lot of reflexes to unlearn from Odyssey before this will be more than a hilarious cavalcade of misery. But it's certainly getting started on the right foot.
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Feb 23, 2019 10:14
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Morter posted:Okay so it took me... *checks watch* ...3 weeks of almost exclusive non-stop playing, but I finally got from 'somewhere in the middle ish' to BEATING NIOH, WOO! Congrats on fighting the trio and the (by comparison) much easier boss after. I recommend doing some of the NG+ just to get better gear. DLC bosses are a complete bitch to go up against.
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Feb 23, 2019 19:37
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Morter posted:Almost all of what I've been playing since I put down Dragon's Dogma is Nioh, slowly chipping away at missions whilst listening to podcasts. I've slowly become more confident and i'm not wanting to flip my table every time a boss cheaply kills me. I'm still at this point, podcasts and everything. Sometimes it goes at a nice pace, but inevitably some 20 minute road block will pop up designed to annoy me be it some enemy, boss, or level gimmick.
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Feb 23, 2019 19:50
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Fargin Icehole posted:Congrats on fighting the trio and the (by comparison) much easier boss after. I recommend doing some of the NG+ just to get better gear. DLC bosses are a complete bitch to go up against. Thank you! The trio? And yeah as soon as I saw how awesome Divine gear is and all the sets that showed up, I'm re-hooked. Aaaaaagh  DOUBLE CLICK HERE posted:I'm still at this point, podcasts and everything. Sometimes it goes at a nice pace, but inevitably some 20 minute road block will pop up designed to annoy me be it some enemy, boss, or level gimmick. The thing is for me that I'll spend stupid amounts of time in small areas even though it's an 'easy' level, because i'm not rushing to the end, but sniffing around for amrita drops and treasure, kodama, and semi-farming revenants in hopes of their loot. So even simple side missions might take me more than a single sit down session. Other than not being open world, NIOH tickles me in a way that few other loot games do.
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Feb 23, 2019 21:45
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Finishing up February and the first game of March: #18: Paratopic - Strange psychadelic walking simulator that'll only take a half hour of your time. #19: Ever Oasis (20 hours) - I got this after Ni No Kuni 2 left me still wanting more RPG-meets-citysim. It mostly accomplishes that goal with the bonus of Zelda-style dungeons. It is repetitive, no doubt, but the loop was good enough to keep me invested from start to finish. #20: Prey Mooncrash (15 hours) - Big peaks and valleys for this one. Same great level design, some fun emails/logs to read, lots of combat variety with the different classes. However, atrocious load times, and a climbing difficulty system that seems just unfair if you don't decide to cheese it by crafting a bunch of hourglasses that add time back on. #21: Resident Evil 7 VR (7 hours) - You know this got talked up way too much? I love the atmosphere and the Baker family, and the action is good, but this isn't a scary game at all. It's a silly one, in all the ways that Resident Evil is as a franchise, so in that sense, it's true to the series roots. But the game is more invested in grossing you out than scaring you. Both this and Evil Within 2 seemed to really just want to make you barf rather than cower. #22: Resident Evil DLC (Banned Footage, Not a Hero, End of Zoe) (4 hours) - Of the DLC, I liked End of Zoe the most because of the ridiculous punching combat. I didn't enjoy playing as a conspiracy theory believing chud, but I enjoyed his fists. I also liked the games in Banned Footage, like Bedroom for example. I thought that was a cute little escape room game. Clancy has it rough. #23: Far Cry 4 (14 hours) - The fourth game in the Both Sides franchise, Ubisoft has you Both Sidesing in Kyrat this time, and like every other Both Sides game, the combat is fun, the traversal is great, you can sic wild animals on enemies, and ride elephants. There are fun diversion missions where you go to Shangri-La or have to escape a prison camp without any of your weapons. But at the end of the day, these games are mostly the same. And the moral is always the same too, which is.... NEVER DO ANYTHING EVER! (tm)
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Mar 2, 2019 10:08
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PLAYED: Deathtrap Dungeon. I was prepared to tolerate some jank, given this game's 2001 release date. However, the tank controls are garbage, and the fixed Resident Evil I-style camera made this really unpleasant to play. Unfinished, and I suspect it was considered a bad game even when it was new. COMPLETED: What Remains of Edith Finch. I finished this and liked it, but I thought it was just a one-and-done thing. Then I found myself thinking about it a lot over the next couple of weeks. One of those stories that burrows into your mind and stays there. COMPLETED: Peace, Death!. A game in which you play as one of Death's Reapers, assigning souls to the correct afterlife. The gameplay has a lot in common with Papers, Please, so if you're looking for another bureaucracy-em-up I'd recommend Peace, Death! but there is a caution involved. Both Peace, Death! and Papers, Please start with simple mechanics and add complexity, but Peace, Death! doesn't know when to *stop* adding complexity. By the end of the game the rulebook you have to follow is about three times as long as in Papers, Please's endgame. My recommendation comes with a warning label. PLAYED: Peace, Death!: Hand of F. I mentioned the base game starting with a solid mechanical base and adding way too much extraneous bullshit on top. The expansion pack Hand of F marks the point at which the core gameplay finally breaks down under the sheer weight of all the additional material haphazardly bolted on. Did not finish. COMPLETED: 9 Clues II: The Ward. A mostly generic Hidden Object Game, although it has that Mass Effect III problem where it goes completely off the rails toward the end. The last ten minutes are pure idiot plot. PLAYED: Anthem. I played some of it, and it was basically fine. Not great, but not bad either. I'll pick it up for $10-$20 in a year or two, assuming the servers haven't been turned off by then. COMPLETED: Katamari Damacy Reroll. Pure fun. This is a game where it's easy to just finish the levels, and the real challenge comes from finishing with a good result. Even going for the best rank isn't stressful, with a couple of notable exceptions (ask anyone who has ever tried to get the biggest bear and cow in the constellation levels how frustrating it was). I might even go back for 100% completion, I enjoyed this so much.  Next up: I've had Yakuza 0 installed since it was released, I really should just sit down and play it. Especially considering I've already bought a copy of Yakuza Kiwami.
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Mar 3, 2019 20:56
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