whatchu playing now

dragon's dogma was good fun, at its best early before everything becomes too easy, so i encourage you to not progress the story at all until you have been everywhere. one of the best and most unique things it has are the giant wandering monsters that really felt like epic fights, at least until my gang quickly got OP'd. helps if you resist the temptation of the broken pawns that are available early.

infinity wars + starbound

helps if you resist the temptation of the broken pawns that are available early.
― Roberto Spiralli, Thursday, April 24, 2014 4:29 PM

what are the broken pawns. i've just been using the free low level ones and trading them in every so often. groups of bandits on the roads are still kicking my butt

i got one real early with an ordinary woman's name, Karen i am fairly sure, and her owner had limited her level but she had maxed-out, late game rare gear and was a total powerhouse

whatever the fighter class is. i got another midway thru with a more forgettable fantasyish name, also a female fighter.

Dammit, Fract really _is_ like myst. I can't find the symbolic to detangle the tune I'm supposed to play to solve the final puzzle in one of the areas.

Final Fantasy - NES
Assassin's Creed IV - PC
Pac-Man Championship Edition DX - PC
Castlevania: Rond of Blood - T16
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night - PSX
Metal Gear Solid - PSX
Metal Gear Rising Revengeance - PC
Metal Gear Solid 2 - PC

you livin' the life, Adam, respect

finished saints row 4
tried diablo 3 again - meh so spammy
maybe back to metro 2033

"Finished" Portal and Fez, loved both. Seems like there's still aftergame stuff for me to do, which is cool.

I'm a good way into the first God of War, and I can't be sure but I think I might kinda hate it. The brutal waves of super tough enemies are awesome, and some of the puzzles are pretty good, but creating Indiana Jones-esque deathtraps with a shitty camera and sketchy controls was the fucking worst idea ever. I've wasted so much of my playtime on failing to kill everything onscreen within a set time before falling to my death or being crushed or sliced up by shit that I can barely see in front of me that it's kinda become a chore for me to continue. I might just be hating the PS2-ness of it, though.

I've been surprisingly digging a lot of arcade-y stuff that I've gotten cheap from PSN recently. Super Stardust and Wipeout took me a little while to get used to but they're amazing once I'm in the zone. Just got Retro/Grade, which I haven't played much but which has an awesome conceit (basically a rhythm game disguised as a shooter that runs in reverse). The Space Invaders update also seems like good value.

This weekend, I hit 50% completion and the 100 hour mark near-simultaneously on Just Cause 2. Clearing a few areas in the game has become such a reliably perfect way to decompress at the end of the day.

kotor + bg2

getting myself psyched + ready for pillars of eternity i guess

xps I played GoW 1 for the first time... a year ago? Maybe two? Felt some of the same frustrations as you, but I'm still planning to truck on through to the others at some point. I can see how it all would've been far more impressive back in 2006, but some of those levels and dungeons are awfully designed.

What build you going for in KOTOR, Mordy?

i guess soldier guardian. tbh i'm kinda more interested in my bg2 half-elf cleric/ranger build (so OP apparently it's ppl's fave for soloing the game). (thought about playing a wild mage too.)

Streets of Rage 3
Bare Knuckle III

So BKIII is the Japanese version of SOR3 and it is WAY easier. This does not mean it is easy though, it only means it is possible to get through stage 1 without using a continue. American version of Streets of Rage 3 is one of the more difficult games I've ever played.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VWsJPJ19DA

That level with the bulldozer is all-time unfair.

all that and he's beat by a girder

i love the energy meter for 'wall'.

i guess i only played Streets of Rage 1 & 2.

man why doesn't axel just jump over the damn walls

sor3 is weird. it seems like it admits to tactics then it doesn't really.

I think after you get past the stage where you are fighting kangaroos and evil dominatrix clowns they just figured they could get away w that.

Played 2-player Hyperstone Heist for the Genesis last night. Got to Super Shredder and then we died and we were out of continues! The music in that game is incredible. Orchestrated speed metal.

i'm still playing bg2.

eu4 always with the eu4. genovese colonial empire.

wish i could get into eu. each time i load it up there are like 300 tutorials

if it helps you still won't know what the fuck is going on if you sit thru the tutorials

Sadly not as into Mirror's Edge as I'd hoped (hinges way too much on barely-disguised quick time events, which fuck that). Surprisingly way more into the first Metal Gear Solid than I expected (tough but mostly fair, cutscenes and dialogue that are reasonably well-written and not totally perfunctory, generous with the game saving, and the controls and camera, while occasionally obnoxious, are better than those on a lot of the PS2 games I've played). I still haven't been able to get past the first boss yet, though, so we'll see how long my admiration lasts.

is there some kind of amazing online tutorial that will teach me how to play?

there is a lot of user and wiki content so possibly but i'm not aware of anything myself. i think you just need to start playing it with the expectation that you won't know what you're doing for a long time. start with france: raise a big army and start some beef. you can go a long way with them without having to worry about some of the more arcane stuff for a while and you will pick up a good foundation in manpower/supply, tech advancement, diplomacy, religion. you can dip your toe into trade and colonies if you want but you'll still be able to do plenty without. and you'll have the immediate objective of unifying france to get your teeth into, which definitely helps the transition into the sandbox. you'll always have something to do with them and that is certainly not always the case elsewhere.

have any of you played crusader kings 2 and can you take the same approach there? tried to get into it but get caught up on figuring out how levies work and what a demesne is and somehow the game had me entering into an affair with my own wife

ftl

Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow
Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance

Aria of Sorrow is incredible. Are the GBA Metroids this good?

Harmony is cool too, if only because the lead character is dressed like anime Santa Claus.

I remember the GBA Metroid I played being awesome

this is gonna make me sound like a crazy person but i've gotten into watching lets-plays of EU4 and i don't even own a PC. they're weirdly soothing?

any you'd recommend? esp for newbs?

there's a youtuber by the name of shenryyr2 who i gather is some kind of god at it. he doesn't really do tutorials but a lot of the rhythm of it comes out via osmosis.

my general sense is it's just not a 'for newbs' game, you just kind of have to keep jumping in at the deep end until it clicks

jeez, just had a click around that guy's YT, he is nutso. if i had infinite hours i would watch the lot. but yeah, as a learning experience you probably already need a foundation to get anything from someone like this.

Aria of Sorrow is incredible. Are the GBA Metroids this good?

yeah he's also endearingly/annoyingly ignorant of actual history & geography

i just wanted some cool flowing graphics of a map shifting slowly over time while i did other shit.

xp

*checks england ca. 1650* "a republic? england went republic? wtf, that makes no sense"

was that cromwell? idk I'm too lazy to wiki at the minute

metro: last light
had no idea the wolfenstein remake is more then just "lol nostalgia", preview trailer got me intersted

xp yeah

just finished back to the future telltale game, it was pretty fun, but if it hadn't been for walking dead s1 i dunno if i would've had the patience. now i am trying to play sam & max penal zone and it is next-level inscrutable adv game :(

Did any of you happen to see this week's Steven Universe where Steven gets obssessed with this epic Pokemon/Final Fantasy-style Mini Golf RPG? Man, I would love for that to actually exist.

no but that sounds great. i also love the SU where garnet becomes transfixed with the meat beat mania arcade game

hah, that was great too!

ftl

Played a little "Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia" yesterday and holy crap am I addicted to these Castlevania games...

Ghost of Tsushima is wonderful. I just finished Ghost of Yotei which, when I first saw the map, I thought would be much shorter.

WRONG. 65+ hours to complete. Probably 15% of that was checkpoint reloads and failed boss fights though. I love these games but I'm not very good at them!

Really enjoyed Ghost Of Yotei also. There are times it can be repetitive or easy as was the case with Tsushima, but generally a lot of fun.

I always get struck by a wave of anxiety when I start these games, a combination of 1) knowing/suspecting the size/level of commitment, 2) worrying about all the stuff I know I'll miss, and, worst of all, 3) struggling to remember all the various systems and buttons and combos, lol. Even though I know in the end, from Far Cry 3 to RDR2 to Horizon Zero West to this, these games are ultimately all pretty similar, and that by the end I'll understand them like the back of my hand.

sold an ancient wii and a bunch of games/accessories to gamestop and ended up with enough store credit to get a second ps5 controller and $125 in ps gift cards. so i bought mouse: p.i. for hire - haven't played much yet but so far this feels like a cute novelty, the fps action is pretty shallow. i had wanted to get a second controller so i could play games with my kids, so i also got split fiction. but when we saw the protagonists are two tough women, my wife got excited about playing with our daughter, even though she never plays video games. it's pretty funny watching her play, she forgets she can move the camera and gasps loudly whenever she gets killed (which is often). cool game though, looks really nice and has a fun hook (going back and forth between sci fi and fantasy worlds).

vampire crawlers

I hope my mate won't mind me posting this Bsky post here he made re MousePI that made me lol:

https://bsky.app/profile/stupidhoroscope.bsky.social/post/3mjpi6agjr22g

i've come around on mouse: p.i. for hire, it's a lot of fun. i wouldn't say it's difficult or that the fps action is particularly deep, but they do a good job of mixing up the environments and adding on weapons/skills to keep things interesting

OK, I'm a good chunk into the first act of Ghost of Tsushima, and while gorgeous and very well-made, it's definitely boilerplate. I'm enjoying it, though. Like a lot of these games, there's a lot to do, and the game does a good job directing you to those things. I know the difficulty level can be toggled, and maybe the game gets more challenging, but right now it's pretty easy, and so far there's really no cost of failure. Which, tbf, is true of many not-From adventure games, including a few of my faves, like Red Dead 2, so I assume the plot will advance or kick in in earnest when I stop doofing around and add an element of stakes, if not literal then at least narrative, to explain some more of the praise.

I picked up Vampire Crawlers too, as I'm a sucker for a dungeon crawl. I played a little this morning but it hasn't really grabbed me yet. It feels a bit too streamlined/frictionless so far, or like Vampire Survivors with extra steps. I'm assuming it will get more challenging and interesting as it goes on

Latest updates: "Ghost" is huuuuuge, and it also scales up (relatively speaking, at least a little) in difficulty. I'm going to have to focus, because it's one of those games where you can't go between point A and point B without coming across either a band of baddies or a side-quest distraction.

I can't even imagine how much work goes into making these things.

are you still marathoning, circa? if so, have you been running cryo?

returned to super mega baseball 4 - I hate that they tried to make the presentation less whimsical and cartoony, which was presumably at EA’s behest. what a game tho

honestly fuck EA - they always buy amazing studios and then either fuck them up or shutter them or both (think metalhead studios, criterion, visceral, bullfrog, westwood. there’s probably countless others)

is the original alan wake (remastered version) worth playing or should i just jump to AW2?

I had a pretty good time with Alan Wake Remastered. It's a bit repetitious, and the combat isn't great, but IMO it's far from bad. It's like playing a pulpy horror novel with Remedy's goofy meta-textual antics running throughout. The worst thing about it is that Wake is an irritating character

My one recommendation is that if you play AW1, put it on the easiest difficulty, because it doesn't let you change it after you've started a save, and the combat isn't that interesting.

I liked AW1, don't remember putting it on easy or, for that matter, minding anything about the combat, which iirc mostly plays into the mood rather than provide a typical video-gamey style of "combat."

I remembered just the other day that I forgot to play the second one! I'll get right on that.

Just finished Forbidden Solitaire, and I enjoyed it well enough. It is arguably more satire than horror. It's akin to Hypnospace Outlaw aesthetically as well as thematically. This is problematic for me because I adore Hypnospace, and any game that invites comparison to it is going to suffer.

played alan wake 1 remastered for a while, it was repetitive but enjoyable, didn't finish i'll go back to it someday. the remastered version is funny bc the environments look beautiful but the characters look janky as hell

now i'm playing ghost of yotei, i love it. looks and sounds so beautiful. obv reminiscent of other big open-world games of the past decade, especially RDR2, but i'm not going to complain about a game being reminiscent of RDR2 if it does it right.

I was going to ask if you'd made it to (insert awesome sequence here) but then I realized I was thinking of "Control."

Still on "Ghost of Tsushima" here. It's such a well designed game, though fundamentally flawed, like a lot of open world games seem to be, in that you get OP pretty quickly, and stuff like combat and resource management becomes pretty inconsequential. Or at least it is so far; I'm on Act 2, completing a bunch of side quests. Never boring, though, and nothing beats coming over a hill and finding an amazing field of red flowers at sunset or whatever.

One person's OP is another's relief that things will be less of a slog and maybe instead of dying 20 times to a boss you'll only die 10

another = me

I don't disagree! You just sometimes end up in a situation that is meant to be challenging or dramatic that is over in seconds, which makes it feel kind of perfunctory: low speed bumps vs. walls. But there's "OP" in, like, From games, where you can still get your ass kicked (albeit yeah, maybe a bit less), or "OP" in a game that is not particularly hard in the first place and just gets even easier. There are always/often built-in ways to make games like "Ghost" more challenging, but they always seem arbitrary to me. Toggling it so enemies becomes damage sponges and kill you in one or two hits vs several, for example. But to me that's the equivalent of, say, playing a character in "Dark Souls" that has no armor and no weapons and just hits things with their fists. Artificial.

picked up FH6 and having a lot of fun. trying to make it as realistic as possible without being too punishing - sim steering, ABS off, traction control off, manual shifting. makes it a lot more challenging but expect it will lengthen the life of the game. have kept the AI difficulty relatively low for now though they’re still battering me. haven’t won a race yet and only scored one podium. looks a bit rough on series S in performance mode. might try quality mode but 30 FPS could be equally rough

Started playing Death Stranding again. Was going to pick up the sequel as I’d heard a lot of the quality of life improvements really worked, but I balk at paying full price, and can’t find any sales. So back to the original we go.

Having vehicles helps a lot.

Emuurom was released today. It's another of those cryptic La-mulana / Animal Well type games. Like Animal Well, there is little combat -- you can't even take damage, like it's a Yoshi game.