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...

Loco Motive - as a pastiche of 90s lucasarts adventure games it's got the style down perfect. feel like i'm even hearing the same voice actors as monkey island though it could be good mimickry, i didn't check. not far enough yet to judge how good it is at the puzzles

Animal Well - bounced off of this back when it came out for reasons i don't remember but i'm giving it another shot. it's fine. i'll finish it this time. probably not the ARG stuff though. i always say i want combat-less metroid games but i think what i really want is a more pure exploration experience like Knytt and that's way harder to pull off compellingly than cramming your game with puzzles and obstacles

not going to post my backlog.txt but it's real and has like 60 games in it. yikes

I've definitely hit the point where I know (not that) deep down that I have more games than I can/will play, just as there are more books that I want to read than I will, or movies to see, etc. It's sad, but I'm at peace with it.

i've been on a real run of point-and-click adventure games, both old and new but retro, so thanks for the loco motive heads up

only having a switch and a ps4 and having niche gaming tastes limits my backlog, which is probably a good thing. i do wish i could play blue prince. i did just get a new laptop so i could look into steam, i suppose, but i'm trying to keep it as a music-making tool exclusively.

mostly playing golf (irl dlc pack). stupid game really

i've been on a real run of point-and-click adventure games, both old and new but retro, so thanks for the loco motive heads up

cool. I get this urge from time to time too, there's some interesting ones on the horizon I've seen. I enjoy the no rush policy of these games

Bought it years ago and tried and failed to get into it a few times, but Rimworld finally hooked me. I guess I just wasn't in the right frame of mind for it before. Playing it with my daughter and we laugh a lot. Might finally get around to playing Oxygen Not Included eventually, too.

OK, finished (the main bulk of) AstroBot, so as a palette cleanser tried out a bit of "RoboCop: Rogue City." Played a little janky, but seems like it will be fun for a FPS.

AI the somnium files, because i'm a game behind on Uchikoshi's catalog.

i'm also wasting time on Revolution Idle and Party House.

thinking i might have to go for Promise Mascot Agency while it's on sale

I'm enjoying RoboCop: Rogue City. A lot of the reviews were pretty otm, in that it's just a solid, not terribly ambitious AA game that's reasonably well done. They got Peter Weller to come back and do the voice, a lot of the game looks great, and the gameplay, at least early on, is fun and maybe a step up from simple and not entirely devoid of challenge. For sure the first time you encounter ED-209 - and I assume there will be more - you are so insanely unmatched that you more or less have to cheese it. Maybe that is the point? The only big down is that the weak link of the game is of course the human animations in the cut scenes, and there are a lot of cut scenes.

Prototype. On Steam, with a mod or two for 60fps+ and 4K resolution. Game goddamn rips. Insomniac’s Spider-Man but the total M rated carnage version.

nice! I never played that series and kept confusing it for a while with the Infamous games, which I played at least one of, probably after it was free on Playstation for a while

Really enjoyed Prototype back when it was new but have never played the second one and have never replayed. But it's very different than Infamous... never really understood the very common confusion between the two.

I heard they added dick auto targeting to robocop via dlc

Ha. I know from the start you could get some bonus XP from shooting baddies in the junk.

Really enjoyed Prototype back when it was new but have never played the second one and have never replayed. But it's very different than Infamous... never really understood the very common confusion between the two.

I think because both came out reasonably the same time(?), and featured a character with super powers going about the city sorting shit out. I can see the similarity myself, but having played both yeah they're not really the same game at all.

Wish Infamous would come out on PC, I loved that game.

"Robocop: Rogue City" was pretty straight forward, simple and fun, albeit a bit mindless. Def. far better than it could have been, though. The biggest problem was its relative ease. When you face the first boss (or the closest thing to one) you are massively underpowered and it's hard to make progress without cheesing. But by the time you face it again you are so overpowered it's pretty trivial. That's kind of par for the course for games with leveling skills, but the same held true for the final boss, which was so easy it barely registered. Still, liked it, and look forward to the DLC. Not every game has to be 80 hours of AAA ambition.

Shogun Showdown - a deck-builder without the deck. hand-builder? i love the rhythm of this and how it starts to resemble a cool action game as you get locked in and play faster despite being fully turn-based. i'm not good enough yet to reach that flow state beyond the first couple levels though, it's tough. really good.

is anyone playing Rematch? it is very, very addictive, very fun when you get a group of teammates who enjoy playing good football, and almost unbelievably annoying when you get dumbasses, which is a lot of of the time

Ooh this sounds good, might have to pick it up.

I initially decided not to buy it based on reviews indicating how simplified the football ruleset is, but Brendan's review on RPS convinced me to take the plunge and I'm glad I did, even if my whole weekend has now somehow evaporated

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/rematch-review

I'm 8.5 hours into Citizen Sleeper 2 and it's taken nearly that long to feel a engrossing as the first game. It adds some new mechanics that you get access to pretty early on that are interesting but the UI isn't always the clearest (I incurred a permanent disadvantage because of it). But I'm hopeful that it's finally hitting its stride where I'm at.

Decided to restart Vice City, ps2 version, all over again. for full 1oo percent.

threw my dummy out over some of the very early mission already, so fuck knows how bad it's going to be later on.

but had to laugh at my remembering how chaotic it can get with simple missions if you just accidentally run over one cop and it all just goes batshit and hilarious.

i've opened up the full islands so now i'm going to focus on finding all 100 hidden packages before any more missions.