What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Anything from run & guns to modern RPGs, what else do you play?
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Immryr
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Immryr »

Panzer Dragoon Saga: I really love the rail shooter panzer dragoon games, but have never played saga. I think in the back of my mind I always just couldn't see how this would work, but man, this is really great. The combat system is really unique and does somehow capture the feeling of the rail shooter games. It's a very linear game, which is often something people complain about with RPGs, but it's not a problem here for me, the pacing is very good. The music is really amazing too, more in line with the zwei sound track than the first game, which is a good thing imo. It fits really well aesthetically with the world of panzer dragoon.

Phantom Dust: Another Futasugi game I have been meaning to play for years. I'm less in love with this one, but I do think it's interesting. I get the impression that the multiplayer game was the focus for this one, as the single player campaign is pretty lacklustre. I'm not really interested in playing the multiplayer. I do think the setting and general vibe of the game is pretty cool though.

Made in abyss - binary star falling into darkness: This is based on an anime which I haven't seen with a pretty dumb premise. An orphanage is sending kids out into a deadly abyss to bring back relics as a source of income for the orphanage..... yeah. Anyway, the game has quite a few problems, but at the same time I like it quite a bit.

The first problem: before you get to play the real game, you have to play through what is essentially a glorified tutorial with half of the game mechanics missing which goes through the storyline to the anime, or at least some of it. If you just make a beeline for the quest markers and speed through the chat you can get through this is about 3 hours.

Once that's out of the way you can play the 'Deep in Abyss' mode, which is the real game. The set up is the same as most classic dungeon crawlers, you have a town which is just a series of menus where you can take on quests, buy/sell stuff, save etc. Then you have one dungeon, the abyss. You spend most of your time in this game just plodding on through the abyss, gathering items to sell or for crafting, trying to to get to deeper, fulfilling quests you picked up in town. The combat is very simple, you have simple 'survival' mechanics too like hunger and item durability, completing quests lets you level up which you use to upgrade all of your abilities from the things you can craft to combat abilities to the amount of items you can carry etc. It's pretty mindless stuff, but I find I can very easily sink hours into games like this.
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To Far Away Times
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by To Far Away Times »

Elden Ring. I thought open world games were played out. No, it turns out its just that bad open world games are played out. The three best ones: Skyrim, Breath of the Wild, and possibly Elden Ring by the time I finish it, all drop you in an area with some vague guidence, minimal if any map markers, and just let you explore and reward you for it. The exploration and the world is the point, its not filler inbetween missions. Games designed around wanderlust. If you can pull that off, then you've got a recipe for a fantastic open world game.

Far too many open world games should be linear games, but the market demands otherwise. Games filled with map markers and filler quests with these big empty worthless open worlds would generally be better as tighter linear games.
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Sumez
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Sumez »

Sounds to me like it's probably been a while since you played Skyrim, and it's not very fresh in your memory. :P

The game is littered with map markers, and is generally not very good at rewarding exploration, unless you like just seeing the same things.
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BareKnuckleRoo
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by BareKnuckleRoo »

Yeah, Skyrim and Oblivion are far more samey in terms of the terrain and the dungeons than the other examples honestly. Sure, they're massive, but the exploration has always felt blander and less rewarding than even the King's Field series where the environment feels unique, tense, and genuinely fun to explore.
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To Far Away Times
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by To Far Away Times »

Sumez wrote:Sounds to me like it's probably been a while since you played Skyrim, and it's not very fresh in your memory. :P

The game is littered with map markers, and is generally not very good at rewarding exploration, unless you like just seeing the same things.
I haven't played it in 5 or 6 years but I remember there only being a few map markers to start, only identifying where the major towns were. There's a lot of map markers eventually, but they're basically individual pins you find by exploring. Or someone puts a single point of your map and you wander for an hour getting there getting sidetracked by tons of stuff.

It's a bit different from the typical more modernish Ubisoft style open worlds. "Do this gambling game 23 times" "Do this mingame 26 times". Skyrim has that handcrafted world that almost always has a point of interest within sight. And it doesn't feel so much like a check list, I just wanted to see what was around the corner.
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ACSeraph
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by ACSeraph »

How's it goin' shmups farm?

Not been playing as many shooters lately, been trying to get through a monolithic backlog of other stuff instead. Working on 3DS games right now which led me to Shin Megami Tensei IV.

When I first bought this the Japanese text was a bit too difficult for me to really enjoy it, hence it ending up in the backlog, but I've improved a lot since then and have no problem with it now. It didn't give me the greatest first impression, but it really picks up in the mid game. I'm currently 40 hours in, so I imagine there's still a long way to go.
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ryu
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by ryu »

ACSeraph wrote:Working on 3DS games right now which led me to Shin Megami Tensei IV.

When I first bought this the Japanese text was a bit too difficult for me to really enjoy it, hence it ending up in the backlog, but I've improved a lot since then and have no problem with it now. It didn't give me the greatest first impression, but it really picks up in the mid game. I'm currently 40 hours in, so I imagine there's still a long way to go.
I also played SMT IV around the time I was just getting started with japanese. Still enjoyed it a lot, despite having missed all nuances of the plot.
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Sumez
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Sumez »

I just wanted to check out how Diablo 2 Resurrected plays on consoles with a controller (it plays fantastic on Switch btw), and ended up playing through all three difficulties with my new paladin.
And it got me thinking.

Out of all these games that take inspiration from Diablo, namely the ever present color coded loot system you see in so many games, why have none of them ever managed to hit that same super-addictive nerve?
Path of Exile, Borderlands, or even Diablo 3 for that matter, don't even come close - in fact I think I pretty much hate the system in all of those games. It's just an ever present bother, looking for all those small potential increases in your numbers.
But that's the thing, that never really happens in Diablo 2. Even getting any decent loot is honestly rare, and if you do it's often a substantial jump ahead, and involves making some sort of compromise forcing you to look at how you put together your gear.

Also, fuck the postgame, spending hundreds of hours grinding for stupidly rare items that you can trade with other players to assemble that perfect build. If you know what you're doing, you can lay waste all the way to Hell Baal without ever stopping in your path to grind or farm out anything, or going online to trade with internet weirdos.

It's funny for how many clones Diablo 2 has nowadays, I don't think any of them ever managed to do anything to improve on it, instead trying just to make the loot much more convoluted with seventy additional colorful tiers, and stretching the game super thin into something people can play for 1000 hours.
I think the biggest thing I'd love in this sort of game (and I'm not holding out for Diablo 4 to go there), is making the RNG present a much bigger impact in each play session. Diablo 1 was heavily inspired by roguelikes, and the random area generation still remains one of the biggest appeals of the sequel for my money. But I'd love to see more unique random encounters that exist to tell a tale of adventure, rather than figure as notes in someone's min-maxing spreadsheet.
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Immryr
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Immryr »

Made in Abyss: I had a situation which reminded me of my first dark souls 1 playthrough. On my second trip down into Layer 2 I decided to just keep going down and see how far I could get. Well, I got all the way to the bottom of the layer, hurray. By this point I had run out of melee weapons, I only had a gun with three bullets, the main item i was missing to craft new weapons was animal bones - which you need to kill animals to gather, which requires a weapon. I was also very low on food which replenishes hunger - gathering that also requires weapons to kill animals (for the most part). In terms of progress my two barriers were the bottom of layer 2, which I am just not allowed to cross, and a forced fight against some monkeys, which I absolutely did not have the weapons to deal with.

So, I decided I would try to climb back up..... This was a total fucking nightmare. One of the mechanics in the game is 'the curse of the abyss', which kicks in when you ascend 'too quickly', if you keep ascending you will take damage, throw up and lose some hunger meter, and as you get deeper apparently there are more serious effects the deeper you go. In real terms what this means is as you're going up you have to periodically stop and wait for this to reset. Normally this isn't a huge issue and is just a minor time waste, however when you have no weapons to bat away the relentless birds and butterflies that are constantly trying to attack you while you climb it is a real problem.

I struggled for a good couple of hours with many deaths as I tried to make my way back up, gradually figuring out the best route and getting lucky with the random bird attacks, finally I made it back to the familiar grounds of Layer 1. This felt like a huge relief at the time, but ultimately it was no use. Each layer is divided into 9-10 zones, and traveling between them costs hunger meter. I eventually ran out of hunger meter and ran out of food to replenish it, so couldn't travel through the next few zones to make it home. Gutted. I actually thought I had soft locked myself for a while, but then I realised there was a 'give up' option which takes you back to town and erases all progress you made since you last left town.

Brutal. This didn't have quite as happy of an ending as when I got stuck 2/3rds of the way down blighttown with only a broken weapon.


This game is still hard to actually recommend, it has a lot of issues and is clearly a rushed, budget product. It's a shame really as it's close to being a very good game. It might scratch a similar itch to Let It Die, for those who liked that one.
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XoPachi
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by XoPachi »

Playing Master Quest because I miss enjoying a fucking Zelda game and I've never actually finished this.

This is...really tricky.
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Leandro
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Leandro »

Currently playing Nioh 2. Having beforehand experience in clearing all difficulties of Nioh 1, I thought this would be an easy ride, how wrong I was. This sequel turned out a much more challenging first playthrough.
Atmosphere and soundtrack are top notch, fantastic game

To Far Away Times wrote:
Sumez wrote:Sounds to me like it's probably been a while since you played Skyrim, and it's not very fresh in your memory. :P

The game is littered with map markers, and is generally not very good at rewarding exploration, unless you like just seeing the same things.
I haven't played it in 5 or 6 years but I remember there only being a few map markers to start, only identifying where the major towns were. There's a lot of map markers eventually, but they're basically individual pins you find by exploring. Or someone puts a single point of your map and you wander for an hour getting there getting sidetracked by tons of stuff.
At the start there aren't much markers at all. On my very first playthrough I just wandered around exploring and being in awe.

Funny how you can't say a good thing about Skyrim without haters arriving quickly, everywhere. It's a cool thing to hate Skyrim, it seems.
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Sima Tuna
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Sima Tuna »

I played hundreds of hours of Skyrim and I kinda hate it nowadays. I guess? I haven't played it in years because I played way too much of it when I was in college. I played hundreds of hours, easy. I just got sick of the Skyrim formula. For me, it became a map marker game, and I hate those. It feels today like a massive downgrade from Morrowind and even Oblivion. Those games had their problems, but they did force you to make choices between different options, rather than allowing you to have everything. Guilds would come into conflict (in morrowind at least.) Your build couldn't be "does everything perfectly" (at least not without tons of exploits.) You couldn't level infinitely. Morrowind didn't have map markers at all, and I enjoyed following the street signs or asking people for directions. Is it more frustrating? Probably for most people, it is. But I think it does give the game that something unique. It helps the world feel lived in.

Skyrim will throw these quests at you that are clearly not made for a game without map markers. It'll be some quest like, "clear out skellingtens at Donkey Dong Barrows." Donkey Dong barrows will be some place you've never been to, but the game will already have it marked on your map with a convenient map marker to follow. But what also makes this even worse is Donkey Dong Barrows will be located halfway across the world, miles and miles away from the town where you accepted the quest! Sometimes this is how it goes in Skyrim. NPCs send you on quests to places so far away that to travel there without fast-travel would be unreasonable. You're kind of intended to fast travel to the closest point to the new map marker and then walk the rest of the way yourself. Which is fine, I guess. I just, after a certain point I get really tired of following map markers to map markers back to map markers. Even if I turned the map markers off, the map marker design elements would remain the same. The distances wouldn't change, nor would the way fast travel is used to blast all over the game world.

Morrowind had literal teleports, and Silt Striders too. But both were part of the game's universe. Teleports sent you between major hubs, but if you wanted to get to a cave, you had to ask people what directions to take. Because there was no way to easily get out there. You could mark and recall back from a dungeon, but the initial walk out was by your lonesome. Directions were vague too. "Go west from this landmark." Which way is west? Figure it out. :P

The stat system used in morrowind/oblivion has many flaws, but it's not really improved for Skyrim. Skyrim just took any choice or punishment out of it, since you can't fuck up anymore. There's something charming about playing the role of a humble potion peddler or mage working on his spells day after day in the basement of the Mage Guild in Balmora. Skyrim is so desperate to show you shiny things that it lets you kill a dragon before the tutorial is over. Then proclaims you Thane before you've probably learned how to play the game. :lol:

Like I said, I kinda (?) hate Skyrim. I say "kinda" because it's a contempt borne from extreme familiarity. So many hours I have spent faffing around in its world... Skyrim is a very relaxing game, I will say that. It does a very good job providing an escapist fantasy world that's initially pleasurable to inhabit. But I think the experience is very hollow and unfulfilling, and that becomes more true the longer you play. I've never had a "build" in any Skyrim game, in all my hours of playing. I could always do everything and I was a master of everything. I would start with a build idea but inevitably end up mastering it all. Skyrim encourages that "do everything, experience everything" kind of approach to content. Like they're afraid to close off content for fear you'll never roll another character. So they eliminate that part of RPGs entirely. You can be the master of thieves and the master assassin and the archmage and the head of the companions and leader of the vampire slayers all on the same character. The only either/or choice I'm aware of in Skyrim is whether to be a werewolf or a vampire. :lol:
Spoiler
I won't blame Skyrim entirely for the guild nonsense though. Oblivion did almost the same thing. IIRC guilds in Oblivion do not conflict in any major way and content is almost never gated off from the player based on their decisions.
Skyrim does many things that are good, in themselves. I'm just not sure I could say the final package is good, exactly.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by EmperorIng »

Immryr wrote:Panzer Dragoon Saga: I really love the rail shooter panzer dragoon games, but have never played saga. I think in the back of my mind I always just couldn't see how this would work, but man, this is really great. The combat system is really unique and does somehow capture the feeling of the rail shooter games. It's a very linear game, which is often something people complain about with RPGs, but it's not a problem here for me, the pacing is very good. The music is really amazing too, more in line with the zwei sound track than the first game, which is a good thing imo. It fits real
Whoa, there were two people playing this at the same time? I just finished the game last night. I thought it was pretty amazing as a whole experience, even if the game itself is pretty easy. Just as a Panzer Dragoon fan finally being able to explore the world was a treat enough. The ending is pretty out-of-left-field and amazing; if you (or anyone else) hasn't finished it you are in for a treat.

Are you emulating? If so, which one?

Unfortunately for me, the emulator I am using crashes the game RIGHT before the final credits roll which is very dissatisfying. I am using mednafen, so I don't know if it's a problem with the game BIN/CUEs I am using, or the emulator, or whatever. It's extra shitty because I can't get the game to recognize my ranking and unlock the bonus features. I am going to try and report the bug on the mednafen forums to see if I can get a resolution.

If you browse CDRomance, you'll find that one of my favorite Sega Saturn games, Bulk Slash, got a full english translation, including a dub! The voices can be pretty cheesy but it still fits the game and I admire the effort put in.

I finally sat down and 1cc'd the game. I never read SuperDeadite's guide until now so I didn't know that you could unlock unique ending cutscenes for each of the waifu navigators in the game if you stick with them for the majority of the game (I would usually just choose one per stage). So I recorded the 1cc AND got the hidden ending. Excellent game all around! Awesome pacing, good level variety, and some very fun boss fights.

Check the run here~
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Sumez
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Sumez »

Leandro wrote: At the start there aren't much markers at all. On my very first playthrough I just wandered around exploring and being in awe.

Funny how you can't say a good thing about Skyrim without haters arriving quickly, everywhere. It's a cool thing to hate Skyrim, it seems.
Yes, when you start the game before you talk to any people or accept any quests, there won't be any map markers yet. I think this makes sense? When you are actually playing the game however, it relies heavily on having map markers for every single thing, though. And the design of the game pretty much enforces that.

I don't hate Skyrim. On paper there's a lot to the game for me to like, but also a lot to dislike. Ultimately it's a game I had a lot of fun with, but also one I'm unlikely to ever return to. What caused me to respond was the IMO correct presumption about open world games, that they should encourage players to just walk around and explore without any guidance, and the namedrop of Skyrim in that context despite the fact that Skyrim is pretty much the exact opposite of that.

But I think Sima Tuna already covered this very well in what he wrote here:
Sima Tuna wrote: Skyrim will throw these quests at you that are clearly not made for a game without map markers. It'll be some quest like, "clear out skellingtens at Donkey Dong Barrows." Donkey Dong barrows will be some place you've never been to, but the game will already have it marked on your map with a convenient map marker to follow. But what also makes this even worse is Donkey Dong Barrows will be located halfway across the world, miles and miles away from the town where you accepted the quest! Sometimes this is how it goes in Skyrim. NPCs send you on quests to places so far away that to travel there without fast-travel would be unreasonable. You're kind of intended to fast travel to the closest point to the new map marker and then walk the rest of the way yourself. Which is fine, I guess. I just, after a certain point I get really tired of following map markers to map markers back to map markers. Even if I turned the map markers off, the map marker design elements would remain the same. The distances wouldn't change, nor would the way fast travel is used to blast all over the game world.

Morrowind had literal teleports, and Silt Striders too. But both were part of the game's universe. Teleports sent you between major hubs, but if you wanted to get to a cave, you had to ask people what directions to take. Because there was no way to easily get out there. You could mark and recall back from a dungeon, but the initial walk out was by your lonesome. Directions were vague too. "Go west from this landmark." Which way is west? Figure it out. :P
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drauch
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by drauch »

Sumez wrote:I just wanted to check out how Diablo 2 Resurrected plays on consoles with a controller (it plays fantastic on Switch btw), and ended up playing through all three difficulties with my new paladin.
And it got me thinking.

Out of all these games that take inspiration from Diablo, namely the ever present color coded loot system you see in so many games, why have none of them ever managed to hit that same super-addictive nerve?
Path of Exile, Borderlands, or even Diablo 3 for that matter, don't even come close - in fact I think I pretty much hate the system in all of those games. It's just an ever present bother, looking for all those small potential increases in your numbers.
But that's the thing, that never really happens in Diablo 2. Even getting any decent loot is honestly rare, and if you do it's often a substantial jump ahead, and involves making some sort of compromise forcing you to look at how you put together your gear.

Also, fuck the postgame, spending hundreds of hours grinding for stupidly rare items that you can trade with other players to assemble that perfect build. If you know what you're doing, you can lay waste all the way to Hell Baal without ever stopping in your path to grind or farm out anything, or going online to trade with internet weirdos.

It's funny for how many clones Diablo 2 has nowadays, I don't think any of them ever managed to do anything to improve on it, instead trying just to make the loot much more convoluted with seventy additional colorful tiers, and stretching the game super thin into something people can play for 1000 hours.
I think the biggest thing I'd love in this sort of game (and I'm not holding out for Diablo 4 to go there), is making the RNG present a much bigger impact in each play session. Diablo 1 was heavily inspired by roguelikes, and the random area generation still remains one of the biggest appeals of the sequel for my money. But I'd love to see more unique random encounters that exist to tell a tale of adventure, rather than figure as notes in someone's min-maxing spreadsheet.
I like Grim Dawn, but it does kind of have some of the same issues with loot you mention. It never feels rewarding to find anything, because it's just constant with the drops. Also, the maps don't change; the enemies do, but not the actual pathing. That sort of kills it for future playthroughs, because it's been like 4-5 years, maybe more, and I have no desire to go back. Gee, I'm really selling this, aren't I! :lol:

But I totally agree--fuck the postgame, especially rune-farming. I do it sometimes, but it loses its luster very quickly.

I think I love it for the same reason it appears you do: I can just play it; the grinding and all of that is totally optional. I've never understood the Ladder get-rushed-fast, grind these few areas, then just Baal run for the rest of eternity until Ubers, then Ladder resets, do it again. Any time I play it anymore, it's typically untwinked, sometimes hardcore. I'm not huge into rogue perma death, but it certainly adds a new layer of gameplay and excitement, especially in how you craft your character. So many items you'd usually scoff at suddenly become valuable and lifesaving. Some of the best fun I've had with the game was running through Normal-Hell HC with a group, just with what we found. One died along the way and we had a lot of close calls, but we did it, and it felt glorious. The other two in the party that survived weren't very experienced and don't know much about the game, but we took our time and played it differently than we usually did. Then after Hell we boot it back up and decide to try Ubers, cause why not? Then our Necro dies instantly in the Den of Evil :lol:

That to me is the testament that makes the game great: there's multiple ways to play it, and the loot system feels... I don't think 'rewarding' is the correct word, but more so satisfying. I've been playing it since launch and there's still shit I've never seen. I love that.
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Sima Tuna
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Sima Tuna »

Sumez wrote:
I don't hate Skyrim. On paper there's a lot to the game for me to like, but also a lot to dislike. Ultimately it's a game I had a lot of fun with, but also one I'm unlikely to ever return to. What caused me to respond was the IMO correct presumption about open world games, that they should encourage players to just walk around and explore without any guidance, and the namedrop of Skyrim in that context despite the fact that Skyrim is pretty much the exact opposite of that.
I completely forgot to mention how a majority of the dungeons in the game are the same copypasted environment with the same draugrs or ghosts. Puzzles usually have their solutions about 2 feet from where the puzzle is found. The overall effect of Skyrim is that the more you play, the less you think. The less you think, the more you play. The game doesn't want you to stop and think about how to solve a puzzle or where to go to complete a quest. It wants you to turn your brain off and follow the marker. Which is why the quest item you receive to go to a dungeon is also the same item that has printed on it the puzzle solution to selfsame dungeon.

I found that pleasurable when I was burning my brain out IRL on scholastic work, but not so much now.

I really wish Morrowind (and to a lesser extent, Oblivion) would receive hd re-releases for modern consoles. Oblivion's world/aesthetic is rather bland, but it has many strong points over Skyrim in the gameplay and questing department. Really, Oblivion just needed to properly implement companions and fix a few other quirks of the gameplay. Skyrim's companion system still lags far behind New Vegas. As much as I distrust modern Bethesda, it's highly likely that a rerelease of Oblivion would include companion tweaks to be more in line with Fallout 4's current system. Which would be a vast improvement.
Spoiler
Fallout 4 is almost perfectly analogous to Skyrim in so many ways, but I don't want to get into them all here. Fallout 3 is Oblivion With Guns and Fallout 4 is Skyrim With Guns.
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Blinge
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Blinge »

ACSeraph wrote:How's it goin' shmups farm?
Shin Megami Tensei IV.
I'm still plugging away at this sometimes on my commute.
Good ol "shit midgami tedious" hahahah

I've got 10 demons who only give me hot shit if I try to fuse them so i'm just holding onto them for now. I've got some like Hariti with her phys resistance and no apparent weaknesses, with heals and buffs.. like. She's good man, I don't see myself giving her up for a good while.
It's nasty in a way... you want to level up demons to see what skills they'll get.. but I also don't wanna be running around with a full party because then I can't recruit more.. so sometimes I just fuse some loser to get rid of him and free a slot up.

I wanna explore more of Ginza and look for a louis vitton store rofl.. but some doucher is asking me for 50,000 macca so he can suck me off tbh.
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Blinge
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Blinge »

Oh damn there's a game for Made in Abyss??

Is it good? I only watched like 3 episodes of the anime. it looked cool.
shame about the weird stuff like the girl shoving a stick in the robot kid's arse hole
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BEAMLORD
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by BEAMLORD »

The Ninja Sailors Come Again.

Uh I mean The Ninja Saviours: Return of the Warriors!

Got into the SNES game only last year. As close to perfect a game can get. Glad to see everything present and correct in this reboot, along with the extras and faithful but juiced Tengo Project sheen.

I absolutely loved Pocky and Rocky Reshrined. Got Wild Guns Reloaded on the way over from Play Asia. Very much looking forward to whatever Tengo produce next time (Shatterhand please).
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Immryr
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Immryr »

EmperorIng wrote:Are you emulating? If so, which one?

Unfortunately for me, the emulator I am using crashes the game RIGHT before the final credits roll which is very dissatisfying. I am using mednafen, so I don't know if it's a problem with the game BIN/CUEs I am using, or the emulator, or whatever. It's extra shitty because I can't get the game to recognize my ranking and unlock the bonus features. I am going to try and report the bug on the mednafen forums to see if I can get a resolution.

If you browse CDRomance, you'll find that one of my favorite Sega Saturn games, Bulk Slash, got a full english translation, including a dub! The voices can be pretty cheesy but it still fits the game and I admire the effort put in.

I finally sat down and 1cc'd the game. I never read SuperDeadite's guide until now so I didn't know that you could unlock unique ending cutscenes for each of the waifu navigators in the game if you stick with them for the majority of the game (I would usually just choose one per stage). So I recorded the 1cc AND got the hidden ending. Excellent game all around! Awesome pacing, good level variety, and some very fun boss fights.

Check the run here~
Oh man, that does sound frustrating - although i don't know what the unlockable features are, i'll have to look into that. I just finished the game a minute ago! i was using the Beetle core on Retroarch - no crashes here.
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EmperorIng
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by EmperorIng »

Awesome ending, right? I didn't expect a little bit of End of Evangelion in my panzer dragoon. :mrgreen:
sunnshiner
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by sunnshiner »

Skate 2 on XB360 :D That gen's Skate games are really good.
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Lander
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Lander »

Got a week off from work and decided to sink it into getting a Grim Dawn character through to Lv100.
Went with a 2H lightning melee Soldier / Shaman, and wow what a difference to my old DW ranged fire Demolitionist / Arcanist that never went beyond Normal difficulty.
This is the mad dash AoE wipe gameplay that the ARPG genre always looked like from a distance :)

The Borderlands games are my closest touchstone to looty ARPGs, so the sheer depth and nature of GD's endgame progression walls are new to me and quite interesting.
Grinding and natural progression will get you somewhere, but it feels like knowledge of how best to break the game is the most important thing for getting through Elite / Ultimate.
Going all-in on one skill at a time, minmaxing resists, understanding where to buy / craft the bits and pieces that will plug holes in your build, etc. Having some of that knowledge this time round has helped a hell of a lot.
Sumez wrote:I think the biggest thing I'd love in this sort of game (and I'm not holding out for Diablo 4 to go there), is making the RNG present a much bigger impact in each play session. Diablo 1 was heavily inspired by roguelikes, and the random area generation still remains one of the biggest appeals of the sequel for my money. But I'd love to see more unique random encounters that exist to tell a tale of adventure, rather than figure as notes in someone's min-maxing spreadsheet.
I tend to disdain anything tagged with roguelike in the wake of its saturating indie boom (mostly for being the death of level design :|), but it's an interesting solution to the structural issues of long-form ARPGs.
Something I've come to notice with the formula is that - particularly at the end of a game's expansion / DLC lifecycle - the amount of available content massively outscopes the leveling progression; playing completionist before the final difficulty will boost you too far, making on-level loot irrelevant and reducing the interim game to a boring speedrun.

It would be interesting to see a game that - instead of offering the entire breadth of content as an OCD-inducing checklist per difficulty - randomized on a coarser level by picking encounters, dungeons, and possibly even hubs from a pool and bolting them together into a smaller more on-scope game world that could balance up from whatever level the player entered it at.
drauch wrote:I like Grim Dawn, but it does kind of have some of the same issues with loot you mention. It never feels rewarding to find anything, because it's just constant with the drops. Also, the maps don't change; the enemies do, but not the actual pathing. That sort of kills it for future playthroughs, because it's been like 4-5 years, maybe more, and I have no desire to go back. Gee, I'm really selling this, aren't I! :lol:
I've found that setting up an aggressive loot filter and using Grim Internals to auto-grab rares helps. That way you can ignore the low-tier stuff, still have a stream of cash from the mid-tier, and actually get a bit excited when a blue or purple shows up... Only to realise it's for a class you don't play :P

Truth be told I've resorted to using a 3x speedhack to alleviate the later difficulty repetition - at least I can smash out the boring stuff (repeat quests, rep grinding ugh) at triple efficiency in the hope that burnout won't set in before Lv100 and the later-playthrough-enhancing goodies that come from having a finished endgame character.
Feels like one of those "it gets really good at hour 200!" games.
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-Fish-
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by -Fish- »

Pizza Tower. Took a chance and purchased it on Steam this weekend knowing absolutely nothing about about it. Ends up being one of the best platformers I've experienced. Feels like a mix of old school Sonic and Wario but ends up playing much better than both. :). Fun theme and absolutely amazing ost as well.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by BareKnuckleRoo »

I messed around with a number of older dungeon crawlers this weekend. There's one called Silvern Castle that looked interesting, was made to directly compete with Wizardry, was sold to a publisher but never released, later got released as freeware. It's got some interesting mechanical changes to it, but I found a lot of it was overly complex for complexity's sake (complex encumbrance systems for multi-character parties where even gold weighs you down are much worse to manage than simple "you can only hold 10 items at a time" type of inventory systems).

Starting out seems to be quite brutal. There's no frontline/backline distinction it seems and monsters will happy attack mages in the back. You need a lot of exp to gain your first level, and spellcasters seem to have trouble starting with enough points to even cast spells!

I think I need to also tweak my Apple II emulator settings as it felt rather slow on the default settings. Apparently 8 mHz is recommended. Setting the emulator to max speed doesn't work like it does for Wizardry as the game's dialogs are not the "press a button to advance" sort of thing so maxing out the emulation speed causes you to miss everything in combat.

A good review of the game here: https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads/sil ... le.104447/

I'm still convinced that some of the best early dungeon crawlers are the Japanese-made Wizardry games. The Gaiden games that were made for the Game Boy and the one for the SNES are exceptionally worthy and fun entries that, despite being spinoffs made by another devteam, are on par if not arguably better than the original games.
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XoPachi
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by XoPachi »

Hi Fi Rush is great. @u@

This is like playing some lost gen 6 game and I'm so glad some AAA studio had the balls to try something like this today.
Strange to see something headed by Shinji Mikami, published by Bethesda playing like a 3D Viewtiful Joe. What an odd, welcome addition to both companies lineups.
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Lander
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Lander »

XoPachi wrote:Hi Fi Rush is great. @u@

This is like playing some lost gen 6 game and I'm so glad some AAA studio had the balls to try something like this today.
Strange to see something headed by Shinji Mikami, published by Bethesda playing like a 3D Viewtiful Joe. What an odd, welcome addition to both companies lineups.
Oh wow, a suprise single player character action game from Mikami? That looks top.

I'd only heard the name until now and assumed it would be the latest entry in the trendy probably-BR multiplayer genre. How nice to be wrong :)
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Mischief Maker
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Mischief Maker »

Freedom Planet 2

Image

This has been out since last September and I didn't know about it?!!

I thought for sure GOG would have it, since they let part 1 on the store. But apparently the fucking GOG curators turned it down! And the day I found out, GOG's big top-of-the-page banner release was fucking "radioactive sewer dwarves," a game that would have looked like a piece of shit even by early 80s standards. I love having a DRM-free game store, but I fucking HATE GOG's idiot curators. Fortunately itch.io has it DRM-free.

Anyway, Freedom Planet, if you don't know, was an overgrown fangame which evolved into its own thing that was equal parts Sonic the Hedgehog and Gunstar Heroes. 3 wildly different playing characters zipped their way through sonic-style levels full of loop-de-loops and ziplines before taking on a Treasure-style boss, with excellent music and spritework as well as fully voiceacted cutscenes. It was great fun, but a little rough around the edges here and there.

Freedom Planet 2 is a total improvement over 1 so far, with all my niggling complaints fixed and all the great parts improved. While FP1 felt like an oversized Sega Genesis game, FP2 feels like a Sega Saturn tribute, with sharper and more detailed spritework alongside basic polygon assets. Each level is a gigantic multi-path affair filled to the brim with props to bounce, spin, and fly off of. And they've added a fourth character with an entirely new moveset. If it's of interest to you, apparently the main villain's voice actress is a big name in anime.

First impressions are very, very positive!
Two working class dudes, one black one white, just baked a tray of ten cookies together.

An oligarch walks in and grabs nine cookies for himself.

Then he says to the white dude "Watch out for that black dude, he wants a piece of your cookie!"
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Lander
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Lander »

In the wake of the remake coming out, I spent 5-ish hours playing "configure original Dead Space under Linux" to finally educate myself on the series. Blimey guv that's one scuffed up PC port, so it is.
Managed to get it working with proper gamma, framerate lock, etc. Keyboard input's unusable since it freezes out mouse aim whenever you press a new key, but gamepad is salvageable with some anti-deadzone tweaks.

I even managed to play the actual game for a few hours! Got to the centrifuge and I'm loving it so far - fantastic atmosphere, solid combat, satisfyingly chunky character control, all around super tight if perhaps a little easy on Medium mode; drowning in items, and the centrifuge itself was my first, second and third deaths all in one :)
I wimped out after one chapter back in the day, but coming back with a stomach for horror has been most rewarding. The panic-attack-having string soundtrack is almost comfy once you realise how explicitly it alerts you to enemy presence.

Simultaneously anticipating and dreading the sequel - everything I've seen of it looks like an incredible setpiece action experience, but the eye / needle scene is going to be challenging.
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Re: What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

Post by Air Master Burst »

Lander wrote:Simultaneously anticipating and dreading the sequel - everything I've seen of it looks like an incredible setpiece action experience, but the eye / needle scene is going to be challenging.
Dead Space 2 is mostly fantastic, but the ending gauntlet gets a bit absurd at times if you play on hard, and the final boss is either a cakewalk or an infuriating waste of time depending on which weapons you take. Personally preferred DS1 silent Isaac but the voice actor is pretty good.

Dead Space 3 is depressing. You can see the bones of what would have been a good game clearly poking out through the horrible multiplayer DLC microtransaction skinsuit.
King's Field IV is the best Souls game.
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