What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

[Sima Tuna]

Sega Ages OutRun.

Son of a bitch.

What a fucking vibe this game is. It's like being on holiday. Sun, surf, the crazy driving of the locals, lax traffic measures...

The BGM is absolutely irresistible. The kind of easy listening future funk that could only have come outta Japan in the 80s and 90s. The visuals, those Sega-blue skies, horizons stretching out interminably, the undulating road beneath you, are a joy to behold.

Very late to the party, of course. Being born in '83, it's a game that's been in my peripherals for a long time, one of those titles you have an instinctive gamer's awareness of even if you never got round to it. Shouldn't have took me this long.

As an aside, seems the Sega Ages line isn't available on PSN? Shame. Really would have preferred to get it for my PS5, but enjoying it on Switch either way.

Outrun makes me sad that those kind of "relaxing holiday" games never took off as their own genre.

BTW if you like Outrun, make sure to play Super Hang-On if you haven't. It's less relaxing but provides the high-octane thrills.

[XoPachi]

I don't know what happened or when but online in Rivals of Aether got so much more ridiculously harder to play recently.
Literally everyone plays like top 8 tournament competitors now and I'm just not able to keep up anymore.

[m.sniffles.esq]

I played SO MUCH Outrun in the arcade, that unfortunately the home versions--sans the Mustang steering wheel/gearshift and vibration--always seem somewhat lacking to me. The really great thing about the steering wheel is that it was weighted and had variable resistance, so it felt right. Unlike say Pole Position's, which was limp.

[Steven]

Got to play Out Run in the deluxe cabinet at some random arcade that I don't even remember the location of a few months ago and it was fucking awesome.

Still hoping to find another After Burner II deluxe cabinet someday, but that thing is stupidly rare. I got to play on one of those a single time 20 years ago when I was very young and I've been looking for another one ever since with no success.

[Gamer707b]

I remember playing Out Run Deluxe in the arcades back in the 80s. Hang On Deluxe too. I remember having both games on the Master System. Even the obvious downgrade didn't ruin it for me. I was a happy camper. Ignorance and innocence was indeed bliss for me as a youth. Now, I'll gladly take the near perfect Saturn Out Run though even without the steering wheel.

[BEAMLORD]

BTW if you like Outrun, make sure to play Super Hang-On if you haven't. It's less relaxing but provides the high-octane thrills.

Had a quick skim through the Hang On/Road Rash thread, will definitely check it out if it gets a new port, or of I ever sort out a MAME or MiSTer set-up. I'm sure I've sat on a Hang On or Super Hang On back in the day at least, when I was a 9 year old scrub in the making.

The arcade situation in the UK is dire. There is a joint called Arcade Club up north, which looks legit - https://www.arcadeclub.co.uk/

I gotta get my ass up there at some point. They have Outrun and Super Hang On.

[Marc]

Arcade Club is the bomb. Hydraulic OutRun is my favourite machine of all-time, never thought I'd have the opportunity to play that again

[XoPachi]

Man Pizza Tower is amazingly addicting. This game is fucking great.

[Kiken]

Finally popped in the copy of Splatoon 3 I got for Christmas and I'm now back on the EXP/Leveling-up-fashion grind. I must have spent at least 15 minutes yesterday just scanning in all my Amiibos.

[Lander]

Man Pizza Tower is amazingly addicting. This game is fucking great.

I caught a bit of this by way of Aris' stream, and looks interesting. The Ren & Stimpy aesthetic has never been my thing, but the sheer amount of energy poured into all the animation work is really cool - like OTT Wario Land by way of an EGA paint package.

And of course, one of the first level themes is a downbeat remix of Funiculi Funicula I wonder, how deep does it go beyond the memes? Perhaps it's the Cruelty Squad / Daniel Mullins paranoia talking, but it gives me the vibe that there's some sinister intruigue behind the mask of funny pizza game.

[XoPachi]

I caught a bit of this by way of Aris' stream, and looks interesting. The Ren & Stimpy aesthetic has never been my thing, but the sheer amount of energy poured into all the animation work is really cool - like OTT Wario Land by way of an EGA paint package.

And of course, one of the first level themes is a downbeat remix of Funiculi Funicula I wonder, how deep does it go beyond the memes? Perhaps it's the Cruelty Squad / Daniel Mullins paranoia talking, but it gives me the vibe that there's some sinister intruigue behind the mask of funny pizza game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-vUtITIZR8
I don't think there's anything deeper to it's aesthetic. It's just bonkers as all fuck for the sake of it. lmao

[Sumez]

Pizza Tower is a fascinating game to me, because just watching videos I can't for the life of me imagine how it's actually controlled!

Seems to me like the game is more along the lines of what the Sonic games have always wanted to be, than anything Wario

[Lander]

Ah, I suppose sometimes a pie is just a pie.

And come on Sumez, not Wario? Next to greed, looney tunes locomotion and frenzied crushing have been his defining character traits since Wario Land 3 and 4!

[Sir Ilpalazzo]

That's my exact impression of Pizza Tower too lol. It does look fun and I'm definitely very curious about it, but it's hard to get a handle on how it actually plays from any of the videos I've seen.

[Sumez]

And come on Sumez, not Wario? Next to greed, looney tunes locomotion and frenzied crushing have been his defining character traits since Wario Land 3 and 4!

In terms of gameplay though? Seems to be a very speedrun focused game

[XoPachi]

Pizza Tower is a fascinating game to me, because just watching videos I can't for the life of me imagine how it's actually controlled!

Seems to me like the game is more along the lines of what the Sonic games have always wanted to be, than anything Wario

It's very openly Wario Land + Sonic. To the point he was showing the game at SAGE and had a build with a hilarious/cute Sonic parody named Snick. The game itself controls really bloody well. You can really just rip ass once you learn it's levels and they all give you opportunities to just use everything at your disposal for a high score. But as insane as it looks, it's not really a hard game to play at all. It's remarkably balanced and highly engaging.

EDIT: One thing that surprised me, the bosses in this game are actually kind of hard. Roughly comparable to Mega Man Zero bosses in difficulty and patterns. It's really fun.
They made a mistake *actually* making the second boss a Mega Man fight by giving you a gun for it though. I can easily see someone struggling on him, but I fucking brutalized him. Destroyed him. That's my forte.

[Lander]

In terms of gameplay though? Seems to be a very speedrun focused game

To my eyes, it has WL4's panic escape sequences all over over it - the parts where the stage begins to decohere and you have to smash your way back to the entrance under a time limit. Only in this case, the world is always weird / half-melted and the timer is soft instead of hard.

It's very openly Wario Land + Sonic. To the point he was showing the game at SAGE and had a build with a hilarious/cute Sonic parody named Snick.

Cripes, I haven't heard about SAGE in forever. That was a real font of weird (and in some cases surprisingly good) stuff back in the day.

In fact, Sonic fangames were the first form of interactive trolling I ever saw - some joker played on the misconception of big file = good stuff and uploaded a ~100MB game that presented as a high-production 2D followup to the first Sonic Adventure, but cut to credits after two screens.

Pretty cunning in hindsight. Not only did they successfully play slow-ass dialup internet for laughs, they also managed to predict the future of digital game distribution

[XoPachi]

To my eyes, it has WL4's panic escape sequences all over over it - the parts where the stage begins to decohere and you have to smash your way back to the entrance under a time limit. Only in this case, the world is always weird / half-melted and the timer is soft instead of hard.

You can do a second lap of the escape sequence which is required for P rank completion. The timer is generous that first lap but when you go for seconds, unless you're amazing, you see how it's the same tight window as Wario. When trying to do everything in this game it's actually surprisingly difficult.

The game isn't actually all that subversive in it's general loop. It's very classic but it ups the frenetic nature of it's inspirations.
The main goal for completion is to get $200 to unlock the boss of each floor. You get $10 for every Toppin you pick up in each floor's 4 levels (3 on the final floor). There are 5 Toppins per level. You kill the boss and advance.

On top of the 5 Toppins, additionally, to get P rank...
You must find each level's 3 secret challenges which take about 10 seconds each.
You need to find 1 artifact behind a door that you unlock by finding the janitor (lol) in each level. Finding every level's artifact unlocks something.
You have to lap the escape sequence and arrive at the exit before time runs out. The portal to restart the escape is hidden somewhere close to the entrance to be out of the way for people who aren't interested in P rank and don't accidentally lap the level.
And you need to maintain your combo for the entire duration of the level. It's an extremely generous decay rate, but getting hit will kill it faster. Like Wario Land 2 and 3, Peppino is invincible. You just lose score/P rank and are shamed for hurting Peppino because how fucking dare you.
But it can all be done in one largely unbroken flow state which is a testament to some incredibly well tested and thoughtful level design.

The hub does something cool as well but that's for anyone sure about buying this to find out.

[Gamer707b]

Went back to XenoGears after taking several months off it. I don't have the attention span for Rpgs anymore, but something about XenoGears keeps me hooked. It's not the usual "sword and fantasy" stuff. I like the premise and very deep story. Also LOVE the character models. They are sprite based. Also, whereas Final Fantasy used pre-rendered backgrounds during this time, the backgrounds were in full 3D in this game if I'm not mistaken. I really want to see this to the end.

[Sumez]

Finished up Doom Eternal last night

I had a lot of fun with the game until the final boss which somehow manages to showcase all the shortcomings of the game, what a horrible note for an otherwise enjoyable game to end on, almost felt like it retroactively made the earlier stages worse.

Took me a while to really reflect on it, but I think the core design idea of "enemies can reach you anywhere, and fast, so keep moving all the time" from both this game and its predecessor is a bit of a gameplay-wise dead-end. At least for a first-person shooter. You simply can't do anything more with it outside of dialing back a bit again.
The thing is, you can only ever see in front of you at any given moment, so you'll be doing a lot of dodging by intuition almost the entire time, rather than actually focusing on what enemies you can see and react to, knowing their behaviors and patterns. You know, like most great action games do.

While I believe there's absolutely a massive span between being bad at Doom Eternal, and being really good at it, there's so much occasional randomness (or at best unpredictability that can be learned until it's less unpredictable) that even if you're doing poorly at one specific encounter, you can probably retry it until you're lucky enough to not get shot in the back by a demon that spawned there without you knowing it.

The game of course gives you a lot of leeway even on Ultra-Violence, to prevent relying too hard on flukes entirely. And in fact balances the entire gameplay loop around the ability to use specific murder tools to regain both lost health and armor (which is just health 2). And it's this core loop of exchanging chainsaws for ammo, and ammo for health that keeps the game fun for quite a while. But the developers know that there's not as much depth to this flow as they had hoped, so instead they just keep pushing new tools and weapons to the player, and creating situations where most of them are needed, until even juggling all of those becomes the bigger challenge than not getting killed.
And the moment you have unlocked every single tool in the game, it only has enough breath to last a couple more stages before going stale, and at least has the good sense to end right before it does - much like Doom 2016 also did. Too bad it had to end with a boss that literally tries to replicate the experience of fighting the final boss in Doom 2, which was also a shitshow.

[To Far Away Times]

I think DOOM 2016 and Eternal take the FPS genre as far as it's ever gone before.

I really appreciate how much Doom Eternal is willing to challenge the player, and the mental stack that goes into juggling all these cool downs, and controlling your position on the map, and choosing between ammo or health, switching to the right weapon for the right enemy, remembering to use your two types of rechargeable grenades, plus aiming.

It doesn't seem like much typing that out, but because of the speed of it, and how much it asks from the player at any given time during combat, it takes all these little things and makes them all important. It feels so good clearing some of those rooms. DOOM is the fun type of stress.

And the last boss (and the one before it with the meat hook as well) are total dog shit. But almost everything else is top tier.

[XoPachi]

I think DOOM 2016 and Eternal take the FPS genre as far as it's ever gone before.

I really appreciate how much Doom Eternal is willing to challenge the player, and the mental stack that goes into juggling all these cool downs, and controlling your position on the map, and choosing between ammo or health, switching to the right weapon for the right enemy, remembering to use your two types of rechargeable grenades, plus aiming.

It doesn't seem like much typing that out, but because of the speed of it, and how much it asks from the player at any given time during combat, it takes all these little things and makes them all important. It feels so good clearing some of those rooms. DOOM is the fun type of stress.

And the last boss (and the one before it with the meat hook as well) are total dog shit. But almost everything else is top tier.

I'd say 2016 was more of a return to form for the AAA FPS and then Eternal is an evolution that future shooters will build upon. I think Eternal is a masterpiece but is more transitional than a insurmountable peak. It's an innovative endeavor that really pushed how we think about gun combat in these games.
Games in the past kind of tried what it does like BulletStorm and Shadow Warrior '13. But Eternal was just so much more laser focused. I massively appreciated how it just forces you to play by very strict rules.

I think DOOM 2016 and Eternal take the FPS genre as far as it's ever gone before.

But I think it's going to be exclusively indies that will take it's example unfortunately.

[Sumez]

I think DOOM 2016 and Eternal take the FPS genre as far as it's ever gone before.

I believe you can absolutely take it further, just not in that direction.

Coming straight from Dusk, the supposed king of the "boomer shooters", combat in that one really left a lot to be desired, and I'd love to see more classic FPS games that play with your interaction with enemies in fast paced action gameplay.
The demons' ability to track you and flank you at any position in Doom 2016+Eternal is definitely a good way to counteract the generally boring dominant strategy of hiding behind corners that works in most FPS games.
But I think it also comes with a massive tradeoff that Doom Eternal really struggles hard to overcome, since the way you deal with any enemy is always the same at its core, and the only way for them to add more depth to that was by massively expanding the breadth of the game instead, via an excessive amount of utility tools, resource management, and cooldowns, as well as hard-coded weakpoints on the enemies.

I'd probably have enjoyed a game that switched up enemy behaviors more, but still rely on simple predictable patterns like all good action games do. I think that's the way to go if you want to take the FPS genre forward.

[Marc]

Just ditched Ori and the Blind Forest. Started well, but about a third of the way in it started to rely on the fact that you can save anywhere, and ended up with sections more like Super Meat Boy than a trad arcade adventure. Plus, the astounding visuals all to often made hazard recognition a nightmare - in fact it seemed to delighl in doing so a certain points. Not for me, sadly.

[m.sniffles.esq]

My commute game has been Labyrinth of Galleria, which I previously heard was "less a sequel to Refrain, and more of an overall improvement", which now makes total sense and I 100% agree with. It's Refrain, but with it's elements either condensed, streamlined, or eliminated. Thus far, I've been real happy with it.

For the sofa: Other than Akka Arrh (which started off rocky, but now I really like. So much, that I'm considered repurchasing it on Steam so I can play using my trackball), I'm trying to clear out some stuff on Game Pass before they disappear. First up: Signalis (aka Resident Evil/Dino Crisis just with big pixels instead of big vectors)

While I'm only about six/seven hours in--and I certainly appreciate the effort--the big pixel aesthetic and creepy/spooky atmosphere may be mutually exclusive. I mean, if they're not, this game doesn't do a whole lot to convince me otherwise. So you have 'survival horror' that isn't very horrifying. And for the 'survival' part, you do so by searching for lots and lots (and lots) of keycards.

I know that may make it sound like I hate it, which I certainly do not. It's engaging, yet I can't say it really gets under your skin in the way it seems like it was intended. I guess the lesson here is before you turn on the 'big pixel' filter in Unity, you should probably have a reason for doing so rather than "this is the look people like nowadays". Because it can very well kneecap what you're going for, and perhaps even magnify other shortcomings.

[XoPachi]

Just ditched Ori and the Blind Forest. Started well, but about a third of the way in it started to rely on the fact that you can save anywhere, and ended up with sections more like Super Meat Boy than a trad arcade adventure. Plus, the astounding visuals all to often made hazard recognition a nightmare - in fact it seemed to delighl in doing so a certain points. Not for me, sadly.

Ori is one of those games I knew was being hyped up because "pretty artful game" and little else so I avoided them for years. I finally decided to play them to see what the hype was about and should have just...stuck to my initial reaction. They're not even close to terrible. But I found them middling. There's a lot of moments that just don't work how the developers intended and yeah, the visuals aren't all that functional in a lot of critical points. Ori is often pea sized on the screen and there's so many blurry, soupy lighting effects, and murky foreground obstructions the game becomes a headache. 2 is much better but still not all that fun to me.
Honestly there's a lot of indie search action titles that get massive amounts of praise but when I play them, I just lose interest. Ori and Hollow Knight have been at the top of that list for me for a while now. I'd just rather replay AM2R, ESA, or Axiom Verge 1.

Coming straight from Dusk, the supposed king of the "boomer shooters", combat in that one really left a lot to be desired, and I'd love to see more classic FPS games that play with your interaction with enemies in fast paced action gameplay.

Yeah Dusk is good, but I felt underwhelmed by it. I don't know quite what I was expecting but it felt very run of the mill for the niche compared to how overwhelmingly high people elevated it. I'll likely go back to finish it, but I wasn't in any rush to do so when I got it.

One thing about Dusk, and this is just me, is that it brings classic movement tech to the fore in a way that it goes from being interesting to being a meme. It's so overpowered and so easy to do, that it stopped being fun for me. Especially considering that, at least in my time playing it, there wasn't really a point where it felt necessary despite it being as simple as Mega Man X's dashing. The reason strafe jumping is so much fun in Quake and Source games despite nothing being designed around it is because it takes practice to be consistent about it. When it's so easy to do and so overly rewarding, it just feels empty like it's there to tick a box.

I think Amid Evil and Prodeus are much more satisfying experiences despite doing much less. The latter is PISS easy on any difficulty, but the levels are just more interesting to me. And as far as boomer shooter combat goes, the generic obvious take is to praise Ultrakill in that regard. But honestly, I agree with the insanely positive reception of that game 100%. It's all the same reasons I liked Eternal in rethinking gun combat and not being shy about having heavily enforced rules and loops. I like Eternal more than Ultrakill for different reasons, but I'd call Ultra the more focused title of the two.

[Stevens]

Fights
In
Tight
Spaces

Went back to it after a very long break. Still great. Will fight more today.

[Mischief Maker]

Fights
In
Tight
Spaces

Went back to it after a very long break. Still great. Will fight more today.

What a coincidence! I did the same thing a couple days ago.

[Stevens]

Only gotten to the prison. I have finished it, but having a hard time this go around. Been either drafting or using the aggressive deck which is honestly the best by far.

Have you spent a lot of time with the 1.0?

[Mischief Maker]

I'm honestly kind of terrible at it, the mafia stage where just about every enemy has counterattack is where I hit a brick wall. I've actually been playing almost entirely with the balanced deck out of habit, it seems like whatever deck you have at the start must be replaced by lategame when objectively superior cards of every type start showing up.

Have you played Trials of Fire yet?