What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

[Sumez]

Reverting from the estus system back to consumable healing items is why I've never really gotten along with Bloodborne, whereas many people list it as their favorite. Don't get me wrong, it's still a good game, but with the cap for consumables set at 20 I feel like I'm expected to grind them back up to 20 when I die otherwise I will just keep dying, and then it kinda feels like the game is wasting my time when Miyazaki and Co. already had this figured out. Kind of a weird regression.

Same thing for Demon's Souls really.
They already figured this out back in King's Field

[To Far Away Times]

I guess it's time to play StarCraft for some reason.

There was a time in my life where I did nothing but play StarCraft for a year.

I fucking love that game. But at the same time, I don't think I could go back. I'm in a different place now, and I think that was the right game at the right time.

[Steven]

Zerg 3, The New Dominion, is kicking my ass. I must have forgotten about this one because either I really suck more than I thought I did or this is a really weirdly unbalanced mission. The enemy base is on a plateau defended by a dozen Siege Tanks covered by Goliaths, missile turrets, and bunkers, and the highest thing on the tech tree that you have is Mutas. Your only choices are either to attack the turrets with your Mutas and drop inside the southern part of the enemy base or attempt to run up the ramp while the Siege Tanks and bunkers destroy you. I hate attacking up ramps in SC1, and so does everyone else, and it's even worse with a billion Siege Tanks sitting on the plateau shooting you the whole time. This would be easier with Dark Swarm/Plague or effortless with Guardians, but you don't have those.

I forgot how I beat this before, but I'm pretty sure that you don't really have a choice other than to sacrifice a few Mutas to take out some of the turrets and tanks and then drop a bunch of ground units to take out the rest of the turrets so your Mutas can clear out the rest of the tanks. Might even be worth ignoring most of the turrets and sacrificing all of the Mutas to kill the tanks. I'd forgotten how awesome SC1 Hydras are... SC2 Hydras are super wimpy in comparison, which always bothered me, especially because they're more expensive and cost 2 supply for some reason now despite dying way more easily.

While I am here, I suddenly remembered something strange that happened a lot time ago. I was at my friend's house playing the campaign and the mission was New Gettysburg. We built a turret close to the Zerg base and this turret chased away an Overlord, but as the Overlord was fleeing it floated over a spore colony, which exploded for some reason and we failed the mission. I have never seen this before or since, and I have no idea how it happened. Can missile turrets' missiles hit buildings that are at higher elevations? That would explain it, but it was really weird. Tempted to see if I can recreate it, but that was like 25 years ago and the game has been patched many times since then, so maybe it's not possible anymore, assuming that it was ever possible at all.

a lot of weird character redesigns.

That's a fair criticism. I played fairly competitively up until last year, so I haven't had the time in-game to even acknowledge them since it came out, lol. Completely forgot about how they sexied up poor Jim's unibrow and took away what I always assumed was Kerrigan's (human) braided hair.

Yeah, with Kerrigan, it's pretty clear that they tried to maintain continuity with SC2 Kerrigan's design and I am okay with that, even if she looks pretty different from how she did in SC1. The problem is that Kerrigan was the only character that they tried to do this with. I'd have been okay with the other characters getting redesigned to match their SC2 designs, but they didn't.

I still watch Starcraft almost every night. I think its 'limitations' are what makes it so enjoyable to watch. With the smaller unit groups that require more control, and the fact that units don't just ball up and overlap makes for more tactical gameplay imo. I love playing it, but the only other RTS with high-level screened gameplay is AoE II, and I find that dreadfully boring to watch with its massive control groups and slower gameplay. But hey, I get it. If you're not playing a billion hours of Starcraft, sometimes getting that Dragoon or Siege Tank down the ramp is infuriating .

It's just a fun game to play, and I think part of it is how different the three species are. Obviously, every unit type in StarCraft is completely unique. Even the workers have different stats and abilities and stuff. Warcraft and I think even Warcraft II have basically identical units for Humans and Orcs other than the magic units, and there are only like 2 types of magic units in the game. Everything else is identical aside from visuals, I think. I loved Warcraft II, but I have literally never played it since StarCraft released. Not a big fan of Generic Fantasy Stuff™ anyway, especially when I can have Generic Space Stuff™ instead, which I can never get enough of, which is also why I played Warcraft III exactly one time on my father's computer for like 20 minutes and immediately went back to StarCraft. Is StarCraft's stuff even generic at all? Maybe. It doesn't really matter to me at all because I like it a lot.

Total Annihilation is great too, but it's probably not as fun to watch as StarCraft. AoE II is... okay. I've never really taken to it. Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds is a better game than AoE II and I played that first, so playing AoE II after that felt like a big regression because obviously AoE II doesn't have X-wings and AT-ATs and shields and all of that fun stuff... and the Death Star if you want to use cheats lol. Still play Galactic Battlegrounds every once in a while. It's a lot of fun to load a bunch of infantry units inside some AT-ATs and walk the AT-ATs over to the enemy base and unload the infantry right there in the middle of the assault. Great game.

I guess it's time to play StarCraft for some reason.

There was a time in my life where I did nothing but play StarCraft for a year.

I fucking love that game. But at the same time, I don't think I could go back. I'm in a different place now, and I think that was the right game at the right time.

Yeah, I know how that goes. I spent like an entire decade playing StarCraft before StarCraft II released and then I spent 5 years playing that offline casually, but I also played with a lot of friends in the barracks on Okinawa. Pretty easy to set up games when everybody lives together and works together and is constantly together outside of work. We only had one copy: mine. Everybody installed it using my disc and I don't remember if they bought it or what, but that's how we did it. One guy lost the fucking case for it somehow and gave me back just the disc and I was pissed, but there was nothing I could do about it. He was the one guy that got into it almost as much as I did even though he somehow had no idea StarCraft existed until I told him about it.

Even after I stopped playing I still made sure to log in every year to get the anniversary portraits, so I do have all of them. It's really nice to go back to both games after all of this time and find that I still love at least SC1 as much as I did when I was like 8~10 or whatever.

[ryu]

I was really into WarCraft III for a while. Although I mostly played custom maps or played around with the editor myself. I was fairly competent with the tool at some point, did my own Tower Defense, Hero Defense etc. maps and only stopped because my friends quit. Note that I was a kid. It's still unreal to me that this is how most professionals do game dev instead of actually programming theie games themselves

[To Far Away Times]

I spent a lot of time in StarCraft’s map editor. I loved how intuitive it was. I made multiplayer maps, campaign maps, some turret defense. That game really was the total package.

[Steven]

I made a lot of almost certainly terrible UMS maps as a kid with my friends. My friends would make the maps and I wrote the triggers since I was the only one who could do that. Those maps are all long gone now, and I don't remember how to write triggers anymore. I could probably figure it out if I wanted to, but I'd need motivation to do it and I don't have any right now.

Anyway, at Zerg 8, Eye for an Eye, now. The New Dominion wasn't hard. All I had to do was make about 25~30 Mutas and use a little bit of micro to kill the turrets and anti-air units and I won. I did drop a bunch of Zerglings and Hydras, but I dropped them too early and the enemy tanks annihilated them. Only 3 Hydras and 1 Zergling survived, but I still had at least 18 Mutas alive at the end.

After that, most of the rest of SC1 Zerg is super easy. Once you get access to Guardians, all you really have to do is mass Guardians, bring some Mutas for anti-air and an Overlord if you need detection, and A-move to victory. Guardians are ridiculous in single player because the only thing in the game with longer range is Siege Tanks in siege mode, which can't shoot at Guardians anyway, and the enemy AI doesn't seem to know how to deal with Guardians. SC1 Protoss missions 7-10 (my last playthrough ended at either Protoss 7 or 8, but I don't remember which one) and especially Brood War are what I'm worried about. Brood War in particular is way more difficult than SC1, but I'll worry about that later. Not looking forward to To Slay the Beast and Omega at all, but at least Omega is easier. There is also the matter of Dark Origin, which makes The Reckoning a bit harder.

I forgot to mention it before, but yes, I did finish Terran 7, The Trump Card, in like 20 seconds. That mission is so weird. Move Kerrigan and the SCV to your base so they don't die, use the Science Vessel you start with to D-Matrix the SCV and run him to the beacon and you win. Yay~ I also infested Jim's command center in Agent of the Swarm because why not.

[To Far Away Times]

The StarCraft 1 Terran Theme is one of greatest pieces of game music ever written.

[ryu]

Some quick impressions on Saros:

It's a solid game. Felt a lot more accessible than Returnal for the most part so far. Biggest difference (and disappointment for me) yet is that it doesn't get me pumped as much. Probably because death is pretty much inconsequential in this game:

- Artefacts feel a lot less powerful, and weapons more balanced. In Returnal I'd sometimes get 5 garbage runs in a row, so not dying on the occasional good run was very important. The point here is that Saros feels a lot more consistent. You don't worry that your next run won't give you any good resources
- You don't spend your "currency" resource mid-run, but keep most of it to spend on permanent power ups in between cycles. Avoiding damage entirely still gives you a resource bonus but it doesn't feel as essential as it was in Returnal (giving more weight to point 1 that cycles in Saros are much more consistent)
- You can start new cycles at the beginning of any biome you've reached so far, so usually death will only set you back 30-40 minutes instead of hours

Macro movement is still essential. If you put yourself in a situation where enemies are surrounding you, you're almost guaranteed to be toast. But I wish the game had more focus on micro movement (avoiding bullets by positioning). You can avoid damage from blue and yellow bullets by i-frame dashing through them or putting up your shield. Neither of those options help against red bullets... so I was really looking forward to the game using more of those in its later stages. And then it just handed me a parry to deal with them... which is mechanically just a more powerful version of the dodge (since you just press R1 instead of L1 during the dodge/parry window). Like... do developers even know what they're doing?

I also hit a difficulty spike now that makes me feel like I should probably start one or two biomes before the one I'm currently progressing through to power up some more. That's going to keep me on my toes when I hit biome I'm struggling with because dying would set me back like 2 hours. However the earlier biomes are almost boring now because of all the permanent power ups I got from the skill tree. So, not sure how to feel about this.

The story is okayish.... you're stuck on a distant planet trying to figure out what happened to the crews that arrived before yours. It's intriguing enough to keep you wanting to find out more... until you get really, really tired of how insufferable the people from your crew (including the protagonist) are. I definitely wouldn't want to play this for the story.

So it's a good game but doesn't hold a candle to Returnal (so far anyways).

[Whiskers]

Who needs GTA VI when you have San Andreas?

[Steven]

Zerg campaign finished. Full Circle is a little bit harder than most of the missions that precede it, but not by much. Only reason it's got much of a challenge at all is because there is not a lot of gas, so mass Guardian is awkward, but you can do it without expanding. There are enemy Carriers here, and they will fuck up everything you have and have like a billion HP and shields plus the second highest armour in the game, so you have to be careful of those. Ended up killing one with Scourges on the way to the temple, which was nice.

I pulled all of my Mutas and Scourges to defend my Guardians from Scouts and Carriers on the way to the temple, so when I destroyed the temple the Protoss sent a big wave of shit including a Carrier and some Scouts to my base and the only things there were Drones, the Ultra you start with, a few Spore Colonies that got blown up before I noticed that I was being attacked, and not much else, so I had to fly my Mutas all the way back from the other side of the map and half of my Drones died because I was too cheap to get Burrow because I wanted that gas for Mutas + Guardians. Oh well. I still won, so that's all that matters.

At Protoss 3 now. First two missions are easy, but this campaign gets pretty hard later and I'm not looking forward to it. I know there is the second (? Not sure if I want to count The Hunt for Tassadar, but it's semi-baseless, I guess) baseless mission with Tassadar coming up eventually too and I remember that being the only baseless mission in SC1 that is actually kind of hard, and not the good kind of hard, instead of brainlessly easy like the other two and a half baseless missions.

Starting to think that 10 missions per race really isn't enough to get some decent practice in before you move to the next race and have to partially relearn how to play the game. Also starting to think that most of the "difficulty" with the SC1 campaign is just not having much money. The AI doesn't attack that much and their attacks are usually halfhearted at best, so in most cases you can sit there building a bunch of whatever your best unit is (until you run out of minerals/gas) and then A-move to victory. I don't remember Brood War's map design at all.

I guess I'll just edit. I'm at Protoss 6 now. This is that baseless mission that I was not looking forward to. I had only Tassadar left alive for about the entire second half of this mission the last time I played it, which was a pain. Protoss campaign is a mess because it has a bunch of really weird/easy missions and then some very difficult ones and nothing in between. Oh well.

The StarCraft 1 Terran Theme is one of greatest pieces of game music ever written.

It is. The whole game's soundtrack is one of the best ever made. The new Terran music in Brood War is kind of weird, and I'm not sure how I feel about it. Then again you're the UED in BW instead of the Koprulu sector Terrans, so I guess it makes sense to have a completely different style of music. Yeah, I still think of the Brood War music and the Brood War units as being "new". I didn't get BW until like 2002 or 2003, which is like an eternity when you're a little kid. I don't remember who it was, but there was someone I knew that had BW, so I did borrow it for like a day and installed it on my computer in like 2000, but without the disc, that option to select Expansion taunted me for a long time.

Anyway, the sound design in SC1 is still one of the best I've ever heard. Everything is really... visceral. SC2 got a massive downgrade in comparison. Music's a lot weaker, too, but I do like SC2 Terran music.

[Steven]

I guess it's time to talk about the Tales of Destiny remake. Finished act 1 and the Oberon Secret Factory.

Spoiler

That fight with Lion is fucking crazy, but either it's not as hard as I thought it was, I prepared better, or I'm better at the game than I was 5 or 6 years ago. Last time he beat my ass so hard so many times that I lowered the difficulty, but not this time; I barely beat him on my first attempt this time. There were a few times where I almost died because he caught 3/4 of my party in Majin Rengokusatsu, and that's guaranteed death to everyone that gets hit by it.

I only had one thing each for resist dark and resist earth, so I gave Rutee both so she could stay alive and spam Raise Dead, and the only thing Lion could really do to her was Majin Rengokusatsu. Mary and Philia died right before my Blast Gauge instantly went from 0% to 200%, but I had double digit HP and Rutee had like ~130 HP, so I spammed Souhajin until he staggered and used Satsugeki Bukouken to end it. Those two missed a lot of EXP by being dead, but I really didn't want to have to fight that bastard again. Still love that the game doesn't tell you that you unlock Satsugeki Bukouken during the fight and that using it when you get it instantly ends the fight and that you have to pay attention and figure that out by yourself as Lion is beating the shit out of you. Great fight, and Lion - Irony of fate - is still by far one of the best pieces of music in the entire series. I know that doesn't say much when 90% of post-2005 Tales music is super bland and forgettable, but yeah.

I am at the point in the game where battles are nonstop massive explosions everywhere, hi-ougi literally every 20 seconds, and I have no idea what's going on half the time because the zako seem to be everywhere at once. I love this damn game. Just wish it didn't have so many framerate problems.

Zako are way, way more dangerous than bosses on higher difficulties, at least so far. I dread the insane final boss, but maybe since I'm not having that much difficulty with bosses this time it might not be so bad. Right? This game's really short, so I'll probably be done relatively soon unless the game decides that it seriously wants to kick my ass sometime soon, which would not be unexpected.

[guigui]

Some posts ago we were talking about Souls inspired games and were wondering which ones made it right.

To this day the game Nine Sols is on a nice discount, and seems to fit some bills here : tense combat, exploration, tough bosses, Sekiro, Metroidvania progression (I do like it).
I'm in need of nice action games these days and wonder if anyone in the shmup community played the Nine Sols game and can give opinion on it ? I always like to refer to the community before pulling the trigger on games like this.

[Sima Tuna]

I booted Nine Sols up but didn't play. I realized it was a parry-centric game and let's just say I have an antagonistic relationship with those. I still probably will play it one day, because I love the art style and the story seems interesting. The aesthetic is very Tuna-coded. I love taoist fantasy shit.

I would nominate Nioh and Nioh 2 for "best soulslikes not made by From that manage to get the formula right while evolving it into their own thing." It's kind of a mix of action game, action rpg and soulslike. I know that sounds like 3 genres that are actually just one genre...

I also really love the first The Surge game. Most Soulslikes have a strong emphasis on lore but very little actual story. The Surge has an amazing, heartfelt story which is only possible because you are not allowed to create your character. Since you can't create the character, Warren is a person who speaks and has story relevance to the game. He can interact with the various NPCs you meet and form relationships with them beyond what the player feels. He can react to things that a souls protagonist would be silent for.

Warren is a very Leon S. Kennedy kind of character (think RE2 original.) He joins a dystopian company and shit goes sour on his first day. The rest of the game is mid-apocalypse (or maybe even pre-apocalypse.) Mostly exploring this Great Value Black Mesa -esque organization. You start in the disposal area and move through Manufacturing and then into other parts of CREO's massive megastructure.

One thing The Surge does very well is follow a theme. Most of your weapons and armor are based on equipment you would need to use as a CREO employee. Mostly repurposed assembly or construction gear. The exosuit which holds your armor pieces is made to do construction work and the devs really leaned into that. There are real weapons but a lot of what you'll find is improvised or repurposed from the existing inventory of CREO, prior to the apocalypse.

The Surge is one of the most unique soulslikes imo.

[To Far Away Times]

I would nominate Nioh and Nioh 2 for "best soulslikes not made by From that manage to get the formula right while evolving it into their own thing." It's kind of a mix of action game, action rpg and soulslike. I know that sounds like 3 genres that are actually just one genre...

Yeah I would definitely agree with this. My only complaint is that Nioh 2 feels like a "been there, done that" type of iterative sequel, but both games are undeniably well crafted. I think Nioh is the only non-From Software Souls-like that truly rips.

--

I finished up Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom a few days ago and thought it was kinda mid. A few years ago I made it a mission to beat every mainline Zelda game (except for a certain trilogy of CDi games that shall not be spoken of), and then this one came out a bit later so I had to catch up on the series. I didn't really gel with this one. Echoes of Wisdom takes some of the mechanics of Breath of the Wild and tries to translate them to a 2D Zelda game. It sounds like a great idea, but they never really develop it as far as they should. There's a couple items like a flying tile, and later on a cloud you can stand on, that trivialize almost all the puzzles. If I were to rank this one within the series it would be towards the lower half. It doesn't aim high, so it doesn't go all that high. Portable Zelda games like Link's Awakening and Minish Cap shouldn't feel more "high effort" than newer entries. Those games are pushing their platforms as far as they can. Echoes of Wisdom by comparison feels like a B-Team effort.

[Sima Tuna]

I agree about Nioh 2, to an extent. What Nioh 2 does offer is the chance to create your own character and play as either male or female. Some people really want that. It also leans even more into the power fantasy, what with turning into a half-demon (inuyasha lol) to fight other demons. Everything in Nioh 2 is just Nioh 1 but they cranked up the gain. I will say that I don't think I like Nioh 2 as much as Nioh 1, but I could totally understand someone feeling the opposite. Nioh 1 is a lot less polished of a game. There are a few bosses in Nioh 1 that are pretty lazy or janky. With Nioh 2, it really feels like they refined every element of gameplay. I do NOT like the new counter mechanic for Nioh 2 but I also wasn't forced to use it much. Nioh 2 has an amazing arsenal of weapons, expanding upon all the great weapons from Nioh 1 and the DLC, while adding even more. The new staff weapon is a chef's kiss of an idea. Beautiful. Hell, I'm almost tempted to rank Nioh 2 higher than Nioh 1 just for the staff weapon and the fists.

If I had played Nioh 2 first, I think it would be my favorite. That kind of iterative Vidya Gaem sequel is a thing that's pretty typical of video games and no other art form. Nobody ever says, "yeah, The Count of Monte Cristo was good, but if it was three times as long and had twice as many characters, then it would be perfect." For a video game though, it's kinda valid. Nioh 2 is just "Nioh but MOAR." If you wanted moar or you started with Nioh 2 then you would be happy with that. Nioh 1's strengths over 2 are more a case of fewer systems and potentially a more enjoyable gameplay loop or moment-to-moment gameplay for a certain kind of player. One who enjoys the base demons and enemies without the addition of yokai counters and demon soul absorbing. Or maybe someone who likes the story of Nioh 1 more than Nioh 2... Although I will say, Team Ninja are not exactly known for telling amazing stories with their 3d video games.

The Nioh games are also some of the best soulslikes around for character building imo. You can come up with so many thematic builds. They will inevitably be Japanese flavored because of the setting, but still. Naginata Shrine Maiden? Kusarigama Ninja? Dual-sword Samurai? Spear Ashigaru? Axe Bandit? Fist Monk? Fox Demon holding a magic sickle? Whatever you want. Weapon scaling is overall really interesting, as each weapon scales with something and none of the stats are totally worthless in that sense.

[XoPachi]

I am thoroughly entrenched in Valve's Deadlock when I have time to play.

This is my favorite multiplayer shooting thing since Tribes Ascend and it's a shame it will turn into utter slop once it hits 1.0 and gains all the slimy trimmings live service games "require" to stay afloat...

Garish skins, constant self advertising battle passes, hero/account leveling, FOMO 'events', experience grinding, post game number-go-up dopamine IV drips, incessant notifications, sluggish loading from the bloated storefront loaded in the background, six different currencies, inventories loaded with bullshit, etc etc etc.

But right now, there's none of that. It's quiet.
I boot the game, no boot logos or "progression maintenance" and updates. I select matchmaking, I play my match. I win or lose, I see the game score, I go back to the lobby. I hit matchmaking...

No distractions. Nothing beyond the GAME. I play the GAME. It doesn't try to sink hooks into me. It is peace.

And that will be all gone when it launches officially. So I'm consciously, ardently savoring this beautiful, fun, complex game before it's almost certainly ruined.

I'd prefer they rip the game from me and demand I pay $60 if it means they can avoid this. I'd be happy to.

[Obiwanshinobi]

Who needs GTA VI when you have San Andreas?

I've been thinking about it of late, actually. One of my PC oldies I might revisit one of these days, alongside Halo: Combat Evolved, Painkiller, Midnight Club II, Secret Weapons Over Normandy...
In fact, I've been slowly getting back into gaming, strangely by a couple of laptops that are not even mine, but can handle most of my vintage PC backlog just fine, even when I'm practically off-line. For a variety of historical reasons, no other period of gaming is likely to ever top PS2 years in my book (even 8- and 16-bit games were, at the time, more widely accessible to me via emulation than ever before).
I didn't think much of San Andreas' 90s "vibe" when it was new, but nowadays - slowly do I process that the decade is "retro" now. Looking at pictures my 12 year-old nephew draws, it's HARDLY credible to me he's a kid who has never played, or maybe even seen, Diablo. (He does play some fantasy online game with treasure, monsters and stuff, and seems to be drawing Diablo-meets-LoTR kinda fanfiction mostly, these days.)
Nevertheless, the kind of time I spend computer gaming lately is practically all spent playing OutRun 2006: Coast to Coast. It must be something I can effectively play sometimes very briefly, yet nonetheless make SOME progress there, be it only re-waking up my latent skills.

OutRun 2006: Coast to Coast

One of my fave racing games, up there with the Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune games. Make sure you check this out, it restores multiplayer functionality via fanservers as well as various other QOL support features for modern systems: https://github.com/emoose/OutRun2006Tweaks

Eventually I shall see what's there to expand it. Discovering I can play it in TATE on my WinXP rig (pretty useless - but fascinating all the same), without any patches, just by virtue of my graphics card drivers, one has to wonder whether those who play PC games using three monitors could make OutRun 2006 run this way, with just potent enough computer, who knows? No size of screen, or magnificence of sound system, seem too grand for the task.
Now, that's a game I'd like to play in a movie theatre one of these days... assuming input lag wouldn't be too much, of course.

Oh yes, and I pretty BADLY need to install Mashed: Fully Loaded on those laptops (makes no problem running off virtual drive, so I souldn't even need carrying my disc around). Since it's THE very kind of game I was just talking about (fully playable in very brief sessions).
Interestingly, Mashed and TrackMania are tiles most popular in multiplayer... that I enjoy playing alone great deal. Likewise, I'd sooner play Unreal Tournament against bots than seek online encounter there. UNLESS I'd have a company of folks playing locally via LAN. Not very likely in this day and age. Although technically should be easier to assemble these days than it was back in LAN gaming heyday.

[Steven]

Now at Protoss 8. I was definitely stuck at Protoss 7 on my previous attempt. I'd heard you can win Protoss 7 in about one minute with a certain strategy, so I tried it and it's true! It feels really bad to do this, so I do want to play it "properly" eventually. For Protoss 8, I tried a full control group of Carriers. It took forever to make them all, and then they got annihilated because the AI went mass Scout and backed those up with Arbiters and Carriers. Will try again, but I'm not going to do mass Carrier this time, I think, but they are nice for dealing with Reavers.

Something annoying about Protoss 6: is it me or do Infested Terrans sometimes spawn behind you? I had only Tassadar and a Ghost left, so I left Tassadar in a safe location and was looking around with the Ghost and an Infested Terran comes out of nowhere from behind me, from where I'd killed everything already, and smashed into Tassadar and I game overed. WTF. It happened a few times, actually. This mission is stupid. At least it's easy when you figure out how to not die.

Also trying Tales of Destiny Director's Cut arena rank 4 repeatedly, but the last few sets of enemies kill me in just a few hits, even with elemental resistances equipped. I think my stats are just too low for this difficulty level at this point and I am not going to lower the difficulty. For now I'll go without Lilith and try again later.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Zako are way, way more dangerous than bosses on higher difficulties, at least so far.

Yeah, small enemies that need to be locked down ASAP with wide area spells are pretty terrifying. There's at least a few bonus fights that are designed like this where you're mobbed badly, scary stuff!

Also trying Tales of Destiny Director's Cut arena rank 4 repeatedly, but the last few sets of enemies kill me in just a few hits, even with elemental resistances equipped.

Characters with access to i-frames such as Leon (Geneijin), Woodrow (Kagerou, Zetsuei), Mary (Kagerou), and Philia (Force Field) make it a lot more doable. If you can lock down enemies with Philia's spells, her Force Field can let you dodge and Blast counter anything that gets near! :3

[guigui]

I am now playing Nine Sols.

Good game for sure. Metroidvania progression style, not too directive to my taste. The artstyle and ambiant music, characters, storytelling, exploration, sense of progression, ressource management are all really beautiful, one cannot go wrong here.

Combats : I'd say this will be hit or miss depending on the player because combat is more than parry-centric. You can defeat only about 30% of ennemies without using parries, and even on those 30% not using parries makes things harder. The other ennemies you have to use the parry system, which is lenient enough and satisfying to use, but create this wanted sense of constant threat : never turn your back to your ennemy, miss the parry window and you'll be in immediate trouble.
Personnaly I like it : being killed by regular mobs when exploring because I was not careful enough with the combat forces me to keep attention, nice. Also note that when you know the zones, you can skip most of the fights so backtracking does not seem too tedious if ever needed.

Of course this has the "souls" systems discussed earlier : estus and loss of ressources on deaths. About the latter, I'd say it is well done here bc each time I died (which means a lot of times...) I did care about going back to retrieve my ressources.
Those ressources are 2 separate things : money and XP. Money is used to buy estus upgrades, new passive capacities and such ; whereas XP is used to unlock new useful skills in your typical skill tree. You loose with when you die, and getting them back seems mandatory to strenghtens your character (at least still for ma after about 5 hours of play). So yeah, well done here.

So yes, definitely a recommend if you like some exploration, a tough but fair game, and can handle the parry combat system.

[Steven]

Zako are way, way more dangerous than bosses on higher difficulties, at least so far.

Yeah, small enemies that need to be locked down ASAP with wide area spells are pretty terrifying. There's at least a few bonus fights that are designed like this where you're mobbed badly, scary stuff!

Zako in this game are super dangerous and given how crazy fast everything in this game is they'll eat you alive before you even realize what's happening. My entire party got Air Pressured out of existence a few times last night when I wasn't paying attention. This game doesn't mess around, but it's fair and well-balanced and it's one of the main reasons that I have always absolutely loved this game.

Never been sure why Air Pressure is earth element instead of wind element in every game it appears in, but I guess it does use gravity instead of wind, so...

Characters with access to i-frames such as Leon (Geneijin), Woodrow (Kagerou, Zetsuei), Mary (Kagerou), and Philia (Force Field) make it a lot more doable. If you can lock down enemies with Philia's spells, her Force Field can let you dodge and Blast counter anything that gets near! :3

I almost got it last night with Stan. Turns out those red things after the Blue Ropers have a mixed element attack that is fire + water, so having both resistances decreased damage from very high to basically nothing. I am sure you know how it works already, but I love how this game gives both huge resistances and increased critical and weakness damage output to even the player on higher difficulties, enabling you to take way more hits and do more damage on Evil/Chaos than on Normal in certain conditions. I think a lot of other Tales games, specifically the Team Symphonia games, just bloat the enemy stats on higher settings and give the player nothing cool at all, not even increased EXP or anything like that.

The sleep-inflicting dudes that are after those Blue Ropers can almost be two-shotted with normal attack -> Kouou Tenshouyoku. They were left with about 400 HP left, so in theory Goushourai -> Kouou Tenshouyoku should probably do it, and if that doesn't work, Goushourai -> two or three normals -> Kouou Tenshouyoku will. Weakness hit -> Kouou Tenshouyoku/Hiou Zestsuenshou really carries Stan through the arena very easily, especially because killing 4~8 things at once will fully charge your meter at least once and you can immediately use another hi-ougi.

It's really strange to find that Satsugeki Bukouken is actually way worse for the arena because it doesn't have the massive AOE that Kouou Tenshouyoku and Hiou Zetsuenshou do, and enemies can sometimes fall out of Satsugeki Bukouken. I've even seen enemies get carried behind Stan by the animation and the rest of the attack missed completely. Satsugeki Bukouken is great for basically everything else, but in the arena I don't want to use it and I wish I could disable it temporarily, so there are times when I will intentionally waste a full green meter using Hiou Zetsuenshou just to be able to use Kouou Tenshouyoku.

Gen'eijin spam would be my first choice, but

Spoiler

he's dead and my dumb ass forgot to get his Narikiri Doll at the end of the last run. Shameful display & fission mailed...

I did try Mary and Philia already and I suck so horribly with Philia that it was a complete disaster when the mummies showed up lol. I was fine before that but I think my strategy was ultimately bad because I was relying on charging to heal + fill Blast Gauge and then using Sacred Blame/Divine Power instead of maybe what I should have been doing.

Mary is fucking amazing aside from her small movepool and poor elemental coverage, and that still probably covers most things she wants to do anyway, but I got comboed to death by Lightning from those bugs because I ran out of CC at a bad time and couldn't use Kagerou. Those bugs are one of the most dangerous waves, and my strategy for them now is to hit as many as possible with Kouou Tenshouyoku when they spawn so I don't get annihilated by Lightning spam. They are weak to fire, so Kouou Tenshouyoku kills them in one hit, fully charges the Blast Gauge twice so I can immediately use Satsugeki Bukouken after, and it feels really good. Mary doesn't really have a big AOE thing like that, so I wasn't able to one-shot them. Philia could for sure with Sacred Blame if I can get her that far.

Having said all of that, this is the part where I have to admit that I no longer remember if you have to be Stan to get Lilith to show up!

[guigui]

Nine Sols still.

I entered the Cortex Center. Did you already enter the Cortex Center ? Brief moment, but a very nice video game moment.

[davyK]

Got 100% achievements on Flippup (steam) which is a vertically scrolling pinball game. Totally rage inducing.

[To Far Away Times]

I finished up Indiana Jones on Xbox Series X.

I had a good time with this one. Going in, I had no idea what to expect. Didn't even realize it was going to be a first person game. The most obvious choice would have been to copy Tomb Raider or Uncharted, but this game really isn't anything like those.

Basic gameplay is a mixture of investigation, solving puzzles, wearing disguises, and punching Nazis. The game puts a lot of emphasis on being the titular character: when you set off for the adventure you have to physically pack your bags, and when you open doors you don't just push a button on the controller, you have to open them by moving the joystick. Going through your inventory is perhaps a bit intentionally cumbersome. Sometimes you spread evidence out on a table and have to interact with it in a certain way. It's different, but it's interesting. Combat is serviceable; there are guns, but using them is almost never the correct choice as enemies will become much more aggressive and numerous. You pick up objects in the environment and use those to knock out enemies, and if that doesn't work then you're usually fighting fist to fist. A lot of Nazis will just straight up fist fight you instead of shooting you. It's silly, but it feels right when trying to mimic the Indiana Jones movies. I liked that you can easily go an hour or more without getting into any combat. You are not Indiana Jones, the mass murder machine. And if you choose to believe you are just knocking enemies out with the fist fighting and stealth blows, then your body count is probably pretty close to the movies.

One thing that surprised me was that there are some Immersive Sim elements in this. I wouldn't call it an Immersive Sim, but you can see some inspiration in the level design, as there's often multiple paths to sneak around. There are a handful of small open worlds like Deus Ex or Vampire the Masquerade that you spend some time in before moving to the next open world. Each open world feels very different to traverse. The first one is set in The Vatican, and there's lot of vertical stage design, doors to unlock, safes to crack, and shortcuts to open. I would not have been shocked if someone snuck in the "0451" code somewhere. Getting new abilities is kept delightfully simple, you find books in the environment that give you the ability to learn a new skill, and then you earn skill points that you can spend to unlock them. That's it. No skill trees, or character levels, or anything like that.

There are 3-4 hours of cutscenes, and the game is about 15-20 hours long. The cutscenes are well done and many scenarios are lifted straight from the movies, like the tropes of battling for a single gun on the floor or a surprise grenade switcheroo; it's all very campy and fun. Voice acting is spot on. It's not Harrison Ford doing the voiceover, but the voice actor is very good, and really nailed Harrison Ford's mannerisms and cadence. It's believable that it's Indiana Jones delivering those lines. The voice actor who voices the main villain does quite a good performance too. The writing is very good for this sort of thing. Story beats are paced carefully, and every Chekov's gun is revealed at the right time and used appropriately. The cut scenes have camera work that feels like it could have been lifted from a movie. You have the globe trotting montages, over the top title cards, and a lingering zoomed in shot of the environment while the credits roll like old movies used to do (complete with very slight and tasteful camera destabilization). The commitment to the bit is commendable.

So if playing through a 15-20 hour Indiana Jones movie sounds like a good time, this will hit the spot.

[Obiwanshinobi]

I know about that Indiana Jones game from a Catholic weekly magazine I read although I'm no Catholic. It was highly recommended there. Goes to show just how far I am out of game-centric media's reach nowadays. (For instance - I learned about PS5's existence from this forum.)
Tonight I'm about to install The Club - a game that, despite being allegedly within mi WinXP rig's capabilities range - wouldn't run on that one at all. It's a quite new state of mind to me - being THIS uninterested about recent games. My backlog of stuff grew so huge it really hardly matters whatever else I DON'T play. Too much stuff I once wanted to play pretty badly, yet I hardly have out of sheer abundance of it.
It's also that with games of certain arcade-style qualities, I easily grow hell-bent on experting them. This does not help playing them casually for a while, then moving on someplace else for a change.

[BulletMagnet]

I know about that Indiana Jones game from a Catholic weekly magazine I read although I'm no Catholic. It was highly recommended there.

My mind immediately pictured some elderly nun with a death-grip on a controller trash-talking the screen as she punches out half of the Third Reich.

[Sumez]

I am now playing Nine Sols.

Coincidentally I've also recently started this

Surprisingly I like the parry-centric combat a lot, which I almost never do. It avoids all the worst typical caveats of parrying I think.
First of all, it's never a "win" button, and it doesn't reduce enemies to all feel similar (even Sekiro suffers from the latter). It feels organically integrated into the combat, and when it's not downright required it's at least ideal to rely on it.
This is supported by the fact that doing it doesn't come at a huge risk either. You either parry or you die, so you might as well parry. And missing the timing window (if you're too early at least) will only cause "internal damage", ie. damage you can recover from if you avoid taking "real damage" until it's healed back. You need to be very mobile while fighting, and of course aggressive as well. Parrying doesn't give you much of a window of opportunity - it's almost entirely defensive, though it does recharge your subweapon attacks. So I don't feel like it reduces any other aspect of combat, which is a direct opposite how something like Metroid Dread handles it.

So while this is all a positive, I feel like it's also the only thing specifically positive I have to say about the game.
I had this idea that it was something really special and remarkable. But from what I've seen so far it's just an extremely derivative "standard metroidvania", doing all the same things all the others do, and not in any particularly outstanding way either. It looks fine, and the music is cool. Exploration feels very uninteresting so far, and the positive notes I have on the combat feel somewhat pointless given most of the regular encounters are quite easy and haven't been able to come across as threatening at all so far. So the one small highlight I had in the game was the first real boss fight against the two-phase centaur dude.
Everything else has been just boring and forgettable.

It's not a bad game though. I don't dislike it. The only thing I do dislike is all the constant (and usually unimportant) dialogue. The game keeps stopping you in your tracks for a bunch of world building that feels superfluous, and likes to dwell on it for just a bit too long, with also things like interaction and transition animations all taking just a bit longer than they need to. This is also accentuated by the constant loading screens everywhere, which are a pain to wait around for all the time. Overall the pacing is just terrible. It doesn't ruin the game for me, but I wish it wasn't like that.

[guigui]

I agree with Sumez on the Nine Sols combat system : parry-centric but good.

On all the other points, Sumez seems to have high level of expectations for a Metroidvania game ! Mabe I played less games in the genre and am not too bored yet. To me the setting, artstyle, story and exploration looked good enough, if not very good. Well, this is not Elden Ring for sure, but I find it good.
I do not mind being interrupted a little by some cutscenes from time to time, I know I'm not playing an arcade game. Also I found the game to be quite hard before the first Centaur boss, it teaches you the combat system the hard way.
Centaur boss I had to try like at least 20 times, I found it tough but fair. This is one of those bosses where you fail every time, and the one time you succeed, you also no-miss it.

Did you enter the Cortex Center ? I loved the small scene you see there the first time.

[Sumez]

I'm not sure where I am honestly. I gotta admit I'm partly glossing over a lot of the story, because it's constantly showering you with so much lore that I feel like I need to actively filter what information I actually need in order to be able to retain any of it

But I'm still very early in the game, so I'm assuming I haven't been there yet

Also yes, that boss was definitely a highlight! I died a TON to it. Not because it was hard, but because I had to find the right mentality to fight it in a way that didn't feel random - which I enjoyed, because when you finally find the correct groove, it turns into a nicely choreographed dance. Also, I kept forgetting which button was the block button XD - I guess another mild criticism I have is that the game uses a bit too many buttons.

I'm not sure what I'd remove in that context, but so far the "mystic nymph" thing feels like a pretty pointless feature

[guigui]

I agree too on many buttons (and you did not get the bow yet, did you ?), I had to remap them because the parry felt unnatural to me.
Mystic Nymph features are very scarce, nothing that you could not do without it. I mainly use it to scout the areas that come right before me, see if I can get there safely or need to retreat to save money and XP for now.

Also another criticism is on the map : hard to display and navigate, no possibility to put markers on it, does not even show the location of that seller NPC while it shows the others NPC. I wish this had the standard "simplified map always in a corner" option. Though I must say this forces you to remember the location and their shapes and may reinforce the immersion, so why not.