What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

[Squire Grooktook]

If it weren't for arcade games and oldschool jrpg's, I would have quit video games by now.

*edit*

Oh and Nintendo. <3 Splatoon.

[EmperorIng]

Just beat Ys I&II for the Turbo-CD. What a wild ride on nearly every part. I can't believe I got invested in the story of such a simple game, but I guess that's what a damn good presentation (with real voice actors) does, ha.

The final dungeon to either half is so damn massive, it's nuts. I feel like 90% of the items you gain don't do anything though. The last boss Darm was a real pain with nonstop projectiles. I beat him within an inch of my life. It's going to be some time before I top that gaming experience. Ha, if only Ys 3 wasn't so expensive... I guess there's the other way...

<3 Splatoon.

It looks fun, and kinda makes me wish I had a Wii U to play it.

[null1024]

Ace Combat 04 [PS2].
Man, I dunno why I didn't get into this series before. I'd played AC2 once before and liked it, and then promptly forgot the series existed.
On the 5th mission so far. Was doing okay and then accidentally hit a bridge pole.

Oh, and
Ape Escape 3 [PS2].
It's more of the same but different, and that's entirely okay. AE2 and 3 change a couple of little things that bug the crap out of me [net swinging mechanics, for one], but it's fun.
looking back, I'm surprised I didn't pick either AE2 or 3 up before, I used to LOVE playing AE1 [it was the only game I had for my PS2 for a few years, mainly used the big black tower as a DVD player]

the framerate in AE3 is as bad as AE1 on the PS1 though if -- unlike AE1, it can hit 60fps, but it has dipped into the low teens, and is generally 30 or less
and AE2 and 3 have screen tearing out the ass, it's super noticeable, who let that happen

[Obiwanshinobi]

The first Ape Escape seemed 30 fps to me, but I hardly played it at all. If the framerate really goes south in PS2 games, that's... unexpected of Sony 3D platformers.

Either it's my GBA SP's hidden alcohol intake sensor, or the Rushn'n Attack port on the Konami Collector's Series: Arcade Advanced cart I just received doesn't let me use extra weapons (I keep knifing with the fire button even when carrying another weapon). Weird, as I recall Green Beret of Konami Collector's Series: Arcade Classics played with a flashcart working flawlessly in that respect.

P.S. Silly me! I forgot it's three buttons now (rather than only two). Makes perfect sense, come to think of it. For such a barebones collection (not even battery-backed suspend save feature), it sports numerous welcome enhancements, one cart 2 player among them, even in (originally singleplayer-only) Green Beret/Rush'n Attack. I can see how the NES port might be preferable at home nowadays (if only for the music), but the GBA version has its obvious merits, being, well, on the GBA.
Shame the jump button makes you STILL climb up the ladders, but maybe it ought to for the sake of faithfullness (it would have to do nothing at the ladders otherwise, or the game would be broken).

[Lord Satori]

Currently playing Guild of Dungeoneering. It's a good hybrid of dungeon-crafting and card... handling, and it has an interesting set of classes. I wish that older classes didn't become useless once you unlock their next tier.

Also, I want to fucking KILL that damned bard!

[EmperorIng]

I followed up beating Ys I&II by finishing Xak I&II on the PC-Engine CD.

I suppose I would enjoy the game more if I could understand its story. Luckily, outside of having to check a FAQ now and then, I could complete the game without a knowledge of Japanese.

I wish I could call the game more than "a poor man's Ys." The games have a lot going for them - great music, decent enemy graphics, and worlds far larger than Ys I's Esteria and with puzzles to boot! Though I wonder whether or not Ys would be larger if they didn't stuff half of their respective games' content into their final dungeons. Xak games don't even have final dungeons, ha.

Despite the good points, the flaws come in the balance. First, everything kills you. A few levels later, nothing kills you. The bosses are the most pathetic bosses I have ever seen in an Action-RPG. They are lucky to last more than one second against your DPS-nightmare of a character. Whereas Ys encounters ratchet up the tension and strategy immensely, the level-scaling and stat increases Ratok has at his disposable makes all the demons of the underworld little more than green slimes to mow down.

I wish I didn't hit the level cap in both Xak I and II a whole 45 minutes before the final bosses. And in games that are roughly 3 hours a piece, that's a sizable chunk of the game where you are practically invincible. And this doesn't count the at least hour before hand where you are essentially invincible.

If they had balanced the game by tweaking the stat boosts, not making enemies drop ridiculously high EXP, and maybe not tying new weapons to level requirements, thus incentivizing grinding... All of these changes would have made the game far more enjoyable.

I liked the whole package, and it shines with polish in everywhere but the RPG mechanics. Oh, and the "shmup" segments, where your character is locked in the MIDDLE of the screen and can only move left or right. What's the point if you are only dodging what's appearing on the top 33% of your screen?

Fray in Magical Adventure feels like a more polished game. It may be very easy, but it at least feels like its designed tighter. And the shmup segment actually plays like a shmup.

[soprano1]

Gave MH4U a little break to play Tropico 4. I love being El Presidente.

[Ed Oscuro]

the framerate in AE3 is as bad as AE1 on the PS1 though if -- unlike AE1, it can hit 60fps, but it has dipped into the low teens, and is generally 30 or less
and AE2 and 3 have screen tearing out the ass, it's super noticeable, who let that happen

The skyscraper plaza area in one of the late stages of AE1 could send the framerate nosediving, IIRC.

[null1024]

Ace Combat 04 is still cool as fuck, but there's too many get xx points in yy time missions so far. Just did the mission where you bomb some targets and then have to go into the ravine to avoid giant EMP blasts. I wish there was some terrain LOD at all, game looks amazing when you're high up and then you go toward the ground and see the texture smeared everywhere, haha.
Man, I've really neglected the PS2's library up till now, hot damn. God Hand is a game I should have picked up forever ago. Same with Gungrave Overdose, it's pretty much the game I've been wanting to play for a while.

Oh, and is the US release of Ace Combat 3 any good? I know it's been cut to hell and back, but is it worth at least playing? Is the mission selection at least the better parts of AC3JP? Probably going to start playing that once I beat 04.

the framerate in AE3 is as bad as AE1 on the PS1 though if -- unlike AE1, it can hit 60fps, but it has dipped into the low teens, and is generally 30 or less
and AE2 and 3 have screen tearing out the ass, it's super noticeable, who let that happen

The skyscraper plaza area in one of the late stages of AE1 could send the framerate nosediving, IIRC.

Oh yeah, AE1's framerate can get pretty bad. The beach stage chokes almost as soon as you walk forward a little bit.

I mangled my sentence structure when I was comparing AE1 and 3's framerates -- what I meant to say was that 3 can run smoother overall [AE3 hits 60, AE1 is capped at 30], but 3 often gets as bad as 1 does [the framerate in the lobby of the TV station early on in AE3 craters hard].
From what I've played of AE2, it doesn't have such severe framerate issues. Was kind of surprised at how poorly 3 runs at times.

[KennyMan666]

I'm 20 hours into Mother 3 and approaching the end. This game has been an emotional rollercoaster like no other, definitely one of the saddest games I've ever played. The combat system is even improved from Earthbound.

Definitely a game I'm putting in the same "experience" category as Star Control 2, Shadow of the Colossus and Odin Sphere.

[CStarFlare]

I didn't set out to do it, but I got the 106% on Super Meat Boy. Higher, actually - the game give 106% when you have like 3 stages left to clear. So 106.xx%? Every time I hit a milestone I felt like I could see the next step within reach. Beat the light world? Well, I've only got to beat ten more stages to fight the dark world boss. Dark world boss died, I only had a dozen bandages to get. Bandages finished? Hey, just four more stages in Cotton Alley.

It wasn't ALWAYS enjoyable but I never reached the levels of frustration I felt with Futari God Mode or Espgaluda Arrange, so I don't have the feeling of being done with this forever. It beat me up a little, but it's still enjoyable.

But that'll have to come later. I've had Ys: The Oath in Felghana for a year now and never played it, and I think it should be next.

[null1024]

Man, I wish I could get my friends to play Psychic Force. Shit's coooooool.
It's sort of like Acceleration of Suguri or Senko no Ronde, but a little bit more like a traditional fighter in some ways and much less projectile focused than either [even if it's still heavily a projectile based game].

Been playing it on my PS2 in the Psychic Force Complete collection.
kind of wish the PF1 port ran at 240p, it looks kind of awful at 480i

Oh, and I started to play Chain Dive [PS2]. Extremely cool game, swing around and smash through things. You have a sword-thingy that freezes enemies when you hit them enough with it, and you have to dive through them. You can chain your dives to regain health. It's extremely neat. JP only, but you don't need to understand a single word to play.

[edit]
Oh, and still playing Ape Escape 3 [PS2].
apparently, the game wants you to be morphed like, all the time and I didn't notice that until just now because I never pressed R3 while morphed

There's zero reason to use the normal net if you have any morph energy. They're silly as fuck -- ninja morph gets you a bunch of neat abilities, you get ninja clones to capture monkeys, and it lets you run faster. Gunslinger morph lets you shoot forever, without pause. The mage morph is particularly silly, letting you cast a big 360 degree capture field around you that can capture multiple monkeys at once.
Really, all of the morph nets are silly, monkeys can't dodge them [so far at least, but I doubt they will], and the monkeys can't steal your shit when morphed.

It's pretty fun though, you have to run around killing and breaking shit to get green powerups all the time to stay morphed, although you can buy morph stocks which let you morph again immediately after you run out of or cancel a morph.

they added all these little features [monkeys dodging, stealing, anger, you can't just swing your net 360 degrees like in AE1] to make capturing monkeys less trivial, and then trivialize it again anyway

[Chaos Phoenixma]

I've been replaying Star Ocean: First Departure.

I had beaten the game a long time ago, but I didn't do a lot of the optional stuff. I also wanted to play the game on its hardest difficulty.


By default the game has no difficulty settings. However, since the remake is based on the SO2 system, there's a dummied out Galaxy and Universe difficulty setting. Just like Star ocean 2, Universe is x2 to all enemy stats, which this game was obviously not designed around and was never meant to actually be played, but of course the game is beatable on this mode.

Used a save that is set to Universe mode to start the run. Even the first battles in the game can game over you on this mode if the enemy blocks too much or just hits you too much or gets you stunned. Even with the 3 hit normal attack combo the remakes have. Once the enemy in the first battles target you, you're going to be hit because their attack is faster than yours and there's nothing like manual(Tales), Full Active Mode(SO3). Even for quite a bit of random battles this is the case until you get some special attacks.


After I got past that, I managed to still have trouble with most of the random battles. You do start with a healer in the first part but quickly lose her for a while and then have to do quite a bit of the game without an actual healer, while with SO2, you have your healer pretty much at the start.

It also took a while to get the money needed to upgrade weapons and armors due to the dying a lot. The armors do help a bit, but with the doubled enemy stats, you're still dying very fast. I decided to drop the first optional since I wanted Ashlay instead since he can teach Roddick some special skills if you have enough PA points with him. Second optional I recruited after Ashlay was Ioshua which finally got me a healer(though I would have gotten one soon after anyway without him since I think you get the first healer back earlier if you don't have him, though IIRC her level does not go up from when she left).


Even with a healer, I'm still dying quite a bit. Currently just got Ronyx and Mavelle at Ionis and am around level 30(which IIRC is midgame at least in terms of maingame stuff). I'm sure there's some way I could have broken the game's difficulty by now, but I'm not going to look it up. It's definitely a much more enjoyable difficulty at this point than it was early game. Compared to Second Evolution's Universe(I haven't played Second Story, but I'm guessing they're close enough), this one seems like it's going to be difficult earlier game and slowly get easier, while SO2 seemed the opposite. Early game SO2 seemed pretty easy on Universe for the most part but eventually got quite difficult, though there were a few easy things even endgame.


I might try out the original SFC version with the translation patch sometime since it's supposed to play quite differently.

[Ruldra]

So there's this site (www.tremorgames.com) that lets you win coins by playing flash games, and then trade said coins for steam games. After about an hour I collected enough coins to get AI War: Fleet Command. Heard it's a pretty good RTS with an actually smart and challenging AI.

I guess the AI is indeed tough because I somehow managed to lose even during the tutorial campaign. Didn't send a strong enough fleet to take over one of the enemy's planets, it retaliated by taking back all the planets I had captured and then went straight to my home planet. An hour of campaign went to hell in just a few minutes.

I heard this game is deep enough that even 100+ hours later the AI is still surprising you and you're still coming across new units. And that not including the 6 expansions the game has at this point.

[Mischief Maker]

So there's this site (http://www.tremorgames.com) that lets you win coins by playing flash games, and then trade said coins for steam games. After about an hour I collected enough coins to get AI War: Fleet Command. Heard it's a pretty good RTS with an actually smart and challenging AI.

I guess the AI is indeed tough because I somehow managed to lose even during the tutorial campaign. Didn't send a strong enough fleet to take over one of the enemy's planets, it retaliated by taking back all the planets I had captured and then went straight to my home planet. An hour of campaign went to hell in just a few minutes.

I heard this game is deep enough that even 100+ hours later the AI is still surprising you and you're still coming across new units. And that not including the 6 expansions the game has at this point.

The best way to "get" AI war is actually to play Infested Planet.

[Lord Satori]

So there's this site (http://www.tremorgames.com) that lets you win coins by playing flash games, and then trade said coins for steam games. After about an hour I collected enough coins to get AI War: Fleet Command. Heard it's a pretty good RTS with an actually smart and challenging AI.

I guess the AI is indeed tough because I somehow managed to lose even during the tutorial campaign. Didn't send a strong enough fleet to take over one of the enemy's planets, it retaliated by taking back all the planets I had captured and then went straight to my home planet. An hour of campaign went to hell in just a few minutes.

I heard this game is deep enough that even 100+ hours later the AI is still surprising you and you're still coming across new units. And that not including the 6 expansions the game has at this point.

I used to play this game awhile ago. The sheer amount of content and replayability grew and grew as time went on and the game got more and more complex. I wish I hadn't stopped playing this game. If I went back to it now, I'd have to start at square one again, it's been so long.

Anyway, I suggest you invest time into this game, because it is very worth it.

[RealPlumpBox]

Haven't had to much gaming time as I just moved and am still getting settled in but I went back to Sunset Overdrive on the X1, and have been playing Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc on my Vita.

[kaicooper]

little bit FIFA 15
Duke Nukem 3D
Doom III

[Ruldra]

I used to play this game awhile ago. The sheer amount of content and replayability grew and grew as time went on and the game got more and more complex. I wish I hadn't stopped playing this game. If I went back to it now, I'd have to start at square one again, it's been so long.

Anyway, I suggest you invest time into this game, because it is very worth it.

I plan to Finished the tutorial campaign and now I got started with the real one.

I have a question, though: is the enemy completely idle if I don't make a move? The tutorial gave the impression that - apart from periodic waves - the AI doesn't do anything if I'm not capturing planets. I'm wondering if they're fortifying themselves on their home planets or something like that if I take too long to get there.

[Lord Satori]

They have no need to fortify themselves. This is an asymmetrical game and the AI owns absolutely everything except your homeworld.

That said, some AI types are easier than others, and the game has changed an awful lot since I stopped playing, so the things they are capable of may have changed since then.

[Some-Mist]

rocket league for the last 4 days. literally getting home and just playing that. haven't felt this way with a game in a long time. also successfully got 3 co-workers and 4 irl friends to buy/start playing it on PC.

[trap15]

Recently got an SD2SNES so I've been checking out a bunch of stuff. Notably good things thus far:

Majuu Ou was recommended in one of our SFC threads, and damn it's solid. Really good background art, very solid control and movement, fun stage layouts and bosses. Still questioning the average sprite size (seriously the player is like 16x16 or something hilarious), and some stuff is a bit peculiar, but super solid. Last boss is really sick. Music is really atmospheric, except the midboss theme is almost goofy sounding with the weird guitar sample. Not sure what genre the game would count under, I guess it's a platformer?

Sonic Blast Man II is one of the better belt-scrollers on SFC I'd say. Great music (expected of Taito), nice graphics (Sonia ), great feel to hits, actually interesting move set and combos despite the system being fairly basic. A few things I would change about it, particularly: dash jumping would be cool, being able to turn while hammering the punch button would be nice, less pause time on the jump.

[MintyTheCat]

Majuu Ou was recommended in one of our SFC threads, and damn it's solid. Really good background art, very solid control and movement, fun stage layouts and bosses. Still questioning the average sprite size (seriously the player is like 16x16 or something hilarious), and some stuff is a bit peculiar, but super solid. Last boss is really sick. Music is really atmospheric, except the midboss theme is almost goofy sounding with the weird guitar sample. Not sure what genre the game would count under, I guess it's a platformer?

Looks bloody awesome - I need to play this on a Halloween

The Japanese developers were never too shy to bring out the demons and lay on the satanic references - I like that.

[Ed Oscuro]

Zombie hookers are the best.

I didn't know Sonic Blast Man II was out there - I thought the series started and ended with that goofy punching bag game.

I'm still working my way through some arcade games, gotta rewire my controller again. "Cleared" GI Joe (Konami 1992), good shit. Not too big on most Konami licensed stuff or even their arcade games of the period, but a few click with me. Joystick aiming is a bit more finicky in this game than I'd like, though - you never notice that when playing on a keyboard in MAME.

[lilmanjs]

Wing Commander III
Loving this to death, but I still have yet to get Wing Commander IV (also bought from GOG) working. I've tried what little I've found for getting it to work on win7 64-bit, but nothing. ohh well. Wing Commander III has a pretty good story and am enjoying it.

[Gespenst]

Midnight Club 3 Remix aka "how to make a proper enjoyable open world arcade racer"

Also Big Air for the best track

[Squire Grooktook]

Recently got an SD2SNES so I've been checking out a bunch of stuff. Notably good things thus far:

Majuu Ou was recommended in one of our SFC threads, and damn it's solid. Really good background art, very solid control and movement, fun stage layouts and bosses. Still questioning the average sprite size (seriously the player is like 16x16 or something hilarious), and some stuff is a bit peculiar, but super solid. Last boss is really sick. Music is really atmospheric, except the midboss theme is almost goofy sounding with the weird guitar sample. Not sure what genre the game would count under, I guess it's a platformer?

Sonic Blast Man II is one of the better belt-scrollers on SFC I'd say. Great music (expected of Taito), nice graphics (Sonia ), great feel to hits, actually interesting move set and combos despite the system being fairly basic. A few things I would change about it, particularly: dash jumping would be cool, being able to turn while hammering the punch button would be nice, less pause time on the jump.

Great games, both. I'm particularly fond of Sonic Blast Man 2, very under-rated and fun beat em up.

[BIL]

Been meaning to revisit Blast Man 2 - loved the sheer meanness of main dude's grapple punches, especially that clubbing neck blow that smashes baddies face-first into the floor. Big green grappler dude seemed to have some interesting techniques, too.

Be sure to spot the "FUCK YOU" in Majuu Ou's train stage. As with Gynoug's second loop Hyper ending, the mark of true transgressive 90s gaming!

[trap15]

Oh man I must've missed that. I'll take a closer look next time

Since it seems several others here have played Majuu Ou, is there any reason to pick a player type other than Orange? The other two seemed mediocre at best, though the Dragon's piercing shot could maybe have some use but it seems too context-specific to use for a whole stage.

[Squire Grooktook]

You have to play all 3 demon's to get the Ultimate Demon form during the last stage and get the best ending.

Don't remember how good they all are, but I find the Green Thingies slide/teleport and sonic boom to be cool as fuck, stylistically at least.