What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

[Blinge]

Finished Sweet Home; fantastic game. Man what a ride, managed it without a guide either, though there were several items I never figured out a use for.

[ACSeraph]

Yeah Sweet Home is great! I've had the famicom cart for a couple years but actually never finished it because it can be a pain looking up vocabulary I don't know. I think I may jump back into it after MGSV though since my Japanese has leveled up a lot since then. The graphics and music are great.

[CStarFlare]

I've just finished a 100% run of Castle in the Darkness. Really good retro-Metroidvania-style game with what I think looks a little more like GBC-style graphics than NES-style. Lots of secrets and solid difficulty make it stand out; there's a new game+ which supposedly has more to do but I don't know if I want to put another 9 hours+ into it when I need to keep burning through my Steam library before the Winter sale.

Oh hell, BoI Afterbirth comes out in two days, doesn't it?

[Ed Oscuro]

Cool, I'll check out Castle in the Darkness - it's currently 67% off (so under $2 USD).

Darkplaces is (are?) dead, Quakespasm is here instead.

It was a little too dark for my liking at first, but the Horde of Zendar map was neat, with a cool multi-tiered layout and even rooftops, lots of medieval design and details better than anything I've seen in Quake before, tough layouts with lots of pile-on fights offering loads of infighting, and a cool staged ending battle (again, also unseen in Quake derivatives before) with some clever use of triggers to funnel you to the very end. The Nightmare entrance wasn't that imaginative but I did enjoy the gameplay. Difficult, though, with a lot of vulnerable spots, ogres flinging grenades, and even some Vores at highly inopportune moments (there's one quite soon after starting the map) with architecture that's kind of bad for taking them on, so ultimately I chickened out with quicksaves. Found 8/10 secrets, the last two must be quite well hidden.

One issue of note: Don't waste a silver key on a wide shortcut door; there's a door on the lower level (I think) that you need to open instead. Also, some of the permanently closed decorative doorways don't really line up with the other side exactly right, but this is something nobody would notice from playing the game normally.

[CStarFlare]

The Binding of Isaac: Afterbirth expansion came out a couple days ago, and I've put a couple hours into it. I'm a little underwhelmed by the new items, but I hadn't hit the bottom of Rebirth's item pool so the new stuff doesn't stand out to me as much as it would others who've hit the Platinum God level. The new womb boss is cool - it's the most danmaku Isaac boss yet. Greed mode is OK, but I don't quite feel it yet.

The original BoI and its expansion are available for $.66 on Steam too, so I've grabbed that and been playing with it about as much as Afterbirth. It's a fun distraction - kind of like playing a downport of a favorite arcade title (though obviously the timeline is different there). I probably won't stick with it for long, but well worth the money. In my first BoI post I said I wouldn't recommend the game to IRL friends etc because it's quite fucked up, but I'm over that now and gifted my brother a copy of the original. We'll see if he bites.

[system11]

Finishing up the DLC extra scenarios for Samurai Warriors 4-II. It's one of the best musou games for a while, runs really well on the PS4 unlike DW8.

[Obiwanshinobi]

My gosh, are some of the animations in Catherine bad, like, the 2004 Appleseed-bad. 2D animations' badness doesn't surprise me that much after the anime cutscenes in Persona 3. By the same studio?
I mean, sure, it couldn't have been too lavishly produced, being what it is... but even the similarily (i.e. cheap cel-shaded) looking Crimson Tears for PS2 had some sweet real-time animations going for it. Same for BoFV: Dragon Quarter, and how many years older than Catherine those two are? PS2-gen Naruto games and so on.
Or does the higher resolution - paradoxically - make it look like a regress to pre-PS2 era? Then again - cel-shading usualy doesn't suffer from high resolutions.
That out of the way, I liked what little I played (prologue dream), the sinister sound design and, well, most of the English voice acting. If anything makes the impression things have moved any forward since the previous generation of Japanese console games, it's the voice acting (in said Crimson Tears, Digital Devil Saga as well as Persona 3 it was only half-good and half-awful in English).

[Leandro]

Bought the Resident Evil franchise pack on Steam this last Friday and just finished Resident Evil 4. Loved the game... The port is poorly optimized, crashed in some areas, frustrating me and requiring to find a solution (run the game windowed during the maze garden), but the game content is much fun. The pacing is fantastic.

Laughed a lot with the corny dialogue... Specially from the little fella Salazar and 80's action hero Leon.

[Blinge]

My gosh, are some of the animations in Catherine bad

Played the whole game, enjoyed it, didn't notice.

Y'know sometimes your posts aren't relevant to the thread; it's supposed to be games you're playing, not impressions/nitpicks from the damn intro.
Persona 3 voice acting is a step above the bulk of PS2 era games anyway.

The Binding of Isaac: Afterbirth expansion...
Greed mode is OK, but I don't quite feel it yet.

I've been getting into this too but barely scratched the surface of the new stuff. I did like Greed Mode though, mainly for it's final boss, have you seen it yet?

[BrianC]

Been playing Ys II in the Chronicles+ collection. I'm liking it quite a bit. I like how it has an option for the PC-88 music.

[CStarFlare]

I've been getting into this too but barely scratched the surface of the new stuff. I did like Greed Mode though, mainly for it's final boss, have you seen it yet?

Yeah. He's quite a boss battle - he's either completely ridiculous or trivial depending on your luck. Fortunately Greed Mode lets you make your own luck if you have an IV Bag and something that let's you exchange health for coins. The things you can do with that are quite fun.

I came too late for Rebirth's discovery process, but I'm having a lot of fun watching people speculate about what might be hidden in Afterbirth. Reddit is good for something, temporarily,

[dink]

Nastar [arcade], the sprites are ugly but the game plays alright and has excellent music, especially during the boss fights.

[Tregard]

I'm close to the end of Doom 64 EX and I loved it. The early levels are the closest I've ever seen a game come to evoking the lonely space outposts of Alien Breed 3D on the Amiga, and the later Hell levels are wonderfully dark and devious, with plenty of nasty traps and teleporting mobs. There's a lack of enemy types, but they lean heavily on Hell Knights and Barons to keep you on your toes, and the Pain Elementals are terrifying.

They just don't make em like they used to. I've been playing Borderlands on and off at the same time and it's so bloated and uninspiring by comparison. Doom 64 is a focused gauntlet expertly crafted by FPS level-design veterans, set to a soundtrack of clashing, hissing, grating horror noise. Borderlands is an endless expanse of brown terrain that's been designed to look coherent and vast rather than offer any kind of specific challenge, littered everywhere with respawning grunts and tedious side-quests.

[Mischief Maker]

Just picked up "Renowned Explorers International Society."

It is best summed up as a superior sequel to FTL taking place in the setting from "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou."

Major highlight: kicking down the doors of a Scottish Abbey and beating up a church full of nuns. Really enjoying it so far, but of course I got my ass handed to me in the final stage because of poor planning early on.

[Strider77]

Obiwanshinobi wrote:

My gosh, are some of the animations in Catherine bad

Played the whole game, enjoyed it, didn't notice.

I honestly didn't either.... I mean it wasn't super lavish but I didn't find myself cringing from it either.

[KAI]

I'm playing The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky SC [PC] (Estelle is still best jrpg girl), and Densha de Go! 3 Tsuukin hen [PS2] (the hardest and the last arcade game on the series). Wonderful games, both of them.

[Squire Grooktook]

Trails is probably the best jrpg I've ever played. Easily.

[BrianC]

Trails is probably the best jrpg I've ever played. Easily.

I might get that eventually. Falcom makes some good stuff. I just beat Ys II Chronicles+. Some of the boss patterns in the remake are very shmuppy. I like the artwork and music selection too, though I mostly played with the PC88 music. For Ys I, I liked the Complete artwork better, but I found the Chronicles artwork to be better in Ys II.

[Squire Grooktook]

Trails is a very different kind of game from Ys, although you can still tell it's Falcom from its masterful pacing and signature musical expertise. The story and characters are 10/10, and it's one of the only turn based games I've played where there's never a dull moment. You go from fun battle to fun exploration to fun cutscene to fun etc. at a mile a minute. You never really know what's coming next, and I love that.

[MOSQUITO FIGHTER]

Playing nba2k16. I have no clue what I'm doing. I just figured out how to run plays the other day. Haven't won a game yet. I keep trying to do a fancy dribble/pass and end up shooting the ball instead. Pretty awful at it right now.

[BrianC]

Trails is a very different kind of game from Ys, although you can still tell it's Falcom from its masterful pacing and signature musical expertise. The story and characters are 10/10, and it's one of the only turn based games I've played where there's never a dull moment. You go from fun battle to fun exploration to fun cutscene to fun etc. at a mile a minute. You never really know what's coming next, and I love that.

Sounds neat. I also just got Ys: The Oath in Felgana for PC. Not sure if I'm going to play that, Ys III SNES (I heard it's not the definitive port, but I like what I played of it. It has been awhile since I have played, though), or something else next. I also have Ys on SMS and Ys 6 for PS2. As far as other Falcom ports I have Faxanadu (technically an original game based on Xanadu) and Legacy of the Wizard for NES.

[Squire Grooktook]

Oath is rad as fuck and definitely worth a shot.

[BrianC]

I gave a Oath at Felghana a try to make sure if works well on my PC (which it does) and I like how it supports the analog on my PS1 controller using Dual Box Pro, as well as the pad. Not too many games seem to automatically detect it. If I remember correctly, the game seems to play a bit like Ys 6 (which is not surprising since it uses the same engine).

[iconoclast]

Devil May Cry 4: Special Edition
Platinumed this a while ago, but just realized I never wrote anything about it. I played through DMC3 a few times before this came out, and now I'm pretty sure that I like 4 more overall. 3 is still better in some ways (better bosses, level design, & ranking system), but 4 trumps it in combat, enemy design, and difficulty design (DMD in DMC3 is just bad, although DMC4's DMD is too easy in comparison). Of the three new characters, Vergil is by far my favorite. He's just awesome. Trish and Lady are fun for a while, but they get old fast because of their limited movesets (especially Lady). I start to get tired of playing them before I can finish a Bloody Palace run (side note: I wish Bloody Palace was half as long and twice as hard).

I never played the PC version of the original DMC4, so this was my first time seeing Legendary Dark Knight mode. It really shows how overpowered these characters are when you can literally fill the entire play field with enemies and it still isn't much of a challenge, but it was still a fun extra.


Lost Dimension (Vita)
Platinumed this. Pretty mediocre strategy game imo, I wouldn't recommend it unless you're really hurting for something new. I don't play a lot of them, but as far as the clearly-second-rate TBS games go, I thought Operation Darkness was better in every way.

I was interested in the premise (which is similar to something like 999/VLR/Danganronpa), but I stopped caring about the story half way through because the characters are one dimensional stereotypes with awful dialogue. I will give them some credit, though, I thought the way they connected the story to the gameplay was pretty clever. In short, you have to use different party combinations for each mission in order to figure out who the traitor is (which is random every time). It works pretty well.

Also, the Vita version is not good. The framerate is consistently bad (I think it's always well below 30) and quite a few special attacks have a quick load screen before the animation plays out. I prefer to play multiplatform PS3 games on my Vita for convenience, even if they're technically inferior, but this is a little too much.

[Obiwanshinobi]

Obiwanshinobi wrote:

My gosh, are some of the animations in Catherine bad

Played the whole game, enjoyed it, didn't notice.

I honestly didn't either.... I mean it wasn't super lavish but I didn't find myself cringing from it either.

Does any of you happen to like Pixar animation? Or Akira's for that matter? Would explain something to me.
(By the way, the gameplay animation is pretty bad too, but the zoomed far out camera makes it easier on the eye.)

[Elder]

I'm currently playing through Rise of the Tomb Raider. Fun game if you enjoyed the reboot from a few years back

[Ed Oscuro]

RE5 and (so far just a bit of) RE6 from the Steam sale, really can't add anything about these except to note that RE5 design decision where the switch between "Attack" and "Cover" actually controls multiple AI decisions at once, and also the tendency of the AI to be really fidgety and try to anticipate your moves, jumping down and climbing up boundaries repeatedly. Both these decisions seem like they were made to try and speed the game up, which I think misses the point about the type of game. Then again, so do many of the level design decisions - occasionally I notice something that just feels thoughtless, like it wouldn't have been there if Mikami was directing. Many classic setpieces, though, even if the atmosphere and progression isn't really done well. Mikami's game turned backtracking into a joy.

Interestingly, my PC is blowing cool air from its vents during a cutscene, after running the game for hours. That's with roughly 2011 hardware (and a 2009/2010 graphics card). Seems pretty well optimized.

[Ji-L87]

Yeah, I bought RE 1 and 4 HD during the Steam sale.

It's my first time playing RE 4 actually. I thought it was going to be a bit different but I'm pretty into it now actually.
Currently I'm working my way through the enormous Castle, at chapter 3-2

[Immryr]

I've been playing Resident Evil HD remaster today, for the last couple of hours. this is my first time playing RE1 and it's been quite frustrating so far. I'm playing as Chris and I made a save as soon as I found the first type writer, played for a while and stupidly died. So I load my save back up and start again. I'm happily exploring for a while, found the sword key and opened up those doors and started looking round the new area. By this point I'm about out of ammo but I can't reload. My inventory is full as earlier on I picked up the emblem from above the fireplace and the gemstone. Those plus the key, my pistol, my knife and.... Some other unusable item fill up my inventory.

I haven't been able to find any way to use any of those items, or drop them or store them anywhere. I knew a lot of this game was about managing item space,but I didn't think picking up two important looking items up at the beginning of the game would screw me over so much.

I'll try again tomorrow cause I was really enjoying the game so far, but I don't have the patience to start over right now.

[kaicooper]

I've been playing Resident Evil HD remaster today.

u r so lucky to play this for first timei remember playing it
in early 2000's and i was teen back then and the graphics on game cube was WOW WOW
and atmospheric..this's the best in the serious ever