What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

[kaicooper]

now playing one of the most FUCKED UP game ever
seriously..Pure surrel..starts cute and fun then weireder and creeper
so sad hvnt got any chance playing it in 90's cus i was playing Mario and
other games instead

EARTHBOUND/Mother 2 1994

[TransatlanticFoe]

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.

You can't drop/discard items, you need to find an item box. They're magic connected things to help manage your inventory - place something in one and it's in all of them. Usually found near typewriters.

Jill has extra inventory slots and gets access to a killer weapon. You might have more fun with Jill as a first timer as she makes the inventory and thus backtracking easier - especially when you start having to worry about crimson heads!

[Blinge]

You may aswell put that emblem back where it was to save space, you can get it later when you realise what to do with it.

[system11]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLwfoQWFtWw

Awwww yeah...

[Immryr]

So after going back it today I realise I had managed to miss the door for the second typewriter / first item box room despite going past it several times -_-;

[Stevens]

I really think at this point Pinball is my 2nd favorite genre.

I've spent a good deal of time with Pinball Fx's Earth Defense, Epic Quest, and Excalibur tables. I've put slightly less time into Mars and Paranormal, but recently have been putting a lot of time into Paranormal.

If I have any gripe its that certain tables are only available as part of packs.

[Leandro]

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.

Glad to know that

[Opus131]

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.

First person shooters died between 1998 and maybe 2001. The last few great entries in the genre weren't even shooters anymore, like Deus Ex, Thief, or System Shock 2. Then came a slew of severely neutered shooters, like Halo, Doom 3, Half Life 2, and Call of Duty 2, and aside for the occasional exception (say, No Ones Lives Forever, or Stalker), the genre hasn't recovered. Multiplatform development is probably to blame as well. Playing a post-Quake shooter without keyboard and mouse just doesn't feel right to me. I just saw a video showing a death match in Doom 4 and it simply left me scratching my head in disbelief. I had to watch some Quake 3 action to cleanse my eyes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRV0tclxXMQ

Ho PC gaming, where art thou gone?

[Ruldra]

I really think at this point Pinball is my 2nd favorite genre.

I've spent a good deal of time with Pinball Fx's Earth Defense, Epic Quest, and Excalibur tables. I've put slightly less time into Mars and Paranormal, but recently have been putting a lot of time into Paranormal.

If I have any gripe its that certain tables are only available as part of packs.

Pinball FX (and Zen Pinball) tables are great, I've bought 20+ tables from them over the years. I love going for the missions and trying to beat the final mission of the table, feels like you've beaten a story mode of a game. Very difficult but also very rewarding when you pull it off.

If I were to recommend one set of tables, I'd pick the Avengers Chronicles one. Not much of a fan of World War Hulk but love the other three (The Avengers, Fear Itself, Infinity Gauntlet).

[Obiwanshinobi]

I believe Counter-Strike has been mighty alive since 1999 (and the likes of Halo on PC can be found pretty lively online).

[MOSQUITO FIGHTER]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLwfoQWFtWw

Awwww yeah...

Me too.

https://youtu.be/zw8g_CNFTaM

[iconoclast]

WWE 2K16
Spent the last week playing this. I haven't played a WWE game in a few years, so I thought I'd see how they are nowadays. It seems like they're as mediocre as ever.

Career mode is painfully dull - you take a created wrestler (I downloaded Kurt Angle) and work your way through the ranks, starting from the very bottom in the NXT training center (thank god Enzo Amore was there to teach Kurt Angle how to wrestle). You start out with low stats, and to level them up you have to earn SP by completing matches and trying to get high star ratings ("your goal is to always try and have a 5-star match", which should please Dave Meltzer). Or you can pay $10 for DLC that boosts you to level 90 immediately. I only played for a few months in game, but nothing really happens. The storylines are generic and the matches are repetitive and boring. Completing the mode seems like an enormous grind, so I'm not going to bother playing any further.

Showcase mode, on the other hand, is pretty cool. It's basically a career retrospective of Steve Austin. They recreated a bunch of key matches from his entire career, from WCW, to ECW, to WWE and added a bunch of nicely made video packages in between to string them all together. Each match gives you a bunch of objectives to complete, which are meant to re-enact the most important spots of the match. Sometimes they'll lead into a cutscene that recreates it exactly as it happened, usually with audio ripped directly from the original broadcast (as far as I can tell). It's not the most creative thing in the world to just remake history, but I liked it. I hope they do one for Shawn Michaels soon (preferably long after Kurt Angle has had anything to do with TNA so they could include their amazing feud & match from WM21).

As far as the actual gameplay goes, I guess I'd say it's acceptable. It's not bad, but it's not even half as good as any of the all-time classic wrestling games. It's slow, stiff, and sometimes feels unresponsive because the animations have so much priority. One of the biggest flaws of Yuke's WWE games has been their reversal system - any match between two half decent players would consist of reversal after reversal after reversal because the timing is so lenient, and you can reverse from pretty much any situation. They addressed that in this game by limiting how many times you can use a reversal (up to 5 times before your meter has to recharge). I guess that's an improvement, because once someone's meter is empty, you can actually start hitting them with some moves. It's less tedious this way, even if it's just a band-aid solution. But it's still not very fun. I wish they'd just throw their entire engine out and copy+paste King of Colosseum's clutch system, AKI's engine, or just go back to systems they used in the good games they've made in the past (Here Comes the Pain & Day of Reckoning 2). But it seems like they're set in their ways.

[Leandro]

Resident Evil 5 running pretty and smooth but damn, the gameplay is a mess. Sheva AI is useless, where's the inventory space upgrade... Fights tend to go on for too long.

The cutscenes are entertaining.

I'm not getting as much enjoyment from the gameplay as I did from RE4. Going to finish this one and go for RE6, hope it's better.

[TransatlanticFoe]

Give Sheva a submachine gun. The AI is really efficient with it, so you can use her for that and extra ammo inventory space. She will waste herbs on you and occasionally fight stuff when you need her at a switch.

I also found fights went on for too long - you aren't sure if they're infinitely spawning and you need to find a checkpoint/switch, or you just need to hold out until they stop.

Resi 6 is QTE hell, so many "oh there's a QTE" > instant death > restart > button prompt changes > fuck off and die. Easy mode disables them, it was the only way I could get some form of enjoyment from the game.

[Ruldra]

RE6 annoyed me to no end with it's boss fights. Some bosses need to be killed like 7 or 8 times before they're done with for good. I don't know what's the point of this, it's not scary or tense, just incredibly annoying.

Other than that, I had fun with it, mainly because I marathoned it with a friend. I imagine playing with an AI partner isn't nowhere as fun.

[mastermx]

For my non shmup games I have been playing MH4U, Danganronpa, USFIV, SFVBeta(whenever they put it on) and I just finished P4G. I sort of stopped playing MGSV once I got to chapter 2(should finish it tbh), and I am waiting for more souls games specifally the bloodborne expansion. I will most likely be getting Fallout 4 this month, but I will wait for reviews before making that decision. Honestly there are too many hobbies and things to do that are eating up my free time besides games. It's a miracle I get all these hours in. Sometimes I feel like a jack of all trades. On months when I'm super busy, what little game time I have, is dedicated to shmups and sf.

2016 is looking to be THE gaming year of the decade. So many noteworthy releases. Seems like japan is going to be very active in 2016 for it's games. Also Nintendo rumored to release the NX, (which some claim is more powerful than the ps4 )

[Obiwanshinobi]

When I got around to installing Ninja Gaiden Sigma on HDD, what else was there to do than make some progress in Spartan: Total Warrior? This time rather than Halo of crowd TPP slashers, it came as the genre's Republic Commando, i.e. made me think of what I was doing where the other titles (Dynasty Warriors, Drakengard) failed to. Musou fans appear to keep wanting more Musou games, but I wonder how many of them have looked back since they caught a Total Warrior bug.
By the way, I think bmups fans might appreciate the combat system of Spartan: Total Warrior. This kind of robust simplicity with crowd control in mind. It's a crying shame nothing seems to have come out of the enhanced PS4 (or was it supposed to be on 3?) port. Some rage attacks would need to be tweaked for the sake of 2 player and certain rough edges should have been smoothed out...
By the way, looks like "HDR" one of the makers talked about is in the 'Cube version too (so I assume it's on Xbox as well). Funny how some folks mention its presence in SotC as if it didn't have right to be rendered by PS2.

[Ed Oscuro]

Resident Evil 5: Capcom's Embarrassingly Terrible Ending for Wesker Edition

Because apparently I never got the Gold version. I'll get it eventually - but my goodness, they want $15 for the upgrade!

I'm at under 7 hours in Normal for the total mission completion, with the opening 3 chapters fairly well optimized (just slowing down for treasure), and the rest is mostly unoptimized. Getting well under 5 hours should be a breeze, if i can just find time. With Infinite Magnum Power, I also had my first kill at the furnace where I didn't use the furnace - and also toasted Sheva for the first time. Keep up, damnit...Some thoughts on what's worked so far:

- I played through most of the game without using the Help function, and my experience didn't suffer, but those chain attacks are nice.
- Get the stun baton. I gave it to AI Sheva first, which was a mistake. She does okay with it, but it's better to have your AI partner using both firearms.
- Melee vests next (though I read they aren't much use on Pro, but by that time I would not be worried about inventory space much).
- Remember that the AI partner generally uses just 2 weapons, and you can usually switch them in calling for Attack or Cover.
- I always prioritized my inventory for maximum income. You can always get more ammo, so don't be underpowered. If you don't have enough ammo in a fight, just quit / save, and restock.
- I did a lot of grinding in 3-1 with collecting treasure. You can do that area fairly quickly, and it's also somewhat fun, with very different areas and different ways to approach them, and you can avoid combat by not picking up slates if you'd like. If you need magnum ammunition, go to the next area - you can pick up at least one box, and probably two, without taking on any enemies - and you can also get the M29 for 6 more bullets + 200 credits without fighting. I am tempted to say the 3-1 grinding was pointless because chapter limits on how far you can upgrade your weapons / needing to complete the game to get infinite ammo means that it would have been possibly more effective to just complete the game and then grind the garden, but I don't like the garden quite as much as I like the boat stage, as it's uglier, got much less variety, and has big empty stretches even if you're rushing the lickers. It was also nice to have everything ready to be upgraded immediately after finishing the game.
- If you have infinite ammo, don't use turrets against Irving.

RE5 has a few surprising nice touches here and there. If your partner takes the head off an enemy with one shot, you can praise them with the Help button! It's also nice that weapons with ammunition in them leave the ammunition when sold. On the other hand, it's downright bad that you can get stacks of 999 machine gun ammo that you can't quickly sell off - RE4 didn't have this problem, though I don't remember if it sped up scrolling through numbers of items if there were a lot, or if there simply weren't such gigantic stacks of ammo to deal with. RE5's really free with ammo, so that you spend a lot more time selling off ammo if you're really aiming to max income. Overall, it's not really worth it - takes too long, and a full inventory makes management of valuable healing items rather painful.

Up through the portable flamethrower battle, my loadout was Chris with MP5, the baton, and a magnum - I upgraded the M29 as soon as I could, and then the handcannon (which you can buy after fully upgrading the m29). Sheva got the S75 and the M92F - later the P8, but I probably should have given her the p226 instead. I didn't upgrade her weapons much at all until about chapter 3 or so.

- Baton is so good it's ridiculous: Kills many erupted / flying plagas easily, stunlocks some big things (including the Power Stone carriers), saves on ammo, and it's melee fun. At worst, it doesn't have quite the same vertical reach as Chris's knife, and might have a very slightly longer delay before swinging.
- MP5 is a consistent damage dealer for the player and saves you from constantly reloading
- Magnum for basically everything really big, but it must be used very sparingly, i.e., executioner and chainsaw guys are okay, Big Man and the platform boss not so much. If it can be taken down another way easily, or if it will eat up all your reserve, I'd use something else
- pistol for AI partner lets them be fairly effective while converting plentiful ammo into damage, without wasting money
- S75 is the AI partner's damage-dealing weapon, and takes care of everything while being highly cost effective per bullet / inventory space (especially with high capacity, you can use downtime to reload it, without wasting an inventory slot). It won't hold up through later plays, though - too slow.

With infinite ammo, I first upgraded the Lighting Hawk, then the MP5, then PSG-1 and Dragunov. Now my AI partner gets the MP5 and Dragunov, and I kept the PSG1 - though I might drop it back into the holding tank as I have little use for it now that I've popped the last BSAA emblem. I will likely swap out the AI's MP5 for the AK, and see how that fares, including against armored enemies. The MP5's piercing upgrade should be a benefit against armored enemies, but on the ship, I didn't see much evidence of it, and I assume responsibility for those guys since I have the Lightning Hawk magnum as my pistol.

I didn't mess around with shotguns and ammo seems really scarce. I'll be trying out the Hydra eventually though.

And one last bit of game criticism: Once you've reached the Wesker RPG fight, there's nothing more in the game that's good. Maybe I'm being generous - the battles in the ship immediately preceding this aren't so hot either, and that's on top of the overall decrease in happiness and fun once the Base Majini show up much earlier. They're not difficult...just kind of boring in a way that their RE4 counterparts really aren't (a large part of which is due to RE4's Base Ganados still being mostly melee-centered).

Damn, I never thought I'd be saying that rushing a huge pack of lickers is a good idea, but here we are.

[kaicooper]

now playing the real Nightmare
its Yume Nikki

[null1024]

KOF 98 [Neo-Geo].
I dunno why I didn't put in 98UMFE, but I had some decent rounds today with my buddies.

I really need to stop doing some dangerous, stupid, unsafe shit though, and I need to get a little more consistent with my inputs -- I've lost a bunch of matches because shit didn't come out or I mis-input badly.
It's also way too easy to forget that 98 has airblocking [it only triggers when you're neutral or back jumping, though].

and I'm still wishing Athena's sweep was as nice as it is in 2002, hot fuck

[Immryr]

still playing Resident Evil hd, I just fought off the big snake and finished placing the death masks on the statues. it feels to me like this game must have been a pretty big influence on dark souls, which is something I haven't seen many people saying, and it came as quite a big surprise to me. tense exploration, minimal use of music mainly to highlight special areas or fights, the feeling of safety in a save room, story telling done mainly through items etc. all very souls like.

I'm liking the game a lot so far, although I'm slightly stumped as to how to progress now. the only item I have which I haven't figured out what to do with is the wind crest. it seems I either need to find the helmet key, or the second octagonal thing to go in the door under the lobby type area.... or perhaps I need to figure out how to get the power working on the lift. anyway I am enjoying stumbling round the mansion looking for answers.

[Chaos Phoenixma]

Been replaying Star Ocean 4 on the PS3 going for 100% IC and 100 % Quests. Also got 100% chests on the run since I didn't manage it my first time on PS3, not sure which ones I missed, plus wasn't sure if I missed some missables.


Currently have the 80% IC Trophy and am at like 7 or 8 quests left. Still need 3 more Ethereal Queen kills(but will probably want 2 more after sometime for the monster jewel). First run through when prepared, Got Crystals on Floor 19 and I got Lymle 100 on the boss, so I did not want to push my luck going farther (plus no Santa on 19 or 20 means no Santa on any floor after 20 due to it repeating those 2). The next try, also Crystals on 19, no Santa on 19 or 20(no Santa for the entire run) which meant no ability to restock on the Disintegration Stones without grinding.


So going to try to get a more farmable layout next time, which of course is RNG and hopefully avoid the freezes (I've had 2 on Gabriel which isn't a huge time loss, a softlock on a loading screen, and a freeze when talking to an NPC, none of which wasted too much time)


If I did this run on the 360, it would put me up to 1,000 Gamerscore once I'm finished, but screw all that postgame disc swapping between disc 2 and 3 constantly. Once I'm done, I'll only be missing 75%, 90%, 100% Battle Trophies and maybe Weapons Data depending on if I find the last one I need from Wandering Dungeon. Undecided if I'll try for Platinum or not because it'd mean getting all those grindy battle trophies a second time.

[soprano1]

Replaying Fallout New Vegas to stop the Monster Hunter 4 burnout.

[Khan]

Decided to put Alien isolation on hold since my pre-order copy of Fallout 4 arrived on release so been busy getting stuck into that

Thus far its more of the same the only real change in the 9 hrs ive put in so far are you can build a crap load more things, anything from furniture for your town to turrets for defense and ive been given Power armor and a mini gun straight away and they are usable too without any training. Graphically the game is alittle better looking than its predecessors and im playing the ps4 version where some people have said they have had fps issues so far touch wood ive not come across any issues I can tell though its more of a grind fest since theres so much more to build....I dont know how some mags are giving the game a 9/10 score there is very little improvement in the game play they have given the main protagonist a voice which isnt a big deal tbh but it might be for some it feels like New vegas i think they tried to sell it on hype with the dog but hes not all that impressive ingame I liked Rex from Nv much more at this current time id give the game a 7/10 because im a fan of the game, no idea why these mags are giving the game 9/10's it doesnt deserve that tbh.

[Vexorg]

I want to play Fallout 4 at some point, but lately I've had more and more issues with motion sickness on first-person games, and just from watching some Twitch streams I got pretty nauseous, so I'd need to figure out something for that.

In the meantime, I've been playing mostly the Afterbirth expansion to Binding of Isaac: Rebirth. Nothing too earth-shattering, but the new Greed Mode is actually quite fun, and there are a bunch of new items and a new boss fight (with some very Danmaku-like bullet patterns) added as well. I'm still terrible at the game, but enjoying it nonetheless.

[Obiwanshinobi]

I want to play Fallout 4 at some point, but lately I've had more and more issues with motion sickness on first-person games, and just from watching some Twitch streams I got pretty nauseous, so I'd need to figure out something for that.

Never had a real problem of the sort myself, but someone recommended: a) higher framerates (so the PC is where it's at, I guess) and b) not to eat anything greasy. Presumably playing on a smaller screen and in a brightly lit room (not very cinematic, then) could also help.

[davyK]

Mr Driller Drill Land. Beautiful update to the original with great enhancements to the basic game. Multi-player modes too.

Doesn't work with a Freeloader (won't save) so I bought a JPN Gamecube to play this. Worth it - but it also means I can play my other JPN games without a need for disc swapping which is a bonus.

[Khan]

I want to play Fallout 4 at some point, but lately I've had more and more issues with motion sickness on first-person games, and just from watching some Twitch streams I got pretty nauseous, so I'd need to figure out something for that.

You can hold down the top sensor button on the ps4 controller and it switches to 3rd person view, though I dont get any motion sickness from playing it in fps that actually would happen to me on older games mainly when I went back to half life 2 a few years ago that game definitely made me quesy

[Lemone]

Just getting to the end of Rogue Galaxy on PS2. Such a cool game (even if it does seem suspiciously similar to Final Fantasy 12 in all areas but gameplay). I realize it was a late release but even so, the visuals in this game have really sucked me in. And the art style of the cut scenes is stunning - and again, this is a PS2 game. There are quite a few mini-games to play and I have not played all of them and have no intention of changing that as my clock is at 75 hours and completing them all would at at least 20 more. It's a surprisingly fun game with a weapon system that is straight up my alley to the point that I got so lost in it and did it for so long before story points, I kind of forgot what was going on. But I have a hard time caring about stories in games so no tears were shed. But if you do care, it gives you a quick refresher on the load screen each time you load your save file so that can be pretty helpful if you have taken any length of time off. All in all, to me, Rogue Galaxy is an unreal game with some minor drawbacks in the battle system and an amazing and age-proof art style akin to that of Wind Waker.

Next up will be either Dragon Quest 8 or Shadow Hearts (with plans to play the whole series). Any help choosing would be appreciated.

[BulletMagnet]

I'm a big Shadow Hearts fan myself, though I'll submit that the series doesn't completely hit its stride until the second entry; I know DQ8 is well-liked by fans of that series, but it's obviously a lot more traditional than SH, so if you're choosing between those two it depends on whether you feel like JRPG comfort food or something a bit different.

As an aside, I liked a lot of what I saw of Rogue Galaxy, but I couldn't get past how dumb my AI allies were and how little I could do to fix that (the same issue turned me off of Ni No Kuni and is making me hesitate to pick up Yo-Kai Watch). Plenty of others seem to do okay with them though, guess I'm just particularly picky about that bullet point.