What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

[Blinge]

I'm doing the FFV - Four Job Fiesta this year.
It's a charity event where everyone plays FFV and has their job class assigned to them by a bot.

I opted in to the possibility of getting the uncontrollable Berserker class, and now have two of them, which has made things a bit painful.

[Chaos Phoenixma]

I tend to do a few runs of that each year now.

First run was Chaos No 750 Berserker Risk. That ended up with me having a Dragoon and 3 berserkers. I still killed all 3 tracked bosses despite that but required grinding my Dragoon all the way up to level 90 for HP and damage, while I kept the berserkers at their endgame level up 44 and had them zombied during Omega so that they would draw some of the counters away from the Dragoon(and really, this is the only way to make a Berserker useful against Omega).


Second run is a Chaos 750, and I got Bard(finally), Dancer, Chemist, and Geomancer. This is going to be an easy run outside of Soul Cannon since I'm not going to use Geo until I actually get to the point where it rolled.(yeah, I rolled the jobs early for once even though I normally wait)

[Leandro]

Just finished Environmental Station Alpha. What a great experience. I ended with 87% completion, must have missed some important powerups since there were quite a few slots left blank.
Loved the difficulty, great homage to Metroid.

I must say, it's better than another similar game on Steam, Axiom Verge, which is a great game too.

[soprano1]

Going to finish the last extra dungeons of Chrono Trigger DS to get acess to the new final boss. Then i'm off to Sonic Advance 2. The first one was actually a surprise, much better than what i expected of post-1994 Sonic games.

[TransatlanticFoe]

I found the levels too expansive in Sonic Advance and the special stages were often stuck behind a "make this jump or you miss it" route. Then when you get there they're a confusing choppy unplayable mess. The rest of the game was pretty good but damn if I can be arsed with getting all the emeralds.

Advance 2 sounds similarly arduous but as a treasure hunt, is it any more fun to get to the special stages?

[Mortificator]

I quite enjoyed the first Sonic Advance, but I don't think either of its sequels are of the same quality. SA2 puts too much emphasis on speed and performing tricks, SA3 is saddled with a Chaotix-esque partner mechanic, and neither of them have as good stage design.

[Zaarock]

Revisiting Armored Core: Verdict Day. Trying to beat hardcore mode on one of the harder settings (type D). Haven't been able to reach the final missions before running out of lives but it's a lot of fun. Might end up skipping later sub missions since they take time and get really difficult.
I miss back when this game was active (spoilers). Still has a lot of fans especially on japanese servers though.

[null1024]

I quite enjoyed the first Sonic Advance, but I don't think either of its sequels are of the same quality. SA2 puts too much emphasis on speed and performing tricks, SA3 is saddled with a Chaotix-esque partner mechanic, and neither of them have as good stage design.

Advance 1 is easily the best of the lot. Only thing about it is that the music is a tad meh, it's otherwise rock-solid as a Sonic game.
Advance 2's stage design is kind of automated, but it has its moments. The thing feels brilliant to time attack and the game is really fluid, you can really get into a good flow when playing.

on that note, Rush is great for this too, but a third of Rush has really bad stage design -- Altitude Limit and Mirage Road in particular, and the rest is varying degrees of iffy

Advance 3's partner mechanic is its saving grace. It's fun to abuse. There's very few places where it's really, truly required, but it's a neat system, and being able to skip large portions of the [relatively bad] levels is pretty satisfying. The music is great, the visuals are great, the stage design feels like a mess. Recently replayed most of it, really felt like a slog, and I distinctly remember enjoying the game years ago.
on a similar note, I think the tag mechanic in Chaotix is half of the reason that game is any decent at all, because the level design is pretty poor [also, a fair few sections of most of the acts in the game are outright copy-pasted between each other, I'm looking at maps of each stage in Chaotix right now], it's much more fun to screw around with the rubber band than actually go through the stages.

I found the levels too expansive in Sonic Advance and the special stages were often stuck behind a "make this jump or you miss it" route. Then when you get there they're a confusing choppy unplayable mess. The rest of the game was pretty good but damn if I can be arsed with getting all the emeralds.

Advance 2 sounds similarly arduous but as a treasure hunt, is it any more fun to get to the special stages?

I dunno, Advance 1's stages weren't too terribly big. They felt about the size of Sonic 2 stages. They're also pretty great.

Getting the emeralds in Advance 1 isn't all that fun and ultimately isn't worth it.
Hell, same with Advance 2, and getting into the special stages way, way, way too much effort. Don't bother.
and then Advance 3's special stages are easier to get into than 2 [it's a decent treasure hunt], but they're just fucking hard, at least from what I remember, but it's been ages since I bothered looking for the Chao

[mamboFoxtrot]

Advance 2 sounds similarly arduous but as a treasure hunt, is it any more fun to get to the special stages?

I haven't played it, but from what I remember seeing it's actually worse, as you have to find a series of hidden objects throughout the level, all collected in one run. I think SA3 works the same way.

I bought my cart of Sonic Advance used, and luckily for me, the last guy that had it got all the emeralds, so I didn't have to bother with the shitty special stages. The Super Sonic stage for this game is poop, so you're not missing anything at all if you ignore the emeralds.

[BrianC]

I haven't played it, but from what I remember seeing it's actually worse, as you have to find a series of hidden objects throughout the level, all collected in one run. I think SA3 works the same way.

From what I remember, SA3 works differently and the objects don't need to be collected in one run.

[Vludi]

Warriors of Fate aka Tenchi wo Kurau II. I started practicing this game again after not touching it for some time, finally got my first 1cc with Portor/Guan Yu. Not an easy game, but what makes it more tiresome is its length (1 hour). Still one of my 5 favorite brawlers for sure.

[Tregard]

I've been fooling around on Typing of the Dead: Overkill the last few days. I enjoyed the Wii original back in the day, but 7 years on (Christ...) and it's not quite as funny nor as fun as I remember. "Fucking cabbage" and "impotent cripple" were the go-to insults in my circle of friends for, oooh, two years at least.

Sigh, I'm getting old.

[wgogh]

I've been fooling around on Typing of the Dead: Overkill the last few days. I enjoyed the Wii original back in the day, but 7 years on (Christ...) and it's not quite as funny nor as fun as I remember. "Fucking cabbage" and "impotent cripple" were the go-to insults in my circle of friends for, oooh, two years at least.

Sigh, I'm getting old.

I used to play the first Typing of the Dead, the one with the story and everything just like the original House of The Dead 2. Never heard about the Overkill until few weeks ago, I was surprised that they did a sequel.

[null1024]

I've been fooling around on Typing of the Dead: Overkill the last few days. I enjoyed the Wii original back in the day, but 7 years on (Christ...) and it's not quite as funny nor as fun as I remember. "Fucking cabbage" and "impotent cripple" were the go-to insults in my circle of friends for, oooh, two years at least.

Sigh, I'm getting old.

Custom wordbanks brought new life into Overkill for me when they were introduced. One of the handful I saw when the feature came out was a hentai-themed bank -- made it harder [had some long-ass phrases] and made me laugh like crazy.

The original Typing of the Dead is a much, much better game than Overkill though. Would be nice if it was on Steam.

[Ed Oscuro]

Just finished up that E2M10 extra intro version of Dismal Oubliette...sort of. There's no weapon pickups in the level, just some powerups, and even shotgun ammo becomes really scarce in a hurry. Definitely not designed for a shotgun start. That said, I went through it as best I could (slapped on God mode eventually, after exiting the new entrance content) and so I guess I squeaked through to to the finish line - all mainline Quake content done before the 20th anniversary, today!

But I've been more interested of late to play Thief Gold again. One thing immediately surprised me - the game looks pretty nice when using the latest TFix (1.23) and a 32-bit color mode, but even so...it looks pretty good considering what this is. That, even though many of the textures are obviously bad, models are wonky with poly gaps and poor UV mirroring, etc. I also like how some textures (like at least a few stone statues) have some apparent green/purple fringing from being taken from blown-up detail from a photograph, apparently. The novelty is starting to wear off a bit with maps like Mage Towers - blackjacking everybody and constant saving, egh - but it's really good. I'm seeing a lot of stuff I don't remember, so going through for as high a level of completion as possible really is worth it. I nudged the gamma up a few notches to prevent headaches and things are good now; I've even found all the loot on the last two levels (Haunted Cathedral and Mage Towers). More good stuff is coming, but overall I'm starting to feel like the series actually got better through the next two sequels.

Also, the bunny hopping is a hoot. Possible to damage doors, or yourself, and once I got stuck on geometry while hopping and watched the viewpoint get pushed up a ways while I kept the hop going (while stationary). Didn't fly out with as much speed as I had hoped, but it was still fun.

Some new weaknesses of the game I've noticed: Garrett doesn't mantle or walk up some short steps with a protruding edge, but often bounces away from them like they're a sloped wall above him. Loading sometimes brings up a black screen (loading again fixes). Mage Towers played no videos - not even the level complete cin. Can't walk backwards over many enemies, which kept making me wonder what my keyboard was up to. Even more annoyingly, a few enemies were partly or totally intangible - I could walk through them or swing a blackjack or sword at them with no effect. Reloading solved this, again.

I'm thinking of doing something very different next, maybe the translated Live A Live ROM or the first Final Fantasy games. Never really tried 'em out before.

[Obiwanshinobi]

Grinding at Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria again, because I want to finish one of those jRPGs not already finished. Neither willing to bid this genre farewell yet, nor can I justify another such acquisition before at least one is put to rest.
While I can understand who keeps BUYING* those things, hell if I know who keeps PLAYING them, like, to completion. I suppose a new jRPGamer is born every day.
*) Folks who feel that some natural order was restored every time we see another one released.

[Tregard]

Grinding at Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria again, because I want to finish one of those jRPGs not already finished. Neither willing to bid this genre farewell yet, nor can I justify another such acquisition before at least one is put to rest.
While I can understand who keeps BUYING* those things, hell if I know who keeps PLAYING them, like, to completion. I suppose a new jRPGamer is born every day.
*) Folks who feel that some natural order was restored every time we see another one released.

Dude. I have Okami, Ni No Kuni, Tactics Ogre and Persona 4 "on the go" at the moment. By that I mean I mean I still consider myself to be playing them as I want to finish them at some point, but hell, some of these I started playing about three fucking years ago.

I love all four and have probably put in a minimum of 30 hours into each, but they're just so damn long. I'm never going near another jrpg again.

[system11]

Nights Of Azure at the moment. Picked it up a while ago, some other stuff came out and I took a break, back on it now. The story is more satisfying than the actual gameplay, I'd made the mistake of burning out on side quest grinding.

Backlog is so big I can't even remember it all now. Sealed games, everywhere. I think I'll finish Batman next, it feels too big and messy for its own good, I miss linear games.

I did finally play & finish Dead Space 3, it was pretty good. Not as good as the first but overall about as good as the second. I'd love to see a remaster of the first one even though I've played through it twice already. Microtransactions were .. massively overstated. I didn't buy any resource packs and by the end of the game I had self designed weapons which were more than powerful enough and there were no schematics I couldn't have constructed. Suit fully upgraded too.

[Bonus!]

Plowed through Uncharted 4. Technically, it is very impressive, and it's overall fun to play through at least once. The gameplay is nothing to write home about. Nathan Drake got a few new tricks, and lost one popular old one (throwing back grenades). Some of the set pieces were so good they fully justified getting the game, like an utterly ridiculous chase scene. I disliked the shoehorned strong (and black!) female character that added absolutely nothing to the story, climbing was a bit tedious, and driving around in a jeep wasn't that much fun either, but it is far from the horror that was the jet ski ride in Uncharted 1.

[Obiwanshinobi]

I have Okami, Ni No Kuni, Tactics Ogre and Persona 4 "on the go" at the moment.

I still gladly replay a bit of Ōkami every now and then. Purchased for PS3 to remind me how it felt like to be there when it was new on PS2 (rather than seriously planning to re-play all of it), but it consumes my hours as easily as it used to (if not moreso). Still, I can't be the only one who finds re-playing more absorbing than exploring not yet explored these days.
Ni no Kuni interests me, but it's one of those I simply refuse to buy with a jRPG backlog as seasoned as mine (I've had this VP2: Silmeria copy since 2008 or 2009; well, even if it was 2010, that's been quite a few years).

[Chaos Phoenixma]

Still playing Rabi-Ribi a lot. This game is so good.

Currently have all achievements except the one for reaching Loop 4 and Bunny Extinction True boss Rush(and the one for all achievements obviously).


My best on Bunny Extinction True Boss Rush has been to make it to round 27/28 a few times. But that takes around an hour to get there, and dying at all in the boss rushes sends you all the way back to round 1. I'm not sure if it'd be better to do this in NG or very early in NG+ Loop 2. Loop 2 would have the enemies a bit stronger, but if you get it in early, the power boost you also get in the loop may balance things out maybe. Of course, doing it in the loop early on also means not entering it with buffs active since you need to go a bit in to get Ribbon back and then reenable Boost and preboost magic switch. I'll definitely need to make another loop 2 save in chapter 1 to mess around with that, but at the moment, I'm leaning toward it being better in NG.

I'm currently in chapter 6 of Bunny Extinction Loop 3. Sure, I probably could have been in Loop 4 already if I had used one of the lower difficulty saves, but I'd rather do it on the hardest nonbroken difficulty(The 2 DLC difficulties have a bit of issues due to being unfinished, and even then this might be harder because of the cap of 1 per item instead of Unknown/Impossible's 3). Currently stuck in Forgotten Cave II yet again.

[Mischief Maker]

Picked up a bunch of games off the GOG summer sale:

Hard Reset Redux: Meh. The biggest thing I hated about Shadow Warrior (mandatory secret hunting if you want the weapons to be worth a shit), meets enemies that are practically impossible to make out against the backgrounds, meets universal ammo (so why bother with the pistol when it's just taking ammo away from the rocket launcher?) Aesthetically the transforming gun was pretty kewl, but the plasma weapon looks like a child's bubble gun. The robots all look boring, even the cyborgs that are supposed to evoke System Shock 2's midwives.

Battlezone 98 Redux: One of the true classics. On one hand you get a fun hovertank action game that still retains the old Mechwarrior 2 simulator aesthetic, on the other hand you have a surprisingly easy to manage command system for a fully functional RTS. Brutal Legend's interface is smelly shit compared to Battlezone's. My one complaint is the redux version, despite looking ancient, still chugs when the unit count gets high.

Pirates! Live the Life: I still consider the minigames a fun distraction while listening to podcasts but holy shit did I forget how incredibly annoying that trade wind mechanic was while sailing the open sea.

Hotline Miami 2: I think this game gets more of a bad rap than it deserves. It's just the difficulty level picks up exactly where part 1 left off. Maybe people were turned off by the ending of the tutorial level? The music is even better than the first. However, I do agree that some of these levels chain together way too many "floors" and could maybe use a mechanic that saves your progress between floors.

Bloodrayne: Betrayal: Awful game that apes the look and style of good brawlers, but is painfully clumsy when it comes to actual mechanics. Slow animations that can't be interrupted, awkward jumping system meets platforming puzzles aplenty. And something about these bloodrayne games in general that never made sense to me is that it's supposed to get my dick hard when she sucks the bad guys' blood while wrapping her legs around them and moaning orgasmically, yet for most of these games she's mounting and sucking the blood out of disgusting diseased mutants so it's more revolting than hawt.

Starcrawlers: The big winner. Even in its unfinished unbalanced current state it's a blast to play. I love the game's emphasis on aggressive abilities where even support skills do some kind of damage to enemies.

[ColonelFatso]

I didn't realize the remastered PC Battlezone was already out! I'm going to have to give that masterpiece another go.

[Zaarock]

Darkest Dungeon [PC]
Picked this up on sale since I always liked the concept. So far I like it but not super into it. The stress mechanic is cool but if the combat feels tedious it becomes just another health bar. the constant appearance and removal of personality quirks & diseases is sort of weird. Combat seems like it could get boring and reaching the endgame takes a long time. From the 13h I played it seemed like even early on your characters have all their abilities but just the enemies keep changing up. Presentation is great though and exploring the dungeons has a charm to it. The intended tension/horror comes through when the dungeons are difficult and throw you off. Was always a fan of lovecraftian horror (read through most of his stories as a teen) so happy to see a game like this. Maybe the classic table top RPGs this is based on are better though.

Sin and Punishment: Star Successor [Wii]
revisited this on emulator since Dolphin just got updated to 5.0. left side of gamepad + mouse works great. The game looks excellent at higher resolutions. Went through Hard for the first time and it was a lot tougher than I expected. Got stuck on the first phase of final boss for hours, goddamn it's ruthless. Swear it's harder than any of the scrolling STG bosses treasure made.. At least it's not as bad as Hiruko on Shinobi PS2 haha. Wanted to try 1ccing the final stage on hard but gotta get better before that. Hadn't played this in over a year and forgot how great it is.

Want to try scoring on S&P2 properly sometime. Looks fun judging from mrmonkeymans old replays.

[Vludi]

Ninja Spirit, reached the final boss but got killed :/, oh well i still don't give up.

[professor ganson]

Only thing I've been playing this summer so far is Disgaea 4. Not too far from finishing the main game without any grinding. Right now I'm cruising, but I'm hoping that there will be some interesting challenges in the final stages.

[nZero]

Line: Disney Tsum Tsum

[mobileapplication]

I am playing ZomBfense Game - a horror cum action game. It has rich graphical elements and stunning sound effect.

[Blinge]

horror cum action game.

[Squire Grooktook]

I know some doujin games like that.