What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

[BIL]

Yeah me too! The series finale of the sidescroller thread will be my hard-hitting report on Parasite in City

[Tarma]

Finally completed Uncharted 4 and have been playing a bit of Fifa '95 on the Mega Drive.

[Durandal]

Painkiller
I've already ranted a bit about this game in the Doom thread, but now I've mustered the motivation to actually finish it.

My opinion of it hasn't really changed much. It's still a FPS which focuses too much on throwing swathes of enemies at you, instead of having you face properly thought-out challenges. It lacks the balance and challenge of Serious Sam, as playing this game gave me the same sensation of playing any modern military shooter, where I felt I didn't have to use my brain at all.

Purgatory feels rather inconsistent, one moment I'm fighting skeletons in a graveyard, then ninjas in an opera house, then crusaders and hell dogs in an ancient temple, then junkies and gangsters in a Mediterranean harbor, and what else. At least the levels look really nice from a visual standpoint. Most enemies are divided into melee rushers, hitscan enemies (which are thankfully not that accurate), some guys who throw projectiles or grenades, though that's it, really. I still don't know what those Baba Yaga hags were even supposed to do on the field but die. Each level will have you facing visually different enemies, but their individual functions don't really matter in the grand scale of things. One of Serious Sam's strengths was that it used MULTIPLE enemy types at once to create more challenging situations, in Painkiller you'll only fight three different enemy types at most. Of course I'll be able to use the same strategy over and over for a largely homogenous pack of enemies. The level design does little to spice this up. The more interesting enemies like crusaders who fire three arrows in a wide pattern or rocketjumping gangsters only appear in one or two levels before they're immediately discarded. Instead of sticking with a set of enemies and balancing the game around them, the drive to have new enemies in each level makes each enemy feel less unique and memorable as a result. It does help contribute to the overall heavy metal atmosphere, though.

The weapon arsenal looks and feels cool, but functionally a lot of things feel out of place. There is a lot of functional overlap between the gatling gun and shuriken launcher, and while the stake gun does deal more damage at longer ranges, one shot of the rocket launcher usually does the job in one direct hit and is easier to pull off as a rocket does not fly in an arc. While the freeze shot of the shotgun is satisfying to use, having such a hard counter against enemies with more HP begs me to ask 'why even bother facing against enemies with more HP'. It's not like freeze shot ammo is rare, or that freezing large enemies in combat is hard to pull off. Compare this to Serious Sam where switching weapons isn't instantaneous, you are switching weapons all the time to deal with the threat in front of you, and wasting too much time will cause the enemy to catch up with you and make things even more difficult. At least most weapons were mashed together so I don't have to switch weapons in Painkiller that often, not like it'd really matter with an instant switch speed. There's also some combo attacks, like the Painkiller weapon being able to shoot out a razorjack which is quite useless in the grand scheme of things, being able to pierce a mid-air grenade with your stake in order to create a long-range high-damage projectile (which is again quite useless overall considering pulling this off is next to impossible if you're moving), and an actually useful penetration shot from the shuriken/lightning gun.

Then there's the tarot card stuff, which I guess is this game's variant of scoring. Tarot cards make life easier by giving you some bonuses, but first you need to unlock them by completing challenges, such as picking up a certain amount of souls, not picking up armor, and more things which limit you in one way or another. Then you need gold to use them. You can find gold by smashing every single object in a level (do NOT play this game if you're a hardcore completionist, you WILL go insane), or alternatively, monster juggling. Monster juggling works by killing off most enemies so nobody will attack you, and then repeatedly mashing RMB with the Painkiller on a corpse before it disappears so that it can drop bonus gold like a piñata. Which is a neat concept and is fun to do, but completely out of place in a game where you kill legions of enemies at once. If monster juggling could be pulled off on multiple enemies at once, then I'd be down with it, but as it stands it feels completely out of place. Monster juggling is probably also the reason why enemies don't drop souls instantly. After killing an enemy, you have to wait before it disappears so you can eat its soul for health, and usually makes you wait like a chump. Why can't the enemies just drop soul in the time and place of their death, as the corpse remains for juggling purposes? Souls are pretty important, since they are your only source for health as medkits in this game are rather rare. Enemies thankfully don't deal major damage (on Nightmare). Maybe Tarot Cards are more useful in higher difficulties, but I never used one up until the Alastor fight where I didn't want to die from the guaranteed falling damage. Though the extent you have to go through to make a Tarot Card work have me questioning its use as a crutch. IMO Tarot Cards would work better as a trump card if using them also had a negative effect on top of its bonuses like the statues in Bastion, otherwise it just makes things easy for the sake of it.

There's also hueg bosses to fight, though the first, third, and fifth are mostly just 'shoot at it until it dies' as you keep circlestrafing, whereas the second boss is just a waste of time and the fourth boss is actually decent. Separating the phases of the boss by having it break another floor in a tower is a cool idea, however most of the time you are going to receive guaranteed falling damage if you don't manage to fall on top of a pillar, whose position beneath you is guesswork for the most part. The third and fourth boss also highlight the physics engine, where a boss destroys all the scenery which makes for TONS OF RUBBLE OBSTRUCTING YOUR MOVEMENT. Seriously, the rubble is no fun to deal with and I can't blast it out of the way either.

Painkiller is a dumb shooter, and a good choice for metalheads or those who need to shut their brain off. If you just want to kill a lot of things that move with cool-looking weapons, have at it.

[Mischief Maker]

Given your complaints about Painkiller's enemy variety, might I suggest Ziggurat?

It's an indie roguelite FPS by the guys who made the Warning Forever clone Infinity Danger. It's the closest any FPS I've played has come to recreating the feel of Serious Sam combat.

The setting is pretty much "Heretic." You're a wizard armed with a variety of wants, books, staves, and explosives fighting through maps of randomly generated arena battles.

The game plays like an inverse Painkiller. Aesthetically the stages and enemies are nothing special, but gameplay-wise all the enemy types fill a specific niche based around forcing you to keep moving. You have shot-leading crossbow kobolds, skeletons who fire three-way patterns of axes, diseased ostriches that shoot poison globs that persist on the ground for several seconds, erratically flying imps that shoot surface-skimming flames, and so on. Basically the enemy variety forces you to constantly be running and bunnyhopping all over the stage like a madman.

My main complaint, aside from the uninspired enemy designs, is the total lack of visceral impact from the twinkling bolts you shoot out of your various magic whatzits.

It's the most arcade-like an FPS has felt in years.

[Durandal]

It certainly sounds more interesting than most other shooters on my backlog, I'll give it a shot.

[KAI]

Densha de Go! 3 Tsuukin Hen Daiya Kaisei (PC)
I've finally managed to clear all the lines and courses. Loving everything about this game, the mechanics, the scoring system and all the graphic details on the railroads.
Fuck Taito for not making more DDGs for arcade and never using that graphic engine again.

[lmagus]

Wrong place huh

[Bananamatic]

ketsui aint shmup its a way of life

[lilmanjs]

Densha de Go! 3 Tsuukin Hen Daiya Kaisei (PC)
I've finally managed to clear all the lines and courses. Loving everything about this game, the mechanics, the scoring system and all the graphic details on the railroads.
Fuck Taito for not making more DDGs for arcade and never using that graphic engine again.

That's awesome to see! I've been playing Densha de go professional 2 lately myself. I didn't think I'd get hooked on this, but it is addictive and of course I'm horrible at it.

[Blinge]

I'm getting better at Streets of Rage 2.

GRAND UPPAGRAND UPPA GR-GR-GRAND UPPA

I'm still finding it to avoid getting surrounded on Stage 5/The Ship though. At the section with grenades being tossed, the ninja assholes tend to fly offscreen then fly back on and hit me from behind, causing me to lose control of the whole situation.

[cave hermit]

I have developed an obsession with Osu as of late; both standard mode and Osu!mania mode (which is basically IIDX, but songs can have between 4-9 keys; in general the turntable is excluded, but 8 key songs are essentially the same as IIDX 7 key with turntable).

I got a small digital signature tablet to use with it, but my wrist seems to get sore after playing for only a short amount of time...

[wgogh]

I'm getting better at Streets of Rage 2.

GRAND UPPAGRAND UPPA GR-GR-GRAND UPPA

I'm still finding it to avoid getting surrounded on Stage 5/The Ship though. At the section with grenades being tossed, the ninja assholes tend to fly offscreen then fly back on and hit me from behind, causing me to lose control of the whole situation.

Wich character you ended up using?

[Blinge]

Axel. Grand Upper!

If I really git gud I'll try and record a clear with Blaze

[wgogh]

Axel. Grand Upper!

If I really git gud I'll try and record a clear with Blaze

Ahh, "grand upper", so that's what he's actually saying...

[Xyga]

If I really git gud I'll try and record a clear with Blaze

In Mania mode ?

[Durandal]

NecroVision

This game is batshit insane. The protagonist goes from contemplating the horrors of war to screaming 'DEATH! DEATH! DEATH!' within the same minute. You have an inexplicable ability to slow down time and kill dozens of krauts by yourself from the start. Shit's fucked when you have to fight zombies, phantoms, dragons, and vampires? You go from fighting not-nazis in trenches to the vampire underground to hell. You fight a giant robot scorpion with your mech. You get to ride a dragon in a level which takes way too long. You get a glove with Wolverine claws and the ability to use spells. Lightning and fire erupts from your body when you perform a combo. It's NUTS. This game is as cheesy as a B-movie, with a cheesy setting, cheesy voice acting, and a cheesy story. It's really hard to take anything seriously in this game.

What sets the game apart from other games is the combo system. If you take down one enemy using a combination of shooting, kicking, and melee attacks, the name of that combo will fly on the screen, time slows down for a brief moment, and your fury level increases by one. Kicking can be used to knock down enemies to the ground, each weapon has a melee attack in the form of a rifle butt until you get the Shadowhand, and you can shoot enemies in the head or shoot them when they're knocked down by your kicks to lengthen your chain. There's also a sprint attack which knocks over multiple enemies (though your kicks are capable enough of causing a domino reaction). Some weapons have special attack, which usually come in the form of throwing bayonets and shovels at the enemy, or special abilities for each Shadowhand mode.

You have an Adrenaline bar which fills up whenever you perform a combo, which slows down time and makes you faster whenever you activate it. Your maximum Fury level is raised by finding Vampire artifacts, which are hidden in secret places. The secret placement is quite clever at times, though the overuse of invisible walls tends to ruin that sense of exploration. Level design is largely Doom 4/Painkiller-ish with nice art direction (especially later on) revolving around loads of enemies spawning in charging at you. Once your Fury reaches a certain threshold, your combos will send out lightning which stuns all enemies nearby, and fire which damages everything nearby, though fire can often ruin your combos as enemies die before you can attack them more than once. Your health regenerates up to 60% and 70% in the later half, since most damage you receive is unavoidable. Health kits and jewels rather function as a means to recharge health quicker or serve as bonus health. You also have a Last Breath mechanic which slows down time whenever you are in critical health and drains your Adrenaline when active (even though it doesn't need any) so you can escape, but you won't die often.

Basically, the game wants you to be quick and get all nit 'n gritty. You can play it like Painkiller, but that's clearly not what the devs intended. You're not going to have any fun if you only keep circlestrafing with the rocket launcher. Chaining combos gives a better sense of flow than D44M's Glory Kills IMO, though I won't deny that you can mash the melee attack key for ez combos. There is even a neat trick where you can reload your gun much quicker if you reload it at the right moment when you get a combo, like the Active Reload in GoW without a bar telling you when to press the button. You can still swing your melee weapons even when your weapon is reloading, so it's not like you can't do anything (as long as you don't kick while Adrenaline is on, the recovery for that takes ages). There's an enjoyable flow of building up adrenaline with combos, and then going even faster killing everything faster until you run out of things to kill.

Enemy variety is a bit on the weaker side, most enemies either fire hitscan stuff at you which mostly tickles you, or just run up to you waiting to get slaughtered. Later on you fight flying manta rays which aren't as fun to fight, because the only combo that works on them is the Rocket Boy or fire combos (if they come close enough for that). Same thing goes for those fire snake things, who only respond to the Head Shredder combo and Rocket Boy combo, since they have fucktons of health and won't go down with just melee attacks unlike almost everything else. Some of those Vampire creatures block your melee attacks head-on, and I wish there was a larger enemy variety. I could stand in one spot and slaughter everything while keeping a constant health supply if it weren't for those hueg Vampire Beasts which take a dozen shotgun shots to die.

Most of the weapons are your usual WW1 gear, with Garands, M1911's, flamethrowers, Trench Guns, gaslamps, bayonets, and dual-wieldable M50s. Once you get your vampire gear, your weapon arsenal will only consist of your Shadowhand, SMG, Rocket Launcher, SHotgun and Flame Thrower, which is nice considering it cuts down on the bloat of the WW1 weapons. Ammo is rarely ever a problem. Each Shadowhand mode has a special attack too, like summoning a skull which automatically attacks everything nearby, a penetration beam and a spell which freezes everything nearby (but won't let you melee). Yet all of these are locked behind challenges you have to do for some reason. The fourth Shadowhand mode, which acts like a grappling hook, is also locked behind a challenge, though I couldn't use it in the campaign even after I unlocked it.

I guess what sets NecroVision apart from contemporary shooters like Doom 4 and Painkiller is that it actually does something new and interesting, in spite of how unpolished it is. There's a fuckton of things which drag it down like first-person cutscenes, crap enemy variety and supply management, forced first-person takedowns on some combos, bugs out of the ass, lenient difficulty, second half being better in comparison, laughably bad story and voice acting, repetitive encounters, blinding visual effects and so on, though at the core there are some interesting ideas to be had. At times it feels like NecroVision gives you more than you really need as your newfound powers are almost overkill. Though one maybe able to overlook these flaws and have a good time. DoDonPachi players might get more fun out of this game than normal people. NG+ also lets you play with Shadowhand from the start, which is cool.

[Blinge]

If I really git gud I'll try and record a clear with Blaze

In Mania mode ?

N..noeee

[Squire Grooktook]

Forget Mania, just clear it as fast as possible so you can move on to the real genre magnum opus's, Alien Vs Predator/Dungeons and Dragons: Mystaria/Armored Warriors/Denjin Makai 2

[trap15]

Seconding Guardians/Denjin Makai 2. Easily the best belt scroller of all time, for all time.

[Squire Grooktook]

^^^I can accept the preference, but you haven't played AVP nearly enough if you think that title can be won "easily" It's a helluva battle for the crown, between those two.

[Obiwanshinobi]

I guess what sets NecroVision apart from contemporary shooters like Doom 4 and Painkiller is that it actually does something new and interesting, in spite of how unpolished it is.

Painkiller is older than Doom 3, though. How contemporary is that? Tell you what new it did for its time - the physics (and stakegun). Max Payne 2 (at least on PC) used Havok before, but Painkiller cranked it way up there and felt quite unlike anything else in that respect. Also, the freeze + shotgun combo seemed fresh to me, but I've never been much of the genre connoisseur. Having any bosses that felt like proper bosses* (rather than mere damage soakers; not all of them, admittedly), if not utterly unprecedented, set it apart from its average peers too (the year was 2004).
I was under impression Painkiller's original purpose was to showcase its engine (but so was Serious Sam's and FarCry's, therefore it's hardly excuse for anything).

*) Hardly inventive or imaginative this, but their sheer size was something else as well.

[Durandal]

I guess what sets NecroVision apart from contemporary shooters like Doom 4 and Painkiller is that it actually does something new and interesting, in spite of how unpolished it is.

Painkiller is older than Doom 3, though. How contemporary is that? Tell you what new it did for its time - the physics (and stakegun). Max Payne 2 (at least on PC) used Havok before, but Painkiller cranked it way up there and felt quite unlike anything else in that respect. Also, the freeze + shotgun combo seemed fresh to me, but I've never been much of the genre connoisseur. Having any bosses that felt like proper bosses* (rather than mere damage soakers; not all of them, admittedly), if not utterly unprecedented, set it apart from its average peers too (the year was 2004).
I was under impression Painkiller's original purpose was to showcase its engine (but so was Serious Sam's and FarCry's, therefore it's hardly excuse for anything).

*) Hardly inventive or imaginative this, but their sheer size was something else as well.

I could imagine that giant bosses breaking structures into bits and pieces wherever they walked must've looked cool at the time. Though HL2 was released ten months later and used physics for means other than looking cool and obstructing your path.

Also, I found out that the centennial anniversary of the Battle of the Somme coincided with me replaying NecroVision. Pretty neat.

[Obiwanshinobi]

Having played H-L2 a couple of years after Painkiller and Max Payne 2, I'd found H-L2's physics nothing real novel (even met its kind of environmental puzzles and pull-push mechanics in Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy before, although that one's physics engine had to work on its time consoles and it showed on the PC too, where I'd played it myself).
I believe Ballance (also predating H-L2) uses Havok too (but after Super Monkey Ball, sophisticated physics in this puny genre games were to be expected). Learned about Ballance years after all of the above, though, so I merely digress at this point.

[Chaos Phoenixma]

Was gifted Wings of Vi and have been playing it a lot.

Picked Mortal difficulty since i knew it was probably not a good idea to go for Demon mode.

What I have to say about it so far is,

The platforming is generally great. only terrible part is when you're trying to deal with normal enemies as well.

The bosses so far have been great. For the most part, they're telegraphed and are completely fair, but there's some bosses where RNG can just screw you over. I'm up to

Spoiler

Kratarac

which seems to be decently far into the game, and is probably going to cause me a lot of trouble from what little I've seen of the fight so far.

The normal enemies are absolutely horrible to fight against, especially when you're dealing with portals summoning a lot of them at a time. Can't imagine how horrible these would be on Demon, but maybe I'll try it out if I can beat Mortal. I don't even see how you'd do a lot of the stuff with Doomed where you die in 1 hit. Probably never touching that modifier.

Some of the red saves(all difficulties) are way far apart. The Mortal/Angel ones aren't too badly spaced, and I'm not sure about the Angel only ones.

[ED-057]

Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth1. I guess it's kind of like Shut Up and Jam Gaiden, except moe. And with more grinding. It gets a little boring after a while, but then again I am still playing it.

Here I thought I was a smartass, making a town that was nothing but a palette-swap of another town. But these devs recycled entire 3D environments for multiple dungeons.

Why in the world do I have to manually control the camera?

At first my video driver kept crashing over and over again during the game. I had to lower the shader clock speed. It's kind of sad when hardware ships with unstable default settings, and I haven't seen any util to tweak the BIOS on a GeForce GT240.

P.S. 16:9 sucks :X

[Vludi]

SoR2 is on par with Guardians or AvP if you ask me (and definitely better than D&D2 for me). The game on Mania is easily one of the most demanding beat 'em ups out there and requires tons of time to get consistently good at it, enemy behavior is just insane on that difficulty.
I don't recommend Blaze at all though, she is pretty much the worst character.

Can't talk about Armored Warriors, but the game has a well known immunity exploit when picking up weapons so meh.

[Squire Grooktook]

Pick up immunity is a trick in AVP too. Not really a problem at all.

AW's insane ground mobility is what makes it unique and good. Both you and your enemies dash around like your on rollerskates, and positioning feels so snappy as a result.

[Vludi]

Pick up immunity is a trick in AVP too. Not really a problem at all.

AW's insane ground mobility is what makes it unique and good. Both you and your enemies dash around like your on rollerskates, and positioning feels so snappy as a result.

It's a modest trick in most Capcom brawlers, however in AW it's exploitable as hell.
I will probably pay more attention to AW later, but as for now it's probably my least favorite Capcom brawler.

[Squire Grooktook]

Looks fine to me. An anti boss trick here and there is fine.

but as for now it's probably my least favorite Capcom brawler.

I'm sad.

Probably in my pantheon of best games ever.

[Stevens]

Seconding Guardians/Denjin Makai 2. Easily the best belt scroller of all time, for all time.

You spelled Streets of Rage Remake wrong:D