What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

[MommysBestGames]

I have a definitely soft spot for Sonic CD. I remember being amazed (at the time) that they created and included an entire original song into the game! It was cheesy, but still really cool. As for the gameplay, I liked exploring around and the sheer size and art variety of the time travel ability.

Speaking of giant, meandering levels, I've been playing "Spark the Electric Jester" on Steam.

I've been enjoying it, as I like a laid back action game to play at the end of the night. It's certainly on the easy side, I think I'm in level 7 and I've only died twice. The levels are quite big, and seem to be in two parts like Sonic.

The twist in Spark is that you collect lots of different suits that give you all new powers. It's fun to experiment with each suit since many have all sorts of new controls and abilities.
If you like the idea of wandering around Sonic-style levels with a lance, magic powers, sword, jet-board, and more, give it a look.

Oh, and I've played Freedom Planet and like it more generally speaking. It's better designed, but it's a little higher difficulty. Which is a plus for most I'm sure, just not me.
If you've played all the Sonic games *and* FP, ...*then* check Spark.

[Marc]

Currently diving back into a genre I thought I’d given up on for good, with some Lost Oddessy on 360. Reminds me a lot of the of the PS1 FF games, although it’s been a while – last RPG I can remember playing to completion was Grandia 2 on DC. It’s very traditional, and the battle system has been quite easy to grasp so far, all good things for someone that’s essentially starting over again, although I’m hoping it expands a little down the line (approx. 7 hours so far). Only criticism is that it seems quite linear so far, but I’m enjoying it enough to keep playing, much to my shock. And those little ‘dream’ stories... yeah, might have brought the odd lump to my throat.

Moto Racer 4: I couldn’t recommend this to anyone. The frame rate is all over the place, the visuals are pretty awful, the handling is twitchy, and the campaign in structured in such a way that it pretty much needs grinding toward the end, yet I’ve spent some 12 hours on it and enjoyed the majority of them. Imust be more desperate than I realised for a pure arcade racer on PS4.

Put a few hours into Slain, but what initially seems to be a decent CV rip soon becomes almost a series of challenge rooms, as evidenced by the frequent checkpointing. It take just a little too much joy in throwing the player into situations that are almost impossible to survive without some prior warning of what’s coming, that or just throwing increasingly larger waves until you make a mistake brought on by needless repetition. Shame, as the visuals are nice and smooth, and there are odd hints of what the game could have been. Should have bought Volgarr instead.

Super Mutant Alien Assault is a fun single-screen platform-shooter type thing which I can imagine many on this board would enjoy. Bubble Bobble with guns and grenades. Controls really well and looks lovely – reminds me of a more detailed Amiga game.

Also played a bit of Final Fight last night. I’m still terrible at belt-scrollers, and really don’t understand the mechanics of them (outside of SoR2). I’ve made it to the third stage on one credit and honestly can’t imagine going any further.

[Sumez]

Lost Odyssey is a gem

[gbaplayer]

Metroid Samus Returns:
Really a difficult game...died so much during my 5 hours into the game now. But overall fun.

[BrianC]

I have been alternating between Wild Guns Reloaded PS4 and the original on SNES. I like both games quite a bit, but, so far, I actually like the SNES version better so far. I didn't find the wider screen space to add to the game and the SNES version actually feels a slight bit faster. For some reason, the bonus rounds were removed from Reloaded. Don't get me wrong, I still like reloaded and the redrawn graphics quite a bit, but some changes weren't necessarily for the better.

[gameoverDude]

Trails of Cold Steel (PC) - Chapter 4 finished.

Hard Reset: Redux (PS4) - Just took down Atlas. Playing it on Insane difficulty, using the Hori TAC PRO K&M controller.

720° (AC) - Played on MAME. More skating, less dying. Finished the Training level with 139,950 and one continue. It could've been better- the medal score was a rather sad 23.

Time Crisis 5 (AC)- Right now at 4.9M with a clear time around 14 mins. Not bad, but HZH has totally destroyed TC5 with a score of 6958250/11'53 which may be a world record. Not sure if I can catch up to this, but I'll try for at least 5.5M.

Syndicate (PC, 2012) - Good cyberpunk FPS that deserved more sales. The special powers kick ass- you can make enemies commit suicide, cause their weapons to backfire, and do some "breaching" to hack things. One good thing about backfiring is that it stuns enemies. Also, the DART-6 overlay slows time down similar to F.E.A.R. Killing enemies recharges the suicide/backfire abilities. There are some really good weapons like the Gauss gun (enjoy it while it lasts, the ammo is scarce) which can lock onto enemies, and a minigun with unlimited ammo. It feels badass to blow away a group of enemies, look over the area, and find them literally torn apart by your fire.

[soprano1]

Pokemon Ultra Sun. Here we go for a few more weeks/months. Stopped on the 4th Stratum in Etrian Odyssey V, great mechanics on the floors. Not as nail-biting as the ones in SMT Strange Journey.

[Mischief Maker]

I'm trying out Megaton Rainfall.

It's a superhero game about fighting off an alien invasion of a procedurally generated Earth while trying carefully not to be the Snyderverse Superman.

First negative: no control rebinding. You can't even invert mouselook.

That said, this game is running a completely superior engine to No Man's Sky. It's shocking how smooth the transitions from floating in deep space to standing at street level looking (blocky) pedestrians in the face is.

Right now I'd put it in the same category as Superhot: more a proof of concept than a fully realized game.

But I'm really having fun so far!

[Blinge]

Bloodborne.

At the end I

Spoiler

Said yes to Gehrman.

I have no fucking idea why.

HHAHAHAHAHA
fuck my life

[TransatlanticFoe]

Metroid Samus Returns:
Really a difficult game...died so much during my 5 hours into the game now. But overall fun.

I think the main issue I have is quite how much damage the metroids do. Early on you can be wiped out twice before you see all their attacks and what telegraphs them. Added to this is some of the telegraphs are very similar so you can easily react wrong and take heavy damage. Some attacks will take off almost an energy tank even after you get the varia suit. You're still vulnerable later on as certain metroids won't drop destructibles you can get health from, so mistakes are costly.

If you die, you respawn near the metroid so it's not too bad - but that sort of takes away the tension of the encounter. It'd be better to have more ruthless respawn setbacks and take a bit less damage.

[Durandal]

I gave the new Ruiner update a whirl lately, and I'm very pleased with it. I posted my earlier post about Ruiner in the Steam forums of the game instead of preaching to the choir like usual, and was surprised to find that many of the changes I suggested found their way in the game. Now there is a New Game+ mode where you start the game again with the loadout from your previous playthrough, but on top of raising the difficulty it also mixes up many of the enemy encounters in the game to the point of being a mode with its own new content. On New Game+ there will be more enemies at once, enemies will have more attacks like throwing grenades, enemies will wield and drop entirely new weapons you won't see in lower difficulty settings, enemy types within encounters are more varied, and bosses will also feature respawning grunts to keep you on the move. Just like some of the things I've suggested. I still need to unlock NG+, but from what little I've seen I'm rather looking forward to it.

They aren't really doing the update justice by advertising it like that. When people say New Game+ they just expect the same shit but with your stats carried over from a previous playthrough, but here it's like higher difficulties in Platinum games which justify a second playthrough given the amount of changes they offer. The Speedrun Mode lets you skip all the boring story stuff and just focus on all the important action. All the in-between non-combat sections are cut out so it's all about going fast. Unfortunately Speedrun Mode only seems to use the Normal difficulty spawnset, I would have loved to be able to speedrun the game on higher difficulties.

The new Ruiner Kill mechanic also does a lot to grease the action. Imagine Glory Kills in nuDoom but not shit. Here they are much shorter in length so as to not annoy you, and because of the isometric perspective you know what's going on around you while performing one as you can dash away immediately if someone tries to attack you while performing a Ruiner Kill, during which you are invincible. Ruiner Killing doesn't restore ridiculous amounts of health, but only one health and one energy bar. On top of that it also gives you a speed boost, which is stackable. When the speed boost is active, every enemy you reduce to 0HP will fall into a guaranteed stagger state during which you can finish them off. This way you can chain multiple Ruiner Kills which can increase your movement speed to ludicrous degrees on top of recovering health and energy. It's also nice because it no longer makes health and energy recovery a question of RNG anymore. It also creates this neat 'use abilities until energy runs dry -> chain Ruiner kills to recover health and energy' combat loop. The only weird part about it is that it always disables Overload when you perform a Ruiner Kill, and I haven't figured out the requirement for triggering an enemy into a stagger state outside a Ruiner Kill Chain yet, so it appears rather random to me.

If New Game+ ends up being as cool as I suspect, this update alone may very well elevate Ruiner from being a 6/10 game to a 7.5/10 game. Given that future free content updates are being planned, there's still a lot more to expect. In this state I'd definitely get it, now that it is on a -33% sale.

[Blinge]

Other than my constant B-bawning, I feel ike Kyuuyaku Megami Tensei I will never end.
This is getting looong.

[Hagane]

Miles Edgeworth/Gyakuten Kenji 2. Slow pacing and too much talking and overly long first two episodes and some really bad writing at places, though still enjoyable and much better than the all around bad first game. Apparently gets better on the third case I'm in, so looking forward to that.

This year beat

- Resident Evil Remake, with Jill. Excellent game, really makes you see how much the Survival Horror genre in general and Resident Evil in particular has declined in modern times. I was scared as shit to revisit a room with downed zombies for the chance a Crimson Head could spawn and wreck me. Zombies going through some doors makes you not feel safe even when getting past zombies. Still amazing presentation and atmosphere. Probably the very best in the genre up there with the first Silent Hill, only problem being the annoying item limitations that had me going back a lot just to solve a puzzle. Can't imagine how much more annoying it must be with Chris!

- Resident Evil 7. Miraculously, a fairly decent game when I had lost all hope on Capcom. It has many problems, mostly it being uneven (nothing happens till you meet the family and clearly runs out of money when you exit the mansion), but the mansion is pure oldschool RE and I welcome running out of ammo for careless usage with open arms. I had to beat the father with the knife in the chainsaw fight for that reason. By the end the game is stretched and boring, character design and art direction is pretty bad as it is the rule with modern Capcom and the final boss is absolutely terrible, but the good parts (the whole mansion part once you meet the family) are a great return to form that give me some hope after Capcom botching pretty much everything they do lately.

- Cuphead. Good looking, has problems with RNG and some wonky design decisions, but overall enjoyable. Aesthetics are much superior to the game itself.

Also almost beat Dark Souls 3, only Soul of Cinder left from the main game. Massively better than the terrible second Dark Souls, though it feels as if it mostly recycles ideas that were better on DS1. Some great bosses though, Nameless King was a really enjoyable fight with pure dodging timing on the second phase. Dropped it on the Friede/Ariandel DLC fight to test Civilization VI, will have to get back to it soon. Ringed City is pretty bad though and is gimmick and feels like Dark Souls 2 with its poor design and abundance of tank enemies.

Civilization VI feels like a return to form after the dry and oversimplified Civ 5, with much more to do and a much smarter system in general. Main problem is that the AI is absolutely terrible and it kinda gets boring after midgame since the AI doesn't know how to put up a fight and things just snowball with little thought. But it's a great base so I look forward to what they do with it and it already is much better than 5 with all updates.

[null1024]

Breakers Revenge.
the more I play this, the less I understand
and afterwards, I started to play a few rounds of KOF98 after to get away from the weird feeling this game gives, and couldn't remember how to play an actually well put together game, got bopped a bunch because everything in 98 felt wrong after playing so much Breakers

Also, Saizo is dumb.
Really fun fighting game... but it's weirdly jank.

[Sumez]

Finally got myself Yooka-Laylee, and 100%'ed it in a matter of a few days, I was so captivated by it.

I loved almost every part of it. The controls are spot on, the game looks amazing, and runs really well for a Unity gamee, everything is just nice and fun, like video games used to be, and the humor is just like it should be. I regret that the reviews put me off of it for so long, because this is definitely one of the best games of 2017 to me. On the other hand, I should probably be glad I didn't have to play it before the patch, because the default camera option is basically unpayable. The alternative option works completely without issues however. Absurd that it is not the default.

It's also baffling to me that they had to include those stupid "retro arcade games" (read: annoying mobile style minigames) that I can't imagine anyone in the world would enjoy, but apart from the obnoxious and completely broken one on the casino stage, they were pretty easy to ignore.

Generally, it was great to relive some of the best platform experiences from the late 90s, and I can't wait to learn what Playtonic are working on now.

[Blinge]

^ My interest rises exponentially.

[ryu]

Opinions on that game are really all over the place.

I'm still holding out for a physical release on switch.

[Sumez]

^ My interest rises exponentially.

If you didn't like Banjo-Kazooie, pass it over. If you liked Banjo-Kazooie, there's no way you won't like Yooka-Laylee.

I think it's sort of interesting how they seem to have been really cautious about the "collectathon" concept, which I can understand considering most people thought they went out of their way with Banjo-Tooie, and Donkey Kong 64 is just unanimously bad design with at leasy 75% of all collectables being a mere chore.

As a result, there's not really a lot of different stuff to collect - just pagies (jiggies) and quills (notes), and neither serve any real purpose other than guiding you and serving as a vague objective of the game - you need to pay quills to buy new moves, but you'll never lack any (which is good considering the purpose), and you need 100 pagies for the final boss fight, which feels awfully abstract. In Banjo-Kazooie you had all the doors all around the hub that you couldn't open until you had enough notes, and I always felt there was something exciting about finally being able to open a new door and seeing where it leads. In Yooka-Laylee you end with 70 pagies and over 400 quills in reserve when you get 100% of them, and you wonder why they even need to have a difference between your "current" items and your "total collected" items.
Apart from this, it's Banjo-Kazooie to the letter.

In the end, it works just fine, as the collectibles have always just been mcguffins to vaguely justify the game, but I actually liked Banjo-Tooie a lot. I wouldn't mind seeing a sequel with a lot more exploration.

[Square_Air]

This has piqued my interest in Yooka-Laylee again. All of the 2D and 3D Rare platformers were a big part of my childhood. Although the flaws have become more apparent in certain games (I'm lookin' at you DK64) I still enjoy all the N64 Rare platformers, even if the original Banjo-Kazooie is the only one that has truly stood the test of time. I've been holding out on this just not wanting to be disappointed in yet another spiritual successor/remake/re-imagining. The reactions have been really mixed to say the least, but I'm still probably going to buy it and get around to it next year.

[Mischief Maker]

Get YL on the inevitable Christmas sale and don't expect it to be any more than the 90s throwback it advertises itself as.

This game got review-bombed because they publicly dropped jontron's voice samples and his fanbase/fellow youtubers were pissed.

For the same reason I don't know if I can trust all the effusive praise heaped on "A Hat in Time" because that game kept jontron in.

[gbaplayer]

Xenoblade Chronicles 2:
Really awesome. Only the battle system is a bit slower than in it´s previous entries in the series, that´s a small negative for me.

[Obiwanshinobi]

Is every battle still pretty much the same as any other? I mean, even by jRPG standards, Xenoblade Chronicles was really pushing it.

[Sumez]

This has piqued my interest in Yooka-Laylee again. All of the 2D and 3D Rare platformers were a big part of my childhood. Although the flaws have become more apparent in certain games (I'm lookin' at you DK64) I still enjoy all the N64 Rare platformers, even if the original Banjo-Kazooie is the only one that has truly stood the test of time. I've been holding out on this just not wanting to be disappointed in yet another spiritual successor/remake/re-imagining. The reactions have been really mixed to say the least, but I'm still probably going to buy it and get around to it next year.

I'm completely on the same page here, Banjo-Kazooie remains great every time I replay it, but I can't stomach even playing through the first stage in DK64 due to all the obnoxious requirements of using specific kongs to pick up specific items with no natural reasoning behind it. Fortunately Yooka-Laylee has none of the stuff that DK64 suffered from, in fact, as I was touching on, it probably even goes a little too much in the opposite direction. But if you dig B-K, Yooka-Laylee won't be a letdown. Just make sure you patch it before starting it up, switch to manual camera, and turn down the volume of the "speech" samples.

A bit disappointing I guess is that the game only have five major stages, but at least they are all much bigger than the ones in Banjo-Kazooie.
One great improvement, is how dynamic all the skills you acquire feel. None come across as redundant, and most have general utility aside from just unlocking access to new pagies. So there are no awkward context sensitive pads here, like in B-K. And the roll move (the one that lets you climb steep hills and move faster) is really fun to use to speed around once you get a feeling for the layout of an area.
Only exception is the flying ability which allows you to skip most platform puzzles in the game - if you want an easy time, just hurry to just before the last area where you get the skill (ie. don't do that). To add insult to injury, this is also the only move in the game, where both the controls and camera remains frustratingly impossible despite the patch.

[gbaplayer]

Is every battle still pretty much the same as any other? I mean, even by jRPG standards, Xenoblade Chronicles was really pushing it.

I´m only 2 hours into the game so far, so i can´t really tell, but i think it is as you said.
But battles are entertaining.

[dunpeal2064]

Is every battle still pretty much the same as any other? I mean, even by jRPG standards, Xenoblade Chronicles was really pushing it.

It still does the MMO thing. The main character doing damage and backstabby things, other party members tanking and healing. There are chains of specials you can do now, as well as swapping "blades" (Think Persona), which does give it a lot more variety than the previous game.

Still, though, most of the depth comes from pre-combat planning and character kits. At about 11 hours in, and so far its pretty good!

[Mischief Maker]

Nine Parchments... bleeeeeh

It's a new twin stick shooter by the makers of Trine 2, quite possibly THE most beautiful fantasy game ever created, even if its gameplay was so-so. Coincidentally I was replaying Trine 2 this month because I needed something bright and whimsical to take my mind off the political shitshow, then I this game came out and you can imagine my excitement.

Like I indicated before, bleeeeeh. It's everything awful about euroshmups. Slow movement speed, bulletsponge enemies, weak peashooter attacks with a recharging clip mechanic that can't even take an enemy down in one clip, elemental affinity system where every enemy is immune to one type of weapon.

But the most damning thing is despite running on a better engine, this game is not as pretty as Trine 2! It's very pretty, but since it's an isometric overhead shooter instead of a 2D platformer you're looking at dirt and cobblestones the whole game instead of Trine 2's often breathtaking vistas.

[kaicooper]

been busy watching TV shows
so im back again and beat 4 games lately

The Butcher .. damn crazy Pixel Shoot'm up game
Gorogo .. moving pictures is new Masterpiece in this generation..to bad its short
Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons .. wtf skipped this for sooo long !!!! had it already since 2013..Perfect Gem
Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight .. yes it has great pixel art and Music..but its bit overrated
very short Metroidvania

[wgogh]

heard only good things about Momodora. As for being short, that tendency in games may be a response to the fact that the player has more games at their disposal. i believe we all remember when we had just a few, so they had to last and we had to get good at it (not saying that i aprouve that).
welcome back cooper

[soprano1]

Tired of Pokemon, so back to Etrian Odyssey V, and starting Final Fantasy XII - International Zodiac Job System with the translation patch. Maybe next year the HD remaster will get converted to PC, like X and X-2.

[gbaplayer]

Man i need to get back to XC2 asap...only 27 hours into the game at the moment. XD