What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

[dcharlie]

Scheduling time back in for a little bit of gaming over the new year :

Persona 4 (PS2 US version) - dropped off at 20 hours, but picked it back up. Loving it.

Amnesia (PC) - recommended by a friend, first person shit-you-up - no weapons, just lots of running and putting stuff behind doors to block the largely unseen threat so far. Enjoying it a lot, but saving this for late at night so i can play it with the lights down and headphones on.

3rd Birthday Party (PSP JPN version) - this is more an "intended" one - it's downloaded from PSN and ready to go.

Dance Central (X360 Kinect) - yeah yeah, i got it as a Secret Santa gift but it's brought a lot of fun for the family. Game works pretty well. *shrug* good honest fun.

Demons Souls (PS3) - because i hate myself for not finishing it when it came out. Like sandpapering your testicles - it mainly hurts but at the end of it you feel strangely good.

[KBZ]

back to playing Day Of Defeat: Source for the first time in a while.

Forgot how much fun the game is. Competition isn't as fierce as I remember it, or maybe I'm finally seeing a benefit from many years of playing.

For years I never really understood the Garand, but something clicked the other day and I've been having a blast with it.

also, the new zombie mod is fun in its wonkiness.

Edit: forgot to mention all the sweet customizations that are available. Found some nice skinpacks for Canadian infantry, and Waffen SS.

http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y85/k1 ... sh0000.jpg
http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y85/k1 ... sh0004.jpg
http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y85/k1 ... sh0005.jpg
http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y85/k1 ... sh0007.jpg

[dunpeal2064]

Moving through Shadow Hearts: Covenant. I doubt you're supposed to kill Astaroth in one hit, but I somehow managed to. Fun stuff.

Oh, and I wasn't overleveled. I hate random encounters and avoid them at all costs. It's just so easy to break the difficulty curve in this game

Have this game sitting on my shelf but haven't tried it yet. How would you compare it to the first? I absolutely loved the first game, but just haven't had time for an rpg lately

Combat is more polished than the first and there are more customization options, but it looks and plays like an early PS2 game.
Two annoying problems: Items (of which you need many for characters' special skills) are often hidden on random spots on the ground or in almost impossible-to-see treasure chests. This means you pretty much need a guide.
Also, there are very few random encounter types. Combat gets tedious very quickly.

However, boss battles are just amazing, and unlike many other RPGs it rewards strategy and good reflexes. Level grinding is a non-issue, since if you can hit the strike areas enemies are pretty much gone.

Sounds excellent, the Judgement Ring is my favorite part of that game. Its like Legend of Dragoon on crack

[null1024]

Alien Soldier [Genesis, on Wii VC w/ Wiimote].
I beat the first boss! Yay! And now I'm stuck on the second [almost beat him once, my problem here is timing, and that the first fight kills my health if I can't do a flaming Zero Teleport that lands].

But it's so much easier with a pad rather than a keyboard!

[Marble]

I'm still working on a one life run of Shadow Warriors. I can make it to the final boss' 2nd form, but I get raped quickly. It's really tough. I've also been dabbling in some Megadrive games: Ghouls 'n Ghosts, Strider and Castlevania: The New Generation. Some of the finest side-view action games on the system, for sure.

Earlier today someone helped me configure GGPO, so I played some Hyper Fighting then... hours of 3rd Strike, now that's probably going to consume most of my time for a while.

[Leader Bee]

I'm playing Demon's Souls and having my ass whooped by black phantoms even at soul level 30; managed to get to the Tower Knight too but i'm making sure i've enough heal items and that i'm equipped properly. Also Disgaea 3 which is my first foray into strategy role players (unless you count advance wars and fire emblem as something similar?)

I'm quite interested in picking up a few other titles too and I have my eye on Armoured Core 4 Answer, hopefully the HD re-release of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus later in the year too because I missed these the first time around.

[BIL]

Rediscovering the brilliance of Doom via the brilliance of ZDoom. I would have no other Doom! The way levels get permanently scorched, pockmarked and caked with gore during brutal battles makes the MURDA SIM action 1000x more boneriffic. Blowing a Cacodemon's brains out to see a gory splat and buckshot marks on the wall as it slumps groundward? AWW YEAHHH. <3 DOOM

[damakable]

Glad to see Vanquish has gotten some recognition here. Once you've beaten it you'll unlock God Hard difficulty which is much harder than Hard -- I'm getting my ass kicked repeatedly in every chapter. So I can definitely recommend it to fans of shmups.

[Danza]

At the moment it is:

Persona 3 Portable

Donkey Kong Country Returns

Monster Hunter Portable 3

G-Senjou no Maou

Out of those G-Senjou is getting the most attention (although, it is a VN, not what most would consider a game). One of the best I've played in a long time. Really enjoying it.

[BIL]

Silent Hill 4. This one has grown on me over the years, to the point I like it as much as the other original four, some of my favourite games. I'm less hung up on its sometimes poor design decisions, and more apt to enjoy the dryly surreal atmosphere and ridiculous Nightmare on Elm Street-esque story. Even the completely non-horror brawling combat is a lot of fun, now I'm a bit less judgemental of it.

("yes Mr. Apething, I know the garden tool-wielding 'everyman protagonist' shouldn't be able to mop the floor with you and your four hulking comrades! I complained about it on fan forums for years! Now pardon me while I dig this shovel blade into your throat and stomp on it full-blast." *SPLAT*)

With a couple of its more egregious design faults ironed out (identical second loop in a horror game = no), this would've been great.

[PainAmplifier]

Currently playing Darkstone...

For an older game it's aged reasonably well overall. If you've never played it, it is a action/rpg in the style of Diablo. Pretty much literally in this case. It used a lot of Diablo's conventions, including the random quests, item durability, portals to town, etc. Diablo *1* that is. Perhaps the major difference is that Darkstone is a full 3d game, unlike either Diablo 1 or 2. Plus in Single Player games you could use 2 characters at once. One would be semi-AI controlled, in that it would act by itself. But you could also switch character control isntantly or just give it some set action limits for potions, spells and a few other actions. Oh, and you also had to eat food.

I prefer using only a single character myself. Partly because controlling two at once is more than I want to focus on at a time. And partly because as you move up in difficulty/levels, the AI starts being a bit too stupid to not die too often. Usually I will have an action/spell set and one of the enemies in the area will have a counter/immunity for that and the AI controlled character will die becasue of it. Most common is enemies with the Reflect spell which means if I have a ranged/magic character on AI, it will kill itself with reflected damage before I can really notice and do something about it.


Which brings up an issue I am curious if others have run into. A lot of the older games I play are hard-coded to only play at SD resolutions. My Widescreen monitor thankfully has a nice little function that allows me to swap from HD to SD as I want to it's not an issue for me, but I've already run across someone in another forum who can't do that. (And I don't know how to do that in W7 either) So the question then would be what other people are doing to get around this?

[Obiwanshinobi]

Are there PC monitors unable to display 640x480? That would be lame.
Bizarrely, I returned to Darkstone a few days ago and boy, was it a horrible experience. Resolution isn't a problem for me (I played it on a CRT with forced hefty AA and FA), but the framerate seems to be capped at 20 fps or so, which is just awful. I can take it from the original Silent Hill, but in a computer game this old it almost made me wanna puke. Who knows, maybe the very first attack of "gaming sickness" in my life was coming, but I wouldn't wait for it as the captions in game were indecipherable due to some glitch, the shadows were glitchy as well and there was just something off-putting about that whole thing, with and without AA & FA alike. Almost like a physical discomfort. I don't normally get this while playing old/ugly games.

[Elixir]

Like sandpapering your testicles - it mainly hurts but at the end of it you feel strangely good.

Oh? Tell me more.

Currently playing Vanquish on Hard. I am so over this game already.

[Rob]

I didn't like it much either. Gears for life.

[elvis]

Super Meat Boy.

I want to marry this game and have its babies.

[Aguraki]

didn't finish XIII and playing Painkiller now(1st one then battle of hell).
wow I love it!

I'm not a FPS player and I really like it and the fact that it is very straighforward,braindead

[DragonInstall]

Arcana Heart 3. Not a pedo

[Ruldra]

Playing SSF4 at the moment. Been using Ryu since vanilla and now I'm experimenting with new characters. Right now I'm trying to main Ibuki, she's really nice to play with.

[PainAmplifier]

Are there PC monitors unable to display 640x480? That would be lame.
Bizarrely, I returned to Darkstone a few days ago and boy, was it a horrible experience. Resolution isn't a problem for me (I played it on a CRT with forced hefty AA and FA), but the framerate seems to be capped at 20 fps or so, which is just awful. I can take it from the original Silent Hill, but in a computer game this old it almost made me wanna puke. Who knows, maybe the very first attack of "gaming sickness" in my life was coming, but I wouldn't wait for it as the captions in game were indecipherable due to some glitch, the shadows were glitchy as well and there was just something off-putting about that whole thing, with and without AA & FA alike. Almost like a physical discomfort. I don't normally get this while playing old/ugly games.

It sounds like you have a driver issue. I can remember this happening before when the game was newer. Your mention of being unable to read the text is what tipped me off, as that was the defining characteristic of this issue. The problem only seems to occur with NVidia cards.

I forget if just upgrading your drivers was the fix, or if *Down*grading them was the fix. It may be an issue that only occurs with certain chipsets in the NVidia line of cards, I just can't recall exactly which cards where all affected by this.

That's assuming that you are running an Nvidia card. If not, I don't know offhand what the problem may be without knowing your setup. I'm using XP/ATI 9550, and everything runs fine on my end.

[mesh control]

Bangai OOOOOOO


Something relaxing after a long day of work.

[sjewkestheloon]

Divinity 2: Dragon Knight Saga. It's got moments of good but spades of bad. Same sort of ratio as Risen. Will be seeing it through to the end if only for closure.

In other news, pretty much Guitar Hero and Rock Band stuff.

Got about 3 chapters into Vanquish too which is pretty good fun. No Bayonetta but I'll certainly give it a few runs.

[trunk]

Been less playing for the beginning of the year.

I started Pier Solar, I'm about an hour+ into it. The music coming from CD is really nice.

Also, trying to get back into outrun online arcade because it is fun and interest has been expressed on this board to play.

[drauch]

Just got the Broken Sword "trilogy" in the mail, aka the original three. Thinking about playing the first one tonight (if I don't get too tired)

[null1024]

F-Zero GX [dear lord, this is hard, it makes X look like a bland walk in the park in comparison!]
F-Zero X [feels slow man]
F-Zero [Fuck whoever came up with Death Wind II's layout. Fuck them with a rake. It's so hard, at least if you're trying to stay in first ;_;]
Sonic Colors [and it's pissing me off, so many pits of death that I don't have time to react to... and other than that, the game isn't particularly hard, just dieing in the same pit 4 times in a row without realizing it's even there is annoying!]
Sonic Adventure 2 Battle [if Sonic Colors had 3D sections like SA2, while still keeping Unleashed style 2D sections, I'd be much happier with it, Sonic's stages in SA2 were all great [whereas quickstep and drifting sections aren't, especially the drifting, I'm not playing Sonic R here!]]

[ratikal]

WoW. But with college starting, gonna be spending less time actually playing and just focus on gold making. It's like scoring in a shmup!

[mesh control]

Gundam vs Gundam on my psp & EDF 2 on the ps2

[stuminator]

Been addicted to Amplitude the last few weeks. I see an occasional mention of the game here, but I'm surprised it isn't talked about more, it definitely shares a lot of similarities with shmups.

[Marurun]

I've been playing Aban Hawkins & 1000 SPIKES. Mean, little indie game it is.

[EinhanderZwei]

Half-Life on PS2
Pretty good port, especially due to lock-on

[TransatlanticFoe]

Just kicked off Alpha Protocol on PC (totally not as bad as reviews made out) and finished GoldenEye Wii (great fun but please go away QTE).

F-Zero [Fuck whoever came up with Death Wind II's layout. Fuck them with a rake. It's so hard, at least if you're trying to stay in first ;_;]

Race it in the Fire Stingray (anything else loses dash speed too quickly) and try bouncing off the walls after hitting a dash panel and before another one - if you hit anything head on you'll go backwards, but try thumping them at an angle. It's precision stuff and a fine line between getting a fast lap and totalling your ride, but there are fast laps to be had by smashing off walls as you chain together dash panels - dash panels have a happy knack of facing you forwards if you hit them at an angle too. It's faster than avoiding the dash panels altogether (which is what I do on Master, because it's too much of a risk) or just braking and playing it sensible for sure.