What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

[Obiwanshinobi]

FFCCh: The Crystal Bearers, purchased thanks to this review, admittedly.

What I'd like to add is that the writing and depicted world remind me of the first batch of Witcher novellas (NOT "saga", which is more of a spin-off). It is subtly different from what you'd expect of FF worldmaking. The protagonist himself is none of the usual jRPG archetypes, but enough said.

Really hard to praise the... gameplay without spoilers. Verily, it's not about things you accomplish; it's about things you discover. There's a Hanami spot that during "night" turns into after-Hanami spot. Dream-like through and through. The game keeps rewarding you with "scores" from the word go, but if you don't get hooked on any of those challenges, it doesn't really matter. It just never feels like a game I've already played n times.
Yes, the "genre" is not really new (everything from GTA through Steambot Chronicles fits the bill). Yes, the psychokinesis was already done in Second Sight and Psi-Ops. Yes, the physics are not a patch on Painkiller. Yes, the "grab & throw" mechanics were technically better in H-L2.
Nonetheless, The Crystal Bearers is much more than the sum of its parts.

It helps that it doesn't look cheap. I'm fed up with developers' and publishers' thinking that we don't deserve good looking games for the Wii.
This one with better animations would look not quite unlike Guild Wars. Also, 480i does not flicker and 4:3 is really fullscreen. Even the animations are not horribly bad and on the balance it's a very nice looking game. Good to see every now and then that Wii has more memory for textures than PS2.
Despite the lower framerate, pointer feels more responsive than in Metroid Prime (Wii). Something Red Steel 2 (also a looker) failed to deliver.
Oh yes, the American voice acting is above average. Nothing made me cringe so far.

[gameoverDude]

Golden Axe: The Revenge of Death Adder

Much harder than the original, probably due to Sega wanting a 4P game to vacuum the quarters out of your pocket like Konami's TMNT. Enemy AI is beefed up compared to part 1 and sometimes you face larger groups. Also, Death Adder is a huge jackass ala SNK's bosses (probably right up there with good old Rugal Bernstein) with his special move being a Kaiser Wave/Reppuu-ken mix that travels along the ground. Jumping that is tricky but there's room to retaliate against it. A 1CC is possible but not near easy- I've 1CCed it to the latter part of stage 4. This is the one GA game that allows ground hits on downed enemies, and the Bizarrians are far more useful than in MD Golden Axe III- especially the skeletal dragon that you meet later in the game (if you can help it, DO NOT lose him!). Maybe Sega nerfed the beasts in GA III because of the potential for players abusing them in TRoDA?

I'm playing more Elevator Action Returns to A) beat the game on one credit, and B) figure out how to exploit the scoring system to get me a high score.

The way scoring works is that you get double-to-triple the points for killing the enemy if you A) shoot out the lights, B) melee attack them, C) kill them with a weapon or set them on fire, or D) crush them with the elevator (by far the most fun way to kill an enemy!).

Even better: you get 4x the points when doing B, C, or D in a dark area. Stage 2's end spot is a fine place for leeching. No lights to shoot out there, but plenty of spawning enemies to bash on.

[BulletMagnet]

FFCCh: The Crystal Bearers

I picked that one up on a lark not too terribly long ago myself, and ended up playing to the end; it's not anywhere near "bestest game ever" territory, mind you, but it doesn't take itself too seriously and allows you to just have fun wandering around tossing stuff about and seeing if anything interesting happens if you need a break from the main storyline. I think that if you go in with tempered expectations you can have a pretty good deal of fun with it.

[shmuppyLove]

Asura's Wrath

Joystiq calls it a "pile of impossibilities" which is a perfect description. on a 1-10 scale, everything is at least a 50: colossal, outrageous and blown so far out of proportion. Within the first 30 mins I must of
said "holy fucking shit...." 20 times. It's completely psychotic. The combat is decent but sparse. Game starts off as a rail shooter with Asura barreling towards a planet firing homing rockets at Gohma (bad guys) battleships. An "interactive movie" with an absurd amount of QTE's. Regardless, halfway through and the story is excellent, the illustrations are beautiful and presentation is top-notch. Despite the awesomeness of everything the game throws at the viewer/player, it's an experience worth no more than $10-$20.

I tried the demo just to see how over-the-top it was, and I was not disappointed, nor was I prepared for just how bombastic it is.

[Mischief Maker]

Thief: The Dark Project

A new patch came out earlier this year that makes Dark Engine games completely Windows 7 compatible and throws in some extra bells and whistles.

Unfortunately... it's just not the same with modern hardware. My current machine is an absolute beast but in the sound department my machine 13 years ago with an Aureal 3d soundcard was superior, and Thief was the best game to show off its amazing NASA technology positional sound ability. Alas, Creative's EAX was inferior tech so like good capitalists they competed with Aureal by drawing them into a frivolous patent lawsuit that lasted for years. Aureal won the lawsuit but sank so much money into the case their investors pulled the plug. Creative aquired the rights to their tech and mothballed it. You can still find Aureal Vortex 2 sound cards, but there are no Windows 7 compatible drivers for them.

Oh well...

[drauch]

^Hell yeah. I happened to flip open a PC gamer and saw an article about the patch. Good news; more people need to play the Thief games. I was thinking about starting Thief 2 up here soon. Sadly never got around to playing that.

[idchappy]

Nintendo Land and Mario U

[null1024]

Sonic Adventure DX [GC].

I forgot how short Knuckles and Amy's stories are. Knux has only 5 stages, and Amy has only 3. What the hell.

Also, Knuckles levels are actually fun in SA1 because the emerald radar isn't gimped to hell and back -- not only is its detection range shorter in SA2, but it only does them in order, which makes no sense.

On the other hand, I actually like most of Sonic's levels in SA2, whereas the last 3 stages in SA1 [Final Egg, Lost World, and Sky Deck, in decreasing dislike order] are fucking stupid and annoying. I can take any Sonic/Shadow stage except for Final Chase [which has the worst implemented stage gimmick, those stupid gravity pillars] and enjoy it completely.


Tales of the Abyss [3DS].
I love how the noise you make on a warp pad sounds exactly like the Star Trek transporter sound, ahahaha.
also I miss flying, the Albiore can't fly right now ;-;

[Moniker]

Found my old Baldur's Gate collection, and decided to spend a few hours modding and optimizing. Lots of fun - the mod scene is really well sorted, and almost all of my issues with the original games have been addressed. Pussied out and rolled a Paladin. One of these days I'll have to run an evil character. Also found Morrowind, considering giving it the same treatment, but its mod community is a bloody mess. Might be worth it; we'll see.

[Mischief Maker]

^Hell yeah. I happened to flip open a PC gamer and saw an article about the patch. Good news; more people need to play the Thief games. I was thinking about starting Thief 2 up here soon. Sadly never got around to playing that.

Here's the latest version of the Thief 2 tafferpatcher that includes the new 1.19 patch.

Note that this is compatible with the Thief 2: Shadows of the Metal Age fan expansion.

Edit: Fixed link to the expansion.

[null1024]

Asura's Wrath

Joystiq calls it a "pile of impossibilities" which is a perfect description. on a 1-10 scale, everything is at least a 50: colossal, outrageous and blown so far out of proportion. Within the first 30 mins I must of
said "holy fucking shit...." 20 times. It's completely psychotic. The combat is decent but sparse. Game starts off as a rail shooter with Asura barreling towards a planet firing homing rockets at Gohma (bad guys) battleships. An "interactive movie" with an absurd amount of QTE's. Regardless, halfway through and the story is excellent, the illustrations are beautiful and presentation is top-notch. Despite the awesomeness of everything the game throws at the viewer/player, it's an experience worth no more than $10-$20.

With all that glowering praise in this post [except for the bit about the QTEs], that very last sentence strikes me as a bit odd. Ah well.


Tales of Phantasia [SNES].
Ass damnit. I was stuck on something really easy for no good reason.
I had to fucking push the rocks into the bubbly pits. I'm pretty sure it told me, but I couldn't remember and I think the line telling me what to do was poorly translated [yay DeJap].

I'm now at Demitel's island, just arrived.

[edit]
Not enough happened to justify bumping this. I beat Demitel.
Took 3 tries because of that effing Summon Lich move. Once I had him in "combo" lock, it was a stupid easy fight because unlike some bosses, he doesn't have a no-startup move to punish people who do that, nor does ToP have a system to stop this [where you'll still hit, you just won't interrupt him anymore].

Doing that was hard though, because ToP's battle system makes it hard to really do what you want.

[Rob]

glowering praise

The only way to praise Asura's Wrath.

[sjewkestheloon]

Finished Tales of the Abyss. Good fun, excellent boss sequence, and has left me wanting more. I think the clock was on about 45 hours on the final save, so definitely a long one. A word of warning: if you finish this make sure you save the clear game file in a different slot to your end save point file if you want to carry on playing before NG+! Unlike Vesperia and Graces f, there is no postgame and it forces you into the Grade shop for the next cycle. Thankfully I saved in a new slot out of habbit and was able to load the previous save back up to work on a few endgame titles and some item mop up. I am going to trawl the world for a little while and pick up everything I can without a guide before I beat the game a second time with hopefully a bit more Grade for the essentials.

I don't like the way that Grade works in this game. In Vesperia you could make some interesting setups to farm for it and in Graces you could do various things like beat the last boss on different difficulties to give more of a bonus. Here you get what you get from battles, you have little way to increase it unless you want to play another 1000 battles or so against shmucks, and you get a fat lump sum of 1500 from the last boss that you can't push up or down with difficulty. It basically forces you to do a whole extra playthrough to get to the point that you can reach in the other games in a more creative way.

I am thinking of playing on Hard next time through with a different character as my main. not sure who though. Considering the AI gets a hardon for the player character permanently it doesn't seem viable to play a caster.

I played a few hours of Mario 3D Land this afternoon which was fun, and then an hour of DJ Max Portable 3. Opened up all of the 4, 3.t and 4.t standard charts in freeplay and have a bunch of MCs to my name. The 4.t SS charts are tough though, so I don't expect to have all of those open any time soon. After about 210 song count I am only level 19 which is utterly stupid, and makes me realise why so many people bitch and moan about the game. Certainly there are a lot of charts available to play but locking you down to 30 songs and making it take hours and hours to grind up to a level where you have a SMALL CHANCE to unlock a song as a RANDOM REWARD on level up is stupid. Also locking 6.t down to Hard only until you get it as a random reward after lvl50 is equally stupid. They seriously laxed up the timing on Normal so you get 100%s thrown at you left and right, but on Hard mode you can die from a few misses and remix mode (.t) relies far too much on an innacurate input device (analogue nub) to nail complex switches.

Still, this isn't unique to this DJ Max entry. One Clazziquai, an otherwise easy entry, they hide some of the song unlocks behind stupidly tricky charts if you aren't very fluent in MCing 6B. Why they though it would be a good idea to lock the 4B 3 difficulty chart because you haven't cleared a 6B 12 difficulty chart is beyond me.

[null1024]

My next TotA run will probably be with Guy or something once I beat it.
No fucking way I'd play a caster, gang up on the human is in full effect.


And I gave up on playing DJMAX Portable 3 ages ago, especially since my PSP's d-pad is a bit screwy on top of being a PSP 1000 d-pad.
although, I was pretty shit at it anyway, but I was totally new.


I'm still playing Tales of Phantasia[SNES], I'm fighting whoever is possessing the prince. Fucking ass, I keep getting assfucked because if my party goes down, they don't stay alive long enough to do anything on recover. So I end up with one not-me character on screen that's surviving somehow and they live long enough for another character to be resurrected and then die.

and I'm too lazy/proud to grind

also, she just has to be fucking resistant to my ice-elemental sword [best one I have right now, and it heals the bitch on hit], aaaaaaaaa

[shmuppyLove]

Got annoyed with Deus Ex: Human Revolution, couldn't finish Mirror's Edge because out of nowhere it started crashing on launch, so all I was left with today was Dungeon Siege III, but oh what a fun game it is.

360 controller is a must, action and menu system is definitely designed for it. Good difficulty level, companions that don't suck (and will actually revive you if you get careless!), just enough loot to be rewarding but not annoying, and a simple yet flexible skill system.

I remember the reviews when it came out being not exactly kind, but maybe they were playing a different game?

[rapoon]

Asura's Wrath

Joystiq calls it a "pile of impossibilities" which is a perfect description. on a 1-10 scale, everything is at least a 50: colossal, outrageous and blown so far out of proportion. Within the first 30 mins I must of
said "holy fucking shit...." 20 times. It's completely psychotic. The combat is decent but sparse. Game starts off as a rail shooter with Asura barreling towards a planet firing homing rockets at Gohma (bad guys) battleships. An "interactive movie" with an absurd amount of QTE's. Regardless, halfway through and the story is excellent, the illustrations are beautiful and presentation is top-notch. Despite the awesomeness of everything the game throws at the viewer/player, it's an experience worth no more than $10-$20.

With all that glowering praise in this post [except for the bit about the QTEs], that very last sentence strikes me as a bit odd. Ah well.

It's a description, not a "glowering praise". whether you associate psychotic, colossal, awesomeness (literal) with being a good thing is your call.
It's so far over the top and the way it's presented, there's not much else like it. It's a very unique game and it's bad ass. It's also short and you spend
75% of the time reading and occasionally hitting a button instead of playing. Camp is heavily divided and after playing it I understand why.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

It's also short and you spend
75% of the time reading and occasionally hitting a button instead of playing.

Are the cutscenes and stuff skippable? I know I initially feared Bayonetta would be like this when I saw how long some of its cutscenes are, but there's an insta-skip function you can use (RT+back) that immediately ends the cutscene, so when you're replaying the game it's pretty much nonstop action. The only scenes you can't skip are ones with quicktime events (they tend to be shorter anyways).

[null1024]

With all that glowering praise in this post [except for the bit about the QTEs], that very last sentence strikes me as a bit odd. Ah well.

It's a description, not a "glowering praise". whether you associate psychotic, colossal, awesomeness (literal) with being a good thing is your call.
It's so far over the top and the way it's presented, there's not much else like it. It's a very unique game and it's bad ass. It's also short and you spend
75% of the time reading and occasionally hitting a button instead of playing. Camp is heavily divided and after playing it I understand why.

Aaaaaah. Ok. I don't think there are many games where statements like that count just mere description, so I'm still tempted to pick it up one of these ages.

[sjewkestheloon]

And I gave up on playing DJMAX Portable 3 ages ago, especially since my PSP's d-pad is a bit screwy on top of being a PSP 1000 d-pad.
although, I was pretty shit at it anyway, but I was totally new.

You really need a 2000 or 3000 dpad to get anywhere as I am sure you know. I highly recommend that and a copy of Clazziquai if you like the games. They contain my favourite charts in music games and the songs are usually really catchy too. I just can't help but shake my head at the buggy nature of their releases and the idiotic design choices that they make.

[Ruldra]

Golden Axe: The Revenge of Death Adder

Much harder than the original, probably due to Sega wanting a 4P game to vacuum the quarters out of your pocket like Konami's TMNT. Enemy AI is beefed up compared to part 1 and sometimes you face larger groups. Also, Death Adder is a huge jackass ala SNK's bosses (probably right up there with good old Rugal Bernstein) with his special move being a Kaiser Wave/Reppuu-ken mix that travels along the ground. Jumping that is tricky but there's room to retaliate against it. A 1CC is possible but not near easy- I've 1CCed it to the latter part of stage 4. This is the one GA game that allows ground hits on downed enemies, and the Bizarrians are far more useful than in MD Golden Axe III- especially the skeletal dragon that you meet later in the game (if you can help it, DO NOT lose him!). Maybe Sega nerfed the beasts in GA III because of the potential for players abusing them in TRoDA?

I found that game to be really easy thanks to Trix's healing apples. You essentially have a huge lifebar that increases with every potion you find. You can get pretty far thanks to that.

There are also some tricks that makes managing enemies easy: move up and down to dodge their attacks and use running attacks to kill bosses without getting hit. And Death Adder himself can be killed pretty easily with a certain trick I happened to find by accident.

Watch my playthrough if you're interested: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL675414A05A78A0B2

[CDexWard]

I just finished Secret Of Evermore. This is the most annoying game I have played in my entire life. Combat, trading, leveling up alchemy and navigating dozens of mazes, this game is frustrating from start to finish.

I loved Secret Of Mana, now I am off to play Seiken Densetsu 3, just hoping that it's more like SoM than SoE.

[BulletMagnet]

Evermore was developed by a completely different Western team than the one that made the Mana games, so chances are you'll find 3 more to your liking, though personally I found it felt a bit "stilted" compared to SoM (though that might just be nostalgia talking).

[blackoak]

Its not like Secret of Mana was a perfect game impossible to improve upon, but I think they made all the wrong choices with seiken densetsu 3. Instead of improving certain promising ideas in the SoM combat system, they just simplified into a stupid hack and slash. They failed to improve the broken magic system from SoM, too. Beautiful game though, shame it has bored me to tears whenever I play it. Early example of story over gameplay imo (and most jrpgs arent that exciting in this regard already)

[null1024]

Etrian Odyssey [DS]

Just started, and first thing, I hear FM music.

hnng

It has that pleasing PC-98 sound, very nice.

Also, stupid me forgot to save before entering, found myself dead, and had to remake my whole party... blah.

[edit]
Tales of Innocence [DS].
I forgot why I stopped playing. I'm stuck at this one boss, and I really don't feel like grinding. But I'm getting asswrecked.
It doesn't help that I keep trying to fight like I'm playing Tales of the Abyss, and accidentally switching characters because free run is on R, not L, I distinctly remember surviving for much longer on previous attempts. Still died, but fuck.

[rapoon]

It's also short and you spend
75% of the time reading and occasionally hitting a button instead of playing.

Are the cutscenes and stuff skippable? I know I initially feared Bayonetta would be like this when I saw how long some of its cutscenes are, but there's an insta-skip function you can use (RT+back) that immediately ends the cutscene, so when you're replaying the game it's pretty much nonstop action. The only scenes you can't skip are ones with quicktime events (they tend to be shorter anyways).

I never tried so I'm not sure. But it's so heavily story driven that you'd be skipping right over the game. instead of action with a side of cutscene, it's cutscene with a small serving of action.

Aaaaaah. Ok. I don't think there are many games where statements like that count just mere description, so I'm still tempted to pick it up one of these ages.

if you see it for a fair price, grab it. it's outrageous. should put a smile on anyones face.

[Ed Oscuro]

This is the most annoying game I have played in my entire life. Combat, trading, leveling up alchemy and navigating dozens of mazes, this game is frustrating from start to finish.

shit just got serious

Leveling up usually isn't good in games like this, though, I'll grant you that. But SoE doesn't do much worse in this regard than "good" entries in this kind of game, IMO, and better than many others.

[BIL]

Damn Big Cores, they get into everything.

[Ed Oscuro]

Level 61 in 3rd Birthday, Deadly difficulty annoying the hell out of me because I have gotten just a pixel's health AND a ODK signal away from defeating the Rover battle before the mandatory cutscene cut me off. You can't retry the section once the cutscene starts, of course. Additional plays show the crappiness of sniping play. Playing with the manual-control weapons is simply not very good. It's difficult to line things up to begin with, and now add in the necessity of sloooowly moving your aimpoint over a stunned enemy to execute an ODK - I've had many times where I've just warped into another character instead of executing the ODK. This is a real drawback to the game design IMO.

Finished my last Level 25 ability upgrade some time ago. I'm still deleting DNA chips for some reason. I'll stop after I get to the next level. I don't give a shit about any abilities not on my equipped DNA board; Odds Up was far less useful than it first appeared because it doesn't give you more chips - just "higher quality" ones (but if you're at level 24 with an ability, you will still have just a 1/25 chance, discounting necessary mutation, to get the level 25; the actual chance is far lower because almost all chips have two cells, meaning you will probably need to line up two cells for 1/25 * 1/25 * mutations = REALLY FUCKING LOW CHANCE), and at this point it didn't make any difference if the generated one-cell OE chip was high or low tier (I don't know if deleting high-level OE chips influences the level of the generated chip or not), because I was already high level. All things considered, I may ultimately have done this in a fashion not too far off from the optimal strategy (just rerolling mutations for the lower levels, and then deleting OE chips for the high level - I probably started much later than I should have, and I know a lot of OE chips went to waste due to being knocked out of the 30-deep queue, neither being used to level up nor to count towards the deleted chip count).

Healing abilities would be nice for OE, but the only ability I have anything like that is Restock, and that is already annoying as hell to use (especially after battles are completed; the triggering rate seems really low then). Unfortunately in Deadly difficulty, the enemies can take 3/4 of your health off in one hit sometimes! That will likely lead to a damn lot of time spent hanging around and healing. I had mostly managed to avoid this with my quick wrapup of Hard difficulty.

I should probably set the game aside for now. I will say that my initial impression that the game might continue to be annoying due to leveling doesn't seem right - levels are coming in somewhat quickly once again; if you just play the game through without regard for grinding then your advancement will be pleasant. Taking time-outs for leveling or BP collection is self-inflicted and you should exert the self-control not to do it. On the other hand, many of the things of a grindy nature that annoyed the hell out of me on my first playthrough still annoy me as much as ever. I have to wonder why Square seems to think it is worth going through the trouble of balancing every level (along with enemy experience drops) for difficulty matching levels, rather than just having each difficulty level match you up against a fixed health point (especially since the grinding is a constant fun-draining chore, AS ALWAYS - fuck you Square). This doesn't even make playing lower difficulty levels unbalanced, because to get good rankings it's necessary to play well, not just use your doubled HP to muscle through. The weapons could have been treated separately from the experience system, mostly.

In a line - if you liked the game in the first playthrough, you'll still like it in your third - however, your patience might start to wear thin.

[null1024]

Sonic Advance 1 [GBA].

Was playing it just to test the DSTWO's GBA emulator accuracy [it sucks, it's choppy, it's not very accurate graphically, but you get to play GBA games on a DSi/3DS, so hey].
It's the most Genesis-like out of all the Sonic games made after the Genesis. Actually a pretty good game.

also, up-right-down-right-L-right-R-right-A in character select
best code

Also, more Tales of Innocence [DS]. I decided to dick around and fight as someone that isn't Luca.

Holy fuck, Hermana is fun to fight with, she gives me that same feeling I get when I play as Kou in Panzer Bandit. And I also discovered block-dashing, where if you're blocking, you can dash really quickly to cross up. Very nice.

I still haven't tried going back to the boss, especially since there's like 5 minutes worth of text and stuff to skip past until I can actually fight it... and then I'll probably die in 3 minutes...

[Ruldra]

No time to play on my PS3 recently so my only choice is to play quickies on my phone. Mostly playing Backgammon and Gin Rummy, both by AI Factory - awesome developer, by the way.

I had no idea how to play Backgammon before trying this app, now I'm hooked. I'm getting the feeling the AI is cheating though, whenever I leave a checker alone the AI always seems to roll the number required to hit it. The app comes with a long text explaining it absolutely does not cheat, but when the AI rolls the exact number to hit your checker three times in a row, you start to get suspicious.

Thankfully the app also lets you use manual dice so I may start using them if the cheating continues.