What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

[Ed Oscuro]

More Mechwarrior...obligatory infiltration level, pretty well done though I'll have to try again on it.

Popped in Otogi 1, finally. Presentation is definitely a step down, but after the bamboo grove things look up quickly. Just went through the water spirit on my first session; no real problems so far. Looks like saving up 7000+ G at the start to "repair" Rikoh's sword was mostly wasted. Also, despite the very quick "saving map" message box that appears after the end level stats screen, you definitely still need to save manually, and there's no warning of it this time. But at least the Give Up menu option isn't in sight. Steps forward and back...

In other news, I got the stick from the Mad Catz controller working perfectly again...at the cost of the A button no longer easily registering presses. I'm at a loss for what to do; I've opened the stick back up in order to try and ensure everything is seated properly. There's a thin film with the various face button pads metalized on it, and just above the A button that surface is all roughed up. But that would've been the case before I opened it. I'm hoping this one will act fine again later, but it would be a shame to have gotten so close to the finish line only to find I was running the wrong race!

I finally went ahead and tested one of the final components I've been needing to - one of the transclucent blue Xbox Controller S pads that came with the system. It's the first S controller I've used for the original Xbox. After one look at this the Mad Catz, with its rather lumpy shape and protruding grip ribs, is out of sight; after a session of use, it's all but forgotten. I still think the original Duke wasn't that bad a controller, but this is just perfect. To be quite honest, when rummaging through some boxes of controllers in a vain search for Duke controllers, we're lucky the Xbox controller options were as good as they were. Plenty of really weird stuff has been released over the years; the N64 in particular got some gruesome third-party releases.

[Blinge]

Fuck Metal Slug 3. I hate this game. Once I get the clear i'm never touching it again.

[mastermx]

Out of curiosity. Why would you want to clear a game you hate?

[Blinge]

ummm.. chicken meet egg?

[BulletMagnet]

"Blinge, what is best in life?"

"To master the games you hate! To see them 1CC'ed before you! To hear the lamentation of their programmers!"

[BIL]

Fuck Metal Slug 3. I hate this game. Once I get the clear i'm never touching it again.

Have you reached the "everything's too easy until Mission 5" phase yet? ^_~

[Obiwanshinobi]

I don't know where else to ask: does the Sega Bass Fishing Wii port benefit from any fishing rod peripheral? (I'm not really into fishing so I don't seek authenticity.)

[Blinge]

Haha, Bulletmagnet knows.

and Bil, yeah that's pretty much it except the stage 4 boss' yellow pattern still gets me. The shmup section is arse and serves to ruin my mood and focus coming into the mothership... Also the final boss is just amusingly cheap, I've no shame in abusing the metal slug's invincibility.

Metal Scrub

[BIL]

I've no official data either way, but I'd guess the last boss was designed with the vehicle exit exploit in mind. The random bubble pattern is ludicrously harder than anything else in the trilogy, something not helped by the characteristically heavy, floaty handling. Maybe no-exploit play is intended for the ultimate Metal Stud, not random joes just trying to make the Mission All Over screen.

Then again, it is pretty exploity feeling, diving between the Slug and the boss with just the right timing to nullify the bubbles and rings. Hm. Oh well. Fuck 'em.

But st4 angry gold needles is ultimately the worst thing in the game, yep. NO REFUGE. I get something resembling survivor's guilt on runs where he doesn't use them!

[mastermx]

I sort of understand, when I think about it, there are games that made me rage till I cleared them. I realised though that those are the games that I end up coming back to the most. More so after finishing them.

[BrianC]

I have been playing SSBM and some handhelds like Plane and Tank. Plane and Tank was fun for a bit, but the game is too easy, even on hard mode (PRO2), since it ends after 1000 points.

[SuperGrafx]

Gunhouse (Windows Phone)

[soprano1]

Recettear - An Item Shops Tale. Capitalism Ho!

[Immryr]

Well, I got diablo 3 on Sunday and I've played a flip load of it this week. Played through most of act 1 with a wizard, then switched to a demon hunter. I'm currently in act 5 and level 65. The game is exactly what I thought it would be, it's repetitive, but the addictive leveling and gear hunting is great. My only problem with it is it's way too easy. I started on hard and have increased the difficulty whenever the game let me. I'm currently playing on torment 1 and nothing is really touching me, or if it does I can heal it back in seconds. I dunno if the demon hunter is just really strong, or if I've been lucky with item drops, but I wish it was more of a challenge.

[Blinge]

But st4 angry gold needles is ultimately the worst thing in the game, yep. NO REFUGE.

Yep.. he just did it 7 times. I did not survive..
In fact I cannot remember a time in which that pattern hasn't come out for me, it has happened, but a long while back.

[evil_ash_xero]

I finished Skies of Arcadia Legends, Shantae and the Pirate's Curse, and Shovel Knight.

Enjoyed them all.

Trying to finish up MadWord, that I've had for years. I can only play it in short bursts, due to me HATING using the nunchuk and Wiimote to play it.
I wish someone would patch it!

[ryu]

The dungeons had interesting designs and for the most part were challenging to navigate through but not to the point it becomes a chore.

I'm about to complete the second dungeon (just need to beat the boss), and I thought that dungeon was awful. All that going up and down everywhere, trap tiles all over the place - no thanks. Hopefully the next place will be less of a hassle to deal with.

However, the regular enemy encounters were not really difficult

So far I think they're fine considering how long the dungeons can be.

I am afraid completing the auto-map will become even more annoying later on where you will have to step on trap tiles on purpose to get them on your map.

Yeah, I just gave up on mapping out all the maps. :/ Wish they had gone with the Eo mapping system

[Immryr]

Ok I take back a little of what I said. There's a huge spike in enemy damage and hp after you kill Adria. It's now taking me forever, with lots of running round in circles and careful resource management to take out the groups with big shiny enemies in. My follower guy is pretty much constantly dead and I have also died a few times.

[ryu]

I played the demo of Diablo III when it was released and didn't like it much. The dungeon that just sent huge waves of enemies at me was a boring chore to play, and the game didn't seem like it allowed much room for customization or anything. Don't know how much the add-on fixed, but the base game seemed pretty bad to me.

[MOSQUITO FIGHTER]

Black Tiger. Going for the 1cc on the 360 Capcom Collection. Great game. I bet it was really impressive at the time.

[drauch]

One of the many reasons Diablo III sucks eggs. As you said, it's wayyyy too easy and extremely boring until about mid game, then the difficulty spikes quite a bit, and the boredom eases up. There's no build up, it just sorta happens. D2 seems so much more balanced and thought out as you advance. DIII just feels like a dumbed down version with the kiddy aesthetics of WoW. One of the biggest letdowns of my illustrious hermit career.

[JBC]

I got Outrun 2006 C2C for PS2 tonight & it's blissful. I used to love the PC version but it never felt right playing a Sega game on a computer. Probably one of the more gorgeous games on PS2. I'm still pretty great at drifting!

[Ed Oscuro]

A new short racing entry here - worth maybe a couple hours but laden with some odd design choices and cost-saving development choices - the old Xbox racer Test Drive Off-Road: Wide Open, last of the offroad series. It seems any opposing vehicle is too easily able to spin you around, and it also seems that some course sets in the career mode don't offer enough flexibility for vehicle choice. But I'll back up a moment - the game has a fairly interesting take on selecting vehicles, which they've broadly divided up into fast climbers and speed vehicles (with four advertised stats each: climbing, top speed, acceleration, and handling). Speed vehicles generally don't climb as quickly (which sometimes looks ridiculous, as a powerful pickup barreling down a straightaway suddenly started limping along up a series of a few steep, but short ridges; a better visual representation could have conveyed this better, but it feels very artificial that some vehicles will just crawl there, but others will sail along without taking many speed bumps). Climbers tend to have a lower top speed, though acceleration might be competitive.

Terrain is interesting but even a great-handling vehicle (like the Jeeps) are tricky to pilot, with every terrain angle registering in jumps and bumps that can send you wildly off course. Checkpoint markers are holographic, but unfortunately trees aren't, and getting inbetween some spots for shaving off seconds can easily be foiled by this foliage. I feel they would've improved this game immensely if they had gone further in following the Rush or Beetle Adventure Racing styles of making interesting jumps - largely, by increasing the number of alternative pathways. Instead, they haplessly bodged in a landing maneuver by allowing you to rotate the right thumbstick when airborne...it doesn't really do anything to close the gap with those earlier titles. A lot of the shortcuts that are actually available seem unintentional, like clipping the very edge of a checkpoint marker to avoid traveling through a train bridge and around a lazy curve (though this exact example might not work very well all the time). There's also some strangeness with the career mode's races - it's quite possible to race to two first place finishes but then finish second overall as your vehicle simply isn't appropriate for the final map, and one opponent manages to outscore you by one point. That'll block you decisively from buying better vehicles, as you must get first place finishes overall in all three entries of the second season just to unlock the first upgrade set for the vehicles (and I'm not expecting new vehicles to show up). At the same time, it seems that most of the vehicle upgrades come at a massive cost in the handling spec, which is a really bad thing given how precise some of the jumps in this game can be. The routine heightmap bases for the race courses are too apparent visually, which has already given me the opinion this is a rather underproduced game which could have been much more. You can't build a Beetle Adventure Racing out of a collection of signs, and the random shack or cactus, and the system doesn't seem to have quite the horsepower - at least not with this wide-open edge - to create spectacular dirt path vistas and really interesting race geometry.

Overall, it's not a great or even very good game, but it has some slight glimmers of brilliance. I'm guessing that Xbox heightmap landscapes, though I think this game demonstrates how they can be fairly bad, still hold some nostalgia for me. I've just got a loose disc which I got with something else here or there - I don't remember any price but as the price seems to be essentially free, that suits me just fine. But it won't survive very long in my play library. I really ought to find some decent racers for this machine.

Speaking of another game whose flat heightmap landscapes annoy me, Mechwarrior's "Wolf In Sheep's..." mission has the kind of bug I kept wondering would be in the game. I really ought to be more proactive about trying for these things now! Mission was getting annoying to try repeatedly the "right" way so I felt no pangs of conscience abusing this trick to get through an otherwise pretty dry stage.

I was wrong about Otogi 1 not having a "Give Up" menu options...it's got a different name. After the mermaid stage, difficulty spiked a bit for me as the next stage has a few not-completely-obvious things you must do about it. The first time I met the big slime...my ship just died; another time, my ship died and I tried to jump and hack at it, but died. Third (I think) try should be the charm.

But what's more annoying is that these are a couple of rather silly water maps which are going to be painful to try to complete for 100% souls and destruction. I actually did the water spirit's stage to 100% destruction - those damn floating lanterns had me play the stage a few times in succession to sweep them all out, and a few more tries dying because I lingered in the water just a tad too long. "Sometimes it's best to wait patiently" your ass, haul it out of there and let's clean this up! I do appreciate that the airborne magic-sapping things are more visible flames in this stage, rather than the less-visible dark splotches on the screen in Otogi 2 stages. It makes a heck of a difference when collisions mean your survival time is shortened.

The actual fights in this game have been too easy, so far. I've heard "It seems attacking recklessly..." a couple times, immediately followed by the level-ending cutscene.

[JBC]

Oh I remember having a bit of trouble getting 100% on those water stages to. I think I recall it being hard to discern what you could & could not destroy at times, causing me to fly over to areas for no reason & take the plunge when I ran out of juice. I want to ask if you've made it to my favorite segment yet but don't want to risk spoiling anything.

I spent all night with Outrun 2006 C2C & piled up tons of mileage (currency). Of course I went straight for the Tessterosa & original music tracks. There's a segment early on where the game really schools you on drifting that I had a slight bit of trouble with using the starting cars but everything else has been a breeze so far.

[R-Gray 1]

I was playing only on meetings and events in the last 3 weeks:

UMK3 Mktrilogy and sf turbo on snes

SF champion edition on arcade

and on my cell i was playing puyo puyo on nes emulator :p

[Stevens]

I spent all night with Outrun 2006 C2C & piled up tons of mileage (currency). Of course I went straight for the Tessterosa & original music tracks. There's a segment early on where the game really schools you on drifting that I had a slight bit of trouble with using the starting cars but everything else has been a breeze so far.

I've probably said this before, but I frickin' love Outrun on the PS 2 and 360. So much fun!

[Mischief Maker]

I spent all night with Outrun 2006 C2C & piled up tons of mileage (currency). Of course I went straight for the Tessterosa & original music tracks. There's a segment early on where the game really schools you on drifting that I had a slight bit of trouble with using the starting cars but everything else has been a breeze so far.

I've always just played Outrun 2 SP (on the PC), replacing the old song files with the arranged tracks. Am I missing anything big by not playing 2006 mode?

[Ed Oscuro]

I think I recall it being hard to discern what you could & could not destroy at times, causing me to fly over to areas for no reason & take the plunge when I ran out of juice.

From the start position on the ships' graveyard, SW of Rikoh's start position there's a big rock with some crystals on it. These are blocked by an invisible barrier. I also noticed that some of the masts poking out of the water seem to be holographic, which is annoying. More annoying is playing the level a few times and only getting a few more crystals out of it - I've not managed to complete it again after going for more ship's masts. Stuck at D ranking for difficulty.

Beyond that, I also ran into a bit of trouble with a big millipede. I haven't killed him yet, but I have cleared the stage with A destruction and 100% souls. After that, I rushed through a bunch more stages with ease.

I want to ask if you've made it to my favorite segment yet but don't want to risk spoiling anything.

This quote has had me in tingling suspense. I haven't seen anything yet that I'd imagine would be a favorite segment, but I'm pretty pleased with how the game continues to be fresh. I'm at the 13th stage now.

I do miss the sequel's Havoc Mode allowing for more "normal" story missions but I still love the diversity of stages.

Oh, and I've been playing all the stages with the default sword at no vitality. *shrug*

I spent all night with Outrun 2006 C2C & piled up tons of mileage (currency). Of course I went straight for the Tessterosa & original music tracks. There's a segment early on where the game really schools you on drifting that I had a slight bit of trouble with using the starting cars but everything else has been a breeze so far.

Reminds me that I still need to check that out! I've had enough of 480i gaming really, so I'll be looking for the PC version.

[JBC]

Ed, sry my cell phone makes it difficult to use the quote function. I'm speaking of invisible Impala looking creatures on a plateau that resembles an early Dragon Ball Z environment. I remember it being at the 75% mark but it's been years & I could be way off.

Edit - Tonight I ended up helping my friend beat MKII Genesis version. We used only Rayden & got stuck at Kintaro most. He beat Kintaro & then I beat Shao Khan. I could never finish this version as a kid & it still seems unbalanced.

[Ed Oscuro]

I actually played a bit further last night - good progress, did Scarlet Path in 56 seconds (skip the first two gates and take both shortcuts!) and almost beat the Crimson King on my first try - just spent too long chopping down bamboo after he first warped. Two false starts more and I got him. He's really not difficult if you just remember to jump. I kind of cheesed him to death on my victorious run because I was having trouble getting the 720 circle slash finisher to work, so just bombed him into the ground a bunch. Easy as cake. I'm going to skip another attempt until I have the one-hit-kill sword - finishing in under 1:10 is the only thing left for me to do.

It took me a while to realize why that stage was special. Very nice setup and those "warping" leaps are neat to behold. That said, I find the actual fight difficulty to be highly overrated.

I found the Sea of Fire stage much more annoying - not necessarily difficult, just a matter of trying to get near the boss when your magic is nearly depleted.

I got out the Locust Wing and I suppose it does make a difference in the many jump / dash-heavy stages, so I'll keep using it for now.

Coming up...reverse and upside-down stages. *barf* I knew there had to be a catch to all these stages