What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

[BIL]

I remember CIT mentioning a preferred order of forms in his SFC thread. I like the green dude too, his imperious look and showy energy blasts remind me of Perfect Cell. ^__^ I seem to recall liking the blue dragon's moves the best, but found him so boring to look at.

I need to revisit Majuu as well, it's definitely a cool sidescroller. Got distracted before I could finish it off.

[trap15]

You have to play all 3 demon's to get the Ultimate Demon form during the last stage and get the best ending.

Aha, that makes a lot of sense. In that case I'll have to do that. More interesting than just sticking with Orange the whole time at least!

I remember CIT mentioning a preferred order of forms in his SFC thread.

Nice, thanks for the list. Maybe I was just thrown off from trying the other two for the first gem, but I did notice that it seemed like they wanted you to pick a different guy for some parts.

[Obiwanshinobi]

Panel de Pon GBA port on the job. Vertical mode works a treat. I've yet to try the 1 cart 2 player.

[trap15]

I didn't know there was a GBA version As part of my quest to collect the entire series, I'll have to find this.

[Immryr]

yeah it's on a cart with dr Mario.



last night I finished playing through the unfinished swan on ps4. I started playing it without knowing anything about the game and found it to be a very fun and inventive little game. I thought they changed up the core mechanics just enough in each chapter to keep things interesting, with the final chapter being a great culmination of what had come before. definitely a game which took me by surprise.

[Stevens]

Under the influence of late I've been playing a lot of Gain Ground.

[Blinge]

haha, i'd have to be under the influence to touch that game, for sure.

[Stevens]

Not a fan eh?

[Ed Oscuro]

Damn, Soldier of Fortune's arrow key movement is all fucked up of a sudden. Not sure what to do.

I did find how to advertise the old ultraviolence though!

[TransatlanticFoe]

Under the influence of late I've been playing a lot of Gain Ground.

I recently picked up the SMS version and it holds up well. It's a really neat game that doesn't get enough love!

[Tregard]

I've just put Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen back on the shelf. Played it for about 14 hours and in that time the following had happened.

-I had my heart ripped out by a talking dragon.
-I cut the head off a snake hydra and was asked to deliver it to the king Gran Soren.
-I ran about killing rabbits and bats and goblins and bandits with nothing much else happening.

That's it - 14 hours. I could have watched the whole extended Lord of the Rings trilogy in that time with all its epic battles, deep and interesting characters, and sense of high adventure. Or I could have played through Vanquish three times. Or the whole of Half Life 2. Instead I was just running back and forth across a rather uninspiring "ye olde fantasie worlde mappe" while my companions hollered "a wolf, arisen!" every 10 seconds.

Similar experience with Borderlands not long ago - really wanted to like it but the to-ing and fro-ing was just too much for me.

The moral of this story is that I clearly should not be buying open world games.

[Satan]

I don't mind a side-quest and I'm aware I'm playing a videogame, but I've kinda had it with that.

[Stevens]

Under the influence of late I've been playing a lot of Gain Ground.

I recently picked up the SMS version and it holds up well. It's a really neat game that doesn't get enough love!

That is good to hear!

Admittedly I haven't played a ton of it, but I rather enjoy it. Kind of reminds me of Gauntlet with more characters and if it was only single screens.

I'm sure the fun goes up with more players too.

[Obiwanshinobi]

Played some of the Wings GBA port/remake (died on the first Allied mission twice). I have the same problem as with Pilotwings and Plane Crazy, i.e. no separate rudder controls break my willing suspension of disbelief. I can understand why they wanted to make those games THAT simple, but this simplicity should be optional, not the Hobson's choice. I wish at least one GBA airplane game controlled a bit more like I believe real aircraft do. "Sim" doesn't have to equal "no fun".

[Ed Oscuro]

Soldier of Fortune, again, hasn't aged well. Ugly textures, ugly detail texturing (now turned off, thankfully), ugly skyboxes (red and green tones right next to each other...in the same engine that had iD Software's nice Quake II backdrops?) - and ugly gameplay in nonsensically-designed levels. Although I had some sense of how bad a map design can be, this game's semi-connected and open maps really are quite annoying to traverse, and only rarely does it pay off in providing a feeling of having found unusual routes. I started off with Challenging and that felt a bit too much like a memorizer / RNG gauntlet, which I didn't want to attempt due to the necessity of using the shotgun in the first stage, and the slightly wonky feeling of movement (slow, and changing video settings will screw up directional movement until a restart - I've also had some choppy movement here and there). On top of that, a harsh savegame limit forces single segment runs - which is OK by me, except that here there'd be a too much restarting. Dropping down to the next difficulty level was like the change from Nightmare to Ultraviolence in DOOM - too big a gap - and there's a difficulty setting above Challenging, called Unfair (doesn't sound very Soldier of Fortuneish to me).

This game's New York subways level is my least favorite game rendering of a subway, being beaten in scale, finesse, and plain looking like a subway by games both older (DOOM, Tomb Raider 3) and newer. However, I did like the "KNOCK, KNOCK" fake movie poster a bit, since it features a doorknocker with a typical Brian Raffel style gothic artwork...a bittersweet thing, since it's a reminder they could have been putting together another Hexen game instead of this. Again, I didn't want to linger very long in this bland, small level.

What really gets my goat are the bugs. Not only the intermittent performance bugs, but a few nasty ones show up in the second Bosnia level. There's a door I was able to use...and it promptly wedged into me, making me unable to move. I had to use the console to get out, and was treated to a nice show of the two doors moving independently and causing a temporary HOM effect as the doors tricked the portal visibility code. Thankfully, it sorts itself out shortly. What was more jarring is an offshoot of what should be a nice thing: The game pays some lip service to not shooting friendly characters - you get messages if you waste a friendly, and probably lose some pay as well - and you can also disarm enemies. Unfortunately, the game often puts enemies in places where their disarmed versions would get in the way. But the absolute worst thing was when I kept running around the nonsensically-designed Bosnian base level, looking for another area - only to realize that I had missed a level transition because I had not wasted every last guy in the final room. If murder is your thing, this probably still isn't your game because of the frankly bad gameplay, at least in the early stages. But it's a feature, I guess. If this is a licensed game from Soldier of Fortune magazine, I think they did a rather poor job with oversight. Then again, the sequel certainly had a twist on the "good mercenaries save the day" story here.

[Squire Grooktook]

Splatoon and Fire Emblem Awakening.

Splatoon is probably the most fun I've had with a multiplayer shooter since Unreal 2k4. Every match is fast and fun, and I feel like there's no end to the tactical possibilities with the ink.

At the last 5 missions or so of FE:A, which is where most people tend to claim the game gets broken as shit (although most FE's are broken late game too), but my attempts at low level running everything seem to have payed off. Still fun, tactical, and challenging.

[MR_Soren]

Just bought Gain Ground for the Genesis. I've wanted it since playing the arcade version on the Xbox 360 Genesis Collection. Absolutely wonderful game concept, I've been playing it a bunch this weekend after it arrived in the mail.

I also played through Mendel Palace for the NES yesterday. My wife made me play it, it was one of her favorites growing up. Brilliantly designed puzzle game.

[Stevens]

Everyone play Gain Ground!

[Blinge]

Haha.. I'll give it some more time

[Ruldra]

I prefer the SMS version of Gain Ground way more than the MD/Arcade versions. At least for me the music sounds way better in the Master System. Also worth mentioning that the SMS version has an extra round after the future era.

[Immryr]

I played some dark souls for the first time in ages today. It felt a little weird at first coming back to it at first having played bloodborne recently, definitely felt sluggish at first which wasn't helped by the fact I was using a strength build. I quickly got back into it though! Managed to ring both bells in an hour and a half without really trying to speed run it.

It made really actually excited for dark souls 3, which I wasn't before. A dark souls game with the fluidity of bloodborne and the roll dodging / weapon choices of dark souls will be amazing.

[Marc]

At £2.50 it would have been rude not to pick up Metal Slug 3. It's still crap though. Well, crap is a bit harsh, but it's the start of a downward spiral. Picked up PES2015 for a tenner in the PSN sale, and with all the controls set to basic and speed to full it's a good two player arcade footy game. Though I'd still kurder for a simple HD version of ISS64. And the WWF games.

[null1024]

Got to play a bunch of Fighting Layer [Arcade/MAME] with a buddy.
Wonder why this never got a port to the DC or something. The music and presentation are wonderful, and the mechanics seem pretty good from the two hours we played of it. It's similar to Street Fighter EX, but different. It's fundamentally a 2D fighter, but incorporates the 3D playfield and 3D dodging quite well, much more than SFEX does.

Some nice graphical effects here and there [that fucking motion blur on some of the moves is really stylish], has the same bright, pastel lighting like Street Fighter EX2 does, decent looking backgrounds.

Are you right, are you ready?
so good

[TransatlanticFoe]

Everyone play Gain Ground!

So I cheated a bit and used save states in the version on the MD compilation (360) to avoid some of the nasty surprises. If you can hang on to the dwarf/viking, the game is a lot easier - he's quick and has good range, plus he can fire over walls in any direction. Will hit up the SMS version at the weekend and play it properly - can't save state on the real thing!

The final boss is a bit brutal.

[broken harbour]

On the home stretch of Wind Waker HD.

One of my pet peeves is having to re-defeat bosses and it happens in this game. It's completely unnecessary and only there to lengthen the game by an hour, and its not like you have to do anything different on the second go around either.

Otherwise.... the Triforce shard quest is not that bad, though I did consult a guide for part of it because I'm an adult with responsibilities and a job and a wife and didn't want to dedicate the next 6 months of my life to hunting down every shard, doing it blind would probably take a while.

Will probably wrap this game this week unless the fight with Ganon is ridiculous or something.

[Jonst]

Alongside doj... I've been quite enjoying Bangai-o spirits on ds. It took me quite a while to get Into it but it was totally worth sticking with it, almost sold it. After I'm done with it, I fancy revisiting Gunhound ex on psp.

[the_last_shmupper]

FTL and Prison Architect.

[Squire Grooktook]

On the home stretch of Wind Waker HD.

One of my pet peeves is having to re-defeat bosses and it happens in this game. It's completely unnecessary and only there to lengthen the game by an hour, and its not like you have to do anything different on the second go around either.

Otherwise.... the Triforce shard quest is not that bad, though I did consult a guide for part of it because I'm an adult with responsibilities and a job and a wife and didn't want to dedicate the next 6 months of my life to hunting down every shard, doing it blind would probably take a while.

Will probably wrap this game this week unless the fight with Ganon is ridiculous or something.

IIRC the Triforce shard quest was nerfed a bit in the HD release. It was even worse on Game Cube.

[mamboFoxtrot]

On the home stretch of Wind Waker HD.

One of my pet peeves is having to re-defeat bosses and it happens in this game. It's completely unnecessary and only there to lengthen the game by an hour, and its not like you have to do anything different on the second go around either.

Otherwise.... the Triforce shard quest is not that bad, though I did consult a guide for part of it because I'm an adult with responsibilities and a job and a wife and didn't want to dedicate the next 6 months of my life to hunting down every shard, doing it blind would probably take a while.

Will probably wrap this game this week unless the fight with Ganon is ridiculous or something.

IIRC the Triforce shard quest was nerfed a bit in the HD release. It was even worse on Game Cube.

Yeah, for Wii U (from what I've read), 5 of the 8 dungeon chests give you the shard directly, rather than a treasure chart that must be translated by Tingle.
I think they also added an optional new sail that sets the wind every time you pull it out, rather than having to stop and play the song every time you want to change direction more than 35 degrees.

[broken harbour]

The new sail eases the tedium immensely, although I could see how you would totally miss it if you weren't paying attention to the auction house, glad I looked it up online.