What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

[Some-Mist]

diablo 2 ladder resets later this month so I'm probably going to be sinking a buttload of time into that.

otherwise, I've been playing through twilight princess again and man is it easy so far..

[mamboFoxtrot]

^ haha, yeah, I was doing a Hero Mode playthrough of the HD version a month-ish ago, and honestly it felt almost exactly like when I last played the game on the Wii (Hero mode being mirrored like Wii adds to this lol), because honestly, taking more damage doesn't mean much when enemies barely attack you and fairies/red potions/etc can be found frequently or purchased cheaply. There's very few points of the game that I feel that would honestly be a problem if doing a 3-Heart or similar run.


Also started playing SotN for the first time, and this ish be like , why the fuq didn't I get to this sooner! Just started the inverse castle.
I've technically seen people play the game before, but they're usually skipping tons of stuff and/or doing things in a weird order (+ my memory is shit), so I don't feel like I've been TOO spoiled, and honestly knowing about things like the existence of spells and needing the Holy Glasses etc is probably making the experience better anyways. The amount of openness to the exploration is actually surprising to me, since I'm so used to adventure/metroidvania/etc games that are railroaded to the point of complete linearity outside of a few bonus items that can be backtracked for.
I kinda feel like there could've been more warp points, though. As in, like, maybe save points could've been warps.
Also, not looking forward to the eventual clean-up of random secret breakable walls...

[Sumez]

^ haha, yeah, I was doing a Hero Mode playthrough of the HD version a month-ish ago, and honestly it felt almost exactly like when I last played the game on the Wii (Hero mode being mirrored like Wii adds to this lol), because honestly, taking more damage doesn't mean much when enemies barely attack you and fairies/red potions/etc can be found frequently or purchased cheaply. There's very few points of the game that I feel that would honestly be a problem if doing a 3-Heart or similar run.

I feel like most Zelda games are actually designed for 3-heart runs.
Most recently A Link Between Worlds is an excellently designed game, but there is absolutely NO threat in the game. I have no idea how Nintendo keep letting it slide. As long as you are being careful and playing well, you can always avoid getting hit entirely - and it's not like you have to be a super player or anything, you just have to put a little bit of effort into it. However, due to the excessive amount of damage leeway, you can practically trample through the game entirely without caring about whether something hits you or not, which completely mitigates the great gameplay and enemy design that I was just talking about.

Bottom line is, everyone should play that game on hero mode without ever picking up more hearts than the initial 3. Doing that turns a mediocre Zelda adventure into a really good game.

[Some-Mist]

yeah, I should have done a hero run or something. to be fair, I've only beaten ocarina of time (and have come close-ish? to beating wind waker but didn't want to do the deep see diving fetch quest) and didn't know what to expect going into it.

at least the dark theme is cool.

[KAI]

I've also been playing BBCF lately. Mori sucks, he can't design new characters without making them god tiers or broken. Es, Mai and Nine have some of the most stupid attacks I've seen in my life.
I love what they did to Jin (always hated the old 3c, and the ice star is <3 <3 ), but the game is a fucking mess.

[Leandro]

I'm so pissed off with those Syberia games. I was doing good on Syberia II without any guide but that Youkoi village is super annoying.

[lepo76]

Mostly dark souls 3 dlc and puzzle bubble

[rapoon]

Tell you what I'm not playing anymore: Battlefield 1.

I made the foolish decision of buying a PS4 just for that game (all my friends were playing it, there was a deal on, I figured it was time I joined the 21st century, yadda yadda), but I can't get into it. Planes, snipers, tanks, grenades, flamethrowers and horses can all one-shot you, and the same may as well be true of normal infantry since in most cases the victor is the person who spotted the other first. That would be fine if it were some kind of intimate tactical shooter, but the maps are enormous open sprawls where chaos reigns and people roll in from all directions.

I realise this is a staple of most multiplayer shooters from the last decade, but as someone raised in the arenas of Quake and Unreal Tournament it feels sluggish and frequently unfair. Being shot in the back or sniped from a distant rock with no chance of fighting back gets old really fast.

Is there anything else worth picking up on PS4? Bloodborne is on my Christmas wishlist.

Got it for the PC a few days ago. What infuriates me about BF 1 is laziness masquerading as customization, i.e. 9 variants of the shotgun and weapons shared among all nations. No Belgian, Russian, or French forces (apparently, Russia & France will be independent, money-grab DLCs). My complaints being rooted in a lack of realism (even in 'hardcore' mode), they highlight the care and effort that Blackmil put into Verdun.

[KAI]

Currently playing/testing En-Eins Perfektewelt. Love the new airdash, but the autocombo and autoblock mechanics are crap. Wish I could play it against someone.

Spoiler

edit:
Ok, I've spend the entire day playing this thing and I'm loving it, the chain mechanics are similar to Real Bout, the burst and burst attack are similar to Samurai Spirit's Issen. I always liked Akatsuki Blitzkampf a lot, and this sequel improved every aspect of the game and added some of my favorite mechanics from other FGs.
A simple game with good offensive and defensive tools and short combos, that a 10/10 for me.

[Shoryukev]

I feel like most Zelda games are actually designed for 3-heart runs.
Most recently A Link Between Worlds is an excellently designed game, but there is absolutely NO threat in the game. I have no idea how Nintendo keep letting it slide. As long as you are being careful and playing well, you can always avoid getting hit entirely - and it's not like you have to be a super player or anything, you just have to put a little bit of effort into it. However, due to the excessive amount of damage leeway, you can practically trample through the game entirely without caring about whether something hits you or not, which completely mitigates the great gameplay and enemy design that I was just talking about.

Bottom line is, everyone should play that game on hero mode without ever picking up more hearts than the initial 3. Doing that turns a mediocre Zelda adventure into a really good game.

This argument is especially relevant with the nonlinear nature or Link Between Worlds. You can tackle the major dungeons in any order, so the order you do them in greatly affects the difficulty depending on your heart count. I did my first playthrough basically just walking through the game. The second playthrough on hero mode was tougher.....but only at the beginning. I might give it a try again and do a 3-heart run on hero mode. I did rather enjoy the game, the new mechanics added a fresh feel to an already great game which was LTTP.

[null1024]

Pokemon Sun [3DS].

It's better than last generation by a lot. It's got some big issues [starts off way too handholdy, and it railroads you around really, really heavily], but it's actually been pretty good so far. On the third island now.

[Blinge]

This argument is especially relevant with the nonlinear nature or Link Between Worlds. You can tackle the major dungeons in any order, so the order you do them in greatly affects the difficulty depending on your heart count. I did my first playthrough basically just walking through the game. The second playthrough on hero mode was tougher.....but only at the beginning. I might give it a try again and do a 3-heart run on hero mode. I did rather enjoy the game, the new mechanics added a fresh feel to an already great game which was LTTP.

I'd like to play that some day but I've gotta go back to LTTP and play that again first. It's been too long since I floundered my way through the gba version when it came out.
Spirit Tracks and Skyward Sword made me despair heavily of the series, but most of the internet and many respected voices here praise LTTP so I should give it another go.

[soprano1]

Pokemon Sun [3DS].

It's better than last generation by a lot. It's got some big issues [starts off way too handholdy, and it railroads you around really, really heavily], but it's actually been pretty good so far. On the third island now.

Ugh, the whole Europe gets it 5 days after US/Japan is ridiculous. And only because some stores sold XY a week before the world release date...Petty.

[soprano1]

Pokemon Sun, finally. See you in a few weeks.

[gbaplayer]

Playing 2 games at the moment: Pokemon Moon and Skyrim Special Edition. The 3rd one lurks around the corner (Final Fantasy XV). Need more free time.

[Ed Oscuro]

After writing another %&@# novel about Duke Nukem II (which is hilarious - everybody should know about it), here's some short takes:

Rage: A mashup of good and bad. The basic gameplay was slow to get my attention but I ended up enjoying it. Unfortunately big characters have a habit of disappearing with no real payoff; it would have been more effective to stick more closely to telling the story of the first group you encounter. There's also no ending to the main campaign, and not even a boss battle which is quite strange. The Scorchers DLC sort-of has an ending, but there's no big finale there either. As far as the looks go, it was hard to be objective about this one due to the megatexture hoopla - outdoors area textures looked good but the rock formations often needed more polygons; indoor areas had enough polygons but the megatexture seemed to lead to many grainy looking areas, even with the 8K texture detail level enabled. I didn't try 16K textures, as I simply have a humble GeForce 960 with only 2GB of RAM, but that would have been quite a bit back in 2011 when Rage appeared. The game still requires a lot of manual tweaking to get acceptable performance and especially to reduce textures popping in even if you just look away for a moment. The game won't automatically generate a needed 1GB texture cache (which should be bigger, I think), nor will it automatically use CUDA on GeForce cards for sending textures. When I set it up with tweaks, I noticed my system ran much cooler.

Rise of the Tomb Raider: I'm not very far in this at all, just past the Syria cutscene; at 1440p my 2GB Geforce GTX 960 seems to push through somewhere around the high 30s in fps in benchmarks, even with a bunch of things turned off entirely. Even so, for a few seconds I didn't realize that the opening cutscene was in-engine - it's just that damn good. With this kind of detail, I think the main thing holding back acceptance of this kind of graphics as photorealistic is in model faces - they're still obviously computer rendered. Movement felt unresponsive in the snowy opening level but I'm not sure how much of that was due to the 30FPS, and how much was due to the intentional slowness of snow movement.

I installed Skyrim Special Ed and looked around a bit; it also runs horribly, though I have most things maxed or close, so I'll have to tone that down. I think the main thing here is they removed a bunch of limits, which is great. A lot of bitching going on about how Bethesda didn't change anything over the original game, but perhaps that was intentional as most people just use the unofficial patches anyway (at least on XBO and PC). My main disappointment is that model hair - buh gawd, it's really distractingly awful for some reason. That, and the fact that the scale of the overworld still feels damn wrong.

Dishonored: Wow, it's Thief in almost every way. I love my Hammerites, but the Overseers are awfully creepy. I miss arrows, but the gadgets you get in place are almost as fun (if a lot more combat-oriented). I miss remote scout orbs, but I'm sure Corvo is happy to have both eyes. The one thing it fails in outright is providing memorable dialogues to eavesdrop on - the guard personalities are pretty shitty, honestly, compared not just to Thief but also to Splinter Cell and the like. But that hardly bothers me here. Like Thief, this game is about social stereotypes (police, religious zealots, the aristocracy) and it's also about man versus nature. However, while the original Dark Project was a story arc about a couple characters in a struggle for survival and power, Dishonored puts just enough detail into each of its characters to show the inclinations to abuse power even in the ranks of the "good guys" - even on my current flawless Low Chaos run (nobody spots me, nobody dies). While I still often prefer the sense of style in Thief, especially with respect to the stuff outside the City, this game still does a lot of things just right, and is a lot more interesting than just increasing the poly count on Thief world things - I like those red devices they use to seal off doors, even though I'm not entirely sure how they're supposed to stand up. It's not at Rise's technical level of detail - more like high Xbox 360 levels - but the style is so good that it doesn't matter and it lets me run high framerates (although this is one of those rare games where I feel anti-aliasing would often be helpful). The "Burglar" excursion of Dunwall City Trials is a good short look at what the designers could achieve if they're going for that crazy Constantine's Mansion style of things; what's more, it's all floating! I'm not too keen about all the Trials, though; scoring in Bend Time Massacre is just too fiddly.

Dishonored's best achievement is that for once, people are justified in thinking those noises might just be rats. Or Hagfish, for that matter - they're very helpful in getting maps cleaned up, I've found.

[Durandal]

Dishonored's best achievement is that for once, people are justified in thinking those noises might just be rats. Or Hagfish, for that matter - they're very helpful in getting maps cleaned up, I've found.

NSF Terrorist occupying an airfield: "Nevermind, must've been a hobo."

[Ed Oscuro]

~Hoboes are eating our babies in the departure lounge~

Other random thought about Rage: According to the law of Bethesda, all games must use the same voice actors. It was weird to have Father Grigori selling me bullets (I think, I can't find a credit for the character but it sounds just like Jim French), but even weirder to have random Skyrim guards talking to me throughout the game, Paul Eiding as Redstone, and John Goodman as "Oh, he went away."

[konmai]

Persona 5
Easily the best combat in the series yet. One More with cherry on top, but unlike mainline, it didn't end up shooting itself in the dick with the new mechanics it introduced.

The dungeons have a high budget RPG feel to them. Visually impressive, filled with cutscenes and hand holdy as all fuck. I'll take the random generated mazes if that means I can play without getting interrupted constantly.

The bosses have their own gimmicks instead of being just bags of damage, a positive.

The biggest turnoff was all the cutscenes, texts and exposition. There were just so much of them and the skip function doesn't kill these off quickly enough. During town exploration you have NPC thoughts (texts) popping up in your face; Cooperations are pure reading and you want to get these up for the gameplay bonuses; your friends comment on every little thing in the dungeons, usually after taking the game's control from you; every time a new party member comes along you have to sit through the obligatory two-way introductions; and when you finally go home and ready to hit the bed you're dragged into their Skype chatroom. I'm certainly not allergic to reading but 80% of the shit being discussed isn't even worth wasting a cutscene on. It left a bad enough taste in my mouth that I haven't finished the game although I bought it 2 months ago.

Mary Skelter
Real time dungeons are one hell of a drug and the first couple areas were some of my most enjoyed times with a tile-based dungeon crawler yet. The game tapers off for a bit after that as it goes back to traditional, rigid mazes, but I'm still halfway through it. The balancing is a bit iffy, however. Classes' skill sets don't feel unique enough, and the distribution feels almost random with completely useless low-level skills and skills that other class trees already had. The Fighter tree has an insanely powerful and efficient skill that lets them shit out 4-5 times the usual damage and boss health are designed with this in mind, making them must-haves whether you like it or not. Both player and enemy sides hit pretty hard and the game has an interesting take on ultimate gauges (these can turn bad and screw you over), so battles last relatively quickly yet I don't find myself autoing too often. Surprisingly I'm also enjoying the story and characters although the hero, the heroine and the big titted girl with hair of an almost slutty shade of green can fuck right off any time.

Also to my surprise, the developer has been listening to feedback and rolling out patches regularly.

Overall it's a lot of neat concepts with a less than stellar but still decent execution (when it decides to execute them at all, that is, I just hope it didn't blow the whole load in the early areas because that would be tragic).

[Blinge]

Persona 5

The biggest turnoff was all the cutscenes, texts and exposition. There were just so much of them and the skip function doesn't kill these off quickly enough.

Hahah, You seem to have played the earlier entries? You knew what you were getting into surely..

[Squire Grooktook]

Trails In The Sky has so much story that a skip function isn't included, on the basis that if you aren't playing for the story, you really shouldn't be playing. A few less battles and it'd be a visual novel.

I'm okay with that when the story and character interactions are strong though. People can go on speeches about gameplay vs story or whatever, but at the end of the day games are about entertainment, and if a game entertains me through whatever means, that's fine by me.

Anyway on that subject, kinda not too interested in Persona 5 or SMT 4 Apocalypse right now. I kinda feel like I've gotten my fill of SMT right now, and the later installments are giving me a very heavy "jumped the shark" feel. Apocalypse's mechanics in particular seem a little too forgiving, and I feel like they're taking too much of the mystery out of the setting with certain revelations. IV was okay (had it's moments) but IMO Devil Survivor 1/Overclocked was the last really cool thing to come out of the franchise.

Besides, playing Undertale and Trails at the same time (connecting to the latter, failing to do so for the former) made me understand why I never felt the urge to replay P4 or finish P3: silent protagonists are fine for big picture, atmospheric types of games (SMT: Nocturne, Souls series, etc.) but when the goal of a game is to make me connect to a cast of characters, I feel like it just neuters the dialogue and character interactions when all the protag convo's are essentially one sided.

[soprano1]

Besides, playing Undertale and Trails at the same time (connecting to the latter, failing to do so for the former) made me understand why I never felt the urge to replay P4 or finish P3: silent protagonists are fine for big picture, atmospheric types of games (SMT: Nocturne, Souls series, etc.) but when the goal of a game is to make me connect to a cast of characters, I feel like it just neuters the dialogue and character interactions when all the protag convo's are essentially one sided.

This is why i love the Persona 4 anime, they made scenes around him saying the funny replies you can pick ingame.

[BulletMagnet]

Apocalypse's mechanics in particular seem a little too forgiving

Maybe it's just my rotten luck when it comes to anything random (just yesterday I tried an Oregon Trail-style indie game and just barely crawled across the first area's finish line on my last legs; according to the post-level rundown literally three-quarters of my dice rolls were negative outcomes), but when I played Apocalypse a little ways back I found myself getting screwed regularly and royally by misses and critical hits; I really wish those weren't also connected to the press turn system and thus also cost you an action when they don't go in your favor, it was annoying enough in Nocturne, which is otherwise one of my favorite RPGs.

[Sinful]

Trails In The Sky has so much story that a skip function isn't included, on the basis that if you aren't playing for the story, you really shouldn't be playing. A few less battles and it'd be a visual novel.

I'm okay with that when the story and character interactions are strong though. People can go on speeches about gameplay vs story or whatever, but at the end of the day games are about entertainment, and if a game entertains me through whatever means, that's fine by me.

I feel the same way, but the story in Trails in the Sky really did entertain for me personally.

[Mischief Maker]

Trails In The Sky has so much story that a skip function isn't included, on the basis that if you aren't playing for the story, you really shouldn't be playing. A few less battles and it'd be a visual novel.

Thank you for sharing that. I've been considering buying it for the longest time but now I know it's not my cup of tea.

[Blinge]

Can't remember if I asked chief, but is Etrian Odyssey your cuppa?

Ive been picking that up more lately, just reached B10.

[Leandro]

Hitman Absolution

[Sumez]

Can't remember if I asked chief, but is Etrian Odyssey your cuppa?

Ive been picking that up more lately, just reached B10.

Oh man! I love how that game evolves as you work your way towards the bottom. It's kind of cliche but it works really well.

[Mischief Maker]

Can't remember if I asked chief, but is Etrian Odyssey your cuppa?

Ive been picking that up more lately, just reached B10.

Part 3 is, yes. But for my money the AD&D Gold Box games were the pinnacle of CRPG gameplay.

[WelshMegalodon]

Is there still no physical Windows release of Trails?