whatchu playing now

you know the drill. post what you are currently playing. add whatever else you goddamn please ;-)

bioshock inf 2nd dlc - a bit of a let down, elizabeth's story is so muddled and confusing.
orcs must die - this game is pretty fun!

I (and, ostensibly, my girlfriend, who mostly only plays the pinball stuff I bought for her) just bought a PS3 a couple of months ago, which I'm completely new to aside from crashing helicopters into gas stations in GTA IV at my brother's. So I've been excitedly hoarding games, since this seems to be the sweet spot between when previous-gen system come way down in price and when they go out of print and skyrocket. But I'm trying to be restrictive in my playing so that I don't play eight million things at once and fail to fully appreciate the varied experiences.

Althought I was completely put-off by it at first (complicated tutorials maybe shouldn't take place in the middle of combat under cover of darkness), probably 75% of my game playing time of late has been devoted to Just Cause 2. So much addictive fun, and great for brief, post-work mayhem sessions. Strangely haven't read or heard a whole lot about it outside of ILG threads, so thanks for that, y'all. Prior to that, I was mostly sucked into Skyrim, which initially impressed and then subsequently overwhelmed me with its breadth. I mean, I'm level 25-ish and realized recently that I'd completed somewhere pretty far south of 10% of the core game, so it feels like a thing that could just go on forever. I'll return to it someday when I'm ready to really dig in.

Other stuff in my current rotation:
Fez (not hugely into platformers but I'm really digging it; music and design and use of color are aces)
Minecraft (kinda don't know exactly what to do with it yet, but it's cool to mess around with)
Arkham Asylum (not crazy about the combat, but maybe I'm just not used to it yet; the beginning of the Scarecrow encounter was amazing)
Where Is My Heart? (cute, cool concept, good for short bursts)
Portal (just started this...the rest of the Orange Box is backburnered for the time being)
Deadly Premonition (not terribly far into it; definitely bizarre as hell but I'm undecided just yet as to whether it's my kind of bizarre)
Prototype (love it to bits; I think I'm near the end so I've been sitting on it for a little while to prolong the love...although I do already have the sequel)
Resident Evil 3 (revisiting after 15 years; controls are for shit but I'm building up anticipation to RE4)
Walking Dead (only played the first episode thus far but it was great and I'm looking forward to more)

I also have a ton of stuff that I've played <15 minutes of (The Saboteur, Tomb Raider reboot, Marvel Ultimate Alliance) that I'm looking forward to jumping into more fully soon.

Kinda want to make a (sadly & ridiculously long) list of the stuff I've acquired and get recommendations of what to tackle next.

MPQ and GTA5, exclusively, for ages now. Very very reluctant to start a new game atm

rotation of dark souls 2 on ps3 and might & magic X and magic online on the laptop. nearly done with mmx and think i am going to finally play monaco. nearly done with ds2 but just going to keep playing it anyway.

diablo 3 on pc! oh nooo

I thought of something else I played recently: WSOP Full House Pro poker on xbla.

I am in a bad place. ;-)

GTA5 in the evenings, still searching for those hidden items
Or Lego City Undercover on occasions.

Any other time I struggle to find time or energy to play anything else right now, I'm trying to design and develop my own games and I find that a struggle in itself.

Games that I *should* be playing anyway...

Pinball FX, really really should fire this up more often
Rayman, not even installed this yet
Red Dead Redemption (still not bothered to attempt the final mission)
Fallout3, embarrassingly never finished this either
Fuel, after having to purchase new PS3 I'll have to start all over again.
Just Cause 2, dropped off the radar a bit, dip into every now and again to get that 100% status
Minecraft/FTB, my only reason for not playing this more often is its just too daunting. In terms of time wasting goes this is the mother of all. FTB packs have basically kicked this game into mind blowing status imo.

(With the exceptions of Pinball and Rayman you might notice a distinct pattern in the games I like)

picked up gta 5 again just to round off the epsilon missions. i was convinced there would be a big heist at the end of all of it, because ripping off the scientologists seemed to make sense and how else would i ever get the cash to buy the golf course etc. so the only one getting ripped off was me :( officially done with this game.

also just finished xcom enemy unknown which i loved to bits. besides it was just long enough to keep my interest through the whole thing.

not really sure what to go with next. ps+ gave me lots of options. i'll probably get going on tomb raider, as soon as i stop struggling to like pes2014.

dayZ and nothing but dayZ. the slow small little updates that come out every couple of weeks just make it that little bit more appealing every day. i try not to think that's there's no real goal or 'end' to it.

Dude, FRACT OSC is out. It's fun, but giving me a lot of flashbacks to Myst, due to heavy puzzles with occasional symbolic language hints. You're exploring this long abandoned machine world and you restoring operation to a giant synthesizer that you wander around in.

SMT4, the soundtrack for this game is so good, running around a post-apocalyptic Tokyo to synthy krautrock <3 http://youtu.be/SG_gB4kb2oA

Oh, FRACT sounds great, might have to grab that.

The only thing I'm playing at the moment is Letter Quest on my ipod. It's quite good but nothing mindblowing.

portal 2 (3rd time), ni no kuni, assassins creed 4, dork souls

FTL and could be on this for a while now that I feel like I finally understand how to play it

im obsessed

so many ships still to unlock and haven't even touched advanced mode...

I've been playing Kingdom Of Amalur, a game that apparently lost the taxpayers of Rhode Island $75m, recently. I kind of hate myself as it's another massive Skyrim-style time sink, but it's quite good fun.

what IS advanced mode

i havent even begun boarding as a tactic yet

sorry "advanced edition"

As a reminder, FTL: Advanced Edition is a free content expansion for FTL. All current (and future) customers will receive this update regardless of where they purchased it. Prior to release, we will post detailed instructions on how to get the update from whatever digital vendor you originally purchased FTL.

http://www.ftlgame.com/?page_id=106

New systems (clone bay??), new race, new ships, just lots more stuff, and it was released as a free sort of patch. It's a toggle option when you start a game, you can choose standard or advanced.

I've been playing Kingdom Of Amalur, a game that apparently lost the taxpayers of Rhode Island $75m
― Yuri Bashment (ShariVari), Thursday, April 24, 2014 3:45 PM

ah yes the curt schilling rpg

oh yeah i'm playing dragon's dogma. i've given up on it twice before so i'm determined to finish it this time. the controls are lacking but it has some of the best gfx i've seen in an rpg. makes dark souls 2 look like shit by comparison anyway.

http://cdn.destructoid.com//ul/266639-curt-shilling.jpg

dragon's dogma was good fun, at its best early before everything becomes too easy, so i encourage you to not progress the story at all until you have been everywhere. one of the best and most unique things it has are the giant wandering monsters that really felt like epic fights, at least until my gang quickly got OP'd. helps if you resist the temptation of the broken pawns that are available early.

infinity wars + starbound

helps if you resist the temptation of the broken pawns that are available early.
― Roberto Spiralli, Thursday, April 24, 2014 4:29 PM

what are the broken pawns. i've just been using the free low level ones and trading them in every so often. groups of bandits on the roads are still kicking my butt

i got one real early with an ordinary woman's name, Karen i am fairly sure, and her owner had limited her level but she had maxed-out, late game rare gear and was a total powerhouse

whatever the fighter class is. i got another midway thru with a more forgettable fantasyish name, also a female fighter.

Dammit, Fract really _is_ like myst. I can't find the symbolic to detangle the tune I'm supposed to play to solve the final puzzle in one of the areas.

Final Fantasy - NES
Assassin's Creed IV - PC
Pac-Man Championship Edition DX - PC
Castlevania: Rond of Blood - T16
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night - PSX
Metal Gear Solid - PSX
Metal Gear Rising Revengeance - PC
Metal Gear Solid 2 - PC

you livin' the life, Adam, respect

finished saints row 4
tried diablo 3 again - meh so spammy
maybe back to metro 2033

"Finished" Portal and Fez, loved both. Seems like there's still aftergame stuff for me to do, which is cool.

I'm a good way into the first God of War, and I can't be sure but I think I might kinda hate it. The brutal waves of super tough enemies are awesome, and some of the puzzles are pretty good, but creating Indiana Jones-esque deathtraps with a shitty camera and sketchy controls was the fucking worst idea ever. I've wasted so much of my playtime on failing to kill everything onscreen within a set time before falling to my death or being crushed or sliced up by shit that I can barely see in front of me that it's kinda become a chore for me to continue. I might just be hating the PS2-ness of it, though.

I've been surprisingly digging a lot of arcade-y stuff that I've gotten cheap from PSN recently. Super Stardust and Wipeout took me a little while to get used to but they're amazing once I'm in the zone. Just got Retro/Grade, which I haven't played much but which has an awesome conceit (basically a rhythm game disguised as a shooter that runs in reverse). The Space Invaders update also seems like good value.

This weekend, I hit 50% completion and the 100 hour mark near-simultaneously on Just Cause 2. Clearing a few areas in the game has become such a reliably perfect way to decompress at the end of the day.

kotor + bg2

getting myself psyched + ready for pillars of eternity i guess

xps I played GoW 1 for the first time... a year ago? Maybe two? Felt some of the same frustrations as you, but I'm still planning to truck on through to the others at some point. I can see how it all would've been far more impressive back in 2006, but some of those levels and dungeons are awfully designed.

What build you going for in KOTOR, Mordy?

i guess soldier guardian. tbh i'm kinda more interested in my bg2 half-elf cleric/ranger build (so OP apparently it's ppl's fave for soloing the game). (thought about playing a wild mage too.)

Streets of Rage 3
Bare Knuckle III

So BKIII is the Japanese version of SOR3 and it is WAY easier. This does not mean it is easy though, it only means it is possible to get through stage 1 without using a continue. American version of Streets of Rage 3 is one of the more difficult games I've ever played.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VWsJPJ19DA

That level with the bulldozer is all-time unfair.

all that and he's beat by a girder

i love the energy meter for 'wall'.

i guess i only played Streets of Rage 1 & 2.

man why doesn't axel just jump over the damn walls

sor3 is weird. it seems like it admits to tactics then it doesn't really.

I think after you get past the stage where you are fighting kangaroos and evil dominatrix clowns they just figured they could get away w that.

Played 2-player Hyperstone Heist for the Genesis last night. Got to Super Shredder and then we died and we were out of continues! The music in that game is incredible. Orchestrated speed metal.

i'm still playing bg2.

eu4 always with the eu4. genovese colonial empire.

wish i could get into eu. each time i load it up there are like 300 tutorials

if it helps you still won't know what the fuck is going on if you sit thru the tutorials

Sadly not as into Mirror's Edge as I'd hoped (hinges way too much on barely-disguised quick time events, which fuck that). Surprisingly way more into the first Metal Gear Solid than I expected (tough but mostly fair, cutscenes and dialogue that are reasonably well-written and not totally perfunctory, generous with the game saving, and the controls and camera, while occasionally obnoxious, are better than those on a lot of the PS2 games I've played). I still haven't been able to get past the first boss yet, though, so we'll see how long my admiration lasts.

is there some kind of amazing online tutorial that will teach me how to play?

there is a lot of user and wiki content so possibly but i'm not aware of anything myself. i think you just need to start playing it with the expectation that you won't know what you're doing for a long time. start with france: raise a big army and start some beef. you can go a long way with them without having to worry about some of the more arcane stuff for a while and you will pick up a good foundation in manpower/supply, tech advancement, diplomacy, religion. you can dip your toe into trade and colonies if you want but you'll still be able to do plenty without. and you'll have the immediate objective of unifying france to get your teeth into, which definitely helps the transition into the sandbox. you'll always have something to do with them and that is certainly not always the case elsewhere.

have any of you played crusader kings 2 and can you take the same approach there? tried to get into it but get caught up on figuring out how levies work and what a demesne is and somehow the game had me entering into an affair with my own wife

ftl

Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow
Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance

Aria of Sorrow is incredible. Are the GBA Metroids this good?

Harmony is cool too, if only because the lead character is dressed like anime Santa Claus.

I remember the GBA Metroid I played being awesome

this is gonna make me sound like a crazy person but i've gotten into watching lets-plays of EU4 and i don't even own a PC. they're weirdly soothing?

any you'd recommend? esp for newbs?

there's a youtuber by the name of shenryyr2 who i gather is some kind of god at it. he doesn't really do tutorials but a lot of the rhythm of it comes out via osmosis.

my general sense is it's just not a 'for newbs' game, you just kind of have to keep jumping in at the deep end until it clicks

jeez, just had a click around that guy's YT, he is nutso. if i had infinite hours i would watch the lot. but yeah, as a learning experience you probably already need a foundation to get anything from someone like this.

Aria of Sorrow is incredible. Are the GBA Metroids this good?

yeah he's also endearingly/annoyingly ignorant of actual history & geography

i just wanted some cool flowing graphics of a map shifting slowly over time while i did other shit.

xp

*checks england ca. 1650* "a republic? england went republic? wtf, that makes no sense"

was that cromwell? idk I'm too lazy to wiki at the minute

metro: last light
had no idea the wolfenstein remake is more then just "lol nostalgia", preview trailer got me intersted

xp yeah

just finished back to the future telltale game, it was pretty fun, but if it hadn't been for walking dead s1 i dunno if i would've had the patience. now i am trying to play sam & max penal zone and it is next-level inscrutable adv game :(

Did any of you happen to see this week's Steven Universe where Steven gets obssessed with this epic Pokemon/Final Fantasy-style Mini Golf RPG? Man, I would love for that to actually exist.

no but that sounds great. i also love the SU where garnet becomes transfixed with the meat beat mania arcade game

hah, that was great too!

ftl

Played a little "Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia" yesterday and holy crap am I addicted to these Castlevania games...

I got stuck on the second DS game and never moved onto that one

Fuckin' boulder, I hate you

been playing the tomb raider game from last year and goddamn, this is the metal gear solid game i wanted instead of guns of the patriots

solo castle crashers insane mode, the endless air comboing has a meditative appeal despite zero margin for error

Risk of Rain

In what I'm sure is news to no one, Portal 2 is an absolute delight. We'll see if my GF agrees if I manage to convince her to try out co-op mode.

yeah the second act of portal 2 where you're climbing your way out of the old laboratory is one of the best gaming experiences ever imo

Warning: the co-op puzzles are a little harder (and generally, way better) than the single player story puzzles. Also lacks most of the charm that story has, but that's an easily forgivable sin.

Ya know what, I forgot about the robot hi-fives. Maybe not.

That is, it's still pretty damn charming.

played co-op with my gf at the time and i was so bad at it that i cried tears of frustration and embarrassment and she was really horrible to me in front of her friends lmao

Well, at least there's no chance of that, thankfully. The scant time she's spent on anything FPS-ish has been mostly about trying to figure out why she can only see the ceiling as she's running into walls.

I just got to the deep, deep underground part of the game last night and was a little wary about whether it was going to still hold my interest now that I'm no longer in the testing chambers. I'm glad to hear it stays awesome.

Oh, and I was wondering if it was a stupid decision to buy it from the PS store (seeing as how I'm rapidly running out of space on my PS3) but I seem to be avoiding the ridiculous load times that I've heard people complain about, which I'm sure only enhances my joy.

Peggle 2 (360) is more of the same with slightly better presentation, but... that's pretty much what I wanted.

ftl

FTL is a semi-permanent rotation for me - gets fired up every week or so for a few quick games.

Anyone got Watch Dogs yet? Picked it up last night, but I'm trying to force myself to finish the last few levels of COD: Ghosts before I move onto it (though, based on the rest of the game, the last few missions should take ~10 minutes).

In other 'whatchu playing' news I'm 4 dungeons into A Link Between Worlds, a few hours into Dragonfall, and barely touched Child of Light (which is very pretty, but mostly boring so far).

i am playing the banner saga, ty ilx

Played the new Wolfenstein the other day on PS3, and it was really really great! Old school shooting fun w minimal (and really well-done) QTE cutscene storyline stuff sprinkled in.

I watched about an hour or two of someone playing Watch Dogs last night, and it also looked cool. A lot like Assassin's Creed 4 minus all the piratey stuff (well I guess you are still a pirate but you use a phone instead of a pirate ship).

I just bought watch dogs on a whim because I needed a new ps + 12 month card and target was giving you $25 off if you bought both.

i am enjoying wash dogs so far. not as good at sleepy dogs but better than gta5. the fake dark souls multiplayer is really fun.

i mean it's fucking broken and stupid like every other ubisoft game and the writing is garbage and the driving is bad, but it's fun.

ha thats what i suspected. bought it but haven't gotten to it yet, hoping it'll get at least 1 patch beforehand.

Get used to seeing a lot of "please wait while we connect you to the ubisoft servers" in a row

ftl

there's a youtuber by the name of shenryyr2 who i gather is some kind of god at it. he doesn't really do tutorials but a lot of the rhythm of it comes out via osmosis.

my general sense is it's just not a 'for newbs' game, you just kind of have to keep jumping in at the deep end until it clicks

― goole, Friday, May 16, 2014 6:46 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

dude will post 90 part videos that god knows only who watches the entirety of.

Ive sunk like 600 hours into eu4/ck2 and sometimes the best way to learn is to fail. They also just released a new patch with new mechanics so some of the lets plays are outdated..

that being said quill18 has some decent lets plays and he does a good job explaining stuff.

I was playing Assassin's Creed 4: You're a Pirate Now which was ok but not great in the same way Assassin's Creed 2: European Vacation was, I don't really know why I bought it when I wasn't in love with AC2, guess I just want to be a pirate. Then my sister got me The Last of Us for my bday so I've been playing that for a couple of weeks but am still not very far in bc of real life.

Speaking of quill18, have any of you guys played Banished? I've been checking it out a bit. Very cool. Apparently it was made by one person, which is insane.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gAXcREfjbQ&index=2&list=PLs3acGYgI1-vZpczu2p5qMXfUWFtg29py

just tried dead island epidemic, not for me but it looks nice

battleheart legacy
really really good

Dragonball Z Budokai HD Collection. I don't know wh-KAMEKAMEHAAAAAAAAA

Super Time Force. Anyone else?

PS3/PS4 player looking to zone out on a new game this weekend, any recs guys? I like violent action games with RPG elements or violent RPGs with action elements.

New Wolfenstein? Watch Dogs? something else? doesn't have to be new.

did u play tomb raider yet?

banished looks cool but from the videos I saw there doesnt seem enough narrative or story other than hard core city micromanagement

since the xbone is a total brick I never use (bf4 lol) all I play these days is dota (I am ashamed) and eu4/ck2

There is zero story. It's pure management, and pretty hardcore.

has anyone been playing the telltale fables game, wolf among us or w/e it's called?

Yeah I just need a little bit and I can fill in the background stuff in mah brain like I do with eu4 or xcom.

I love that I asked this question in the general thread and in the PS3 thread and the takeaway rec from the general thread is a game about caring for hungry villagers and the takeaway rec from the PS3 thread is a game about stabbing nazi cyborgs in the balls

Prison Architect. Very fun little game.

Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin

The Egypt level is AMAZING! Rondo of Bloodlines.

That goddamn boulder.

I actually spent a week and 1000/1000'd DBZ Budokai HD Collection (yup, both games). Life is pretty dark right now, but hearing Vegeta scream "I am the PRINCE OF ALL SAIYANS... DEFEATED by a CLOWN!" still makes me laugh.

Wolfenstein is kinda of blah early on, i regret paying full price. A lot of pretty cinematics but the gameplay is pretty stale. could be b/c i played through both metro titles so i'm finally getting fps fatigue.
just started fallen enchantress: legendary heroes - which is an incredibly nerdy title but seems promising
+mario kart 8 obv

ftl

still playing bg2. also did a quick playthrough of hammerwatch.

f117a stealth fighter off GOG. playable w/ 360 controller, includes a pdf of the old-school microprose keyboard reference card, fuck your libyan sam sites

holy shit i remember that game

this game "fallen enchantress: legendary heroes" had me nostalgic over Warlords II.
http://www.myabandonware.com/media/captures/W/warlords-ii/warlords-ii_11.gif

just remembered i grabbed curt schilling's rpg for $5 during that psn flash sale but haven't installed it

this game "fallen enchantress: legendary heroes" had me nostalgic over Warlords II.

Thank you for this!!! I used to LOVE Warlords II, gotta check out this other game.

I'm still going through Portrait of Sorrow for the DS, it's still really fun but I'm at the end of the game just doing random sidequests.

Dawn of Sorrow seems promising, but it suffers from bad level design. LOTS of backtracking and often through large areas that, once you've killed the monsters in it, are just empty wastes of time. I don't think that stuff is fun, walking through a giant empty room you've been in 3 times in the last 15 minutes.

Right now I'm playing New Super Mario Bros., and it is AMAZE. This is where all the cool modern 2.5D Mario b stuff came from. It has a very SMB3/Super Mario World feel to it, which is lots of fun.

You wonder what kind of Castlevania they could have done if they followed through from the New Super Mario Bros. -> New Super Mario Bros. Wii formula. An HD 3D/2.5D big budget console NSMBW-style sequel to Order of Ecclesia would be great.

ftl

FTL is fuckin' hard. Have you finished it? I've made it to the boss on easy mode, still got my ass handed to me. On normal mode I can make it to sector 7 or something.

my secret shame is that i played FTL for a few weeks and never beat the boss. i'm terrible.

my open pride is that i'm play Dragon Quest VIII, finally! my secret shame is that i'm playing it on ipad.

i beat ftl on normal. tried to beat it on hardcore a few times when the new edition came out but it was so hard i gave up.

The great thing about the game is that the difficulty is never discouraging, probably in the way that people who play video lottery terminals or slot machines always feel like "Next time, I'll get my lucky numbers."

FTL is fuckin' hard. Have you finished it? I've made it to the boss on easy mode, still got my ass handed to me. On normal mode I can make it to sector 7 or something.

― fields of salmon, Friday, June 13, 2014 5:15 PM (57 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

a few times, on normal (never tried easy)

working my way through to unlock all the ships. its a great challenge

thing is beating it with one ship/race is a completely different game than any other

i found the difficulty plenty discouraging after enough time, couldn't even beat it on easy

it gets better

nearly threw my ipad out the window when I finally won a fight with the boss ship and it turned that you pretty much immediately have to do it all AGAIN, soooo frustrating. great game though

One of the things I liked most about "New Super Mario Bros." is the music. I really enjoyed the New games for Wii and Wii U but felt that the music was kinda off and in some instances really distracting and wrong. NSMB has a much smaller sonic palette to deal with, and the result is more stripped-down arrangements that usually include a lead square wave or old school chiptune sample.

metal gear solid v - ground zeroes

nearly threw my ipad out the window when I finally won a fight with the boss ship and it turned that you pretty much immediately have to do it all AGAIN, soooo frustrating. great game though

― Windsor Davies, Saturday, June 14, 2014 7:33 AM (10 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the boss level could be better thought-out. sometimes you're just fucked because of the way the repair planets are randomly located.

it felt rushed, or like it needed another endgame

it's not quite the case that it requires an ascension kit but it's not far off -- certainly one finds oneself box-ticking from the first sector or two after a while. tbf that while is "after twenty hours of playtime."

i still haven't played the expansion.

it would be fun if it had an infinite mode, maybe. maybe that would be horribly anti-fun. i don't know.

like the ideal ftl style game that exists in my head, i guess, would

i. take place on a square map rather than a linear one
ii. have some things you could to which would affect the overall status of the game world directly
ii.a. like, side x or side y makes gains in the war, takes over more systems
iii. have some allegiance/reputation stats that opened up new game options, an endgame that wasn't win/lose

also (and i think kind of necessary to the above) i think it would need to have encounter options that say things like "fire on the ship? (70% success rate (lasers level 3))" rather than being an exercise in metagaming/memorization

so basically yeah i'd like a whole other game with the same interface

Was gonna try Final Fantasy X again, but could only handle literally a minute of the voice acting. I need to find the Japanese language version...

i wish i hadn't spent ten minutes thinking about those two posts because it made me start playing ftl again

ftl

for the loss

exactly

getting ready for my first go at Surgeon Simulator 2013

i expect perfect realism and precise controls

lol @ ftl discussion, thomp otm the battle interface is what i've been craving since um star fleet 2: krellan commander (library sale), and depressurizing sections of my ship (let alone having reasons to do it!) scratched the deepest itch possible but idk about choose-your-own-adventure roguelike, as a genre; idk if what rogue needed was to simplify. windsor davies describes exactly what i'm pretty sure was the last time i played it. i couldn't believe they did that.

still it was a model kickstarter game iirc and so it prob spent its money right; maybe someone will pay them now to make the game thomp describes.

ftl

diplomacy online

super mario 3ds or w/e this is game called. it's awesome!

I wish the FTL developers would try their hand at a roguelike homage to Final Fantasy Tactics...

playing Trails In The Sky, pleasant enough but blah blah blah do they talk a lot in this game, having Golden Sun flashbacks

spent an hour or two playing space hulk. its sort of amusingly not a videogame

Spent a few hours playing Rogue Legacy yesterday after buying it for seven cents or something on Steam. Pretty fun game, kinda Wonder Boy + Castlevania + Dark Souls. I have made zero progress so far.

Rogue Legacy is awesome, and I keep meaning to go back to it once I get a new USB gamepad. Playing it on keyboard was kind of a bummer, because so much fun but difficult to control.

the controls are better on pad, but it's still pretty wobbly. i need to get back to that game too

has anyone played tactical rpg roguelike 'steam marines'

i want to play something that is like space hulk but is actually a videogame

i'll bite: why is space hulk not a videogame

it's kind of a sim of a tabletop rpg right? that's SORT OF a video game.

well there's ios/pc/console version galore

i would play the fuck out of a proper sim of warhammer 40k

i mean i don't think that chess against a computer is a videogame either

How about a traditional war game like battle of the bulge which could easily exist as a physical game but only exists as a video game? Is the criteria that a game must do things that can't be done on a physical board or that it can't have been a physical game first?

in other news dayum it's fun buying a million games on steam that you may or may not play but cost as much as a subway token so who cares

i've never played battle of the bulge so

how familiar are you with space hulk the board game? it's full of things that are highly elegant solutions to the problems of limited resources that come with the medium (one side has unlimited units but these are represented with cheap paper counters until they are in line of sight at which point they are replaced with models; the board is made of various sections which are re-assembled for each mission; the different kinds of attack all roll d6 but in different ways) but which in a videogame feel counterintuitive

i suspect that if given the resources to play a paper-only simulation of fire emblem: the sacred stones or ufo:enemy unknown (i picture two hardbound volumes, one being a decision tree and one a compendium of random numbers) i would feel comfortable complaining that it was 'not a board game'

xpost i just bought nidhogg and steam marines /:

i feel like a lot of avalon hill games would work better digitally than w/ 300-page rulebooks.

anyway, challops ahead but i think we should be able to vote for non-video games in coint + plick bc all games are games, man, no matter the medium let me vote for jane mcgonical ARG next to monopoly philadelphia next to hopscotch next to halo 17 plz.

Because our results aren't esoteric enough

is neverwinter nights not a video game because it's based on d&d??

if apples to apples wins the goddamn coint + plick poll i will seriously be fucking furious, i hate that game, and i while i can respect people who enjoy playing it i also hate people who somehow rate it as their favorite game of all time. like this is what someone would choose to do, play this terrible fucking game where people can say witty things and people can choose interesting cards and people can choose a nasty combination, but no, THIS person will be chosen as the best player for this round because they chose "Keanu Reeves" (paired with something unrelated like "a fine wine is like...") and that simply MUST be the winner because hahaha they have a thing with Keanu, and meanwhile, this dude across the table just pulled a Shakespeare on the table but won't be rewarded because everyone's draaaaaanking tonight.

GOD FUCK THAT GAME, and in conclusion if people are dumb enough to love that game and play it on purpose than maybe physical board games shouldn't be included. i admit it's possible i could be overreacting

i was at a bar last week and there were 2 girls playing cards against humanity against each other

cards against humanity is the mother fucking worst

like i don't really like mardi gras b/c it feels like Mandatory Fun. does that make sense? i don't like cards against humanity b/c it is Mandatory Edginess?

kill that 2nd ? as that is an assertion

You guys sound like the people in that Scientology thread.

Marvel: Ultimate Alliance (2006). Follow up to the two X-Men Legends games by Raven I didn't play. Fun console Diablo-lite with atrocious voice acting and lots of fan service. Wish the online wasn't dead and hope they follow it up with a sequel someday, but I think the developer is locked into making Skylanders games for the foreseeable future.

I actually bought Ultimate Alliance 2 used yesterday for local co-op and it was more fun than the first one until a really buggy, awkward boss fight

annoying as hell that they artificially sectioned off loads of major playable characters as DLC you can no longer buy because Activision no longer has the rights; think that puts paid to a straight sequel but why nobody with the license has managed to make a next gen game that basically does the same thing is beyond me

MUA 1 has the same problem, there are eight DLC-locked characters that are totally unaccessible now unless you buy an OOP "Gold" reprint for like $80 on eBay (hells to the no). Not only that, there were common annoying bugs that prevented characters from unlocking properly, so for I was never able to select Doctor Strange and Ghost Rider after their storyline missions. So like half the characters were unplayable for me.

I heard there was no sequel because MUA 2 didn't do well, which doesn't surprise me since it was the fourth game in the series and it seems like they didn't put much effort into upgrading the engine since the PS2 days. That said, I should try those LEGO games, they seem similar though more simplified.

Have played about half of Lego Marvel on PS4 and it's fun but the formula gets old p fast - combat's not really as satisfying as the co-op puzzling, whereas having Storm bounce lightning off Wolverine's claws to obliterate a room of guys in MUA2 is a lot of fun

ftl

finished Trails In The Sky, decent enough story but far too easy and the battle system only gets good in the last few hours.
started and finished both Proteus and Ikachan today, took less time than a Kojima cutscene. lol short games.
can't decide between Jeanne D'Arc and FFT Advance next.

FFT Advance is good fun stuff, but you know, 50-100+ hours if you're gonna do it all. Also none of the complex plot or gravitas of the original but more efficient streamlining of the general mechanics. It convinced me that the RPG-TBS genre is absolutely perfect for handheld gaming.

yeh i want a long game to play on & off during TdF, i like SRPGs but have never got round to FFTA. find the prospect of digging out my GBA from storage more daunting tbh!

if you beat ffta and wanna keep scratching that tbs=rpg itch, the tactics ogre game on there is great too... far less streamlined tho

I have put 30-35 hours into Fire Emblem and it has been almost as much of a joy to me as FFT was all those years ago, with the added bonus that I care more about the characters and want to marry them off.

I suspect I will be done with this in 10-20 more hours. Would love to play Bravely Default next but that cover art is embarrassing or creepy for man of my age to be buying. If the NA release had the EU cover I would have been fine with it.

has ANYONE beat ftl with the mantis ship(s) particularly the one with NO WEAPONS?!?!?

is that the one w/ the 4-man transporter room? bc if so, yes, and it's one of my favorite ships (and i think i played it pretty exclusively until i unlocked the crystal ship w/ the 4-person transporter)

yeah!

i've been playing it for a while and have gotten SO close... but tbh i find with the boss level luck just plays way too much of a factor, you can go in strong but have no access to repairs etc bcz of the layout

if you put the right ascension kit together (transporter, ion weapons, cloaking device, missile drone defense I, etc) you won't need repairs against the boss

you know i never eff with cloaking device, largely because its so expensive. what's your strategy for that?

generally pop it whenever you're about to take dmg you can't prevent, but during the boss fight in particular you want to get it on cycle to trigger right before that super drone attack or the super weapon attack that they send. essentially you need to dodge direct damage until you've disabled the individual weapon rooms by teleporting into each one, killing the operator manning the particular weapon, and then destroying it. if you kill everyone on the ship, it'll start to auto-repair which isn't good for you, but if you leave even one guy alive you can disable all the systems and he'll run around like an idiot trying to fix them (and he can't even get into the weapon rooms bc they're separated from the ship proper).

aw, yeah, i just came up with the teleport into weapon room strategy myself two days ago and then got totally owned by the auto-repair! good advice.

I've been playing the premium beta of Elite: Dangerous, [featured today in the New Yorker](http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2014/07/the-video-game-that-maps-the-galaxy.html). The standard beta (at a more reasonable £50/$75) starts 29 June.

Even with rather restricted universe/ships/playstyles compared to the full game, E:D is pretty glorious, particularly with respect to sound design. Full game late in 2014, and a Mac version in early 2015.

Say hi should you run into Cmdr Sanpaku.

it looks amazing. i'll def give it a try in 2015

I do like the look of Elite. I loved playing it and Frontier back in the day, though I think I spent most of my time practising the manual docking and generally being a trader rather than a fighter. I'm not willing to take the plunge on it until the price is down though - I don't think I'll get on well with it if it's too online-oriented and just full of trolls blowing me to pieces every time just trying to make some cash on a trading run (or, as some previews have suggested, it's crazy difficult to get started with *just* trading).

On the FTL topic, I feel like I've got to be missing something. I really enjoy it, but boy am I terrible at it. Like, I never have any cash beyond repairing my ship and stocking up on a few more missiles. Guess I should read up some basic strategies - I've only made it to the end a few times, and never completed it.

Since I last posted in here asking if anyone was playing Watch Dogs, I have (all PS4): completed Watch Dogs, Stick it to the Man, Murdered: Soul Suspect (in a single day with my wife's help), given up on Child of Light half way through as I'm just not feeling it, and bought Wolfenstein to tide me over until the Last Of Us is released.

Haven't started Wolfenstein yet, but between that, Pixeljunk Shooter Ultimate and Tower-game (can't mind it's name - the PS+ freebie) I think that'll be my gaming for July.

Spent a good chunk yesterday replaying Bastion in New Game+ mode to finish out the achievements and see the other ending. Still love the music, art, narration, story and general feel of the game, it's just too bad the gameplay was not fully realized and tuned up. They went a long way though - the difficulty idols you unlock near the end of the first playthrough make it a lot more interesting and rewarding, and all the weapons feel better when fully powered up (for example, heat-seeking Calamity Cannon). I still have to check out Transistor at some point.

man you played and replayed something of which your final judgement is tgat the gameplay is not there?

The gameplay was like 50% there, but the way it was rolled out was weird. New Game+ made a lot more sense for this because everything was unlocked from the get go - the first time through you're getting a new weapon/secret skill every level, all the way to the end! So you don't even really get a chance to play with all the toys. But the best stuff in Bastion is from everything else I mentioned, which made it easy to go through again. Also, the game can be beaten in about six hours or so.

NBA 2K14. 80 games in a season (and that's before the playoffs), but I'll be damned if I miss out on any VC points, so I'm playing every game at the full 48 minutes (well, whatever minutes I get as a starter and depending if OTs happen). I'm not sure I should be playing these games, health-wise.

finally got into diablo 3 on the 3rd try
watch dogs is just not fun :<

Red Faction: Guerrilla. Holy shit, why isn't "total environmental destruction" an entire genre of games?

space asshoooooooole

- heroes of the revolution (indie schmindy wargame where you play castro and his incompetent merrymen on their journey to own the means of producing cigars. i actually really like this game but i SUCK. i can't even manage to make it more than 10-15 turns in. i imagine the more talented ILGers would be able to handle it without a problem and would probably enjoy it.)
- SimCity (i am the mayor of the dimension 77 region, and i am having a grand ol' time. now that it's the year after the debacle launch, there are no server issues, and i'm enjoying it. it's a streamlined simcity experience, kind of the civilization revolution to a regular civ game.)

I played a bit of Super Hexagon today. It's funny, during all three sessions during which I tried it, I eventually reached a point, about 15 minutes in, where my brain began confusing figure and ground, taking the three lighter triangles fanning out from the hexagon for objects in the foreground, and then I'd just die immediately. Maybe it's visual overload or something -- my brain can only keep these crazy fluctuating shapes sorted for so long.

i def think one of the skills you need to train to progress in it is focus/attentiveness over longish periods of time

I never did understand how you got so good at it

i never even beat the first stage

I can just narrowly beat (i.e. survive 60 seconds) Hexagon on normal mode. You sort of figure out how to manage the different gauntlets, but I'm still really bad at dealing with a succession of square three-sided boxes.

I played through VVVVVV on the weekend too, which was incredible fun. I died literally ~700 times getting the "Veni Vidi Vici" trinket. There's a screen just before it that I thought was so clever. You need to get onto a conveyor belt which shoots you off very quickly. Upon falling off, your normal Mario-honed instinct is to quickly reverse direction to land on one of the platforms 'above' it (gravity is pulling you upwards here). But the platforms above are set up so that sudden reverses will just land you further away. The only way not to fall further back is to fight the instinct to reverse direction and just 'go limp', basically. As an obstacle there isn't much to it, but I thought it was a really cool wink at the player.

is the veni didi vici one w/ the multiple rooms you basically fly thru that are covered in spikes?

yeah, probably the hardest sequence in the game
man, that game was so great. i should go back and finish it.

SimCity (2013): i hate playing with other people in a region. if i ever play it again, i will only play the single player mode. although a lot of people hated the big changes for this version of the game - having several small cities within a region that can share services and affect each other in various ways - i actually like the concept. and when i first created my region i enjoyed a couple blissful days (irl) where it was just me in the region, working on two separate cities. i made the first one a shitty overpolluted city that specialized in energy production and mining, and the second a city that focused more on entertainment, culture and tourism. because i am perpetually nervous and overcontrolling when i play simcity, my progress is generally very slow because i constantly pause the game. as a result it generally takes me several hours of playing to even get the population up to 15,000. i like my nervous, crawling pace.

the other day, just before i closed the game and went to bed, a stranger joined my region and started working on one of the 3 empty plots of land. "hello" they said. "hello" i said. i went to bed.

when i loaded up my main city the next day, a wave of announcements greeted me - "City X has built Y which unlocks Z for you", "City X has given you a gift of 200,000 simoleons", City X has done everything possible in the game while you were sleeping and is now enjoying a cigarette after sex". i guess some people would be happy that some stranger invaded their digital world and suddenly made everything very easy. but i actually enjoy the long slog through the game, trying to balance industries and zoning, saving up forever to finally build the soccer stadium. i guess i could have gifted back the 200,000 simoleons and just ignored the unlocked buildings/services and rejected the free police/trash/health/water services that the intruder volunteered to me, but instead i just closed the game for good. part of the joy to SimCity (to me) is just having full control, and being forced to relinquish that control sucks. i can imagine a scenario where a stranger joins your region and it's fun, but it would have to be someone else who plays at a turtle pace like i do, instead of lil' doogie howser or whoever the fuck ruined my region ("DIMENSION 77")

currently downloading baldur's gate II on iPad

so does it work now?

god i hope so. haven't started yet

sorry i meant simcity, not bg2. last i heard it was super buggy?

oh yeah, it works just fine! i'm not sure about bugs, but i think the main complaints were that people were having problems connecting to servers and being unable to play. i had no problems with that, either because they somehow addressed the issues via updates or just because not as many people are playing now as on launch day

cave story. bloody hell, this game is ten years old

timeless classic tbf

wasteland 2! they did a pretty strong job of nailing what people want from an old school rpg vibe. I sunk like 8 hours into it over the weekend.

huh, tgat came out?

cave story is like a seven out of ten experience, given the benefit of hindsight

Playing through MGS3: Subsistence on PCSX2. I've played through 1 and 2 and am a huge fan, so I'm willing to put up with slow framerate (pretty much crawling during swamp scenes) to see this thing through. I've just beaten The Pain (and that was a fun boss fight! haha bees you can't catch me I'm in the water!) and made it through some pitch-black dark caves using thermal goggles to spot snakes and craps and bats and other creepy crawlies. So far I think this might be my favorite MGS. LOVE Major Tom/Zero's accent, and all the blatant 007 references. LOVE Ocelot's ridiculous "meow" battle cry. LOVE crawling through grass, keeping an eye on distant guards when HOLYSHITAKINGCOBRAJUSTCRAWLEDEIGHTINFRONTOFMEEEEE

love that game so much. snake will wear whatever outfit and camo u put him in during cutscenes. in my case the entire like 45 minute ending sequence happened w/ homeboy in kabuki makeup, he looked great

Cracked open an old unopened copy of Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga. Very very boring, and especially disappointing compared to Marvel: Ultimate Alliance. I can usually wring the fun out of games aimed at children, but this was too banal. Surprised because these games generally seem to have a good rep?

every year a lego game shows up in coint and plick and i download some demo and give it a shot. i don't get it. they're probably more fun as multiplayer games, but as a single-player experience ehhh

Yeah, exactly

picked up shadow of mordor, put a few hours into it last night. arkham combat, AC tower-scaling map-revealing, and a neat named-enemy system with randomly generated elites with particular strengths and weaknesses.

stalking and killing those dudes is probably the closest i've seen a game come to the promise of the originial assassin's creed, like following a guy and figuring out what he's up to and striking at that opportune moment.

also they remember previous interactions w/ the player so if you, say, burn one and he gets away, next time you see him he'll be bandaged or scarred and he'll bitch about it, or if you ran away earlier he'll fuck w you, etc. idk if that'll get repetitive or what but it's entertaining rn.

i think monolith are the great unsung developers of the last 15 years or so: blood, shogo mobile armor division, no one lives forever, FEAR. all excellent games, particularly shogo.

My copy's in the post - really looking forward to getting stuck in to it. The enemy system sounds really fascinating, and hopefully the combat with scratch that Arkham itch until the next game comes out.

In the meantime, Velocity 2X has been way more compelling than I expected.

yeah this SoM sounds really fun, it's going on my list for 2015.

sounds interesting... definitely will consider for when I jump to next gen

i thought while i was playing last night, "jordan would be into this game"

sounds cool except "arkham combat"

madness, arkham combat is THE BEST

+1 for "meh" on that but i am still gonna get this game at some point

huh this
http://www.polygon.com/2014/10/1/6880061/shadow-mordor-kissing-design

belongs in eukaryote thread

hahah it was Zach Gage!!

We don’t kiss our loved ones in the same way we kill our enemies, games should know that.

clearly not been to any of my dinner parties

look at the Transformers movies. No matter how you feel about those movies, it’s very clear that Michael Bay understands cinematographic technique very well. He uses every single tool he has available to him to make you feel a certain way, and it’s effective.

wut

Alien: Isolation is fucking terrifying.

I played 15 minutes at the Eurogamer show last week and yes, it was fucking terrifying. But I couldn't imagine that being sustained over a 10 hour campaign?

I'm a couple of hours in and one of those hours was mostly Alien-free, so it's hard to say how well it'll hold up over the campaign. So far, though, it's been an impressive battle of wits with the creature and I'm starting to get a better handle on how to use crafting items to direct its attention. There's also been more variety than I was expecting in the form of interactions with androids and other survivors (both fucking terrifying too in different ways).

We'll see how it goes but so far it's been my favourite gaming experience of the year. It's even caught the attention of my videogame-agnostic wife - it's the only game she's ever asked to watch me play.

Yeah I downloaded it from Steam yesterday. It captures the look of the movies perfectly. Haven't even encountered the alien yet and it's already nerve-wracking.

Ok this game is genuinely scary (especially with headphones). When I finally ran into the alien I screamed like a baby.

I want to play FFXIII but I don't have 120GB free on my HD!

60 for the install package and 60 more for unpacking? LOL. How many hours/days of pre-rendered cutscenes are there on it?

alien keep eating me :/

ftl

j/k im playing shadow of mordor

how is it?

i don't know what to make of it. it looks rly good, controls/mechanics have some familiarity w/ assassins creed and combat is arkham style as mentioned. i still feel that kind of combat is way too button-mashing to ever really give a full sense of control over whats going on (dark souls or gtfo). i don't like the batman games but this is pretty fun, i haven't done any missions just wandered around killing uruks and getting killed a lot. the nemesis system is next-level but i don't quite get some aspects of it. one captain came back like 10 times after being killed so i guess they regenerate like the player does???

i think they are alive until you decapitate them. i dunno what prompts the decapitation vs whatever else. the orc politics are the best part of that game, the story missions are fuckin trash, i think there is dope stuff later on but every time i do a story mission i end up quitting out and playing alien instead.

i really enjoy shadow of mordor i just wish they had been ballsy enough to jettison all the tedious AC-style shit and let us just go populous 2 on orc military society

ps play alien it owns so far

so much forza. i need to quit really :/

i thought while i was playing last night, "jordan would be into this game"

hahaha. i watched a friend play it on a projector the other night, good clean fun.

i really wanna play Alien and Evil Within. wonder if i should wait until i spring for a PS4 next year sometime. also the same friend lent me his PS3 + Demon's Souls, so i can finally play that before Bloodborne.

i'm back on pacman championship dx and getting deeeeeep in it

reminds me a lot of the time i put in with gran turismo back in the day, finding the right line, shaving off seconds, unlocking new areas

A new 3DS XL and the most recent Zelda are in the mail, so I'll be tackling that soon. Also I got back into Card Hunter for some reason.

Pacman Championship DX is amazing!

i really enjoy shadow of mordor i just wish they had been ballsy enough to jettison all the tedious AC-style shit and let us just go populous 2 on orc military society
― adam, Monday, October 13, 2014 8:50 PM

its funny how much of the mechanics are shamelessly ripped from AC - the scaling heights, cover system, distract/stealth-kill, hidden symbols you can only see in special vision mode (collect 'em all to find out about...zzzzz). i guess the artifacts w/ hidden memories are tomb raider reboot-style. it is a fun game, the a.i. stuff is hilarious. i freed some slaves and they all ran off except one kept hammering a wall. i decided to test if you can hit npcs and slashed at him. he almost fell over, then shook it off turned around and said "thank you" before running off

dx is like distilled crack

it's so frantic that i feel like i'm just blowing by subtle details in design, like you might never actually study the underside of the eaves of an outbuilding in an immaculately rendered 3-d world, except in this case it's the intricately realized Line Of Best Fit, the shortest path to solving a Rubik's cube, the elegance of which you're too frazzled to fully grok but which your diligent practice allows you to stumble upon with less serendipity and more determination, but regardless, it's thrilling when you brush against it or even, for a short time, fully inhabit it

dragon quest/warrior 2, howdy ho. iOS port, absolutely no frills. perfect for playing in the bathroom at work, i mean, old school jRPG fix. level up

man, i'm really tempted by that, DW2 & i have some unfinished business from 1991.

how far did you get?

it's my first time playing it, although i played through the first Dragon Warrior a million times when I was a kid. i just finished picking up my first party member (who i have named after my dog Bird), and it was a hilarious 1990 style painful fetch quest. "Bird is headed to castle X! go find him!" (45 random encounters on the way to castle X!) - "Bird just left, but he said he was going going to the cave of heroes! go find him!" (82 random encounters on the way to cave) - "you just missed Bird! now he's on his way to castle Y! go find him!" (54 random encounters on the way to castle Y!) - "what? i haven't seen Bird. he is my son and i will cry if he has perished! i have no advice for where to look for him. guess you'll just have to recheck everywhere you have ever traveled" (1000s of random encounters occur). then i found him in an inn in a town that was otherwise useless.

now i'm ready to get my third party member! *pumps fist*

for some reason i decided to watch the ending to Dragon Quest 1 just now:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=judJaM1Vviw

there is some weird shit that casually goes down at the end. the princess begs the hero to let her "join" him, and then they proceed to walk away from the king...with him always 1 step in front of his new companion. is he just laying down the misogynistic law early on, about 5 seconds, into their new relationship?

I think I'm about a third of the way through Alien Isolation now and I'm really, really loving it. Occasionally the spell is broken by witnessing the alien wandering aimlessly around like a drunk searching for his lost spectacles but mostly it's been utterly riveting and very, very scary. I rescreened Alien again the other night and it's incredible how perfectly Creative Assembly have captured the look and atmosphere of the movie.

Also, lobbing a noisemaker into the midst of a group of hostile survivors then hiding in a locker to watch them get eviscerated is a lot of fun.

true almost all of the time

how far did you get?

i don't remember any specifics but i feel like it was pretty far, because i had three or four tiny people following me around? i loved they were all visible in their little conga line.

gimme another ipad game to burn through

no platformers or runners or anything like that

something like FTL or tower defense or a good board game port like carcassonne or star realms

Galaxy Trucker
Galaxy Trucker
Galaxy Trucker
Galaxy Trucker
Galaxy Trucker
Galaxy Trucker

besides that (i have it and mostly like it)

If you haven't played Little Inferno yet it's worth a fling.

i have

it was cool i guess

i like really replayable strategy-ish games

iOS XCom?

played it to death on ps3 :)

sunless sea

or shadowrun

was that a suggestion or a response to the OP

i was replying to op - i like sunless so far. but i keep dying and having to start over.

mine was a suggestion

steam's free weekend of "don't starve" hooked me, i ended up paying for it. it scratches the same itch that the "glitch" mmo did a few years back.

aw, i shoulda bought it and woulda if you had said GLITCH

it goes on sale a lot. i'm kinda pushing that one off to PS4 future queue

don't starve is definitely worth playing and the less you know about how to play it correctly beforehand the better

I just got an Xbox One this weekend. Ramen noodles for me for a couple of weeks. Luckily Minecraft is only 5 bucks, and Outlast was on sale for $15 so I picked up that as well. I reaaally want play Alien Isolation and Evil Within, but need a few more paychecks.

transistor ... super fun!

just played through transistor. so great. resisting doing another full playthrough on new game+

sleeping dogs. this game is not good

fighting borrowed from arkham, but not as fluid or fun

freerunning borrowed from ass. creed but bad, totally unclear from the textures which heights/surfaces are climbable or jumpable

driving is terrible, all the cars are both twitchy and understeery. totally unfun to drive around. there's a "ram" mechanic which is like sub-mariokart. you can buy cars but there's zero indication which are better.

basic stuff like street directions and the camera just plain don't work.

a whole lot of awkwardly placed cutscenes with the video game average writing and v/o (ie barely listenable)

a gta-alike in a HK action mode (complete with gang-cop duality bs) should have been a slam dunk.

about the only thing they did better than GTA was make it more easy and fun to shoot while driving.

MGSVGZ for PC. SO GOOD

Sleeping dogs is incredibly terrible, I have no idea why people hype that game up

crypt of the necrodancer off the steam sale. rhythm spelunky. pretty fun.

Sleeping Dogs is one of my favourite games of the last few years but it gets 100% more fun when you really get the hang of the combat. It's probably the only thing I can think of that I would replay from start to finish for the atmosphere, music, etc.

I'm currently playing Tomb Raider 2013 and it is genuinely great.

dog of dracula 2. even better than dog of dracula 1.

Sleeping Dogs was more than the sum of its parts for me.

yeah i gotta agree, i ahd a lot of fun w/ sleeping dogs. i did play it with keyboard/mouse tho?

Naruto Shippuden Ultimate Ninja Storm 3 FULL BURST (aka the 2013 edition of a 2012 game with the DLC, already outdated by a 2014 edition). Pretty damn good, as far as licensed anime fighters go - the visual and presentation quality of the in-game fight engine and integrated cutscenes is stunning to me; even this YouTube video doesn't do it justice, given that on the console it's all running at 60fps. I stopped keeping up with Naruto long before Shippuden, so it's all new story to me, too. Comprehensive fan service at its best.

When I'm not getting shot to pieces by 13-year-olds on GTA Online, I've been playing one of those new free PS+ games. Duke Nukeum something something? I'm realizing that I could just about play this thing blindfolded, given how much I played it back in '96. Now if they'd only release Quake on PSN.

you mean DUKE NUKEM MEGATON EDITION? been meaning to download it for my vita - i think i could probably draw the layout of the first couple of levels from memory. it was one of the first games i ever had for my first pc and i played it over and over and over.

I bought Super Mega Baseball for PS4 and am really into it so far.

shadow of mordy / infamous:first light / alien:isolation. also tried a.c. unity multiplayer coop, its fun but buggy as hell and the lag is terrible

which, if any, of these games should i get?

far cry 4
forza horizon 2
ass creed, the pirate one
saints row 4
arkham whatever the latest was

hmmm

havent played
haventplayed
fuck assassins creed
saintsrow 4 is basically more of the same
played until i got to a dumb boss fight that blew and i quit, seemed like a pretty pale imitation of the first 2 honestly

you are welcome

played blood dragon, mix of fun and repetitive boredom. at least they don't give you a silenced sniper rifle, which makes those games really easy. it legit took a while for my eye to adjust to the style of it, the VHS fuzz, dull red color palette shot through with harsh neon. i don't get the choice of giving each enemy a color-coded corona of light. i loved the choice of making the ending an unchallenging blast tho. actual funny gross videogame sex humor, which has to be a first.

what i'm hearing is "arr matey"

i liked arkham, it's more of the same if you really enjoyed the first two. a couple of great setpieces that that make the more mediocre stuff worth sifting through

I deleted bitcoin billionaire today. wtf @ me for getting into it.

arkham is lovely & worked on by handsome ppl

Far Cry 4 is worth playing.
As is Piratey Ass Creed.
Saints Row 4 has its charm

Yeah I have Arkham Origins on the go at the moment and it's a fun time, except for the fact that I'm still just as bad at the combat as I was in City and Asylum.

Also now playing:
Persona 4 Golden
Little Big Planet Vita
Tomb Raider 2013
Lots of Pinball FX2
Bits of Disney Infinity here and there

Still farming, but still in 2013 version. v15 is young and lacking some of the standard mods that should improve the game once they come out, thus the 2013 game with cool mods provides a better farming experience.

Have returned to the world of Minecraft, and am enjoying using the Yogscast mod packs. A far more easier to set up interface than the FTB packs imo.

And a squillion Abandonware games, usually adventures including the Ultima games, Future Worlds, Rainbird games.
And the occasional Amiga game, still love Carrier Command.

GTA San Andreas: a friend found a PS2 at a thrift store and a bunch of PS2 games so we tried them out yesterday. He doesn't have a memory card yet so we put in cheat codes. Flying cars around Los Santos is CLASSIC FUN.

Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance: I haven't played many 3D MK games - was a big fan of MK2 back in the day - but this is actually a really fun and good fighting game.

Space Invaders: On a PS2 Taito Arcade pack. Only beat the first level, that last wave when the invaders are going really fast is TOUGH. You look at a game like Destiny, the most modern thing we have, and it's still basically Space Invaders.

Rastan: Also from that arcade pack. Playing some of this back in the day (Conan! whoo!) but looking back on it this is a really good Castlevania-style action game. Has some upgradable weapons, and some really cool spritework on the enemies. There are quite a lot of hidden gameplay mechanics in here - your sword can attack in front of you, but it also hits a little behind you, you can swing while on ropes, you can jump and aim your sword up or down, etc. May have to sit down and really get deep into this game someday.

The New Zealand Story: Awesome, smooth, colorful, rad puzzle platforming at its finest. Good stuff like this is what modern mobile games look like to me, at least design-wise.

Tomb Raider (2013): Replaying this on a new computer, DAMN it looks good. Still sort of wish they had gone a Wilderness Survival route with this reboot rather than shooting at hundreds of murderous pirates but this was easily one of the best games of 2013.

deleted bitcoin billionaire today. wtf @ me for getting into it.
― droit au butt (Euler), Tuesday, 13 January 2015 17:52

I spent money on this stupid game! It's compulsive in its simplicity.

Tap Titans at least had tiny variety. Not enough to actually constitute a game though.

Risk of Rain is very good if anyone looking for a straightforward run and shoot. Lots of little details and umlockables.

I'm probably late but assassins creed with the pirates is fun.

Umlockables are items you get but aren't totally convinced by.

tap titans is good for "train ride i don't want to think about"

All on the 3ds:

Fantasy Life
Castlevania: Ecclesia
Fire Emblem: Awakening

Finally got Doomsday working on my computer! So I booted up DOOM last night for the first time in probably 15 years. WOW. That game is still amazing. Crazy to think I never used WASD controls, I always played w arrow keys and ctrl/shft/alt.

I really like the effects they have added. It's not too overwhelming. There is some additional bloom now and it makes things like the Soul Sphere look THAT MUCH more cool when you stumble upon them. Mouselook is pretty nice as well, even though it's a 2.5D game, it still totally works like any other fps you would see.

Metroid Prime, amazing that this game is 12 years old really

ultima online on a free server. amazing how much i am still into this game like 13 years after i quit playing

I was playing Donkey Kong this morning so I beat all of you for retroness.

Get past the first screen?

Super meat boy and civ 5

Got to the "end", although I was playing the NES virtual console version and it turns out (I never realised this before) that there's a level missng from that version. So I only really cleared 3 screens.

Have you tried the gameboy version of Donkey Kong? That game is soooo good.

Donkey Kong is great, but tough. I remember screen 2 used to frustrate the living daylights out of me, that jumping thing just moves SO FAST compared to you.

Last night I lived one of those "Things you never would have imagined" when I found the Doom 2 levels I made in the 90s on this site:

http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/?file=levels/doom2/d-f/d2ew1_0.zip

And got to run through them IN 3D (anaglyphic red-cyan) using Doomsday! Wow I hadn't played these in 15+ years. It's funny, the whole time through I kept thinking "Oh these levels are too cramped, I should open up this space, this hallway is blah blah, there's not enough ammo in this room, etc. Ended up downloading Doom Builder and really trying to resist the urge to start making levels again. Anyways this WAD pack is just 3 levels in Doom 2, and I used to be able to play through it in Ultra-Violence but it is very conservative with ammo drops and has lots of jump-scares/ambushes, so I ended up turning on God mode just to get through them.

donkey kong country is the best tho

Something about hearing doom and Godmode triggers a warm fuzzy nostalgic asmr-like response

man, it's great to be playing grim fandango again. i loved it so much back in 1998. it's the only other game, along with alien isolation, that my wife has enjoyed watching me play.

it's amazing how well the script and the concept hold up 17 years later, and how little the art design has aged, even if the remastered characters might benefit from a few more polygons.

Yeah never played it myself, but whenever I've heard it mentioned it's always been highly regarded.

it's the only game where you can try to scare pigeons with a balloon rendering of robert frost, that's for sure

do you still have the password to super_shotgun35 at yahoo, Adam?

grim fandango is one of my alltime faves - i highly recommend

have somehow never played grim fandango even though curse of monkey island was like my favorite game when i was a kid and that's its immediate predecessor of lucasarts games iirc

iirc it was the first game not to use scumm

There wasn't much after that iirc; just Escape From Monkey Island?
But yeah obv. classic. I'll pick it up on the cheap at some point for a long-deserved replay

do you still have the password to super_shotgun35 at yahoo, Adam?

― The Understated Twee Hotel On A Mountain (silby), Tuesday, February 3, 2015 2:05 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Hah, no way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYgjV5Exh7E

This is me doing a Let's Play on my map pack. I made it pretty hard! Or at least, I suck now that I am not 14 and playing DOOM every day.

Gravity Ghost - Ok this is sort of cool, a 2D version of the planetoid-hopping Super Mario Galaxy. It sounds better than it works in practice, or maybe it would just work better with touch controls? The level design revolves around you using gravity from planetoids to rocket yourself toward very specifically placed items, and by the end of the levels I tend to find myself floating all over the universe _just barely_ catching the items.

Batman: Arkham Origins - Meh, I really liked Arkham City but this less so. The levels seem more claustrophobic for me for some reason, and they don't wait to introduce more advanced battle mechanics like dodging knifes, they throw them in right at the beginning. I really really miss playable Catwoman. Also the camera is not great, I understand the weird puzzle nature of the environment means the camera needs to snap into spots to help you find the next thing but it feels really cumbersome. The minute I started drowning repeatedly, lost in an underground area, I gave up. Not fun.

Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker - WOW WOW WOW playing this original on PSP and I know I say this w every MGS game but this may be my favorite one yet. Fultoning is so addictive. The tiny levels are so wonderful. Love all the asides about coffee and exotic birds and tree frogs and stuff. The bosses are very interesting as you can tackle them stealthily or you can shoot them repeatedly with machine guns. The Phantom Pain is going to rule so much.

Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes - I'm at 97% now, trying for 100% completion. It's insane you actually have to do these trials, but it's providing replay-ability beyond just S ranking all the side ops. Spotting all the enemies (meaning spotting them and NOT killing them) is not quite so easy with such a big map, so I tend to start evacuating enemies via chopper. So the map gets less and less populated over time. At one point yesterday I was piling enemies into a car and driving them around the bass, which looked hilarious.

It's not out yet, but since I just Platinum'd Full Burst 3 I'm pretty hyped for the new one
http://i.minus.com/ibkbLHLEZ2Nef8.jpg
http://i.minus.com/ibarBNvAvgbxN3.jpg

right now playing for the first time earthbound + super metroid and for the millionth time super mario bros 3

i've been resorting to the walkthrough a bunch for super metroid which i feel guilty about but i like the bouncing around shooting things + platformer elements 100% and the backtracking trying to figure out where to go next almost not at all. i kinda feel guilty about this :/ ethics in gaming amirite

played sniper elite v2 because it was free with gold

it was bad

i plan to try that just for the x-ray testicle bursting action

i kept trying to pull that off then just gave up and youtubed it

it's funny to see a game have all its eggs in one basket (ok two if you count the "realistic" ballistics). the stealth stuff and AI are just awful, no characterization at all, zero atmosphere either. it's a standard-issue ww2 shooter but instead of, like, regular guns, you just have a sniper rifle.

i have been mostly playing darkest dungeon

how do you like it? i was thinking about trying it when it's "done" but it's still in beta right (or whatever the stage of development is where people are invited to play on steam)

i opened 'analogue: a hate story' just to see what it was like and ended up playing through it in one sitting

i did something similar with 'a dark room' which i hadn't heard of before

i started playing neo scavenger but went to the wiki to spoil it instead since i realised that one would be way more of a time sink

I'm playing Rogue Legacy after getting it on PS+. I'm enjoying it so much I'm almost feeling guilty enough to pay for it

xps it's great, and in ~15 hrs i haven't encountered anything that betrays it as beta

xp yeah Rogue Legacy is pretty great

wow, i am really bad at darkest dungeon.

i made it through the first quest, but ever since then i've struggled to make it even halfway through any quest before resigning - as a result never leveling up and increasing stress. stuck in a bad loop where i have to spend all the gold i manage to pick up during the halfquests on reducing stress levels, resulting in a slight negative cash flow.

this is kind of reminding me of real life

what are you having trouble with in particular? it takes a bit of trial and error to learn which are of your guys skills are better and when, which types you want making up your group, what order they should be in, etc. figuring out food and light also important. stress shouldn't be too big a factor early on. i generally don't worry about stress reduction for someone until the bar is over half full. prioritize the first upgrades that reduce the cost and only using the first 2, cheapest methods in each place has worked for me. use your full roster and don't be afraid to just drop someone from it if they get messed up. i guess another thing is to be discerning about what you objects you interact with on missions, some things are just too often bad, corpses and graves, but backpacks and crates are safe. once it starts to click you should find yourself accumulating cash pretty quickly in the early stages.

l read a quick beginners guide earlier and then dived back in and did much better. the two things that helped the most were something you mentioned -

don't be afraid to just drop someone from it if they get messed up

- and also to use torches liberally and keep the light level above 75.

fun game! kind of a steep learning curve right at the beginning but once you get over the hump it's a grand ol time.

Yeah food and torches are cheap enough but important enough that you want to err on the side of taking too much until you have a good feel for how much you need in each area

And if it's a camping mission, plan enough food to feast when you camp

i got a 3DS XL (or whatever it's called) recently but i've barely touched it...UNTIL NOW. I downloaded Bravely Default and i'm having a grand ol' time with it. Anyone else played it? It's kind of a cross between FFIX (homage to old school JRPGs but with updated mechanics/graphics) and FFTactics (job system, support abilities, music). it has so many great little touches, like how you can fast-forward the combat so that when you want to grind a few levels it doesn't take nearly so long. the only awful thing about it, so far, is the voice acting. it is really, REALLY bad.

far cry 2

also playing darkest dungeon on mac (two thumbs up) and pixel heroes on iOS (it's kinda ok. but it could have been a lot better. and it's $7.)

I started Far Cry 2 a little while back, but...the fuckin' malaria, man. Sheesh.

first time i tried it i had trouble w/ taking down guard stations which made everything super tedious. i've since gotten really good at driving into a station w/ a truck and switching up to the mounted weapon so the entire experience has become much more pleasant. also i think malaria just requires an underground courier mission once in a while which, if you get good at traversing the map, becomes much simpler.

xps Bravely Default is in my backlog; stupidly I bought it at launch thinking I would play it (just like a ton of 3DS games last year) but glad to hear it sounds good

Mrgrgr. Bravely Default is so well designed mechanically but the way the story plays out towards the end is very divisive - I was ok with it but ymmv. Really looking forward to BD2 though,
Still playing MH4 but reaching the fatigue point at almost exactly the same stage as MH3.
Why is Bloodborne so expensive in EU, haven't seen a decent price for it yet :/

my main worry with bravely default is that the fun of the combat/job system will wear out and i'll quit halfway through the game. the story so far hasn't really grabbed me (i'm only 6-7 hours in so it's possible it hasn't really started yet), and i'm actively annoyed by all 4 main characters.

I think people who either a) liked Bravely Default, or b) liked the idea of Bravely Default but didn't dig some particular part of it (for me there was something about I just couldn't put my finger on) would really like Etrian Odyssey IV. What a great game. The story gets out of your way and lets you interact with the great turn-based gameplay system. The music is unbelievable. And there is the mapping mechanic which I thought would be annoying when I tried the demo, but ended up being really rewarding when you "complete" your map of a dungeon.

has anyone tried Cities: Skylines yet? just knowing that it lets you define the specific routes for each public transit route makes me O_O excited to check it out.

got it over the weekend but haven't had much time to do anything other than install it and make sure it was running. i suspect i'll end up losing weeks to it if it's half as much fun as it looks.

the lol kotaku review mentioned that the traffic was so buggy that it affected the entire game, but once that's (hopefully) patched i can't wait to dig in.

Just got it and had some limited playing time. It's alot like old sim city as far as I can tell and rly enjoyable

The traffic thing seems like some advanced level issue that I haven't noticed yet

Got Genesis Plus CD emulator working on my Dreamcast and it's pretty glitchy but sooooo much fun. The sound is usually like 2 channels, extremely lofi. Sonic the Hedgehog 1 works pretty perfect but some of this stuff sounds like amazing intense harsh noise. Character select screen on Sailor Moon is some amazing crushed atonal dance music.

Oh wait it wasn't Sailor Moon it was the ranking screen in Alisia Dragoon.

Git yer Streets of Rage 2 on

Tempted by City Skylines too, what's the general comparison to Sim City 5? Is it actually better?

The road laying in Sim City looks a bit glitchy from the LP's I've seen.

Sid Meier's Starships

anyone else?

how is it?

wizard's lizard + vertical drop heroes = both good

Cities Skylines lots of fun but too easy in vanilla I think, particularly if you've played sim city 4. Yes, it's better than Sim City 5, mainly because you can actually create cities, not just high-rise hamlets.

just reinstalled my old copy of simcity4 and played for a bit, man I think I recall even SC2000 being more accessible and fun than this.

About to try 3000 instead now...

how is it?

i'm glad i held off on answering this until i finished a playthrough. at this point it feels like:

civ: civ rev :: civ rev :: starships

being a glass half-empty kind of person i'm probably focusing too much on the problems with it, but i'd still say it's worth checking out for civ rev fans. it's just disappointing because the guts of an amazing game are there, but some things seem unfinished or unpolished or just off.

just from the concept and a familiarity with civ you can get a feel for what it's like - you start with a planet which generates resources (energy to upgrade your ships, metal to build improvements to the planet, science to unlock tech tree upgrades, food to build additional cities on a planet/increase resource generation multiplier). you build a small fleet and then travel to nearby planets to complete missions.

the missions are the fun new exciting part, at least for me. they consist of turn-based combat, often with a generic objective (escort missions, survive for x turns). if you go into it expecting a super-deep tactical turn-based combat, you'll be let down. but it's deep enough to hold your attention. torpedos in particular are fun - you launch them at a certain trajectory and then have the power to manually explode them as they're flying during the second and third turns after launch. the "terrain" of the battlefield is made up of asteroids which can't be traveled through, or shot through effectively by lasers and cannons (torpedos can fly through them, though). anyway, it's not axis & allies or anything but it's engaging and fun.

completing missions gives you resources and other upgrades, and also increases your influence on that planet. increase a planet's influence to 4 and they become part of your empire. at first the map is pretty empty and you're just adding planets to your empire as quickly as possible. soon the map starts to fill up with competing civilizations, and things get antagonistic.

so far, so good. an hour in and i figured this was going to land near the top of my coint & plick 2015 ballot. but then the problems start to become more noticeable.

a big problem, almost gamebreaking one, is the way that war works on a meta-level. unlike the civ games, where you have tons of different units marching around the map, starships only features a single fleet per civilization. in one way this simplifies things in a pleasant way, as you only have to worry about your single fleet moving around from planet to planet. but if also makes taking over another civilization ridiculously easy. all you have to do is invade their home planet. the enemy's fleet will show up there, if they aren't there already. you fight a single (admittedly entertaining) battle pitting your fleet against theirs. if you win, you get all of their territory and planets. if you're one of the first civs to do this, you become ultra powerful because you suddenly have double the resources and territory of anyone else. it's just kind...weird. i guess it accelerates the pace of the game but winning that easily is almost a letdown.

then the other oversights pop up:

- there's no way to pull up a ledger, civ 5 style, that displays how you're doing in comparison to everyone else. the information is being tracked - in the super-simple diplomatic interactions you can get them to divulge all sorts of stuff - it's just not easily accessible.

- tiny thing, but so stupid: in the spaceopedia, certain entries that should be alphabetized (like lists of wonders or types of cities or planet upgrades, of which there are dozens) aren't alphabetized. it's tough to explain why this is annoying but if you ever play it you'll know what i mean. it's just a ridiculous oversight.

- no multiplayer. i'm guessing there are reasons for this (i would go into it but this is way too long already) but it's still disappointing.

- wonders are overpowered to an occasionally gamebreaking degree. i'm all about the wonders and i certainly benefited from them, but some of them are just way too strong and make you nigh-unstoppable.

- there's no leaderboard that shows how many times you've won, as which civilization, which difficulty, etc. you get one simple gameover chart that shows population over time (and even then the axes aren't labeled?!?!?), and then after you go to the main menu it's gone forever. ?? why??

anyway, as usual i complained a bunch but this is actually a really fun game. it's got the "one more turn" thing happening for sure, and after i won my first game i immediately started up a new game on a higher difficulty and a different civ. that's a good sign, i think. it's a $15 ipad game so that's sure to turn off many people, but if it's ever on sale it's worth picking up.

thanks dude. i will pick it up at some point but based on this i am ok with taking my time to get to it.

yeah, i'm also hopeful that they'll release a patch that makes a bunch of obvious improvements. stuff like being able to name the ships in your fleet, for example.

I started Vanquish this weekend. I didn't know what the hell was going on for the first hour or so, but man, what a ride. Like, it literally feels like some crazy, immersive amusement park ride. I'm sad to read that it's such a short game and that I'm apparenly halfway through it already. I hit a similar "I don't know what the hell is going on here" wall pretty early into playing Bayonetta but I think I need to give it another shot now. Or Revengeance, maybe? Batshit and busy as hell but ridiculously fun.

finally played thru grim fandango over the past 2 weekends, was enjoyable though it never really reached the high points of the monkey island games for me

now i'm trying to find other good point+click adventure games that i might have missed out on. i've played all the classic lucasarts ones now and most of the old sierra ones but not a lot of others

first of all: i have no mouth + i must scream

also: beneath a steel sky, broken sword, the longest journey, full throttle, gabriel knight, blade runner, freddy pharkas, various telltale games?

also maybe check out this blog for more suggestions:
http://advgamer.blogspot.com

Ha I was going to suggest B.A.T too, (on that blog), but I found it a bit shit really. Nice visuals though.

LIve set by YOB from January. Pretty heavy stuff innit?

thats a useful list thanks. have played full throttle but none of those others iirc

CITIES: SKYLINES

having such a good time. imagine if someone took simcity 4 but made it better and more user-friendly and gave you more control without overwhelming you with choices, rather than producing whatever the awful series of compromises that the new Sim City turned out to be.

do any of you know of any cities:skylines youtubers that aren't annoying as shit

um, I kinda like Sips ones. But I could see how some would find him annoying.

do any of you know of any cities:skylines youtubers that aren't annoying as shit

Finished Infamous (a game I put on hold for like 5 years- frustrating AI, monotonous grimness, a bug that still hasn't been fixed making it impossible to 100% one of the islands), breezed through the sequel (so much better in almost every possible way; still falls down a fair bit on the story front) and started the PS3 version of Resident Evil 4. It's my first time playing it ever, and while I'm terrible at it, I'm nowhere near as game-breakingly awful as I was at the first RE (my only other experience with the series) so hopefully that won't keep me from enjoying what everyone says is one of the best action games of all time.

Had a similar experience when I first played RE4, as I was so bad as at the old REs as well and ended up loving it. I'm pretty sure the opening village sequence is brutal and treacherous by design, forcing players into learning the new style, sadistically punishing you for trying to survive the same way you did in the old games. (I think it's brilliant)

i played RE4 for the first time on the wii and never really felt totally comfortable with the motion/wiimote controls, which is why i kind of cheated and just killed every boss with the rocket launcher. one of the best games ever though.

I loved the wiimote pointer controls, suspect they made the game easier than dual thumbsticks tho

love re4 so much - probably the most relentlessly thrilling game i've ever played

I hit the ceiling of my competence almost immediately- Nhex, you're goddamn right about that village. First attempt I tried sneaking off to the side, thought I'd found a spot where confrontation was inevitable, and started some shit on my own terms, thinking (foolishly) the point of the sneaking was to get me to a good place to fight. Took about 40 pitchforks to the face and restarted the area. Second time, I committed to the sneaking, made it a bit farther, literally jumped when I crossed a mumbling pitchfork lady's sightline and she shrieked at me, fucking RAN until I made the intimate acquaintance of a gentleman with a chainsaw. This game is not fucking around.

Heh, yup, it's all a trap. Your sneaking days are over! Get used to busting ass all over the ambiguously Spanish landscape.

I noticed that the game helpfully fills in the map for you in advance, including the next objective (whatever the fuck it is; I managed to bumble into two locked doors and a yokel with a flour sack on his head and a chainsaw in my neck). Next try I think I'm just going to make a mad dash for the marked objective and see what happens- that chainsaw guy can take so many shots to the face and kill me so wuickly if he gets close that engaging with him at all means I'm having to deal with a massive mob of bumpkins with farming implements. Who can spawn BEHIND me wtf

Oh, and while the sneaking bit managed to desensitize me to the regular enemies' mumbling (MIERDA and SIN MADRE and whatever), that Silent Hill-y drone when they're slowly closing in still gets under my skin way too easily...

After a while of not playing a lot of diff. games... i've actually played plenty of games played in the past coupla months.

- Danganronpa: must-own for VITA owners. Super weird and interesting and unique.
- Danganronpa 2: starts less good than 1; ends as good as 1.
- Zero Escape Virtue's Last Reward: escape the room vs. weird bonkers timey-travelly-shit, kinda stupid but I was genuinely rivetted through the end
- Dragon Age Inquisition: is almost work but not quite
- OlliOlli2: I finally realized this is fun. Liking it more on Vita than on PS4.
- Final Fantasy Type-0: yet to really put time into this. may be not-garbage but I am not yet convinced.
- MLB15 for PS4: whoa mama look at those graphics.
- marvel puzzle quest: because i hate myself?

legend of dungeon is fun and awkward and i don't know what i'm doing?

www.swordandwhip.com
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (Playstation via PSP)
Revenge of Shinobi (Genesis via Dreamcast)
Metal Gear Solid 2 (PS2 via PC)
Grand Theft Auto V (PC)
Dark Souls I & II (PC)

Gave up on Resident Evil 4 (I'm way too much of a chickenshit for this game), tried Castlevania: SotN, loved it but found that it will cheerfully let you play for 45 minutes without ever finding a save point and blunder straight into an unwinnable boss fight. Right now I'm working on the PS3 port of No More Heroes, which I'm also terrible at, but manageably so.

I really, REALLY don't know what I think of No More Heroes. The levels are (barring the odd amusing setpiece) really flat and bland, the endless mook fights are seemingly just there for you to rampage effortlessly through even on the higher of the two starting difficulty levels, the between-mission menial jobs get old long after they've made Suda51's point, and the assassination side missions are bizarrely poorly suited to the game- the time limits make it hard to fight defensively, but the tiny parking garage they all take place in makes it easy to get surrounded if you play aggressively and nearly impossible to recharge your weapon; they're essentially the worst of all possible worlds as far as the game's combat goes.

And then I hit a boss fight and realize that, holy shit, the combat in this game is really fucking good, and it would be nice if I got to use it and think about it more often. Even apart from the wonderful anti-antihero (if that makes sense; Travis is just such an absolute cock that his sheer unlikeability becomes weirdly fascinating) and gratuitous weirdness that seems like a pisstake of MGS games (RAP WITH ME, JENNIFER), the fights are really tightly designed and clever, the Shinobu fight especially.

heh. yup, that sounds like a Suda 51 game.

Does anybody use Grouvee or Dpadd?

Here's mine:
http://www.grouvee.com/user/ryan.hupp/

It's been pretty helpful getting me to prioritize my fucking ludicrous Steam sale/late console generation buying spree backlog and to knock out a few major indie games (Thomas Was Alone, Gone Home) while I dutifully slog through the AAA games I'm mired in (Final Fucking Fantasy XIII, Far Cry 3, Mass Effect 3 which has been on hold for almost two years at this point)

oh boy

you know those fliers that get handed out near places where you can gamble? "if you keep playing and you've stopped having fun, you have a problem"?

i sympathize with you TT. i'm still really bad at prioritizing the insane ever-growing backlog... sometimes it feels like the longer it's been in the shrinkwrap/queue the hardest it is to just sit down and play it
i hadn't heard of those two sites, but I remember when backloggery.com started

yeah, dang. i keep presuming at some point i'll get fired and have to move back in with my mother and THEN oh boy

I did finally crack open Bayonetta today. Damn, that's some entertainment. Basically, everything they did in God Hand but even more blown up.

Splatoon is so much fun, every part of it feels incredibly polished, from the balance to the controls to the soundtrack to the mini NES squid games that you can play while waiting in the lobby. It's like they mariokarted the shooter.

I tried playing Super Mario Sunshine last night for the first time. Um..... ehhh..... Sorry if anyone likes it but it is easily the worst mainline Mario game I've ever played. Chasing that kidnapping evil Mario was fun for about 10 seconds and when I couldn't get him and had run through the level for the 6th time in a row, just shut it off. Yuck.

The intro cinematic is funny, with the Princess seeing weird shit in the distance, with Mario going to jail, etc. Also I am playing on emulator on PC, I wonder if I am missing out by not using the GC controller.

Never really liked 3D Mario until Galaxy tbh. 64 was fine but I'm too old school when it comes to the plumber.

i remember that intro level being stupid, but at least get to the hardcore "space" levels before you dump the game - that's where the game really shines (get) IMO
i think you are honestly missing something without using the original GC gamepad, but that's almost always kind of a problem with emulation when it comes to unusual controllers. but those first-party GC games really feel fit to those kidney beans and triggers

Yeah it said to 'lightly' press a button to shoot while running, which I couldn't get to work. Do I need to eff with X-Input controls for this?

invisible inc

i'm messing w/ watch_dogs right now which is nowhere near as bad as people made it out to be. the nice thing abotu playing overhyped, underdelivered games a year late is that you kinda adjust your expectations and have a lovely time.

xp Invisible Inc will totally be mine... the second it hits a humble bundle.

it's so good.

+ so difficult

xp adam the only analog buttons on the GC pad IIRC were the back triggers (I'm assuming this is referring to the water/jet pack cannon using Right Trigger?) - you may need to configure your emu to recognize the analog triggers on your pad, assuming they have them

It's not all grim compulsiveness with these games. I mean, I was really enjoying ME3, but put it aside when reports started coming in of the underwhelming/incomplete ending (since fixed), the inevitable slew of DLC (now over, though I haven't worked up the enthusiasm to buy the most expensive one, and it'll take a while since Bioware/EA never put that shit on sale). Far Cry 3 was fun, but I put it aside when my aging PC started having overheating issues; I've since been able to finish it up. But Final Fantasy XIII...okay, that one's pure Stockholm Syndrome at this point, with the determination to not leave another goddamn unfinished game on the stack. I like thinking about the design of the games I play, and I have a history with leaving games, books, etc unfinished due to anxiety/depression that definitely contributes to me wanting to finish it despite it not being very good, but I'm almost definitely going to sell it or give it away once it's finally over.

stupid question on invisible inc: i know that i can quit a mission early if i'm about to lose, and bank XP (by choosing Retire Agency and then restart mission/day?). but do credits carry over as well? i thought they did but i just quit a mission early and the money didn't carry over. the difficulty is pretty steep (for me, but i suck at games) so i need some help!

credits do not carry over, XP to unlock new starting chars / programs do

such a good game

ah, thanks!

btw u don't have to quit the mission early to bank the XP. i think losing at any time banks XP (which is awarded based on the number of missions you've completed that run)

i've mainly been quitting early when i lose a team member and can't revive them or drag them to the exit, and it's clear i'm outmatched (ie a waste of time to keep going). do you play with regular settings? even on beginner mode i'm returning into severe trouble early on, like 4-5 missions in!

Can anyone recommend any Turbo CD/PC Engine CD games? I was playing "Gradius II" earlier and it was really cool, especially the music.

xp i just beat it on experienced for the first time tnite. guess expert is the next step.

the main skill of the game is how to move through the bases without the guards seeing you. my first few playthroughs i relied heavily on stunning guards but near the end of each game there are just too many guards and too many things that need power and not enough characters. you need to know where a guard is going to pass and where you can sit safely so he passes by you, and then save the stunning/killing for more dire situations.

Ground Zeroes is on PS+ this month. Loaded it up, sat through a ten minute unskipable cutscene, finally got control of snake, went into the menu to invert the y axis, couldn't find the option, searched for five minutes, still couldn't find it, then my wife came home, so I turned it off.

Apparently you need to set up controller options at the main menu before you start the game.

don't think it's unskippable is it? press the left touch pad

great game

xposts to Adam B.

I think it's just for regular PC Engine, not CD, if that makes a difference, but play SPLATTERHOUSE if you haven't already.

Oh I know me some Splatterhouse! The Genesis one has one of the coolest intros ever.

Left touch pad? Goddamnit I pressed every other button on the bloody thing.

this looks great
http://www.pcgamer.com/her-story-review/

rps gave it a great review too

looks cool.

Anyone play the first 3 episodes of Life is Strange? I feel like I might be put off by teenage romance scenes if they're in this.

yeah, definitely interested in Her Story. may be falling victim to empty '90s FMV nostalgia though.

Life is Strange looks very cool, but I'm waiting for it to end and hear final verdicts from others

Hand of Fate
Endless Legend
Wasteland 2
Crusader Kings II

her story was good. very much more an interactive fiction than a 'game,' but a well-written fiction that is edited + paced almost perfectly and that tells a somewhat lurid, engaging story. nb it is very very short. i saw almost every clip after 2 hours and spent one more trying to find the last few (i'm still missing 5 clips). i think the acting job is good enough - it didn't bother me like it apparently did internet cinephiles.

$5 for two well spent hours seems okay to me. will try.

Finally dug out Nier and gave it another try. I was already interested the first time around, between the art direction and good word of mouth, but I quit after like 30 minutes, probably either job stress or depression shit or both. I'm maybe 4-5 hours in now, and god, I love this game. It's so well-written and localized I refuse to believe this came from the same hemisphere as FFXIII, let alone the same publisher.

Though yeah, that fishing minigame. The otherwise A+ localization fails utterly there, because the instructions it gives you are 100% wrong and will make you fail every single attempt. If this were a Suda51 game, I would assume that was intentional; Taro Yoko seems weird, but not the kind of director who's going to be an asshole just to make a point.

...okay, he's KIND OF an asshole for the main character's bizarrely slow ladder-climbing.

PC: Batman Arkham City that's right I said City (clearing up all the collectables on my umpteenth retry, when I have no brain left at all and need something to do with the TV on in the background)
PC: Hexcells Infinite (something to do with my hands while listening to computer audio)
WiiU: Lego City Undercover (cleared the main storyline, just spending an hour clearing all the collectables from each area)
PC: Lego Marvel Superheroes (spoilers: it's a lot of fun)
iPhone: Two Dots (nearly burned through the extra levels released on Monday)

Went to a stag do with a game-loving groom, played:

Nidhogg*
Johann Sebastian Joust*
Mount Your Friends*
Proteus
Spelunky
The Stanley Parable
SpeedRunners

*stag tournament games

Inspired me to actually sort out my Steam account, so now I'm playing Limbo properly for the first time. It's great. Debating getting Her Story but despite being a massive fan of IF I'm still not entirely convinced by the premise.

guys!
The Executive on iOS.
go get it.

Self-described as a cross between Elite Beat Agents, Zelda II and Street Fighter II. $3... ugh fine I'm sold

it's fun! and there's a clicker counter game buried in there too!

this is quite good:
http://www.hanakogames.com/closet.shtml#demo

Looks interesting - it's the Long Live the Queen people

Played an actual Intellivision for a bit today. "Burger Time" is the killer app on that system, that game is amazing. I guess they remade it with stupid busy 3D graphics but this version was super charming and fun to play.

I had one - that's why I spent much of my childhood at the houses of friends with the 2600. Does your thumb hurt from the damn edge of that analog disc on the controller?

Mordy I see you've fallen into the paradox k-hole with ck2. How do you like it?

i like it, and EU4 as well (which i think i like even better). so far i reformed the kingdom of ireland which is i guess what they recommend for all newbies and now i'm trying to decide where to play next. i thought about getting the sons of abraham expansion which has some options + stuff that interest me, but i feel like CK2 is kinda a - as these things go - more casual experience than EU4. i do like the focus on domestic/familial dynamics and dynasties. in my last game i married one of my daughters off to a foreign heir and she was shipped out. soon after my steward died and i needed someone new to fabricate claims for me. one trick i've learnt is you can marry yr daughter off into a maternal-descent inheritance line and then her new husband will move to yr court (instead of vice-versa). so i was bemoaning the fact that i married her off too early when i could've used her to lure a good steward in. then the king of norway (one of my allies) asked me to help him fight a war and, lo and behold, it is the family of my daughter's new husband. to blackmail me against entering the war they throw her in prison and at the end of the war i end up ransoming her for like 100 gp. anyway that brought her back to my court and i immediately used her to get a new steward. <- i dig any game that can produce this kind of procedurally generated complex storytelling

paradox k-hole is a good way of describing it. these games are def a world unto themselves.

i'm straight up afraid to get into those games tbh

i've put them on pause while i try to finish wasteland 2 which is a) a fantastic + wonderful game that harkens back to fallout 1 + 2 UI and b) the buggiest game i've ever played. it crashes literally every 20-40 minutes, its story beats are constantly bugging out of order, and if it wasn't as good as it is i would've quit a long time ago.

paradox games are awesome but yeah theyre all about the gameplay since they can take dozens of hours to finish and theres no real endgame to speak of

if you want to get real confused try out victoria 2.. kind of an interesting idea but implemented weird. I have never even touched hearts of iron bc that shit looks insane to me.

Goddamn, The Executive was so good. Blew through it ALL in three days.

Nier has fainting goats and this makes it objectively the best videogame ever

been playing Final Fantasy V on the GBA for the first time
only other ones I haven't played are 2, 12 and the MMO's
it's pretty good so far, can see why that four job fiesta thing is popular

i never even managed to beat FFV on a regular run when I first played it. i looked at a FAQ and found out I was like a dozen levels too low to beat the final boss, gave up. maybe i'll try it again one day

got 110% completion on The Executive - that's all achievements, A+ on every level #braggin #shame

it's a compulsive game

Dug out Mirror's Edge to see if I could complete it. I want to like it, and on the rare occasions you get to actually play the fucking game, I do, but between the constant armed pursuit, ridiculously fragile main character and hand-to-hand combat that is, I do not wish to mince words, pure untrammeled shit, it's really difficult to enjoy. I'm still going to check out the sequel if word of mouth is any good, but Christ, this game is a frustration engine.

Honest to god, just found myself thinking "I've had enough grim slogging through inevitable repeated deaths with failure as my only reward, think I'll fire up Demon's Souls for a bit instead"

lol. i'm afraid of Mirror's Edge now

The simple fix of removing all the stupid fucking guns would almost be enough to make it great, if not a classic for the ages or anything (you have a lot less freedom than advertised). I'm looking forward to the time trials stuff and Tron-looking DLC levels for that reason- I'm thinking of the main single-player like the story mode of a fighting game, with all the implications of crap writing and dialogue and stupid gimmicks (in this analogy the guns are those dumbass matches in Soul Calibur games where you fight a SPOOOOKY SKELETON and the FLOOR IS LAVA or whatever).

haha. maybe i'll make ME next after I torch Bayonetta.

I liked ME, but I played it by avoiding all combat as much as possible

A wise decision. It still shoehorns you into an uncomfortable amount of combat, though, and as much as I hate the inclusion of guns, hate the clumsy way gunplay is implemented, and just HATE HATE HATE in general i found areas where there were a lot of SWAT cops much easier if i just took down one (way trickier than it should be; I'm terrible at doing the disarm move even with the reflex button, and missing the first attempt is a guaranteed pummeling to death), shot the rest in the face, tossed the gun and got on with the actual game.

Demon's Souls, though! How about this fucking game. I've died a moderate amount, not a lot, but never really feel frustrated with the game for it because every time I know exactly what I did wrong.

That said, I still don't understand like 80% of how this game works, especially the hidden stuff and "world tendency" and so on. I just defeated Phalanx and I'm coming back to world 1-1 to try and explore/clear it out, in the process learning that the red-eyed knight will fuck me up bad and that the user messages reading "beginners should come back later" are no joke, and I genuinely have no idea what makes certain elements spawn or not. On this return visit, the dregling merchant is gone, but then so are the dragons, which meant I could run out onto the cliffside and help myself to a shit-ton of free loot. Likewise, I tried Ostrava's escort mission, and died on the blue-eyed knight because I'm used to fighting the ones with a sword and shield; this guy's huge sword totally changes up his attack timing and gives him crazy reach. I came back, and Ostrava's gone, but the first room full of dreglings are all lying around dead. I'm trying to figure out as much as I can on my own instead of playing with a wiki open on my laptop the whole time, but it's a weird experience playing a game where all the moment-to-moment systems are so perfectly transparent and on the surface and everything else is as obfuscated as humanly possible.

i thought that game nicely incentivized the quiet, avoidant playstyle. it's not perfect though.

xp

the time trials are easily the best bit of ME tho
nearly finished FFV, the story is bollocks as per FF tradition but it zips along at a nice pace
goofy sprite puppeteering >>>>>> lengthy "cinematic" cutscenes

I'm reading through the Demon's Souls thread and wincing at my overconfidence last time, when I got up to Phalanx, wasted all my fire shit, and more-in-sorrow-than-in-ragequit for four solid years. I just took my first stab at 1-2 and oh my god so much fire, YOU FRIED

Some day I will play Demon's Souls and it will be glorious.

Currently replaying through Dark Souls 2. I like it a lot better the second time through!

Rocket League. free to PS+ customers. Amazingly addictive Speedball/Destruction Derby/Sensible Soccar style fun. Can't stop playing it.

Seconded, we've been having a great time with the split screen.

I got the Far Cry 2/3/Blood Dragon compilation and started with FC2, which was OK but the 10+-year-old graphics were hard to look past and I wasn't having much fun honestly, so when I accidentally fell into a glitch ditch that I couldn't jump out of, I used that as an excuse to start FC3 instead and it's sooooooooo much better that it's ridiculous.

Soldiering on with Demon's Souls- I took a break from 1-2 (it's that group of crossbowmen with a blue-eyed knight; I've managed to get through it once only to die to the second knight because I'm still a little shaken up from the first one) to work on 2-1, which is markedly easier, and made it to the boss, all while making pathetic whimpering sounds as I notice the giant spiderwebs all over the deepest parts of the tunnel. Unless the Armor Spider turns out to have more nasty one-shot abilities than the flame breath that killed me last time (new plan: swap out Thief's Ring for Ring of Flame Resistance, also run away) I might have my second boss down soon!

I also popped into 3-1 and 4-1 to check things out. Those illithids in 3-1 and their horrible little bells are a little too much for me to handle, though I did manaage to kill a couple on my second attempt and back out with some nice loot. But within seconds of entering 4-1 I was almost killed by a FUCKING NINJA SKELETON what the hell. I was only saved because I was super paranoid- someone had left a bloodstain literally at the very patch of ground you spawn at upon entering the level.

i still like the idea of playing FC2, but it's difficult in a way that feels unfair (unlike the Souls games). FC3 was great but you sorta have to make your own fun.

good luck Telephone, i love reading Souls diaries. i spent sooooo long on 4-1, more than any other level in the game i'm sure (except for maybe 5-2). i think i died in body form there as well, which adds even more (and more powerful) ninja skeletons.

Metal Gear Solid V Ground Zeroes -- Damn this game is smooth. Revisiting it after a long break, and feel like I'm getting the hang of it again. It's such a great sandbox. I'm really into extracting enemy soldiers and putting them on the heli. Apparently you can use the ones you get from this in TPP.

Metal Gear Solid -- On an original PS1. I finally got a decent controller and last played the incredible Psycho Mantis fight. "You like Castlevania, don't you?" "It's true that [Solid Snake] has killed a lot of people, that doesn't mean he doesn't have a heart." LOL

Donkey Kong 64 -- Tried this one out, absolutely loved the intro rap, then the game started. Looked pretty nice but I was in some kind of hub world where the only thing I could do was jump in a barrel and attempt a mini game with the most obnoxious circus organ on speed music I have ever heard. I won. Back to the hub world. Couldn't find anywhere else to go so I jumped in another barrel. Cue the awful music. Cue me shutting off the game.

Castlevania 64 -- Ok I have never played this and I'm sort of a 2d snob esp. when it comes to Castlevania but this game is DAMN impressive! Getting very strong Dark Souls vibes right from the start. Semi-open world that is unlockable, combat that centers the camera on the enemy, that first boss the giant skeleton set piece, etc. Refreshing lack of scrolling text boxes and tutorials. Might try and play this one all the way through.

I've never played castlevania 64! I thought it was supposed to be legendarily bad? Maybe it was ahead of its time

<3 <3 <3 talos principle <3 <3 <3

Yeah as long as you realize Castlevania 64 is a 1st gen 3d game (thus shitty camera and awkward platforming a sort of a given) it's a pretty spectacular thing imo. Most 3d games of the time had a hub world structure but this game feels like a real world unfolding in front of you. I'm probably doing a bit of projecting but fighting that giant skeleton for the 2nd time, while a crew of skeletons roll around him on motorcycles, and cutting off his left arm and still having him chase me, all felt very Dark Souls II.

rocket league is a goty contender for me. maybe my favorite futbol game full stop.

The last six months, I've been checking on and off this one damn puzzle in Hexcells Infinite. Can't bring myself to quit or win...

Debating how much more Wasteland 2 I wanna do. Am deep into the SoCal portion after several dozen hours.

The free-to-play Trials Frontier (iOS) is really addicting.

The reviews make it sound like IAP hell...

yeah, it's definitely heavy on IAP, although i've always managed to steer clear without a problem. i played about 3 to 4 hours straight and constantly had new stuff to do, without having to wait for any countdown timers. (althoooough i can foresee a point in the near future where i won't have enough fuel to race and will choose to view a 30-second ad to get more fuel rather than waiting for a countdown timer to give me more)

but mainly it's just fun. if you've played other Trials, you know what you're in for.

<3 <3 <3 talos principle <3 <3 <3

oh this is good? i'll check it out when it hits PS4, it's been awhile since i've had a good puzzle game.

the cat cover alone convinced me... to eventually buy it when it goes on clearance

still jamming Swarm Simulator (because I am an idiot) and today I finally finished getting all the achievements. 20 ascensions! and I am STILL letting it run. I like watching numbers get bigger.

talos principle is very fun. the puzzles are generally not particularly difficult but get kind of baroque in terms of implementation and are thus satisfying. the mechanics are consistent enough that one can generally enact one's envisioned solution.

what makes it really compelling imo is that it feels very expansive. obviously it's a puzzle game so there are discrete puzzles, but there are hub worlds and optional worlds and little unexplained details that are left up to the player in a very 90s fashion. a little portal, a little myst, a little old fashioned fps in momentum and movement.

(also there are optional puzzles to solve that cross those discrete puzzle boundaries in ways that demand a different kind of thinking than the rest of the game, which is cool.)

fwiw i feel much less railroaded into a meme-y theme park ride than i did with portal (which i liked)

still a slave to destiny trying to break the habit w a USB snes controller and roms of every snes game. looking very much forward to play through #20ish of ff3

Spent some quality time w Fallout: New Vegas. First time playing a Fallout title for a substantial amount of time.

Tutorial NPC was a grizzled hunter/trader with a faithful companion dog who she loved. She took me on a mission to shoot some geckos and when she was off-screen her dog got in the way and met an unfortunate end. Running into her a few minutes later, she had little to say on the matter. I think if you were living in a post apocalyptic wasteland and a stranger had just killed your companion you'd be upset but nothing much seems to upset ANYONE in this world. Ran into an NPC later that told me about losing his wife and daughter and retained a pleasant and cheerful disposition for the entire conversation. It wasn't long before I just started skipping all dialog. Oh, Bethesda.

The world is fun, if a bit boring and empty. Everything is a bullet sponge, from the scorpions that take a dozen shots with a 10mm to wasteland bandits that can withstand a barrage of shotgun blasts at point blank range while wearing NO armor. The bullet-time is fun, but it gets a bit ridiculous shooting limbs off with a frequency only matched by Arrested Development's armless man.

Mod the hell out of FONV if you cast.

Anyone else playing Rocket League?

If you can, rather

rocket league RULES. my only beef is the huge gap between bot intelligence between amateur and pro levels when playing offline. but not a biggy. fucking love it.

Started playing this last night - i suck so much at it. I'm trying to hang back and anticipate the ball coming out of the scrum but it consistantly goes sailing over my head. Haven';t tried going online yet, I'd be destroyed.

it's all about using the double jump/forward spin combo to gain speed - its a quicker way to get down the pitch than boost... also learning when to go slow as the ball is SLOW, and at first i would zoom past it every single time