whatchu playing now

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

My one recommendation is that if you play AW1, put it on the easiest difficulty, because it doesn't let you change it after you've started a save, and the combat isn't that interesting.

I liked AW1, don't remember putting it on easy or, for that matter, minding anything about the combat, which iirc mostly plays into the mood rather than provide a typical video-gamey style of "combat."

I remembered just the other day that I forgot to play the second one! I'll get right on that.

Just finished Forbidden Solitaire, and I enjoyed it well enough. It is arguably more satire than horror. It's akin to Hypnospace Outlaw aesthetically as well as thematically. This is problematic for me because I adore Hypnospace, and any game that invites comparison to it is going to suffer.

played alan wake 1 remastered for a while, it was repetitive but enjoyable, didn't finish i'll go back to it someday. the remastered version is funny bc the environments look beautiful but the characters look janky as hell

now i'm playing ghost of yotei, i love it. looks and sounds so beautiful. obv reminiscent of other big open-world games of the past decade, especially RDR2, but i'm not going to complain about a game being reminiscent of RDR2 if it does it right.

I was going to ask if you'd made it to (insert awesome sequence here) but then I realized I was thinking of "Control."

Still on "Ghost of Tsushima" here. It's such a well designed game, though fundamentally flawed, like a lot of open world games seem to be, in that you get OP pretty quickly, and stuff like combat and resource management becomes pretty inconsequential. Or at least it is so far; I'm on Act 2, completing a bunch of side quests. Never boring, though, and nothing beats coming over a hill and finding an amazing field of red flowers at sunset or whatever.

One person's OP is another's relief that things will be less of a slog and maybe instead of dying 20 times to a boss you'll only die 10

another = me

I don't disagree! You just sometimes end up in a situation that is meant to be challenging or dramatic that is over in seconds, which makes it feel kind of perfunctory: low speed bumps vs. walls. But there's "OP" in, like, From games, where you can still get your ass kicked (albeit yeah, maybe a bit less), or "OP" in a game that is not particularly hard in the first place and just gets even easier. There are always/often built-in ways to make games like "Ghost" more challenging, but they always seem arbitrary to me. Toggling it so enemies becomes damage sponges and kill you in one or two hits vs several, for example. But to me that's the equivalent of, say, playing a character in "Dark Souls" that has no armor and no weapons and just hits things with their fists. Artificial.

picked up FH6 and having a lot of fun. trying to make it as realistic as possible without being too punishing - sim steering, ABS off, traction control off, manual shifting. makes it a lot more challenging but expect it will lengthen the life of the game. have kept the AI difficulty relatively low for now though they’re still battering me. haven’t won a race yet and only scored one podium. looks a bit rough on series S in performance mode. might try quality mode but 30 FPS could be equally rough

Started playing Death Stranding again. Was going to pick up the sequel as I’d heard a lot of the quality of life improvements really worked, but I balk at paying full price, and can’t find any sales. So back to the original we go.

Having vehicles helps a lot.

Emuurom was released today. It's another of those cryptic La-mulana / Animal Well type games. Like Animal Well, there is little combat -- you can't even take damage, like it's a Yoshi game.

Mina the Hollower is fantastic so far - and challenging! Surprised (in a good way) at how much platforming there is for a top-down adventure game

Is this the one from the Shovel Knight team?

Oh nice, I am super interested in that one.

yeah it's very good, but the early game has a very steep difficulty curve that takes some getting past. once you get enough upgrades after a few hours then you stop being incredibly fragile and the game stops being anywhere near as difficult

having fun with Blippo+, which is not really a game but an interactive alien cable tv thingy.
things it reminds me of: Pickle Surprise, Pee-wee's Playhouse, Max Headroom, Liquid TV, The Glam Metal Detectives (which I'd completely forgotten about until now and it took me 10 minutes of googling to even find out what it was called)

oh i played that recently, yeah weird stuff.

I’m playing (and really enjoying) the new single player focused efootball on switch 2

it reminds me of PES 4-6 era

also played a demo of Michael Brough's sequel to 868-HACK, 868-BACK, which of course has ludicrous, eye-watering design and UI and even in the demo version, entire systems of rules and trade-offs working against and amplifying each other.

loses some of the original's appealing minimalism and simplicity-generated complexity, but i'm more or less 'let me give you some money' with Brough's games.

i bought the full version (which is on steam for mac gamers, what i’m playing on)

i am so incredibly bad but also so addicted. i thought we had a michael brough thread but couldn’t find it. would be interested to see who else is still playing! the addition of the devices adds a really satisfying layer. still haven’t cracked 0 or taken down a single megacorp, but i feel like i’ll get there soon

MS Flight sim 2020, twenty quid at the minute. Decided to take the plunge yesterday.

Cor! It's quite gorgeous indeed.

lost & found co. - this is like the mario odyssey of hidden object games. so dense and polished and joyful to play

Lingo - The Witness but with word puzzles. The non-Euclidean map, with seamless warps everywhere, wears out its welcome. I have reached an ending screen but I have finished less than half of the achievements, so there's still a lot to find.

lingo is kinda neat but yeah the non-euclidean map has diminishing returns very quickly and it's a bit frustrating how inconsistent it can be with the rules at times - there's the occasional solution that relies on you having a particular accent, or just a not very robust understanding of english vowel phonemes

Sheepo - after loving crypt custodian i figured i should play kyle thompson's previous games before his next one comes out. this one is simpler but still pretty tight and fully formed for a first game. reminds me of those old nifflas games like knytt which were kinda the foundational indie games for me, feels like they're a big influence on this too whether directly or indirectly. the joy of traversing a simple but nicely stylized and atmospheric platforming world. i've been able to sightread most of the tricky platforming sections and bosses on the first try so i'm clearly just on the same wavelength as this guy's games. feels satisfying.

The Artisan of Glimmith - pretty solid abstract puzzler so far, been mostly cruising through the early puzzles but the one level-6 panel i did was a nice workout. looking forward to seeing what the even higher levels are like. the 'overworld' makes the game feel a lot more deluxe than if it was just a list of puzzles, even if it doesn't do anything as elaborate with it as the witness and such, just some bonus hidden puzzles you can find by messing with the perspective. which is still a nice little extra layer.

Enjoyed Wuchang Fallen Feathers, which is pretty much ‘what if Dark Souls but Chinese?’. Maps suitably twisty and interconnected, bosses appropriately aggravating. Barely an original thought but one of the better copies. Even respected finishing it and getting locked into the eternal cycle of Samsara to, narratively, start again at the beginning as punishment for not engaging enough with the NPCs.

The Adventures of Elliot: Millennium Tales is abysmally titled, has atrocious Steam Deck performance despite being 2d, has an almost unbelievably annoying sassy companion and is apparently fairly repetitive over its short run time, but I am all over it because it is a bit! like! secret! of! Mana!

I've also had fun with the recent anime-style reboot of the 90s racer Screamer recently, but I'm terrible at it and need to go back and practice more

Finished the main game of Ghost of Tsushima. It's an interesting contradiction, imo, a game that is objectively pretty generic and yet does the things it does better (and looks better) than most games of its ilk. And then I've heard the sequel does what the first one does even better, which is intriguing.

still hooked on Artisan of Glimmith after 18 hours logged. there are SO many puzzles. i'm not even halfway through yet. i love how many of the puzzles have these little "aha" moments where the aha isnt at the solution but at encountering the 'trick' you have to overcome that was not obvious from first glance

finished ghosts of yotei. still impressed by its visual beauty, enjoyed it overall but also had a "who is this for?" feeling when going between trying to master its (to me) finicky parrying system/deep weapons system during battle and then story elements where everything stops for you to learn about the ainu (japanese indigenous people) or teach your young niece about flower arranging. i'm glad that that stuff is in there but even to someone who is sympathetic to those aspects they slowed things down more than the "kratos learns about parenting" aspects in the newer god of war games.

i've also been playing split fiction with my daughter, that game is a lot of fun and takes some unexpected (and very weird/funny) turns. good difficulty level for us too, we've been making progress together but i don't feel like i'm dragging her through the game.

not sure what i want to play next. might need something shorter/puzzlier as a palate cleanser before another big game.

Disappointingly I'm bouncing off Mina the Hollower. I usually like difficult games, but the difficulty here all seems to come from the awkwardness of the control and positioning. I'm sure it gets easier as you get me trinkets and levels, but it just doesn't feel good to me, which is the main thing I look for in a game.

I could just jump into the new Doom dlc but I was hoping to switch things up.

I started enjoying Mina a lot more when I began using some of the modifiers. Especially removing pit damage.

Honestly the controls in Mina feel amazing to me. I grew up on top down Zeldas though where you can only attack in 4 directions anyway. In Mina the weapon you choose makes a big difference. I picked the hammer first, then switched to knives mostly. I haven't bothered with the whip except for one specific boss — I can see how that one could feel stiff

I think the rhythm of the jumping, burrowing, attacking, dodging is really cool

In Mina the weapon you choose makes a big difference. I picked the hammer first, then switched to knives mostly. I haven't bothered with the whip except for one specific boss — I can see how that one could feel stiff

this is very good to know! i chose whip first (i like castlevania) and also kind of bounced off of it after 6 hours or so, without having unlocked another weapon. i should revisit!