whatchu playing now

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

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