whatchu playing now

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.