whatchu playing now

wish rocket league was on mac!

Rocket League is rad, i am terrible at it.

House is child free for a couple of weeks starting tomorrow, so in anticipation of actually getting some decent game time in, I just went to the psn store and bought:

Everybody's Gone to the Rapture
Game of Thrones Season One
er Peggle 2

Demon's Souls: nine hours played, two bosses down. This is going to take a while, isn't it...

always turn off the rocket league music! always!

the new map is a headfuck and a half. still, scored 2 hat tricks in consecutive games yesterday and it was probably my highlight of the week.

horizon chase (ios) is a sort of perfect rad racer update, get it.

There is a Triple Triad (card game from FFVIII) now on Android/iOS I've been playing. It's hidden away in something called Final Fantasy Portal. They kept the music so all is well, though the performance kind of sucks.

Everybody's Gone to the Rapture
― JimD, Thursday, August 13, 2015 5:44 PM

how is that

It's absolutely beautiful. Alternately nostalgic and disturbing, I'm enjoying it a lot. I'm making it last though, just playing an hour here or there. It's a lot like playing a John Wyndham book.

Beautiful but lonely?

Well, it actually feels like a populated village, you never see anyone else but you're constantly hearing little...memories, I guess? Scenes from before/during the incident being played out again. Some of them feel like excerpts from The Archers. Some of them are really horrible.

the trailer for that made me want to buy a console, solely to play it

bought that as a Monday-ugh present for myself so will start it tonight....

on another note, me and the girlfriend started playing collaborative Rayman Legends this weekend and WOW THAT IS ONE AMAZINGLY FUN PLATFORMER! and huge huge value for money too. i would imagine also an awesome adult-plays-with-their-child game too, similar to the Lego games

actually one of the most fun things about it is that a little helper guy who is remotely controlled to help you get through levels at certain points (by tickling enemies or sawing through bits of scenery) can be controlled by either player, so there is some major timing needed to make sure you're not both hitting that button at the same time and killing each other, its really fun!

Yeah had amazing fun on that game with my godson

let's all go to the rapture reminded me that i wanted to play that gone home game since a good while ago. got it today. very eerie and intense. has anyone played dear esther?

Yeah, its a solid walking sim

lol. so it is shit?

no, seriously: it's a solid walking sim!
http://store.steampowered.com/tag/en/Walking%20Simulator/#os%5B%5D=mac&p=0&tab=NewReleases

ah i had never heard that term before and it sounded like a pejorative!

it kinda is but it's also an accurate description

i'm not sure it's been done brilliantly yet, but i do like the idea of a game with no winning or losing, just wandering, maybe a story that unfolds with no real effort. especially if they can create a good atmosphere. it's where it becomes a bit more like immersive theatre or something.

gone home is p cool tho i guess. the emptiness of it really builds a sense of dread.

Journey is probably the best attempt so far at a walking simulator, it has some very minor platforming at points but 95%+ of the game is pressing the forward button and looking at the scenery.

Proteus has it licked, as it's literally just walking around. Not much of a game per se, but I find it really meditative.

yeah, i thought gone home was great. probably helped a little that i was the roughly the same age as the characters in the story in the time period it was set in, but it's definitely a great example of how a small team with a limited budget can create something really compelling.

i've played about an hour of welcome to the rapture so far and it's pretty cool - the sense of place and specifically British-place is really striking. jimd's wyndham reference is otm.

Walking simulator is a proto-GamerGate term iirc: you can't even shoot things, this isn't really a game, and of course women like it. Though obviously it's eligible for reclamation.

Hohokum is similar, inasmuch as there are goals (albeit only implicitly defined) but you're mostly just a kite-like thing floating through various colorful areas and bumping into things.

Submerged is also a post apocalyptic explorer with thankfully no shooting, meant to be pretty great

its pretty fantastic to see physical download cards of Rapture in Game's top 10 ps4 chart this week instore... just the fact that it has store placement amongst all the shooters reflects well on Sony i think

in some ways minecraft and terraria and don't starve and the like are just walking simulators with end states.
this deserves a thread i think

"Walking Simulators": Puzzle/Exploration games

Playing a bunch of Hawken while I wait for TPP to download. Hawken is a really cool f2p fps where you are in mechs. I tried a bunch of f2p Steam games and this was the best. Tried Quake Live! and it was cool and the levels were really neat but I got my ass handed to me. Matchmaking in Hawken seems a bit better.

I started playing the original Splinter Cell and, ignoring the story (which I couldn't care less about) and the graphics (which are, y'know, PS2 graphics), it's basically a pretty tight little puzzle game which weirdly kinda feels like a more 'realistic' Portal (I tried to come up with an analogy but it was strained). I gather that this is part of what people like about the MGS games (and what MGS probably does better).

i tried that a few years ago; got stuck on some early level. didn't mind the graphics either, but i was constantly getting lost on where to go and what to do. largely blame that on myself gettin' soft tbh

Bio shock infinite while I wait for MGS - the phantom pain to hit the $5 price point sometime around Christmas 2019

i forgot what the thread i put for live events is named but:

NYU Game Center Lecture Series presents
Masayuki Uemura
The Genesis of Nintendo Power
Thursday, October 15, 7PM
2 Metrotech Center, 8th Floor; NYU Campus

Join us to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) launch in the United States with Masayuki Uemura, the designer of the Famicon, NES, and SNES systems. Mr. Uemura will discuss his role in the development of the NES including how he conceived the Family Computer and then collaborated with chip manufactures and software developers to create the NES. Hear a first hand account of the NES coming to America amid a crisis in the video game industry and how the Famicon turned into the Nintendo Entertainment System.

This lecture is free and open to the public.

tempting

also: Special NYC Video Game Events

ah yes

The Beginner's Guide is $7.99, 90 minutes long, and probably the best game i've played this year. hard to explain, but it's about another guy's games. the narrator (who made the apparently acclaimed Stanley Parable, which I haven't played) walks you through his friend Coda's experimental games, in chronological order. Coda is a goddamned genius, and has some issues. so does the narrator. i thought the ending was the only time where it veered into cheesiness (and maybe i'm just an asshole for thinking that; i could see others being really into the scene i'm talking about), but in general the narrator is extremely compelling. it helps that coda's games are a joy to travel through.

http://boingboing.net/2015/10/02/the-beginners-guide-is-a-gam.html

it's a hell of a gam

Yeah, i think it would be better to play it than read about it in case of spoilers

i am totally going to play that

however, today, for some reason, i decided it was a good idea to download 'heroes of the storm'

Well I didn't expect this but I sort of hated The Beginner's Guide. Or at least, I loved the form but got nothing at all out of the content (although I'd say for its form alone it's still really interesting and worth playing so SPOILERS AHEAD if you haven't done).

It's like, if The Stanley Parable is very much a game about games (which I think it is, and it's great), this is too much a game about game criticism. It's got that awful second album feeling - "for my second project I'm going to write about the ways I disliked the reaction to my first project". Which is fine but you're not talking to me any more, you're just venting.

I've seen a few articles since playing it (Laura H's up there included) where the player started out assuming Coda was real and reacted to it on that basis before coming to the realisation that actually he probably wasn't (or even where they don't appear to have decided he wasn't real at all). I assumed he wasn't real from the start, and feel like maybe I spoiled it for myself slightly by not falling for the central conceit that way?

Bought it, will report back some day

I really need to play the Stanley Parable

played the demo a few weeks ago of Stanley Parable, got me jazzed to play the real thing

discovered that remote play via ps vita works like a dream for mlb the show, so i'm now workshopping every surface in my apt to determine which is the most comfortable spot to grind out seasons in my franchise.

oh shit i haven't tried that yet. that's my monday night now!

but what i have taken to doing is, when playing long marathon sessions of mgsv, when i want to have a smoke i plug headphones into the controller, and listen to tapes on it while outside. i may remote play into it so i can listen to other ones when in bed. i have so many left to listen to and i like doing it but when i am sitting on the couch i would rather be playing, you know?

also they sound so much tape-ier on headphones

caveat to my previous post - i found pitching to be most conducive when not using the meter for remote play. i couldn't quite get the timing down and it was a little hard to see so i switched back to classic pitching (haven't attempted the other modes). given that pitching is m/l easier than hitting i was ok w/ the tradeoff

I just got MLB the show a few weeks ago. Pretty fun