whatchu playing now

when four people are nattering on about how the yimmicks are totally fouling up that last jump where you should be able to get a toehold but the crumbling turf has led to a faceplant on the spikes BUT the anti-yimmick jodhpurs you purchase from the second merchant at the ice station (the hidden merchant, not the guy with the dog) totally make that jump a breeze and you can even backstab that fucker and kick HIM into the spikes.... that is the moment when i get my credit card out and walk sadly to the teevee to buy another game i will not likely finish. the seduction of the gullible through excitable argon wins again.

"jargon", not http://s1.thingpic.com/images/px/8egCww5y5x8bTXdbLJvhcZBc.png

and learned how to deal with the skulls (ie don't get hit by them, and you can touch them without damage as long as they're not firing up).

aah, thanks! i didn't realize you can sometimes touch them without getting damaged, so the way i was approaching them was kind of crazy and counterproductive. i'll give it another shot.

re: self-awareness and insane minutiae, i usually try to dial it down but on a thread like this i'm just let it all hang loose

Stardew Valley: they ain't kidding, this will warp time past you in a blink

I am still getting used to all the underlying systems (especially the submission & pin-escape minigames) and fine-tuning my settings, but I have played enough of WWE 2K16 to endorse it wholeheartedly. it's basically The Show, except it's about pro wrestling instead of baseball. I haven't played a wrestling game since that Fire Pro game which inexplicably came out in the US towards the end of the PS2's run, and this definitely scratches the itch (or at least I feel eminently confident that it will once I get the timing & logic down).

also been playing some Civ V with the Steam Controller lately and I sincerely and truly recommend the experience of kicking back on the couch and building up an empire enthusiastically enough. CK2, EU4, and Cities: Skylines all work great too (although I only gave them a cursory test; I'm limiting myself to Civ rn to avoid burning myself out on the genre); if someone ever puts together a template for Colonization I may never leave my apartment again.

I am also still playing Galak-Z; I am unilaterally terrible at it but the premise + mechanics are just too satisfying to put down. it's free on PS4 for PS+ members this month btw.

star wars battlefront developers did an excellent job of making people disappointed the new hero was nien nunb only to reveal him as a powerful battlefield commander

borrowed my sister's copy of until dawn, resolved to lead all of these hapless teenagers to their respective untimely deaths

trackmania turbo is amaaaaaaaaazing

okay, hooked on salt/sanctuary now

Anyone playing Hyper Light Drifter? I'm loving it so far; especially, oddly enough, the total lack of any context clues in the UI or environment beyond the initial "press X to slash," etc- really forces you to go for full immersion and apply what you know of how other games in the genre work, though it did make me cry a single manly tear upon realizing that what I thought was currency for upgrades was in fact quarters of said currency and far from being able to buy the cheapest upgrade in the game at a point where I was already starting to butt up against incredibly hard fights, I was only 25% of the way there.

The music from Disasterpeace (Fez, It Follows) is really something else too.

Yep, I'm playing Hyper Light Drifter. Really enjoying it, but I'm only about 2 hours in. Still not 100% sure what I'm doing, but I seem to be gradually getting further through areas, and lighting up ~somethings~ here and there, so I assume I'm making progress. Loving the sound track, too.

definitely gonna get HLD sometime in the future. SFV still pretty much sucking up all my game time

Lately p heavily into Cities: Skylines, its a pretty decent replacement for the old SimCity4 and its mod community (the Simtropolis forums even brought it into their fold). I wish it ran a little better than it does on my laptop, but I'm enjoying it regardless.

Also if anyone is playing Animal Xing New Leaf hit me up with a code so I can come and vandalise... er play in yr town.

i should open that game...

Finished Salt & Sanctuary, great game. It was kinda crazy how similar my approach was to Dark Souls, from the build (melee, one-handing a fast weapon so I can keep a shield in the other hand, rarely using it but enjoying knowing that it's there) to being terrible at looking at item descriptions.

I got 4 bosses in but I haven't played a videogame in the last few weeks. A friend of mine was talking to me about S&S last night, and he said that it was good but the last half of the game was imbalanced so that your character could just steamroll through all the bosses, many on the first attempt. Was that your experience too Jordan?

Not at all, but I think that's because I was doing a dex build (with the Steel Centipede sword/whip). Relatively low damage and I never put much into hp or armor, so I had to learn the boss movesets until the end (and the last boss was appropriately hard).

Looking on Youtube, strength and magic builds seem to do 2 or 3x the damage, which would certainly make things easier.

yeah it absolutely unbalances as you progress. leveling happens too often and there is no incentive to do anything but pour points into damage output. i realized early on that a shield doesn't really do anything so i played through with a 2h weapon. the game ends up leaning more on platforming for challenge as it gets to the later stages. it never stopped being fun to play though.

'her story' was really fun, i wish that was a genre of puzzle that there were hundreds of (maybe it'll happen?). thinking up new words & phrases and typing them in and hitting enter and getting that unseen video icon was a great video game loop.

even if you don't like leaving the anti-glare off i would recommend leaving if off for like 15 minutes just to appreciate all of the weird little touches they put in, like the police sirens illuminating your creepy avatar's waxy face.

I finally made the breakthrough and beat my first boss in Hyper Light Drifter (West). From there I was able to quickly go on to meet a 2nd boss (North), but as yet he has me bested. I'm about 5 hours in, though I'm not sure how long the game really is. It's fun, though, despite the fact I still have no idea what's going on.

i've cleared east, north, and west in 7 hours or so. east was the easiest boss i think, so you have that to look forward to.

sometimes i just sit my drifter down so we can relax and take in the scenery. such a dreamy game! also dashing + slashing in general is one of the best mechanics ever.

I'm about four hours in and have made significant progress in East and West (all four terminals, if I remember the term in the achievement, activated) and made it to the boss in the North- I gave him two tries, but with a an attention-seeking cat who kept jumping up in front of the TV it was absolutely miserable. Gonna try again later, and since it's a fairly easy path to him and I don't have to worry too much about my save point I might buy an upgrade first. Right now I've just got the multi-dash and bullet deflection with the sword; multi-dash could be crucial here but I haven't totally mastered consistent timing yet.

dirt rally. so, so hard.

started playing life is strange. i'm on episode 1. despite the fact i prob should hate this due to the intense, incessant indieness, i am enjoying it. some of the parts where you sit down and the camera just moves about and you can kind of just hang out are cool.

it's a longstanding legendary board game, but Twilight Struggle has finally made its way to PC/Mac/iOS. the graphics are a little...basic, although I expect them to improve quite a bit as patches come out. but the game itself, holy moly - this is an addicting, wonderful game, esp if you have any interest whatsoever in the cold war or 20th century history in general.

agreed - fantastic game. haven't tried the digital version yet (is the AI any good?) but the board game is a stone cold classic

definitely a game that benefits from not having to deal with setup/cleanup

yeah, never as numbing as risk but there certainly are nine thousand small pieces of cardboard in it. still a board in midgame is a p cool artifact.

i'm playing it on mac/steam. i don't mind the simplistic graphics (although i've seen grumbling about it elsewhere), but my only functional issue with it right now is that when an opponent plays a card, it appears on the screen for about a second, gets swept away, and then all the effects of the opponents action happen automatically and instantly. it's hard to tell what happened without referring to the playlog, and i also end up having to manually find the card they just played and read up about it. i expect that as i get familiar with all the cards it won't be a big deal because i'll just see the name of it and know what it does, but as a beginner it's annoying to have to do every time. an option to have the played card remain on the screen until you click on it (or whatever) would be very useful for newbs

newb perspectives: it does a great job of creating constant tension and a feeling that you're teetering at the edge of collapse in numerous theaters at the same time. during the first several turns, even, it's like: i KNOW that iran is gonna be a thing (along with the rest of the middle east) and that access to it will help me at least get a foothold in either pakistan or india, but at the same time i can't neglect west germany because that would be a disaster, but also i need to expand into turkey so that i start to influence syria (which seems key for reaching israel, although i could also approach from saudi arabia), but oh yeah the korean war is a thing, but also establishing myself in SE asia would seem to be a good move, but....there's no way to do all of that sufficiently at the same time, so you just have to play the hand you're dealt (teehee) and be ok with holding your ground in certain areas and falling behind in others. it feels like (as the US at least) there's no way to completely dominate the early game, but there are definitely ways to completely fuck up everywhere, so it's a scramble to at least maintain a few strong areas and make sure there's at least a possibility of gaining ground in other areas later on.

goddamn what a great game, i love it

it feels like (as the US at least) there's no way to completely dominate the early game, but there are definitely ways to completely fuck up everywhere

yeah, usa early game is always v reactive ime, not just because ussr goes first but because they have a bunch of cards right off the bat that just suddenly open new fronts -- castro, vietnam, nassar -- whereas usa i think just has the us-japan defense treaty in this vein (tho because it locks down japan essentially forever this is a totally infuriating card from the ussr side whereas castro/nassar/ho can all be couped out w improbable ease) and thus doesn't have a lot of opportunity for expansion while having to be braced for containment anywhere.

the ai is not too challenging and seems pretty uncareful in choosing which of your events to play, but it beat me in one of the three games i've played so far. km otm about that played card thing which tbh seems crippling; i have the board game and know the (early- and mid-) cards pretty well but this seems like it would rightly infuriate new players. maybe we are missing something.

as almost all of a game ends up sitting at defcon 2 i enjoy the danger in certain cards (e.g. ones that play a friendly event unseen from your opponent's hand) of accidentally triggering game-ending nuclear war. a much more nervous+capricious simulation than DEFCON's slow predestined crunch. (DEFCON's mechanics rly more suited to a climate change game.)

besides this i am playing a deus ex update lol but not revision which there did not seem much point to when i tried it. this one does a little ai work instead of replacing the soundtrack (!) and tbh a little goes a long way, like uh guards notice bodies which is quite a concept, plus levels are tastefully redesigned in some neat ways. strongly recommended 2 dx heads.

the twilight struggle AI just got all tangled up in itself trying to play "destalinization" and after waiting five minutes for it to decide how to reallocate its influence i quit

yeah, it's crashed on me three times so far (playing on mac). the first was during the midwar period of the tutorial, and it was a shame because you can't save/load a tutorial game. the other two times i was able to just exit and start back at the beginning of the action round, so not a huge deal (although annoying). something kind of interesting, though, is that when i opened up the load state after both crashes, the AI repeated the same exact actions that it did before, and the same exact dice rolls occurred on their side. i remember this pretty vividly because i got really lucky with 2 poor realignment rolls by the AI, and then game crashed. I was bummed because i figured that when i started again, they'd probably win those realignment rolls. but no - they rolled poorly in the exact same way. so it seems like the rolls aren't completely random - maybe they're predetermined at the beginning of each action round? don't know.

i have completed one game, on default difficulty/influence settings. i won as the US in Turn 7, and it kind of exposed the flaws of the AI in two different ways. first, i picked up 11 victory points within just a few action rounds through a very obvious mideast Control score. i already had control of iran, iraq, saudi arabia, and halfway to israel and egypt. i got impatient and decided to just go for broke, and over the course of a few turns i just kept placing influence points on israel, played a USSR get the fuck out of egypt card (forgot the exact title), and then put more influence on libya, then the scoring card, and the game was over. if it was a human doing the same thing, it would be very obvious that they were going for some sort of mideast-specific play, because i was completely ignoring mayhem in the rest of the board. but the AI just kept going for weird little moves in south africa, even though the africa scoring card was out of play until the next reshuffle. so...that wasn't very impressive.

secondly, the AI almost always permitted the DEFCON to be at 3 or 4. as i read up on beginner strategy afterward, everyone (including DLH's post above) was saying that DEFCON is almost always at 2 the entire game. i can see why that would be true, and how it would be advantageous to the USSR to keep it at 2 (as USSR, you do a coup on action round 1, dropping the DEFCON to 2, and then US is prevented from doing coups the rest of the turn because the world will blow up at DEFCON1. at the end of the turn the DEFCON gets bumped back up to 3, the USSR gets the first action round the next turn, rinse and repeat). but the AI didn't do that.

so it's kind of a conundrum because i feel like i probably need to do several more playthroughs before attempting to play against a human. especially because i'm assuming most people playing the game this early on are people who were obsessed with the board game and have moved on to the low-maintenance computer version, so they're probably way better than i am. but i don't know how helpful it is to play against a terrible AI. i could bump up the AI's influence settings at the beginning of the game, but i don't think that would correct the other flaws in its strategy.

Stephen's Sausage Roll omg! When I started this game, I visited five or six levels and decided each one was a different variety of impossible. Since then I somehow managed to beat a handful, but the game is hair-pullingly difficult. And it's literally about rolling sausages around! which makes it seem like it's making fun of you. Sausages wtf.

Also Warbits. A challenging Advance Wars knock-off.

And Not a Hero. Dumb fun.

i really want this N64/voxel aestetic to die already

It's more of a "one person developing alone in unity and spending more time on mind-pulverizing puzzles than an 'aesthetic' " aesthetic.

Disney Crossy Road, they've added some quirks to the game play plus you get donald duck

this is probably old news but i just found this site https://isthereanydeal.com/

man, not gonna be good for the bank account

oh boy

yup, it's been around for years. good resource

See also Dealzon and Cheapassgamer

kinda loving firewatch

kinda feeling massively indifferent about the third act of firewatch

been playing the uncharted collection & nuclear throne (fun!)

i got really into StarBreak, but quit after getting disconnected from the servers became a constant thing. still, i'll probably check back in if/when they get that fixed. RIYL if you like Realms of the Mad God (think it shares one of the same designers, even)

i could not figure out what was enjoyable about rotmg and i tried a bunch

yeah, it's not for everyone. it's kind of relaxing in a way, just being part of a swarm. StarBreak is a 2D contra-style platformer version of it.

also ponyisland is v. frog fractions esque and worth checking out imo