whatchu playing now

Like "walking simulator". Like a lot of originally derogatory terms, it can be embraced, and its less cumbersome than alternatives (immersive environment, virtual narrative etc).

I played the *Elite* beta for quite a while using TrackIR, which still seems like a better match than VR for flight-sims where most objects are distant and control panels have lots of tiny text. If I had an Oculus, I'd be most interested in loading up *Subnautica* (underwater survival horror).

PUBG remains fun for blowing off steam, and has become quite a marketing phenomenon (400k concurrent users for an Early Access game). Friend me (NotThisWay on steam) if you'd like to team up.

I'm mostly still fucking with the Friday the 13th game, despite the many issues with playing this game on Xbox.

oh hell qualx u in for a treat. ct is the sweetest fruit on the jrpg tree.

I generously gave a friend of mine my old CD copy of Rollercoaster Tycoon + expansion packs. After I'd set it up for him on his laptop, we played for a bit and it was so fucking great I immediately went home and bought the Deluxe version off Steam.

Just finished Inside, and what a finish! Still not quite sure what to make of it.

Perhaps a definition of 'game' is impossible, there's no necessary and sufficient criteria. Perhaps there's just some sort of 'family resemblance' *cough*

― Eallach mhór an duine leisg (dowd), Friday, July 21, 2017 11:59 AM (four days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yo otm

backlog update: did Batman: Arkham Origins DLC "Cold Cold Heart". appraisal: Not bad.

oh hell qualx u in for a treat. ct is the sweetest fruit on the jrpg tree.

― flippy bard (Will M.), Monday, July 24, 2017 6:07 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's not an active member of my backlog so it might be hard to justify rn

i also really wanna play through suikoden 1 and 2 for the first time in... 15 years?

I am playing Pyre, the new game from Supergiant (the Bastion/Transistor folks) and it is AMAZING. the game essentially plays like a hybrid of the Oregon Trail and NBA Jam, except it's presented in some fantasy setting; you might think that such disparate elements might not gel that well together but you would be incredibly wrong, because this is a brutally easy game to just keep playing (I went for ~4 hours last night pretty much without blinking). it is also one of the most beautiful games I can remember seeing on my TV in a while; if P5 hadn't also come out this year it would be a massive frontrunner for the best-looking game of 2017. A++++++++, please play it.

Nex Machina, the new game from Housemarque, is also fucking phenomenal (not that anything less could be expected from that amazing team). apparently it was developed as a collaboration with Eugene Jarvis, the guy behind Robotron & Smash TV, so it's pretty solid fundamentally. highly recommended if you are an enthusiast of explosions and/or shooting stuff.

I have also been tinkering around with the PS4 Diablo 3 again lately; I picked up the necromancer expansion on a whim recently and got sucked right back into the best version of this excellent game.

finally Miitopia came out last night; I was only able to sink an hour or so into it but my love for the demo absolutely carries over. it's essentially Tomodachi Life, only with a point.

I got hooked on Pyre last night, it's really great.

horizon zero dawn

the game essentially plays like a hybrid of the Oregon Trail and NBA Jam

Pyre is pretty great (only about 2-3 hours in)
"the you know who prevail"

i only wish i could just skip all the story stuff. i get that it's trying to be a rpg, but god i hate this kind of shit

the music and overall sound design is excellent

the fun factor is 4.5 out of 5

I haven't tried it but apparently you can hold down square to make the story go fast

titanfall 2: there's a co-op horde mode now and it's pretty nice
persona 5: this game fuckin' rules! (never played a persona game before)

persona 5 is way up on my list (alongside yakuza 0) but i'm waiting for the price to drop a bit more to closer to $35

this is the first time the price dropped (that I noticed, anyway) since it was released so I went for it

this *was* the first time, I mean

am no longer a gamer, but i have a bizarre addiction: there's a scene of youtubers who do really quite serious endurance-style racing within GTA V. organized multiclass hour-long events, carefully designed courses with pit lanes, socially-enforced rules about faults and incidents, teams with season standings, the works. it's completely bonkers and i find it really soothing to watch. i'm not a motorsport fan, at all. help me.

― goole, Tuesday, January 10, 2017 1:40 PM (six months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

if anyone found themselves falling into this rabbit hole, one of the bigger events is happening again, info here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1eT25bTCs7zxqvxKHIhkLXsH4cmeq4PT0DBWCpBfGbrc/edit#gid=0

god help me I've reinstalled diablo 3 to check out the necromancer

No shame in that.

I took Tweetbot off my phone so I've installed Magikarp Jump as a substitute

pyre got really addicting. i just finished my first (and probably last) playthrough, although it seems like the kind of game lots of people would replay to try to get different endings and see different storylines. the "rites" which constitute the bulk of the action were interesting all the way up to the end, although the strategy of simply rushing forward with the fastest player and then weaving and jumping through to the opponent's pyre (the basketball hoop, basically) never really stopped working. luckily, there's an interesting banishment system where the player who scores last is banished for the next round which prevents that strategy from working every time.

the sound design was really good, as was the narrator (not surprising from the makers of bastion). i skipped through a lot of the side-character storylines but the story that i did read was pretty good for a video game. some of the stuff that i'll remember most, though, are the awful, awful ballady songs with painful literal lyrics sung in the style of Low with Yanni accompanying, and no, that is not nearly as cool as it sounds.

i played 2 hours and got a steam refund. the rites were fun but i couldn't handle the story stuff. same as bastion really. i don't know who told these people they could write.

I cannot stop playing Miitopia; it's like Nintendo's take on The Oregon Trail

played Cosmic Star Heroine and Inside over the last couple of weeks, both v enjoyable in different ways. CSH has an interesting battle system and cuts the usual fat from RPGs streamlining it to a 15 hour game, wish more JRPGs would try that. Went into Inside blind, had a big stupid grin on my face for the last half hour. Puzzles were a bit too simple but the atmosphere, music and non verbal storytelling more than made up for it.

did you get the secret ending for Inside?

No don't think so, guess I should that up on youtube

just cause 3 is doing some weird "i am unkillable" glitch and had me run around a town for an hour demolishing everything because i didn't see the switch i was supposed to throw. three tanks lined up to blow me up and blew each other up instead. nice but no.

Prey. Lots & lots of Prey.

i received my retroengine in the mail today, which, yes, i know. i have already learned my lesson. my guess is that the makers will get sued.

even if it does end up working somehow (i couldn't even get it to connect to wi-fi after 2 hours of troubleshooting, so i never set it up) the hardware is absolute garbage, and all of the cords are like 6 inches long which is one of my biggest pet peeves. i COULD go through a bunch more troubleshooting or wait for them to come up with some sort of work around

check out their awesome website that they direct you to if you "have questions": http://retroengine.doyodo.com/

i also purchased an OUYA, so i just deserve to be slapped at this point

Wow, they hid the hell out of that link to the actual content. For a moment there, I seriously thought that single paragraph was the whole thing. I guess they designed the website for mobile, and didn't give a shit about desktop browsers.

I'm still playing Stephen's Sausage Roll and it's great and frustrating. Funny how the hardest levels so far are usually the seemingly simple small ones.

5 hours of the 10 hour Mass Effect: Andromeda was quite enough to make me not want to spend money on it.

1 hour of last guardian (and 45 minutes of camera issues) was enough for me.

Sonic Motherfucking Mania

It is everything I have wanted in a Sonic sequel since...checking...1994. Not going to spoil anything but the first time you play this, make sure to at least play through to the end of Chemical Plant Act 2...

What is your sense of whether it is actually a fun game for someone who has never played Sonic and isn't sure whether Sonic was fun to begin with

A good question! I'm the worst person to ask (I played the hell out of Sonic 2, 3 & K both on the Genesis as a kid and on emulators as a depressed adult) and this feels like it's throwing me enough curveballs that I have to play it fundamentally differently, outside of that flow state, BUT it's also better designed as an actual game? Like, there are constant opportunities to redirect your momentum (every potential dead end has to have some interesting new route branching off of it) and also less unfair with placement of enemies, spikes, etc. Part of that might just be a function of being the first 2D Sonic game competently designed for widescreen ratios, which this model of platform game always needed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCO1r7xvDW4

finally finished nier:automata. such a beautifully presented game, definitely one that's going to stick with me.

Zelda: Breath of the Wild is so goddamn good

Also playing Zelda atm. Good stuff so far. Pretty early on still tho - only up to that first village. I feel constantly low on weapons - there's no way to craft new ones right?

more or less yeah. you can waay later in the game but even then it's pretty resource limited

There is a way to increase your weapon inventory slots though, which is quite useful

Haven't played it, but is there any reason why the game constantly breaks your weapons? Is it to kind of force you to keep trying different ones that you run across rather than relying on a single favorite throughout the game?

it's to make you very very angry