whatchu playing now

playing atelier while watching the nba playoffs for the maximum possible aesthetic dissonance

Beat Kirby Star Allies with my allies tonight and my god I will be surprised if Xenoblade Chronicles 2 manages to have a weird ending

How’s Atelier, what’s it like

atelier's a long running series of girly jrpgs built around elaborate crafting/alchemy systems. the newest one (lydie & suelle) is a pretty good one though the switch port is kind of janky.

Won my first Fortnite round!

I've played fifteen rounds of Fallout now. Zero kills. Think It's time to acknowledge I can't play that sort of game.

which fallout?

or maybe you meant fortnite? i'm with you, if that's the case. i downloaded and played for about 30 minutes but i'm just awful. i've finally come around to the idea that i just don't like first person shooters that much

I’m also terrible at it. Have made it to the final few a couple of times, mostly by avoiding everyone.

Have had fun playing with friends, not so much solo.

I hate its aesthetic. Low rent Blizzard. And that stupid dance makes me cringe.

My friend said he was officially over it after he played with some kid who did a Peter Griffin impression on voice chat the entire match.

I did mean Fortnite! Ugh one of those days.

I'm terrible at the shooting but it's a game where you can get pretty far with a bit of luck and a bit of stealth, and I enjoy the map a lot more than I'd have expected to. Only killed 2 people in the one game I won, and I killed them both in the last 2 seconds when they found me behind a tree, tried to hit me with a rocket, missed, and I somehow panic whacked them both with a crappy assault rifle. It felt GREAT.

I'm fine with the look and feel of it, always happier playing cartoony shooters than po-faced military ones. I haven't ever turned voice chat on though, and don't know why anyone would.

The fort part of Fortnite is extremely cool and weird. Has sort of a Inception / Doctor Strange-esque feel where the architecture of the environment is constantly changing.

Seems like there's a fairly huge advantage in using extreme controller/mouse sensitivity settings so you can build quickly.

Red Dead Redemption (PS3)

yeah this game is incredible. just the design of it all, it is very well done. combat is not amazing but pretty smooth. compared to doing a drive-by in GTA:VC it is infinitely easier to pop off shots as you ride your horse in circles around bandits. the slow motion superpower is cool and the ideal thing for this game. last night it helped me shoot a rope, freeing a hanging victim. yeah it's pretty much a spaghetti western come to life!

i really love it at nighttime. not sure whether it is the low resolution and/or by design but the stars have this great shimmery quality to them.

Ah, I loved that game. Zen cowboy GTA

i did some horse-and-carriage racing earlier and kept rolling over. then i did a mission where me and an NPC went down into a mine as cool as any Skyrim dungeon but with a surprise exit, let's just say it was way cool.

i tried fortnite again. i played 4 matches, each of which ended with me sneaking around in loneliness before suddenly dying, often before i even fired a shot back. somehow placed in the top ten for 3 of the 4? i don't know. i want to be better at the shooting part of it but i've only had about 15 seconds total of shooting across an hour of playing? maybe i should try that other mode (zombie survival or whatever) to get more experience with the actual combat

I've been playing a little Fortnite lately, too. I'm definitely not a shooter kind of person, but I've only been playing it when a couple of friends are online too, so we're in a 2 or 3 man squad. We can easily go for 3 or 4 games without any of us getting a single kill. Other games it all just clicks where there's good loot drops, enough time to prepare, and some blind luck getting the jump on people equally as rubbish as us, and we'll get 8-10 kills between us (still no victory royale though). I definitely notice when I come up against people who are actually competent, because even when I get the jump on them and pump a full clip at them they manage to kill me. Like you say, though, the actual shooty bits are so sporadic I don't know if I'll ever actually get good at that bit. Then you watch guys like Ninja on Twitch, and it's just ridiculous.

RDR is getting better and better.

really astounding level of detail here. lots of seamless immersion. the interplay of systems working together to make emergent stories is nice. i was headed out to a contact when i passed by someone who had just had their horse stolen and they were yelling for help. i turned around and went after the thief and caught the horse and brought it back to the owner, who thanked me. later i was walking with a contact and listening to the story when we passed by some prostitutes standing on the corner. they made come ons and my character said "I'm not that kind of man anymore", which is some random character building, then some town drunk passed in front of us on our way out of town. as we left i could hear him talking with the other NPCs in concert.

its a real, living world (or at least a real, living Pirates of the Carribean-style playable ride). the animation throughout is so impressive. so many incredible stunt deaths, people falling off roofs, people falling off horses, varieties of the most spectacular tumbling from horse deaths, etc. imo the GTA games always had lame deaths, the screen goes bw as you ragdoll. here it is stylized, much like stunts from those old cowboy films. i was making an escape and coming up on a bridge that had a lone horseman positioned to shoot at me. i got them with my revolver and the horse reared up, the force of the shot hitting the bandit sending him flying back due to realish physics. pretty incredible animations here!

the actual shooty bits are so sporadic I don't know if I'll ever actually get good at that bit

I've started going into some games with the intention of looking for trouble rather than of surviving as long as possible, just so I can get more practice at this stuff.

Been playing some PUBG on mobile too, and I don't know whether it's just a lot easier than I'd expected, or whether I've been hugely lucky, or whether I'm just a fucking badass or something, but I've played 3 solo games and already won one of them, played 2 squad games and already won one of those too. Combat in this feels a lot less manic, and that does make up for the lack of polish and the dreary environments.

Oh shit hold on:

https://www.polygon.com/2018/3/22/17142692/pubg-mobile-bots

I played a couple of hours of fortnite and it is just Not Fun

i bought the big (and mad expensive) xcom 2 expansion. xcom 2 is Still Fun, i would say

tbh the first pubg-like with random map generation i am in in in but as someone who played dozens of hours of tf2 and didn’t ever properly know the convoy route i don’t think I’m gonna learn the ins and outs of a square mile of fictional neighbourhood

i kept going with fortnite and i'm starting to enjoy it more! i will never memorize the entire map, but i've been initially dropping into certain areas more frequently and i'm gradually starting to learn the lay of the land. i still reaaaaaaally wish there were a freeplay/practice mode where i could practice building things. i guess i need to just drop into an isolated area several times in a row just to work on building, and forget about trying to win. it's kind of nice that the stats aren't too detailed: i can't see how many times i've died, or my killelimination/death ratio, the % of times that i've placed in the top ten; instead, i can only see the total # of times i've placed in the top ten, the total number of eliminations, etc. in other words, i can just die over and over and over and not be reminded of it or penalized. that's nice.

made it to Mexico in RDR yesterday. jaw dropping, painterly skyboxes! those pinks and oranges and blues.

I'm reading your posts and enjoying reliving my love for the RDR production quality, it really does look beautiful.

in fortnite i spectatored ppl who killed me and the ppl who killed them etc and it really does seem like it comes down to memorizing the viable strategies and executing them with muscle memory. very, very tedious. i suppose the team stuff might help, maybe it would come down to more than making the exact same boring fortress as everyone else

it just feels so fucking boring and gross!! it's like the imagine dragons of videogames!!

Dylan Live 1966 Tour - 32(!!) disc box set. Just getting started on this monster.

Oops i did it again!! Dammit. I really need to not post this early in the morning.

'llow it. seems in dialogue yanno.

so basically what your saying is I should just continue to play farming sim?

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

So God Of War is really really incredible. It's just about the perfect blend of Zelda and Bloodborne that I wanted. Absolutely fantastic art direction. and like Last Of Us, somehow does the magic trick of having a non-annoying child companion. I'd recommend going in spoiler free.

i'm planning on taking it on in a few weeks! i've never played a god of war game (didn't have a ps3) but i like the idea of encountering greek gods and hitting them with an axe.

the zelda and bloodborne references are intriguing! what makes you mention them?

i don't think this one has anything to do with killing greek gods they moved it into Norse mythology now

oh! bummer. well, i hope this game lets me throw an axe at odin, thor, and loki, then, because that's about all that i know.

Been enjoying Trackmania Turbo, which is like ... Trials meets Wipeout? Is free this month on PS Plus

zelda - this thing is PACKED with puzzles and exploration is fantastic.
souls/bloodborne - fantastic world building, enemy design and level layouts

its really quite good.

Trials meets Wipeout

aaaaaaaaaah wtf mindblown.gif. i don't even have any kind of console anymore why am i bumming myself out by reading this thread.

It isn't as good as either of those games, to be fair. But I like it. :)

God is Far Cry 5 a dumb fuckin game

please dont buy ubisoft games in 2018 expecting them to be anything but

bought Nier: Automata last night after seeing it place so high on ILX's C&P placing. pretty excited to check it out this weekend

it's good....

the only weird thing i'll warn you about is that the intro/prologue sequence is like 45 mins long and doesn't have save points which is kind of bs, if you're a hard mode liker i would still start on normal and wait until you get to the main part of the game and save before turning the difficulty up.

bookmarking that for a theoretical future time when i get round to playing this game

only thing i have checked out from the poll so far has been northgard, which is v good

other than that just know that the game isn't over when you see the credits roll, not even close

if you're a hard mode liker i would still start on normal and wait until you get to the main part of the game and save before turning the difficulty up.

Or easy mode, if you suck like me. The tutorial is very easy to get through, but then the tutorial boss is much more difficult (when you’re new to the game). “Good” news is that the tutorial only takes about 30 minutes instead of 45, at least after you’ve had to do it several times. I’m still mad at Nier about that

thanks for the info, all! hah this is why i didn't start it last night, i knew playing through the intro would be at least an hour long

woah.... well that was... not what i expected! went in thinking it would be your standard 3rd person action game, instead it's a crazy combination SHMUP, run n gun, twin stick shooter, linear 2d platformer, cinematic 3rd person open world, etc. game. about a minute into fighting the giant robot i was like, this is so OTT it has to be a Platinum game, sure enough, yep!

gonna be a wild ride.

nier automata w0w!