whatchu playing now

sunless sea had [marginally] more ludic content. fallen london + cultist simulator are imo v innovative interactive fictions.

also wondering if it's pleasant to play on the switch i'm thinking to how it plays on the PC and there's a lot of clicking and dragging that i feel like would feel awkward on a touch screen...

slay the spire is a legit great game if u love the idea of mashing card builder w/ roguelike in early access w/ v satisfying strategy layer

It's awesome - and I would think it's underrated, except in the daily challenges I come about 100,000th.

slay the spire seems like the kind of thing to avoid if i want to maintain any personal productivity

just can't go on with No Mans Sky anymore, bumbling my way through the fucking dreadful inventory system just leaves me with thoughts of dread.

i just play it in the free play mode or whatever it's called

Rise of the Tomb Raider is pretty cool so far, tho im not very far. it opens w a cool cinematic snowy peaks scaling setpiece. then it goes to Syria with a really cool temple tomb carved into the desert mountains.

she is such a horrible archeologist tho compared to the old Lara. every place she goes is bound to explode, the ground caving in under her feet, as she makes a daring escape, entire civilizations lost (i admit it does look cool).

im also playing Arkham Knight. i almost like this more than the modern Batman movies. you have the cartoon series Batman and Joker doing the voice acting, and the other characters and villains are pretty good as well. i got this cos i heard the way they do the Joker is really cool, even tho he is dead, he will turn up periodically as a hallucination. plus it is always fun to swoop swoop through the sky above Gotham City.

MGS3. going through this again (i played it on emulator this is on PS3 w the HD collection) and it is incredible. the atmosphere is so thick. the humor is great. the mystical bullshit is off the charts. the game is cinematic as fuck. to me it is clearly the stand out of the series. the amount of humor vs. amazing tactical gameplay, the sixties spy/James Bond/Rambo stylism, the level design and immersion via survival mechanics (and first person grass crawling). the story is great, i love the static-y shots of international spies, the focus on Cold War era espionage.

comparing them all, 1 is great but the back tracking & control are showing their age. 2 and 4 are hurt by too much focus on story over gameplay, and the actual playing suffers. V is incredible but is basically a redo of 3. it does't have the bosses of 3, it lacks scripted moments like the walk through the river of everything you have killed during the game. seriously, that may be the most brilliant thing Kojima has ever put into these games.

top 5 MGS:

MGS3
MGSV
MGS2
MGS
MGS4

I haven’t played MGS3 since PS2 and I have that MGS collection. That’s like the “fixed up” version, right? Know they re-released it with some gameplay tweaks. I really need to dig that out and give it a go.

i have the PS3 collection but yeah it has the nice camera, it has up-rezed graphics, it has Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake for MSX.

just fought The End in an epic 30 minute battle. <3 what a boss fight.

the feeling of accomplishment on beating The End in MGS3 is pretty hard to top.

I deleted TLOU from my PS3 to make room for ME3, teh symbolic sadness. (The curse of having a 70GB model.)

Well I tried loading Fortnite but it's asking for authentication in Korean, so that's that.

Finally restarted Dishonored after, Jesus Christ, six years since the last attempt? That can't be right, Dishonored is a NEW GAME. Anyway, I have the original game, all the DLC and #2 through various sales, but finally replaced the janky old computer that made actually playing it difficult

Friends

I am very, very bad at stealth games

I'm doing OK so far in the opening prison escape sequence- no outright detection, just a guard catching me in his peripheral vision, coming to investigate and obligingly presenting his back for the ol' chokeroo- but knowing I flubbed what must be the easiest stealth segment in the game gives me some pause

Ha, I started playing the original Deus Ex from 2000 and messed up the stealth training section of the tutorial five times! stealth mechanics have come a long way in terms of taking cover , more realistic enemy sight cones, actually being able to tell when your hidden, etc

You're

As far as I can tell, Dishonored, at least in the early offing before you get spooky devil powers, doesn't have an in-UI indicator of how hidden you are? Certainly nothing like the Thief visibility indicator; I've just been relying on how much shadow is cast on my character model, which is nice and elegant, assuming it works. It does have that overlarge (presumably for console players) stance indicator, which is a really odd design choice.

OK, I just met Panic! at the Disco and bought Dark Vision, that should make things much easier. I am still legitimately pissed that I got dinged for a dude getting eaten by rats in the first mission. For fuck's sake, <i>I</i> didn't eat the guy...

Octopath Traveler - Switch (2018)
Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker - Switch (2018)
Doom - Steam (2017)
Cuphead - Steam (2017)
Rise of the Tomb Raider - Steam (2015)

doom was 2016!!!!!!!!

bejeweled blitz and chess

xcom2

also played some Beat Saber, which is the best VR game I've played thus far

I also played this game Killer Queen, which is 2-10 player local multiplayer and reminds me of Towerfall:

https://www.polygon.com/features/2013/8/29/4593934/killer-queen-joust-starcraft-giant-snail

Yeah I’m excited for the Switch adaptation of Killer Queen; I don’t go to arcades in general so I haven’t sought out an arcade with Killer Queen in particular

It should be in every Dave and Busters imo

Bar in my neighborhood has Killer Queen. It’s a lot of fun, but obv. tricky to catch it when there are people around playing it. I think they have “nights” but eh.

Not sure the fun would translate playing remotely.

The Switch/home version (dunno about other platforms) isn’t gonna be a straight port. Max 8 players rather than 10 for instance. Tim Rogers interviewed one of the developers for Kotuku at E3. I doubt I’d play much online but we love Towerfall so we might at least be able to get 2v2 going locally.

Started Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, and the first couple hours are pretty frustrating since the puzzles are opaque, but after those initial levels, the solving experience gets a lot smoother.

The combat isn't revolutionary, though there is one part that's absolutely intense and left me in tears afterwards.

Also I just finished a level that looks like Reign in Blood.

I'm still mediocre at Dishonored but the fast, unrestricted quicksave/quickload and the sheer amount of stuff you can do very quickly makes it merciful in a way that, say, my first shot at Metal Gear Solid very much wasn't. I feel a little foolish doing my usual Deus Ex "stealthy" routine- incapacitating everyone I possibly can, usually taking a top-down approach- but it's getting to the point where being unexpectedly spotted doesn't immediately ruin a playthrough and necessitate a quickload, and I think that's partly up to fairly simple AI that's more prone to rush into combat than run for help, and the huge, easily visible, sparsely placed alarms I haven't been unlucky enough to set off even once.

But more than anything, I think this is my favorite setting in any game, ever, and I'm so fucking excited that there's so much more left (the two story DLCs, the sequel and *its* story DLC). The sheer complexity of the scripting (for instance, all the ways the High Overseer Campbell mission can go down and all the ways that affects the ongoing world state) and the way the city is believably geographically contiguous give it so much more presence and believability. On that latter note- it's still chunked up into mission areas with doors, but there are never any loading screens in the middle of hallways in the Valve mode, and the density is even more clever than the Minerva Metastasis mod that's always brought up as the epitome of use of space. I'm almost done replaying that as well, and it's a wonderful piece of work but the encounter design is so-so at best and so much of it is just making little linear rabbit warrens that run parallel to each other. Different game styles- corridor shooter vs "immersive sim"- but still a useful comparison, I think. Yes, I am using a new midrange gaming PC to rehash hot takes from 2013, what of it

One last thing about Dishonored, though: is it just me or is the celebrity voice acting weirdly bad? Susan Sarandon does best, but Brad Dourif: the man is a legend and I will not hear one word spoken against him but what the *fuck* is he doing here, it sounds like he learned his lines phonetically

played some MGSV FOB. they have all kinds of patches and updates, you can now be Quiet or Ocelot, plus there are now easy & hard versions of the offline FOB missions. its always fun to take out a base full of highly trained soldiers with the rocket punch.

I really tried to get into the original Deus Ex (2000) after very much enjoying Human Revolution, but I'm giving up! The archaic controls, interfaces, graphics, etc are just too much to get over for me. I think my cutoff for whether I'll be able to enjoy an older FPS-like game is probably right around Half Life 2. Maybe I'll watch someone else play it on youtube.

It's rough, definitely- there's a thriving mod scene that'll make the graphics look better (it's been a while since I poked my head in, but iirc there are more or less standardized/favorite mods to modernize it) but certain things like the aiming reticle, the utterly useless sleep darts (which make enemies run around screaming for what seems like an eternity instead, of, you know, SLEEP) and the mortifying Asian accents haven't aged well at all

Yeah, the most annoying thing in the early game at least is that there didn't really seem to be any good way to do a non-lethal takedown!

instead, there are several bad ways

start w a point in unarmed and hit people in the back of the head w the baton, or in the legs w the prod-- certainly as swift+reliable as a quicktime prompt

the tranq darts are p much a red herring yeah.

thanks!

i don't mean unarmed obv.

crankily i think stealth game controls have declined since thief/DX (tho i do like dishonored and think from both this perspective and others that it's a better DX successor than dx's modern sequels) BUT if you do find them unmanageable or boring, it is surprisingly possible and even a kind of relief to play the game as arnold-in-commando. even more fun after you are familiar with the whole game "in stealth mode" of course. i have played thru DX a lot of times.

i'm playing link to the past rn.

Bought Witcher 3 today! I'm still 10% away from finishing Uncharted 1, but that shouldn't take long.

Christ help me, I just bought Destiny 2 on sale >_<

It'll have to wait until I a) get around to a PS4 and play through the as much of the first game as is solo-able, and b) get a second SSD because the required install is massive, so that's a few months out (by which time I'm sure it'll be a ghost town), but I really, really enjoyed the demo of the first one I played over and over on PS3 and this looked like the cheapest way to get the base game and expansions that was likely to come along in a while.

thanks again dlh, turns out most of my problems with stealth takedowns in deus ex were because I had somehow failed to take the baton off of the first corpse you encounter

Assassin's Creed Brotherhood
Mass Effect 3

found both for PS3 nearly new at a thrift store this weekend for a couple bucks. ACB is pretty good, tho it is a direct sequel and the opening had me constantly confused about the plot, i do love Ubisoft's attention to detail and the historical tourism aspects of chilling in 16th century Italy.

ME3 i only played for half an hour or so, i found it clunky to control, gameplay wise not really my thing, and when the cutscenes revealed "We have to travel to the citadel and present our findings to the council" i nearly passed out from how boring it sounded. really high production value all around tho, i guess this is why these games are so big.

the in-game maps in AC games make me exhausted just to look at them.

i have never understood ME love, either. i think a lot of people really put a lot of stock in AAA-production values

The part of the story where you "travel to the citadel and present findings to the council" is pretty spicy iirc

For me, the appeal with ME3 (and ME2) is how it develops the characters. There are some genuinely big-hearted moments that really affected me.

I've only played the first one, but it's like the great Star Wars/Star Trek RPG adventure that was never officially made (well, outside of KOTOR)

guess w both series i just kind jumped into middle entries, i have no idea who any of these people are.

There are some genuinely big-hearted moments that really affected me

just the intro to this was pretty incredible in that way, you are escaping some massive assault on the planet, and then at the end you see this kid who is trying to get away, and your character has already made a connection to this kid before so you are already sort of invested, and then he gets in the helicopter and is saved, then a giant robot comes out of nowhere and just lasers all of the helicopters and there is this sad piano note or something. i know it sounds pretty cliche but it was pulled off perfectly, it was really devastating, more moving than most of the comic book movies out there or whatever.