whatchu playing now

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.

the facial animation is quite good, the face Shepherd makes after she sees the transports destroyed really sold the moment for me.

Heh that kid isn't popular among ME fans, anyway, though I actually was referring to brodown moments with your crew.

Is Tom Clancy's The DivisionTM worth playing at all? The full original game and DLC are on a super-steep discount at Humble now and I'm kind of curious...

I didn't play much of it but I thought it handled well. Supposedly much improved since it launched.

I played the first Uncharted this week. It was pretty good but I hope the second one is considerably better because I thought this was a lot annoying than AC games of the same era. The gunplay in particular was horrible.

That was my impression, too, re: Uncharted. It was mostly dumb fun until the last few levels, when it became frustrating.

Yeah the end was terrible.

I’m playing Just Cause 3 now for the relief of blowing everything up.

Uncharted 2 is a huge improvement over the first one, yeah. I remember the gunplay feeling tighter but also the encounters themselves being far, far better designed to the parameters of the actual game

Good god, "Lady Boyle's Last Party" is one of the best-designed levels in any video game I have ever played

Ha, I'm so off the deep end (in every sense) with Hollow Knight that even online help is not always helpful, since there are so many different ways to go and no definitive order to do things in! It's kind of fascinating to stumble around so much, though I admit a little frustration that I'm dozens of hours in and still unclear of the objective, which means even clear progress doesn't always feel like progress.

into the breach on mac now!!!!!!!

hell yeah, thanks for the head’s up

Nobody get mad at me but imho video game’s are good

Celeste on the Switch, but I had to stop because my thumb started to hurt!

Anybody playing La-Mulana 2? I was excited for it, but I'm also afraid of it. I gave up on the first one after (spoilers?) finding the "womb" puzzle, where you had to pause the game for a few minutes in a certain location. No way could I have figured that out.

Minit is just okay, it reminds me of old ZZT/Megazeux games i used to play as a kid in how rudimentary a zelda-like it is. it doesn't do as many things with the 1 minute gimmick as i was expecting, which is a big letdown

just installed Into the Breach and i am fucking pumped

also, i realize that hearing about other people's coincidences is as interesting as hearing about their dreams, but this killed me:

https://i.imgur.com/d20vfNo.png?1

I named my profile name "Birdie" after my dog, because I name all of my primary characters after my dog.
the generated character name for the first pilot is Ralph Karlsson. Ralph is my cat's name. The second character name is always Ralph when i play games. and i'm karl, here at least.

i've never thought of my pets as having last names, but i'm considering appending the last name karlsson to their official documents

it's really good. maybe not as good as ftl imo but it's extremely compelling.

i think some ppl might like it more than ftl. its puzzleness is much crisper and crunchy than ftl which, despite its infinite pausing, plays more like an rts