whatchu playing now

Continuing my "hey i'm back on ILX and i spent my year off with lots of media; here's my best of gaming list for 2018... nothing earthshattering but hey.
I have a PS4, Switch, iPad and Steam for Mac with gaming platforms being used in roughly that order.

Best
Spider-Man (PS4)
Dragon Quest 11 (PS4)
Celeste (PS4)
Hollow Knight (Switch)
NES Switch Online (Switch)
Captain Toad Treasure Tracker (Switch)
Florence (iOS)
Donut Country (iOS)

Have and need to Play More... or, uh, at all...
Subnautica (Mac)
Iconoclasts (Switch)
Into the Breach (Steam)
Yoku’s Island Express (PS4)

Based on My Interests (and the Internet), I Apparently Will Play These in 2019 (with 2018 non-sale pricing) - Would welcome suggestions to add!
Dragon Ball FighterZ (PS4) - $60
Ni No Kuni 2 (PS4) - $60
No Man’s Sky Redux (PS4) - $60
Monster Hunter World (PS4) - $50
Tetris Effect (PS4) - $40
God of War (PS4) - $40
Monster Boy and The Cursed Kingdom (PS4) - $40
A Way Out (PS4) - $30
Dead Cells (Switch or PS4) - $25

Octopath Traveler (Switch) - $60
Valkyria Chronicles 4 (Switch) - $60
Super Smash Brothers Ultimate (Switch) - $60
Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze (Switch) - $60
SNK 40th Anniversary Collection (Switch) - $40
Katamari Damacy Reroll (Switch) - $30
The Messenger (Switch) - $20
Chasm (Switch) - $20
The Gardens Between (Switch) - $20
Gris (Switch) - $17
Minit (Switch) - $10

Two Point Hospital (Steam) - $35
Return of the Obra Dinn (Steam) - $20
One Hour One Life (Steam) - $20
Paratopic (Steam) - $6

No and I Bought It but I Actually Mean No
Red Dead Redemption II (PS4)

Dragon Ball FighterZ (PS4) - $60
Ni No Kuni 2 (PS4) - $60

figured as much, but thanks for that... maybe something I play on PS+ in 2020 instead.
God of War is like $15 on Gamefly right now and I'm still not really into it. Too much backlog!
Just started Iconoclasts and it's a good time. Very light Metroidvainia.

i didn't play that many games in 2018, but i'd rank them like this

the game i spent the most time playing this year, by far, was CINCO PAUS (iOS), a michael brough joint. it came out on christmas day, 2017, i believe. it's the one where all the text is in portuguese for no reason (brough doesn't even know it well himself), which put off a lot of people. i made the mistake of introducing it to my partner, who plays very few games in general but gets incredibly addicted to them when she does. she has put an incredible number of hours into it this year. i didn't even like it at first, but there's a weird learning curve/hump and then the replayability goes through the roof and doesn't stop for a very long time. i feel like i'm trying to sell crack to all of you, it makes me feel bad.

i believe i officially and publicly crapped my pants out loud in my praise for CELESTE (ps4) on the ilg thread. the only reason i stopped playing was because i suffered a right-thumb injury from playing it to much. the controls are so perfect and exact, but they require intense d-pad mashing. i was working my way through the b-sides (and had yet to even tackle a c-side) when the thumb pain got to be too much. i had to go on the 30-day DL, and as i gave my thumb my rest i got hooked on another game, a mouse-clicking kind of simulation if i remember correctly. i understand people complaining about the difficulty, but here's the thing. the vast majority of players will not be able to 100% this game. i could barely get through some of the b-sides, and i think i literally could be completely stumped on some of the c-sides, if i could even get to them. celeste it really isn't about "beating" the game so much as the satisfaction of mastering certain segments of it, and this is cheesy, but also the joy of the responsiveness of the controls and level designs. the reason super mario bros 3 often gets brought up w/ celeste is that there are levels in both where the combination of muscle memory + perfect level design temporarily allows the player to transcend and get totally ~zoned in~, zooming through the level, careening off enemies, changing directions mid-air twice in the same jump, stringing together 8 or 9 sick little movements in a row. when you watch a really good speedrunner do smb3, it's amazing how you can see that the levels are designed for the perfect player - if you go full speed and bounce off things in just the right way, so many enemies and platforms and timed objects are perfectly synched together. smb and celeste are designed with these perfect routes in mind, and both have such perfect controls that most anyone who spends time with it ends up landing on them on occasion. very very satisfying to play. jfc i just crapped my pants out loud again, sorry

i've only played an hour or so of RETURN OF THE OBRA DINN (steam) but i can already tell it's going to wind up around here. very, very cool. each of the "memories" you can find have the exact moment of death, frozen in time, and you just walk through them looking at what happened from various angles, seeing who was involved. the memories are found in an order that isn't chronological, as you peep in on fatal moments of all these people on a boat that was sailing toward the tip of Africa. innocent bystanders in one memory will be key actors in another, and as you watch a bunch of them you start to form a general construction of what happened how various storylines connect. looking forward to playing this more but i need to finish cowboy game.

if HOLLOW KNIGHT counts (it's a 2017 game), then definitely that. i didn't play it until this year, on the switch. for some reason i quit playing after about 10 hours, then picked it up months later and got really into it.

i am playing RED DEAD REVOLVER 2 (ps4) right now, nearing the very end. rockstar games are rarely my very favorite, but they're always solid and i generally play them to the end. but i'm getting kind of sick of just hitting the lock-on button and pressing the trigger, over and over. i know i should turn auto-aim off but i can't stand the feeling of manually aiming with the analog stick on the PS4. it makes me physically feel unwell. it's not the same as fingernails on the chalkboard, but it's in the same general category of personally sensed physical discomfort. so instead i just auto-aim and fire. not sure what to do about this, but i'm about ready beat it and move on.

i played and beat GOD OF WAR (ps4). it's a good AAA game. my eyesight sucks and my tv sucks, and for probably not unrelated reasons i just don't care that much about cool looking graphics. god of war has more going for it than graphics, but that's a big part of the experience. i think i would have enjoyed the axe-throwing aspect more if i didn't suffer from the analog-stick repulsion syndrome that i mentioned above re: rdr2.

i wanted to like INTO THE BREACH (steam) more than i did. i didn't unlock even half of the possible unit factions, and i imagine there's a replayability there which might rival FTL. but i started getting bored with the lack of variety in the mission scenarios and especially in the maps. there are volcano, desert, and ice planets, and they all present environmental obstacles, usually in the form of certain tiles disappearing or changing in some way. but in practice, it seems like most battles play out in pretty much the same way, regardless of scenario. the maps are randomly generated (i think?) but there's just not enough variety.

i played A WAY OUT (ps4) with my partner, which is the 2-player game where everything is in split screen and you have to cooperate in order to break out of prison and then do a bunch of dumb shit that i forgot. we called the two characters sean bean and sean penn, which made the experience way better than it would have been otherwise imo. i read a rave kotaku review about how fun it was, but i found it to be a straight up bad video game. it's bizarrely constructed, too. the first 4/5th of the game is this really long and unimaginative set of co-op exercises (cut scene, sean bean must press X in order to let sean penn tap square repeatedly which lets them meet up at a different object and hold triangle together, cut scene) paired with the dumbest story of all time and dialogue/performances that teeters on the edge of funny-bad and bad-bad. i never did figure out which side it was on. then about 8 hours in, near the end, it suddenly turns into uncharted 3 and you get a gun and suddenly have to murder dozens of enemy agents who are flanking you and killing your partner irl over and over again. after 8 hours of pressing face buttons and slowly walking from one obvious task to another with no time limit, it assumes that you're suddenly ready to snap into a fucking 3rd person cover-based shooter game. we struggled to the end and i think both of us wished we would have spent the time playing cinco paus instead

excellent breakdown zs!
i'm with you on Into the Breach so far. I think i'm just tired of the roguelike philosophy.
you always enjoy difficult games more than i did and i liked celeste a lot but i hit a controller throwing point and never went back. great game tho!

Yoku's Island is A LOT of fun... how long does this game go on for? ten hours? twenty?

that reminds, i had this in clipboard earlier but was waiting to paste it until after the mountain of text so it would get buried:

glad you're back, ulysses!

a lot of your lists mirror mine, which makes sense because i enjoy your taste in games and we have most of the same systems (i don't have a working iPad, though)

entire words and phrases are now just disappearing from my sentences, sorry

heh, i thought you were engaging in my easygoing, folksy writing style!

hahaha

that reminds...*old man accidental whistling noise through the teeth*

xp yoku's isn't that long, it's like 5-6 hours to complete, maybe 10 hours to get 100% of the collectibles

Ah, then i may be closer to beating it already than i thought!

iirc there's 3 main "bosses" you can do in any order and getting to and beating those is most of the game and then theres a finale

hollow knight is a 2018 game

fuck playing a PC

damn, i'm impressed you actually took a whole year off from this place... must've been weird!

xps you know when people say a game is 6 hours long? I always have to double that. value for money I suppose... but my poor ego...

i'm the opposite, i always finish games in like 20% less than the advertised playtime. i think it's just because i read really fast and play a lot of dialogue heavy games

i usually take longer than average, but i also like to spend a lot of time doing really dumb things in games whenever possible

lol looking at my purchase history everything that I played after getting back into gaming was this year!

TLOU - GOAT

Mass Effect Trilogy - The second one was good and my favorite of the three. I enjoyed the third too (the nerds who raged out over the ending are morans), especially the individual character moments.

Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice - Enh. Maybe I needed to play this with headphones on, but I didn't get much juice out of the story.

Uncharteds - MEH. The story for 4 was the only thing that kept me going, and I hope TLOU2 doesn't play like it.

Witcher 3 - Slightly better MEH. I put decent hours into it, but mostly with the expectation that it would finally click for me at some point. I got as far as Act 2 when I decided it wouldn't.

God of War - Fun game, but the much vaunted story didn't touch me. I beat it but still have things I could do, but I'm pretty sure I'm done with the game for the foreseeable future. Also per KM's writeup, I have a good tv (though I played on a Slim) and the visuals did not transport me (I'm not a graphics nut to begin with).

Persona 5 - YAYYY. Love the characters so much, I started my NG+ pretty soon after finishing my first playthrough.

Bloodborne - too creepy (rules out playing on the evenings) and too hard (rules out casual sessions).

What Remains of Edith Finch - Couldn't finish this because my motion sickness kicked in.

Hollow Knight - My first dip into its world was astoundingly magical: art design, music, it all created a beautiful and unadulterated experience. The characters are great, and if/when I try to revisit the game it'll be because of them.

Horizon Zero Dawn - My love for this is mostly carried by the story, the scale of which is ambitious and deeply moving. The combat is really good, too, even though I barely scratched the surface of it.

Nier: Automata - Still playing, I'm finding it to be incredibly uneven. On normal difficulty, I was able to get by pretty much mashing the light attack button (i.e. boring), and the deeper combat tactics have largely eluded me. But on the B path, I'm enjoying the hacking minigames (and I don't think it's because of any misplaced '80s nostalgia). Storywise, the stuff on the periphery has the most pathos. Such a weird game so far.

subnautica is v fun

i only have time for one completely immersive open world game rn and i've been considering horizon zero dawn over RDRII

Caveat: I have not played RDR2, and probably will never.

But as for HZD, the world isn't overwhelmingly large (cf. Witcher 3). The map might show a zillion landmarks on it, but most of them are NOT in fact quests (the number of which, as a consequence, is a lot more manageable). The character animations are wonky though, so be warned that you'll be talking to a lot of NPCs that look like Disneyland animatronics.

might grab yoku in the EU switch sale

lol isn't that sort of part of the conceit tho

RDRI i used to kind of pretend was westworld and it made the cutscenes much more believable

xpost

lol isn't that sort of part of the conceit tho

LOL but not the humans! Anyway, they mostly fixed it in the DLC (which is excellent btw).

vertical line man, definitely get yoku. it's great fun!

I finally got RDR 1, and I bored of it quickly.

I'm still down to do c+p this yr btw but I won't open nominations til Jan (and leave em open for like a month per usual)

merry christmas ilg folks

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

Remade spyro trilogy cos I’m an adult and it’s sooooo fun and cute omg

Bought three people Return of Obra Dinn for Xmas. I also bought myself and my brother Fallout 76 - I know it’s meant to be crap, but I think we can wring some fun out of it.

Humbug on iPhone is perfect Dec 27 hangover/exhaustion gaming. NB, the freemium version is the devil, it's definitely worth three quid.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NB-Pghq9JsE

ipad, i mean

Subnautica—- wow!

#wow #whoa

I am playing Obra Dinn, it is ok so far.

i've been using the seamoth almost exclusively but i finally bit the bullet and built the cyclops. it's pretty overwhelming. it's huge for one and there's so much going on (not sure how to make it power self-sufficient, i did plant some melons in it tho so I have a mobile food supply, and i made a depth module so i can go down to 900m now). i still haven't made the prawn suit tho i have the mats for it. i'll probably make it and stash it in the cyclops before trying to descend.

mostly breath of the wild but some night in the woods, which i was pumped to play but i don't think is for me. it's pretty boring, aesthetics aside

NBA 2K Playground 2 is my jam these days, it's on fire. I liked the first one but the sequel gives you a lot more to do, with a season mode to unlock characters, and a grind to accomplish various tasks like 10 finger rolls in a single season game to up your 2 point shooting. It's weirdly missing Charles Barkley but otherwise it's got Michael and Kobe and Bird and Magic and current stars and mediocrities (no Austin Rivers RIP). Why the Admiral is only Epic but not a Legend bugs me, and no Tim Duncan, but I still won the championship with Rudy Gay and Pau Gasol.

xp it's a visual novel, more or less. not really a gameplay experience

eh I wouldn't call it a VN, it's got exploration and light platforming elements, and there's an embedded rhythm game. But if you aren't enjoying hanging out with the characters and environment yeah there's not like some in-depth gamey experience to back it up.

We played through Gris in the waning hours of 2018, it was very pretty and had more going on gameplay-wise than I was expecting. Compare to Monument Valley.

been playing the old ace attorney games, these didn't click for me last time i tried them but now I'm fully on board and tearing through them

also finishing off my year of Falcom with tokyo xanadu which is better than i was expecting, it's not as good as trails of cold steel or ys 8 overall but has a good mix of ingredients from both and i think the character movesets are more fun than ys.

I've started the Gravity Rush games. The first one definitely shows its roots as a portable game, and the cut scenes are dinky, but the dialogue is unexpectedly funny.

xp I did this too, bought the first one in 2008 & then picked it up again five years later and did the rest in a few weeks. What cases do you like best? Must replay at some stage, it’s handy that they’re all on iOS now.

the 4th case of the first one is my favorite so far i think? the one where you're defending edgeworth. just started the 3rd game though so i haven't seen too many cases yet.

If you're playing through all the ace attorney games, look up the second Miles Edgeworth game -- it wasn't released outside of Japan, but there's a good fan translation of it. It's one of the best in the series in my opinion.

yeah i'm just doing the original trilogy for now, gonna take a break after that to not burn myself out. will play ghost trick at some point in there too

DOOM 2016

it owns

I have nostalgia for the Ace Attorney games I’ve played. (1-5 by release date). I quit there because no 3DS.

all the 3ds ones are also on android/ios i think