whatchu playing now

feels closer to ys than mana to me, but with zelda puzzle heavy dungeons

the mmo framing seems rolleyes-y on paper but they execute it so well that it really makes it feel like its own thing more than a retro game

Is there a word for when you find yourself playing a game you know is not good, and shallow but it's kinda... there, enough, that you keep going? For me that game is Croixleur Sigma. It was an indie PC hack n' slash from a several years ago that got a port to consoles, the PS4/Switch version came to the US in the last year or two. It didn't expand THAT much from the original, there's like... 2 dungeons that you just keep grinding until you're good enough to beat them. I don't know why I've played it all weekend.

i am still doing all the daily tasks on Disney Crossy Road every morning despite there having been no updates for about a year and nothing to buy with all the coins / pixels / tickets i have been collecting.

I know the shame...but with Bouncy Hoops instead

...and tbh with MPQ but it's best not to talk about that

Nhex, I'm getting that at the moment with Diablo 3. I've come to it late and maybe there's have been some rebalancing updates that have retroactively broken the campaign, but I'm playing it through on the highest difficulty it'll let me use and there's still absolutely zero challenge, I haven't even come close to dying, even once. But I'm still playing, I think just because it's so frictionless.

My buddies got me into this iOS game called Golf Clash, which is easily the most right-wing game I've ever played. Half of the clans are called like Alabama Luvs Trump or some shit.

Fun though

xpost
Yeh I gave up on Diablo 3 after about 10 hours, zero challenge or gameplay, just holding down attack and push forward with the occasional trip to the menu to upgrade equipment. Hollow and boring. Maybe I was playing it wrong? idgi.

No that’s the game I think.

yeah that sounds about right.

about 3/4 thru Wind Waker as I never got round to it earlier, and god, it is stressing me out. I hate the punitive nature of a lot of Nintendo games. Oh you misjudged a landing? OK fall 8 floors to the bottom and START ALL OVER AGAIN THEN. Grrrr.

(I think I was spoiled by the save and return in that spot nature of BOTW)

i dont even remember where wind waker gets vertical enough to do that

The wind temple has this big silo you have to move up and down in with cyclones and the hookshot and I am effing sick of running out of magic and dropping to the ground floor!

still playing through my pre-holiday backlog i posted way upthread

Timespinner is basically a castlevania pastiche circa Symphony/Aria but it's got the vibes and presentation down pat and it plays well. the story isn't really working for me though, feels like it's trying to tell a 20 hour RPG story in a 5 hour platformer via a lot of info-dump-y plaintext

CrossCode is impressing me more the more i play it, even if the pixel art makes it look like a backwards looking 90s thing in the screenshots, it's really not, it feels like its own unique & ambitious thing

CrossCode is on my list of games where I will meditate on the possibility of a Switch port rather than spend money on a PC version I know in my heart I will not spend any time on

i investigated that and am 99% sure there will not be a switch port of it because it's written in html5/javascript which nintendo does not allow

or at least doesn't work natively on switch

so you're saying there's a chance

hit a bit of a rough stretch in CrossCode and starting to sour on it now heh. it starts to fall into this awkward gap between a puzzle game and an execution game that creates a lot of frustration when you figure out how to beat a room but need 10 tries to pull it off because the timers are too short or because they throw 3 enemies at you with the same puzzley weakness instead of 1 and it creates too much noise to execute cleanly. it's not like a Celeste where the satisfaction is in the execution, its more like playing a zelda game where every enemy in a dungeon doesn't take damage until you first bank an arrow off a wall or through a flaming torch or whatever, that sort of thing that's usually reserved for boss fights starts to show up in every enemy encounter. v similar to Trayce's wind waker frustrations in nature actually.

luckily there's an assist mode which lets you reduce a lot of that friction and it makes the game more fun imo if you turn down puzzle speed and enemy damage a bit.

the game does know how to lay out a good zelda style puzzle dungeon though, i just wish the encounters stuck with more traditional hack and slash and dodge fare than 'puzzles that can dodge your attempts at solving them and also kill you' whcih is what they're all turning into now 12 hours in.

Obra Dinn. I wish the last chapter was more exciting and that the game had some more thought-out deduction puzzles but all-in-all an excellent game. Fun to unwrap each new location.

Sanitarium. I dug up this old, isometric, dos adventure game and loved it. Cyclops vs. Insects in a cybernetic hive in the sky!

Elastica. Another old dos adventure game with Alone In The Dark style graphics. I enjoyed it but the story was very light. Theres was some neat ideas and varied gameplay throughout. Kind of a short game though. Gotta love all the death sequences.

*Sanitarium was a windows game
*Elastica Ecstatica

ok i was wrong about crosscode on switch

will play

i still stand by my nascent criticism that the enemy encounter design gets bad, and it was even worse on controller than with mouse+kb, but the presentation/story/puzzles are great

Haha, I bought sanitarium back in the day. Couldn’t get past a buggy lock puzzle and returned it

is this a different sanitarium than the horror adventure game? cause i loved that game.

It was isometric and set in a ... sanitarium. Whacked out patients as NPCs...that’s about all I remember

yeah that's the one! v creepy.

yup that one was great

It’s been ported to iOS for $4

ooo good to know

Obra Dinn.
About to dive into this one too. Really looking forward to it.

Pico-8, developing for and general messing about with this thing.

Just stupid amounts of indie games on steam

Tales of Greta, a free downloadable difficult single screen platformer - reminds me of Donkey Kong kinda.

still minecrafting

My list of games beaten over the past several months now goes something like this:

✅ Yakuza Kiwami (completed 2018-07-01)
✅ Yakuza 0 (completed 2018-10-22)
✅ Yakuza Kiwami 2 (completed 2019-01-21)
🈺 Yakuza 6 (to begin playing shortly)

(I actually played through some other games in this time as well. I have been playing a LOT of games this year actually? mix of gf on evening shifts + me having money + me not doing normal adult shit = couch time and games for me! beat far cry 5, horizon zero dawn, super mario odyssey, almost beat valkyria 4, prey, and put in serious time on octopath). Also have God of War on tap, and more Octopath, and Rise of the Tomb Raider (the second one I think?), and Uncharted Lost Legacy, and Murdered Soul Suspect... just have to resist the temptation to play Yakuza 6 now instead of some of the other stuff.

kiwami 1 finally coming out on pc next month, maybe i'll clear enough of my backlog by then to justify buying another game

we should have run a clear your backlog challenge on ILG or one of those 'one-out-one-in five slot challenges'

basic rules tend to be:

- you have 5 slots
- getting a game consumes a slot
- ‘get’ includes: new purchases, rentals, loans, double-dips, gifts, DLC, freebies, F2P, and anything installed from backlog after a certain date
- when you ‘finish’ the game - which might mean different things for different games - you get a slot back
- the game remains in the slot until 'finished'
- if you exceed your 5 slots in the calendar year of our lord 2019 then you lose and don't get into heaven and have to go hang out on the botw thread with josh who is not actually playing botw but is weighing cauliflowers instead

good way of backlog/spending management

Re finishing games I am radically committed to only playing games until the moment they stop being fun

Sometimes that’s the length of the game but not very often

Yeah, same here

valid valid. guess I've seen this done on other forums where ppl have had issues with compulsively buying either (i) that new new or (ii) swathes of very cheap games (that will never get played) from steam sales

100% nobody should feel forced to play something beyond when it's fun!

i feel like i already have this five-games-max thing and it's called "the playstation 4's 500gb hard drive combined with my shitty 6mbps internet connection"

(but yes i am in)

What happens when you give up on a game without beating it?

one ball/ovary shrinks temporarily until you forge ahead and complete the game

i have more than 5 games in progress let alone in my backlog

intervention

im not gonna start anything new until i get back down to my usual rule of 1 PC slot 1 handheld slot 1 wild card slot that i flagrantly broke

i like this idea