whatchu playing now

happy new year gamers, here's my top 10 games i played in 2019 and felt like putting into a list:

10) Baba is You (2019) - this is the best type of pure puzzle game, where the solutions feel like moments of epiphany rather than the result of several steps of incremental logic. i'm far too stupid to ever finish it though.

9) Judgment (2019) - it's not as sublime as yakuza 0, though that's one of the best games of the decade so no big deal, this one still pulls its weight as a member of the yakuza family of games. my only complaint is that i could do with fewer of the tailing missions, which are no less dull in this than in any video game that has them, and more of the missions where you chase a wig that's being blown around the city by freak gusts of wind

8) Eastshade (2019) - eastshade dumps you into a modestly sized, vaguely elder-scrolls-like world as a traveling painter. you wander around, look at the scenery, talk to people, find and paint things for them. there's no main story, no combat, no conflict to speak of. this is basically all i want out of my open-world games. i only spent a few hours in eastshade because it ran like shit on my PC at release, but i'd like to go back assuming they've patched up the performance a bit by now.

7) SaGa Scarlet Grace: Ambitions (2019) - it's a JRPG without levels or resource management, which i dig. it also has no field or town or dungeon environments, just an overworld map and combat, so the fact that i, a hardcore Environmental Design Liker, got hooked by this is a testament to how good the combat system is. i'm only like 10 hours into my first playthrough, as Urpina, but i'm curious to find out exactly how different an experience the other characters' campaigns are since it feels like there's enough room within the systems for it to be a substantially different game. also the text is even smaller than fire emblem somehow, so we're well on our way to the first JRPG you have to play with a magnifying glass, pretty cool.

6) Under Night In-Birth Exe:Late[st] (2017) - i got really into fighting games for a bit earlier in the year, tried a bunch of stuff but settled on UNIST as my game of preference, as i really like its pace and character variety and visual clarity. spent a few dozen hours in training mode learning Nanase combos, went online, got destroyed, got destroyed again, made some adjustments, got destroyed again, won like 3 of my first 100 matches, got frustrated, logged off, quit video games entirely and just watched anime for a couple months. pretty much the standard fighting game experience, i think. the new version of this comes out soon and i'm excited to do it all over again.

5) Tales of the Abyss (2006) - it took the Tales devs more than a decade to figure out that beat-em-up combat is more fun with a stamina bar than a mana bar so that you aren't constantly disincentivized to use your cool moves as if it's a strategy game. and then half the fanbase complained and acted like the series had lost its way, once again proving that JRPG fans hate change more than they like fun. of the old-style Tales games though, this is the best one i've played since it doesn't gate the fun too hard and has one of the best JRPG stories.

4) Anodyne 2: Return to Dust (2019) - i can't put my finger on which gross-looking PSX or N64 game this game's overworld reminds me of, but it really captures all the unknowability and red herring empty space of the best 3D hub worlds of that era. and then the actual levels are bite-sized 2D zelda dungeons. beyond that i don't really know how to talk about this at all without spoiling the experience, it unfolds in surprising ways.

3) 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors (2009) - i played the whole Zero Escape trilogy in 2019 and enjoyed all of them to various extents, but this first one does it the best and most memorably. again, i can't really say much without spoilers but the way in which it gradually primes you for its big payoffs is masterful. the escape rooms are pretty good too.

2) Zero no Kiseki/"Trails from Zero" (2010) - this is the first of the two PSP games after Trails in the Sky and before Trails of Cold Steel that never got an english release. i started this kinda halfheartedly to learn about the characters before they showed up in Cold Steel 3, but was blindsided by how much tighter it was than all the other Trails games, even through the haze of a rough fan translation. it's clearly the product of more experience than Trails in the Sky but without the overreach in narrative and cast size of Cold Steel. there's a higher quality fan translation that's almost complete, and Falcom just announced a PS4 rerelease so it'll get another chance at an official english version too. so if you're one of the 1 or 2 other people on this board who have played Trails in the Sky already, keep an eye out i guess.

1) Hypnospace Outlaw (2019) - this is great not because it parodies the Y2K-era internet but because it does it with the comedic voice of corny 00's pre-social-media internet humor like homestar runner et al. much like obra dinn last year, it's a game that made me not want to leave my desk other than to eat and piss until i'd finished it.

thanks for the write-ups! Under Night In-Birth Exe:Late[st] is the most videogame title of all time (or it would be if there was a 3 at the end)

the upcoming new one is called Under Night In-Birth Exe:Late[cl-r]

i finally took the plunge on the apple arcade for my phone. so far i'm very much enjoying Bleak Sword and Card of Darkness. Sayonara Wild Hearts, unless i'm misunderstanding something, does not play very well on a phone. i couldn't get my character to move quickly enough, no matter how i swiped. i'll probably check it out again on the switch, with a joystick.

oh yeah i keep meaning to try that one, it's only a couple hours long afaik so should be a no brainer

xps yeah everybody just calls it UNIEL/UNIST. happy to see that game slowly getting picked up over the past couple of years

I tried Observer, starts off impressive but the neural sections drag out and just consist of pointless wandering around imaginary corridors for no reason. The detective parts of the game work quite well though but the neural parts seem to feature more in the game, such a shame.

I played Sayonara Wild Hearts on iPhone and it’s my goty so yeah maybe just persevere with it a bit? I didn’t have any control problems at all.

is it a game? i keep reading it's like an interactive music video? which sounds awesome obv

it's an endless runner style game i think. but with an end

Yep, it’s mostly endless runner-ish, though a good take on it. And there are some gameplay shifts here and there, couple of Rez-style shooty bits and a recurring rhythm action minigame which is similar to Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan. But mostly yeah, it’s a great album with lovely visuals and a touching story. The game part is just simple enough to not get in the way of the rest of it.

and it's got queen latifah

ya sold me on Ouendan

RIVER CITY GIRLS now on sale for PS4 for $21... Kind of uninterested in games at the moment so might wait for it to drop further.

Dunkey's best of 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzfmtGESBxw
Anyone else as great as this dude on YouTube? I feel like he's the first video reviewer I've really liked since Consolevania ended, and I don't want to watch unedited three-hour streams

dunkey's got super basic taste but good comedy chops

Dunkey’s shtick strikes me as a bit…minstrel-y.

For anyone that didn't know Consolevania has been back up and running for a couple of years now. It's Patreon backed but you get episodes on Youtube on time delay - http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCb5dkmeyjJ9kHbDoWGUATVg/featured

I did not know! Thank you!

Got around to playing Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy. Funny for 15 minutes, but I kept playing for an hour. Now I want to punch this man in the face if I ever meet him

Also, the idea that he's teaching a new generation of students at NYU to make games is terrifying

I recently found out he was the bassist on Cut Copy's first album.

ha, that's a good asterisk!

I’ve only seen that game in the frustrating clips and an interview, and subsequently in a speed run video
where someone finished the entire game in
under two minutes

I feel like that is a classic of video game feelings. What was that NES zapper game where you were controlling a moving guy, but had to shoot under or at him to jump, etc? I only watched a friend play, with the gun inches from the screen, and it was still jokingly referenced as a classic of the frustration genre

Gumshoe! That game was great.

been playing a lot of red dead online. well, spent a lot of time, it doesn't really feel like i've done very much.

they've added four "roles" so there's four different job paths with unlock grinds to take you away from generic unlock grind. they are fun in themselves (the moonshiner role has some tough story missions) and eventually make good money, but have the same lack of explanation and baffling design decisions as the rest of the game

someone figured out that the timers on the bounty missions, for instance, run backwards. multipliers go up the longer you take. so if you want to make your time really worthwhile, you have to stand around at the drop off as long as you can. smh.

you can find lots of commentary on the lines of "what is there to actually do in this?" the trouble is the PVP modes are not great. the RD platform might just be bad for it -- the sluggish and arbitrarily lethal combat + overly complex controls for consuming tonics is better for narrative than competition. i suspect r* was banking on everyone doing the "elimination series" battle royale mode. but literally nobody does. i've tried a few times to find the queues completely empty.

there are a separate set of PVP "free roam events" that are more interesting and varied, but you can't do those at will -- the system will invite you every 45 mins.

years ago i played a crazy amount of GTA online. the racing was great! there were some co-op wave defense modes that were good too. so it felt like grinding to buy new cars or garages or guns was worthwhile.

still though, lots of clothes. that's cool. which you need, because r* made everything winter for the holidays, and you'll freeze if you don't have a combo of warm clothes on. which is not explained. and you have to buy them.

In the actual correct thread

I started playing Two Point Hospital again after giving it up on it for months and I love it; strong recommend. If you haven’t played it in a while, you can now rename your doctors, which ofc has potential for endless awfulness.

It turns out I'm incapable of hitting the block button at the right time to parry in the Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order game, so I did a lot of it in the easier mode.

It's got some goofy platforming bits and a lot of wandering, but the story is everything I wanted as a Star Wars dude and the gameplay once you unlock a bunch of force abilities is really fun. The progression from single lightsaber to dual bladed to *censored lightsaber spoiler* is cool.

the whole combat and movement in Jedi is *really* spongey - especially having come from a similar mechanic in Sekiro.

TPH is in this month's Humble Choice, so I'll give it a try eventually

xp they seem to have patched out some of the buggier things, but I did encounter at least one stormtrooper who completely failed to notice I was there, and some of the jumps when you're sliding down an incline are goofy

you can kite a miniboss to the edge of its scripted range (where they just stop chasing you) and then force pull it beyond that range, where it'll just sit there. it'll counterattack when you swing but won't follow up so you can dodge out of range and take another whack at your leisure. or push/pull it to a ledge and voila.

score match on android, a full-team match engine upgrade on the outrageously addictive score hero

The Escapist 2, trying it out with a split screen buddy.

Seems fun so far, kind of like Skooldaze where you had to attend a daily schedule whilst trying to fit in working your own sneaky agenda

Uncharted trilogy "free" on PSN this month, I had only played 4 before so having fun.

played some control this morning. fun game but i am terrible at action/shooting games. made it to the first boss but keep getting killed

the shooting controls ironically aren't that great imo

I should go back to Control but I was too bad at timing to get past the last round of bosses on my initial runthrough

Ideally, shooting only complements your launch ability in CONTROL. Launching is how you kill most enemies.

Had to use some YouTube hints to beat some of the control bosses. I have old slow reflexes though and stubbornly refuse to lower difficulty. The worm boss (1st) and the plant boss prob took 20 tries each.

Lately I have just been playing OOTP baseball. Very nerdy and addictive.

cyberpunk delayed to september

delayed from when?

(should have been july 7)

it had an april release date previously

follows the FF VII delay, makes sense

Just 100%'d schlockware title Mr. President! where you rag doll your way into stopping Trump assassination attempts. Not sure why I did this.
Spoiler: after the 10th chapter when you've saved Trump from being murdered in the post-apocalyptic wasteland he's caused, you go back in time and kill him, erasing the timeline.
Probably took years off my life getting the hardest achievement where you play as Trump himself throwing endlessly respawning immigrants out of a wrestling ring.

dang

Kojima does it again.

I played Wargroove after a long break because I sort of got stuck on one level in the campaign. I had the AI boxed in but that just concentrated their defenses into a smaller space, and I didn't like the idea of using my troops as cannon fodder. Those sprites are too cute to blithely send to their deaths!

I just started Outer Wilds. The bad news is I don't know wtf I am supposed to do. The good news is I didn't get motion sick from it.

Finished God of War. I warmed up to it as it went on but then it just kinda ended. When the credits started rolling it was very “that’s it?”. Some optional areas to explore afterwards, but this was on the whole kinda underwhelming. Peak example of the trend of AAA games getting 90+ Metacritic scores even though they’re at heart totally just OK-to-pretty-good.

Arkham Knight was sitting in my library as an old, free PS+ download. Liked the first two games, but this starts off immediately worse than those. Hitching your ride to this clunky ass Batmobile stuff was maybe not a good move. I’m only a few hours in and it’s still mostly fun, but it does seem sloppier and less considered than the other Arkham games.