whatchu playing now

asscreed - the list of checkboxes that is also a game

I liked the first one but never got around to the others. Will give the Ezio saga a shot someday i guess

yeah that one's impressive - climbing around on recreated italian cathedrals is a hoot

I've been playing Noita, and I love it. The "every pixel is simulated" concept combined with the open-ended wand creation mechanics makes the game breakable and cheese-able in a way that really appeals to me. Everything in the environment can be destroyed, and it's possible to make wands that turn the entire screen into a maelstrom of explosions, acid, saw blades, etc, destroying everything in sight, including your own player character. It's also super hard, so you almost HAVE to find cheesy ways of playing in order to succeed. The only game I've played that has a similar amount of genuinely emergent gameplay is Nethack.

Although tbf I haven't really played minecraft

i got hypnospace outlaw but i have barely played it because i also got tony hawk 1+2 and have been soaking in full-octane nostalgia all weekend

hypnospace outlaw is great and wonderfully creative- will scratch a different nostalgia itch

cyberpunk got delayed again lol

the death march continues

the crunch talk coming out about it (and they've been in crunch since January!) is disheartening honestly

are we even surprised ?

i was dumb enough to think a couple years ago that maybe RDR2 would finally be the reckoning for game reviewers taking a stand against crunch-fueled AAA open world excess and not giving perfect reviews across the board, this time i'll know better

RDR2 is an epic, cinematic masterpiece without comparison, a triumph of storytelling and unforgettable characters. get to know john marston all over again, but this time through the lens of one Arthur Morgan, a renegade with a heart of gold. 10.0

*two weeks later* the fundamental gameplay underlying the whole thing is kinda rough though
*two months later* also the online mode that they didn't have ready at review time but was a big selling point sucks ass

all of the grinds have been fine-tuned so that it will take you up to 20 hours of action-packed hunting and trapping to earn your first trophy headpiece, just one of hundreds of ornamental clothing items you can earn. 10.0

all the same, i did put it on my coint and plick the year it came out, and there's no denying the fun of some of the horse chases and shoot-out scenes, beautiful scenes at dusk, all that

at least cdpr don't do microtransactions

can't wait to see a near future urban setting handled with the grace and progressivism expected from the people that brought you Sword Man With Sex Cards

After 30-40 tries, finally beat Control's "A Good Defense" timed test to gain the Shield ability. Not very good at timed actions or platforming (jumping, tend to give an extra nudge that drops me off the side), so feel some vindication. Mostly luck, though, having the scatter gun active at the start of this attempt, which allows for bigger spread to hit the targets. Had been failing using the single shot setting and just not quick/accurate enough to pass. Enjoying the game as a whole, particularly the telekinesis and the leveling up.

Shield was not really useful when the game came up but it got buffed in later patches and probably would've been useful in a DLC boss fight that itself got nerfed.

I found it useful in a handful of boss fights, particularly when you had to fight a bunch of soldiers while some variant of Clayface throws rocks at you

I have an early Xbox One, and Control reaches a certain point where the Xbox freezes with a "video memory overload" error. Happens about three hours into play, so I'll start limiting my time not to go down mid-mission.

I missed an explanation in the game for why the mold sub-mission pauses for the doctor to work the antidote. Using Eurogamer's fine walkthrough, figure it's to gain the Levitate ability via finding Dylan, which will be needed to complete the mold side-mission.

sounds right, i remember some really steep drops for the mold quest

there are ledges you can hop down on either side to get down there, iirc

not that I played through 80% of Control on PS4 before buying the PC version and turning on the aim-snapping to play it again while having more fun, and then did all the expansions.. or anything

beat pikmin 3 deluxe on normal in about 7 hours of play. this was my first pikmin game.

Really, really enjoyed it, but was really upset about how short it was. I thought I had a lot more game to go. I ended with 40+ bottles of juice and 150+ pikmin of each type in bank--I started an ultra-spicy run which I think will make the game more satisfying to complete. The ultra spicy difficulty gives these changes:

* Maximum of 60 pikmin in the field at a time (down from 100 pikmin on normal)
* Day length reduced from 18 minutes to 13 minutes
* Enemies have higher HP
* Fruit yields less juice

In sum: fewer workers to use, fewer resources to collect, resources deplete more quickly, and fights with enemies are more consequential. The added pressure will be a nice change.

I also did a few of the side story missions, which were a nice change of pace. Each side story mission is siloed off from the others, so it is an individual scenario with a fixed time limit. The missions remind me of Eventide Island from Breath of the Wild (in a good way!). You start out with only your wits and whatever you can harvest from the land around you--the rest is up to you to figure out.

All in all, it was a good purchase. It has piqued my interest in the earlier Pikmin games. As with any franchise, I'm hesitant to move backwards for fear of clunkier controls and worse game mechanics.

Started GTA San Andreas on my phone after losing a save towards the end of vice city

ouch, which part?

the last mission where you have kill everyone in your own Scarface house

I'd love to start San Andreas again because it's been so long and I've almost forgotten the missions past the Los Santos part. There's so much going on in that game.

But I have my hands full still with Minecraft and managing my timber and hay career in my ever growing empire in farming sim 19

also, RDR online got boring really quickly.

Been waiting to pull the trigger on buying Project Zomboid for some time now, I'd always thought the fog of war mechanic made the visuals look confusing.

Happy to say I pulled that trigger today and played co-op with a friend and we had a ton of fun. This game has been made with a lot of passion and it really shows. Classic slow zombie survival game. I was also expecting a lot of clunky controls but it plays absolutely fine. Driving vehicles turned out to a pleasant experience, but ultimately noisy so expect dozens of curious zombies to come and check you out.

Some nice complex skills and crafting stuff in here too.

We haven't touched on crafting in it yet though, spent most of the day hoarding food into our base and then driving around in a pickup.

Red dead is on sale , should I start playing this campaign shit or continue with GTA v online

Red Dead online is nothing special, the main game experience on the other hand is outstanding imo (and has to be seen to the end)

So I played a bit more Zomboid tonight. After randomly creating new character without checking any of the traits it had allocated to me I started the game and thought my sound in the game was broken, hearing nothing. Then tried reading some magazines to learn new skills, didn't seem to be giving me the option to read! wtf. Turns out, after checking my traits, I was a deaf illiterate character. Didn't last too long.

so recently for some weird reason i was hankering for a jrpg and i played thru some game called the caligula effect (directed by the guy who wrote persona 1 apparently?) and it was... lets be real it wasn't great but it more or less scratched the itch for a couple of weeks. definitely aping the structure of the latter persona games without any of the depth -- the exceptional part is a really cool battle system, where you enter your "real-time" commands and see a kind of "simulation" of how they'll play out -- trying to time knock-ups with aerial attacks etc -- but then the enemies are so generic and boring that it becomes a chore (or you end up selecting the default attack over and over). maybe i should've played on difficult because even the bosses are a joke.

then it was done and i was still in the jrpg mood so i started looking at old lists for 3ds and ps vita (which i recently dug out from their dust-collecting spots) and realized that... i had either played everything i wanted to or couldn't convince myself to dive in due to the intimidating lengths of commitment (legend of the skies or whatever it's called? trails in the sky? that one mostly. and the atelier stuff). then i remembered i already owned SMT IV and had bounced off of it several times before shelving my 3ds, so i decided to give it one last try and... what do you know, i love it. finally i am a REAL SMT GAMER who hasn't only played the new persona games. wooooooooooooo. now i am debating buying strange journey and apocalypse when i beat this one (thankfully they are somehow still availble on the 3ds store and i don't need to buy physical copies on ebay for 100-200 a pop)

i've fallen deep into the trails rabbit role. the first two games (trails in the sky fc and sc) will definitely scratch any classic jrpg itch. i wouldn't say they're a HUGE time commitment compared to SMT games, but each arc kinda requires you to have played the previous games in the arc so you can't just jump in anywhere

just to make it easier for anyone curious since everyone should play these games:

liberl arc (play them on PC so you can use turbo mode):
trails in the sky fc
trails in the sky sc
trails in the sky the 3rd

crossbell arc:
trails from zero - the PC version with the geofront english patch
trails from azure - no english version but geofront patch is nearing completion

erebonia arc:
trails of cold steel 1-4 - all have ps4 versions, first two on ps3, 3 on switch, 4 on switch next year

ok, now i remember why i was so confused by that series... shame they're not on mac

as the resident trails fan i wouldn't really recommend getting into it unless you're interested in the long haul, its like the jrpg equivalent of one of those long-running shonen anime with hundreds of episodes and some major highs and lows in story quality.

also it kinda shifts tone over the course of the series to match the popular anime of the time so trails in the sky is extremely 'game made during the initial height of popularity of fullmetal alchemist' whereas cold steel is a bit more like the light novel magic school harem stuff that was popular a decade ago, which causes a lot of folks to balk at it. which is totally fair, but at the same time persona is also that and people love persona so ymmv i guess

also they put tokyo mirage sessions on switch if you want to play the SMT game for cool people

I am once again feeling regret that I never finished Vagrant Story, which I had ages ago and got distracted by “real life”. Would it age well? Should I just install a PS emulator or whatever? hmm

If you're OK with spending a lot of time in the menus then I recommend it. The ending is quite the mindfuck.

Some tips: Cheat your way through the weapon crafting with a chart. For stats, blunt/edged/piercing is important, the other stats not so much.

it's been a while since i played Vagrant Story, but i do remember it being pretty complex. i vaguely remember having to start over after several hours because i had completely bungled my upgrades (the blunt/edged/piercing stuff abanana mentions rings a bell)

more than anything i remember the VIBE of Vagrant Story, which is set in the same universe (Ivalice?) as FF Tactics and FFXII (which i still have never played). that's my favored Final Fantasy universe

it is a super cool universe, no doubt, having played FFT and FFTA1. i think i bought it on PSN on my PS3 years ago and never touched it, it is kind of intimidating

i wonder how the graphic style holds up? it might be in that "so-low-poly-it's-good-again" zone

isn't ff9 also ivalice? or is it a different but similar world

ah its the latter

ffxii had a v protracted development phase and yasumi matsuno (ogre battle, FFT, VS) ended up leaving the project a year or so out "for health reasons" after a few months of vague stories about his being "temperamental". i don't know what if anything actually changed in development as a result but i do wonder if matsuno's taste for deliriously intricate 30-years-war fanfic found itself at odds with the demands of the flagship juggernaut. certainly the finished product (which is pretty great tbh; i am very pro-gambit) seems to take place in the star wars universe.

some website did a Vagrant Story article recently about how well the visuals hold up! they really put a lot of work into make it look good, if jagged polygons

modern psx emulators can upscale, disable dithering, etc to make things look pretty good. i personally keep everything original because i like the look