whatchu playing now

been playing a lot of luigi's mansion 3. we got it as a present for my 6-year-old but it was too hard and too scary so now i play it and she watches. good game.

I'm back on the Final Fantasy 14 grind, boys. that game really does get its hooks in ya.

did i never say forza horizon 4 in here? because it was free on gamepass so i was like oh huh maybe i'll try a racing game as a diversion and everything about this game is just so JOYOUS. like truly a labour of love, care and thought and excitement packed into everything in the game, feels really good to play, excellent soundtrack, always something to do in its open world but never feels like its pushing you to do "completion," you can just tool around in a silly car or go really fast on the highway in a scary car, just LETS YOU LIVE. this game fucking rules and i am so glad its on pc so i can play it

FH4 is the best, pretty sure i talked it up a bunch on here when it came out

i probably read those posts and filed it away as "i guess that'd be cool if i could play it!" def remember someone loving it here. never thought i'd have the opportunity due to ps4 being my primary console, but new pc has opened new opportunities.

also, my new pc build is good but not BONKERS good, so colour me stunned that this game is running on ultra, 1440p, >60fps

yeah my video card from 2017 ran it at that too, its pretty well optimized. extremely good looking game, probably the most effective/appealing AAA 'realism' i've seen. driving games are still the best vehicle for that

These are the things I have played through in the past few months:

Rez (PC)
Wario Land (GB)
Virtual Boy Wario Land (VB)
Wario Land II (GBC)
We <3 Katamari (PS2)
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 (PS2)
Okami (PS2)
Luigi's Mansion (GC)
Pikmin (GC)
Super Mario Sunshine (GC)
Chibi-Robo (GC)
killer7 (GC))
Metroid Prime (Wii)
Metal Gear (MSX2)
Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake (MSX2)

killer7 was one of the most incredible experiences I've ever had like p much across all forms of media and is now my 2nd fav game of all time next to EarthBound

welcome to the killer7 cult, Stevie. changed my life too

I have No More Heroes queued up but I'm sad I can't just play killer7 again for the first time, like a true actual once in a lifetime experience

I wrote a @wirecutter letter of recommendation for virtual reality and @pokerstars VR https://t.co/KEVwAuLAS4

— roxane gay (@rgay) February 18, 2021

I am playing Viewtiful Joe and it's really hard???

yup, it was always super difficult. I never unlocked the last bonus character, burned out on the game before that

like there are so many enemies on screen doing so many different things and there are so many different ways to attach them (Slow! Fast! Zoom!) that I’m often like “wait what am I supposed to be doing rn?”

attack, rather

valheim is quite fun with friends. seems like it has a lot of potential

Also cracking half a million simultaneous players on Steam!

yeah, i'm completely hooked on valheim. it's amazing. the multiplayer skyrim/minecraft/sims/terraria we've all been waiting for. in early access, but devs say 75% of the mechanics are present (what actually makes a game good, and they're great here) along with 50% of the content, which is very exciting to see what this could grow into.

How does the server stuff work? Is it complicated to get multiplayer going?

if you just want to hop on a game with friends it's really easy. multiplayer lobbies are hosted within the game, and all progress carries from session to session. the host needs to be present, however- dedicated servers require some tricks to get working

wish this had been more available earlier in COVID, 4:45pm valheim times feel a little like a happy hour, it's nice

This is pretty neat... AI-created text adventures.

aidungeon.io

They only let you play for a little bit without paying but it gives you a good idea of how well this works.

oh man am i gonna do ff7 remake now

i bought the disc months ago but i guess i can wait... another... however long it is until I can snag a PS5

it's free on ps+ is the thing

not gonna wait for the Yuffie bonus content!??

i thought i didn’t gaf about the ff7 remake so i read all about it and ended up like OMG THAT IS SO COOL. a cautionary tale

it was one of the most hyped releases of the past decade and people didn't hate it. that alone warrants a look, let alone that I've heard pretty much universal praise

I devoted hours on end to playing it in college and I watched this whole video so we'll see
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hu4H5ykBP0I

don't trigger me, forks.

Oh, is that Tim Rogers?

Brian David Gilbert must have been a crushing blow for him.

Nah he posted once while still at Kotaku that he really liked BDG!

I need to finish FF7 Remake but, from the portion I have played thus far, I can wholeheartedly endorse it

It’s not just a game, it’s a dissection of the FF7 phenomena, and above that, a dissection of that dissection

*takes the 200,000 ft view of that post and considers*

It's funny that I watched a stream of Remake and despite not considering myself a fan of the original and thus thinking that I was immune to the nostalgia factor, I felt a real pang of nostalgia when Aerith first shows up in the opening cut scene.

same tho

Loop Hero rules

...

The game opens with your hero—and nearly everyone else—waking from an amnesia-like blackout. In a daze, your hero sees a single road ahead and marches forward to jog their memory, unaware that it's a loop—but also uncovering more monsters, landmarks, and increasingly powerful weapons with every step on the path.

In gameplay terms, this means you can walk away from Loop Hero after its opening plot sequence and watch your hero auto-walk and auto-battle until they die. (Upon every death, the world's amnesia haze consumes you, and you start over in another blacked-out world.) Your hero's movement tracks along a loop (not a round one, mind you, but made of chunky '80s-computing right angles), with the hero and enemies appearing as tiny icons. Whenever the hero walks into a foe, a larger "battle" window opens up with higher-res versions of each hero and monster, and everyone auto-slashes each other until one side is dead. Huh. That's it?

Of course, it's not that simple. In your very first adventure, the wimpy enemies you kill will either drop items or "cards." The former are limited to equippable fare (weapons, armor, shields, rings), and like in most RPGs, these primarily tweak your battling stats. The latter play into the game's rolling-amnesia angle, because you're asked to rebuild your forgotten world one landmark at a time. Some landmarks, like meadows and mountains, add bonuses to your stats. Others, like a cemetery or a haunted mansion, will add new, deadlier monsters to your looped path.

Loop Hero truly begins once you realize its gimmick: you need to place landmarks around your loop to jog your memory and reach each new threshold of world recovery, and you need to place these landmarks intentionally to help your hero survive and get stronger. Jog your memory enough, and you'll find a boss to fight on a loop. With each new loop, everything starts anew, and you'll have to accrue new gear, place new landmarks, and hunt for a new boss. (We'll get to how all of these randomly generated loops chain together in a second.)

Placing all the deadliest landmarks in a single corner of a loop will go poorly, for starters. You'll do better when you realize how certain landmarks play off of each other—like a "dry grove" that generates annoying rats but also lets you plant a helpful, enemy-killing "blood grove," so long as it's adjacent to the dry one. That's a simple chain reaction, then: spread dry groves out early on so that their squares overlap with the "generate super-deadly vampires" mansions in ways that let the blood groves do some helpful damage.

...

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/03/loop-hero-review-ive-somehow-gotten-hooked-on-an-rpg-that-plays-itself/

the last paragraph of that review already seems true to me too, even though i've only installed it earlier today:

For a so-called "automatic" game, Loop Hero sure presents enough questions and choices to get me invested in its missions, its accumulation of city structures, and its organic lessons about how to max out a particular loop. I haven't felt this surprised and engaged by a mix of new and familiar in a game since Slay the Spire. That description should terrify anybody who is not in need of another unique gaming obsession, because if my addiction is any indication, Loop Hero could very well burrow into your brain for the next few weeks. You've been warned.

I played through the first act. I played the SNES ones as a kid and watched my friend play through ten, but otherwise I know nothing about this series. It's very cool so far FOR AN RPG.

Quibble: When Cloud does a double-backflip in a cutscene, it makes me wonder why he couldn't mantle over those small crates a few minutes earlier.

were you at all familiar with the story?

the big thing about ff7 remake is it’s not really a remake of the game ff7 per se, but a remake of the plot, with the possibility for change

I'd watched the Tim Rogers video so I understood the basic scenario but that's about it.

Paper Mario (N64) is VERY fun
Star Fox 64 is also sort of fun but is underwhelming me a bit

I started playing the original FF7 maybe a year ago and sunk like 20 hours into it but haven't picked it up in 6 months and I really should before I forget everything entirely

yeah i was playing it over the holidays and havent touched it since whoops

the gamecube paper mario is a top 10 nintendo game

I'm at what i think is the final bowser in mario 3d world and got a little bored so tried bowser's fury which is lots of fun. hoping to galvanize the gamer sense and power my way through both in the next week or two and then see if I can sty focused on FF7 Remake. Gaming still not coming easy but there are some stess-killing rewards to an active fantasy life that comes with a controller.

Ni no Kuni on Switch. Fun! Slowly reveals itself as a Pokemon style game. Some nostalgia associated with that concept for me, as I liked Jade Cocoon way back when that came out for PS2.

Alright, I have a massive pile of PHYSICAL MEDIA, remember that? I'm tired of keeping it in a box over my closet. Any NYC ILXor gamers have any use for a 360, PS2, Wii and PS with something like 80 games? And does anyone need a gamecube?

sorry: does anyone need gamecube GAMES. I lost my cube some days back.

Have you noticed any cube-shaped holes that suddenly disappeared? Seems like it has to be around there somewhere