whatchu playing now

Looks like I made it through the first Hitman and the game automatically moved on to the second, which is cool with me. I find the best/easiest way to play is to wander around until I trigger one of the missions, then complete the level that way. There is no "right" way to play a level, there are dozens, so I figure might as well finish them any which way but loose, and then come back to it in the future when it's done and try a different way, since trial and error can lead to all kinds of fun results. Like, I was just playing the Colombia level, and bodies I barely stashed were discovered before I could take out the baddie with a sabotaged statue. So instead, while some other baddie was giving a speech I ran to the top of the hill and just pushed the statue off and smooshed her, and got away with it, too.

Nearly finished Demon's Souls, just gotta beat King Allant who's a pretty tricky customer. I managed to get almost completely white tendency other than Boletaria because somehow Ostrava got himself killed after I saved him

Also dipping in and out of FFVII (original) because it's a friend's all time favourite game. It hasn't totally gripped me yet and I'm kind of put off by some of the language localisation.

What I've mostly been playing though, is Theatrhythm Final Bar, which is a ridiculously addictive rhythm game based on the music from the Final Fantasy series of games. It's very simple really - just tap the buttons in time with the music. But my god it's snacky and fun

robotron: 2084

10 virtual 10p pieces every evening, which lasts about 20 minutes as i can't get to 10th wave yet. high score: 152225

(blue label)

I'm playing Dredge, a questy gotta-catch-em-all fishing-mystery-horror game with madness effects if you stay out too late with your fishing boat

It's great

Game looks great, but I'm going to wait a few months.

Been tempted for Dredge, looks like a nice chilled experience similar to Spiritfarer which I enjoyed.

I tried out Shadows of Doubt, a voxel cyperpunky sandbox detective game. It's interesting to play, and has tons of atmosphere. It's early Alpha, which is pretty impressive for what's in it at the moment. Although I am feeling some of the investigations require the player to go through tediously similar motions. Side jobs are more fun. Interaction in the world is impressive, but needs work as a bit janky right now. Don't even try playing with a game controller tho.

https://deadline.com/2023/04/vampire-survivors-video-game-animated-television-series-story-kitchen-luca-galante-poncle-trailer-1235340337/

waht

what if vampires were survivors

Finished Hitman 2, enjoyment def. hinges on your own creativity as a player. But it's fun, for sure.

Had a friend over last night who is in a similar situation to me several years back (he hadn't had a console in years, loved Nintendo back in the day, bought a Switch). He was curious about PS5, so I let him play some Ratchet and Clank, and it blew his mind. Mine, too, tbh; I hadn't started it yet, but it looks great. Looking forward to seeing what comes of more PS5 exclusives rather than games hampered (however slightly) by PS4 limitations. New Horizon Zero West DLC is PS5 only, right?

New Horizon Zero West DLC is PS5 only, right?

Yes, because clouds: https://kotaku.com/horizon-forbidden-west-playstation-5-burning-shores-ps5-1850283566

Clouds, reflections, rain, foliage ... nature is hard on the processor!

trying out honkai star rail. it's like a light version of trails of cold steel kinda? i have no idea how the gacha stuff works and it's pretty confusing, but i clicked something once and apparently got the best 5 star character. also controlling 3d game on a mobile phone is abysmal

Aeterna Noctis, from the souls-like humble bundle -- what if Hollow Knight but you play as Alucard? It's fun so far (2 hours in) but I hear it gets ridiculously hard near the end.

I finished Xenoblade 2, also doing every quest except one (the pop idol one which takes 8+ hours of waiting). The game does some things extremely well and other things very poorly. The strategy for preparing for combat is great. The story is good. The world looks amazing. Then the 3 main characters are awful, the actual combat is repetitive chaos, all of the quest rewards are procedurally-generated garbage. The worst is that the writers of the main story must have kept it a secret from everyone else on the team. For example none of the town NPCs have anything to say, usually just nattering on about their favorite food or whatever. And when your characters respond they only have 3 or 4 lines each. "Wassup?", "Looks like another quest complete.", etc.

Anyway I started Xenoblade 3 and I immediately see that most of these problems have been solved. One quirk of Xenoblade 2 is that the mini-map has 4 different size settings, but only two are useful, so you need to press the button 3 times to cycle from the good big size back to the good small size. XB3 just has the two good sizes. I guess other people had the same issue.

I finished Dredge last weekend. It it turns out it's a bit front-loaded quest wise, possibly as enticement in the demo, so ended up suffering in its second half from having a few promising looking areas to explore without much above-water life. There's still a whole fish encyclopedia to complete, which I did enjoy doing, particularly for the satisfaction of finding the aberration horror fishes, but a few more quests and NPC interactions could've deepened the story. Good game length though, maybe 15-20 hours if filling in the encyclopedia rather than just running through the story.

Anyway I started Xenoblade 3 and I immediately see that most of these problems have been solved

funnily enough I've been playing the Xeno 3 expansion Future Redeemed and it's fixed a lot of the problems I had with Xeno 3 main game e.g. pacing/cutscenes, exploration, levelling.

Buncha games out now that look cool. Strayed Lights, Afterimage, After Us. Anyone played/seen reviews/have thoughts?

I finished Jedi Survivor last weekend, less than a week after release


I feel no shame

Sounds like a good time!

while i've been... i don't know, maybe i'll repurpose the word "socially distancing"... i've been kinda digging into more games. i got a switch for the new zelda game but mostly i've been playing the sega ages rerelease of the original phantasy star? i saw this lady streaming "monster sanctuary" which is a game i love in theory but which is pretty strategy-based, my strategy is about single-player pokemon level. anything that actually requires me to use my brain and i get tpk'd pretty easily. but then i find out she's a big phantasy star streamer as well, and again really relatable, growing up and my favorite video game was the one where you play as a girl, truly There Were No Signs. it actually motivated me to install a patch for phantasy star ii as well - i tried the rom a while ago but the walking speed is excruciating, particularly with how huge and complicated the dungeons are and how high the encounter rate is... the patch fixes a lot of old school rpg annoyances about the game, but the encounter rate is insanely high, and even someone like me who is there for the grind, it starts getting obnoxious for a while. so i wound up looking up a walkthrough which turns out to be written by this streamer under her deadname. so that was awkward.

i also randly found out about this new game called cassette beasts, i was watching a stream and, like, any game that starts out by letting you choose your pronouns, with the default being "they/them", is gonna get love from me.

cassette culture is vexing to me, i'm a big tape nerd, i had hundreds of maxell xl-iis, i would take the little stickers and send them off and they'd send me like 50 free xl-iis, but it seems like bands only started selling shit on cassette when you couldn't actually get a decent tape deck anymore. seriously techmoan complains about it all the time, nobody in the world makes a decent tape mechanism these days so it's all, like, artificial scarcity of trying to find an old nakamichi. at least with estradiol cypionate you can just get that shit compounded somewhere, you know? (you, uh, probably don't know, now that i think about it.)

anyway, cassette beasts, it's like a pokemon game and it's based around cassette tapes like, i guess, celeste or something and it lets you pick they/them pronouns and i'm probably going to buy it and not play it because i'm addicted to this match 3 game (it's like the marvel one but less pay-to-win) and also the new zelda is coming out this week.

Oh I've heard Cassette Beasts is good/probably up my street, thanks for reminder to add it to my post-zelda wishlist

Playing Baldur's Gate with a mate at the moment after having my first tabletop RPG experience last month. So fun, so rewarding, amazing atmosphere, engaging strategy, some of the most fun I have had gaming in a while. Decided to pick it up after touching divinity original sin 2 which receives all of the same praise. Bought every good CRPG (pathfinder, pillars of eternity, tyranny, planescape) from the excitement these games are giving me. It took a while, but glad to finally find myself enjoying these games and looking forward to going deep with them.

I should of played BGI instead of skipping right to BGII, which is supposedly less straight forward.

I quit BGII as soon as the "2nd dungeon area" because "unkillable" enemies were mixed with regular enemies. You needed illusion magic to fight them (which you wouldn't have at this point). Perhaps it was intended for me to run past them but I doubt it. I think the game was just unforgiving in terms of where you should go when you are presented with your first open world area. There was some order of operations; the "dungeon" that dangles right in front of you smack dab in the middle of the screen had to wait. I said fuck that.

going further back in CRPG history is not going to get you closer to the warm-bath nirvana of "don't worry it doesn't actually matter what you do"

that said bg2's theme-park density (dungeons dangled in front of you everywhere you look) never quite gets me absorbed the way the endless generic forests of bg1 do.

Bought every good CRPG (pathfinder, pillars of eternity, tyranny, planescape)

don't forget to buy the bad ones too (arcanum, kotor2, nwn2, temple of elemental evil, bloodlines); also to double back for previous eras (gold box d&d, betrayal at krondor, might+magic i'd-say-three-to-six, whichever wizardry game makes it the most rewarding to decipher+exploit the inscrutable manias of the people who made wizardry games)

(i'm just kidding about temple of elemental evil. these days you can just get that stuff from pathfinder)

pls liveblog tho. was sure we had a CRPG thread or an infinity engine poll thread or something but can't find.

might and magic 4/5 ("world of xeen") are the finest crpgs ever made imo

https://kottke.org/23/05/sinerider-a-game-about-love-graphing

My gamer pals and I enjoy playing co-op shooter games, and we've just started up Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Breakpoint after about 6 months of Sniper Elite 5 (which slaps). We'd played quite a bit of Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Wildlands during quarantine so another Ghost Recon game seemed like a decent fit. (We'd previously planned on our next game being Redfall, but it turns out that game isn't very good!)

When Breakpoint was first released, unlike Wildlands, it was a looter shooter. In Wildlands, when you ping a bad guy and line up a perfect sniper shot, the poor fella dies. But Breakpoint gave enemies huge piles of HP to helpfully direct users to the endless weapon upgrade grind. At some point, the devs relented and added a classic mode, and that's what we'll be playing. If you don't mind the game being fundamentally evil, the Ghost Recon games offer a fun set of tools and scenarios. I'm curious to see if I find any fun in this one.

The main game I've been playing on my own is DREDGE. I finally picked up a Switch in anticipation of the release of Zelda 45, and DREDGE was my first Switch purchase. It's ostensibly a fishing game but has some added Lovecraftian horror flavor. The gameplay loop in this game is really addictive... each day of fishing for mutant fish is fairly short, so why not another? I like how the game cobbles together features from wildly different games: the sailing of Windwaker, the town business of Darkest Dungeon, the briefcase management of Resident Evil 4...

Finished Hitman 1-3, which all look and play great. I can totally see myself returning to it, because there are so many paths left unexplored. I think next up I shall finally play "Stray," but I did dip into "Hotline Miami," which in its own way is a manic, lo-fi analog (in every sense) to "Hitman."

I started Signalis and immediately freaked out at a jump scare lol.

the briefcase management of Resident Evil 4.

haha this was the absolute main thing that attracted me to it.

I played a bit of Signalis with my nephew, seemed pretty cool.

Playing shin Megami Tensei fan translation on the ps1, and I see this poster briefly as it pans up a building...

https://i.imgur.com/Niv9153.jpg

I squinted and I was like... I must be crazy. It can't be....

Then I googled the Japanese movie poster, and yes, sure enough:

https://i.imgur.com/lqekqdg.jpg

(cross posting myself from the insert credit forum, because I've maybe slightly been cheating on ilx with another forum. Imagine 2 forums in 2023)

Humble has a rogue like deck builder bundle which I just purchased and my God, my Saturday disappeared in the blink of an eye. I got off my phone from a friend at 9pm, booted up a slot machine deck builder, and 30 minutes later it was 1:30am. Perfect steam deck material

xp the Cage!!

reminds me of how silent hill had a school that was clearly based on the kindergarten cop school.

Playing a lot of indies at the moment in honour of the new steam deck: Celeste = top stuff. Spiritfarer is beautiful. Dicey Dungeons is a nice mechanical puzzle (could be harder, though i think that comes later). Tainted grail, A Hat in Time, FTL and Salt and Sanctuary are next on the list. Picked up a capcom humble bundle with every mega man game on. Seems a bit daunting but think I’ll give it a go from the start.

Ridiculous how much this steam deck has increased my gaming. It has gone from excessive to ludicrous.

Also, the aforementioned slot machine deck builder game is called “luck be a landlord” and everyone should buy it and play it. It’s not the same game as vampire survivors, but it gives you the exact same feeling. The overall enjoyment and pull to keep playing is crazy.

I have an itchy trigger purchase finger for "ZED ZONE". Has anyone played it? It just looks so darn nice.

But I've been well back into 7D2D lately with a friend, it's a looters paradise, we've managed to get to day 20 and just progressed into the steel industry, I love the thought of dread I have for every seventh day - just knowing all my beautiful shit is going to get trashed yet again.

Glad to hear Spiritfarer is good, I picked it up on sale because I saw it recommended as a solid co-op game.

Im so desperate for a game to play but apparently if you don't like sports, killing zombies, murdering large groups of people or chasing dragons around you're shit out of luck. Whatever happened to the great snowboader games (I'm thinking pro snowboader from PSONE?)

I also want to play the first 3 tomb raiders again. I guess I'm getting old.

ssx 3 was the last snowboarder game everyone liked, dunno what happened in the 2 decades since

Started playing INFERNAX the other day and so far I'm impressed. It's a retro-pastiche of Castlevania with a little bit of Souls DNA in there. I've played games like it already (Salt and Sanctuary, Tails of Iron), but this one seems to deliver just enough new twists and turns to make it pretty fun and compelling. Recommended

xp
Yeah, that one was good. the only snowboarding I can find is winter Olympics stuff but when you go to download it there's no snowboarding. Just skiing, skating, and those bike things.

Despite snowboarding being on the cover.

Pumped that Trackmania is on PS5 now. I really love that game.

Humanity is pretty fun so far. Kind of a throwback to PS2-era 3D puzzle games. You're a cute dog guiding a sea of humans. Apparently this really pops in VR.