What are you currently playing?

[Hawki]

So I finished Leon's campaign in RE6.

Gotta say, there's parts when I played this when I felt outright embarassed to be playing it, because Christ, the writing's stupid. Leon and Helena should be dead ten times over due to the number of explosions, vehicle crashes, and everything else - it's like the writers thought "explosions = drama." Also, it's an interesting contrast of Simmons with William Birkin, and how much more restrained RE2 was. Both characters are arguably the central antagonist in their respective games, both are infected with an 'uber' virus that causes them to constantly mutate, but Simmons is handled so poorly it makes me shudder to think what RE2 could have been. Y'know, with Birkin speaking in monster form, turning into a giant spider...sigh...

Anyway, I started Chris's campaign, and I'll be honest, it's better than Leon's. Like, it's not good, but it feels like this is what the devs wanted to make (lord, that's depressing), and, well...it's not GOOD. It feels like a poor man's mix of Gears of War gameplay and Call of Duty atmosphere, but it fails at both. But as a braindead third-person shooter? I mean, it works, I guess...

Also, why am I fighting monsters with kabuki masks, screaming, wielding machetes? Is it because I'm in China? Y'know, considering the racism row over RE5, I'm surprised this didn't attract the same scrutiny.

Anyway, the game still sucks, and while there's flashes of brilliance, it's drowned by a storm of mediocrity. Far as I'm aware, this wasn't a good time for Capcom, and it really shows in how Chris's game tries to ape better shooters, while Leon's campaign goes for a braindead "bigger is better" approach.

Bleh.

 

[happyninja42]

Fiddled around with the Moonstruck DLC for Prey. I'm honestly kind of puzzled as to why this is Mostly Positive reviews on Steam? It's a roguelike, repeatable map, where you play one of 5 different people on the Moonbase. You play as a digital hacker, who is data diving the material, trying to figure out what's going on. You can level up the crew members through each iteration of the run, installing neuromods to gain new skills, and the skills persist. Also any fabrication patterns you obtain, allow you to not only build those in mission, but also just pay a resource in the overworld stage, to just start with the equipment. The idea is to escape via certain methods, with certain characters, to unlock their story mission. But, I'm not really sure about whether that's engaging enough? The maps are really small, and the various obstacles, are specific to certain people to overcome. So ideally you want to run through the whole facility, in one go, with all 5 of them, unlocking various things to allow the other people access to previously blocked areas. So I assume there is some "perfect path" you can pick, based on who you start with, and what their skills are, will determine who comes through on round 2.

I've only unlocked one story mission so far, but...I find myself not very inspired to play it? I dunno, it's kind of neat, but also kind of lifeless compared to the main campaign. I'll probably try the story mission tonight after work, but I might just keep playing my NG+ Survival Mode that I started last night, this time actually installing the various Typhon abilities, instead of staying pure human. I'm curious how the survival mechanics will impact my playstyle. I suspect it's going to mean I use Typhon abilities instead of weapons most of the time, to reduce durability damage.

 

[meiam]

I've been kinda in a video game rut lately so I guess I'll just whine about various game I tried and find disappointing.

Everspace 2: I usually avoid early access game but I've been inching for a space game and this looked really good. Most important of all it's not eurotruck simulator in space, you spend most of your time fighting and exploring! Sadly the shooting part is super boring, almost every weapon is either missile or machine gun (there's some shotgun that are literally worthless and there are sniper that tickle enemy), the only dept is that if an enemy as blue health you shoot with the blue weapon and if they have orange health you shoot with the orange weapon. That's pretty much it, you're almost always fighting the same 4 small ship. Once in awhile there are larger ship to shoot at, the cool idea is that you can shoot at part of them to break them, the bad idea is that's only for gun turrets which are super easy to dodge, the ships also pepper you with missiles and spawn drones but you can't break those part, so the system is pointless. Ships and ships customization are also really limited, it use randomly generated loot and you level up pretty fast so it's just about using level appropriate parts, nothing interesting there. Environment gets pretty repetitive and mission are very simple for the most part. Maybe once it leaves EA it'll be better, but its just plain now. Project sylpheed did spaceship fighting so much better years ago (please port it to steam square enix) and even freaking ubisoft did this formula better in starlink.

Monster hunter world: Grind, grind and grind. Oh and also annoying multiplayer stuff being forced on single player. There's an excellent game in there but it's just ruined by the grind and multiplayer aspect for me.

Humankind: Just came out and was really looking forward to a serious competitor to civilization, especially since there endless franchise is pretty good. But it's super barebone. First 20% of a game is really fun but after you're done with the settling part there's just nothing to do outside of war and I was mostly bored and clicking next turn constantly. AI is brain dead and can't keep up with you unless it has massive numerical advantages, problem is humankind snowball like crazy, so on one difficulty setting I end up leaving the AI in the dust and they can't compete with me and the other one they leave me in the dust because I can't compete. The game balance is also complete crap, every era you pick a new civilization, except some of them are utterly broken, for example one civilization can easily increase their science output by 10 fold once you pick them. The city building aspect is nice so there's potential in the future, but it doesn't bring anything new to the formula that's that interesting and feel like it's missing 3-4 expansions worth of content.

Black desert online: Some friend have gotten really into it so I tried and, ehhhhh. It's like an mmo that decided it was going to do all the things, so there's combat and trading and crafting and player housing and long storyline, and relationship and, and, and... But nothing feel polish, everything is super shallow and the answer to every obstacle is to grind. Also the game is constantly showering you with gift and such to the point where my inventory would regularly overflow with just random crap, but it doesn't bother explaining most systems so I have no idea if an item that boost life exp is worth using right now or if I should keep it for later. Early game is absolutely awful, you're constantly given quests that just have you running back and forth between character to hear little snippet of exposition dialogue, except bad one (translation isn't great and the writing is worse). I was literally hoping for the gold old "go to the forest and find 25 boars scrotum" cause the combat is the best part of the game. Mind you it's not particularly good, you just have a bunch of ability that you can use, there doesn't really seem to be anything resembling rotation or priority, it just seem to be "use whatever, whenever" but it's super flashy and satisfying, sorta like a dynasty warrior game.

Legend of hero, trail of cold steel: So super long franchise, I tried the very first one on PSP and found it pretty boring, this is the same universe but pretty different setting and it's... okay, I guess? I'd say it's average to below average in everything but it get a gold star for effort. It's like a small studio trying to make a big budget JRPG. Graphic look early PS3 at best and art style can be summed up as generic but serviceable. Story seems like it'd be interesting at first, it's about kids going to military school, I was really looking forward to some low key adventure cause I'm sick and tired of being "the one" who save the world. Well guess what? You play as "the one" who save the world. The game keep repeating the same cycle, you're in school and are going on a field trip, there's usually some interpersonal BS between the class student that need to be fixed during the trip, but most of it is really forced. Once you arrive at destination you do a bunch of menial quests before some big terrible event happened (usually something that would cause a lot of political upheaval), you almost solve the problem but then some character show up, goes "hey I'll fix everything" and then the game skip 3 weeks and no one mention the big event that happened, rinse and repeat, story blue ball. Characters are super cliche, main character is just a nice guy but actually he's an orphan who has a deep dark secret that cause him to go berserk (I shit you not, when he does his hair turn white, I laughed out loud at that) his adoptive sister is obviously in love with him (she even has an "onichan baka!" moment) and I don't think I need to write anymore, you already know him. The class is supposed to be made of mixture commoner and noble, but every commoner is essentially a noble so that fall flat. There's way to much writting (yeah I see the irony in typing this), scene that could be 3 lines of dialogue are stretched to 20+. Also, every time the story progress you have to go talk to literally every single NPCs in town because the game hide a bunch of missable stuffs behind talking to random NPC. Combat is the most generic version of turn based JRPG possible, except its super easy to break once you figure out a few tricks (some attack will delay enemy turn, you can just spam those to never let the enemy take a turn, works on boss too). There's a system that's sorta like FF7 materia system except shallower. It's a shame cause the worldbuilding is pretty strong and since you spend most of the game in the same school/town you get to see the NPCs evolve a bit and that's nice.

Anyway, my backlog is essentially infinite at this point so I'll eventually find something good, just annoy that pulled a bunch of dud in a row. I might try cyberpunk 2077 since its on sale, but I dunno if my gtx 970 can really keep up with the game.

 

[NerfedFalcon]

A while back I picked up a copy of NEO The World Ends With You, the day it came out in fact. Somehow, I didn't get around to playing it until today, and I've only played up to day 3 so far. The battle system feels a lot better than I was worried it would, and the new characters are mostly pretty interesting and fun, even if some of them are total punks. Definitely hoping this goes to good places, and I see a lot of potential for it to do just that.

Also started Red Dead Redemption 2 on PC, which I got even further back, from the last big Steam sale. I have to say, playing with a mouse and keyboard feels a lot better to me than the controller did. I even got a gold medal on the deer hunting mission, which was the last one I did today.

Still playing Genshin Impact and Old School Runescape as well. Could hardly get a more different set of games out of a hat, but I like what I like.

 

[happyninja42]

Picked up Tainted Grail last night, I was feeling an itch for a deckbuilder game, that is also a roguelike. This one is pretty fun. The tone of the setting feels like a blend of diablo setting, and celtic lore. Like someone said "hey, you know the entire tone of culture that Heilung is reinvigorating in pop culture right now? Let's make a game with that tone, and make it a deckbuilder. It feels like Diablo, in the overall "your in a ruined village and go out and find various people to come set up shop there, and thus give you access to resources and upgrades." And it feels like Diablo. I seriously felt like I was in Tristram in the opening village area. The only difference is the combat is turn based, card combat. You have an overmap you run around on, spotting enemies you can avoid (kind of) if you have enough light from your Wyrdcandle, but you basically encounter random events with NPC's, who give you weird and gruesome quests, because of course it's all bizarre and horrific.

Basic premise, you are part of a village of Avalonions who come to this new land to try and settle. But the Wyrd is all around you, and the lands are hostile. You all find this Totally Not Creepy and Ominous...Seriously totem in a clearing, that is a literal statue of the fucking Grim Reaper, that, for SOME UNKNOWN REASON, the various hostiles don't want to go near...hmm...wonder why. *scratches chin* So your village, BRILLIANTLY decides "hey, let's settle here!" And then...shock of shocks, you all die in a Wyrd Thingy. You wake up, not in the afterlife, but not in life, and are basically told. "Hey, reality's all fucked up Because Reasons, but you will be able to go out, fight the Wyrd monsters, and grow stronger, to try and kill the various bosses that are making everything dangerous and fucked up. You will die, but not really because you're already dead, but you can keep fighting." Which is the in game reason for the meta-progression you have with the game's mechanics. So you go out, fight some fights, maybe kill some things, maybe run into new NPC's with quests you can further progress. Eventually you will die, but you will earn XP towards your meta-rank, which unlocks things like new classes to play, new cards that can show up in the random deck draws as rewards, etc. If you've played things like Slay the Spire, then you will be familiar with this bit.

The combat though, looks like a JRPG, at lest in the 3D layout of it. So far I've only got 2 classes unlocked. The starter class, which is kind of a berserker, though I forget the name offhand (Maurader maybe?). And the newest one Summoner. The starter class, is all about stacking up damage buffs on yourself with consecutive attacks, and stacking up debuffs on your enemy with the same attacks. They're really best (I think, so far) on single target enemies, as if you can stack multiple hits on the same target, the amount of damage output he can unleash is pretty impressive. I didn't really get the hang of him, and had a lot of trouble having much longevity in the field. If you aren't blocking basically everything coming your way (which limits how much offense you are doing), he doesn't really have much damage mitigation long term. I'm sure there is a way to be OP with him, but I don't have that figured out yet. The Summoner however, was WAAAAY easier to be powerful with.

He gets pets that he summons, that have specific jobs. One is a tank that draws attacks, another does single target attacks that break armor, another buffs you, and another does AOE attacks. Their thing is about having multiple out at once, and triggering their attacks with your action cards. And they're pretty powerful. First run of that class, and I beat the first Quest Boss, on first try. Whereas the starter guy, I would sometimes go down after just 2-3 fights, if the cards didn't go my way. I'm still actually playing my first run of the Summoner class, I just had to log off for sleep and work. There are like 10 classes in the character lineup, all that get unlocked with game progression. So it's pretty robust for variety of classes and ways to play it. Not sure how much GAME is there yet, but it definitely seems like they are putting a lot of quality effort into it.

Oh, and the mention of Heilung earlier, they DEFINITELY like that band. I just looked it up, and apparently the song is actually by a band called Danheim. But damn if they don't sound like Heilung to me. Not sure which is first, but, it's a pretty slick ass song to be listening to while you are fighting the boss enemies. It's not there for every fight, only the BIG BOIS. It lets you know "ok this is going to be a tough fight"

I'm enjoying it a lot. I'm biased to deckbuilders of course but, I found myself playing it for like 3-4 hours last night once I loaded it up. And I was seriously debating the "stay up longer and play and be tired as fuck at work" debate every gamer has. So that's saying something about my engagement. I want to leave work early and go play it some more because I liked the playstyle of it.

If you like deckbuilders, and like pagan/celtic/irish cultural flavored Wyrdness, with a bit of british snark and humor as well, you could do worse than picking this game up.

 

[BrawlMan]

I did some rounds of Devil May Cry 5 last night. Trying to get back into the swing of constantly juggling enemies in the air for as long as possible. I'll probably do some online for the first time finally in Guilty Gear Strive. I'm off work on Friday tomorrow, so I'll be able to pick up No More Heroes 3 when my local GS opens.

@happyninja42, let me know how No More Heroes 1 & 2 are whenever you get the chance to buy them or they're on sale. I'll let you know how the lightsaber style combat is for the third game.

 

[Chimpzy]

Played the first couple levels of the Quake Remaster.

Also playing Quake remaster on Nightmare.

Should you lads end up hankering for more Quakey goodness, I can heartily recommend Arcane Dimensions, a really high quality mod.

Not sure if it works with the remake tho.

 

[Dalisclock]

Still playing Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity

Some late game spoilers

I think I'm close to the end. The Calamity has happened and the plot has finally kicked into high gear. In the Past few missions, I've had to reclaim the 4 divine beasts, Defend Akkla Citadel and Fort Hateno. And I do kind of love how it's All the missions after Calamity Ganon appears are happening almost one right after the other, where in one mission two of the divine beasts will come to aid Akkla Citadel and the other two will be sweeping up guardians in hyrule field around the same time of the battle of Hateno. It also begs the question of just how many of those damn monsters are there. They're like fucking roaches in that you kill thousands and it doesn't seem to make a fucking dent in their population? Where are these damn things breeding and how? Is it like murder rabbits on crack? On one hand, It feels like I'm committing genocide but on the other hand they never seem to run out of dudes and I have to question how the fuck Hyrule hasn't been overrun by this point even when Gannon isn't showing up to mess up the place.

That aside, It does feel like this hits a hell of a lot harder if you've played BOTW and unlocked the 13 memories, where you see the difference between the original timeline in BOTW and the New Timeline created here. Especially how the original timeline likely went down where Akkla Citadel barely holding on instead of falling due to the heros showing up in time, Link and the future champs showing up to prevent Ganon from grabbing the divine beasts and killing the present champs, and how Link tried to hold off 4 Blight Ganons with Zelda able to keep him from getting critically injured. So history changes due to a few key pieces being in the right place at the right time.

There's some great stuff in the endgame, with the battle of Akkla Citadel and Fort Hateno feeling fucking epic and tense. The downside is that it feels like a lot of the game up until this point has been.....ok. Sure, it's prepping everything but the missions tend to a feel a bit samey a lot of the time(and I realize that's a problem with importing the DW gamplay). I've fallen off on playing a lot of the side missions because I want to advance the story and the side missions feel like they're there for the sake of grinding levels and resources. I guess you're also supposed to do the same to characters but I've decided I'm gonna play Link, Mipha and Urbosa and let everyone more or less sit there. I don't even want to try to grind up everyone's special abilities and hearts and such because I don't care about most of them and I can only imagine it would make the grinding so much worse to try to do all the side missions and quests and try to 100% all the regions(why the fuck do you need 20 chickens to a side quests and no you can't fucking buy them at stores).

So anyway, I should be done fairly soon.

 

[Worgen]

Should you lads end up hankering for more Quakey goodness, I can heartily recommend Arcane Dimensions, a really high quality mod.

Not sure if it works with the remake tho.

I think that quake 1.5 works with it so Arcane Dimensions should work, might need to finagling though.

 

[wings012]

Been playing Fallout 4. Cause they finally lowered the price of the Season Pass so that it doesn't cost more than the GOTY edition of the game(which comes with the season pass).

Decided to try the new Survival Mode. Except it prevents you from saving anywhere you want and gets rid of fast travel. I rather not deal with that, I just want deadlier combat and the need to eat/drink so I modded those back in.

That said the deadlier combat can be very infuriating. Until you get significantly geared up, a lot of things are going to kill you very fast. That starting Deathclaw outside Concord is capable of oneshotting you even in the provided Power Armour. If a raider decides to throw a molotov at you, there's very little you can do to survive it.

But well it does make the playthrough spicier than my previous normal playthrough I guess so I'm just gonna roll with it. My main objective here is to check out the DLCs, and probably do the BOS or Railroad ending since I haven't done those yet.

 

[BrawlMan]

all the regions(why the fuck do you need 20 chickens to a side quests and no you can't fucking buy them at stores).

Yeah, it can be annoying. For materials that can't be bought, you can usually mark them (provided you've done the side mission requirement first) and the indicator will let you know what missions or side missions have the materials you need. You can increase number count of materials you want on the radar by doing more missions to gather more materials. Though I last I checked, I could buy chicken meat and eggs. You've must have not unlocked the region yet that has that specific shop.

 

[Dalisclock]

Yeah, it can be annoying. For materials that can't be bought, you can usually mark them (provided you've done the side mission requirement first) and the indicator will let you know what missions or side missions have the materials you need. You can increase number count of materials you want on the radar by doing more missions to gather more materials. Though I last I checked, I could buy chicken meat and eggs. You've must have not unlocked the region yet that has that specific shop.

I thought I'd unlocked all the shops but there might be one that hasn't shown up yet locked behind one of the other side quests/side missions.

LIke after I finished one of the more recent main missions and suddenly a ton of side quests/missions popped up on my already crowded map.

 

[happyninja42]

That aside, It does feel like this hits a hell of a lot harder if you've played BOTW and unlocked the 13 memories, where you see the difference between the original timeline in BOTW and the New Timeline created here. Especially how the original timeline likely went down where Akkla Citadel barely holding on instead of falling due to the heros showing up in time, Link and the future champs showing up to prevent Ganon from grabbing the divine beasts and killing the present champs, and how Link tried to hold off 4 Blight Ganons with Zelda able to keep him from getting critically injured. So history changes due to a few key pieces being in the right place at the right time.

Yesssss. It's so much fun to see that. I really liked how they opened the game with you seeing the Worst Ending. Everyone dead, Zelda about to go down too, and she does that magical hail mary to the little robot in her room, to try and change the timeline, before dropping. And then when she starts actually becoming the leader of Hyrule, giving speeches to her troops, leading charges. FUCK I love Zelda in that game at that point xD

There's some great stuff in the endgame, with the battle of Akkla Citadel and Fort Hateno feeling fucking epic and tense. The downside is that it feels like a lot of the game up until this point has been.....ok. Sure, it's prepping everything but the missions tend to a feel a bit samey a lot of the time(and I realize that's a problem with importing the DW gamplay). I've fallen off on playing a lot of the side missions because I want to advance the story and the side missions feel like they're there for the sake of grinding levels and resources. I guess you're also supposed to do the same to characters but I've decided I'm gonna play Link, Mipha and Urbosa and let everyone more or less sit there. I don't even want to try to grind up everyone's special abilities and hearts and such because I don't care about most of them and I can only imagine it would make the grinding so much worse to try to do all the side missions and quests and try to 100% all the regions(why the fuck do you need 20 chickens to a side quests and no you can't fucking buy them at stores).

So anyway, I should be done fairly soon.

Yes the side missions are mostly there to just let you farm supplies to level up gear and stuff. Have you unlocked the training grounds? That lets you spend money to just speed level people up? If not, I would recommend doing that. It's a great way to shore up new heroes that you might want to play *Cough cough* Unsealed Zelda *cough cough*, but don't want to spend hours running around grinding. I didn't have that issue too much, as I found immense joy in running around with Unsealed Zelda,laying waste to the forces of darkness with radiant light arrows and columns of divine light.

though I totally highfive you good sir! For your choice of Urbosa in your list of primary champions! She was my favorite, BY FAR, until Unsealed Zelda. Then she became a very close second, with the rest of the roster significantly lower down. My wife was a devout Mipha fan though, from the start, and used her at every opportunity.

 

[happyninja42]

And because this freaking forum hates it's own design (Seriously Escapist, this is ridiculous, you can't even use the emojiis your own system has in place without breaking your forum system!!) Part TWO of my previous post


OT: So I did a bit more of the Mooncrash DLC for Prey and....yeah I just don't find it that engaging. I finished one of the story missions for one of the 5 characters, and it was basically just a side mission, with very little actual content to it. An audiolog or 2, a few emails, a note here and there, done. I feel they wanted me to be invested in the story of it, and feel the tragic loss, but it's literally someone I've only ever known as a corpse....hell both of them actually. The engineer class is unlocked...by finding her corpse...which then let's you replay her life up to the point she died. Which makes the whole objective of "escape with the 5 characters" very strange, as it's not how the events took place. Or maybe they are how, and the corruption makes it seem like everyone died, but really these 5 survived by the different ways you can get them to escape. I dunno, I can't find myself to give enough of a shit to replay this thing over and over to find out.

I also tried out the Survival mode for Prey, but I honestly don't know if I'll keep playing it. It's just weapon degradation, injury trauma debuffs, and limited O2. Since I'm playing NG+ it's not really making anything harder for me. So I don't know if I'll continue. I might try for the "No Needles" achievement at some point, using zero neuromods. I suspect the easiest way to get that, is to probably take the escape pod? Not sure if that's enough of an "end" to qualify for that achievement. Might have to just play the game all the way through. We'll see. Most of my attention has been sucked up by:

The Tainted Grail.

I'm REALLY enjoying this game. The blending of RPG and deckbuilding is really appealing to me. Running into the various NPC's out in the world, and dealing with their evolving quests is really fun. Plus the various classes have really interesting designs to their playstyle that are significantly different. I'm currently enjoying the Pathfinder, which is basically the tank. Their thing is all about NOT being hit over consecutive turns. The longer you go without taking any health damage (you can be HIT, it just can't hurt you), the larger of a stacking damage buff you gain. So, the strategy is to turtle up for several turns in a row with defensive cards, and then once you've got a healthy damage boost, unleash pain on your enemies with your damage cards. It's quite satisfying to do when you pull it off right. I'm still eyeballing the Apostate class, as one I really want to play when it is unlocked. I'm curious how they are going to build a character that is, apparently, against the gods (who are established to be real here), in a game like this. Most pop culture portray people without religion really badly, so I'm curious if they're going to have him be well aware the gods exist, but defies them because they are all horrible assholes in this world, that do nothing but make the beings suffer. I'm also curious how that will translate to a power/class deck structure.

But yeah, I'm playing a lot of it. Second day in a row of me grumpily turning the game off to go to sleep, because I had work in the morning, and REALLY being unhappy about it.

 

[BrawlMan]

And because this freaking forum hates it's own design (Seriously Escapist, this is ridiculous, you can't even use the emojiis your own system has in place without breaking your forum system!!) Part TWO of my previous post

It's weird, because the DMC fan forums more or less had the same design for years before E2.0, and they never have this problem.

 

[Silvanus]

Finished Demon's Souls last week.

Now playing through Ender Lillies & Doom Eternal's DLC.

 

[Terminal Blue]

One thing I've noticed being on stimulants is that I can't hyperfocus on games any more. Before I could easily play games literally all day and barely be aware of where I was. Now, I still enjoy games but I don't really get that feeling where the whole world disappears and I'm just totally immersed in whatever I'm doing. As a result, I'm starting to find that a lot of the games that I used to play just take too long, and if I can't make meaningful progress in an hour or two I'll start to get a bit bored.

But I'm still playing Dyson Sphere Program, although I mostly play it while chatting on discord. I think it's really good for ADHD brain because you can break everything down into small tasks. Each time I play I just set an objective to build a new part of the factory, and when it's done if I'm not bored yet I'll set another. I haven't left the starting solar system yet, but it's getting pretty close to being fully exploited so I imagine I'll get round to that soon.

I really miss playing Space Station 13. Before I went on meds I was mostly playing Goon RP and trying out big construction projects, but I don't think I'd have the patience for that any more. I think Goon 1 is probably more my speed now, but my last few Goon 1 rounds were kind of disappointing so I think I just need a bit of time to get my enthusiasm back.

That's the problem with SS13 though, you'll have the occasional amazing round where you get in a meth fuelled slap fight with macho man randy savage or something, but you're just as likely to have a round where some nerd just murders everyone with a lightsaber and it's really boring.

 

[Dalisclock]

Yesssss. It's so much fun to see that. I really liked how they opened the game with you seeing the Worst Ending. Everyone dead, Zelda about to go down too, and she does that magical hail mary to the little robot in her room, to try and change the timeline, before dropping. And then when she starts actually becoming the leader of Hyrule, giving speeches to her troops, leading charges. FUCK I love Zelda in that game at that point xD

Yes the side missions are mostly there to just let you farm supplies to level up gear and stuff. Have you unlocked the training grounds? That lets you spend money to just speed level people up? If not, I would recommend doing that. It's a great way to shore up new heroes that you might want to play *Cough cough* Unsealed Zelda *cough cough*, but don't want to spend hours running around grinding. I didn't have that issue too much, as I found immense joy in running around with Unsealed Zelda,laying waste to the forces of darkness with radiant light arrows and columns of divine light.

though I totally highfive you good sir! For your choice of Urbosa in your list of primary champions! She was my favorite, BY FAR, until Unsealed Zelda. Then she became a very close second, with the rest of the roster significantly lower down. My wife was a devout Mipha fan though, from the start, and used her at every opportunity.

Yeah, that was amazing. Zelda finally gets a chance to shine there, rallying the troops after barely making it through the night after Fort Hateno. . I do like her new attacks though I haven't been able to finish her Bow training mission because somehow I run out of dudes to kill before the time limit so I can't meet the KO quoto(and I tried this a couple times). Last time I think I was like 950/1000 when time ran out but the enemies stopped spawning for some reason.

I have been using the training camp to keep levels up(my god, why can't some RPGs think of this? Instead they want you to level everyone up individually which is a problem when you introduce a lot of characters).

I've been jumping between them. Mipha may not hit as hard but she's fucking fast, Urbosa has lighting godess goodness and Link just does well at everything. I think I'll try to get Zelda into the rotation as well now that I understand her new moveset(I swear Fort Hateno was a bad place to introduce you to that becuase you're fighting bosses and defending a fort)

 

[meiam]

OT: So I did a bit more of the Mooncrash DLC for Prey and....yeah I just don't find it that engaging. I finished one of the story missions for one of the 5 characters, and it was basically just a side mission, with very little actual content to it. An audiolog or 2, a few emails, a note here and there, done. I feel they wanted me to be invested in the story of it, and feel the tragic loss, but it's literally someone I've only ever known as a corpse....hell both of them actually. The engineer class is unlocked...by finding her corpse...which then let's you replay her life up to the point she died. Which makes the whole objective of "escape with the 5 characters" very strange, as it's not how the events took place. Or maybe they are how, and the corruption makes it seem like everyone died, but really these 5 survived by the different ways you can get them to escape. I dunno, I can't find myself to give enough of a shit to replay this thing over and over to find out.

I also tried out the Survival mode for Prey, but I honestly don't know if I'll keep playing it. It's just weapon degradation, injury trauma debuffs, and limited O2. Since I'm playing NG+ it's not really making anything harder for me. So I don't know if I'll continue. I might try for the "No Needles" achievement at some point, using zero neuromods. I suspect the easiest way to get that, is to probably take the escape pod? Not sure if that's enough of an "end" to qualify for that achievement. Might have to just play the game all the way through. We'll see. Most of my attention has been sucked up by:

Mooncrash is more about the gameplay than the story, if your so so on it you won't find much interesting there. As for the character fate, most character escaped the station in their own unique way, you replay them until you can escape with all of them using the correct escape in one session.

 

[BrawlMan]

I played No More Heroes III for a couple of hours. I will give a more in-depth review on the thread I made. So here's quick summation so far:

Pros:

• The combat is at it's best in the series. Taking elements from the previous games and Killer Is Dead. You can see what they kept, and got rid of what didn't work. Travis can now jump and dodge with their own dedicated buttons now. So no more having to hold block (though still a good idea) to do a dodge or perfect dodge (used to be called Dark Step). You have Death Chip attacks that can be equipable and run on a cool-down timer. Just like TSA.
• This game has so much style, and Suda is just going full nuts.
• Each boss battle has it's own unique gimmick or theme. I've only done two so far though. I'll be working on side activities for a while.
• The side activities are fun and can be done at higher levels for more rewards.
• Upgrading Travis can all be done at one place now at his home.
• You can fight bosses you've beaten again, and up the difficulty for bigger rewards when at home base.

Cons:

• The open world is pretty barren with not much to do other than going to point A to B. There are important collectibles you can get, but that is about it. I would have just preferred the menu system from NMH2. The only good thing I can say it's easy to go where you need, and there is fast travel.
• Surprise Difficulty. You can die fast in this game before you get the chance to upgrade Travis, that it will catch veteran and new players alike unguarded. The first boss actually killed me a 4 times, and I picked Normal. The second boss only killed me once. So I recommend you try to activities as much as possible to get the currencies to level Travis up properly.
• Dash and Charge Attacks are moves you have to unlock, instead of being default like the 2nd game. Why? They were always default moves. This just adds padding to moves you should already have.
• Some of it might be overwhelming for people with all the tutorial pop ups for new mechanics. Thankfully, you can go back and look at them easily in the menu any time.

I'll play so more either later tonight or tomorrow.