What are you currently playing?

[Hawki]

So Battlefield 2042 was free over the weekened on Xbox, so I gave it a shot.

I didn't have time to play enough to really give any kind of real review, but random thoughts:

-The No-Pat thing is so stupid. Russia and the US are using them for plausible deniability, but in-game, the factions are clearly designated for the world to see, as are the flags, so who do they think they're fooling?

-Speaking of countries, so far, Russian and US forces have fought in countries like Qatar, India, and South Korea. Um...where are the Qatari, Indian, and South Korean forces? Their countries still seem to exist, as far as I can tell.

-When it comes to the gameplay, I didn't really have enough time to make any kind of judgement, but it might be the slowest Battlefield I've ever played. As in, slowest rate of movement, with slow rates of fire (or at least, you've really got to stop and aim your shots to make a have a chance of hitting the enemy). It's a weird antithesis to Halo Infinite (which I've mostly played), which is much faster, with much smaller maps. This isn't bad, per se, but its a style that's noticable.

Anyway, really just bog average.

 

[Drathnoxis]

Beat Nethack again. I was just going to play one game for an hour or so until I died... but I didn't die so I ended up playing for 14 hours (that's what alt.org lists for the time). It's my sixth ascension on alt.org and my 10th total. Also it seems that this is the start of my first win streak on Nethack, since it looks like the last game I played was also a win. I was a elven wizard. I finished with no wishes, polypiling, or genocide. It was a really lucky run to start, starting with a magic marker and a ring of regeneration was a huge plus. Also I found another magic marker, a pair of speed boots, and a wand of death within the first 5 floors.

So great start. I made a couple of mistakes like getting bitten by a werewolf and not praying to cure my lycanthropy and instead trying to make it back to my stash to grab some holy water and ended up destroying my cloak of magic resistance and studded leather armor, but it ended up being ok. I had a cloak of displacement and was able to get Magicbane right away to make up my magic resistance. I also lost both my ring of regen and my ring of teleport control (while I had teleportitis) due to a shock from a trapped chest. It could have been pretty bad, but I was 3 levels away from intrinsic teleport control and got 2 levels from 3 wraith corpses that dropped in a the Valley of the Dead (lucky!) and had a potion of gain level in my bag. I also found another ring of teleport control a few floors later which was also really good because... it turns out that fighting Vlad with a magic cancellation of 1 is a really bad idea. He drained my level from 19 to 13 before I killed him. I also didn't know that you could use a potion of restore ability to restore all lost levels so I never kept any because I thought they were nearly completely useless. I was only able to get back to level 15 before the end of the game. I was a little slow and missed my usual goal of being under 20k turns, coming in at just under 21k.

All in all, I'm pretty happy with the run. God, liches are annoying, though. I swear I ran into like 12 master/arch liches. I didn't kill them all so I don't have proper stats on that.

 

[laggyteabag]

I finished Inscryption, and despite my previous post, I was actually quite sad to see it end.

I still think that the game would have benefitted from continuing to flesh out Act 1 - at least from a gameplay perspective - but the story eventually got me.

It was a good time, and I would definitely recommend it (at least for the Sale price I got it on).

Now, I am dipping my toes back into The Witcher 3 for another playthrough, after watching Season 2 of the show.

I did sort of promise myself that I would avoid replaying many games this year, but I never did finish Blood and Wine, so that is my excuse.

 

[Silvanus]

First game played in 2022 was Night in the Woods.

Enjoyed it a lot, fantastic writing, fantastic thematically too. Could've done with being a bit longer maybe.

And I've got Dusk Stars, the tune that plays while Mae is stargazing with Mr. Chazokov, stuck in my head for days now.

 

[Dalisclock]

First game played in 2022 was Night in the Woods.

Enjoyed it a lot, fantastic writing, fantastic thematically too. Could've done with being a bit longer maybe.

And I've got Dusk Stars, the tune that plays while Mae is stargazing with Mr. Chazokov, stuck in my head for days now.

That's an amazingly good game but it's hard to describe why it's good.

Honestly my only complaint(and it's a small one) is how the last act gets weirdly Lovecraftian and while I normally like that sort of thing it feels like it doesn't quite mesh with the rest of the game.

If you have the version that comes with the winter side story(Longest Night, I think it's called), which I believe all of them do now, take the hour or so to play through it. It has little to do with the rest of the game but it's still worth it.

 

[Silvanus]

That's an amazingly good game but it's hard to describe why it's good.

Honestly my only complaint(and it's a small one) is how the last act gets weirdly Lovecraftian and while I normally like that sort of thing it feels like it doesn't quite mesh with the rest of the game.

Well, as I understand it... the "Black Goat" is very much up to interpretation, and I didn't think it was real. There are newspaper clippings about how the gas released in a previous mine accident caused hallucinations, and the cultists were all huddled around the deepest hole in the ground. Plus, their "sacrifices" didn't seem to actually be doing anything to save the town.

In the end, I think it was delusion and denial from the cultists. Almost like a mirror for the difficulty Mae has with coming to terms with change.

If you have the version that comes with the winter side story(Longest Night, I think it's called), which I believe all of them do now, take the hour or so to play through it. It has little to do with the rest of the game but it's still worth it.

Hrmrmrm, I got the Switch version, and if that's included I can't seem to see an option for it.

 

[Gergar12]

So Battlefield 2042 was free over the weekened on Xbox, so I gave it a shot.

I didn't have time to play enough to really give any kind of real review, but random thoughts:

-The No-Pat thing is so stupid. Russia and the US are using them for plausible deniability, but in-game, the factions are clearly designated for the world to see, as are the flags, so who do they think they're fooling?

-Speaking of countries, so far, Russian and US forces have fought in countries like Qatar, India, and South Korea. Um...where are the Qatari, Indian, and South Korean forces? Their countries still seem to exist, as far as I can tell.

-When it comes to the gameplay, I didn't really have enough time to make any kind of judgement, but it might be the slowest Battlefield I've ever played. As in, slowest rate of movement, with slow rates of fire (or at least, you've really got to stop and aim your shots to make a have a chance of hitting the enemy). It's a weird antithesis to Halo Infinite (which I've mostly played), which is much faster, with much smaller maps. This isn't bad, per se, but its a style that's noticable.

Anyway, really just bog average.

How many times did you crash? I kept crashing and stopped playing it.

 

[Dalisclock]

Hrmrmrm, I got the Switch version, and if that's included I can't seem to see an option for it.

Apparently it was only on the PC version, called "Wierd Autumn edition". Also, I was wrong, while "Longest Night" is a side story for the game, the one I was thinking about was "Lost constellation" which you can grab online if you're really interested from ich.io. It's not essential by any means but it is an interesting piece of side content.

 

[Silvanus]

Apparently it was only on the PC version, called "Wierd Autumn edition". Also, I was wrong, while "Longest Night" is a side story for the game, the one I was thinking about was "Lost constellation" which you can grab online if you're really interested from ich.io. It's not essential by any means but it is an interesting piece of side content.

I will, cheers for the link!

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

Loop Hero: beat the first boss!
Sekiro (replay): beat a couple of mini-bosses around Ashina Castle and ran around unlocking a few shrines and collecting upgrade items. Each Sekiro session is me asking myself why I'm putting myself through this torture again interrupted by brief moments of victorious glee.

Sekiro is designed to be aggressive with offense, so you should be feeling pretty fearless instead! The responsiveness of 60fps on PC should only encourage that. I platinumed the game on PS4, which is hooked to a projector that has 67ms input lag, so it’ll probably feel like a dream going to PC someday.

 

[NerfedFalcon]

Chapter 7 of Genealogy of the Holy War down. Leif seemed slightly underwhelming when I first looked at his stats, but he's already started kicking ass after a few levels of good growths. And Ares and Shanan just start out really strong, so I've gotten a few badasses added to my team. As well as some good support staff too, can't win without them.

Genealogy seems to take the approach to balance that 'if everyone is OP then no one is OP', but it doesn't really work out that well for the most part. Some characters are just much better than others, and the generally high power level of the game means that anyone who starts lagging (like Johan) will stay lagging. Still, I find it compelling enough to keep going into the next maps.

 

[Hawki]

How many times did you crash? I kept crashing and stopped playing it.

Zero. But I only got 3 matches, 1 of which was against bots.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

My Friend Pedro

This is a game without story, characters or even a little bit of context, it's not particularly pretty to look at or stylish in its aesthetic, couldn't tell you what the music sounds like and the humor is very, very, very flat. But the gameplay rocks so it's a lot of fun. It does the Hotline Miami thing of quickly dispatching everything with a pulse in vicious, frenetic ways as you keep a combo going and try to S-rank each level. The levels themselves are very simple with some minimal platforming involved so the challenge is getting a high score, and the gameplay is so much fun that I feel like going for them just for the hell of replaying the levels.

 

[Bartholen]

I've been doing the usual post-game cleanup in Arkham Origins, and it just further highlights how half-assed the game is in comparison to its predecessors. The Riddler trophies are just that (they're not even trophies): there are no question marks to align or verbal clues to solve like in Asylum and City, and even the puzzles to get the trophies are super basic. City had some genuine headscratchers.

Another niggling annoyance is how the game locks previously available mechanics like freeflow combat gadgets and the shockwave attack behind specific gameplay challenges. This isn't anything new, but what is new is that you need to complete the challenges in order, which has basically zero chance of happening organically through normal gameplay. Like how one challenge requires you to lure an enemy into a takedown with the sonic batarang 3 times. For one I basically forget that gagdet even exists whenever I play these games, and for two the goddamn thing seems to be bugged up the butt, or only works in specific circumistances. I must have thrown that thing at a patrolling enemy's feet some 20 times in the hopes of luring them, but they just stroll idly by.

 

[laggyteabag]

I'm replaying The Witcher 3 at the moment, and I have forgotten just how beautiful this game is, even 7 years on (seven?!)

I'm just at the point where I leave White Orchard after killing the Griffin, so I am just cleaning up the side-content before moving on.

It speaks volumes about this game's quests and storytelling, that a single tiny side quest about a frying pan is more compelling than many other open-world game's main quests.

Otherwise, I am also playing the Vader: Immortal on my Quest 2. Its short, and a bit too hand-holdy, but obviously very well put together. I just finished part one of three, and I am excited to continue.

At the very least, it is nice to have something short to play in between the (likely) 100+ hour experience that The Witcher 3 will turn out to be.

 

[XsjadoBlayde]

Trying Breath of the Wild after falling off it a while ago. Am a little bummed out there's no musical instruments in this one as the music interaction since Ocarina was one of the more appealing aspects of the series that got me invested into them more than any other series. Seems like a well made game though. Just chill to explore and randomly die every now and again.

 

[Old_Hunter_77]

Sekiro is designed to be aggressive with offense, so you should be feeling pretty fearless instead! The responsiveness of 60fps on PC should only encourage that. I platinumed the game on PS4, which is hooked to a projector that has 67ms input lag, so it’ll probably feel like a dream going to PC someday.

Man, I dunno. I got up to Genichiro and yeah it took me 1000x to beat him on PS4. Now on replay on PC, I'm reliving all of the miserable experiences I had on PS4, especially and including moments where I for sure pressed the damn button and wolf just stood there like a tool getting smashed in the face.
I am feeling no difference between PS4 and PC.

 

[Old_Hunter_77]

.... 7 years on (seven?!)

You shut your goddamn filthy dirty mouth, I'm not old, you're old *cries*
Yeah, no, it's gorg. Most of my gaming choices since then are just me distracting myself from yet another replay.

 

[BrawlMan]

Kaze and the Wild Masks (PS4) - Freedom Planet is considered a throwback to old school Sonic games. Then this game I am playing is the retro throwback to Donkey Kong Country and it is awesome. This is the second DKC style game, with Yooka-Laylee & The Impossible Lair being the first. Kaze I consider better for me. Tried Impossible Lair, and it did not work for me.

 

[Worgen]

Final Fantasy 4 Pixel Remaster. Its so good to play it again, I did have to mod in an exp mod to reduce the exp gain since it seemed a bit too easy, but this should help... at least till I need to farm levels for something and get super bored and just remove it, we shall see what the end game holds. I just got Edward.