What are you currently playing?

[Specter Von Baren]

Replaying Galaxy Angel series again, starting with the second game.



Such a shame these games were never officially released stateside. They have such a nice comfy feel to them. I wonder how well they would do in today's world with more acceptance of VNs and these being designed for all ages. But such is the way of things I suppose.

 

[Worgen]

Still working on Elden Ring, also been messing around in Planetside 2 again since it just had a decent update and Nightmare Reaper since it finally fully launched.

 

[Dalisclock]

I have to wonder why they bothered developing him as much as they did. He wasn't a good character and gets dropped about half way through. I was expecting him to become an antagonist or something near the end, but he just kind of disappears.

I feel like the devs lost a bit of focus on the plot after new dam city, because after that the plot starts getting really wierd and less comprehensible once you leave. I mean it was wierd before but the wierdness gets cranked up a bit, starting with the timey whimy stuff and the monkey train.

 

[Specter Von Baren]

I feel like the devs lost a bit of focus on the plot after new dam city, because after that the plot starts getting really wierd and less comprehensible once you leave. I mean it was wierd before but the wierdness gets cranked up a bit, starting with the timey whimy stuff and the monkey train.

I have to say, even though I've just reached New Dam City and so am not that far in, the writing, or rather, the plotting, in the game does feel a bit under par. Things like John not talking, why the people of Potrock let the mayor order them around and banish whoever he wants when he really doesn't have much actual power or enforcers, John not saying anything about what's inside the mountain (they could have had Sam and him get separated for a bit and have that reveal only happen to her), a bunch of old ladies helping a girl get together with a guy she met hours ago, etc. It feels like a yarn ball that's had threads pulled out of it. There's a lot of polish and love put into this game but it has spots that feel like they really should have been tightened up.

 

[Drathnoxis]

I have to say, even though I've just reached New Dam City and so am not that far in, the writing, or rather, the plotting, in the game does feel a bit under par. Things like John not talking, why the people of Potrock let the mayor order them around and banish whoever he wants when he really doesn't have much actual power or enforcers, John not saying anything about what's inside the mountain (they could have had Sam and him get separated for a bit and have that reveal only happen to her), a bunch of old ladies helping a girl get together with a guy she met hours ago, etc. It feels like a yarn ball that's had threads pulled out of it. There's a lot of polish and love put into this game but it has spots that feel like they really should have been tightened up.

My thoughts exactly. That romance subplot was just really odd and off-putting for me in particular, it was just so forced.

 

[Drathnoxis]

Started playing Xcom: Enemy Within. I'm still enjoying it more than Xcom 2 and the pod activation isn't even as big an issue in this game either because sometimes you can see a pod on the edge of your view range, just before they activate. Also even on hard difficulty the game is more forgiving than X2 was on normal. The enemies have less health, and getting wounded is less of a big deal since 2 points of damage won't take your soldiers out for a month. I really don't understand how they screwed up the sequel so badly.

Managing country panic levels kind of sucks, though, since there isn't really much you can do except launch satellites, and I don't have enough engineers yet to build another uplink. Probably shouldn't have taken scientists in the first panic mission.

Also I feel like the whole world pooling it's best and brightest into an elite alien fighting organization is a much more satisfying theme than a flying guerilla base trying to repel aliens that have already won.

 

[Specter Von Baren]

My thoughts exactly. That romance subplot was just really odd and off-putting for me in particular, it was just so forced.

Mm. It felt like they were both trying too hard and not enough there. It would have worked better if it had just been the lady being attracted to John but it never going beyond "Ah, I see she's kinda into him" or if you spent more time in that town getting to know the characters there so that it was more believable, heck, even just a cheap -1 weak later...- card after you first get settled in would have made that make more sense cause even if we didn't see development we could at least assume it happened off screen.

It lacks... finesse. It wants to have its payoffs but doesn't have time to invest into them, in which case it's better to scale back what you're doing if you can't deliver on it. Or to put it another way, it's better to make a peanut-butter sandwhich for dinner than grill chicken and not cook it enough.

And I'll say this one more time because I don't want to just harp about this forever, but John really really really shouldn't have been a silent character. Even as far as silent characters go he's lacking. Mario is a common character to point at as a cipher but even he emotes way more like in Super Mario RPG where he does pantomime or the Mario&Luigi games where the bros speak Italianish and do poses and reactions to things all throughout the games. Like in the first Mario&Luigi game, Peach wants to visit an immigrant town of Toads in the Beanbean Kingdom but the way there is dangerous so she asks Mario and Luigi to escort her, to which Mario shakes his head yes and Luigi shakes his head no, Mario then looks at Luigi and gasps in shock before hammering him into the floor and saying, "Let's go!" That's a ton of characterization in one scene for two characters that are notoriously known to be non-chatty and it's done without any text dialogue from Luigi or Mario.

You can still do stuff with a character that is technically silent and I guess I'm just baffled as to why they decided on this. This isn't a AAA game, they had plenty more freedom to do what they wanted with this, you aren't just playing a player constructed character, there's already a lot of flourish in things like the art and animations so it's not a budget issue, and this game is pretty text heavy anyway. It's just... strange. Like seeing a ditch ten feet in front of you and choosing to just walk into it and fall.

Like, I wanted a scene after John and Sam got banished where he says something like, "It's fine, as long as we're together we'll be fine." Basically, I want some heartwarming dialogue damnit, and the game is blueballing me with this decision.

 

[Drathnoxis]

Mm. It felt like they were both trying too hard and not enough there. It would have worked better if it had just been the lady being attracted to John but it never going beyond "Ah, I see she's kinda into him" or if you spent more time in that town getting to know the characters there so that it was more believable, heck, even just a cheap -1 weak later...- card after you first get settled in would have made that make more sense cause even if we didn't see development we could at least assume it happened off screen.

It lacks... finesse. It wants to have its payoffs but doesn't have time to invest into them, in which case it's better to scale back what you're doing if you can't deliver on it. Or to put it another way, it's better to make a peanut-butter sandwhich for dinner than grill chicken and not cook it enough.

And I'll say this one more time because I don't want to just harp about this forever, but John really really really shouldn't have been a silent character. Even as far as silent characters go he's lacking. Mario is a common character to point at as a cipher but even he emotes way more like in Super Mario RPG where he does pantomime or the Mario&Luigi games where the bros speak Italianish and do poses and reactions to things all throughout the games. Like in the first Mario&Luigi game, Peach wants to visit an immigrant town of Toads in the Beanbean Kingdom but the way there is dangerous so she asks Mario and Luigi to escort her, to which Mario shakes his head yes and Luigi shakes his head no, Mario then looks at Luigi and gasps in shock before hammering him into the floor and saying, "Let's go!" That's a ton of characterization in one scene for two characters that are notoriously known to be non-chatty and it's done without any text dialogue from Luigi or Mario.

You can still do stuff with a character that is technically silent and I guess I'm just baffled as to why they decided on this. This isn't a AAA game, they had plenty more freedom to do what they wanted with this, you aren't just playing a player constructed character, there's already a lot of flourish in things like the art and animations so it's not a budget issue, and this game is pretty text heavy anyway. It's just... strange. Like seeing a ditch ten feet in front of you and choosing to just walk into it and fall.

Like, I wanted a scene after John and Sam got banished where he says something like, "It's fine, as long as we're together we'll be fine." Basically, I want some heartwarming dialogue damnit, and the game is blueballing me with this decision.

I'm guessing it's because Ness was a silent protagonist in Earthbound. Yeah, it really hurts the impact of the story because John shows basically no emotion. His beard and hair cover almost his entire face so you don't see any expression, and he basically just has that one animation where he scratches his head. He also always moves really slowly so I couldn't help but keep thinking of him as a hobo who's brain has been ravaged by drug and alcohol abuse who is almost incapable of conscious thought and just vaguely follows after Sam as his last bleary connection to reality.

It's really another case of too much/too little. He is too much of his own character that he clearly isn't the player's avatar, and too blank to really be his own character. Since you've given an example of a silent protagonist that works because they are given a personality, I'll give one that works because they are blank. The main character from Undertale. They truly are a blank slate. You never learn where they came from or why they ended up falling down the hole. They never speak and have a neutral expression at all times. However, your actions throughout the game end up defining the character. The actions you take are allowed to stand and the game won't contradict you to say, no, they wouldn't do that. If you spare everybody in the game your character is recognized as a great person that everybody wants to be friends with. If you kill everyone, then they are a psychotic murderer with no compassion for anyone. You don't come away from the game feeling like they weren't a character because the game's reaction perfectly aligns with your intention. John isn't like that. He clearly has his own goals and background. He adopted Sam and always wants to protect her and follow her every command. He learned to cook somewhere. There was the aforementioned badly done romance. It's enough to distance him from the player, but not enough for the character to stand on his own.

 

[Kyrian007]

So, continuing on in Weird West... but not really. Got to a difficulty roadblock right at the end of episode 1 of 5. Not really a roadblock, it is an optional objective so I could just go on. But I never do that so it is a roadblock for me. Not that I couldn't defeat the bosses, I just couldn't do it and keep everyone in the party alive. And it is permadeath, they'd be gone for the rest of the game. Then I got to thinking about all the things I should have done a little differently... and it hit me. The only reason it took me a whole week to get 1/5th of the way into the game was unfamiliarity with the controls, the gameplay. Really this was a good place to start over, not make the same mistakes again. Wow. I have gotten way better at this than I thought. I remember a week ago when I was quicksaving as often as I breathed out. Now I'm finding autosave is plenty good enough. I got past the introduction part and into the wider game after about an hour or so. Back then I beelined for getting the perk that let me slow time so I could have something like VATS to slow the action. Now I'm taking a different perk instead, I'm finding that one a little more useful... and funny (its basically a proximity mine.) The other big mistake I was making, was playing it like a top down 2d game. Really easy to see obstacles as something you have to work around thinking like that. This game really makes the most of its 3d space, even though it is more isometric in design. And if you see it that way, it really gives you an advantage.

But, I'm about to stop playing it. Or at least as much. Because I'll be splitting my time between it and the Chrono Cross remaster coming out today. Trigger was the better game, but I'm actually partial to Cross and have been waiting for someone to finally say "hey, we remastered everything else we did... why not Chrono Cross?"

 

[Specter Von Baren]

I'm guessing it's because Ness was a silent protagonist in Earthbound. Yeah, it really hurts the impact of the story because John shows basically no emotion. His beard-

 

[gorfias]

Got Oblivion from Amazon Prime this month. When I first started it, I had to save, exit and try again as avatar would not move back and forth. I'm told this glitch will return. Often.
But, at 720P pretty looking game.

 

[Gordon_4]

Ran up 2019's Modern Warfare just for a bit of story comparison to MW2. So far they're both about the same in terms of a mix of perfectly plausible plot points and shit that wouldn't pass muster in a Matthew Reilley novel. Visually there's no contest; there is a visible difference and improvement in basically all visual aspects between the two.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Continuing the Hyper Light Drifter comparison to Team Ico... you know the Ico games have this fame for being super ambiguous and minimalistic but at least they set up the protagonist with a premise that's simple enough to follow and with enough urgency to draw you in. Escape the castle. Rescue the princess. The nature of the situation and the consequences of your actions will slowly insinuate themselves, and that's your lot.

With HLD you're not really given anything to stand on. There was (or will be?) a cataclism at some point, and your dude is either trying to stop it, cause it or undo it. There's no real surface level narrative beyond guessing what's going on with the protagonist. And whatever you're trying to do you do by pushing all the buttons and activating all the pillars - pretty thin characterization for your quest. For a more human element apparently every area has its own horrible genocide going on and I guess I'm fighting the oppressors but I don't understand the connection to the main plot, whatever the main plot is. Seems like a tangential thing.

 

[Specter Von Baren]

Continuing the Hyper Light Drifter comparison to Team Ico... you know the Ico games have this fame for being super ambiguous and minimalistic but at least they set up the protagonist with a premise that's simple enough to follow and with enough urgency to draw you in. Escape the castle. Rescue the princess. The nature of the situation and the consequences of your actions will slowly insinuate themselves, and that's your lot.

With HLD you're not really given anything to stand on. There was (or will be?) a cataclism at some point, and your dude is either trying to stop it, cause it or undo it. There's no real surface level narrative beyond guessing what's going on with the protagonist. And whatever you're trying to do you do by pushing all the buttons and activating all the pillars - pretty thin characterization for your quest. For a more human element apparently every area has its own horrible genocide going on and I guess I'm fighting the oppressors but I don't understand the connection to the main plot, whatever the main plot is. Seems like a tangential thing.

I thought Hyper Light Drifter was a rhythm game...

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

I thought Hyper Light Drifter was a rhythm game...

You're supposed to chain your dash move rhythmically in order to reach certain offshoot areas, if you want to torture yourself trying. I guess it's supposed to help in boss fights too but it's not like in Furi where rhythm is the crux to everything. You have to buy the ability to chain dashes and you could be well into the game by then.

 

[Ezekiel]

Damn movie games...

 

[Old_Hunter_77]

I just bought and installed two games on my laptop (I banked a bunch of money in my Steam wallet before scrapping my gaming PC due to a bit of poor planning):

Before Your Eyes
because I listened the Design Dev stream, it seemed interesting, and it's 4 bucks now.

The Secret of Monkey Island
because a new sequel is coming out, apparently that's a big deal, and I managed to skip over that whole series so sure why not try a good ol' fashioned point and click

Won't probably get to them in like a month or two but will be looking forward to changing things up

 

[Dalisclock]

Continuing the Hyper Light Drifter comparison to Team Ico... you know the Ico games have this fame for being super ambiguous and minimalistic but at least they set up the protagonist with a premise that's simple enough to follow and with enough urgency to draw you in. Escape the castle. Rescue the princess. The nature of the situation and the consequences of your actions will slowly insinuate themselves, and that's your lot.

With HLD you're not really given anything to stand on. There was (or will be?) a cataclism at some point, and your dude is either trying to stop it, cause it or undo it. There's no real surface level narrative beyond guessing what's going on with the protagonist. And whatever you're trying to do you do by pushing all the buttons and activating all the pillars - pretty thin characterization for your quest. For a more human element apparently every area has its own horrible genocide going on and I guess I'm fighting the oppressors but I don't understand the connection to the main plot, whatever the main plot is. Seems like a tangential thing.

Yeah, HLD is really really opaque and pretty much everything is told through visual design and some short cryptic cutscenes. You're really left to guess WTF is going on. At least Team ICO games generally are good at telling you what is going on if not the background behind it.

 

[Dalisclock]

I just bought and installed two games on my laptop (I banked a bunch of money in my Steam wallet before scrapping my gaming PC due to a bit of poor planning):

Before Your Eyes
because I listened the Design Dev stream, it seemed interesting, and it's 4 bucks now.

The Secret of Monkey Island
because a new sequel is coming out, apparently that's a big deal, and I managed to skip over that whole series so sure why not try a good ol' fashioned point and click

Won't probably get to them in like a month or two but will be looking forward to changing things up

Also Recommend getting Monkey Island 2: Lechucks Revenge. It pairs nicely with SoMI and the new MI game is going to be a sequel to MI2(it's a bit darker and more cartoony though) directly rather any of the games that came after it. Expecially since Both games are honestly kinda short and it's only some of the really wierd puzzles that make it last any length of time.

There's one particular Puzzle soluton in MI2 which stumped a lot of non-Americans because it was a joke based on a very American term for a specific object and in the days before the internet this was kind of a problem(or buy the hint book). Possible Puzzle Spoiler follows: Basically you need to turn a valve with a tool and one of the things you can pick up is a Monkey. Well, you can turn the monkey into a....wait for it......MONKEY WRENCH

 

[Specter Von Baren]

Decided to bite the bullet since I'm still too chicken to finish Corpse Party: Blood Drive, I decided to finally try out Corpse Party 2: Dead Patient, to see if maybe it could reveal what happens afterward since Ayumi and Yoshiki appear in its intro. So I played it today, got through Chapter 1 and then... no Chapter 2 popped up and suddenly I understood why I hadn't ever heard anything about Corpse Party 2 because the game has been seemingly abandoned after many years of no updates to it. Unfortunate, but what can ya do.