What are you currently playing?

[Johnny Novgorod]

In the interest of wasting my time I'm playing Fall Guys again.

The game is enjoying renewed popularity since it went F2P, hitting 20 million player in just a couple of days and over 50 million in 2 weeks. To boot, the new rounds are pretty fun in general, and they added a bit more aggression in the more competitive rounds in the form of blast balls, which makes for a fun final round. You can now 'attack' other players beyond simply grabbing and shoving. And because it's F2P that means an influx of fresh meat that doesn't quite understand the nuances of the limited moveset, which is great when you're competing against (but not so much when you're sharing a squad).

The sucky part comes with the territory of F2P. So now they've implemented a bullshit premium currency you can't obtain by simply playing the game, and reduced the regular rewards for playing the game to measly XP instead of giving you currency for skins/patterns/etc. Even winning the game doesn't really give you anything anymore. You get a point towards the next rank, which is something like 50 points apart, and each rank gives you a costume. So now instead of earning a new skin every couple of wins or so you gotta win 50 times to get a skin you don't even get to pick.

In a nutshell they devalued the hell from the existing currency (the shop is almost purely catering towards premium currency that, again, you need to pay actual money for) and removed rewards from playing or even winning. It's all clearly geared now to get you to spend money for the stuff you used to get for free just by playing. Legacy players hate it and the newbies adopt this infuriating shut up and consume policy about a game they did not pay for, so of course Mediatonic has to make their money back somehow, poor them.

 

[laggyteabag]

So I played through the last scenario of Frostpunk a couple of nights ago, and this one was The Last Autumn.

This scenario is a bit more unique to the rest of the game, because it serves as a prequel of sorts, which is to say that it is isn't blisteringly cold yet. You take the role of an employee at IEC, and your job is the manage the construction of one of the generators that you rely on in the other scenarios in the game.

In this scenario, you don't really have to worry about the cold so much, but there is more of an emphasis on managing workplace safety, as well as dealing with worker strikes and deadlines. And because this is your job, if you fail to meet those deadlines, you will be fired, and the game will end.

To that end, instead of giving your citizens a sense of purpose through either Faith or Order (and whatever horrible extremes they lead to), you get to decide what kind of working environment you run. So, on one end of the spectrum, you can become a worker-focused communist dystopia, and on the other end, a penal colony - of which I found the latter to be much more effective. Sure, you can appease your workers through optimised strike negotiations, and reducing the risk of those strikes - or you can just ship in prisoners by the dozen, and not give two tosses about how they feel (and then throw them into a mass grave when they eventually expire). All good fun!

One benefit of this not being the end of the world (yet), is that instead of scavenging for resources like you do in the other scenarios, you rely on docks to get most of your resources and personnel shipped right to your doorstep, which works great, until the seas eventually freeze over, and you must make do with what you have gathered so far.

In the end, I found this scenario to be really challenging. Strikes and workplace disasters ate into my deadlines, which resulted in me being fired more than once. And one time, when I did eventually get to the endgame, I was so ill-prepared, that I simply didn't have enough resources to complete the scenario. In the end, I optimised my strategy, and managed to complete the scenario with all but one of the optional generator upgrades.

I really enjoyed this one. And Frostpunk is a great game. I am greatly looking forward to the sequel.

Now maybe i'll give a new RPG a go, and try out Wasteland 3.

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

In the interest of wasting my time I'm playing Fall Guys again.

The game is enjoying renewed popularity since it went F2P, hitting 20 million player in just a couple of days and over 50 million in 2 weeks. To boot, the new rounds are pretty fun in general, and they added a bit more aggression in the more competitive rounds in the form of blast balls, which makes for a fun final round. You can now 'attack' other players beyond simply grabbing and shoving. And because it's F2P that means an influx of fresh meat that doesn't quite understand the nuances of the limited moveset, which is great when you're competing against (but not so much when you're sharing a squad).

The sucky part comes with the territory of F2P. So now they've implemented a bullshit premium currency you can't obtain by simply playing the game, and reduced the regular rewards for playing the game to measly XP instead of giving you currency for skins/patterns/etc. Even winning the game doesn't really give you anything anymore. You get a point towards the next rank, which is something like 50 points apart, and each rank gives you a costume. So now instead of earning a new skin every couple of wins or so you gotta win 50 times to get a skin you don't even get to pick.

In a nutshell they devalued the hell from the existing currency (the shop is almost purely catering towards premium currency that, again, you need to pay actual money for) and removed rewards from playing or even winning. It's all clearly geared now to get you to spend money for the stuff you used to get for free just by playing. Legacy players hate it and the newbies adopt this infuriating shut up and consume policy about a game they did not pay for, so of course Mediatonic has to make their money back somehow, poor them.

F2P is one of the worst things to happen to gaming when you think of it. It’s always kinda reminded me of a more AAA version of shovelware. It’s the epitome of irony too when these pubs are technically making money hand over fist from this model.

 

[Drathnoxis]

I finished watching SGF play through The Quarry at 2X speed, and overall I think the game is pretty bad. The characters are all immediately insufferable, and the plot is really dumb. Nothing anybody does makes any sense. *Spoilers* First off the camp owner guy starts freaking out completely when the car breaks down and they need to stay an additional night, but all of the characters decide that he's just trying to scare him and to ignore all his frantic advice to stay quiet and inside and have a loud party instead. It's idiotic. But what's more idiotic is running a summer camp when you are a werewolf! Seriously, how does this make any sense? And at least close the thing a couple of days before the full moon, you know, just in case there's some event that delays people. And why can't any of the Hacketts actually explain to the kids what is going on? Like, instead of freaking out and driving off with everybody confused, Chris Hackett could have sent one of his brothers over to keep an eye on the kids and protect and explain things as necessary. No, instead the hunters all wander the forest acting very menacing to the kids, refusing to explain things even after its clear they've all seen the werewolf. Also, why were there even werewolves running around to begin with? We see that they have these fancy electric cages built in the basement presumably to contain the infected Hacketts during their transformation, except they are all empty apart from the ones that the kids occupy. Instead, Chris Hackett is held in some barn or something by chains that he immediately and easily breaks. Why would you spend thousands of dollars on an electric cage setup only to not use it?

The cop guy was the worst. So Laura and Max ran into the werewolf on the night before the camp (again, buffer guys) and Max turns into a werewolf. They then figure out that he's a werewolf, but the cop still refuses to tell them anything, apparently intent on holding them captive forever for absolutely no reason. THEN late in the game he randomly turns around and asks for Laura's help on coming up with some plan to kill the white wolf because she's been accepted to college, while still being a total jerk for some reason. Seriously, he should have explained things right away instead of holding them captive for 2 month. They had just as much incentive to kill the white wolf as he does, since Max is infected, but no, of course nobody can talk to each other.

The last thing that bugs me is how blasé everyone is about horrific injury and dismemberment. One of the hunters shoots off their own finger without even a sound. Dylan has his hand cut off with a chainsaw and doesn't immediately bleed out, or pass out from the pain, and minutes later he's talking and joking around completely casually, he's even pushing on stuff later with his still bloody stump without screaming in agony. Frankly, with a back woods amputation like that he would most likely die of infection or blood clots, becoming a werewolf would have been the better option. Later, Ryan is stabbed, and has equal ease in running around with a knife in his ribs. Seriously, there's no way. You'd barely be able to move or breathe. Also related is when Dylan and Ryan are radioing for help, and Dylan gives this bizarre comedic performance that nobody would take serious even if they heard it. Is he insane or something? Also, he needed to have it on repeat or it's basically worthless to have even bothered going to the radio tower.

Overall it's a plot that wouldn't happen if anybody at all behaved rationally, the worst kind of story in my opinion.

 

[Dalisclock]

Overall it's a plot that wouldn't happen if anybody at all behaved rationally, the worst kind of story in my opinion.

But how are hack writers meant to make a living if they can't make liberal use of the idiot ball? Think of the writers!

 

[meiam]

But how are hack writers meant to make a living if they can't make liberal use of the idiot ball? Think of the writers!

My real issue with the idiot ball is that nobody in the story ever react to the fact that the character just acted like idiot. People do dumb thing all the time in real life, but when your co worker act like a moron a bunch time you don't keep trying to rely on them. But in these story some character will hold the idiot ball the entire time and yet every other character treat them like normal people and keep expecting them to not act like idiot.

 

[Drathnoxis]

Played a couple hours of Golden Light. I just can't get the hang of it, and it feels so bad to play. I beat the first dungeon, and got her head, but the next one is just kicking my butt so hard. Maybe I should have played on the lowest difficulty, but the game just is not very fun. Items are mostly useless because the only way to discover what they do is to either randomly find out from notes or to throw it. If I throw it I'm not likely to find another one until I die and I'm also not likely to find the note for an item I actually have. Besides that most of the effects are kind of useless and just as likely to damage you and agro peaceful NPCs as kill your enemies. Also the more items you carry the slower you walk so you can't horde them until you know what they do. Item randomization is a classic roguelike feature, but it just doesn't work here, because you are very limited in your ability to identify items.

The dungeons are way too dark and mazey, which is made worse because your screen is half taken up by your item and weapon and you don't have a minimap. If you want a map you need to sacrifice one of your two weapon slots for it, also the maps often seems to have damaged segments that are unmapped. It's nearly impossible to find your way around and find all the keys and items without a map. Picking up items is also really annoying. When you kill a monster, their gold tends to go flying in every direction and you need to click on each individual nugget to collect it, which is really tedious. I found a perk that causes items to roll towards me, but it seems like it only works for a minute or something before it stops.

Weapons are only good for killing a couple monsters before they break, killing monsters spawns more monsters and makes the game harder and things to cost more, and combat is just not fun. The overworld is also very large and annoying to travel through, again because you have no map. You need gold for all sorts of things, but it seems impossible to accumulate very much because of constant deaths and status effects that drain gold. Sometimes the levels will just fill with status effect clouds randomly and you are just screwed.

Overall the game looks bad and feels bad so I think I'm going to drop it here. It's okay because I found a secret ending and had the credits roll on the first floor of the first dungeon when I discovered I could break walls and mined my way out until a door appeared so I can still say I finished the game.

 

[BrawlMan]

I finished my playthrough of Evil Within 2 on XONE. The game still holds up after 5 years. The story, gameplay, atmosphere, and characters are so much better here than in the prequel. I will give the original credit for having some better enemy design and variety, but it small potatoes to the overall package. I mentioned this a 1000 times before, and I will say it again, Evil Within 2 is still the best and true sequel to RE4-RE8!

My NG+ run I will do later, as I've done it many timers already on both difficulties for PS4. NG+ makes the game even better. The run is done mainly to finish or gets some extra achievements.

 

[Chupathingy]

Finished replaying Spyro 3.

While still fun, it does feel like a step down from 2. It does have much better collectibles (dragon eggs were much more interesting than just orbs/talismans), and some other minor improvements like expanded NPC dialogues, camera control and the ability to kick Moneybag's ass at the end of the game. However, the big thing about the game is the new playable characters, unfortunately I don't find any of them more enjoyable to play than Spyro himself. I like them as characters but playing as them often feels like a slog.

Level design is of similar quality to Spyro 2, but with much more minigames and side areas where you play as the new cast, some of which are just outright dreadful (like the bomb escort). I will give a special shoutout to Frozen Altars though, which features some of the best post-Spyro 1 platforming and level design, as well as a unique feature that's actually well incorporated into the level's design without feeling gimmicky, and a secret multiplayer section, which is rare in single player games in general. Not to mention NPCs with strangely suave voices, a unique and heavily underused aesthetic (winter/tundra Mesoamerican), and one of the best music tracks in the trilogy. Races were added to Speedway levels, but they feel more like a time trial than a race, and aren't particularly engaging. Another noticeable drop in quality was the soundtrack, which is easily the weakest of the trilogy. I've only ever played the PAL version which includes multiple reused tracks, and most of them are just so bland compared to previous offerings (Frozen Altars and a few others being exceptions).

Overall though I still enjoy it more than 1 for the same reasons I like 2 more than 1, but this feels worse than 2.

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

Played a couple hours of Golden Light. I just can't get the hang of it, and it feels so bad to play. I beat the first dungeon, and got her head, but the next one is just kicking my butt so hard. Maybe I should have played on the lowest difficulty, but the game just is not very fun. Items are mostly useless because the only way to discover what they do is to either randomly find out from notes or to throw it. If I throw it I'm not likely to find another one until I die and I'm also not likely to find the note for an item I actually have. Besides that most of the effects are kind of useless and just as likely to damage you and agro peaceful NPCs as kill your enemies. Also the more items you carry the slower you walk so you can't horde them until you know what they do. Item randomization is a classic roguelike feature, but it just doesn't work here, because you are very limited in your ability to identify items. The dungeons are way too dark and mazey, which is made worse because your screen is half taken up by your item and weapon and you don't have a minimap. If you want a map you need to sacrifice one of your two weapon slots for it, also the maps often seems to have damaged segments that are unmapped. It's nearly impossible to find your way around and find all the keys and items without a map. Picking up items is also really annoying. When you kill a monster, their gold tends to go flying in every direction and you need to click on each individual nugget to collect it, which is really tedious. I found a perk that causes items to roll towards me, but it seems like it only works for a minute or something before it stops. Weapons are only good for killing a couple monsters before they break, killing monsters spawns more monsters and makes the game harder and things to cost more, and combat is just not fun. The overworld is also very large and annoying to travel through, again because you have no map. You need gold for all sorts of things, but it seems impossible to accumulate very much because of constant deaths and status effects that drain gold. Sometimes the levels will just fill with status effect clouds randomly and you are just screwed.

Overall the game looks bad and feels bad so I think I'm going to drop it here. It's okay because I found a secret ending and had the credits roll on the first floor of the first dungeon when I discovered I could break walls and mined my way out until a door appeared so I can still say I finished the game.

So anyways, I like how there’s like twenty sentences in that first paragraph, and then two in the other one.

 

[Drathnoxis]

So anyways, I like how there’s like twenty sentences in that first paragraph, and then two in the other one.

Ok, fine. I'll put some arbitrary breaks in it for you.

 

[Casual Shinji]

Picked up the Klonoa remaster on PS5, and this thing is 50 fucking dollars! Like what the fuck?! It's two 25-year old games with a meager polish and Bandai Namco charges 50 bucks for this? Fucking dickheads!

But yeah, I bought it, cuz you know, Klonoa....

 

[BrawlMan]

I managed to only die three times in Final Vendetta with Claire. I got a B rank overall, and managed to beat my old high score again. You can cancel moves in this game, so it does help. You still have to be cheap back at enemies or move carefully at times. Blocking is actually useful, but it's hard to predict when an enemy is going to attack. You're better off just running away or using the vertical dodge. Trying to block is more than likely to get players killed, and is only useful, if there is 1 or 2 bad guys. Any more, and a player might as well evade.

 

[meiam]

Been playing citizen sleeper and the game is excellent, if you've been looking for something sorta like disco elysium (crossed with tharsis gameplay) I cannot recommend it more. My two slight issue with it is that at 5 hours I'm close to being done (I'm guessing 8 hour to do everything) and the game very quickly remove any form of pressure on you so you can progress very slowly and don't really get any sort of penalty for that, which makes the entire gameplay aspect feel a bit wasted, although maybe that's because I've getting pretty lucky since the start.

 

[BrawlMan]

I decided to play The TakeOver again to compare it to Final Vendetta. Yeah, the former is better than the latter. The only thing FV's got over TTO is kicking enemies on the ground, back attacks, blocking, environmental interaction from enemies, soundtrack, and weapon variety. The last one is not much of an achievement, because using weapons suck, unless you got the patch update on Steam (still has not reached consoles yet; gives weapons faster recovery frames). While TTO has more levels, more combo moves, gunplay, an unlockable character, more modes, unlimited continues (unless on hard mode) and replay value. Most of the modes are unlocked after beating the game once, or given as a free update as soon as the game has been installed. FV has fake padding with its modes and unlocks. You can unlock alternate colors for characters by beating boss rush mode, but there is not much else.

 

[Bedinsis]

I am playing Chaos; Child, mostly because I played another entry in the same thematic series, Steins; Gate, and ending up loving it. What I liked about Steins; Gate was how it allowed itself to be a slice of life experience while they perform science experiments right up until the midpoint where the plot gets vastly more tense, and even though I suspect its science does not hold up to scrutiny the early science experiments and the fact that the heroes are exploring uncharted territory meant that it felt like it was scientific.

I bring this up because I just encountered a thing in Chaos; Child that made me go "Come on, that's just stupid anime bullshit!". And when providing a "scientific" explanation for the... thing my reaction was that it sounded too versatile and convenient for me to think of it in any other way than "It works that way because the author says so.".

Apart from that: I should be saying "playing" within quotation marks since the only things resembling gameplay so far has been that occasionally I get to choose if the player character has a delusion, like one of JD's cutaways in Scrubs, where a short scene plays out of things the player character think could happen given the current circumstances. Which only takes time or possibly helps characterize the player character, it does not help advance the plot. There also was an instance where the game asked me to put the right photos in the right spots on a bulletin board, which was nothing more than checking if I remembered all of the plot, and if I got it wrong I immediately got to start over. Which is not even a puzzle, it is just busy work. And it isn't even as if they could not have added some actual puzzles; once the photos were in place in the aforementioned bulletin board the protagonist noticed a new detail in the photos, which pulled the plot forward; couldn't the game have asked me to find what was significant in the photos?

I am playing through the game somewhat begrudgingly at this point.

 

[Worgen]

I played through the two released episodes of Deltarune today. Something I noticed was that the budget felt like it had increased since Undertale, since there were both more animations and those were smoother, and the various monsters felt more varied and more colorful. Something else I noticed was that the game was a lot more willing to hold hands when explaining things.

I had fun, but I think the difficulty could be upped a fair bit; the only boss battle I actually struggled with was the very last one. In Undertale I struggled with at least the first midpoint boss battle at the end of the Waterfall area.

I replayed Undertale and Deltarune recently and I think the difficulty was reduced for all of them. Undertale felt much easier, and both chapters of Deltarune felt a bit easier from when they had launched. Undertale I am sure was reduced in difficulty, but Deltarune might just be me knowing how to play them.

 

[Casual Shinji]

I played Klonoa 2 for a little while, and that game has not aged well. Control wise it's fine and visually it's alright (eventhough they did erase the artstyle of the original game), it's the early PS2 "spectacle" where it really shows its age. I remember Klonoa 2 being one of the earliest PS2 games, and I'd forgotten how it feels designed to make you wonder at the draw distance capabilities of the PS2 at the time. The way you jump from the foreground to the background, and vice versa, the way the camera is dramatically placed whenever Klonoa does a high jump. It all feels like it's trying to show off how far you can see into the distance, which at the time was a big deal but now obviously... isn't.

This aspect of it having aged isn't too bad on its own, but frankly it doesn't feel like it has too much else to offer. Gameplay wise it's kinda undercooked compared to the first game. And the way the levels are done to include cutscenes as individual levels to walk back and forth to on the map is really annoying.

 

[gorfias]

Played some Forza Horizon 5 on an Xbox 1 X on my 75" Samsung 4K.


I got to play Forza Horizon 4 on an Xbox Series X on an 85" Samsung last week. Dunno if it was 4 or 8K.


Both were gorgeous and very fun to play. In particular on 5, I was playing a 7 stage home brew sorta thing... users make a levels for people to try and it is so good I don't know if I need to play anything else.

The experience did tell me that I think Gen 9 has more growing pains ahead. The shortage that has kept us from getting the Series X readily may have something to do with it but I can write unlike going from Gen 7 to 8, while I look forward to getting 9 someday, so far I'm not seeing enough difference to get excited about it. I hear that is coming this year.

 

[Drathnoxis]

Well I just lost my 3 win streak on Nethack. I was on the very last floor of the dungeon, just about to get the amulet of Yendor and ascend, when I stepped on a magic trap and spawned a bunch of monsters around me. Normally this would have been no big deal, but one of them happened to be a succubus and I didn't notice it and focused instead on killing a demi-lich. Well eventually the succubus made herself known when she took off all my armor in one turn. Now I'm naked in a crowd of monsters and my health is falling fast, so I break my wand of teleportation teleporting all the monsters around me away. Unfortunately, there were more monsters a step away that promptly filled the gap. Now I made my second fatal misplay, which was to attempt to put my armor back on, this took a really long time and by the time I was finished I had 27hp and someone had gated in Yeenoghu who had confused me. Now I'm truly screwed, I had picked up a potion of gain level recently, which if cursed would teleport me up one floor, which I drink and it was and it does. Unfortunately Yeenoghu comes with and kills me anyway.

Hindsight, the play would have been to open my bag and get a potion of full heal and a levelport scroll on the first turn of being undressed. It was obvious seconds after I died. I still have no ability to step away from the game and think things through when things suddenly turn bad. I know it's the right thing to do, but I have no ability to do it. After years of play and many ascensions it doesn't seem like something I will ever learn.

I kind of want to play another game, but I just can't decide what and keep obsessing over Nethack. I have a problem. I just wanted a nice round 5 win streak darn it!