What are you currently playing?

[Bedinsis]

Finished AI - The Somnium Files.

When the description says it's about being a detective catching a serial killer, I thought the gameplay would involve more detective work in the form of puzzles. Instead of it being incredibly light on that aspect. Frankly, it makes more sense if you think of it as a weird adaptation of a Hercule Poirot novel, since up until the titular character of those novels come with a summary of the case I tend to be incredibly lost, and in this game I was lost until... something happened that explained a lot of things. Couldn't you have let me figure out those things in the form of gameplay, Spike Chunsoft?

Anyway: the story is fine and the characters well realized and distinct. I was however lost at frequent points when the game asked me to "Now go to this timeline for the plot as a whole to continue", since I didn't remember everything that turned out differently in the different timelines. It was also weirdly sexual. When I did the "examine background detail" common in point and click adventures I often got a mildly funny piece of monologue or dialogue but it often turned into below the belt humor. Which... is an artistic choice. I also think it got a bit too sci-fi for my tastes.

 

[Bedinsis]

Oy, @Dalisclock, this is the second time you've like:d me writing grievances on AI - The Somnium Files. Have you played it yourself? What did you think of it in that case?

 

[BrawlMan]

Did more Prodeus, and exited the Prodeus dimension into an ice world now. There's now a new enemy type that is like the ice version of an Arch-Vile except it doesn't resurrect enemies, thank God! The thing looks like Glacius. I am more than halfway through the game. You can cause monster infighting between the red and blue demons like in Doom, but most of the time they'll already be fighting each other. I usually let the red monsters fight the blue monsters, or go after blues while they're weakened. The Prodeus demons have more health and attack power, and are always the bigger threat. A nice advice on anyone picking up this game. I finally got the dash upgrade now. Now it's easier to reach secrets I couldn't beforehand. The next thing I am going to buy is the Auto Shotgun.

After that, I did a round of Final Vendetta.

 

[laggyteabag]

I've been playing Marvel Snap basically non-stop for the past couple of days, at least when my phone isn't charging. It is a neat little game. I have a homebrew build that I am quite enjoying, the different locations really make each round feel unique, and I really love how each game only lasts around a couple of minutes.

I do wish some of the cards reflected their owners abilities more, though. For example, I love how you need to destroy the Bucky Barnes card to summon the Winter Soldier - that is great! - but Cyclops having no ability at all, and just being a stat stick, is disappointingly boring.

I can really see myself sinking my teeth into the game. It looks as though I just joined the game as this current Season is about to end, so we will see what the next season brings, but I am (so far) excited to play more. It also means that I am probably going to have to go cold-turkey on it in a few days, before it completely steals my life.

I will say though, some of the microtransactions are ludicrously priced. There is a bundle that is active at the moment, that is two skins, two profile pictures (who cares), and some in-game currency, and it is £45!? No thank you!

Otherwise, I have also been playing some Forza Horizon 4, which I picked up from the Steam sale. I don't really own all that many racing games (only really Need For Speed Most Wanted (2012), and Forza Horizon 2, but that is on the Xbox). Its entertaining, but definitely buggy. I have had it freeze multiple times already, and the suggested solution is to download a months old graphics driver. We'll see how that goes, but its certainly not ideal.

 

[Dreiko]

So I'm slowly (SLOWLY) advancing in Pathfinder, just cleared the first chapter. I have a party of fun weirdos assembled, one girl is especially adorable and tragic in equal measures, also she has a pet crow (doesn't fight but gives her a bonus in perception skill checks cause it talks to her apparently). Name's Ember, cause she was burned at the stake under false demon suspicion and survived. Get it, Ember. Not her real name, but that's what folks call her. She has the sunniest of sunny dispositions and the contrast is nuts. Everything she says is either profound or adorable.


Anyways, game's extremely engaging now, I got past the early bits where you have few spells and a time constraint on resting so I can stretch my wings, feel confident in most fights. It took me about twice as long to acclimate here than in Divinity because the base game is just really dense and you have to read multi-paragraph descriptions every few turns in some fights it feels like, but once you memorize everything it goes a lot smoother.


Also once you level up a bit you unlock some interesting abilities. My paladin got to lvl 5 and could get a horse or a magic weapon, I already had this rapier girl with the magic elemental weapon so I figured I'd get the horse for the paladin. So far the only animal fighters I'd used were summon spells which would like, summon a wolf or a giant frog or something as your ally and it'd behave based on AI and fight for a bit before vanishing, pretty standard stuff. Well, the horse is like a Druid's Animal Companion it turns out, that means that it's basically a 7th party member that you fully control. You get to level him up, name him, pick a horse specialization (there's horse specializations) and you can even outfit him with horse armor and horse weapons (spiky knee guards). Animal companions also have their own unique sets of perks that enhance their various types of potential attacks. My horse only has bite and hoof attacks but there were some other ones in the list like Tentacle that has me imagining some sort lovecraftian companion lmao. Maybe my eldritch rogue party member will summon one of those at some point lol.


Oh and I named him Horace. Horace the horse. He's cool.

 

[BrawlMan]

I've been playing Marvel Snap basically non-stop for the past couple of days, at least when my phone isn't charging. It is a neat little game. I have a homebrew build that I am quite enjoying, the different locations really make each round feel unique, and I really love how each game only lasts around a couple of minutes.

I do wish some of the cards reflected their owners abilities more, though. For example, I love how you need to destroy the Bucky Barnes card to summon the Winter Soldier - that is great! - but Cyclops having no ability at all, and just being a stat stick, is disappointingly boring.

I can really see myself sinking my teeth into the game. It looks as though I just joined the game as this current Season is about to end, so we will see what the next season brings, but I am (so far) excited to play more. It also means that I am probably going to have to go cold-turkey on it in a few days, before it completely steals my life.

My big bro is loving this game, but I have no interests.

I will say though, some of the microtransactions are ludicrously priced. There is a bundle that is active at the moment, that is two skins, two profile pictures (who cares), and some in-game currency, and it is £45!? No thank you!

Part of the reason why I am not interested.

I managed to finally achieve S Rank on Survival Mode in Final Vendetta, using Claire. You need at least 275 kills, and I managed to achieve 289.

 

[Bartholen]

I've been trying to get Dragon Age: Origins to work for literally like 2 weeks. All I wanted to do was get some texture and character face mods so the game doesn't look like vomit, but apparently that's too much to ask. Previously it used to crash right at the end of the bridge to Ostagar. Now I literally can't even get into character creation. I want to play a female character, but the game crashes the instant after picking race, class, gender and background. I've tried literally everything I could find and/or come up with: reinstalling the game, reinstalling the mods in different orders, turnin off VSync, windowed mode, frame effects, turning the graphics lower, updating my drivers, reinstalling my Nvidia Physx drivers, installing older Physx drivers, verifying the game files, running the update from the redist folder, nothing fucking works! But what's truly baffling is that I actually played through the opening section multiple times with a female character before, and only now has the game decided to start being sexist.

 

[meiam]

I'm kinda done with triangle strategy. Lots of small problem that sapped any enjoyment I had.

Gameplay wise its more like a fire emblem than FFT, where you have multiple character but very little control over how to develop them. There's a lot of character, but they don't have that many abilities and the one they do have often aren't worth the trouble or overlapped a lot among st themselves. Also a lot of character takes way too long to get their ability that make them interesting, and the game is sadly very grind heavy since you never get quite enough exp to keep up with the enemy level and the number of character you can bring vary alot from fight to fight, leaving some character underleveled. So it all depend on the actual fights to make gameplay interesting, to the game credits, all the fight have some interesting aspect. Sadly the difficulty is a let down, on normal its so easy you don't need any strategy to win, just move and attack and you'll do fine. On hard, every enemy has insanely high stats so they can kill any of your character in two attacks and takes 4+ to dies (with most boss able to survive literally every character attacking them). This is where the strategy is supposed to bridge the gap, except there's only one strategy worth using, turtle in a corner and let the enemy come to you. So long as you don't get to close to them, some enemy won't actually charge you (crucially that include the bosses), this way you don't get swarmed by enemy and you can kill them slowly as to come to you, anything else will just fail you unless you aggressively grind to overlevel the content.

Story wise they have the big picture nailed, with lots of geopolitic justifying the conflict involved. The small picture is however a complete mess, your group of character display an astonishing level of cutscene stupidity, constantly letting enemy walk away after being defeated or not making anything useful out of the victory they just got. The game makes a big deal of the choice you have, letting you discuss with every character before you make a selection and needing to convince them to vote your way, but in effect you just pick whatever you want. The choice are presented as a big deal, but ultimately all that change is the few cutscene after you pick a choice. Otherwise everything resolve more or less the same or your choice is just nullified, later in the game you have to chose between sneaking in to assassinate the head of the enemy army or destroy the town where the army is to win the war. But if you chose to sneak in, the town still get destroyed anyway. So, w/e, just pick the choice you want, right? NOPE! Later in the game your faced with a set of choice, all are terrible and stupidly extreme, except if you took a very specific sets of choice throughout the game, that's impossible to figure out unless you look them up, at which point the character will just get to pick a sensible choice that works out for everyone.

 

[Dalisclock]

Oy, @Dalisclock, this is the second time you've like:d me writing grievances on AI - The Somnium Files. Have you played it yourself? What did you think of it in that case?

I have not but it sounds like something I might have been interested in from premise. Sadly, it sounds like my experience with the professor layton games where the puzzles and the mystery often don't seem to have anything to do with each other. I do appreciate the discussion of its flaws though.

One of my criteria of upvotes is making a good argument or informative post, even if I may not agree. It's not the only criteria. In this case, the information about the game is appreciated.

If we had downvotes my criteria for a downvote would be basically being an asshole or making a terrible argument.

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

If we had downvotes my criteria for a downvote would be basically being an asshole

I feel attacked.

-1

 

[Dalisclock]

I feel attacked.

-1

Don't worry. The people on my shitlist(all 3 of them) are already on my "IGNORE" list. And only one of them even wanders out of "Current events" anyway.

 

[Dalisclock]

Still chugging away at Pentiment. The writing of this game is good and carries a lot. There's a particular dream sequence in act 2 that is just fucking rough when taken what you know about Andreas so far and why he seems like he's so miserable despite his success. His only child died of plague during the 7 years between acts and he's still unsure if he even loves the woman he was forced to marry by his parents despite the fact she seems to want to love him

The primary gameplay challenge comes from the fact that each time a person is murdered, you are given a time limit to investigate and find a culprit or risk the wrong person being convicted of the crime. And there are good reasons why people are willing to believe or at least tolerate said person being punished, even if they're the wrong reasons. What complicates is that you're given a number of leads and each time you follow one up, time advances to the next part of the day, meaning you will never have enough time to follow up them all. The game also prevents save scumming this by using a persistent autosaves, so you can't just save, try following up a lead, then going back to you initial save and trying a different approach. No, you have to commit to your choices knowing the clock is ticking as you try to find the real killer. And it's damn effective at creating tension that you had better make good choices.

 

[Drathnoxis]

I feel attacked.

-1

Exactly, you can't help being who you are. People always say to be yourself, and then when you do they tell you to stop!

Oy, @Dalisclock, this is the second time you've like:d me writing grievances on AI - The Somnium Files. Have you played it yourself? What did you think of it in that case?

My name isn't Dalisclock, but I'll answer anyway. Disclosure, I didn't actually play the game, but watched SGF stream it, so that likely affected my experience of it. I liked it a lot. It's easily my favorite of Uchikoshi's games that I've seen (Zero Escape series and the 2 AI games.) The characters were fun, the plot was well put together, and the twist brought everything together well. The game doesn't take itself very seriously, which ends up being a lot of fun. Yeah it's pretty dumb that a porno mag plays a pivotal role in a combat encounter, but then it becomes kind of hilarious that they play a role in almost every combat encounter! It is an anime game, after all, sexual humour is something to be expected in that territory.

I quite liked the Somniums. They weren't puzzles, and you might feel misled if you expected this to be a puzzle game, like Uchikoshi's previous works were, but I thought they worked well as a way to add a little interactivity to the game and allow a lot of fun character moments.

The game has one of my favorite endings of a video game ever: a showdown with a serial killer followed by an upbeat musical number involving the entire cast (the song is much better in Japanese, it sounds rushed in English). Just the perfect way to end the game.

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

Exactly, you can't help being who you are. People always say to be yourself, and then when you do they tell you to stop!

I'm even worse in real life.

 

[Bartholen]

I caved with Dragon Age. After racking up like 3 hours of in-game time merely trying to get it to fucking work, I bought it on the EA app. It was like 5 bucks anyway, and I'm not in high school anymore, I don't have time to deal with this shit. Well, to be exact, I did get it to work... only to realize all the DLC from the Ultimate Edition had vanished somewhere. So that's where I said "fuck it". The EA launcher version is downloading right now, fingers crossed.

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

I caved with Dragon Age. After racking up like 3 hours of in-game time merely trying to get it to fucking work, I bought it on the EA app. It was like 5 bucks anyway, and I'm not in high school anymore, I don't have time to deal with this shit. Well, to be exact, I did get it to work... only to realize all the DLC from the Ultimate Edition had vanished somewhere. So that's where I said "fuck it". The EA launcher version is downloading right now, fingers crossed.

Hopefully it doesn’t turn into the Extended Aggravation version.

 

[Bedinsis]

I have not but it sounds like something I might have been interested in from premise. Sadly, it sounds like my experience with the professor layton games where the puzzles and the mystery often don't seem to have anything to do with each other. I do appreciate the discussion of its flaws though.

One of my criteria of upvotes is making a good argument or informative post, even if I may not agree. It's not the only criteria. In this case, the information about the game is appreciated.

If we had downvotes my criteria for a downvote would be basically being an asshole or making a terrible argument.

Ah, cool.

I asked because despite my grievances I had a good time with it and was hoping to get someone else's opinion to see what their takeaway was.

The Professor Layton analogy is quite accurate. I've only played the first one, but I remember how at various point unlocked 10 mysteries in that game and thought I would get to poke around and discover the answer, instead of how in the final area of that game Luke goes: "Hey professor, about this mystery..." and Layton answers "Well, the solution to that mystery is..." and then it just gave a "Mystery solved" message. Only one mystery involved the player solving a puzzle though that was the main one, If I don't misremember.

There actually are some puzzles that relates to detective work: if you consider examining the points of interest around a scene and going through a dialogue tree "puzzles" then there's that, but more importantly there are interrogation scenes where the various clues you have gathered must be connected to the argument at hand, in the vein of the following:

Q: Why couldn't it have been Krusty on the Kwik-e-Mart surveillance camera?

clue 1: Krusty cannot read
clue 2: Krusty has a pacemaker
clue 3: Krusty is Jewish
clue 4: The man in the surveillance footage used a microwave oven
clue 5: The man in the surveillance footage was using a gun

and you then get to pick out which clue or which two clues that points towards it. Though it is VERY forgiving; if you pick a wrong one the game goes "No, that's not it." immediately and you get to try again.

My name isn't Dalisclock, but I'll answer anyway. Disclosure, I didn't actually play the game, but watched SGF stream it, so that likely affected my experience of it. I liked it a lot. It's easily my favorite of Uchikoshi's games that I've seen (Zero Escape series and the 2 AI games.) The characters were fun, the plot was well put together, and the twist brought everything together well. The game doesn't take itself very seriously, which ends up being a lot of fun. Yeah it's pretty dumb that a porno mag plays a pivotal role in a combat encounter, but then it becomes kind of hilarious that they play a role in almost every combat encounter! It is an anime game, after all, sexual humour is something to be expected in that territory.

I quite liked the Somniums. They weren't puzzles, and you might feel misled if you expected this to be a puzzle game, like Uchikoshi's previous works were, but I thought they worked well as a way to add a little interactivity to the game and allow a lot of fun character moments.

The game has one of my favorite endings of a video game ever: a showdown with a serial killer followed by an upbeat musical number involving the entire cast (the song is much better in Japanese, it sounds rushed in English). Just the perfect way to end the game.

Thanks for sharing your opinion though I disagree that sexual humor is to be expected on the grounds that "it is an anime game". I also liked the second part of the ending, as you wrote in the spoiler.

 

[Bartholen]

Hopefully it doesn’t turn into the Extended Aggravation version.

Considering I already tested it with multiple mods, and it ran first try without any issue, I'd be quite surprised. There were also multiple Steam reviews telling people to get the Origin version instead. The only reason I'm reinstalling it currently is because I managed to make it unlaunchable due to messing with the Physx software: I'd installed a legacy version for the Steam version, but wanted to update it to the new one. Turned out that even if you reinstall the newest version, the folder which allows the game to use Physx will disappear and not come back upon reinstall, rendering the program unusable.

 

[Dalisclock]

I caved with Dragon Age. After racking up like 3 hours of in-game time merely trying to get it to fucking work, I bought it on the EA app. It was like 5 bucks anyway, and I'm not in high school anymore, I don't have time to deal with this shit. Well, to be exact, I did get it to work... only to realize all the DLC from the Ultimate Edition had vanished somewhere. So that's where I said "fuck it". The EA launcher version is downloading right now, fingers crossed.

Yeah, I only had some technical issues which I was fortunately able to fix quickly but I've heard a lot of people having issues with the DLC not working depending on how you bought the game. Youtuber TheSaltFactory mentions this explicitly in his DAO review and god I empathize with the suffering he's enduring there.

DAO is really let down by it's difficulty to get it work correctly on modern systems for some people and that's owed somewhat to the aging engine it was built on and it's hard to enjoy any of it's strengths if you can't even play it as intended.

 

[Bartholen]

Yeah, I only had some technical issues which I was fortunately able to fix quickly but I've heard a lot of people having issues with the DLC not working depending on how you bought the game. Youtuber TheSaltFactory mentions this explicitly in his DAO review and god I empathize with the suffering he's enduring there.

DAO is really let down by it's difficulty to get it work correctly on modern systems for some people and that's owed somewhat to the aging engine it was built on and it's hard to enjoy any of it's strengths if you can't even play it as intended.

This is something I'd never considered before, but we might be reaching a threshold where even digital copies of games won't be guaranteed to work anymore on modern hardware. As a total software noob I guess I assumed there was some magic system guaranteeing compatibility on digital platforms unto infinity, but if DA:O is any indication, this could be a future that's closer than we'd like to admit.