What are you currently playing?

[meiam]

Just finished Live A Live.

I am of two minds. I quite liked the short vignettes with each having its own gimmick. They're simplistic, but charming. But then you get to the final chapter and that gets dropped for a really bog standard old school jrpg with random battles full of enemies that aren't hard but just annoying to fight, and a dumb 'go beat the dark lord plot', and that simplicity suddenly starts working against it. And the game imo just takes a nosedive.

Been awhile since I played it and maybe the remake changed much, but I remember the final chapter being maybe 5 hours long and been kinda neat with every hero been usable for the end. I also quite liked the backstory of the big bad so I like the chapter.

 

[Elvis Starburst]

Well, I was playing Xenoblade Chronicles 3, but I finally just finished it after taking a long break from the game, only to pick it back up a few weeks ago. This game hit me hard in so many spots... Was well worth the time I sunk into it.
Now I have to figure out what to play next now that my time sink is over

 

[laggyteabag]

I completed South Park: The Stick of Truth

Honestly, I actually really loved this game.

I thought it was really hilarious, it looked exactly like an episode from the show, and I just had a blast playing it.

I've not really watched too many episodes of the show either, so whilst I understand that most of the jokes are purely referential to various episodes (and are probably a lot of the same jokes that they have been telling for the last couple of decades), a lot of them were fresh to me, and I was giggling to myself for hours.

There was a decent amount of build diversity, between the spells that you could unlock, the armour that you could wear, the weapons that you could use, and the modifications that you could make to those weapons and armour. I also liked that your chosen class only represented what abilities you could unlock, but didn't dictate what weapons or armour you could use.

I also really appreciated the setting, and how the game represented a lot of my abilities. So this is a Fantasy LARP story set around the South Park town, but as a mage, obviously magic doesn't exist, so when I was using fireball, I was just lighting a firework in someone's face, or instead of shooting electricity out of my fingers, I was throwing a bucket of water over someone, then throwing a car battery in the puddle.

I was actually working on-call from home yesterday, and I received a call whilst setting fire to a bunch of homeless people in the sewers, looking for Mr Hankey's poo-children. I had to stop myself from giggling away at the sheer stupidity of the situation, as I was at the same time trying to diagnose this woman's PC problems.

They also did something quite clever with the combat encounters. So in many instances, when you were approaching a group of enemies, you could either just run in and fight all of them at once, or you could use some light environmental puzzles to pick some of them off before the fight started. This meant that you weren't constantly in battle, and could skip quite a few if you were observant.

One weird quirk of my version of the game, was how it was censored quite a lot towards the end of the game. Basically in the last act of the story, the town gets overrun by Nazi Zombies. These guys would speak German, throw up a Nazi salute, and wear the red Nazi armbands. In my Steam downloaded copy, these salutes and armbands were censored. Looking online, the UK was supposed to be in the list of uncensored countries, so I have no idea how or why my version of the game ended up being censored, but it did kind of detract from the final chapter for the game, having random black bars appear all over the place.

The only real BUT that I would have to apply here, would be that your appreciation of South Park's variety of humour is essential. Multiple times, my girlfriend would ask why I was laughing, and I would show her, or retell the joke, and she did not find it funny at all. She said I had the sense of humour of one of her 12 year old students, and I guess learned to stop asking.

Overall, I really enjoyed this one. It ran really well on my Steam Deck. I also appreciated how it was relatively short.

 

[Old_Hunter_77]

I completed South Park: The Stick of Truth

Honestly, I actually really loved this game.

I thought it was really hilarious, it looked exactly like an episode from the show, and I just had a blast playing it.

I've not really watched too many episodes of the show either, so whilst I understand that most of the jokes are purely referential to various episodes (and are probably a lot of the same jokes that they have been telling for the last couple of decades), a lot of them were fresh to me, and I was giggling to myself for hours.

There was a decent amount of build diversity, between the spells that you could unlock, the armour that you could wear, the weapons that you could use, and the modifications that you could make to those weapons and armour. I also liked that your chosen class only represented what abilities you could unlock, but didn't dictate what weapons or armour you could use.

I also really appreciated the setting, and how the game represented a lot of my abilities. So this is a Fantasy LARP story set around the South Park town, but as a mage, obviously magic doesn't exist, so when I was using fireball, I was just lighting a firework in someone's face, or instead of shooting electricity out of my fingers, I was throwing a bucket of water over someone, then throwing a car battery in the puddle.

I was actually working on-call from home yesterday, and I received a call whilst setting fire to a bunch of homeless people in the sewers, looking for Mr Hankey's poo-children. I had to stop myself from giggling away at the sheer stupidity of the situation, as I was at the same time trying to diagnose this woman's PC problems.

They also did something quite clever with the combat encounters. So in many instances, when you were approaching a group of enemies, you could either just run in and fight all of them at once, or you could use some light environmental puzzles to pick some of them off before the fight started. This meant that you weren't constantly in battle, and could skip quite a few if you were observant.

One weird quirk of my version of the game, was how it was censored quite a lot towards the end of the game. Basically in the last act of the story, the town gets overrun by Nazi Zombies. These guys would speak German, throw up a Nazi salute, and wear the red Nazi armbands. In my Steam downloaded copy, these salutes and armbands were censored. Looking online, the UK was supposed to be in the list of uncensored countries, so I have no idea how or why my version of the game ended up being censored, but it did kind of detract from the final chapter for the game, having random black bars appear all over the place.

The only real BUT that I would have to apply here, would be that your appreciation of South Park's variety of humour is essential. Multiple times, my girlfriend would ask why I was laughing, and I would show her, or retell the joke, and she did not find it funny at all. She said I had the sense of humour of one of her 12 year old students, and I guess learned to stop asking.

Overall, I really enjoyed this one. It ran really well on my Steam Deck. I also appreciated how it was relatively short.

Yep, I pretty much agree with all of this. I remember playing a few years back when I still had some fondness for South Park, including the episode that introduced this premise.
The sequel is way less interesting, both as a premise and a game.

 

[Bedinsis]

Started playing the first Danganronpa game.

I'm only at the prologue but so far it feels VERY Japanese.

One of the advantages I've seen so far in Visual Novels is that they tend to not simulate movement to any great degree, it is mostly movement-via-menus, which I appreciate as someone that gets easily motion sick. In this game I should've read the description since apparently you move between locations by rotating the camera and going forwards. In other word enforced neck movements. The worst thing for motion sickness. Sigh.

I hope there will at least not be any enforced fast movement. That would render it unplayable.

 

[laggyteabag]

I have decided to play Pentiment. A fun little fact is that this game, and South Park: The Stick of Truth are both actually made by the same developer - Obsidian.

And these two games could not be more different, other than the side-scrolling nature of their world navigation.

In South Park, I was at one point the size of a gnome, fighting an underwear-stealing gnome, under the shadow of my in-game parents fucking each other, whilst avoiding all manner of breast and testicle.

In Pentiment, I am a scholar in 16th century Europe, walking around, speaking to various priests or townsfolk about art and religion.

The contrast is quite jarring.

With that said, very little has happened in Pentiment, so far, but I am not disinterested. It is just well-written, at the end of the day. Im itching for the inciting event to happen, but I am so far still content with just chatting to people about their beliefs.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Finished Aggelos, started La-Mulana. I can tell I'm gonna like this game but at the moment it's all a bit overwhelming.

 

[mirbrownbread]

Blasphemous

What a freakin' great time it is!

It reminded me of how big of a metroidvania fan I actually am. Plus, it's aesthetics are incredibly unique: gripping and disturbing in the best possible way. Simply staring at the parallax-scrolling vistas is evoking of various late renaissance paintings depicting what the other site must be like. That concept is nothing new and Dante's Inferno is an obvious reference point - but Blasphemous does it so, so much better. I can't get enough of it for days now, besides the slightly-infuriating insta-death platforming challenges.

A solid 8.5/10 from me!

 

[XsjadoBlaydette]

Scars Above. Trailer makes it look like a knock-off Returnal, but is more hoping to be a knock-off sci-fi soulsie-like. Basic premise is alien triangle object decides to hang ominously above Earth, so a small ship of fools decide to go kick it in the nuts to bait a reaction out of it (honestly they dont bother with any communication at all, only straight up intrusive action, wtf). After a quick tutorial, the aforementioned nuts are kicked and our fools finally get their desired baited reaction. Which is being sucked into some kinda gravity shenanigan and dropped on some alien planet maybe with some dangerous mysteries to unravel. Well done, humans!

You are protag woman space scientist voiced by that same sounding voice that every videogame woman protag seems to have now. There's a noticeable jank going on: human animation is, shall we say... nostalgic? Pre-Mass Effect 1 nostalgic? And the dialogue is shaky cheese, but also sincere. Sky vistas sometimes appear in a jarring lower resolution. Movement feels disappointingly light at the moment despite clear intentions to use the funky rumble tech in the pS5 controller. However, there is gun. And no soulslike ever suffered from having gun. There's scanning too, tho only the annoying restricted type where you can see hundreds of other interesting environmental unknowns that the game does not give a solitary shit about if they don't provide cold hard tangible rewards. It's a budget priced game so a fair bit of this is expected, especially with an ambition to be a 3D sci-fi soulslike. More time is needed, more data required. Perhaps more specifically data in future patches?

 

[Drathnoxis]

I played Minit, and I liked it a lot. Just a fantastic concept for a game, very well done. You have 60 seconds to explore an NES Zelda like world before you die and restart at your house. You keep progress and items and you can reach other starting locations, but enemies reset. The presentation is simple, just black and white sprites, but it works well, and the music is pretty good and changes every couple screens. The game is not overly difficult, despite the harsh time limit, and it's a pretty smooth experience if you play it in one sitting, which is pretty easy. I beat the game in a couple of hours and NG+ where you only get a single heart and the time limit is cut to 40 seconds in under an hour. The story is minimal, but the concept is fresh enough and the game is polished enough that it doesn't matter.

I had a great time... until I went for 100% that is. I spent probably 45 minutes after beating the game for the first time with around 75% completion, just wandering around making absolutely no progress. I think I found maybe 1 or 2 more coins or so in all that time, which was really surprising, because that first 75% was pretty obvious. Then I looked up a guide and found the kind of nonsense you need to do to get the remaining items. Stuff like die in a random room after starting from each of the houses you can start from to open a locked gate. Just something nobody would ever think to do. There actually are hints in the game, but they are so obtuse, even after getting 100% completion I can't understand what half of them are trying to say. The hint for the aforementioned puzzle was "The start is what shows the end where it grows." Bear in mind that this is a game with a watering can you use to grow plants. I can kind of see where they are coming from now, if I squint, because after you die each time a plant grows in the room, but I had never died in the room so I didn't know that. It also didn't help that I was missing 2 items and I thought that they might be needed to get some of the remaining ones. I suppose this kind of thing fits with the NES style, but I think these kinds of obtuse 'puzzles' and hints were better off left to rest in Castlevania II and Zelda II.

 

[Dalisclock]

I have decided to play Pentiment. A fun little fact is that this game, and South Park: The Stick of Truth are both actually made by the same developer - Obsidian.

And these two games could not be more different, other than the side-scrolling nature of their world navigation.

In South Park, I was at one point the size of a gnome, fighting an underwear-stealing gnome, under the shadow of my in-game parents fucking each other, whilst avoiding all manner of breast and testicle.

In Pentiment, I am a scholar in 16th century Europe, walking around, speaking to various priests or townsfolk about art and religion.

The contrast is quite jarring.

With that said, very little has happened in Pentiment, so far, but I am not disinterested. It is just well-written, at the end of the day. Im itching for the inciting event to happen, but I am so far still content with just chatting to people about their beliefs.

Pentiment is generally kind of slow and the worldbuilding and character development, though in the first couple acts you get something pivotal will happen and then you'll have a time limit to do as much investigation as you can, and you'll be able to follow up one lead per time block, so you'll never be able to talk to everyone. Once you reach that deadline, you have to make a decision even you're not convinced the correctness of any of the choices. It drive the plot but the worldbuilding and character development of the townspeople really does seem to be the focus and where the game shines.

Blasphemous

What a freakin' great time it is!

It reminded me of how big of a metroidvania fan I actually am. Plus, it's aesthetics are incredibly unique: gripping and disturbing in the best possible way. Simply staring at the parallax-scrolling vistas is evoking of various late renaissance paintings depicting what the other site must be like. That concept is nothing new and Dante's Inferno is an obvious reference point - but Blasphemous does it so, so much better. I can't get enough of it for days now, besides the slightly-infuriating insta-death platforming challenges.

A solid 8.5/10 from me!

I really did love the art style and general worldbuilding(as buried as it can be) and the gameplay was solid enough for me to enjoy it. I haven't played the DLC yet because I'd have to do New Game+ but I want to do it before the sequel comes out sometime this year.

 

[Chimpzy]

I was planning on starting Dark Cloud 2

But I've been playing a lot of jrpgs lately, and I'm feeling a little burned out. Could use a bit of a breather, play something really stupid. So Disaster: Day of Crisis it is. At least, as soon as I remember how to make the Wiimote play nice with my pc.

 

[Absent]

Of course Mafia 3's car radio follows Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" with commercials for hemorrhoids meds.

 

[BrawlMan]

Of course Mafia 3's car radio follows Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" with commercials for hemorrhoids meds.

It's the logical conclusion.

 

[Dalisclock]

Somewhere in Chapter 2 of Pathfinder Kingmaker.

I think the game has finally started to click for me. Part of the problem being that I've never been much for D&D and Pathfinder is basically "Protestant D&D" as I've heard it said. So while in theory I understand how the rules and attacks and mechanics work, stuff like the Vancian "you can only use X level spells Y times between rests" magic had nuaces which eluded me until very recently. Also the fact that some buffs last for minutes(which each minute is like a round) and other last for fucking hours was also something I'm kind of noticing. I'm thinking of using a mod to change that because buffing before every fight on a map is kinda annoying. Like I don't want to rush between fights but if my buffa are gonna expire before or during the next fight, I don't have much of a choice.

That out of the way, while not much has really been going on plotwise other then a bunch of fucking trolls going apeshit and me having to go deal with that personally. The game kind of reminds me of RDR2 where it's mean to be slow paced and thus I'm like 35 hours into the game and only on chapter 2. Granted, I'm also doing all of the fights turned based because then I can actually think about what I want my 6 dude/ttes and a leopard pet to do each round and it's easy to die by making a dumb mistake or two. Also the fact you can just walk into a powerful mob on a map that is full of otherwise decent or low level mobs or get ambushed means, yeah, you really do need to think about what you're doing. So very much like what D&D is apparently supposed to be like, except the DM hates you(but that's what the difficultly sliders are for).

I also did the troll fortress which is the first "dungeon" outside the tutorial and despite not being that big, it's essentially an outside screen and 2 interior screens and since you'll encounter trolls and dogs in like every encounter, it wears you down after a while. I found out the hard way that while you can talk your way inside the fortress, this can be a very bad thing because then the enemies on the outside map are still there and if I want to leave(like to camp), I need to fight my way to a safe zone out from the interior and it turns out not to be worth it. It was actually safer to fight my way in from the outside because I could always back out to go camp and refresh everything. I understand you can camp in the dungeon but every time I tried I'd get attacked during my rest time and it wouldn't be worth it.

The Barony management I think I'm kinda getting. Like you get different issues that come up every so often, some being problems(some creepy cultists are fucking around on your land), some being opportunities(convincing merchants to set up shop in your capitol), some being "Hey, I want to annex the neighboring area. Anyone got a problem with that?" and you basically do that by assigning advisors to deal with it for X amount of time(often days or weeks). And while sometimes multiple advisors can be an option for the problem, only one can be assigned and they can only work on that problem unless you pull them off of it(and then it's failed automatically). And apparently how they handle it is based on who you pick, so there will be a little burb like "Joe prefers the direct approach" or "Jane wants to find a solution everyone is happy with" based on their alignment which reminds me of the War table from Dragon Age Inquisition. There's also a little "simcity-lite" where you can order construction of buildings in your towns but I havn't seen if those do anything other then add certain points to you. But you can set them to a task, and then either advance time a day at a time until something happens or go out exploring.

And since traveling takes time, either hours or days and you have to stop and camp to rest which takes like 8 hours at the least, the passage of time is meaningful. It is very much worthwhile to set people working on a goal and then go adventuring out in the wilds to come back in a couple days or a week or so(and I think every so often someone shows up at your throne room wanting to talk to you about something so if you're within the barony you get a little notice "Someone is waiting for you back in the capitol" and it'll pop up as a thing on your to-do list). There are a couple things though where you have to do a mandatory time skip(like a few weeks), such as Annexation, because apparently you have to do it personally or something.

I generally do like the fact that for stuff like main quests you get a goal like "Find out why the trolls are going apeshit, which isn't normal for them" and then you get a series of smaller goals like "FInd out more about trolls" and "Find their lair" and certain NPCs can give you leads to follow up on. It's not super intuitive because one clue I needed to find a location was in a note I missed somehow in one particular location and without that I couldn't find the place I needed to go to find the next location(and just wandering around didn't help). OTOH, when you do find out the location(either someone telling you or you seeing it in the distance) you still have to find a path to get there and finding the various paths across the map and exploring all the places they lead to gives you stuff to do while adventuring(as well as making it easier to cross the map next time).

 

[meiam]

I was planning on starting Dark Cloud 2

But I've been playing a lot of jrpgs lately, and I'm feeling a little burned out. Could use a bit of a breather, play something really stupid. So Disaster: Day of Crisis it is. At least, as soon as I remember how to make the Wiimote play nice with my pc.

Having never heard of that game, I looked it up and boy does it look like jank incarnated, should be interesting. I do like that the very first video of it I find was played trough dolphin XD.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

Scars Above.

I played the demo for this back during Steam's whole demo extravaganza. The Soulslike roots shone through pretty clearly from the start, but nothing about it stood out enough to interest me.

Of course Mafia 3's car radio follows Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" with commercials for hemorrhoids meds.

Hey, at least it didn't follow up "I Walk the Line" with an ad for padded insole inserts.

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

The Barony management I think I'm kinda getting.

Okay, in Kingmaker I get the half-arsed management sim dropped on you, becoming a Baron was your aim in the first place... but why do so many RPGs insist on doing this shit when HR and property management is not part of the skillset you'd expect in your average murderhobo adventurer?

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Played another 18 holes in Cursed to Golf. Very pleased to confirm the devs have finally patched trophies after 4 months of radio silence.

 

[Dalisclock]

Okay, in Kingmaker I get the half-arsed management sim dropped on you, becoming a Baron was your aim in the first place... but why do so many RPGs insist on doing this shit when HR and property management is not part of the skillset you'd expect in your average murderhobo adventurer?

Honestly a good question. I like the idea of being able to have a home base and be able to run it to some extent, but it has to be done somewhat decently to make it worthwhile.