What are you currently playing?

[Worgen]

This is why I always prefer starting on Normal first. That said, I find most of the mini bosses more fun than the main bosses for specific chapters. I hate next-to-last boss. Fuck him. Another gripe I have with the game is the skill tree. I would prefer just a regular upgrade system like the game does with Jesse's weapons. If there ever is a sequel, Flying Wid Hog needs to get rid of it.

I had more issues with some of the miniboss combos then the bosses, second to last was kinda rough, but not as bad as the combos.

 

[BrawlMan]

I had more issues with some of the miniboss combos then the bosses, second to last was kinda rough, but not as bad as the combos.

Really? The mini boss combos can be challenging at times, none of them has killed me more than Jesse's father. I hate the boss and everything about him is bad boss design. On Normal, he's barely tedious, but on Hard and above..fuck that boss.

 

[Worgen]

Really? The mini boss combos can be challenging at times, none of them has killed me more than Jesse's father. I hate the boss and everything about him is bad boss design. On Normal, he's barely tedious, but on Hard and above..fuck that boss.

I didn't have too much trouble with him. He killed me a few times, but not that many. I had more trouble with Brunch since I didn't really know how to do damage at that point and he taught me to use my ult. But some of the miniboss combos were really rough if I got into them with things on cooldown and I wasn't sure of the order to destruction yet.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Playing the Resident Evil 4 remake again, going for the Platinum. Just S ranked the shooting gallery. Missing the S+ runs on Standard and Hardcore, which don't stack - unless you play Pro S+ instead. Can't decide which road would be hardest. The two runs would be tedious, and it's tempting to just do it on Pro - but Pro's 15 save limit is absolutely going to get on my nerves. Decisions decisions.

 

[Old_Hunter_77]

Dave the Diver

Yep, I am one of those now, one of those people that saw the hype around this game and though "oh this does look cute" but didn't care that much what with all the big ticket games out this year. But then I started playing it and I'm absolutely hooked.

I realized now I have a new favorite genre, or sub-genre, and I don't think it has a name: it's like when there's two games in one game, where one of the games is an action combat game with some sort of dungeon crawling and/or procedurally generated elements, and the other game is sort of a management sim type chill game. And the two feed into each other- you resources you get from the dungeons let you build your base which then gives you benefits to help crawling and so on.

The two other games in this sub-genre I played are Boyfriend Dungeon and Cult of the Lamb and I similarly enjoyed them immensely.

Here's why I think these games work for me:
- The dungeon crawling is like a baby version of rogueli*es. You basically are doing the same thing over and over but the action isn't as demanding as Spelunky or Dead Cells. And except for maybe towards the end of the whole campaign, each "run" is explicit forward progress, because you get to use what you did in the other half of the game.
- The management sim stuff is also pretty straightfoward, and there aren't real consequences for small scale failures like being too late with someone's order in DtD or not cleaning up enough poop in Lamb. The punishment/reward is your own sense of accomplishment and the speed of the larger campaign, and things like achievements or bonus stuff.
- All this also is way to implement "difficulty" without explicit settings. Including the complexity of the various systems and menus- I kind if didn't understand how the menu system worked in DtD's restaurant part for a while so I wasted a bunch of resources. If I were to replay the game I would make money earlier and faster which would propel me forward quicker, for example. But I'm still ok to progress the game, and I never had to futz with some stupid menu or restart the game.

Specifically for DtD it implements all these in ways that really hook me. Each activity is very short and the whole thing is broken up by days. So most "days" are two dives (morning and afternoon) and running the restaurant at night. Each dive is short, at least so far- I image they'll get longer as I'm able to dive deeper and deeper.
A pleasant surprise is how impactful the resource gathering is- harpooning a fish feels good and I even fought off some pirates in the water using these simple mechanics and it didn't want to make my throw my console out the window, which is really impressive.

Most important is there a really story and overall campaign. Just seeing a big text that says "Chapter 2" at the end of my last session is the most triumphant thing. And there is some story with some sea people or whatever- it's all very silly and cute, as these small/indy games tend to be.

This is a great example of a game that really isn't particularly innovative or brilliant or anything like that, it just knows what it is and it does it well. The only thing that can spoil it for me at this point is if they introduce some bullshit to extend play time and unfair difficulty curve or obtuse gameplay elements out of context.

 

[AllMondayEveryday]

I am knee-deep in act 3 with my Dark Urge run and this really feels like it was the main story originally but they decided to cut it out and make it a separate origin for a customer character. So many plot beats in Act 3 feel more impactful playing Dark Urge. Also glad I played BG 1 and 2 before really delving into Dark Urge. I'm still in chapter 5 of BG2 but I've seen to give a lot more context and weight to certain characters and events in Act 3. Also, performance is a lot more stable and I have encountered a lot fewer bugs.

 

[Bartholen]

There's an achievement in Arkham City Knight for beating Killer Croc in the Iceberg Lounge challenge, which is an endless survival mode. Thing is, you have to get one million points to get him to spawn, and it just feels fucking impossible. Not necessarily because of a skill issue, but because the game's systems that are designed to help start actively hindering you. A huge part of keeping up a good combo is deciding what enemies to target, and after a point the fight becomes more of a puzzle. Problem is that the camera snaps like a hungry shark to what it prioritizes as a threat: enemies starting a charge, for example. But those enemies are far and away the least of the problem that far into the challenge, where acute awareness of your surroundings is paramount. But it's next to impossible to keep track of it all, because the camera pans so blisteringly fast, and the usually reliable auto-targeting starts crumbling under its weight. I guess if you had infinite patience you could cheese the challenge by just spamming the batclaw slam, but frankly fuck that.

 

[hanselthecaretaker2]

There's an achievement in Arkham City for beating Killer Croc in the Iceberg Lounge challenge, which is an endless survival mode. Thing is, you have to get one million points to get him to spawn, and it just feels fucking impossible. Not necessarily because of a skill issue, but because the game's systems that are designed to help start actively hindering you. A huge part of keeping up a good combo is deciding what enemies to target, and after a point the fight becomes more of a puzzle. Problem is that the camera snaps like a hungry shark to what it prioritizes as a threat: enemies starting a charge, for example. But those enemies are far and away the least of the problem that far into the challenge, where acute awareness of your surroundings is paramount. But it's next to impossible to keep track of it all, because the camera pans so blisteringly fast, and the usually reliable auto-targeting starts crumbling under its weight. I guess if you had infinite patience you could cheese the challenge by just spamming the batclaw slam, but frankly fuck that.

And lemme guess, there’s no option to turn off auto target or something? I never looked that deep into menus when I played this or Asylum, but it seems to camera was made to be on the cinematic side almost to a fault with things like finishers.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Ok, so I tried Re4make on NG Pro for my S+ run and immediately pussied out after getting decimated at the village. Fuck it. I'm not doing this limited save shit. I'm taking the grindier yet more manageable route, which is more on brand for me. Gonna get S+ on Standard and Hardcore instead of acing Pro for the Plat.

Currently 35 minutes in and just defeated Del Lago. I think I can clock in a run under 5 hours at this rate.

I was tempted to do a single Pro run "to save time" but there is absolutely no way a perfect under 5.30 hours run, on that difficulty, with only 15 saves and no checkpoints, takes me less material time than doing 2 runs under 5 and 5.30 hours when I can freely savescum and shave off precious minutes between saves.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

There's an achievement in Arkham City for beating Killer Croc in the Iceberg Lounge challenge, which is an endless survival mode.

I believe this is on Arkham Knight.

 

[Drathnoxis]

Despite having both Mario Odyssey and 13 Sentinels on the go after reading The CRPG Addict's playthoughs of Angband and Omega I'm starting to get the shakes and feel like I need to play an old school roguelike. It's been over a year since I've played Nethack so I've done pretty well. I'm not sure whether I'll play a more recent version of Angband which I've never played, a variant of Nethack since I've barely touched any except a little bit of Slash 'em and one Evilhack ascension, or maybe I'll play Stone Soup Dungeon Crawl since it was on Chimpzy's Top 25 and I've never really gave it more than a cursory attempt.

 

[Bob_McMillan]

Watch Dogs 2 ends with a wet fart. Eh. Nothing interesting was done really. You sneak around the same startup, Silicon Valley office building and press buttons. Really thought they'd either end with a hard puzzle or let you go wild.

Overall, there is an incredibly fun game to be had in this franchise. I do think if they had kept the tone of the first game and the gameplay of this game, then you would have something special. Although I suppose San Francisco isn't exactly a great fit for a dark and brooding story.

 

[XsjadoBlayde]

Evil West had urge to go back n retry wormflower boss difficulty wall but lowered to normal instead this time. well for once my cunning plan worked, the beast is finally dead! - not original tactic tbh, Sun Tzu himself always said "do not fear the difficulty options, boy." though the control scheme does make returning after a long break a tad trickier than the average videogame: still been occasionally firing the shotgun off due to panicked muscle memory assuming reload remains a thing.

Tried the 'vivid' visual mode on fancy telly for game as well - it hasn't cooperated so good with every game tested yet, some colours and contrasts just get smooshed and harder to distinguish in motion, to say the least - however Evil West is looking uncompromised with the curious visual enhancement technology so far....frame rate was fine already, aside the stubborn motion blur. Is perhaps resolution upscaling and fruity colour boosts doing the hard work this time, plus some smaller frame rate smoothing may be involved too. Basically it looks bloody great, the mysterious telly mode may have legs on it yet! Is intriguing to consider a future of technologies meeting halfway between the telly and console to take some weight of the console processing.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Dave the Diver

Yep, I am one of those now, one of those people that saw the hype around this game and though "oh this does look cute" but didn't care that much what with all the big ticket games out this year. But then I started playing it and I'm absolutely hooked.

I realized now I have a new favorite genre, or sub-genre, and I don't think it has a name: it's like when there's two games in one game, where one of the games is an action combat game with some sort of dungeon crawling and/or procedurally generated elements, and the other game is sort of a management sim type chill game. And the two feed into each other- you resources you get from the dungeons let you build your base which then gives you benefits to help crawling and so on.

The two other games in this sub-genre I played are Boyfriend Dungeon and Cult of the Lamb and I similarly enjoyed them immensely.

Here's why I think these games work for me:
- The dungeon crawling is like a baby version of rogueli*es. You basically are doing the same thing over and over but the action isn't as demanding as Spelunky or Dead Cells. And except for maybe towards the end of the whole campaign, each "run" is explicit forward progress, because you get to use what you did in the other half of the game.
- The management sim stuff is also pretty straightfoward, and there aren't real consequences for small scale failures like being too late with someone's order in DtD or not cleaning up enough poop in Lamb. The punishment/reward is your own sense of accomplishment and the speed of the larger campaign, and things like achievements or bonus stuff.
- All this also is way to implement "difficulty" without explicit settings. Including the complexity of the various systems and menus- I kind if didn't understand how the menu system worked in DtD's restaurant part for a while so I wasted a bunch of resources. If I were to replay the game I would make money earlier and faster which would propel me forward quicker, for example. But I'm still ok to progress the game, and I never had to futz with some stupid menu or restart the game.

Specifically for DtD it implements all these in ways that really hook me. Each activity is very short and the whole thing is broken up by days. So most "days" are two dives (morning and afternoon) and running the restaurant at night. Each dive is short, at least so far- I image they'll get longer as I'm able to dive deeper and deeper.
A pleasant surprise is how impactful the resource gathering is- harpooning a fish feels good and I even fought off some pirates in the water using these simple mechanics and it didn't want to make my throw my console out the window, which is really impressive.

Most important is there a really story and overall campaign. Just seeing a big text that says "Chapter 2" at the end of my last session is the most triumphant thing. And there is some story with some sea people or whatever- it's all very silly and cute, as these small/indy games tend to be.

This is a great example of a game that really isn't particularly innovative or brilliant or anything like that, it just knows what it is and it does it well. The only thing that can spoil it for me at this point is if they introduce some bullshit to extend play time and unfair difficulty curve or obtuse gameplay elements out of context.

You should check out Moonlighter (dungeon crawler + store management sim) and Dredge (fishing game + management sim). Neither is terribly complex regarding the management part but they feed the other half of the game in a fun, natural way.

 

[NerfedFalcon]

Moonlighter (dungeon crawler + store management sim)

If you liked that, you'll probably like Recettear, since that's a very similar concept.

 

[meiam]

If you liked that, you'll probably like Recettear, since that's a very similar concept.

Capitalism OH!

Receattear is like 10-15 year old at this point, it was kinda unique back then but nowaday is mechanically very simplistic and the writing is fun but its mostly about making fun of trope and never does anything very substantial.

 

[Drathnoxis]

Capitalism OH!

Receattear is like 10-15 year old at this point, it was kinda unique back then but nowaday is mechanically very simplistic and the writing is fun but its mostly about making fun of trope and never does anything very substantial.

Was just in the middle of typing this exactly. Recettear is not worth playing. It's a middling dungeon crawler wearing the mask of a shop management game that has no complexity beyond "buy low, sell high".

 

[Dalisclock]

Stray Gods: A Roleplaying musical

Checked this out because I wanted a short game to play. Basically the idea is that the main character, Grace, has a run in with a woman named Calliope who dies in graces arms and gives her her "soul" so to speak. She then finds out Calliope was actually the last of the Greek muses and now Grace is the last muse. But more important, the Greek Gods, at least some of them, are both real and still alive and think Grace killed the last muse for her power/soul. She's given a week to Prove her innocence or be executed.

With the plot out of the way, the game is particularly interesting in that it's really linear in story(leading to an average playthrough of about 6-7 hours per playthrough, shorter if you're mainlining the critical path) but where it shines is that it's a musical where your choices affect how the songs go and there's a LOT of replay value because you can't see/do everything on a given playthrough. For example, you might have to choose between helping two different people and thus get a different version of song helping one person then another, if not an entirely different song.

Now to be fair, I'd say almost none of the songs are really bangers but they're generally pretty well done overall, especially since it's voice talent like Troy Baker and Laura Baily who aren't normally known for singing(but can sing pretty well ngl).

I also kinda like how they depict the gods they do feature(a lot of the gods are background and some of the major ones are dead or not accounted for), so the big characters are: Athena, Aphrodite, Eros, Persephone, Pan and Apollo, with some minor roles by Hecate, Medusa, Orpheus and the Minotaur. Mostly how a lot of them are struggling to deal with the modern world in understandable ways and there's a lot of character drama because of that. Notably Apollo who is overall a sad boy who refuses to do prophecy anymore because if he tells someone what their prophecy is it becomes locked in for them, so he's basically so strangled by the idea of determinism so he just refuses to deal with it.

So overall a fun game/musical take on greek mythology with some obvious nods to ideas from American Gods and Fables as well.

And with that, I decided to keep the Mythos train going with: God of War: Ragnarök.

I will say that unlike the original GoW2018, GOW:R seriously just goes all in pretty quickly. WIthin the first hour I've fought two different gods, one of them a multi-phase boss fight with Thunder Boy Thor and of course Freya just being overall still angry over that whole killing Baldur thing. It slows down a little after that with the journey to the dwarf realm, which is still linear, but I'm fine with that because I'm getting back into the "swing" of things. (I'm sorry, stop throwing things).

While a lot of the stuff was lost, at least some of the big tools from GOW 2018(such as the Blades of Chaos) are still available so I'm not starting totally from Square one this time.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Re4make, just got to the castle in 1 hour 12 minutes. I think that's a lock on the S+. Not looking forward to doing two consecutive speedruns. But at least Hardcore allowing for another 30 minutes should make up for the higher difficulty.

 

[Jarrito3002]

Was just in the middle of typing this exactly. Recettear is not worth playing. It's a middling dungeon crawler wearing the mask of a shop management game that has no complexity beyond "buy low, sell high".

And would PLAY IT AGAIN!!!!! HAHAHAHA.

Look these newer ones are trying to flaunt their 4 year college education in economics for me keep it simple. But the dungeon crawling is basic I will give you that.