No worries. I ordered Fn'R around late February, and was expected to come later. I am waiting on Switch copies of No More Heroes 1 & 2.
What are you currently playing?
- Thread starter Nick Calandra
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Didn't order a copy of Scott Pilgrim, so that's a no by default. Haven't ordered anything off LRG lately. Made some relatively expensive but worthwhile retro purchases the past months, so no more room in the budget.
Automata or Replicant? It’s one of those IP’s I’ve always thought of but never tried. Maybe after I whittle down my backlog enough to see my keyboard.
Automata I played back when it just came out, I'm now on the replicant remake. Automata was easily my fav game of the decade btw, the story is super incredible. I just got to a super pivotal point in replicant as well so that's also getting super good. Tons of really dire and heavy moments back to back and oodles of character growth.
You don't need to play em in order but you do definitely have to play em one way or another. Top tier storytelling and a lot of smart gamer-focused elements and references and nods are intersperced with a timeless tale that can just do a 1400 year timeskip just like that and keep going without breaking its stride.
Ehhhhh I'd recommend just wasting a LP of them, gameplay is pretty poor (especially the first one). Story has it's moment but it's padded with a lot of rather boring moment.
Nah you ruin the immersion and the feeling of wandering the world with the awesome music that nier is all about. The game is about making you think a lot so if you just skip to the big moments without the in-between bits that let you decompress you're not getting the full experience. It's one of those games where it's actually fun to just travel around and a lot of the smaller side quests emphasize that.
As for the gameplay it's a hype action rpg, not particularly difficult but extremely flashy and cool. I especially love those killing moves where you rip arms off of giant monsters and stab em with a million spikes and so on. They're kinda like Bayonetta torture kills, super hype. Also when you unlock the spear and two handed weapons and the ability to switch between all 3 types of weapon on the fly the combat opens up quite a bunch.
I actually installed it last night and played it for two hours or so(I got to L3 and completely took apart 2 of the small ships, Mackerel(?)) because of your take on it and i pretty much agree. It's strangely fun despite being basically a job simulator and the soundtrack feels like it nicely enhances the atmosphere. I also like the bit where you get smacked(or smack against something) and it knocks the radio out of whack for a bit.That's the thing though, the rotation isn't a lot of songs to be honest. But, I dunno, maybe it's personal taste, or the fact that they are all instrumental, but they don't become tedious like other games with music. They just seemlessly blend into the background as you are doing your job. It helps that I LIKE the songs a lot. They have enough EDM elements to them to tickle my personal musical tastes, but it's also this really chill, space country twang for some of the songs. Like, the theme song to Firefly, but minus lyrics, is a VERY good sample of the flavor of some of the songs. To clarify, I didn't think the previous song rotation was tedious, or got old. Not at all! It was always enjoyable to listen to, even after hours of playing. It's just they added more songs to it, so it's just a longer loop, but the original loop was a good loop.
As to including it, yeah it's a really fun game in my opinion. I've described it multiple times as Space Jenga, and I stand by that. Because it's all about pulling the hulls apart, piece by piece, without the whole thing falling apart. But in this context "falling apart" is code for "violent explosion"
Also, the dystopian corporate humor feels like it adds a lot to the experience, even if it's fucking terrifying if it were real(part of the employment agreement at the beginning is promising to vote for a certain candidate). It reminds me of Subnautica where you were being billed for all of the planets resources you used to survive and escape because the corporation apparently owned the planet.
Also, I noticed the guys who made Hardspace: Shipbreaker were some of the same people who made the Homeworld games and that explains why some of the spacecraft and objects look so familiar.
Yeah the way the radio gets interrupted to indicate damage is neat.
I didn't play subnautica, but that tracks yeah, the part that I found really disturbing about the contract signing part is where they say...right before they start "taking samples" is that the process of getting your dna samples for the cloning program, will destroy the original body. So the YOU you is entirely dead, and you've now been genetically enslaved to their shipyards for eternity. That's pretty fucking dark.
Oh did they?! I never looked into that, but I was getting some MAJOR Homeworld vibes from the designs yeah. Even down to the sometimes barking radio chatter that isn't a language you understand. It sounded a lot like HW's stuff. I'm so happy to hear that, as the original HW and Cataclysm, are two of my favorite games of all time.
I'm glad you're enjoying the game! Keep workin' Cutter....Weaver out!
Decided I'd grab Resident Evil 8 while it was still fresh out of the oven. So far, I've been... a little frustrated, mostly with what feels like the weakest basic handgun in the series so far, and a section that I'm fairly sure I had to be 'killed' to progress through, but the story's interesting even at this early point and I'm interested to see where that goes, and what better guns might be available.
I dunno why but I thought re8 was ps5 exclusive for some reason. Not sure when but I will get to playing it as it looks surprisingly interesting. Hopefully you don't need to know much beyond RE7 stuff.
Still playing The Witness. There's a bit of deception involved in the way the puzzles incorporate their surroundings. Every single puzzle is a panel with a grid on it, and they never ever evolve beyond connecting two points in a single trace (as complicated as they can get with obscure or fancy criteria), so it's a bit disorienting when they start incorporating the enviroment for clues or even lifting patterns.
There's a section where you're supposed to trace a pattern over a very simple labyrinth, with hundreds of possibilities but only one correct answer and no evident way of telling how you'd figure it out. You're supposed to listen to the sound of birds chirping, then translate the pitch and length of each noise across the labyrinth into the shape of a sound wave. And as soon as you've done it a couple of times the game starts trying to trip you over by playing several overlapping cries of birds at irregular intervals so you don't immediately know which one to single out. Not that these are even remotely the hardest puzzles in the game but holy hell the gymnastics required to figure out what you're supposed to do in the first place are enough to make you go insane. Game wants you to lift patterns literally out of thin air.
There's a section where you're supposed to trace a pattern over a very simple labyrinth, with hundreds of possibilities but only one correct answer and no evident way of telling how you'd figure it out. You're supposed to listen to the sound of birds chirping, then translate the pitch and length of each noise across the labyrinth into the shape of a sound wave. And as soon as you've done it a couple of times the game starts trying to trip you over by playing several overlapping cries of birds at irregular intervals so you don't immediately know which one to single out. Not that these are even remotely the hardest puzzles in the game but holy hell the gymnastics required to figure out what you're supposed to do in the first place are enough to make you go insane. Game wants you to lift patterns literally out of thin air.
That's right where I gave up. The game is solid and the mixture of environments and voiceovers is nice, but the instant I have to pull out my guitar tuner and copy down music notation to solve a puzzle is where I draw the line.
It also strikes me as kinda cruel to anybody who's tone deaf or just doesn't have very good hearing. If the whole game were based on the concept from the start then whatever, but this one portion of the game seems weirdly exclusionary. Same with the area involving different/overlapping color filters, with variations so subtle that color-blind people would be physically unable to play through them. A friend of mine is color blind and can't even play Uno without second-guessing every other card, I can't imagine him going through the flower bunker in Witness.
I was a little suprised too. I noticed the those big Czech Hedgehog looking structures and even the ship designs reminded me of something out of Homeworld, then looked it up and realized some of the Devs did work on Homeworld, so that makes sense. Also glad to know those guys are still working.
I loved HW though I've had less luck with Catacylsm. I've started it twice and bounced off pretty fast both times, usually within a mission or two because I remember it feeling...difficult to control or something like that. I know there was a renamed re-release a year or so ago and I need to give it a good try with that, because I've heard Cataclysm is really good too. I really wanted to like HW2, but HW2 had other ideas.......
I suspect Hardspace: Shipbreaker will be one of those games I play in spurts when I'm in the mood to play a Job game, but since I'm taking a Break from my Stardew Valley Replay now that the Community Center is finally done I'm sure I'll give it a good go for for a while.
On a related note, I'm finally Done with the Community Center in Stardew Valley and while it's nice to be finished with that, damn it felt like it takes FAR longer then it really should. I was 98% with the bundles for like a season and a half, but had to wait till Fall of Year 2 to finished the last 3 items(Apples, Pomegranates and A walleye), two of which can only be gotten from trees that bear fruit in the fall and take an entire season to grow(and stop growing if a rock shows up within like 20 feet of it during the growing process). Apparently people speedrun to CC completion by the end of Year One but I can only imagine you have to be going nuts all day every day and get some lucky breaks with the traveling merchant considering how luck based some of those things are and others are seasonal.
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Just defeated the first major boss of Resident Evil 8. Gotta say, the game picked up significantly in that area, and I'm having a great time now, especially with a couple more upgrades to my guns and a decent supply of ammo. I'm sure it'll all get used up pretty quickly, as is the way of Resident Evil, but you gotta enjoy the feasts to make it through the famines. Story's starting to get fairly intriguing too; I won't go into details here, but at this rate I'll definitely see the whole game through, at least.
Going by the achievement list, Mercenaries is back, and I might well play a fair bit of that too.
Going by the achievement list, Mercenaries is back, and I might well play a fair bit of that too.
Yes the designs screamed HW to me too. I figured it was just an "inspired by" kind of thing. But to be fair, a lot of the older scifi ship designs from previous eras, had that same kind of clunky/elegant style to them. Retro futurism.
Yeah I was very disappointed by HW:2. It lost a lot of the feeling that I felt HW1 and Cataclysm had. I really enjoyed the voice acting in Cataclysm. It felt really real. Plus they had one of the coolest tutorials in my opinion. Being called back to defend your homeworld from a planetary bombardment. But yeah, Cataclysm was fantastic for me. It took everything I loved about HW 1, and just added more fun to it. I can't recall any major control issues personally. They tweaked a few things, but not so much that I recall having interface issues at all.
Yeah it's built nicely for that. You can load up the game, pick a hull, and depending on how efficient you are at breaking, you could be done in 10-20 minutes or so. You can set yourself little objectives, like "Get my next certification and then I'm done for tonight" or "Get enough Lynx Tokens to buy that helmet upgrade and then I'm done for tonight." or "Finally break this particular hull design in only 2 shifts and I'm done for tonight." It's very fun.
Pro tip: If you haven't already noticed, O2 is your biggest hindrance to a speedy break shift. Try and upgrade to the O2 recycling upgrade for your helmet ASAP. Then, if you are operating in a pressurized section, it will replenish your O2 for you. There is of course the risk that if you forget you're in pressure, and cut the hull, you space yourself. But for some hulls, you can spend a lot of time just shuffling stuff around, and can benefit from that constant O2 top up.
Cata wasn't that different control wise but it has a very different atmosphere to it than 1, it's almost like an horror movie.
2 isn't as great as 1 but it has some cool stuff, but they practically removed the ability to steal ship which was one of my favourite thing about 1.
Desert of Kharak is pretty fun if you haven't played it, it's on the ground but honestly that doesn't really change much.
Yeah they really dove head first into the horror element of that setting, it was great. xD Plus I just loved the ending of that game. It was a really fun escalation of Kith Somtaaw, from measly mining clan with only one ship, to a powerhouse, and they became that way because YOU lead them. And the end cinematic, the epilogue. Fuck I loved that so much. The changing of the clan symbol, the shot of all the ships lined up like an honor guard, how their names were recorded in the annals of the Kushan histories. Just, so fucking good.
Yeah Desert of Kharak was pretty neat. It was interesting how similar the controls were, despite it being more of a 2D map instead of 3D. I should probably replay that one. I remember almost nothing about it. I'm hesitantly optimistic about that HW 3 teaser that came out a while back. HW 2 did not really sit well with me, on a narrative level. Controls wise it was fine. It just felt so lifeless and drab. It didn't have the spirit of the franchise that HW1 and Cata had.