What are you currently playing?

[BrawlMan]

Finished Dawn of the Monsters. A good brawler, but it does get repetitive by late game. 13 Days Studio's does annoying thing of fighting the main bosses all over again in the next to last stage. Not every brawler needs to do this! The only reason that was done back in the day was due to memory space on cartridges and arcade boards. There is no excuse for that nowadays, other than "tradition". Smaller studio, but they could have removed the boss rush entirely, and skip straight to the final boss.

Ganira, turns this game in to a joke with certain perks and her summon ability. To the point of me using her for the rest of the game. Late chapter 4, and all of chapter 5, I preferred her over Aegis Prime. Summoning a minion distracts the enemies and bosses lets you damage them with little risks and repercussions. Which sucks, because Aegis is my favorite character to use. The game also has a habit in the later stages of spawning so many enemies, that it expects you to know how to either parry or perfect dodge. I preferred dodging as parry could be finicky for me at times.

The story gets surprisingly dark with a few twists. One twist you will see coming two miles away and won't be shocked in the slightest. You will know when. The ending is not a complete downer, but the game ends on several sequel hooks. I hope the game does well enough for it to happen. The story ends with open-endedness, but they're clearly expecting to make another game down the line. I wish most modern games would do a complete story in one game, or keep the conclusion open-ended in case things don't go well. That way you ain't playing a stillborn franchise.

If they do get a sequel, 13D is going to need add more combo moves, more level variety, and new monsters or robots to control.

 

[Drathnoxis]

XCOM 2 is built with the idea that you've lost XCOM 1 (hence why the commander start kidnapped).

And yeah, pod activation is imo the biggest problem the game has since it specifically punish you for trying to get flanking since that has a high likelyhood of just bringing more enemy in. So to avoid that you just fall back on inching forward and using the overwatch ball of death. They tried to fix that by giving a timer to most mission, but then RNG just become more important since you have to constantly rush. Longwar sorta fix this because you'll quickly be running 30-40 units at any time and so losing one or two isn't such a big deal. Firaxis also tried to fix that with chimera squad, but that was just too far in the other direction imo since the level are super tiny. I dunno what they'll try for that marvel/xcom thing.

What a strange and confusing premise for the sequel. Like, XCOM: Enemy Unknown wasn't really that difficult a game, and really, it's just bad writing to invalidate all the work the player did to win. But, from what I just saw it seems pretty clear that the writer is just phoning it in for this one.

Apparently the 'true form' of the Thin Men is... a snake person? And they just don't feel the need to hide this fact anymore. This just doesn't make sense on any level. From my understanding of the first game, all the enemies that you faced were genetically engineered to fulfill their roles (and yes, I do remember the game making a point that their eyes seemed reptilian and that is why they wear sunglasses), but you can't just take off genetic engineering and return to the base form. That just doesn't work. Maybe some of the snake people's code is in the thin man, but it's been so heavily modified that it is clearly a new species and would need to be birthed as that species. I didn't accept this nonsensical interpretation of genetics when Star Trek did it and I'm not going to accept it now.

 

[Chimpzy]

Ghostwire Tokyo

Hated it. I'll admit I got it purely based on the yokai/Tokyo urban legend premise and visual style, and didn't do much research, so perhaps I can only blame myself. I sort of liked it at first, but then I got to the game proper and the core gameplay turned out to be just "go to place, beat enemies, unlock more places to do the same. It's a fucking Ubisoft open world. I can barely tolerate this kind of open world provided there's some gameplay element to immediately hook me in, but this game did not grab me. I got turned off so hard, promptly uninstalled it, and because I was less than 2 hours in, got a refund.

Tho I must say it's the first game I played where I feel the ray-tracing actually makes a noticeable difference. Having those reflections adds a nicely atmospheric element to the wet neon-drenched urban streets.

 

[meiam]

What a strange and confusing premise for the sequel. Like, XCOM: Enemy Unknown wasn't really that difficult a game, and really, it's just bad writing to invalidate all the work the player did to win. But, from what I just saw it seems pretty clear that the writer is just phoning it in for this one.

Apparently the 'true form' of the Thin Men is... a snake person? And they just don't feel the need to hide this fact anymore. This just doesn't make sense on any level. From my understanding of the first game, all the enemies that you faced were genetically engineered to fulfill their roles (and yes, I do remember the game making a point that their eyes seemed reptilian and that is why they wear sunglasses), but you can't just take off genetic engineering and return to the base form. That just doesn't work. Maybe some of the snake people's code is in the thin man, but it's been so heavily modified that it is clearly a new species and would need to be birthed as that species. I didn't accept this nonsensical interpretation of genetics when Star Trek did it and I'm not going to accept it now.

I never found XCOM story to really be interesting so it didn't really bother me, but yeah it really felt like they wanted it to be a sequel for commercial reason and just had to come up with some non sense to make it work. The only way to make a true sequel to XCOM:EU would be if you took the fight to them in teh alien world (which would be really different) or if earth get invaded again, which would just feel like re heated non sense. The one thing I headcannon for myself about the alien invasion is that it was directed by some bored incompetent bureaucrat that didn't bother to check if the planet they were invading that week was advanced enough to be a threat and that's why it takes them so long to send in the serious muscle because he was constantly trying to hide his failure from his superior.

Ghostwire Tokyo

Hated it. I'll admit I got it purely based on the yokai/Tokyo urban legend premise and visual style, and didn't do much research, so perhaps I can only blame myself. I sort of liked it at first, but then I got to the game proper and the core gameplay turned out to be just "go to place, beat enemies, unlock more places to do the same. It's a fucking Ubisoft open world. I can barely tolerate this kind of open world provided there's some gameplay element to immediately hook me in, but this game did not grab me. I got turned off so hard, promptly uninstalled it, and because I was less than 2 hours in, got a refund.

Tho I must say it's the first game I played where I feel the ray-tracing actually makes a noticeable difference. Having those reflections adds a nicely atmospheric element to the wet neon-drenched urban streets.

I was literally coming to this thread to ask if anybody played this to get some impression. That's disappointing to hear, some of the preview made it look like an immersive sim (something shock, Prey 2016, deus ex) and I was interested because of that, but if its really just another ubisoft collectathon then naw pass for now, maybe grab when it's -75%.

 

[Bartholen]

Just started it, yeah its miss-fest for the first couple of hours, it gets better over time as you build your character well and their hit chance increase along with them getting more attacks every turn, but it'll never be anything more than maybe hitting 1/3 of attack (unless you make a really broken build, but you might as well play on easy then).

The -4 to enemy engage in melee isn't explained but there's a feat to negate it, so I guess that's the closest thing to the game telling you about it. The number that appear above a target when you attack is (Your roll v The number you need to get to hit). To hit you need to get above the target armor class once your modifier are taken into account. So let say your character gets +5 to attack roll and the enemy has 23 AC, you need to roll 19+ to be able to hit. So if your character roll, let say, 15, you'll see (15 v 19) and know that its a miss. The reason why it changes every attack is varied but the main one is going to be because different character have different bonus, so say another character attack and they have +10 to attack roll, you'd see (15 v 13).

I don't know how much you care about picking exact path for your character, but I'd look a bit into the various mythic path and how to achieve them, by default you have 2 paths (demon and angel) but there's actually 10 different paths and some of them are very arbitrary in their requirement so if you don't know ahead of time how to trigger them you may very well miss them and be forced into a path you might not want.

Maybe it's a remnant of the real time with pause system, which I absolutely despise with every fiber of my being. I can't help but wonder if the abysmal hit rate is there to offset the fact that if hits were more consistent the combat would be an incomprehensible clusterfuck that would move too fast and too much would be happening to keep up. But playing it on turn-based mode is just incredibly tedious and sluggish as characters just stand in place whiffing their hits over and over and over and over again.

 

[Worgen]

What a strange and confusing premise for the sequel. Like, XCOM: Enemy Unknown wasn't really that difficult a game, and really, it's just bad writing to invalidate all the work the player did to win. But, from what I just saw it seems pretty clear that the writer is just phoning it in for this one.

Apparently the 'true form' of the Thin Men is... a snake person? And they just don't feel the need to hide this fact anymore. This just doesn't make sense on any level. From my understanding of the first game, all the enemies that you faced were genetically engineered to fulfill their roles (and yes, I do remember the game making a point that their eyes seemed reptilian and that is why they wear sunglasses), but you can't just take off genetic engineering and return to the base form. That just doesn't work. Maybe some of the snake people's code is in the thin man, but it's been so heavily modified that it is clearly a new species and would need to be birthed as that species. I didn't accept this nonsensical interpretation of genetics when Star Trek did it and I'm not going to accept it now.

Yeah, but.

 

[Dalisclock]

Yeah, but.

Snek?
Snek!
Sneeeeeeeek!

I find it telling that snek escort clubs are canon in chimera squad. I'm also not shocked in the least.

 

[Old_Hunter_77]

In a bit of a holding pattern, having acquired that sweet sweet Demon's Souls platinum trophy and waiting to see what the new month of Play Station + brings to see if I'm inspired to try something new.
Re-playing AC Valhalla with sound when I want some easy pretty story action and on mute when listening to podcasts and just want to plug away at collectibles and raids.

 

[Casual Shinji]

Yeah, but.

 

[meiam]

Maybe it's a remnant of the real time with pause system, which I absolutely despise with every fiber of my being. I can't help but wonder if the abysmal hit rate is there to offset the fact that if hits were more consistent the combat would be an incomprehensible clusterfuck that would move too fast and too much would be happening to keep up. But playing it on turn-based mode is just incredibly tedious and sluggish as characters just stand in place whiffing their hits over and over and over and over again.

The core system is lifted pretty much straight from the pen and paper version, although they might have messed with the number and so the enemy have more AC. Part of the issue is that attacks are very deadly, ie your character will die in maybe 3 hit, with a crit often able to one shoot character. So if they're not avoiding almost every hit most fight would be done by turn 3.

The number of attack you do everyturn will increase quite a lot, at level 2 my character is currently doing 4 attack and by end game he should do more than 10, so this will help "average out" most attack.

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

Ghostwire Tokyo

Hated it. I'll admit I got it purely based on the yokai/Tokyo urban legend premise and visual style, and didn't do much research, so perhaps I can only blame myself. I sort of liked it at first, but then I got to the game proper and the core gameplay turned out to be just "go to place, beat enemies, unlock more places to do the same. It's a fucking Ubisoft open world. I can barely tolerate this kind of open world provided there's some gameplay element to immediately hook me in, but this game did not grab me. I got turned off so hard, promptly uninstalled it, and because I was less than 2 hours in, got a refund.

Tho I must say it's the first game I played where I feel the ray-tracing actually makes a noticeable difference. Having those reflections adds a nicely atmospheric element to the wet neon-drenched urban streets.

Game Informer’s review piqued my interest in it a bit with this commentary -


What the story does, however, is give narrative justification for why Shibuya is empty (save for those spooky ghosts). And I think this is one of the more interesting parts of Ghostwire; its open-world take on Shibuya is a fantastic recreation of architectural density – minus the people. Not only are buildings tightly packed together, but they feel massive in the way real skyscrapers do. Thanks in no small part to Ghostwire being in first-person, this is immediately apparent. I loved craning my neck up at the buildings around me, feeling the game's sense of space and scale. That scale extends far outward, too, as it captures Tokyo's urban sprawl; crossing the map takes time, though I rarely felt bored walking around like a virtual tourist.

Ghostwire is obsessed with the idea of urban isolation, that even in a city where millions of people live on top of each other, you can feel alone. Ghostwire achieves this feeling by completely taking people away. There's an eerie quality to walking around a city without its population, knowing there's no one to talk to beyond yourself and the (literal, in this case) voice in your head. More often than not, I found myself wishing there were people – or even just one friendly person – I could find on Ghostwire's streets. Not because I was ever bored walking through an empty world, but rather its sense of isolation and loneliness was incredibly effective and haunting.

And I genuinely mean haunting. Ghostwire takes every chance it has to sell its spiritual apocalypse. Occasionally, the game will mess with you. Walking around, I'd see the painted lines on the street waving in the wind as if they were thin pieces of paper. Or I'd turn a corner and realize that, in just maybe one alley or one small city block, the rainfall was now blood, soaking the surrounding buildings and street in a dark, sludgy red. More dramatically, at key story elements, the world breaks around you. In fantastic set-piece moments, levels twist, warp, and change seamlessly before your eyes, as if M.C. Escher has taken over as art director. It's endlessly impressive and fun to look at, and I loved using photo mode to capture the bizarreness surrounding me.

Recalling classic rapture imagery, personal belongings litter the map exactly where they were left – you can't take your purse or cellphone with you to the afterlife. Most strikingly, clothes are everywhere. Especially in high-population areas, there are often vast seas of garments littering the floor where people vanished. It's imagery like this that hammers home not just the scale of the game's rapture but how terrifying something like this would be. Add that the city is still functioning – lights are on, speaker systems play, you can go into the subway or inside convenient stores – and Ghostwire has a world not hampered by its lack of things to do but strengthened by its commitment to being desolate.


It’s kind of a shame the gameplay wasn’t as fleshed out as the setting seems to be.

 

[Chimpzy]

Game Informer’s review piqued my interest in it a bit with this commentary -


What the story does, however, is give narrative justification for why Shibuya is empty (save for those spooky ghosts). And I think this is one of the more interesting parts of Ghostwire; its open-world take on Shibuya is a fantastic recreation of architectural density – minus the people. Not only are buildings tightly packed together, but they feel massive in the way real skyscrapers do. Thanks in no small part to Ghostwire being in first-person, this is immediately apparent. I loved craning my neck up at the buildings around me, feeling the game's sense of space and scale. That scale extends far outward, too, as it captures Tokyo's urban sprawl; crossing the map takes time, though I rarely felt bored walking around like a virtual tourist.

Ghostwire is obsessed with the idea of urban isolation, that even in a city where millions of people live on top of each other, you can feel alone. Ghostwire achieves this feeling by completely taking people away. There's an eerie quality to walking around a city without its population, knowing there's no one to talk to beyond yourself and the (literal, in this case) voice in your head. More often than not, I found myself wishing there were people – or even just one friendly person – I could find on Ghostwire's streets. Not because I was ever bored walking through an empty world, but rather its sense of isolation and loneliness was incredibly effective and haunting.

And I genuinely mean haunting. Ghostwire takes every chance it has to sell its spiritual apocalypse. Occasionally, the game will mess with you. Walking around, I'd see the painted lines on the street waving in the wind as if they were thin pieces of paper. Or I'd turn a corner and realize that, in just maybe one alley or one small city block, the rainfall was now blood, soaking the surrounding buildings and street in a dark, sludgy red. More dramatically, at key story elements, the world breaks around you. In fantastic set-piece moments, levels twist, warp, and change seamlessly before your eyes, as if M.C. Escher has taken over as art director. It's endlessly impressive and fun to look at, and I loved using photo mode to capture the bizarreness surrounding me.

Recalling classic rapture imagery, personal belongings litter the map exactly where they were left – you can't take your purse or cellphone with you to the afterlife. Most strikingly, clothes are everywhere. Especially in high-population areas, there are often vast seas of garments littering the floor where people vanished. It's imagery like this that hammers home not just the scale of the game's rapture but how terrifying something like this would be. Add that the city is still functioning – lights are on, speaker systems play, you can go into the subway or inside convenient stores – and Ghostwire has a world not hampered by its lack of things to do but strengthened by its commitment to being desolate.


It’s kind of a shame the gameplay wasn’t as fleshed out as the setting seems to be.

I know the spoilered bits aren't your words, but I feel it actually pretty apt to spend 4 paragraphs describing the solitidunous atmosphere of the game, and then only a single sentence on its gameplay. Tho technically you are not entirely alone, you regularly run into an errant doggo (shiba inu, of course). And yes, you can absolutely pet the doggos. Which was coincidentally the most excited I ever got playing. So humdrum

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

I know the spoilered bits aren't your words, but I feel it actually pretty apt to spend 4 paragraphs describing the solitidunous atmosphere of the game, and then only a single sentence on its gameplay. Tho technically you are not entirely alone, you regularly run into an errant doggo (shiba inu, of course). And yes, you can absolutely pet the doggos. Which was coincidentally the most excited I ever got playing. So humdrum

Oh they go into more gameplay criticism too later on about it being repetitive, derivative and clunky but yeah; the convincing setting seemed to go a long way in their opinion.

 

[Ezekiel]

Nearing the end of Ocarina of Time again. Have 18 1/2 hearts and 82 skulltullas. Played it several times but never completed it completely. Will try this time, even though it gets pretty boring towards the 100 percent point.

Water Temple is the best dungeon. Sad that's the one that gets so much hate when many others are structurally blander.

The game has some 4:3 things baked in, even outside of the obvious pre-rendered backgrounds. I don't know of a way to force 4:3 in this "port."

 

[Kyrian007]

Nearing the end of Ocarina of Time again. Have 18 1/2 hearts and 82 skulltullas. Played it several times but never completed it completely. Will try this time, even though it gets pretty boring towards the 100 percent point.

Water Temple is the best dungeon. Sad that's the one that gets so much hate when many others are structurally blander.

The game has some 4:3 things baked in, even outside of the obvious pre-rendered backgrounds. I don't know of a way to force 4:3 in this "port."

I think a lot of the hate for the water temple may have been people playing it as kids. OOT came out when I was in college, and I didn't notice any real difference in the difficulty from one temple to the next. There was a noticeable spike around becoming adult Link for the first time, then difficulty went down from there... as you get more and more hearts and equipment and more familiar with enemy patterns. It had a pretty similar difficulty curve to the previous Zelda games... and most of the Zelda games since.

I purchased my first new game of 2022 yesterday. Weird West. I've been waiting for this one for a while now... and I'm kind of torn so far. Basically they threw a Deadlands like plot at an attempt to marry XCOM like gameplay with Active Time Battle. Like the pretty terrible hybrid of turn based and active time that later Final Fantasy titles seem to try and adopt. And... I don't know. Right now it isn't clicking. It is screaming for something like Fallout's VATS, and it does feature a slow time perk that does make it bearable... but they need it free (so it can be a part of every build) and available right from the start. Because right now you just save scum and quickload when things go south... although I've had some pretty funny "plans go wrong in hilarious Wile E Coyote moments" so far. So maybe that's a feature not a flaw. Story, good for Weird West Deadlands style so far. It is actually a anthology story, so it is 5 (or maybe more I can't see yet) separate tales. A little like the most recent western I've seen, the Cohen Brothers Ballad of Buster Scruggs. I'll have more to say about it as I've only gone a couple of hours in so far. If the combat ever "clicks" for me it will be an enthusiastic thumbs up from me, as biased as I am as I have wanted to see an official Deadlands video game since I first encountered the tabletop game in 1996 and only have had "spiritual" versions along the way.

 

[Worgen]

Still working my way through Elden Ring, I think I'm getting pretty close to the end, well, I could just run to and face the final boss now I think, but there is more stuff I want to do.

Started playing Paladins again too since they brought back the daily rewards and there are a ton of new champs.

Also got Princess Farmer, its so cute, its a pretty chill match 3 with a twist and a very cute plot.

 

[Dalisclock]

I think a lot of the hate for the water temple may have been people playing it as kids. OOT came out when I was in college, and I didn't notice any real difference in the difficulty from one temple to the next. There was a noticeable spike around becoming adult Link for the first time, then difficulty went down from there... as you get more and more hearts and equipment and more familiar with enemy patterns. It had a pretty similar difficulty curve to the previous Zelda games... and most of the Zelda games since.

I purchased my first new game of 2022 yesterday. Weird West. I've been waiting for this one for a while now... and I'm kind of torn so far. Basically they threw a Deadlands like plot at an attempt to marry XCOM like gameplay with Active Time Battle. Like the pretty terrible hybrid of turn based and active time that later Final Fantasy titles seem to try and adopt. And... I don't know. Right now it isn't clicking. It is screaming for something like Fallout's VATS, and it does feature a slow time perk that does make it bearable... but they need it free (so it can be a part of every build) and available right from the start. Because right now you just save scum and quickload when things go south... although I've had some pretty funny "plans go wrong in hilarious Wile E Coyote moments" so far. So maybe that's a feature not a flaw. Story, good for Weird West Deadlands style so far. It is actually a anthology story, so it is 5 (or maybe more I can't see yet) separate tales. A little like the most recent western I've seen, the Cohen Brothers Ballad of Buster Scruggs. I'll have more to say about it as I've only gone a couple of hours in so far. If the combat ever "clicks" for me it will be an enthusiastic thumbs up from me, as biased as I am as I have wanted to see an official Deadlands video game since I first encountered the tabletop game in 1996 and only have had "spiritual" versions along the way.

I played OOT 3DS emulated a few years ago and I found the Water Temple annoying but not the 9th level of hell some people made it out to be for years. And I get it that the 3DS remake cleaned up some of the issues with the interface and such, but maybe also that I was playing as an adult in my 30's whose been playing the vidya games since age 5 or something so I wasn't as impressed by it's awfulness. And honestly, I still think the Iron Keep in Dark Souls 2 is far worse as far as That One Level is concerned.

I hope Wierd West ends up being good because I like a lot of the ideas in the game so as long as the game is at least good I'll probably play it someday.

 

[Ezekiel]

Had to use rumble to complete Ocarina of Time, because a lot of the secrets are the kinds you just walk over unknowingly. I dislike rumble, so I normally never use it. It's a DS4. DS4Windows' rumble settings are pretty bad. Often it will keep rumbling for no apparent reason. One of the dumbest controller features ever. Why would the vibrations go to my hands? Usually noisy too, and it's nearly always powerful when it should be light.

 

[BrawlMan]

I tested SFV with the new update. Played around for a bit in Survival and tested out the cel-shade filter that's been added. Looks pretty good. I am not touching the pixel filter. V-Shift is awesome when you know how to use it or get practice in.

 

[Drathnoxis]

Had to use rumble to complete Ocarina of Time, because a lot of the secrets are the kinds you just walk over unknowingly. I dislike rumble, so I normally never use it. It's a DS4. DS4Windows' rumble settings are pretty bad. Often it will keep rumbling for no apparent reason. One of the dumbest controller features ever. Why would the vibrations go to my hands? Usually noisy too, and it's nearly always powerful when it should be light.

I never had a rumble pack for the N64 so I could only dream about how the Stone of Agony might enhance the game.

Nearing the end of Ocarina of Time again. Have 18 1/2 hearts and 82 skulltullas. Played it several times but never completed it completely. Will try this time, even though it gets pretty boring towards the 100 percent point.

Water Temple is the best dungeon. Sad that's the one that gets so much hate when many others are structurally blander.

The game has some 4:3 things baked in, even outside of the obvious pre-rendered backgrounds. I don't know of a way to force 4:3 in this "port."

A fair bit of the hate comes from the fact that you need to go into the start menu frequently to equip/unequip the iron boots. It never really bothered me as a kid, but I could see how that is annoying. Also the Dark Link fight is pretty terrible. He's nearly impossible to beat with a sword if you use Z-targeting, and not using it is antithetical to the entire combat system. Using the Megaton hammer is borderline broken, and almost looks like a glitch.