What are you currently playing?

Gergar12

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I finally got Nioh 2 on PC despite the game being never on sale which it is right now. Currently downloading it. I want Elden Ring for PC so badly after seeing Tik Tok videos of it, but it refuses to go on sale on JUST PC, it's on sale for consoles.
 

Drathnoxis

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Got a couple of things in the Steam sale.

First is the PC port of Disgaea: Hour of Darkness, the first in the series. As expected it's frighteningly deep, but it's a pretty approachable SRPG nonetheless. I'm not very far into it at all yet, and I'm sure I'll be playing it for many hours. Also, nice port, haven't seen any graphical bugs at all.
I had the DS port and I feel that portable is where the series belongs. I even eventually did all optional bosses and stuff, which is something I never did for D2.

Does the PC port have the Prinny commentary? Or was that exclusive to the DS one?
 

BrawlMan

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I am seeing where some reviewers are coming from with GORE. There are some weird and unnecessary difficulty spikes within the campaign. I hate timed missions or areas where you have limited movement. Two of the levels I had to bump down to Easy, so I could get through them. Hopefully, the game won't have many more irregularities. I like the game, but there are parts that already frustrate me or I wonder why they needed two different timed missions. I just wanna shoot stuff. This is the part of old-school design that is not needed, and was thrown to the way side for a reason. I play more tomorrow.
 

NerfedFalcon

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I've made a disturbing revelation about myself in Overwatch 2: Despite the fact that I know full well you're supposed to switch heroes to counter the enemy team or synergize with your own, I actually have more fun insta-locking Hanzo and never swapping off of him, and I think my win rate is better too. And I'm not even a very good Hanzo.
 
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09philj

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I had the DS port and I feel that portable is where the series belongs. I even eventually did all optional bosses and stuff, which is something I never did for D2.

Does the PC port have the Prinny commentary? Or was that exclusive to the DS one?
Wiki says that's a DS exclusive feature. (And only available once you've beaten the game)
 

Casual Shinji

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Replaying GoW: Ragnarok on GMGOW and so far it has not been too brutal yet. I'm actually dying far less to enemies early on than on my first playthrough on No Mercy.
 
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BrawlMan

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No, it's cold. I'm guessing NG+ will be patched in later down the line, along with photo mode and skippable cutscenes.
They've learned nothing from last time. Thank God I got other games to play. For their sake, it won't take them a couple of months to get the new game plus mode out again.
 
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Casual Shinji

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I am finding myself enjoying GoW: Ragnarok quite a bit more the second time around. I have a super solid grasp on the combat from the start now, and I can relax and enjoy the story for what it is, when on my first run I was kinda miffed it wasn't hitting me as hard as GoW '18. Also, knowing what's what, certain character behaviour reveals a hilarious bit of character writing for Odin.
 
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BrawlMan

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I finished Scumland Outer Sanctum, Scumland Inner Sanctum, and all of the Hong Kong stages in GG GORE. By far, most of the Hong Kong stages are the best. I didn't care for Part 1 of HK Back Alleys. Fighting around a whole bunch of shipping containers ain't the most fun and makes me wonder why anyone still uses this video game cliche. Thankfully, it does not last long. What I like about the HK levels are they show what's best about this game and franchise. The wide-open spaces and neon lights and signs are all prepped for destruction and mayhem.

The end boss of HK is the psychopathic sword guy. One of the four top leading the Raven Clan. Before you fight him, you fight a kung-fu who looks liked he walked straight out of Tekken, and he is awesome. Sword Guy's first form ain't that hard, but the second phase will throw you into a surprise and killed me once. Once you get the pattern, he's not too bad. Anyone who plays this game, I recommend you upgrade Grave's Bullet Lv. a couple of times, so enemies can die faster. Helps on taking down boss's health meter quickly too. I played as Bunji after that and has sick mechanics different from grave. Too bad he is only playable for the one level. I do find it weird the camera zooms in so close to Bunji when moving with him, and only zooms out when in Burst Mode or activating a Demolition Shot. The same applies to Rose Quartz whenever you get to play as her for one level. A big heads up for you, @Specter Von Baren, should you ever decide to get the game. The next area of stages are in Vietnam.

I will give credit to GORE having the most location variety. Grave is globetrotting all over Southeast Asia. I will play more tomorrow after work is done.
 

Drathnoxis

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Ok, finished Zone of Enders: The 2nd Runner. It wasn't too long, took me around 10 hours, that's what the clear time said anyway. Felt way longer. It was so difficult to control, mainly because of the awful lock on system. The camera is always fixed directly on the lock on target and because you and your enemy are constantly dashing around the camera is always swinging madly about. Locking onto a specific enemy is very difficult, you can either move the right stick to move to the next enemy or click LT to target the nearest enemy, but if you want to lock onto, say, the mummyhead on the edge of the screen that can fire a laser that will drain all your health in around 3 seconds you are going to be screwing around for way too long (all while the camera lurches around every time you switch targets). You can also disable the lock-on and move freely, which would be great for dodging and repositioning, but you need to hold LT for around 2 seconds, which is so long as to make it useless. None of this would really matter except the game is very difficult (Edit: So much is made in cutscenes of how powerful your mech is and how it's the equal to the big bad's mech, and all of it is BS. Your mech fires spitballs and has armor made of cardboard.) and often throws hordes of mixed enemies at you that you need to keep track of and avoid, which is impossible because you can't control the camera. It also doesn't help that you will be constantly stunlocked by enemies. I just found it incredibly frustrating to play.

You get a bunch of sub-weapons, most of which are useless and use way too much meter. Worst of which is the vector cannon, that takes around 10 seconds to fire, and you will never use it outside of 2 specific points in the game where it's mandatory to progress. It's not all bad because the second weapon you get, the gauntlet, knocks back enemies and does a ton of damage if they hit a wall, and barely uses any energy. So I pretty much just spammed that the entire game.

The game also has escort missions, which are pretty much the worst thing ever. The characters will constantly nag you, and complain that they are taking damage. Look, I can't help it! The enemies respawn and beeline toward you, what am I supposed to do? The extreme of this is when you have the big battle mission. There are around 30 friendlies you need to protect and heal vs a couple hundred enemies. Everybody is constantly whining about taking damage, or needing to be revived, or saying that there's too many enemies and they need help killing them. I can only be in one place at a time, you need to look after yourselves! Thankfully it wasn't very difficult and you can still progress if most of the friendlies die, it was just kind of ridiculous. (Edit: forgot to mention the fact that you can also easily lock onto the allies you are supposed to be escorting and start attacking them instead of the enemy, very annoying.)

All this might be forgiven if the story was good, but honestly, it was really obtuse. I spent most of the game just barely grasping what we were doing and why. Most of this is the fault of the translation, I'm sure, because when characters spoke to each other, half the time it just didn't make any sense. Here's an example from near the end of the game between the protagonist (Dingo) and the female lead (Ken).

7:46
Dingo (unprompted): "Use power for the right things. At least for the things that you believe in"
Ken: "So who's secondhand?"
Dingo: "Your father."

??? What? What is this even supposed to mean? It sounds like he's insulting her father, but he's not because her father was one of his comrades that was betrayed and killed by the main villain years ago. You can tell the voice actors didn't understand the script any better than I do, because the line delivery is really off all through the game.

I wasn't really expecting much because I didn't enjoy the first game either. I don't remember the first too much, but I do think the sequel is an improvement. It looks better, and I seem to remember the first having a lot of repetitive and tedious missions. If you are really into mech stories you might get more out of it. I'm not really too big on giant robots so it kind of left me cold.

One last thing I want to mention. All of the robots have these massive codpieces and it's really distracting. Even the girl robots. I think that's where the cockpit (pun) is, but why would you design it that way? It's so weird.


 
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meiam

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Ok, finished Zone of Enders: The 2nd Runner. It wasn't too long, took me around 10 hours, that's what the clear time said anyway. Felt way longer. It was so difficult to control, mainly because of the awful lock on system. The camera is always fixed directly on the lock on target and because you and your enemy are constantly dashing around the camera is always swinging madly about. Locking onto a specific enemy is very difficult, you can either move the right stick to move to the next enemy or click LT to target the nearest enemy, but if you want to lock onto, say, the mummyhead on the edge of the screen that can fire a laser that will drain all your health in around 3 seconds you are going to be screwing around for way too long (all while the camera lurches around every time you switch targets). You can also disable the lock-on and move freely, which would be great for dodging and repositioning, but you need to hold LT for around 2 seconds, which is so long as to make it useless. None of this would really matter except the game is very difficult and often throws hordes of mixed enemies at you that you need to keep track of and avoid, which is impossible because you can't control the camera. It also doesn't help that you will be constantly stunlocked by enemies. I just found it incredibly frustrating to play.

You get a bunch of sub-weapons, most of which are useless and use way to much meter. Worst of which is the vector cannon, that takes around 10 seconds to fire, and you will never use it outside of 2 specific points in the game where it's mandatory to progress. It's not all bad because the second weapon you get, the gauntlet, knocks back enemies and does a ton of damage if they hit a wall, and barely uses any energy. So I pretty much just spammed that the entire game.

The game also has escort missions, which are pretty much the worst thing ever. The characters will constantly nag you, and complain that they are taking damage. Look, I can't help it! The enemies respawn and beeline toward you, what am I supposed to do? The extreme of this is when you have the big battle mission. There are around 30 friendlies you need to protect and heal vs a couple hundred enemies. Everybody is constantly whining about taking damage, or needing to be revived, or saying that there's too many enemies and they need help killing them. I can only be in one place at a time, you need to look after yourselves! Thankfully it wasn't very difficult and you can still progress if most of the friendlies die, it was just kind of ridiculous.

All this might be forgiven if the story was good, but honestly, it was really obtuse. I spent most of the game just barely grasping what we were doing and why. Most of this is the fault of the translation, I'm sure, because when characters spoke to each other, half the time it just didn't make any sense. Here's an example from near the end of the game between the protagonist (Dingo) and the female lead (Ken).

7:46
Dingo (unprompted): "Use power for the right things. At least for the things that you believe in"
Ken: "So who's secondhand?"
Dingo: "Your father."

??? What? What is this even supposed to mean? It sounds like he's insulting her father, but he's not because her father was one of his comrades that was betrayed and killed by the main villain years ago. You can tell the voice actor's didn't understand the script any better than I do, because the line delivery is really off all through the game.

I wasn't really expecting much because I didn't enjoy the first game either. I don't remember the first too much, but I do think the sequel is an improvement. It looks better, and I seem to remember the first having a lot of repetitive and tedious missions. If you are really into mech stories you might get more out of it. I'm not really too big on giant robots so it kind of left me cold.

One last thing I want to mention. All of the robots have these massive codpieces and it's really distracting. Even the girl robots. I think that's where the cockpit (pun) is, but why would you design it that way? It's so weird.


lol I think ZOE 2 has one of the best control scheme of any game and is the closest I ever felt to playing game where the control don't get in the way of me playing it. Sub weapon are also devastatingly powerful, the gauntlet is super cheap to use and break most encounter in tight space and homing missile just let you clear any encounter almost immidiatly (although it drain all your energy), vector cannon really isn't meant to be use in game (although there's a few time you can actually do so but its not viable). Zero shift is so much fun to use, sadly its given to you in the last hour, which isn't that great since you spend most of it figthing the same boss fight over and over again.

Story is pretty simple, but the translation is wonky at time.

The cod piece are a bit weird (on the kits version you can easily not use them), but it gives the suits a unique look so I don't really mind it, and anubis is such a cool looking mech.
 
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The Rogue Wolf

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I noticed that Painkiller: Black (the original and Battle Out of Hell) were on sale for $2, so I snagged it. I'm not really sure it aged well- this is classic room-to-room arena shooting at its most basic- but it was the best example of the genre, polished to a shine with memorable weapons and varied (in appearance, anyway) enemies. Getting to play in 16:9 at 120FPS does give it a new kind of feel.
 

Drathnoxis

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lol I think ZOE 2 has one of the best control scheme of any game and is the closest I ever felt to playing game where the control don't get in the way of me playing it. Sub weapon are also devastatingly powerful, the gauntlet is super cheap to use and break most encounter in tight space and homing missile just let you clear any encounter almost immidiatly (although it drain all your energy), vector cannon really isn't meant to be use in game (although there's a few time you can actually do so but its not viable). Zero shift is so much fun to use, sadly its given to you in the last hour, which isn't that great since you spend most of it figthing the same boss fight over and over again.
I was playing the remaster on Xbox 360, so it's possible there were some differences from the original.
 
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hanselthecaretaker

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Meanwhile in Ragnarok, the whole sequence from Atreus' dream with Angrboda to the backyard brawl with Freya was pretty exceptional. Sony can't help themselves with the slow walk n talk stuff though. At this point I think I'd just prefer a non-playable cinematic for that stuff so I can kick back a bit and have a drink or something lol.
 
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Sony can't help themselves with the slow walk n talk stuff though. At this point I think I'd just prefer a non-playable cinematic for that stuff so I can kick back a bit and have a drink or something lol.

It's what makes these game a pain to do replays. There is no NG+ again, and we have for another update to skip most cut-scenes and some walking sections...again.
 
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hanselthecaretaker

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It's what makes these game a pain to do replays. There is no NG+ again, and we have for another update to skip most cut-scenes and some walking sections...again.
UC3 desert walk was kind of the most blatant example that seemed to help kick off this trend. Opening of MGSV hospital crawl was like the exorbitant entry fee to the rest of the game. I had to replay it a couple times for two trophies towards Platinum and it was about as fun as being constipated.
 
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UUGGGHHH.... I hit a roadblock. What is with people thinking forced platforming in 3rd person shooter is a good idea? In stage 19, you play Rose Quartz, I am not liking it! Her brawling controls are awkward, the platforming doesn't work and has horrible collision, and the checkpoints suck! I might trade this game in for Evil West or something, because I don't have the patience for shit like this anymore! I really hate to say that, but I might be done with Gungrave GORE! Why did anybody think this was a good idea?!
 
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