If it makes you feel any better it topped at least one poll of hundreds of hardcore roguelike players. So within the genre it sounds highly respected.
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What are you currently playing?
- Thread starter Nick Calandra
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Ironically that section is actually more of a slog than it was in Half-Life, despite Black Mesa's whole goal of streamlining or changing the annoying bits.
- Apr 1, 2009
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Their goal was to make it interesting, what makes it a slog is it feels like Zen is now almost half the game.
Sure, but I'm pretty sure Rogue Wolf is talking about a particular section of Xen.
I'm still mixed on it. I don't love it the way I do Nethack. In a lot of ways it's a lot easier to play due to a lot of convenience features, like autoexplore, but on the other hand if playing the game is something you want to automate, isn't that a problem? It also offers a lot less freedom than Nethack which definitely makes it more challenging. I gave more detailed initial impressions a few weeks back and I'd still stand by them I think.
Start with one part being disappointed by the most recent Assassin's Creed, add a re-watching the film Master and Commander: Far Side of the World, and stir in currently reading Tai-Pan (a story large on or about 19th century ships and naval conflict) and you get a perfect recipe for wanting to replay:
Assassin's Creed: Black Flag
a-hoy me hardies
Assassin's Creed: Black Flag
a-hoy me hardies
Chapter 7 in The Quarry. Ugh, it’s slow. So slow I could barely stay awake. After a slight peak in suspense to cap off chapter 6, the next chapter pulls a “what happun?” with the Prologue’s main characters holed up in a jail cell. I guess it helps flesh out what little story there’s been so far in this story game. Really, most of the plot development in the first half of the game has been, idiot camp counselors have their little bonfire interrupted by a few monsters. That’s it. There are attempts at building interpersonal relationships between half of the cast, but it’s assumed to be of little relevance until the end. The game notes this with a “path updated” icon. It’s funniest when preceded by an unintentional QTE slip up. I opted to try playing on DualSense and navigation feels better but QTEs are better served by a keyboard.
Played through the Spyro Reignited Trilogy these past couple of weeks.
It's been a blast playing these games again with updated graphics. It's quite nice to see how Insomniac evolved their games as the series went on, adding and subtracting things with every game.
The relatively simpler industry during the PS1 days...
It's been a blast playing these games again with updated graphics. It's quite nice to see how Insomniac evolved their games as the series went on, adding and subtracting things with every game.
The relatively simpler industry during the PS1 days...
And Metroid Prime Remastered is completed.
It's just as fun as I remembered, although with better controls everything felt easy But at the same time, some areas were tedious and too long to get through just like how I remembered.
It's just as fun as I remembered, although with better controls everything felt easy But at the same time, some areas were tedious and too long to get through just like how I remembered.
Finished 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim. I liked it overall. Like I said before I had a lot of trouble playing it for long sessions, but I managed to get kind of into it when most of the character stories were wrapping up. The combat was really easy for the most part and I S-ranked probably 85% of the levels on my first attempt on the hardest difficulty. Except the last level, which I got D-rank on after 2 restarts. My playstyle was to immediately overpower threats as they appeared which really didn't work in a 5 minute siege, probably needed to make use of a few more defensive abilities maybe considering my best long range offense was also the only character with EMP. Not playing the 10 bonus stages that unlocked after completing the game, the RTS isn't that much fun. They should have been available earlier because there were far too many story sections compared to gameplay levels and I could have used them to break things up a bit more.
I found the story really interesting, but I feel like it just went one twist too far. The plot is very complex and interwoven and the characters are all really good and well developed and likeable. Most of the plot twists manage to shake things up and make you evaluate events in a new light without damaging anything that came before. Even the one I have a problem with doesn't ruin the story or even the ending really. It's still a good ending. It's just insane when you think about it a little.
Ok so they were in a simulation the entire time and only 15 of the 1.2 million population were real people and this is already the worst re-population scheme I've ever heard. How is 15 a sustainable population? Come on, that's not even enough to count as a village. Why is there even a simulation of 20-21 century Japan? They said something about carrying on their culture, but come on. You are going to raise 15 people to be average citizens of a world that no longer exists and that is supposed to somehow prepare them for creating a whole new civilization? It's insane. Why don't you raise them to be good at making a new civilization? It also makes all the plotting and looping and deaths and memories being imposed onto androids not really make any sense. So like, every time the world restarted all the clones would be killed and started from scratch again? Why?! It's insane and makes a lot of the characters motivations look pretty pointless in retrospect. It's definitely one of the better "it was all a dream" endings I've seen, since the virtual world does still exist at the end, but I imagine it would still make the story difficult to engage with on a replay.
Also, every time I saw Morimura in her stupid spandex suit I started laughing.
I found the story really interesting, but I feel like it just went one twist too far. The plot is very complex and interwoven and the characters are all really good and well developed and likeable. Most of the plot twists manage to shake things up and make you evaluate events in a new light without damaging anything that came before. Even the one I have a problem with doesn't ruin the story or even the ending really. It's still a good ending. It's just insane when you think about it a little.
Ok so they were in a simulation the entire time and only 15 of the 1.2 million population were real people and this is already the worst re-population scheme I've ever heard. How is 15 a sustainable population? Come on, that's not even enough to count as a village. Why is there even a simulation of 20-21 century Japan? They said something about carrying on their culture, but come on. You are going to raise 15 people to be average citizens of a world that no longer exists and that is supposed to somehow prepare them for creating a whole new civilization? It's insane. Why don't you raise them to be good at making a new civilization? It also makes all the plotting and looping and deaths and memories being imposed onto androids not really make any sense. So like, every time the world restarted all the clones would be killed and started from scratch again? Why?! It's insane and makes a lot of the characters motivations look pretty pointless in retrospect. It's definitely one of the better "it was all a dream" endings I've seen, since the virtual world does still exist at the end, but I imagine it would still make the story difficult to engage with on a replay.
Also, every time I saw Morimura in her stupid spandex suit I started laughing.
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Entirely a me problem, but I gave up on it after 3 hours, because there appears to be no option to just watch the dialog happen while eating chips. You kept having to walk over to this person, click dialog, dialog stops, click dialog again, walk over to other person click dialog, over and over. The amount of clicking for what amounted to 80% visual novel just drove me insane. Every once in a great while there were meaning dialog options, but of my 3-4 hours it just felt like I was watching a movie that paused and made me hit play every couple seconds. Did I miss something? Was there some way to make the game automate the dialog? I found the story and occasional gameplay compelling I just couldn't stand all the clicking for non-interactive scenes.
No there aren't any real choices, you could just watch a let's play on youtube.
Agree with what you said. Also there's the one girl who is constantly in her gym clothes for contrived reasons.
Also, For me it was the whole "Why do you have a WW2 scenario replete in Japanese Nationalism and bombing raids? Who thinks of that as their ideal historical getaway?"
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Nearing the endgame of The Knight Witch. Turns out you can fast travel between biomes but not between checkpoints. I dunno. Any game where suiciding (or quitting to a menu, then reloading) is more cost-effective than making your way back to a checkpoint feels like it missed its mark.
Another point of aggravation are the ambush rooms. These work essentially as challenge rooms - you have to kill everything within a time limit and without taking damage to get a gold star - and you eventually unlock the means to retry them after you best the ambush the first time. Problem is you have to toil all the way back to each location across the game instead of selecting from a menu or unlocking a challenge hub. And there's no way of restarting a challenge once you've taken damage or failed the time limit other than by finishing off every enemy. So again, it's more cost effective to simply let your character die in order to restart - which you do at the last checkpoint, wherever that was. Could be the room next door, could be several romfuls of enemies away. Again: pointlessly annoying.
Also you might as well not even bother with retrying most ambush rooms until you unlock the ghost gun card, copying it and then spinning the card roulette at a checkpoint until you're dealt two ghost gun cards. Doing this for every attempt gets especially irritating.
Another point of aggravation are the ambush rooms. These work essentially as challenge rooms - you have to kill everything within a time limit and without taking damage to get a gold star - and you eventually unlock the means to retry them after you best the ambush the first time. Problem is you have to toil all the way back to each location across the game instead of selecting from a menu or unlocking a challenge hub. And there's no way of restarting a challenge once you've taken damage or failed the time limit other than by finishing off every enemy. So again, it's more cost effective to simply let your character die in order to restart - which you do at the last checkpoint, wherever that was. Could be the room next door, could be several romfuls of enemies away. Again: pointlessly annoying.
Also you might as well not even bother with retrying most ambush rooms until you unlock the ghost gun card, copying it and then spinning the card roulette at a checkpoint until you're dealt two ghost gun cards. Doing this for every attempt gets especially irritating.
I completely forgot I have Game Pass. Should probably cancel my subscription.
Also most of the girls need to lift their shirt/skirt in order to summon their sentinels.
They changed it from Gold, in which I got 4, then 2 games a month, usually the types of games I can get from Amazon Prime just for being a member. But I built up a pretty good library from Gold over the last 11 years. Now Gold is gone, replaced by "Core?" which sucks. I will, sadly, let this lapse myself.
Tomb Raider: Rise and Shadow... issues.
I just got a new 8K capable HDMI cord and got 4k gaming to work on my new LG Ultragear 4K monitor (1st real gaming monitor I've ever owned. Had 39" TV before that).
Tried Shadow of the Tomb Raider and was going back and forth between between 4K and 1080p to see how much a difference it makes when I must have corrupted something. Game crashes. Unloaded and reloaded. Crash. Did so and used on a different monitor. Crashes. Thankfully, Rise still works and at 1080p! The big difference I'm seeing is my new monitor is OLED and HDR capable. Going from 1080p to 4K makes a tiny difference but I can forgo it to take it easy on my poor GPU, a mere RX6750xt (which I thought wouldn't really do 4K. It does at about 80 FPS. If I continue, may try to cap it when possible at 60 FPS. [ I got more CPU than needed. A Ryzen 9 79003XD while the 7 is considered for good reason to be the sweet spot for gaming CPUs]. I read developers are increasingly leveraging the CPU to help with graphics. I do wonder if that is what is happening here).
Will try on my old 2018 build to see if it still works there ASAP. Not a tragedy as I have it on PS4 and Epic game app as well but if anyone has any idea how to unmess up this game on Steam PC, any advice is appreciated.
EDIT: Something seems to have worked: I tried turning off DX 12 and was able to play without crashing.
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Roguelike mode in TLoU2 is preferred way to access the combat system now. none of having to deal with all that repetitive talking no more - straight to the shooty bangs and stubby hugs it is! Yes yes, I know: messages about cycles of violence received and understood already... gimme that there finely crafted combat system seeing as none of this is affecting the relentless real world cycles of violence anyway.
Somewhat tangential, but I seriously considered buying an Xbox Series X over the holidays, but their new game pass is so expensive and convoluted that I couldn't talk myself into it.
I get the distinct impression that both Sony and Xbox are trying to ride the streaming service train so hard that its going to bite them in the ass when people start "digital" cord cutting because of the exponentially increasing fees. Ill even put $20 on it right now Xbox will start airing unskippable commercials before you launch a digital game in the next 3 years.
Also tangential: I think HBO (now, oddly, MAX) is doing commercials which you can skip for a fee.
Happily, in a world where competition is skyrocketing, we have other options. They're hosing themselves.
Handheld "PCs" can and will, I think, ultimately replace consoles within 10 years. I have about 1,000 Steam games (shame on me!) many of which I can play on my Steamdeck like its a Nintendo switch on TV. Others are entering the market place. Lenovo has a really cool one. Irked enough by it? Buy a laptop and hook it up to your TV if necessary. And more.
I admit, I want to see if PS5 has a pro edition releasing next year. Add a 4 TB SSD and, could be worth getting.