What are you currently playing?

[meiam]

Yeah, I'd heard people talk about the chopper before so I knew it was gonna be rough.

And yeah, the game gives you a really basic AC and plops you into a mission with nothing more then "Have at it, kid". Which I guess is FROM being FROM.

At least there's the checkpoint right before the boss fight so you don't have to run the entire level every time.

I kinda stopped looking at AC stuff around the time it came out because I was waiting for a price drop(or someone to gift to to me on steam). Is there any Lore I really should know from the rest of the series or is it pretty much "People are shitty, things are bleak but hey you get to pliot a giant robot so there's that'"?

Nah, most entry are completely independent of each others (a couple of them are direct sequel, but each new numbered entry is a new universe). In FROM fashion, story is mostly vague and you need to dig and fill a lot of gap if you want to get the full picture, but its not required for enjoyment.

I started playing souldier, a metroidvania. It seems the game got a pretty bad launch because the game overall review is mixed while recent review are very positive. I also strangely enough never heard of it at all, only reason I even know it exist is because I look at every new game that come out on steam, otherwise I would have no idea it even existed.

It got a great looking pixel artstyle and has a great soundtrack. Combat is satisfyingly fast, but with few options in how you play, at the start of the game you pick one of three classes, but sadly it seems like the classes have very little variety themselves, there's no way to switch weapon as far as I can tell from playing a couple of hours. You do get a small skill trees, but the game really take its time unlocking stuff in it and the option are really not interesting (I only unlocked 2 skill in it and I already feel like I've ran out of stuff worth unlocking until I get to high enough level to get new options, so I'm sitting on a bunch of unspent point). I think it would have been much better to just have one character and be able to switch between three weapons (ie the classes). The dungeon are also pretty long, thankfully they have good variety, but your glad to be out of them once you reach the end. Story is a bit strange, you start as a group of medieval soldiers on some daring missions, but before you even take control, everybody die and get rescued by a Valkyrie who send you to a new world, it seems overly complicated for nothing but maybe it'll all tie together?

Oh I also played stranded alien dawn, which is just rimworld except... nothing its just rimworld. Well its in 3D with a realistic art style, so if you couldn't get into rimworld because of the visual, there you go. Sadly it has the same problem as rimworld with your character having no common sense and needing to be babysitted for even the simplest task. The game also has crazy high rate of decay for equipment and tool, so you pretty much need to have a large portion of your workforce just dedicated to churning new cloths, its gets pretty annoying after awhile because you just feel like your running in place and not progressing. Kinda stopped once I was stable enough to not worry about any danger.

 

[Dalisclock]

After a bit of distraction, I finally finished Modern Warfare 2. Great game, still holds up really well, plot's kinda stupid but it's carried by great characters and action. Next on the list is Black Ops, which I remember being pretty unimpressed by when I played it a few years ago; that was the terrible Playstation 3 port, though, so hopefully with it actually looking and running good on PC, I'll be able to enjoy the plot more.

BO I have a wierd relationship with.

It's got some great missions and set pieces, but it's also fucking stupid much of the time and at times it feels really OOT and not in a good way. Yeah, I know it's CoD but it's hard to take it seriously much of the time despite the fact it seems to want me too.

 

[NerfedFalcon]

The fourth fifth mission of Black Ops, at the army base in Vietnam, has the worst checkpoint in any of the CoD games I've played, bar none. It's the one where you start at the top of the hill, and you have to stab the barrels of napalm with a knife, except the enemies are infinitely and relentlessly respawning, there's barely any cover - and none at all around the barrels, meaning you can easily get cut down while trying to interact with them - and, the best part, the objective marker's not even on the barrels, so you have no way of knowing you're supposed to actually run up to them except an easily missable scene of Woods stabbing one with his knife.

That was worse than storming the steps of the Reichstag building in 'Heart of the Reich', and I hope I never, ever have to do that shit again in my life.

 

[XsjadoBlaydette]

Dabbling skull n bone open beta a smidgen, tbh surprised (and a lil disappointed) to see it isn't a complete train wreck from Singapore having to force ubisoft to release the damn product they agreed to make with the nation's taxpayer funds they took long ago.Was hoarding popcorn in anticipation too!

it actually kinda runs, looks and plays ok, perhaps sometimes even - dare I say, surely I can't say, nah I wouldn't say would I? - on the odd occasion fun? Nowhere near the amount of fun it would've been to wallow in another potential lawsuit against Ubi of course, but hey, all those peoples' hard work can at least be given a fairer chance to be appreciated on this timeline, eh? Theoretically? Am I being too positive?

there's no harsh cold realities of political exploitation and oppression of the era in this game however, this is the funsie playtime pirate pool you miserable old gits! So obvs character creation ended with me pirate cap'n a wonderful scrawny women clown (clothing wise) with ginger afro and highest melanins.

Credit where it's due though, this may the the first game where your custom character's afro/curly hair isn't erased to a bland default straight-hair type by equipping any hat. Legitimately been a bugbear of mine for so long, too petty to bring up but too omnipresent to ignore lol.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

I finished getting every trophy in Foamstars, then uninstalled it. I can just never get into these kinds of games. The gameplay gets repetitive, the downtime between winning or losing a match and starting another match is unendurable (victory screen... results screen... progress screen... get dropped back in the hub... go to a versus screen... select what kind of match... agree to everything... wait 2 minutes for matchmaking... get to the waiting room while everyone chooses a character... another half minute showcasing the level...). All to get paired with people who don't know what they're doing and/or paired against people who significantly outrank you because this is their life now. And the rewards are either paltry or paywalled the fuck up.

 

[hanselthecaretaker2]

I finished getting every trophy in Foamstars, then uninstalled it. I can just never get into these kinds of games. The gameplay gets repetitive, the downtime between winning or losing a match and starting another match is unendurable (victory screen... results screen... progress screen... get dropped back in the hub... go to a versus screen... select what kind of match... agree to everything... wait 2 minutes for matchmaking... get to the waiting room while everyone chooses a character... another half minute showcasing the level...). All to get paired with people who don't know what they're doing and/or paired against people who significantly outrank you because this is their life now. And the rewards are either paltry or paywalled the fuck up.

How the Foam did you have the patience to Plat that?

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

How the Foam did you have the patience to Plat that?

There's no Plat and there're only 12 trophies, which you get easily just by playing for a few hours. The biggest challenge was winning a "hard" squad mission (10 waves of tower defense), which I got instantly once I switched over to the Japanese server.

I thought it would take longer. My plan was to play Foamstars until Feb 13 once I can download Ultros. I'm in between games and didn't want to start something that would take much time or investment.

 

[Casual Shinji]

If you combine the right materia for Tifa, she'll play like a Platinum games character.

Once you get Haste she definitely starts to overwhelm enemies like crazy. There's some later enemies that not only have giant healthbars but also unleash some bullshit attacks, but hasty Tifa is damn good at interupting that.

 

[Piscian]

Finished Steamworld Quest tonight. Pretty mixed feelings about it.

It's blessedly short. I spent about 15 hours on it, but a good three or four hours of that was spent leveling up an optional character to see if would be worth switching up my party.

While I liked the gameplay loop generally speaking it definitely worn me down after a while. You don't fight a ton of enemies, maybe 10 in any given chapter, they become perpetually more and more drawn out, when even a regular enemy fight taking 10 minutes because they go very hard on status effects, - sleep, blindness, berserk, etc so it becomes this mindnumbing grind of doing damage, while healing, and cleaning your team, doing a little damage, over and over. It's so intensive that it ends up kinda dissuading you from experimenting with your 3/5 party member line, and you feel kinda shuffled into a party dedicated to magic and counteracting status effects. Like you'd really need to invest and energy into building a party that plays well with the awkward side characters. I ended up with just a mage, a cleric and a samurai who can do both. I really wanted to play with the other two characters, one a dark Mage/Thief and a Brawler, but it just wasnt efficient and I really wanted to get the game over with 10 hours into it.


It's definitely stronger as an Art project than a game. I really enjoyed the characters, art and music. the last two songs on the soundtrack are real bangers.

I wanna rate it highly just for those two songs alone, but idk. It was a 7/10 for me. I woulda liked to have seen more time spent on game balancing.

Whole soundtracks on bandcamp

 

[Drathnoxis]

I've been replaying Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Darkness because I remember it not being too bad. Unfortunately I seem to be mistaken in my memories because the game is so ridiculously easy that most of the systems in place go unused. I've been diving to the stairs as fast as possible so as to be underleveled and most enemies still die in one hit. I barely use items, and money even less. You can't control your partners so strategy is minimal, you can't switch out half of your team. All in all it's an incredibly barebones roguelite kind of thing with pokemon branding. It's a shame because it could have been pretty cool if they had put a bit more into it. But it's ok because I'm playing it as a sleep aid and it's serving it's purpose well.

Playing it has put me in the mood for some turn based strategy so I thought I would also replay Disgaea D2. I've played the heck out of Disgaea DS and I think I beat all the optional bosses in it but I've only played D2 the one time. The problem is that it's not a handheld game and grinding just isn't fun if I can't be watching something in the background while doing it. Anyway, I've been trying to continue my save but I'm having problems. I want to replay the story, which you can do, but I'm having trouble finding a good place to set the difficulty because it seems like I did a bit of grinding back in 2017 when I last played the game so my characters are a bit unbalanced. Most of my characters are around lvl 100 with two or three at lvl 300 so that's not too bad. Then there's Etna who is lvl 1000 and Laharl at 600, so like everybody else is completely useless when compared to those two and I don't even remember what method I used to get them so high. Then with the difficulty settings my options set the enemies in the first couple stages between level 1-45 or between level 240-4000, so it's a choice between steamrolling the game or most of my party getting steamrolled and Etna killing everything else. There's also a nightmare of systems connected to the character stats that I don't really remember. I'm kind of thinking I might just restart fresh, but I also kind of wanted to get into more of the post game content and restarting is antithetical to that. Or maybe I'll play Disgaea 3 or 4 instead since it's actually the collection that I have. I don't know.

 

[Old_Hunter_77]

Also started playing a game called Chorus. Its a 3rd person space shooter game. The plot is that you were one of the high priests or something of this religious group and your prophet went a bit nuts and started turning on everyone who didn't follow it and long story short, he had you blow up a planet and you decided after that to nope out of there with the most advanced ship they had. The game looks great, combat is challenging and satisfying and I'm interested where the story will go. Finding things can be weird, I do wish the game had a radar, when you are trying to track enemies or hidden items all you have are screen icons, which work after you get used to them but still feel awkward to me. Either way, quite enjoying it.

Hey that looks pretty cool, I like space combat. I'll add to my wishlist for when a discount pops off.
Did you play Everspace 2? That was my last game looking to scratch that space combat itch and I enjoyed it until the game's nonsensical grind didn't let me finish.

 

[Old_Hunter_77]

Steam Next Fest! Here are the games whose demos I liked and added to my wishlist:

Tales of Kinzara: Zau
Already posted about this, my most anticipated game of the year.

Ultros
Another game I was already anticipating since I saw it highlighted in a SkillUp weekly video. It's metroidvania but like if a hippie barfed all over it. So many colors, omg, just colors everywhere. But since the theme is about plants or something the sound is also very squishy moist. It's an aesthetic I dig, like as if the album cover to The Zombies' Odyssey and Oracle came to life.
Gameplay is interesting- yeah it's action, strike and dodge and jump, but combat involed reaction and like a sort of parry that is a slide? It will take some time to get used to. The jump/grab mechancs are fortunately forgiving so the actual gameplay is pretty good.

Lysfanga: The Time Warrior
Another one I was already anticipating and interested in. Mechanics/gameplay is like your basic 2D indy action dungeon crawler thing, right? But ok...
So combat is closed-off battle arenas because the fights go like this: you get not nearly enough time to kill everything and then you sort of die and everything respawns while your previous version is going and around doing what you just did while new you is also playing, and you get like 3 of yous to start with and you gotta figure out how all 3 of yous can work together to kill everyone. Then you got some enemies that heal each other, you gotta also unlock doors or deal with enemies with shields and other problems... it's pretty sick.
And hard! By the end of the demo I'd get stuck where I missed one stupid enemy... argh!
A really clever mix of action and strategy.

Pepper Grinder
A very indy looking pixel art platformer. The gimmick here is that your character has a drill that propels her through sand or water or whatever. So instead of your traditional jumping and dashing, it's basically like... well, all "dashing," when I think about it, but not in air but through other things. It's really satisfying to string together drill-dash combos that kill enemies and pick up loot. As with most indy platformers I'll probably make it halfway through before quitting out of frustration.

Crypt Custodian
Highlighted by Marty Sliva on Second Wind's round-up, it's a Tunic-meets-Death's Door kinda thing where you're a cat with a broom. Like Tunic the interesting bit is the world (though it's 2D and I don't expect it to be nearly as dense) and the combat is really simple but good enough, and hard! Not mechanically just not forgiving. If the game delivers on its promising potential this will all be in service of encouraging you to explore for upgrades and such.

 

[Worgen]

Hey that looks pretty cool, I like space combat. I'll add to my wishlist for when a discount pops off.
Did you play Everspace 2? That was my last game looking to scratch that space combat itch and I enjoyed it until the game's nonsensical grind didn't let me finish.

I only played the demo for Everspace 2, but I played a good amount of the first game. So far there is absolutely no grind in Chorus, there is a demo for it you can try also.

 

[Silvanus]

(Baldur's Gate 3)

Hmm. Asterion has permanently left my party because I wouldn't let him massacre 7,000 innocent vampire-victims, including his own exes he manipulated and abused. So in a huff he broke the only key to let them out of their prison, then acted like I was the bad guy and ran off.

What an absolute fuckwit. Absolutely fantastic VA performance though.

 

[Old_Hunter_77]

I only played the demo for Everspace 2, but I played a good amount of the first game. So far there is absolutely no grind in Chorus, there is a demo for it you can try also.

Demo, sweet, will check that out tonight, thanks!

 

[Casual Shinji]

(Baldur's Gate 3)

Hmm. Asterion has permanently left my party because I wouldn't let him massacre 7,000 innocent vampire-victims, including his own exes he manipulated and abused. So in a huff he broke the only key to let them out of their prison, then acted like I was the bad guy and ran off.

What an absolute fuckwit. Absolutely fantastic VA performance though.

Was your relationship status not high enough? I got a much more positive outcome with him.

 

[Worgen]

Demo, sweet, will check that out tonight, thanks!

I didn't play enough of Everspace 2 to form a strong opinion about it, but I certainly like the gameplay of Chorus more then the gameplay of Everspace 1. I mean the space combat, the story, etc.

 

[Silvanus]

Was your relationship status not high enough? I got a much more positive outcome with him.

It was in neutral beforehand. But then I failed two Persuasion rolls during the conversation, leading him into flip-out madhouse territory unless I helped him sacrifice the others.

 

[Bartholen]

I started making my way through the RE4 remake, and it's a damn fine game. Pretty much all rough edges the original has have been ironed out, and what's left are just the good bits: the exquisite pacing, the satisfying gunplay and the high-intensity action. I started on Hardcore on account of having played the original just last year, but if I'm being honest it still doesn't feel like that much of a challenge. I'm still at the very start though, so that's probably bound to change. It looks great, runs smooth as butter, it's just great all around, and just goes to show what a phenomenal game changer the original was.

 

[BrawlMan]

I played a few chapters of Tekken 8 on Hard Mode to see the difference in difficulty and man does it show. The AI gets a health boost, they evade more often, and I swear there's input reading. I found the input reading on Normal difficulty with the last few boss fights on my first playthrough. I did Chapter 10 on Hard, and enemies are much more aggressive in the Tekken Force Warriors segment. They will straight gang up on you! I died a few times. Mainly on Raven's section and Shaeen's section. King and Steve are the most in this chapter. King more so; cuz his segment turns into Final Fight Haggar Wrestling Throwdown!

I did an Arcade Battle Run and got to Angel Jin again. I know the first time I got to him was with Law. Sot it's my second encounter with him. This time I used the good ol' Lively, Legendary Luchador, KING! It's hilarious doing wrestling moves on a silver winged angel. Especially when you do a jumping pile driver!