What are you currently playing?

[Old_Hunter_77]

I'm still enjoying Lysfanga very much but I wanted to set this marker in the sand because I have reached Act 3 (presumably of 3?). Most games in my experience start throwing bullshit waves of enemies and repetitive fights and difficulty spikes and then I'll come around and whine about it. But unless/until this happens, I want to call out one thing this game does right (so far): difficulty, and player choice and skill ceiling.

There are no difficulty settings. Rather, there are optional challenges. Each fight times you and there is a challenge to beat it under a certain amount of time. So if you're a filthy casual like me and only care of moving from space to space and progressing through the story, you can just beat up shit and move on. But if you're a god gamur git gud type you're welcome to beat the challenges. And anything in between- mess with the different spells and runes and just try some and move on as you like. Telling you how much time you took to beat the fight and what the challenge is is more interesting than the letter grades you get in your Devil May Bayonetta type games because it's specific, and ties directly into the theme of the game- you know, time... shifting... and such.

 

[laggyteabag]

Finished up Arkham Origins, and I greatly enjoyed it.

The combat is basically the same as City, but with a few extra tricks, but the story is much better paced and presented. I like Arkham City quite a bit, but its story really grinds to a halt when you have to go and find the League of Assassins.

I think the biggest issue with the game is that the world feels comparatively quite lifeless. It still has essentially the same map as City, but it has been stripped of all of its DC character, and replaced with snow and Christmas. Its an interesting tone, definitely, but it was always really cool in Asylum, City and Knight seeing all of the little easter eggs pointing towards other DC characters and events, even if those characters don't appear in the game themselves. They gave the world a sense of history, and a purpose to go exploring, but this is sadly absent in Origins.

Ultimately, it is a solid game, and one that doesn't deserve the flak that it has historically received.

 

[BrawlMan]

Ultimately, it is a solid game, and one that doesn't deserve the flak that it has historically received.

One of the main reasons why Origins got so much flak at the time, was because of its buggy launch window. I know it's ironic and quaint in comparison to what happened with Arkham Knight's PC launch. Granted, the hate has died down due to a few things:

1. The game runs great on XONE or Series X, lacking any problems the 360 had.
2. Nostalgia.
3. Everyone hates Gotham Knights and Suicide Squad. Origins looks like heaven with or without the comparison.

Here are these for you, if you're into harder difficulty modes. The walkthrough with the playlist of the main campaign is from 2014. The DLC Seraphim17 did last year.

​

@Old_Hunter_77, I took Wanted: Dead back to the GameStop and got my money back. The 4th stage us too frustrating and difficult for many wrong reasons. Not worth suffering. I'll spend my money on Slave Zero X. That comes out tomorrow.

 

[Old_Hunter_77]

@Old_Hunter_77, I took Wanted: Dead back to the GameStop and got my money back. The 4th stage us too frustrating and difficult for many wrong reasons. Not worth suffering. I'll spend my money on Slave Zero X. That comes out tomorrow.

How long into the game did you get until that point?

Also, chalk up a point for the pro-physical media argument that you were able to get your refund

 

[BrawlMan]

How long into the game did you get until that point?

There are 5 stages total, but the 4th stage has some of the worst checkpoints in gaming history! They patched fixed one or two checkpoints in the early games, but mainly for the 1st stage. The developers chose to do nothing about the Stage 3, 4, and I'm assuming whatever else on 5. Soleil and 110 Industries expected people to pay $70 for this? Fuck you guys on this. There's no amount of "quirky and weird" saving this, if you have that much bullshit design. WD is no Suicide Squad, nor Skull and Bones, but you would so much expect better from former Ninja Gaiden and Devil's Third mid-level developers. Then again, they learned almost nothing from Devil's Third with this game.

Also, chalk up a point for the pro-physical media argument that you were able to get your refund

Indeed!

 

[BrawlMan]

I popped in Evil West, No More Heroes III, and Ninja Gaiden 3: RE to get the taste of Wanted: Dead out of my mouth. For all of its problems, NG3:RE has much better and more satisfying combat encounters. Evil West is the better low to mid budget 360 throwback game, and No More Heroes III is quirky and weird, but doesn't get obnoxious about it.

 

[Piscian]

Im around 30h into Persona 3 Reload. Its just now opening up to where you have more to do than you can manage which is welcome. There was a good stretch of the game in which you're basically shuffled into a routine which is exactly not what you want in a game whos primary selling point is choice.

I think if I had to levy any criticism distinct from the next two is that this one is less thematic.

In Persona 4 it centers around a murder mystery and explores the insecurities of the cast. There's a clear sense of "growing" with these characters as friends in a small town emulating real life. It's got that Stand By Me vibe to it.

Persona 5 takes it a step further and ties the story heavily into the main casts struggles and personality with bosses literally being abusive teachers or another members self-loathing. Each "castle" is literally an unraveling of a playable characters trauma. It's very difficult not to care and feel some empathy with all members in the cast as they join.

So far at least Persona 3 is primitive in comparison. You're just thrown together in a Dorm with random team members and told you gotta go fight monsters. Through you experience some growth with these characters over time it's very slap dash. Two of your teammates have direct ties to the main story, but you don't find out until deep into the game its treated pretty lightly considering the context. In P4G and P5R your "buddy" character has a story and trauma you work through during the story. I'm 30 hours into P3R and your "buddy" characters only trait so far is they are a boob man.

To the games credit I find the music pleasant where as I ended up muting a lot of PS5 because the frenetic music started to really wear on me like being trapped with a 6yo explaining Five Nights at Freddys. Its got that inoffensive soap commercial rhythm (badaba-ba-ba-ba baaaaa) where as P5R is DO YOU LIIIIKLKEEE ROCK WITH JAAZZZ NOISES! ??YEEEA&%&*%*&%$$ for a 150h straight.

I'm not ready to give the game a score. It's in a weird space where out of the 3 modern releases It's the one I like the least so far, but this in like the context GOTG where it's 3 great games giving me what I want, but this will the least great game.

 

[FakeSympathy]

Well I finally “finished” mhw iceborne. I say that because turns out there are some post-game content.

I will be honest, it wasn’t a top tier experience that I had hoped. Don’t get me wrong, the monster designs and the new area are cool, but some of them had really annoying attacks that made hunting them a real torture.

There were too many AOE and sweeping attacks, as well as some “floor is lava” bs. The room and positioning to attack some of these monsters were shit

Id say i co-oped about 70% of all iceborne hunts, which is quite different from the base game experience.

I think this is one of those cases where I prefer to co-op; Almost everyone knows what they are doing and aren’t there to troll. The reduced money reward became afterthought as I learned to focus more on the materials and parts these monsters drop.

Overall pretty good time, but holy hell, some of these monsters can go eat a dick

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

I played most of the demo for Pacific Drive. And I wanted to like it, I really did, but the controls feel super-clunky and the inability to rebind a lot of functions really puts me off (for instance, I prefer arrow keys for movement but you can't change any of the movement keys). Apparently the full release fixes SOME of this, but I don't want to play games whose controls aggravate me.

 

[Piscian]

I played most of the demo for Pacific Drive. And I wanted to like it, I really did, but the controls feel super-clunky and the inability to rebind a lot of functions really puts me off (for instance, I prefer arrow keys for movement but you can't change any of the movement keys). Apparently the full release fixes SOME of this, but I don't want to play games whose controls aggravate me.

Im highly highly interested. I need another oxenfree soul soother, but Im gonna wait for reviews before getting too excited.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

Im highly highly interested. I need another oxenfree soul soother, but Im gonna wait for reviews before getting too excited.

From everything I'm hearing (and the demo so far seems to confirm this), the game largely treats your car as a mobile base for on-foot looting. I was really hoping that the driving would be more involved.

 

[BrawlMan]

Contra: Operation Galuga Demo - This is a fun game! WayForward knows what they're doing. Everything is what you expect from vintage Contra. 2D Run n' Gun, Weapon Switching, Upgradable Weapons, and lots of guns. There are multiple selectable characters, but for the demo, you can only choose Bill or Lance. Interesting unique features: health meters are back from Hard Corps and Uprising. Three Hits and you're dead. There is an option to select being killed in one hit, but I will never do that when given the choice. I pre-ordering this, if there's a physical release.

EDIT: You can only choose Bill or Lance in Story Mode, but for some reason Arcade Mode let's you choose between three more characters, but that's not all of them. Weird way to do this for a demo.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

I'm about 30 hours into Ultros. I could wrap things up but I'm having fun going for 100% completion. I'm at the point where I've unlocked or upgraded just about every gardening tool in the game and the level of versatility and interlocking factors that go into playing the game is delightful. It also makes the most out of the basic satisfaction of connecting a huge sprawling map in a metroidvania, by having you literally connect a kind of magical tether across the whole world. The tether disappears if you move too far away without connecting it to anything (flower buds, special statues, save points) so there's the jigsaw puzzle challenge of figuring out how would you efficiently bypass an area while linking everything together.

You can eventually dig up seeds, replant stuff, shape and direct the growth of plants, splice parts from other plants together, herd animals to use for fertilizer, use different plant properties to essentially reshape the topography and behavior of an area. The sheer array of options definitely invites sequence breaking in the latter half of the game. You could grow a vine into liquid, where it will branch off indefinitely, but continually lift it and slowly lead the growth across the surface so it can pierce a barrier. Or splice a carnivorous plant at the end of a long stem, spray the stem to curve it and then jump into its mouth to trade off some damage in exchange to be catapulted for a considerable distance after it spits you out. I like a game that invites and rewards creative problem solving.

 

[NerfedFalcon]

Finished Modern Warfare 3. It's definitely pretty rough around the edges, and not in the way that people use it, 'this game is a *real* game and not an *over-polished* AAA game' or w/e. The TF141 missions are great all around, but Team Metal lets the party down badly; even the one-off characters get better missions than any of Metal's. Still think I liked it better than Black Ops, though.

Black Ops 2 is next on the list, then circling back around to CoD2. After that, I'm finally free.

 

[gorfias]

4 hours into Hogwarts Legacy and I'm still attending my 1st wizard classes!

I've heard that it helps to be a fan of the source material and that seems reasonable.

It is an incredibly beautiful game so far. Playing it at 4K on PC using an OLED Ultra Gear and that by itself is really good looking. The gameplay, even for me, so far, is very intuitive and I've built us a small arsenal of spells already.

 

[Worgen]

Finished Modern Warfare 3. It's definitely pretty rough around the edges, and not in the way that people use it, 'this game is a *real* game and not an *over-polished* AAA game' or w/e. The TF141 missions are great all around, but Team Metal lets the party down badly; even the one-off characters get better missions than any of Metal's. Still think I liked it better than Black Ops, though.

Black Ops 2 is next on the list, then circling back around to CoD2. After that, I'm finally free.

I played through MW3 a few times, like 3 or 4 I think. I found it really interesting that I always feel burned out by the end mission. I always just end up just finishing things up, like when you use the specter gunship to blow open the bunker and you have all these stunned enemies, I just run by them and get annoyed at my allies for not just capturing them since I'm done with war by that point. I find it fascinating since I can't think of another fps game that does that to me, even the other cod games.

 

[Old_Hunter_77]

I'm still enjoying Lysfanga very much but I wanted to set this marker in the sand because I have reached Act 3 (presumably of 3?). Most games in my experience start throwing bullshit waves of enemies and repetitive fights and difficulty spikes and then I'll come around and whine about it. But unless/until this happens, I want to call out one thing this game does right (so far): difficulty, and player choice and skill ceiling.

There are no difficulty settings. Rather, there are optional challenges. Each fight times you and there is a challenge to beat it under a certain amount of time. So if you're a filthy casual like me and only care of moving from space to space and progressing through the story, you can just beat up shit and move on. But if you're a god gamur git gud type you're welcome to beat the challenges. And anything in between- mess with the different spells and runes and just try some and move on as you like. Telling you how much time you took to beat the fight and what the challenge is is more interesting than the letter grades you get in your Devil May Bayonetta type games because it's specific, and ties directly into the theme of the game- you know, time... shifting... and such.

Sure quoting oneself is the mark of self-involvement, but appropriate when playing a game where your big weapon is copies of yourself.

Well the thing I knew would happen happened- I reached a point in late game where it got too hard and frustrating for me to handle. According to a youtube play-through I found this is the penultimate fight. So even after taking down a huge unique multi-phase beastie, a "regular" room of enemies was just a smidge harder than everything else and I lost patience... quit, uninstall.

The game has a really great progression of new abilities and tools that they keep giving you as you go on so even after I reached the point where all the flashing lights became too much for my old brain to handle, I pushed forward. But the end without that or a compelling narrative, it becomes just about the will to beat it and I just couldn't be bothered anymore.

That's ok I got 25 hours of fun out of the game and 1 hour of misery- not bad for $20. I still heartily recommend that game. I am a bit perturbed to see it getting such mixed review as of now- I wonder if this is one of those things were more hardcore action game veterans have seen more like this before so the stuff that impresses me doesn't impress them. Or that things that don't bother me bother others- like there isn't really armor or level building or any kind of metroidvania exploration (you can find collectibles but only one is really valuable, the one to give you more resurrections in a fight, the rest is just outfit colors). I also saw complaints that the game is too long though seems just nitpicky to me- I mean 20-30 hours is like normal game length? I dunno.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

I played the demo for a game called Fossilfuel 2. It really, really wants to be a first-person Dino Crisis, but it makes a whole bunch of rookie mistakes- unskippable cutscenes, clunky controls, ugly fonts, poor optimization, telegraphed encounters. Still, it does have a couple of beautiful locations, there's a kernel of something interesting in it and it's not as if we have a glut of its like to sort through.

 

[BrawlMan]

@Chimpzy, I decided to get Penny's Big Breakaway. I am loving this beautiful looking Sega Saturn/Dreamcast/mid-life GameCube game. Still early in, but they've already out done themselves. I wanted to go with Penny, because I needed a break from the hack n' slash, and Slave Zero X has some really bad checkpoints, so I am holding off on getting it. Plus, it's been a minute since I've done a 3D platformer. Aside from Rift Apart.

 

[Worgen]

Grabbed Pacific Drive since Helldivers continues to have server issues and it looked really cool. So far, its pretty cool, but I didn't realize it was a roguelike. It also has very specific areas that can be randomly generated so you can go from one area to another or just return to the garage at any time with your resources. The resources are pretty much the standard open world resources. It is fun getting enough to replace parts of your car. There are also anomalies in the zone which mess with you, so far all of them are pretty predictable, but they feel dangerous enough that you want to be careful around them. Its pretty neat, but not quite what I was expecting.