What are you currently playing?

[Drathnoxis]

I feel like I'm about ready to drop Darkest Dungeon 2 already. The first game had huge issues with not respecting player time and I can already see that's still the case in the sequel. Unlocking skills is so bloody slow since you can only get 2 or 3 a run. In 4 runs in about 5 hours of play I've only unlocked all of the skills for the Highwayman and nobody else. That means that it's probably another 15 hours before I even have a full party of 4 fully skilled out. This means your strategy options are severely limited for a really long time, and since you don't know what later skills even are and if you even want them there's no strategy to the unlocking. It's just pure time sink until it's all unlocked. And it really feels like there are far fewer meaningful decisions to be made than the first game, at least in the early game. Once you've chosen your party that's the only high level decision for quite some time, as most of the carriage encounters are unmarked (aka zero choice).

As the first game, the style and production values are excellent, but the actual experience of playing the game is tedious. My first party made it to the mountain with 2 member (both at full health) who then got completely covered in debuffs and eviscerated in about 2 turns, so I'm not too optimistic about actually beating the boss the next time I actually manage to make it to the mountain.

 

[Worgen]

I beat Blaster Master 3. I think it was a bit weaker then the first 2 games. The story is still good, and the gameplay is still good, power ups are mostly interesting. What really hurts it is this new dimension swap mechanic and the mapping system really not being setup for that and the level layouts not taking the mapping system into account. The dimension swapping isn't very well shown on the map and without good icons for it, it makes trying to hunt down hidden items kinda annoying. The level layouts not working with the map system is best illustrated by me going into an area, and being able to see a teleporter but not being able to get to it and moving on, but the map made it look like I had explored that area, so when I had to find a hidden item around the teleporter it made it a pain in the butt to figure out that was where I needed to try and go. Some savepoints/teleporters can only initially be used to go to a new teleporter and figuring out which will do that is impossible with just the map.

Either way I would still recommend the game and the trilogy, its a damn enjoyable old school time. But, the second game is the best.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

I am FREE from Sackboy: A Big Adventure. That's Platinum N° 127.

Sackboy can wipe that dumb smile off his little big face. He's not fooling me. Some of those latter levels are ridiculously stupid.

But then there's The Ripsnorter, which is plain romhack stupid.

The Ripsnorter combines all 15 time trial levels strung across the game into a single obstacle course with no checkpoints that restarts if you take more than one hit or fall off a platform. How long is the race? 10 minutes gets you Gold (20 for Bronze).

You can perfect each section of the individual trials all you want. Stringing them all together in a perfect run is a different, ugly beast altogether. Get hit once within the first half, you might as well start over. You're also encouraged to repeatedly roll to gain speed and shave seconds, which means you'll be controlling and precariously balancing a very unwieldy ball on a bunch of vanishing platforms.



Yeah get lost buddy you and me are done professionally.

 

[Old_Hunter_77]

Coming back to the vidyer games after a rest and I beat each of the bosses I got stuck in at each of the two games- Bayle in Elden Ring and Elaine witch in Ender Lillies.

Video games are silly.

 

[Worgen]

Started playing Persona 5 Royal. I was pretty unsure about this since the description said "Don the mask and join the Phantom Thieves of Hearts as they stage grand heists, infiltrate the minds of the corrupt, and make them change their ways!" I was worried it would be just anime teens railing against "the man!" But it pretty much hooked me immediately with its style and its story. The story is a bit anime weird, but it works well enough so far that I want to see where it goes and I can see things kinda working with how they happen in game. Granted the dialog is a bit stilted, but thats kinda expected from a Japanese game, the voice acting just kinda makes it a bit more obvious, but it does the job.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Coming back to the vidyer games after a rest and I beat each of the bosses I got stuck in at each of the two games- Bayle in Elden Ring and Elaine witch in Ender Lillies.

Video games are silly.

You should stick to Ender Lilies! It's a pretty good game.
Eleine is a weirdly difficult boss for being relatively early game (as I recall).
There're definitely more complex bosses ahead though.

 

[Dreiko]

Started playing Persona 5 Royal. I was pretty unsure about this since the description said "Don the mask and join the Phantom Thieves of Hearts as they stage grand heists, infiltrate the minds of the corrupt, and make them change their ways!" I was worried it would be just anime teens railing against "the man!" But it pretty much hooked me immediately with its style and its story. The story is a bit anime weird, but it works well enough so far that I want to see where it goes and I can see things kinda working with how they happen in game. Granted the dialog is a bit stilted, but thats kinda expected from a Japanese game, the voice acting just kinda makes it a bit more obvious, but it does the job.

It does do that, but in a masterful way that personally involves you and isn't just some generic rage against a faceless machine thing. The Man always has a face this time, and it's extremely punchable! XD

Oh and are you playing it in English or something? Cause the JP voice acting is not stilted at all and they have an amazing cast of veterans voicing practically everyone. Your uncle is freaking Alucard from hellsing.


Anyways, enjoy what is probably the largest and one of the best Jrpgs ever made, you definitely are getting your money's worth here.

 

[Worgen]

It does do that, but in a masterful way that personally involves you and isn't just some generic rage against a faceless machine thing. The Man always has a face this time, and it's extremely punchable! XD

Oh and are you playing it in English or something? Cause the JP voice acting is not stilted at all and they have an amazing cast of veterans voicing practically everyone. Your uncle is freaking Alucard from hellsing.


Anyways, enjoy what is probably the largest and one of the best Jrpgs ever made, you definitely are getting your money's worth here.

Started it on english, if it bugs me I'll change it.

Especially since I got it for just 20 bucks.

 

[meiam]

Started playing Persona 5 Royal. I was pretty unsure about this since the description said "Don the mask and join the Phantom Thieves of Hearts as they stage grand heists, infiltrate the minds of the corrupt, and make them change their ways!" I was worried it would be just anime teens railing against "the man!" But it pretty much hooked me immediately with its style and its story. The story is a bit anime weird, but it works well enough so far that I want to see where it goes and I can see things kinda working with how they happen in game. Granted the dialog is a bit stilted, but thats kinda expected from a Japanese game, the voice acting just kinda makes it a bit more obvious, but it does the job.

It might work for you, but to me it was exactly teen railing against the man in an extremely clunky way and it never clicked, especially because I found most of the teen to be insufferable, some of them worse than some of the targets.

 

[Worgen]

It might work for you, but to me it was exactly teen railing against the man in an extremely clunky way and it never clicked, especially because I found most of the teen to be insufferable, some of them worse than some of the targets.

So far I like em and what they are doing would be awesome to be able to do. Imagine being able to destroy trumps ego and make him have to face all the shit hes done? He would never be able to sleep again. That is such good justice and revenge.

 

[Dreiko]

So far I like em and what they are doing would be awesome to be able to do. Imagine being able to destroy trumps ego and make him have to face all the shit hes done? He would never be able to sleep again. That is such good justice and revenge.

There's this one char I was calling Bernie back when playing the original p5 (sun arcana dude), which came out in autumn 2016 in Japan so it was around election time when I was playing it. Fun times lol. And the politician in p5 is actually based on a real figure from Jp politics too btw, so it hits harder if you have in mind who they're parodying.

 

[Old_Hunter_77]

You should stick to Ender Lilies! It's a pretty good game.
Eleine is a weirdly difficult boss for being relatively early game (as I recall).
There're definitely more complex bosses ahead though.

Yeah I'll go back to it but I just had to go back to Elden Ring first....

Games like Lillies.. I usually get pretty far once they capture my interest but then give up towards the end when the bullshit difficulty piles on exponentially (i.e., Ori and the Blind Forest)

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Yeah I'll go back to it but I just had to go back to Elden Ring first....

Games like Lillies.. I usually get pretty far once they capture my interest but then give up towards the end when the bullshit difficulty piles on exponentially (i.e., Ori and the Blind Forest)

Well, there is one bullshit part of Ender Lilies. You'll know it when you hear this song:

 

[Worgen]

There's this one char I was calling Bernie back when playing the original p5 (sun arcana dude), which came out in autumn 2016 in Japan so it was around election time when I was playing it. Fun times lol. And the politician in p5 is actually based on a real figure from Jp politics too btw, so it hits harder if you have in mind who they're parodying.

Ahh, nice, I'm looking forward to getting there, still on the school.

 

[laggyteabag]

I played through 2015's Mad Max game.

It does a decent job of portraying the Mad Max fantasy, but this is one of the most Ubisoft-y open-world games that I have ever played, which is quite impressive, seeing as this has nothing to do with Ubisoft.

The open world is just your usual 5 or 6 different activities, multiplied ad nauseam across miles and miles of desert. I really wish it was more ambitious, because as it stands, whilst they're fine distractions, there is very little of interest or note outside of the main missions.

The hand-to-hand combat is very Arkham, and it is very weighty, but you don't have the gadgets (or equivalent) or combos that Batman does, which gives it comparatively little agency, beyond your usual punching/dodging/countering. I also don't feel like the car combat ever really had its moment to shine.

The story isn't particularly noteworthy most of the time, but the final act was definitely the strongest, with some nice moments.

Overall, I think it is a pretty average game - there is nothing egregiously wrong here, and there are a few bright spots, but they're pretty few and far between. I'm happy to have ticked it off my backlog.

Now, I'm replaying God of War (2018), but this time on my PC. 60FPS is definitely nice, and the combat is a lot of fun, but I still can't shake that this game is massively overrated.

 

[Drathnoxis]

I beat the first boss of Darkest Dungeon 2. That's probably as far as I'll go with it. My impressions are that it doesn't lean into the Roguelike aspects hard enough and has too much metaprogression. Trinkets still suck in general and mostly feel like they hurt as much as they help, like the first game, only it's worse now because if you do manage to find a good one it's gone for the next run. Really I think skills should have been unlocked as part of each run and the shrines should have unlocked the different roles for each class, because that's the biggest thing that makes the game hard to play is knowing it's X amount of runs until you have a working party with all the options. If skills were unlocked mid run you would have a bit of character growth during a run instead of all the growth exclusively taking place in the meta. I don't know, I feel like the developers don't really understand the Roguelike genre, which is a shame because I do think it could have worked well with some modifications.

Oh well, I'll be interested to hear more of @Dreiko's thoughts as he goes through the game, though.

 

[Worgen]

If skills were unlocked mid run you would have a bit of character growth during a run instead of all the growth exclusively taking place in the meta.

You do get skill upgrades during a run.

 

[Old_Hunter_77]

Elden Ring and Ender Lillies uninstalled.
The former's last boss is a bunch of horrific insulting crap and the latter had me running around every room trying to figure out where to go but the rooms are full of enemies so it's super annoying. Life's too short.

 

[Drathnoxis]

You do get skill upgrades during a run.

Yeah, like 3. I'm talking actual character progression like a real roguelike. You should unlock a skill after every fight, and then reset it every run.

 

[BrawlMan]

Now, I'm replaying God of War (2018), but this time on my PC. 60FPS is definitely nice, and the combat is a lot of fun, but I still can't shake that this game is massively overrated.

In some ways, yes the game is a little overrated. It's more critics going overboard on the gushing of the story. I like the story, but there are some gameplay problems. Ragnarok attempts to fix most of these by expanding combat options and veritcality, but both of these games need a jump button. Whenever a third game (6th mainline game) comes out, give Atreus a jump button. Since he will more than likely be the leading character in the next title.

I played some DMC5:SE earlier this week. I did a no death Hard Arcade Run as Blaze on SOR4 (Steam) to get some achievements. I won't be gaming much this week, but I will play something to keep me busy.