Give some final thoughts on it?
You could try Void Stranger, a Metroidbrainia that was pretty decent.
What are you currently playing?
- Thread starter Nick Calandra
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You could try Void Stranger, a Metroidbrainia that was pretty decent.
Maplestory
The last time I played this was a few years ago; I come back to this MMO every now and then, and everytime I come back it's unrecognizable.
I decided to start a new build, and I came to realize just how scared this game is for you to grind.
In the older version of this game, it would take me a few days to a week to reach lvl 80; I have been playing it for 2 days, only a 1-2 hours per session, and I already reached 90. They give you so much xp from doing quests, most of which involves go talk to this person, deliver this item, etc. They also teleport you all over the place to the next quest giver NPC.
The old me would've loved this, but my current self hates it. Granted the grind was painful, but this super fast leveling has made me loose all sense of advewture and discovery; Like, There is no reason for you to go out and killing monsters, when doing these quests get you to the next level.
I wouldn't have minded if the quests had you doing something interesting, but they are really mundane, as I described above. There are some monster kill quests here and there, but they are boring as shit.
Still the art style, music, and sprite animations for skills are amazing.
Thankfully, Kinda like WOW classic MS is also doing the same thing by releasing a "remastered" version of the classic server.
The last time I played this was a few years ago; I come back to this MMO every now and then, and everytime I come back it's unrecognizable.
I decided to start a new build, and I came to realize just how scared this game is for you to grind.
In the older version of this game, it would take me a few days to a week to reach lvl 80; I have been playing it for 2 days, only a 1-2 hours per session, and I already reached 90. They give you so much xp from doing quests, most of which involves go talk to this person, deliver this item, etc. They also teleport you all over the place to the next quest giver NPC.
The old me would've loved this, but my current self hates it. Granted the grind was painful, but this super fast leveling has made me loose all sense of advewture and discovery; Like, There is no reason for you to go out and killing monsters, when doing these quests get you to the next level.
I wouldn't have minded if the quests had you doing something interesting, but they are really mundane, as I described above. There are some monster kill quests here and there, but they are boring as shit.
Still the art style, music, and sprite animations for skills are amazing.
Thankfully, Kinda like WOW classic MS is also doing the same thing by releasing a "remastered" version of the classic server.
Pragmata is basically a more grounded version of Vanquish. Though both games have clear inspirations from PN03, either way. Which definitely makes the most sense for Vanquish, because Shinji Mikami was the lead director PN and the former.
I just played the demo and I am already loving this. The hacking I got used to within 10 minutes. I managed to no damage the end stage boss.
I just played the demo and I am already loving this. The hacking I got used to within 10 minutes. I managed to no damage the end stage boss.
I've been playing Jotunnslayer: Hordes of Hel, a game I picked up at some point while it was free on the Epic Game Store, which is basically Vampire Survivors with a coat of Norse mythology paint; the primary difference is that your timer counts down instead of up, and you must complete a certain number of challenges within that time limit in order to summon the final boss. It's got the same "just one more run" energy, though while the graphics are solid and the sound is amazing, it doesn't have quite as much charm.
The version I remember playing 20+ years ago provided quests up until level 15~ and then it was hours upon hours of mindless monster grinding.
That's my memory of the game too, and you can't go anywhere new because anything out of your level range just stomps you in 1 hit while you do 1 damage.
Overwatch, Deadlock, Heroes of the Storm, and a little Mechabellum and Helldivers 2 are in my regular rotation at the moment.
I started Divitinity Original Sin 2, but I haven't touched it for a couple of weeks now.
I've been playing looaaaaaaaaaaads of Warhammer 40K on the tabletop though, if that counts.
I started Divitinity Original Sin 2, but I haven't touched it for a couple of weeks now.
I've been playing looaaaaaaaaaaads of Warhammer 40K on the tabletop though, if that counts.
Haven
The studio that made this game just came out with Cairn, the critical darling mountain climbing game that looks impressive but would be so frustrating for me that I'm not touching that thing. But I was aware of Haven and it looked pretty neat.
I'm early on and so far impressions are mixed. The setup of the game is you basic survival game- you're stuck on a planet and you have to explore, gather resources, build things to advance the plot. The hook is that you're a couple and play as both people- and I believe you can actually play it co-op. Traversal is like gliding/skating so it's fast and smooth. Art style is very colorful.
The characters are the important thing- they are the most actually romantic couple I've ever seen in the game. They are working together, sleeping together, and they are supportive and sarcastic and if you've even been in a couple bubble you will feel right at home in this experience.
Combat is weird- it looks and feel like turn-based but you're controlling each character with a joystick to give commands so it's pretty tricky. When the game starts it tells you that the game is "not challenging"- I don't know if I've ever encountered that before!- and the options have difficulty settings all around combat.
Gliding around and watching the cut scenes is nice, combat is like meh whatever, but at this point early on I'm lost and confused about where to go. The world layout revolved around these little islands and you get between them on these light bridges with a loading screen each time you cross to another island. The islands so far look all the same, there is no map, there is no HUD, so being lost is miserable.
However, apparently there is a map at some point so I'm gonna push on until I find one. I think I did but it was guarded by a big monster that defeated me (because by the time I tried to take it down my health was down from, you know, being lost). I looked up some descriptions about the game and hopefully I have enough to get past this in my next session.
The studio that made this game just came out with Cairn, the critical darling mountain climbing game that looks impressive but would be so frustrating for me that I'm not touching that thing. But I was aware of Haven and it looked pretty neat.
I'm early on and so far impressions are mixed. The setup of the game is you basic survival game- you're stuck on a planet and you have to explore, gather resources, build things to advance the plot. The hook is that you're a couple and play as both people- and I believe you can actually play it co-op. Traversal is like gliding/skating so it's fast and smooth. Art style is very colorful.
The characters are the important thing- they are the most actually romantic couple I've ever seen in the game. They are working together, sleeping together, and they are supportive and sarcastic and if you've even been in a couple bubble you will feel right at home in this experience.
Combat is weird- it looks and feel like turn-based but you're controlling each character with a joystick to give commands so it's pretty tricky. When the game starts it tells you that the game is "not challenging"- I don't know if I've ever encountered that before!- and the options have difficulty settings all around combat.
Gliding around and watching the cut scenes is nice, combat is like meh whatever, but at this point early on I'm lost and confused about where to go. The world layout revolved around these little islands and you get between them on these light bridges with a loading screen each time you cross to another island. The islands so far look all the same, there is no map, there is no HUD, so being lost is miserable.
However, apparently there is a map at some point so I'm gonna push on until I find one. I think I did but it was guarded by a big monster that defeated me (because by the time I tried to take it down my health was down from, you know, being lost). I looked up some descriptions about the game and hopefully I have enough to get past this in my next session.
Honestly, I kinda miss that version; Because while the grind was painful, at the very least it had you travel all over across the world, and you had to find the next hunting spot to level up; Now they just dump you with free xp.
It kinda defeats the purpose of having such an expansive universe nowadays, ngl.
Oh and they try to add story-driven quests, and while it does add cool lore of the heroes and the ultimate big bad, the dialogs can be really corny and you can't skip these cutscenes.
Just patiently waiting for that classic world to open.....
It's a great puzzle game. Love anything that involves correlation and fill-in-the-blanks deduction. This kind of gameplay is usually combined and/or dilluted with a more generic approach, the way Outer Wilds presents itself as a space sim or Tunic looks at first like a Zelda clone, but Lorelei works as a practically pure correlation/deduction game. I like that the game builds up to not just amassing information but being able to interpret it differently.
And it happens to pair wonderfully with nouvelle vague's playful obsession with art, ambiguity, homage, performance, tropes and references so presenting it as a '60s monochrome arthouse film on the cusp of exploitative B-movie horror feels on brand. It finds a very specific tone rooted in the post-modern detective story and channels the absurdity and paranoia perfectly.
It takes a lot to get me to parse through every document in a game so props to the writing. The biographies, letters, interviews, police records, script pages all seem interesting and believable enough and aren't meant to provide filler or act as mere vessels for clues. Whoever wrote them clearly has a literary inclination.
Speaking of which: this may be the closest any videogame has gotten to capturing the work of Jorge Luis Borges, who was a big fan of mirrors, libraries and labyrinths in meta-fiction about performative murder and performative detective work.
I kinda wish the game would let you organize all those notes and documents you collect for maximum efficiency, but I also like that feeling of scrambling through papers looking for the one thing I think is going to help me. Same with the single button thing. I wanted a plain back button or cancel out button but learned to roll with it.
The one thing the game definitely needs is better signaling when a document has more than one page. The most I was ever stuck was when I missed the dim > symbol to the right of the screen while reading Lunar Phases of 1847. Don't I feel stupid after.
I'll agree with everything you said, it was a pretty good game. There were a lot of changes to formula that kept things fresh too, like the prototype game glitches, or the memory tests that served as challenges and plot elements. I also really liked that one gameboy minigame where you divide squares in half. That was just genuinely fun to play and I spent a couple hours trying to beat my highscores.
Did you do all the optional map and shortcut puzzles? I thought some of those were just kind of ridiculous and even looking at the solution, I don't see how anybody was supposed to come up with the answer.
Apparently you need to add up dots. I don't know what would possess anybody to try this other than sheer exhaustion of all other possibilities.
I think I spent close to 2 hours staring at this, not even being able to tell whether I was supposed to read the sequence from left to right or top to bottom, or how I was supposed to use the information I had to fill in the blanks. This is the kind of puzzle that pretty only a programmer would be able to solve. I don't spend my day thinking about powers of 2, so the pattern was just completely impenetrable.
This one I'm annoyed at because it has two solutions, and I think the wrong one is more obvious. The blank spaces clearly make 761. I would just stare at it, wondering how I could be misinterpreting such an obvious number. I didn't even notice that the lines spelled out 714, probably because the 7 is smaller than 14 and out of set.
I did everything! At least everything that adds to 100%. I'm only missing a trophy for beating a high score in one of the three GameBoy games.
From the three puzzles you posted I only had trouble with the first one, which in my game was No. 1 (the west wing shortcut in the 2nd floor that leads to the hole over the chapel). That was the last shortcut that I unlocked and only after I exhausted dozens of other possible solutions. Since it wasn't an essential part of the critical path I kept circling back to it, trying a few ways, then leaving it for later. My problem was that I initially tried it the wrong way (4 + 3, ignoring the dot above the i) and then didn't think about the alternative until much, much later. And that was after exhausting a ridiculous amount of possibilities. For a while I was convinced there was a correlation between the first three sentences, the three numbers and the bottom two sentences, and that the 2 being perfectly sandwiched between the two 'ylld' was part of it.
The other two came very easy. No. 17 at first I assumed involved a single cipher change in every row, but couldn't get that to work. Then I assumed the combination was incrementing top to bottom and tried the obvious thing of doubling each number, and that worked immediately.
The last one was one of the easiest for me simply because I didn't even think to try assigning value at the things in the picture. Just looked at it for a minute and went duh. Same with that other shorcut where you have to spot the 'hidden' number in a maze. I do think the 7 should be higher up though.
I was mostly stumped on puzzles where I didn't realize I was still missing information (like trying to solve the puzzleboxes going alone by the corresponding door patterns, without first unlocking the doors) or assumed I didn't have all the information, therefore would overthink and leave it for later (the freaking piano).
I don't think I even saw them as 4 digit numbers, but rather sequences. I think I was even trying to solve it with algebra at one point. Just didn't occur to me to double what I could see of the numbers.
Yeah, the problem was entirely that I saw the wrong solution first. It's like one of those optical illusions where once you see the vase that's all you can see unless it's pointed out to you that it could also be two faces.
I spent a lot of time coming back to the puzzle boxes too, they probably unlock far too early in comparison to when you are able to get the first solution. I don't really remember how long the piano puzzle took me, I don't think that one was too bad for me.
I figured the piano was like the lunar diary or the astronomical clock in that it looks a little too overly complex compared to all the other stuff you've been sorting up until that point, and also it's not at all apparent what you'll get out of it (also it doesn'tappear to be in the way of anything), so I just assumed it was always for further down the road.
I think on average the puzzles in this game tend to look more convoluted (maybe by design) than they really are.
Romeo Is A Dead Man - Fuck the chapter 5 boss. Fuck the chapter 5 boss. I hate it! I hate it! I hate it! I hate it! I hate it! I really only won due to war of attrition and reviving twice in the same fight. Has a satisfying cut-scene finisher, but I am never bother with this shit in challenge mode.
- Apr 1, 2009
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Been playing Gobliins 6. Its quite good if you like classic point and click adventure games. Plays just like the old ones. Started off kinda rough, mainly because when it launched on steam, the translation file was incomplete, the itch.io version was fine, but the steam file was less then half there and any non English text just defaulted to French. DLed the translation file from the itch version and that worked, but then when it patched it screwed up the save files, because of some difference in how steam and itch handle things. So had to do the first couple scenes a couple times, but since then everything has worked fine.
It does seem to be a bit lacking in direction at times. In the, why am I doing this kinda direction. Like in the first scene you get a message from the king and have to button up things around your farm before you can finish the scene, but you have to talk to the messenger like 10 times to get all the info and items from him and you're not really told what you need to take care of around your farm to be ready to go. Its not hard to figure out just by clicking things, but I do wish there was more "I need to say goodbye to my queen bees" and less "I have to do something before I leave." But I love the art, the humor is still there and I want to know what happens.
It does seem to be a bit lacking in direction at times. In the, why am I doing this kinda direction. Like in the first scene you get a message from the king and have to button up things around your farm before you can finish the scene, but you have to talk to the messenger like 10 times to get all the info and items from him and you're not really told what you need to take care of around your farm to be ready to go. Its not hard to figure out just by clicking things, but I do wish there was more "I need to say goodbye to my queen bees" and less "I have to do something before I leave." But I love the art, the humor is still there and I want to know what happens.
Dante's Inferno - I made it pass the Judge of the Dead boss and about to enter the circle of Lust. Holy Cross moves are busted as fuck in the early game. Though I am focused on leveling up my scythe moves. I try to keep both upgrade paths somewhat even.
I played the demo for Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War! (yes, the exclamation point is part of the title) and... ugh. Look, I know not every game can have the tight controls and visceral impact of Helldivers 2, but this is bad. Friendlies are sprites, enemies are 3D models that look like something I'd have seen coming out of my Voodoo 5 card, balance is completely off-kilter (one mission sets you up against two Tankers [the giant flame-thrower bugs] and an endless horde of regular Bugs when all you can carry is 300 rounds of rifle ammo, and you could exhaust all of that on a single Tanker and it'd have health to spare). And the AI is bone stupid; I lost three friendlies due to them running into my line of fire, and another one because it thought standing right by the feet of my 14-foot-tall mech was a brilliant idea, along with the Bugs getting caught on obstacles constantly.
And, of course, the two leading topics on the Steam forum are from people complaining that the player character is a woman.
And, of course, the two leading topics on the Steam forum are from people complaining that the player character is a woman.
- Apr 1, 2009
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Why would they mix pixels and 3d models like that... I mean I can understand doing it for the big boss type enemies, but if you are going to go retro, choose one or the other.
I swear the steam forums have gone to shit since conservatives discovered the word woke and had it mean everything they like to whine about.