What Video Games Are You Currently Playing

  On 2/14/2023 at 11:19 AM, Enthusiast said:

I don't think so. This is my first time playing it, I didn't own a Gamecube and didn't play Trilogy on the Wii, so can't say how tough it gets. It certainly is a 3d Metroid experience with all the backtracking and upgrading to access new areas that the games are known for.

I bought it as well. Its really great and more like a puzzle game with guns 

This looks so weird:

Pretty cool so far, looking forward to the Castlevania DLC

Picked up Doom 2016 for a whopping €4,29 for my Steam Deck. Quite playable even if you're, like me, not used to controllers. Very fun to be running around shooting monsters again. Unbelievably gory, though. Crushing zombie skulls with your bare hands is disgusting.

Found a 20" Trinitron (Mid 90s KV20s20) on my way home this afternoon, two blocks from my place.  All I've done so far is clean it up (inside and out), degauss the screen and adjust the focus on the flyback transformer, but it already looks SWEET.  The convergense is a little weird on the upper left but not bad, I'll learn to adjust that eventually, I've been putting it off for a while but this one is good enough to be worth the trouble.

Looks like these fuckers are going for ridiculous prices on eBay these days, too, because everyone has lost their collective mind.

Thoose jagged edges on the vertical lines are from my phone's rolling shutter, not the TV itself.  Best I could manage.

  On 2/16/2023 at 5:11 PM, Rubin Farr said:

 

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I was really hoping this was going to be a terrible narrative adaptation of the game itself, kind of like a modern, TV version of the old Missile Command album (that I swear used to  be on Youtube or Archive but doesn't seem to be now, and I have no idea where the cassette of it I found in college is these days).

Elden Ring update: I've been slaying bosses left and right (including Malenia, Mohg, Maliketh I'll admit was a bit hard). But the damn last boss is too hard to hit. I can barely get to 50% health. He always just moves away from me in the second phase. I don't want to go back to leveling up, but I may have to. Level 150 right now.

EDIT: Story still doesn't make any sense, and I have no idea why I am fighting any of these people.

Hahaha. WTF. Hack/slash w/ 3rd person gunplay made, in part, by some of the team behind DOA and Ninja Gaiden I and II (Itagaki era, though no Itagaki involvement here). This has been on my radar for a while now, most anticipated game this year (for me). 

It's an intentional clusterfuck. Billed as a throwback to PS2 era it is a total kitchen sink of wtf. Ridiculously bad voice acting with PS2 era cutscenes that give way, suddenly, to deeply gorgeous anime segments that bely an emotional depth (sometimes) that tonally smash-cut into a lewd and crass "guy with 4 balls" joke. A rhythm minigame where you eat Ramen. A ps2 era graphic police station hub where you can play a claw game that, I swear, only seems to work when you press the button to kick the machine. You use the Konami code to unlock the easy difficulty (which forces your character to wear cute cat ears because, in the words of the developer, you're playing in "pussy mode.")

Deadly Premonition has been getting thrown around as a comparator for some of the feeling of "charming jankiness" but this is realllly out there. I haven't even gotten to the gameplay. Reviews have been savaging this, with the weirdest I've seen being IGN"s heavy coverage and "final preview" in particular lauding the scrappy charm of the game but the final review totally trashing it and giving it a "4."

I played this for about 1/2 hr on day one and turned it off, utterly disappointed. I'm a HUGE NG Black / NGII fan and felt totally let down. Combat was stiff. Gunplay felt wonky. I made myself a salad. I watched a few episodes of Sealab 2021. I decided to turn it back on for 15 minutes before going to be. 

Ended up spending the next hour totally engrossed. 

It's a tough as nails, bust your balls hard game. Lots of enemy repetition (wave after wave). Your have a very limited skill tree which seemed like it was going to make combat extremely boring. It's not. It's more that the game needs to be approached in a very specific way, and once you realize that, it totally opens up, and each skill opens up new, specific opportunities that change the way you play. 

You open up an extended dash and, aha, it's a roll that allows you to change direction and get behind enemies / create space. You open up skill that allows you to perform finishers (basically, NGII's Obliteration Technique) on de-limbed enemies, and suddenly 1/5 encounters becomes instant kills. You open up a post-parry strike that often de-limbs and you've got another tool in your belt to combine with the finishers. 

It really follows an old school combat approach, where different enemy types/scenarios are vulnerable to different things. In some ways, I guess there's a whole new set of games coming up that are kind of like this - your Sekiro's, Nioh's, etc. - but this (for me) is waaaaay more fun. I'm only at the end of level 2/5 and repeatedly getting slaughtered (because even grunts can put a hurting on your if you lose focus) but I'm rarely frustrated. It's, honestly, just too much fun. 

I think what tickles my brain with something like this more than something like a FromSoftware title is there is room for creativity, and an immediacy that I just don't get from modern games. Part of that is the ultraviolence, part of it is just the feel of it. 

Ultimately, an extremely, extremely niche product. However, I'm apparently that niche, as this will likely be my GOTY. 

Kinda late to the party, playing Bloodborne atm.

Getting my ass kicked of course. Just killed the first executioner, was hoping for a better reward than the loot i got. Some stupid lure item. Maybe I can use it on those fucking wolves 

finally playing Darkest Dungeon. immediately sucked me in. disgustingly good.

Finally beat Elden Ring after a billion tries on the final boss. Had to watch a Youtube video to try to make any sense of the story. It still doesn't make sense. 

I started Inscryption. It's loony.

  On 2/20/2023 at 7:23 PM, onecaseman said:

Finally beat Elden Ring after a billion tries on the final boss. Had to watch a Youtube video to try to make any sense of the story. It still doesn't make sense. 

I started Inscryption. It's loony.

I love Inscryption so much, one of my all time favorites.

I've been really taking my time in Elden Ring, slowly exploring everything I can and leveling up a bunch before moving on to any new area. I'm enjoying it a lot but still in no rush to finish. Might take a break from it for a bit to play Signalis, I've been eager to give that a try for a while and I'm kind of in the mood for horror.

  On 2/20/2023 at 8:41 PM, Boxus said:

I love Inscryption so much, one of my all time favorites.

I've been really taking my time in Elden Ring, slowly exploring everything I can and leveling up a bunch before moving on to any new area. I'm enjoying it a lot but still in no rush to finish. Might take a break from it for a bit to play Signalis, I've been eager to give that a try for a while and I'm kind of in the mood for horror.

Signalis is on my list too, but gotta work through a backlog.

Inscryption rules. wonderfully cryptic and weird. nod to Obel for recommending me that one and getting me into card(y) games, I also tried Slay the Spire on his recommendation and spent many hours in it.

Currently having some time off from work, so slogging through Hollow Knight. Pretty, fun and … difficult.

Fun, though, unlike Elden Ring which drove me into a rage when I’d *almost* slaughtered everyone at the castle on the Weeping Peninsula only to get killed by one of those flying monkey demon dragon things that was hiding behind a pillar. Not cool, From Software, not cool.

I gave up on Spyro. I blame the controls, or maybe I'm shit at it but over half way in and the difficulty ramped up crazy. It just wasn't fun anymore. Now I'm playing Kirby and the Forgotten Land and so far love it.  Super high quality Nintendo ip.

Played a bit of Atomic Heart. Not really feeling it. I guess they tried to do a bioshock, but everything feels very unsatisfying and straight up dumb. Nice aesthetics but I wouldn't bother.

edit:  oh yeah I forgot, the player character is a duke nukem type "cool" guy, just what you wanted amirite? I'm guessing whoever wrote this isn't too bright. 

edit edit: oh shit these guys have some icky russians backing them. glad I only checked it out on game pass, apologies to any Ukranians out there, won't happen again.

damn.

  On 2/23/2023 at 1:05 PM, Limo said:

Hollow Knight

beautiful game. the rest music soothes the soul.

  On 2/24/2023 at 2:17 PM, usagi said:

damn.

beautiful game. the rest music soothes the soul.

Theoretically yes but given its association with infuriatingly hard bosses, no

Finally caved and ordered the Konami Collection 1 for the old 360, so I can play Symphony of the Night on an actual CRT without emulator lag (or spending hundreds of dollars on an original disk, or finally installing a modchip in my ps1).

Seriously considering grabbing an old Wii so I can softmod it and load it up with the whole Gamecube library, too.

EDIT: in the mean time I might get Syndicate Plus going in DOSbox.  I've had it since I was a kid but never really got far into it because the DOS version enver worked reliably on any computer I had back then, so I mainly played it on a friend's mac. If nothing else, I might have never played Dungeon Keeper if it weren't for Syndicate making me implicitly trust Bullfrog to make a good game.

i beat elden ring again. going to put it away now

  On 2/24/2023 at 7:16 PM, exitonly said:

i beat elden ring again. going to put it away now

Like … how is that even possible?

  On 2/24/2023 at 9:19 PM, Limo said:

Like … how is that even possible?

when you do a new game after beating it the first time, you keep your build. i was a level 220 by the end of it. some parts are still hard but i wasn’t spending days on a single boss like the first go-round