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What game are you wasting time on?

Krivol

Magister
Joined
Apr 21, 2012
Messages
1,951
Location
Potatoland aka Prussia
I just dropped Dragon's Dogma after two quests for some princess - writers were totally retarded here... (I mean, she felt in love with me after 1 meeting, then her husband throwed me to the dungeon, I escaped, and this moron forgot whole case... after a moment he sent his wife to far-away tower, I went to help her and we fucked with guards patroling nearby area, because why not. I think I start playing this game as a kid, because this scene will be hilarious that way).

If you play (or stop playing) Dragon's Dogma because of the story, you're doing it wrong. That story is nothing to write home about, the pacing is off, and it's pretty obvious through large parts of it that they ran out of money. I still find it and some of its characters more interesting than most other games' stories and characters, and the game actually has some decent c&c (even though it's not immediately obvious). And it mostly doesn't get in the way of the gameplay, which is superb and the reason why you should continue playing. At the very least you should give Bitterblack Isle a try.

All true, I actually stopped this after 82 hours (acc to steam) of playing - I got a bit bored and after those two quests I just lost it... It's still great game, better than any recent Bethpizda shit.

I managed to beat FTL for the first time, then done it 2 times in a row. I am ready for medium difficulty :D.
 

Ezekiel

Arcane
Joined
May 3, 2017
Messages
5,373
Beat Uncharted 4. These games would have been better without health regen. You're so weak. A crouch would also have been nice too, considering how much low cover and uneven elevations there are and how you're not always in the best spot to attach to cover. I also would have liked the recoil to not be so high and the hipfire to be a little tighter. There's a trophy for hip-shooting, so they know people want to do it. Being able to swap shoulders only while using the over the shoulder view is somewhat limiting.

The game took so long to get going. For what felt like three hours, most of it consisted of brain-dead climbing and talking, with almost no shooting at all. After it finally became a shooter, there were still long downtimes of mediocre puzzles, climbing and talking. Uncharted never had very good writing and it's kind of corny to now watch the characters being all emotional and crying about their personal problems in this very unrealistic pulp action adventure. The drama feels misplaced. I don't want melodramatic art crap in my Indiana Jones.

The ending boss fight reminded me of the MGS4 ending boss. You have to block the villain's attacks with Triangle or Circle depending on where his sword is coming from. Both this fight and the one in MGS4 require you to get good at a completely different kind of game than the one you've been playing for hours. I don't play fighting games.

I didn't find the game bad, though. The action was okay, the story was okay and I liked the look of the environments, even though they were pretty ridiculous and unbelievable later on. 300-year-old wooden structures and fabrics in remarkably good condition. Letters left in the open for centuries, still legible.
 
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Joined
Mar 27, 2013
Messages
3,914
Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
Currently, I'm playing:

MS-KICODE.jpg


and

LifeIsStrange-BeforeTheStorm_XL.jpg


Also, there are a couple of games I'm "generally" playing currently, meaning they wait to be finished / continued, and probably will be rather soon, but I'm not literally playing them now:

91Up9VyS4xL._SY445_.jpg


and

300px-ShadowrunHongKongHeader.jpg


as well as

61y5VRP9tXL._AC_SX215_.jpg
 
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markec

Twitterbot
Patron
Joined
Jan 15, 2010
Messages
45,672
Location
Croatia
Codex 2012 Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Dead State Project: Eternity Codex USB, 2014 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath
Finished entire Deponia series and all I can say FUCK THAT ENDING, FUCK IT IN THE ASS, FUCK!

I played the games because I wanted a humorous lighthearted feel good story and you give me THAT, well FUCK YOU!

What the fuck am I gonna play now to lower my stress from the game that was supposed to lower my stress.

Well Im gonna go and take my chance with Primordia.
 

Unkillable Cat

LEST WE FORGET
Patron
Joined
May 13, 2009
Messages
27,089
Codex 2014 Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy
Finished entire Deponia series and all I can say FUCK THAT ENDING, FUCK IT IN THE ASS, FUCK!

I played the games because I wanted a humorous lighthearted feel good story and you give me THAT, well FUCK YOU!

Including Doomsday? Because they made that game as a direct response to people who reacted like you just did.

What the fuck am I gonna play now to lower my stress from the game that was supposed to lower my stress.

Well Im gonna go and take my chance with Primordia.

Primordia has multiple endings, and you only get stress-inducing endings if you act like a soy-bot.
 

Sykar

Arcane
Joined
Dec 2, 2014
Messages
11,297
Location
Turn right after Alpha Centauri
Underrail

I confess I went into this game rather ignorant. I was expecting a Fallout-esque RPG and I was partially right. However, the game is obviously not as refined or fleshed out. The limited AI really impacts the battles at length. When you've done hundreds of fights, it all becomes rather predictable and boring.

The combat in UR is several levels above that of FO and much more varied. I have no idea what you mean with "refined". When it comes to combat and character building Underrail is way ahead of Fallout. FO beats it in writing and C&C but thats about it.
 

Dux

Arcane
Joined
May 26, 2016
Messages
635
Location
Sweden
I'm not going to go out and say F1 or F2 had amazing AI or even combat for that matter, but these are quite old games we're talking about and the underlying concept was fairly new back then. As for "refined" I'm basically talking about the overral design.

As for myself I never really found that Underrail pushed the envelope so to speak, even though it's obviously more sophisticated. Not as sophisticated as I would've hoped, though. A lot of fights felt far too similar and I was rarely - if ever - surprised by things that occurred in them. That's my experience. I guess after so many fights I hoped to be caught off guard just once and see something different from the enemies. As far as I could see, however, most enemies seem to have one mode and that's it.
 

Adon

Arcane
Joined
May 8, 2015
Messages
667
The ending boss fight reminded me of the MGS4 ending boss. You have to block the villain's attacks with Triangle or Circle depending on where his sword is coming from. Both this fight and the one in MGS4 require you to get good at a completely different kind of game than the one you've been playing for hours. I don't play fighting games.

As someone who plays fighting games, that last boss fight in MGS4 isn't even good at what it tries to be. It ends up playing out like a really bad, stiff 3D fighting game, and it's even worse in higher difficulties. The only reason people like to laud that boss fight is because of how much nostalgia is dripping out of it.
 

markec

Twitterbot
Patron
Joined
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Croatia
Codex 2012 Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Dead State Project: Eternity Codex USB, 2014 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath
Including Doomsday? Because they made that game as a direct response to people who reacted like you just did.

I do think that the way they ended Goodbye Deponia felt forced, out of place and open to sequel, but I wouldn't have minded that ending that much if there was no fourth game.

Doomsday on the other hand gives you hope at start and then you experience game that felt like hours of gut punches made by developer that hates its fan base, ending with a big middle finger.

As I said I came into the game expecting a lighthearted feel good story with a happy ending and got a big fuck you.

Primordia has multiple endings, and you only get stress-inducing endings if you act like a soy-bot.

I expected as much so I decided to first try The Dark Eye: Chains of Satinav and then Memoria.
 

kalganoat

Savant
Joined
Jun 5, 2017
Messages
306
I'm playing ninja gaiden 2 on 360. I've played sigma 2 on PS3 before but people always say it sucks compared to NG2. So I just have to try the real thing.

Yeah it's so much better than sigma 2. Only downside is shitty fps drops. Imma get a xbox one the moment this game is backward compatible.
 

TheHeroOfTime

Arcane
Joined
Nov 3, 2014
Messages
2,879
Location
S-pain
About the Ninja gaiden I think the is best is playing both versions from PS3 & 360, mainly because each version has improvements and letdowns that the others doesn’t have.

In the case of comparisons, I think the people tends to find the “Black VS Sigma” a lot of more jarring due the lack of riddles. Unfortunately I never had the oportunity to play the original xbox version.
 

Shackleton

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Dec 29, 2011
Messages
1,301
Location
Knackers Yard
Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture
Just given up on Mafia 3, after taking over the first area. Got in this months Humble Bundle and thought I'd see if it was as bad as Codex made it out to be at launch.

Yes, yes it is.

Made quite a good first impression, decent intro section for the first 2-3 hours. Great soundtrack and a gorgeous city to drive around. Introduced you to the gameplay elements while setting out the groundwork for a fairly run-of-the mill revenge tale. Graphics are decent now it's fully patched. I thought it was going to be the usual open world fare- collect stuff, take over areas, upgrade stuff etc etc.

However, then it came to the open world missions. Holy shiii-iit, the AI is absolutely horrific! Literally every encounter was broken by the extreme ninja skills of hiding behind a box and whistling. Get one enemy to come over, 'Q' him for an instant kill, then watch as every enemy in the level wanders slowly over one by one to see what the deal is with the dead body only to get an instant one-button knockout and join the pile.

Maybe it gets better later, (although I highly doubt it), but after the first area it became apparent that I was going to be doing the exact same routine for the next 30 or so hours and frankly I've got better things to do with my time. Like picking my belly-button fluff out or cutting my toenails. Such a shame they apparently spent all the time on graphics and rushed the AI and mission design. Even the brilliant 60's songs couldn't get me to waste anymore time on this one.
 

Ezekiel

Arcane
Joined
May 3, 2017
Messages
5,373
More decline coming... I'm replaying Uncharted 2 (HD collection), trying to use as little cover as possible. It's usually easier without. You know, a lot of my deaths are because I get bored waiting for my screen to no longer be black and white. I've heard it said that health regen allows for a faster pace, since you don't have to be as careful or look out for health items, but I feel it's the opposite. I can run non-stop through a level of any Max Payne, quickly swallowing painkillers. Here, you're constantly cowering and waiting.
 
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Deflowerer

Arcane
Joined
May 22, 2013
Messages
2,052
Since Far Cry 5 came out, it reminded me that I hadn't played any Far Cry games and have the first one on Steam for some reason, so installed it and gave it a shot. Seems alright, will see how frustrating it will get playing on Realistic.
 

Durandal

Arcane
Joined
May 13, 2015
Messages
2,117
Location
New Eden
My team has the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit.
In my search for first-person shooters with good boss battles I came across Gun Buster, a 2.5D light gun shooter made by Taito in 1992, featuring an unique joystick & light gun set-up similar to what most modern first-person shooters would use, and an actual deathmatch multiplayer mode, which makes this game quite the innovator considering it was released right before Wolfenstein 3D and a year before Doom.

You play as a bounty hunter (called Blade R- I mean Gun Busters) whose mission it is to take out cyborgs gone mad with a prize on their head. Between every mission your handler lets you pick out of two missions which to accept, and progression is actually kind of branched, where more difficult opponents yield higher bounties. Moving around is done with the joystick, whereas aiming is done via the light gun (or mouse if you play it emulated) which controls a crosshair on screen, and turning is done by moving the gun to the left or right edge of the screen. You get to choose between four Gun Busters, each with their own health and speed attributes, and their own special firing ability. One fires a laser, the other a spread shot, and the other two I forgot about. Turning having to be done by moving your crosshair to the edge of the screen instead of mouseaim controlling both turning and aiming is rather annoying, though probably an inevitability given the 2.5D engine. Since your turning speed is limited and the drawing distance of sprites even more so, the game has a useful pop-up in the form of a rader telling you in which direction you need to turn or where to go next in order to get to the boss.

What's also interesting is that Gun Buster is essentially a boss rush game. Each stage has you and the boss enemies face off in a small arena, where sometimes there are more boss enemies, some times they'll constantly spawn cannon fodder, and so on. There's certainly no lack of variety here. Some bosses are fought through a motorcycle chase (it should be noted that all Gun Busters magically float in the air in a crouched Superman pose, as if they're equipped with an invisible jetpack), the other is fought over the sea as he constantly submerges to get you from beneath, the other disables your radar and has you aimlessly chase him through a big arena, and the other is a giant talking brain in a tube who'll eventually start chasing you around. What's cool is that the more you damage the bosses the more you tear off their fake skin and the more their true robotic nature is shown.

The arcade game structure also influences a lot of things about this game which you don't see in, any other first-person shooter really. To avoid having the player getting lost, the levels are small arenas. Instead of facing a plethora of enemies at once, it's just you versus one or two boss fights. Hitscan is non-existent, and some projectiles can actually be shot down. There's loads of variety in the way bosses can damage you, homing missiles, straight lasers, mines, spreadshots, enemy spawns, you name it. Ammo is unlimited, and the special attack instead needs to recharge over time. You don't need to find an exit, just killing the boss transports you to the next level select screen.

I'm not particularly experienced with light-gun games, but I don't think you can reasonably no-damage this game (a TAS might prove me wrong). The attack frequency of some of the later bosses is so ridiculous that it becomes hard to consistently avoid their attacks, especially depending on how restrictive the arena design might be. Your limited turning speed doesn't help during some of the bosses who spawn loads of enemies which shoot you from all directions or some of the motorcycle chases where the boss can make some sharp turns, which leaves you constantly turning the screen around until you can align your sight with the boss. As a result it feels like some attacks are just impossible to avoid. It doesn't help either that the amount of health you recover between levels (damage persists in this game) is incredibly low. With a modern control scheme and reasonable sprite drawing distance this might have been avoided, but as it stands some of the later bosses make it feel more like you have to tank your way through and hope you have enough health left to reach the final boss.

As a result I like the bosses here more conceptually than how they are actually executed, though even so the boss fights here stand above most boss fights in every other FPS out there. For starters the bosses here don't have (untelegraphed or inconsistently avoidable) hitscan attacks, they aren't a puzzle boss which need to be beat through solving an abstract challenge rather than actually challenging the skills you have learned throughout the game, they aren't a lazy summoner-type boss, they aren't helicopters, they aren't QTE sequences, they aren't giant bulletsponges, they actually move around and challenge your aiming skills (even if this is more of a result of the awkward control scheme), there exists some semblance of playing aggressively here unlike most bosses where you either need to take potshots or the way of dealing damage is so one-sided that there's no real way of optimizing your damage output and thus killing the boss faster, and since you only have weapon they don't suffer from the problem every other FPS has where despite your giant arsenal designed to take on multiple enemies at once, only the most powerful weapons are of any use against single powerful enemies.

This game is especially interesting to me because it's an arcade first-person shooter developed by a Japanese company which unlike most light-gun shooters (I assume) lets you actually move around, already a rarity on its own considering Japanese developers gave this genre a wide berth as a year later the Masters of Doom established the legacy of first-person shooters on the PC platform which would be embraced mostly by Western developers, and the unique control set-up of Gun Buster probably couldn't be as easily replicated or popularized in the arcade scene, the game wastes a lot of time with its first two bosses on tutorials anyways because of how unorthodox the controls are.

For action platformers I've always considered there to be two main design philosophy branches, the Japanese arcade action platformers focused primarily on limited toolsets, a minimalistic scope and high difficulty, whereas the Western Apogee-esque platformers were developed for the home gaming audience by home gamers first and foremost, which thus focused on breadth of content, more open level design focused on exploration and finding secrets, and being more maximalist in scope and terms of content. For first-person shooters, Doom would obviously fit the latter, as id did make Commander Keen before Doom.

Doom in turn influenced the FPS genre as a whole with this philosophy, to the point where 'good FPS level design' has mostly been conflated to the standards of Doom and Quake because they are good and because no alternative in FPS level design philosophy has really been acknowledged by diehard fans, primarily because it's rarely ever attempted and otherwise rarely done right. Some outliers in level design style such as Serious Sam and Devil Daggers get a lot of unjustified flak for mostly taking place on flat spaces and not having "good level design", even though "good level design" in this case implies "traditional 90's level design", and trying to cram that style into Serious Sam and Devil Daggers would result in many enemy designs and gameplay systems being broken and made redundant, and changing those to suit the "good level design" would instead net you an entirely different game, which couldn't be seriously called either an improvement or deterioration.

Yet here, in a game released a year before the Doometeor hit, lies the seed out of which an entire unexplored subgenre of first-person shooters could sprout. But almost nobody's ever heard of this game, and almost nobody is even trying to make something akin to an arcade-style first-person shooter. While I'm glad that most indie developers are realizing that beating the roguelite horse to death does not make your infinitely replayable game infinitely fun and that randomizing everything in an FPS results in a lot of skill being thrown out of the window, if the most anticipated FPS releases of 2018 are in a wave of Early Access 'retro throwback shooters' with little in the way of innovation, then that's just going to send the wrong message to aspiring developers until people finally tire of these too. And even the recent AAA releases were conceptually interesting too, the first person to actually refine Doom (2016)'s formula into something good could be crowned the person to kickstart the FPS-Robotron subgenre, and Titanfall 2 showed that first-person platforming can actually be done right, and that it doesn't need to involve instant death pits everywhere. Hell High and DESYNC do seem interesting, but both give me eyecancer.

Now suppose what would happen in this decrepit gay genre if someone were to make the first-person equivalent of Alien Soldier or Sin & Punishment.
 
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PulsatingBrain

Huge and Ever-Growing
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Joined
Nov 5, 2014
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6,163
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The Centre of the Ultraworld
Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Codex+ Now Streaming! Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is. My team has the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit. Pathfinder: Wrath
Playing Dragon Age Origins at the minute, I thimed things out pretty poorly and ended up spending about 7 hours in the fucking fade over the last 2 days :badnews:
 

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