What game are you wasting time on?

[sullynathan]

Played lots of Ninja Gaiden, in the future I'll talk about it more. So far, this game is tough as hell with some bullshit elements. Camera is your greatest enemy.

Played Asura's Wrath. Game is pure anime cutscenes, i'm not even sure I can call it a game.

Did anyone here play lost planet?

 

[Ninjerk]

Played lots of Ninja Gaiden, in the future I'll talk about it more. So far, this game is tough as hell with some bullshit elements. Camera is your greatest enemy.

Played Asura's Wrath. Game is pure anime cutscenes, i'm not even sure I can call it a game.

Did anyone here play lost planet?

Very briefly. I watched my cousin play the sequel a bit and it looked like 10 times the game Lost Planet appeared to be.

 

[Kabas]

Decided to try some different scenarios in PC Realmz with a fresh party and i think i start to see the point octavius made about the meta-game requirements.
Prelude to pestilence started fine and everything, a two fairly tough combat encounters with a limited amount of a magical weapons for your party to use. The problems begun after party left the first cave and i decided to rest, only to be ambushed by a party who had a wizard with mass charm.
Status effects are scary in this game, but they're hard to land on enemies -> a rule that rarely applies to your enemies as i noticed. My vampire dabbler was the only who made that save.
Perhaps i should have gone to the nearest city first, which i did after reloading - only to find that any attempt to enter the stores crashes the game, rendering scenario unplayable.
Tried another one with a new party, Trouble in the sword lands, which i heard was good. My attempt to be a caravan guard failed miserably, perhaps due to the lack of any proper gear, so i decided to do as the scenario info suggested and go into the tavern first. It ended even worse, culminating in the fight with the squad of worms, every single one of whom had a huge amount of stamina and a 3 attacks per round with a good chance to inflict disease/paralize. I have no idea how i was supposed to win this with the level 5 party.
Characters created immediately at the skill level 5 lack any appropriate equipment and the needed amount of money, in other words they are too weak for the suggested level of the scenario. And i created a new party from scratch because i heard that they will be too overpowered if transfered from the Bywater, .

I also tried another game, called Helherron. It's a bit simple but fairly fun - first encounters in the goblin cave are somewhat varied, there are a few secret rooms to find and so on, but i wasn't satisfied with how my party turned out to be.
Mainly, i wasn't satisfied with my golem and the orcish shaman. Golem is great at bashing goblins and watching him do it is great too, but he is too slow. I don't like how i need to hold back my other melee guys just so this guy will not miss on any action. For orc shaman i noticed only later that i rolled too low on the mental stats, he constantly fails his spells and his animal summons were of little use so far.
Planning to reroll my party in the foreseeable future.

 

[Sceptic]

Quest for Glory 4 is so fucking excellent. I've been replaying the entire series as a fighter/paladin and I feel like I'm back in the 90s.

I hope you're playing the CD version. The voice acting is the best of the early 90s and both famous (Jennifer Hale and John Rhys-Davis) and obscure (the guy who voices Ad Avis) actors shine.

 

[Kabas]

Another game that i am finally came to play is Alvora tactics. It's everything like it's predecessor Voidspire tactics(which i loved a lot), but with more races/classes and a changed focus to the dungeon delving with a hub.
My recruits are as follows:
Ulfo - Berserker/Brawler. A lizard/dog guy who has a 50% chance to poison anyone who hits him in melee. Berserker is a new class that can increase his morale while lowering that of enemies, remove debuffs and increase his strength at the cost of the defence and so on. He also has access to an interesting passive similar to the warrior counter-attack, but instead of counter-attacking one enemy for 90% damage he attacks everyone around him for 80%, even friends. Great guy to throw into the fray, prone to getting hurt though. Perhaps he would have benefited more from getting a guardian as a side job, but the ability to throw an oversized sword at the enemies is just too awesome to pass up.
Morek - Bat handler/scout. Another new race with a little bonus stregth and spikes on the back against backstabbers. Scout abilities are all over the place, but i like making a use of them. Bat handler is another new class i just unlocked. I am yet to summon a bat in combat, but his ability to fly on it already proved useful in the exploration.
Paxon - Spell Archon/Sorcerer. A new race with bonus 10 mana/energy. Basically an archer/mage hybrid with a focus on setting things on fire, not a new class. Kinda regret investing into crossbows as his ranged weapon, i feel that the bows would be better for him. Oh well, i hope it would not be too long until i find a two-handed guns, don't want to bother with unlocking a shifcloak the hard way for that double-reloading passive.
Lux - Sage/Scholar. The same race as ^. Sage was invaluable with his heals and barriers in the voidspire tactics, he is invaluable here. I don't feel the need to unlock anything fancy on him.
Burvi - Unmaker/Defiler. That faceless race from the first game, perhaps not the most optimal race thanks to one of the defiler passives. Defiler is an interesting take on the "dark mage" theme. He can automatically kill anyone below or equal to 10 hp, cast a a bunch of useful debuffs and so on. The main difference from the unmaker is that the defiler is not focusing only on the ruin magic, but use all the elements. This guy also looks like a maniac with his mask and bone axe.
Krya - Warrior/Rogue. Scurio race from the first game with a bonus to acting time. I want to make her the Blade/Rogue or Rogue/Blade with a focus on double daggers. But for now she(I think it's a girl) is acting as my main tank, Ulfo is in need of a day off after that one particular nasty fight that resulted in his K.O.
All in all i love it. I also like that you now have an alternative way to unlock new classes in addition to the old method of acquiring an exp in a few different classes first.

 

[J_C]

Did anyone here play lost planet?

I played it. Nice worldbuilding with the ice planet, and I loved the mech combat against huge monsters. Story is meh.

 

[newtmonkey]

Played lots of Ninja Gaiden, in the future I'll talk about it more. So far, this game is tough as hell with some bullshit elements. Camera is your greatest enemy.

Played Asura's Wrath. Game is pure anime cutscenes, i'm not even sure I can call it a game.

Did anyone here play lost planet?

I played and finished it (the first one) on Xbox back when it was released. It's a fine action game with some nice twists (I liked that you needed to stay warm by starting up heat stations and by killing enemies to absorb their heat (...)) and some great battles against giant bosses.

 

[Lampshade]

Terraria expert mode has been a fun ride so far.

I haven't even beaten Moon Lord or Duke Fishron in a normal world yet, but I'm still going the route of "constantly play with friends to give free buffs to bosses and get killed 10 times in a row".

It's probably the exploration of new gear and satisfaction in finally beating a boss which is really pulling me in. We end up trying a bunch of weapons, going through piles of garbage and eventually finding something broken.

Also, an update would be nice. Small dev team woes

Yeah, expert mode is pretty fun. Are you in hardmode yet? That's when the real madness starts.

I've been there for a bit now, just beat all Mechanicals. After going through the ritual of "break altars, die to 50 wraiths" and going through 10 weapons, I've finally found peace with the Sky Fracture and Meteor Rod.

We've killed over 200 Skeleton Archers for my friend, still no magic quiver drop though.

 

[octavius]

So, what is the game you're mostly playing now and what do you think of it?

To start this thread off, I'm spending most of my gaming time on Paradox's Crusader Kings with the Deus Vult expansion and the DVIP mod installed. The game honestly has me ensnared so much that I'm even dreaming about it. Haven't had that in years. The game is somewhat of a mix between a medieval sims, strategy and roleplaying game in which you guide a dynasty through the Dark Ages. It also has a tendency to shower all sorts of misfortune over you at the most inopportune moments. Love it, even so much that I started an ironman of it. Masochism incarnated.

For those interested, Root is making an excellent LP of it.

https://itch.io/s/8976/four-of-the-greatest-rpgs-to-date-on-sale-now

Someone give this guy a Spammer tag.

 

[wyes gull]

Played a popamole double-decker. LA Noire and Binary Domain.

I was consistently impressed with the technical side of the former. The city looks great, as do the people and the cars (it might've converted me into a fan of 40's motors). The face-tech I was particularly curious about, especially the eyes as they're most often the hardest thing to get right, but I walked away much more impressed with the mouths, of all things. You do get the feeling often enough (and it probably is what's happening) that the lips/teeth textures don't move in sync with the geometry which means you end up with wobbly teeth but even with that, the result is extremely impressive, close to the better of those face-replaced gifs that are floating around. Voice acting and music are great as well, and not just the licensed tunes with regards to the latter.
Shame it's all in service of a very mediocre game. Driving is serviceable but nothing more. It does that same trick GTA does of making you think you're going faster by rev noise and reduced handling when you're not actually going all that fast(er). Cars accelerate and corner well but have huge turn radii and terrible brakes, both things that, however realistic, the game could do without for the players' sake; It's bad enough that the game chides you for hitting things/people but when it expects you to do 5 point turns and break 3 weeks in advance, that makes driving almost a chore. Chase sequences have obnoxiously scripted parts that annoy your play for cinematic purposes and bring you out of the game by limiting your agency- and that's a good example of what the whole game feels like. Whether you're shooting, tailing or investigating you feel more like you're holding the action button to proceed rather than improving your knowledge/skill and beating the game as a result. As such, every failure is an annoying impediment, doubly so because you can't skip the cutscenes that "plague" (I mean, they are the point- just not the same one 3 times in a row) the thing. Failing any of the action sequences enough times also ellicits a "Would you like to skip this?" prompt which should tell you how high an opinion the game has of itself. As for the interrogations, their impressiveness drops as the game progresses. You start with small cases with obvious actors/evidence and it's easy to tell from the facial animations and plot that the character's lying and what it's lying about. When the cases and the amount of places you can visit and evidence/clues start to increase, odd situations tend to happen. One character told me he knew nothing about the morphine that I'd just found and even though I could tell he was lying and accuse him, I had no way to point towards the cache that's sitting RIGHT BEHIND HIM. All told, and considering the amount of variation, I think they did as good a job of preventing these irregularities as well as could be expected but then this is purely anecdotal. I would expect more and would expect them to be just as annoying as the ones I came across. The cases are decently varied but even someone who tends to avoid police procedurals such as myself will find most of them predictable and have more trouble finding out what the game expects you to do to get the result you want than what that result actually is.
As for the plot- it's hard not to be disappointed by the lack of agency but it was always going to be hard on a game this size. That said, I think the it had the right idea splitting the cases between desks (patrolman, murder, vice, etc) and having each case play out in an episodic fashion. Tying some of these desks to conspiracies was also a good idea for continuity. However, as a whole, a lot of these just knock the wind out of the over-arching plot, even if it does use flashbacks and backstory to good result. The story winds up suffering for the game (especially the length), while it suffers for the cinematics. As tends to happen with these things.

Except when it doesn't. Enter Binary Domain. BD is a very, very retarded japanese sci-fi story about a XCom squad a UN-type thingy's anti-robot squad that gets sent into Japan to find the creator of extremely realistic robots who have been outlawed following the 8th treaty of the 2nd Geneva conventions after the 5th world war on the moon or something. Who the fuck knows? Like I said, it's japanese. Fuck reason, time for overacting, dramatic pose-offs and corny one-liners. That it manages to navigate a plot and characters/direction that bonkers and end up one of the most well-written games I've played is no small feat. Take a bow, Antony Johnston. Further, it seems to hit a very small mark in that neither game nor story suffer for one another while maintaining (the illusion of) player agency over the latter. For you see, the game's main gimmick is the main character's ability to mold his relation to his squadmates. Pick any 2 of the 5 and act in a way they approve and you will gain favor; act untoward and they will dislike you. These are either conversation options or battle performance. Being loved won't (unfortunately) influence all that much as far as the plot's concerned but the illusion is there for a couple of playthroughs. It's hard not to feel cheated but I'm not entirely despondent. There's plenty of situational banter to make up for it. And the characters are great. A collage of personalities from every squad action movie you've ever seen from Aliens to Predator and anything inbetween, each amusing, annoying and often tongue-in-cheek tacky in their own way.
Then there's the game. It's a console TPS so the bar is pretty low. Controls don't transition all that well for PC and I struggled to find a mouse sensitivity setting that was comfortable at all times. Movement is naff and has contextual shit and 1-button-for-everything so it's more like driving than actual character motion. Weapon selection is surprisingly poor, especially considering it's sci-fi. You have your grenades (which you have to select first and THEN use, rendering them mostly useless), a couple of rocket launchers (that don't have enough ammo to be a valid, consistent option), a sniper rifle and choice of "realistic" guns that fire the exact same bullets with varying degrees of accuracy, capacity, speed and spread and that feel EXACTLY THE SAME. And none of them have any "oomph" to it. I ended up wielding a LMG for most of the game for its ROF and capacity and because the accuracy can be made up for with mouse aiming and rarely ever felt the need to switch up unless I ran out of bullets or had a contextual thingy to overcome with the assault rifle's secondary fire. There is fortunately a good amount of variation between not only arenas but set-pieces, wether you're driving or turret-ing. The real nugget tho, is enemy design. These are some of the most satisfying foes to fight in any shooter I've played. Not from an AI standpoint, mind (on that note they felt pretty milquetoast) but in the way they're built. They're robots who oh-so satisfyingly come apart depending on where you decide to hit them. Whether it be arms or legs, you're going to see bits shed and jump off and litter the battlefield. And reactivity to damage is excellent. Knocking out the legs will make the crawl; shooting an arm will have it drop off and if it's the one holding the gun, the robot will pick it up off the floor with his other one; shooting the head will make it lose IFF and start shooting his own team. And then there's the bosses. And whereas everyone bitches about bosses in every fucking game nowadays, I've seen nobody bitch about these and with good reason. You're fighting HUEG FUKKEN robots with movement sequences and weak spots you have to work out, armor you have to eat up and who crash thunderously when beaten. Even with the shitty gun selection and movement, gunfights end up being really satisfying to play through.

TL;DR- LA Noire is a AAA game with AAA looks and AAA "gameplay". Binary Domain is a AA game with AA looks and AAA bantz. I can recommend the former to someone who wants to see a meticulously recreated 40's LA and the latter to anyone who enjoyed Alpha Protocol, anyone who enjoys mech design or anyone who wants to see near perfect interplay between a talented english writer and a bonkers jap plot.

 

[sullynathan]

Just realized in Binding of Isaac, taking soy milk gives damage way down and tears way up

 

[Azalin]

Finished Shadow Tactics:Blades of the Shogun like most people have said before me this is a very good real time tactics stealth game,anyone who has grown tired of replaying Commandos and Desperados should give it a try.It's on sale during the steam summer sale and I think is't also on sale for a couple more hours at gog too so get it.Recommended.

 

[Farewell into the night]

Good old games. They're still pretty good, all of them!

 

[Ninjerk]

NOTATNIK

 

[Beowulf]

Nu Syndicate ...

 

[Ivan]

Fran Bow

Easy point and click adv game bursting w/charm in a land of fantastic horrors and wonders. Pretty short (due to difficulty) but very much worthwhile. I really enjoyed this one.

 

[Curratum]

Picked up Descent 1 and 2 in the gog summer sale, finally found out they have sourceports and been having an absolute blast with both of them!

 

[Ravness]

During the GOG summersale, I picked up Heroes of Might and Magic 3 because of this video here...

Spoiler

Also picked up Might and Magic 6-7 (Casually playing through 6 atm, very slowly) and recently picked up Jagged Alliance 2.

I probably have to find the time to actually play Jagged Alliance 2 since there's alot to it and its not as "pick up and play" as Heroes 3.

Overall I really enjoy Heroes 3 alot, playing the campaigns atm

 

[agentorange]

Finished my replay of STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, ending my replay of the trilogy as a whole. Although on replaying Call of Pripyat I found I liked it far more than before, SoC still ends up being my favorite. I would say it is the most consistent in quality of the three, with even the final areas of Pripyat and Chernobyl feeling as dense as necessary; unlike in CoP there is no expectation that Pripyat will be a full fledged hub area so the fact that it offers a highly detailed locale as well as some challenging fights against monolith forces feels enough. The big difference between the two games is how side-quests are handled, and looking at the side quests of the two in themselves those in CoP are far superior, but in a certain way they are more similar than they seem. It's only that in CoP the complexity of the side-quests are fulfilling the relative lack of complexity in the main plot, finding the helicopters being merely a clever pretext for getting the player to explore the maps; in SoC the main story-line is what displays the most complexity while the often repetitive side quests are there to offer a means for gaining an optional edge and may have the player explore areas they would not see if only following the main path. In terms of scripting the side quests in CoP are more intricate, but the story-line of SoC remains more appealing to me. Uncovering the secrets of the Brain Scorcher, discovering C-Consciousness, following the footsteps of Ghost, Fang, Strelok, all present a more mysterious and eventually satisfying story than the military focused plot of CoP. Strelok's personal determination to get to the center of the Zone also gives the story some more drama than the meandering goals of Degtyarev in CoP. In fact I always thought it was odd that at least two of the plot elements comprising the main story of CoP, the shifting of anomalies as well as the development of the gauss rifle, that, as far as I can tell, were meant to be surprising, are already dealt with in both SoC and Clear Sky: the shifting of anomalies were revealed in CS, as the very premise for the central plot, and the gauss rifle is available in both CS and SoC. It would seem to make more sense to have the central plot in CoP deal with what effect the elimination of the C Consciousness had on the Noosphere. The lack of some of those more enigmatic qualities of the zone, explored and alluded to in SoC, made CoP far less atmospheric.

As someone pointed out before, here or in the STALKER mod thread, the enemies in SoC are noticeably more durable than in the later games. And in the vanilla game even on Master difficulty there is still some random spread applied to bullets. It's a conflicting difference because although it can at times be aggravating or absurd to dump half a magazine into an enemies chest and have them survive, or spend 5 seconds shooting at an enemy from far away with your bullets going anywhere but where the scope is pointed, it does make gunfights significantly more intense in my experience. In CS as well as CoP enemies will go down from one or two shotgun blasts from even a fair distance away, and once a high quality rifle is acquired it becomes a trivial matter of pointing and clicking on the enemies head. Likewise, from what I could tell, the player similarly died far faster in CS and CoP, making firefights a matter of whichever character gets the drop on the other, rather than a more sustained back and forth. I think this is one reason CS threw far more enemies at the player, to try and even out the difficulty, and in CoP they did not even do this, for better and worse, resulting in the game being the easiest of the trilogy. After all although it's realistic that a headshot would kill or incapacitate someone in one shot, it's simultaneously unrealistic to believe that someone in the midst of a firefight could be calmly popping off dozens of headshots, due to a variety of factors.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

i'm suffering.
i've been playing the mod "old world blues" for hearts of iron 4 and now i feel the urge to reinstall new vegas.
but i know it like the back of my hand =_=
but i want it
but it takes ages to redownload, reinstall and fix all the necessary mods =_=
but i need it
but i spent already a hundred hours on it =_=
but i'm fond of it

crap.

 

[Kabas]

A few additional observations and things about Alvora tactics:
-I did not regret keeping brawler as a secondary job for my berserker. Throw weapon is his most damaging single target attack, with the only downside being the need to waste the next turn picking his weapon back. I am thinking about giving him that instant swap passive of the scout so he can become a full-time thrower of the oversized swords.
-Bat handler is a support class, who can increase party speed, boost/decrease evasion and his summoned bat can add a bit of damage. All of that in additon to a great exploration tool in the form of bat flight ability. He also has one fun passive that deals 1 damage to every enemy every time his turn comes up, rarely useful but fun.
-My Bat handler/Scout can also act as decent secondary healer thanks to a new scout passive that boosts healing.
-I decided to requalify my spell archon back into the simple but effective combo of the Sorcerer/Scholar. I found myself really disliking crossbows, especially on spell archon. Plus i found the Spell Archon/Sorcerer generally not being a good combo, because the former is clearly more of an archer than a mage and benifits more from multi-classing with sharpshooter. Ended up wasting a lot of exp into unneeded classes and stars into crossbows, but oh well. Now my Paxon is a fire sorcerer who can occasionaly hit with the crossbow.
- Defiler is actually sharing some similarities with spell archon, in that most of his abilities are single(two if upgrated) target ranged attacks with status effects that combine two different attack types(ruin magic and other elements in this case). His ability to instakill low hp enemies is trully shining when combined with his passive, that activates this spell on everyone in the spell radius when hit into the critical condition.
-I decided to abandon my idea of making a Blade/Rogue after taking a closer look at the blade abilities. Blade is clearly benefits more from choosing a sword or axe as his primary weapon instead of daggers, so after taking a passive that allows a bonus dagger attack in the off-hand i turned her back into the Rogue/Warrior. She is mobile, her damage is decent and she is great at landing some status effects, but i am in serious need of aquiring some rare materials to make a dagger that gives additional status effect, so i can benefit more from their high accuracy.
-I also recruited a new goat guy who i intend to turn into the guardian, because my only team fighter would rather throw swords every day than learn a guard. And another guy who looks like a goat whom i intend to turn into the ignis knight. Ignis knight seems like a fun to play as class, judging from that one ambush there a group of those caught my party completely unprepared.

 

[Kabas]

crap.

I suggest you to not give in in your urges, judging by what you said.
I speak from experience
Edit: you will likely lose this urge the moment you install everything.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

you don't know the worst part: i LOVE browsing through hundreds of mods, looking for something new.
damn, i'll probably do it in a few minutes.

 

[markec]

Day 1 bought Fallen Haven on GOG and finished the human campaign, as mentioned before it is rather simplistic game but still quite fun.

On Steam sale got The Quest, Im 9 hours in and I might say that so far Im enjoying the game.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Day 1 bought Fallen Haven on GOG and finished the human campaign, as mentioned before it is rather simplistic game but still quite fun.

On Steam sale got The Quest, Im 9 hours in and I might say that so far Im enjoying the game.

How on earth do you have time to play games?