What game are you wasting time on?

[Ivan]

Playing Vampyr and I am enjoying it very much so far. Vampires are one of my favorite themes, particularly mingling with and manipulating humans. The hard difficulty isn't a joke, it throws a werewolf at you in the second chapter already and I had to go back and level up a bit, going to give it a second go now.

You can tell it was made by the Life is Strange devs though, a few hours in and I've already met the black ambulance driver and the nurse who burns the coal as well as the two war buddies who survived being buried alive which apparently made them gay for each other. And the MC is depicted as very understanding. Luckily, any minor or major story character can eventually be drained and killed for lots of experience which in turn will cause the district to become less safe. I was planning on draining in moderation.

Overall I enjoy the theme and atmosphere and the MC is likeable as well, the cordial nature of most conversations in particular is a joy to follow.

it's free to play on Xbox Game Pass for PC, you figure it's worth a try solely for the narrative/VA?

 

[markec]

Finished Nier Automata and gave away my save to help others. I must say that I really enjoyed playing this game despite its faults, its easily one of the most memorable games I played it the last few years.

Now Im probably gonna start Dragon Quest XI which I bought on this Steam sale.

 

[Viata]

Finished Geneforge. 34 hours playing a hell of a game. Because I had a shitty build(I thought mechanism and leadership were important, but that is ok), I decided to join Goettsch to finish this game. It was pure suffering because of said shitty build, but I was able to get close to Geneforge/Trajkov and after that, just did what Goettsch said(I guess in this part leadership really helped me lie to Trajkov). Based be Vogel for giving many ways of approaching some place, otherwise, I'd suffer a lot trying to get into the Geneforge via The Quarters without joining the Takers. After that, I was finally able to get my boat and it was also hard, holy shit, that shit was guarded so well and if I had not found that servant mind, it would be pure hell. Still, amazing game and some day I want to do a better ending(killing every faction leader and using/destroying geneforge).
Now I'll play something else before I jump into Geneforge 2.

 

[Puukko]

Playing Vampyr and I am enjoying it very much so far. Vampires are one of my favorite themes, particularly mingling with and manipulating humans. The hard difficulty isn't a joke, it throws a werewolf at you in the second chapter already and I had to go back and level up a bit, going to give it a second go now.

You can tell it was made by the Life is Strange devs though, a few hours in and I've already met the black ambulance driver and the nurse who burns the coal as well as the two war buddies who survived being buried alive which apparently made them gay for each other. And the MC is depicted as very understanding. Luckily, any minor or major story character can eventually be drained and killed for lots of experience which in turn will cause the district to become less safe. I was planning on draining in moderation.

Overall I enjoy the theme and atmosphere and the MC is likeable as well, the cordial nature of most conversations in particular is a joy to follow.

it's free to play on Xbox Game Pass for PC, you figure it's worth a try solely for the narrative/VA?

I saw in a review that apparently later on there's some iffy VA work but they seem to have used their budget wisely, you probably won't even notice that one person could be voicing 4-5 minor story characters. The social aspect in this game is really neat, you speak with apparently dozens of proper characters who have their own issues you can help them with, get hints regarding other characters to press them with, cure their illnesses and then at your discretion finally kill them for fat XP, which will affect the health of the whole district. I'm way too early to comment on the story so far, in chapter 3 it's still about the MC searching for the vampire who sired him.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

I'll be playing Black Mesa with the new Xen update presently. Avoided this fan-made project in the past because I'm a completist and couldn't stand the idea that the last chapters weren't weren't completed. But now they are, so here I go.

I remember playing the original Half-Life when it came out and finding it balls hard compared to Quake 2 and other FPS games based on its engine. But I seemed to vaguely remember frame-rate drops that annoyed the fuck out of me so I quit and never finished it.

An amusing aside about Half-Life: there was a cracking group or uploader on Usenet that got a hold of a full-beta before its original release and was about to post it on newsgroups to many clamoring warezheads looking forward to it (okay, I'm not proud of the fact that I was one of those warezmonkeys at the time with their clamoring little monkey fingers reaching). The group then suddenly made a big announcement that they wouldn't be positing Half-Life because it was a cartoony, garbage Quake 2 rip-off that would disappear into obscurity as soon as it was released for being so completely inferior . lol. That's almost as funny as the guy I saw on a Usenet gaming discussion group who spent three hours trying to figure out the "puzzle" of getting those huge steel bay doors in the middle of Half-Life opened. All he had to do was go up to them and press the Use key. The doors were unlocked.

 

[PeachPlumage]

Marathon 1 via Aleph One - Picked Marathon up again and hoping to finish it this time. Anyone know if ZPC is playable on Aleph One?

 

[newtmonkey]

Far Cry 3
I've had this game forever and I don't hate it, so it's time to put some time into it. Like all Ubisoft games of the last 10,000 years you basically just do the same thing over and over and over, but at least you have some leeway in how you approach obstacles (except when the game forces what passes for stealth in the game on you). There are worse games for sure. Like with the Batman: Arkham games, this is my "dumb" game to play in between more substantial games.

Demon's Winter
Made some good progress here. So far, this game is just great. Combat isn't amazing, but you have some nice options... for example, it's got an action point system where certain actions all consume a fixed number of action points. That means you can attack multiple times per round, and any points you don't spend can be put toward "dodging" which gets added right to your armor class. It's not on the level of Wizard's Crown or even Gold Box (due to lack of ranged weapons), but it's a fine combat system.

The first dungeon was a lot of fun to explore. Not massive, but had a nice layout that made some sense, and a decent mix of fixed and random encounters with environment/item "puzzles." It's too bad the series stopped with this game, as I would have enjoyed seeing a few more games running on this engine!

**Having said that, Dungeons of Chaos is a pretty nice spiritual successor (with Demon's Winter confirmed as a major inspiration by the author of DoC).**

 

[Abu Antar]

Titanfall 2. God, do I hate kamikaze enemies that blow themselves up in your face. Not only in this game, but in general. So far, the electrical smoke bomb has been my best friend in the game.

 

[octavius]

My ass kicking Assassin was the first one to get past the Hell Ancients in Diablo 2, on the third try. First time one of them had a nasty freezing aura, and being slowed down she was killed quite quickly. Second time I didn't bring enough potions, so she had to Town Portal out when Korlic had Physical Immunity and Stoneskin and half his health left. Third time I brought tons of potions and better equipment (you don't need Magic Find and max resistances), and only needed to pick up a few potions.
Being able to spam a decoy/meat wall is of tremendous help, with no easy way to separate the three Ancients. So I dread facing them with my Paladin...

EDIT: I see the "experts" claiming that lvl 78 is very low for facing the Hell Ancients, yet my Assassin, with no über equipment (Stealskull casque and String of Ears belt being closest) did it at lvl 70 without too much problems. I dunno, maybe they are easier with patch 1.09 or something...

 

[Nifft Batuff]

My ass kicking Assassin was the first one to get past the Hell Ancients in Diablo 2, on the third try. First time one of them had a nasty freezing aura, and being slowed down she was killed quite quickly. Second time I didn't bring enough potions, so she had to Town Portal out when Korlic had Physical Immunity and Stoneskin and half his health left. Third time I brought tons of potions and better equipment (you don't need Magic Find and max resistances), and only needed to pick up a few potions.
Being able to spam a decoy/meat wall is of tremendous help, with no easy way to separate the three Ancients. So I dread facing them with my Paladin...

EDIT: I see the "experts" claiming that lvl 78 is very low for facing the Hell Ancients, yet my Assassin, with no über equipment (Stealskull casque and String of Ears belt being closest) did it at lvl 70 without too much problems. I dunno, maybe they are easier with patch 1.09 or something...

I see you like Diablo 2 a lot...

 

[octavius]

Completed Diablo 2 on Hell difficulty with my Assassin, at lvl 72.
Died once when facing The Ancients and once when facing Baal (got too cocky). Apart from that she cut through most of Act V like a Lilura through a horde of scrubs.

Never saw any of the top tier Elite items (magic or not) dropping, nor any runes higher than Pul (ilvl 45). It feels like the game may be partly level scaled, or else I'm just having bad luck.

 

[Achiman]

Finished Nier Automata and gave away my save to help others. I must say that I really enjoyed playing this game despite its faults, its easily one of the most memorable games I played it the last few years.

Now Im probably gonna start Dragon Quest XI which I bought on this Steam sale.

Just make sure you play it on the hardest difficulty. I played it on normal for about 3 hours. it's pathetically easy and made me abandon playing it further because I didn't want to redo all my progress (you can't change difficulty mid-game).

 

[someone else]

Tried out the freemium LOTR MMORPG.
Hundreds of HP at low level, 100k+ HP at lvl 100+.
Bloated no. of recovery items for different levels.
Tons of microtransactions unlocks/boosts in exchange for purchasable currency.
Do x times quests grind.
Literally doing fedex quest.
I want to play Moria but the quests are pay-to-unlock expansion.
Wallet is limited to 2 gold coins, pay-to-unlock wallet limit with freemium points.

I wonder what Tolkien will think if he is still alive.

A LOTR RPG like an improved one Interplay did in the 90s will be nice.

 

[Reality]

Cuphead

I had watched some Walt Disney Silly Symphony collection with Leonard Maltin commentary for years before Cuphead even came out, so I get the maximum fanserice from the artstyle…. But...

The Run N gun using "boss rush" format doesn't feel as satisying as just playing a traditional game. On its own merits I have a problem with the fact that taking Charge shot seems to absolutely break the game. - I kind of feel like the game requires it's 'peashooter" only + no purchases to retain it's difficulty appeal (on top of the obvious play for no-hit max rank). But no hit + max rank with Charge shot is easy, and the 4 other shot types seemlike garbagey long range stuff that makes no hit even easier but make the time goal hard to reach. The charms and supers make things even worse.

I feel like this is a game that I really SHOULD like, and in retrospect it's even a genre that I usually overate games for- Run N Gun is one of the few genres where I don't care about only playing best in genre, and I like getting into games I never heard of (using MAME roulette) . But in the end, this has dropped too far from the tree.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Picked up fire pro wrestling.
Thank goodness the visuals and music are badass because fuck, how do I play this?

 

[bussinrounds]

Picked up fire pro wrestling.
Thank goodness the visuals and music are badass because fuck, how do I play this?

Play the mode which teaches you the timing for the grappling system. It's all based on timing and it's not a buttan masher at all. (except when it comes to kicking out of pinfalls)
For breaking submission holds, you need to move around the directionals (same inputs that move your wrestler around) I just keep pressing back and forth with left & right and that seems to work.

The way the grapples work is you have to input the type of move you wanna do (pausing brings up the moves list) as soon as the wrestlers lock up. There's small, med and large type moves. You can't start off a match and immediately go for the big moves (well you can, but they'll most likely get reversed even if you do win the grapple) you have the work your way up to the bigger moves and wear your opponent down more first. Changing the difficulty directly effects that grappling timing window.

With strikes you just have to be lined up and the proper distance away, which changes depending on the particular strike. I play on difficulty 8 and the cpu def wins over 50% of the grapples on me, but I get the better of them on strikes, so it kinda balances it out and makes for pretty even matches right now.

As far as mods, I use Carlzilla's mod pack which has a patcher that lets you select various components/options for it. In the match pacing and booking options I recommend changing the default match pacing to either average or short from long (game default) otherwise matches drag on for too long. Also in the mod pack for 2.0 I use the modified damage scale set at 60 (med) and 18 (high)

You can dl wrestlers from the workshop, but then you gotta move them from the retired section in edit mode > team edit > transfer wrestler to the promotions you want them in. (which you have to create before anything)

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Picked up fire pro wrestling.
Thank goodness the visuals and music are badass because fuck, how do I play this?

Play the mode which teaches you the timing for the grappling system. It's all based on timing and it's not a buttan masher at all. (except when it comes to kicking out of pinfalls)
For breaking submission holds, you need to move around the directionals (same inputs that movie your wrestler around) I just keep pressing back and forth with left & right and that seems to work.

The way the grapples work is you have to input the type of move you wanna do (pausing brings up the moves list) as soon as the wrestlers lock up. There's small, med and large type moves. You can't start off a match and immediately go for the big moves (well you can, but they'll most likely get reversed even if you do win the grapple) you have the work your way up to the bigger moves and wear your opponent down more first. Changing the difficulty directly effects that grappling timing window.

With strikes you just have to be lined up and the proper distance away, which changes depending on the particular strike. I play on difficulty 8 and the cpu def wins over 50% of the grapples on me, but I get the better of them on strikes, so it kinda balances it out and makes for pretty even matches right now.

As far as mods, I use Carlzilla's mod pack which has a patcher that lets you select various components/options for it. In the match pacing and booking options I recommend changing the default match pacing to either average or short from long (game default) otherwise matches drag on for too long. Also in the mod pack for 2.0 I use the modified damage scale set at 60 (med) and 18 (high)

You can dl wrestlers from the workshop, but then you gotta move them from the retired section in edit mode > team edit > transfer wrestler to the promotions you want them in. (which you have to create before anything)

Man this helped. Didn't win the match but lasted near 18 minutes without giving in.

 

[ebPD8PePfC]

Devotion - It's probably one of the best walking simulator horror games, which became somewhat of a subgenre. The gameplay is very standard walking around and solving basic puzzles, with no surprises of any kind. The environment is a home in Taiwan in the 80's, which is recreated in detail, and along with the unique themes explored in the game help make for an interesting experience.

Superliminal - Short three hours puzzle game with not enough puzzles. The game keeps introducing new mechanics without ever going in-depth into any of them, so you don't really get the chance to feel clever for solving anything. It’s more about understanding what mechanic the puzzle uses, rather than using that mechanic in an original way to solve a puzzle. It not necessarily bad, but it's not my cup of tea.
The humor / story gets tiresome quickly. It's a Portal clone with mediocre writing. Could be nice to have an AI that gives advice when you get stuck too long on a puzzle, rather than a sardonic quip machine.
The most impressive thing about the game is the relative lack of bugs. The basic mechanics (increase size of object, multiply infinite objects) seem like bug factories.

 

[Dedup]

Well, with the new ability to add map specific music to Gold Box Companion, all the games I had started previously are officially on hold for a new gold box run. My last run fizzled out at the start of the ice cave in Secret of the Silver Blades. Hopefully I'll be able to get through it this time. Right now I'm almost done with Sokal Keep in Pool of Radiance. I'm finding it makes a world of difference having a soundtrack that changes with different maps and when you go into battle, instead of just playing a bunch of tracks on an external player.

 

[Prime Junta]

I've taken a complete break from gaming for a while now, but just snuck over to the GoG winter sale and dropped about one AAA title's worth of dosh on over 20 games that are all guaranteed to be at least as good and almost certainly better than any AAA game released last year. Some I've already played and technically own; others I've missed; some I'm not even sure I'll ever play but if it costs less than a euro I think it's worth paying that even if it's just to support the effort of keeping them playable on modern rigs.

When I get the itch again I'm thinking I might do a deep dive into the Witchers. I loved the fuck out of 1, quite liked 2, and never quite managed to finish 3 and it's been long enough since I fired any of them up that the experience ought to be fresh-ish. Also I've been watching the Netflix series which is less shit than I expected so why not.

 

[octavius]

Completed Diablo 2 on Hell difficulty with the Sorceress.

Dispatched both The Ancients, Baal's Minions and Baal quite easily. I guess I got lucky with none of them being cold immune.
Hardly ever used the Teleport spell, except in emergencies or to move quickly on a cleared map. Frozen Orb was my main weapon, with Fire Wall as second, Chain Lightning third (bloody slow spell that "glues" you to the spot when casting) and Lightning Storm active "in the background". Blaze was also useful sometimes, especially when I had to use the Benny Hill tactic on Cold Immune/Lightning Enchanted/Multi-Shot bosses or other Cold Immunes my merc didn't have a chance to survive against. And of course Static Shield to soften up enemies with lots of HP.

One advantage of the 1.09 version is that there's no synergies, so less risk of over-specializing and meet a dead end when you face something none of your spells can damage.

 

[Kabas]

Still playing conquest of elysium 4
Still can't stop playing it
help

Also tried the latest version of Remnants of the Precursors. Never played the original Master of Orion, but i liked it. Both art and music are nice.

 

[Morgoth]

Playing this:



Now I'm normally not into visual novels, but this little gem from the Puzzle-wizards of Zachtronics really keeps me glued to the screen, thanks to the grounded writing and relevant subject involving general AI, the limits of technology dealing with the ailing of existence, idealism, corporate greed etc. I'm actually struck by how intelligently this interactive novel deals with these subjects. Characters are all fairly relatable and memorable. Definitely one of the most pleasant surprises recently.

 

[Machocruz]

Just finished Dying Light. God what a shit last mission. Running away from mosnters and climbing shit forever and a non-boss fight. Otherwise one of the best AAA games I've played since the Age of Decline began, and a funner open world game than most of the ones people suck off these days. Did most of the sidequests but still a lot of extra content in the game. Techland really supported this game nicely.

 

[Adon]

Been playing Witcher 1 for the first time.

It's pretty okay, and serviceable. It's any wonder this series took off if I'm being honest. I like a lot of concepts for both the gameplay and narrative, but the execution isn't there to elevate the rest of the game.

For the story, take Chapter 1 for example. I don't know if I missed anything here, but it seems a fairly straightforward goal of solving quests, and figuring out information about Salamandra while doing them as you try to find Javed. At the end of it, Abigail mentions all these twists and turns about how the people you've been working for the entire time are all rotten to the core, and have done evil deeds that caused them to unintentionally conjure up the beast. I love the idea behind that if there were a bit more foreshadowing around this concept. Instead of having clues here and there (the most you get is maybe a small scene with Odo's dog), it's just a bit of a twist that turns the narrative on its head instead of a proper build-up leading into a crescendo.

Similarly, Chapter 2 starts out by giving you a list of suspects that might be working for Salamandra, and you even work alongside a detective. That's great, but the structure for that plot thread isn't there. You just casually cross off suspects as you do quests, or Geralt will extrapolate some loose "connection", confront the suspect, and then essentially give up, mentioning that he'll drop it for now until new evidence comes to light. Again, much like Ch. 1, it's a great idea that doesn't get fleshed out. On the other hand, Chapter 3 felt more straightforward of a crossroads which, after the last chapter, was a nice change of pace.

What can I really say about the combat? It's there, it's serviceable to a degree. Game gives you 3 fighting styles, 1 of which is completely useless (or I've never felt the need to use the group style), and to pad things out, there's 2 different skill sets you can upgrade for these 3 fighting styles -- one for the silver sword and another for the steel sword. Potions are a nice idea, and I like that not all of them are combat related, the toxicity mechanic rarely ever comes into play, but I like the idea behind it. Side quests are generally okay; my biggest gripe is the need to go out of my way to get books in order to be able to pick up certain herbs or get certain items (i.e. a drowner's brain) from dead monsters.

To be honest tho, one of the best parts of the game is getting these.

Spoiler