What game are you wasting time on?

[JDR13]

You just need to figure out enough about the game that you know which sidequests to skip, because there's one behind every corner and it can easily burn you out given how progression is so millimetric (to the point of not really mattering at all) other than in terms of story, which is where the game shines.

This^

I also got burned out the first time I played TW3 because I was too OCD about trying to do every single sidequest. The game is a lot more enjoyable if you play it organically and just go with the flow.

 

[Abu Antar]

In Yakuza 5, I beat Saejima's portion of the story. At this point, It will take me over 100 hours to beat the game. I blame the mini games. In 40 hours, I have probably spent eight hours playing different min games. Saejima is a brute, his fighting style is effective, but he's also the least fun to play, in my opinion. Story is as always charmingly retarded. Side quests are great as usual. Can't wait to play the other characters. Man, is this game huge.

In Danganronpa 2, I have solved the third class trial. Things are really heating up. Can't wait to see what else the game will throw at me.

I have a lot of other games on my plate, but these two, plus Slime Rancher are the ones that I am currently spending the most time on.

EIT: I forgot. I'm actually making a lot of progress in Underrail. I'm on my third attempt at a run. My psi build is annihilating everything. I've finished most, if not all of the Expedition content, so I'm trying to move things along by doing stuff in Core City.

My replay of Ho Tu Lo Shu with English text is also going smoothly. I should probably try to beat unplayed games, but this one is just great.

 

[samuraigaiden]

So I started playing RAGE. I didn't know anything about it except it's a PA open-world game and it didn't review well. Played through the first couple of hours and was positively impressed. Guns feel nice. Enemy AI is above average. Kinda weirded out by how health works, but OK. Made me wonder why people shit on this game so hard.

Then I got to the Wellspring. Fuck me, Jesus. Why did they go and turn this into a goddamn RACING game? Who asked for this?

 

[baud]

So I started playing RAGE. I didn't know anything about it except it's a PA open-world game and it didn't review well. Played through the first couple of hours and was positively impressed. Guns feel nice. Enemy AI is above average. Kinda weirded out by how health works, but OK. Made me wonder why people shit on this game so hard.

Then I got to the Wellspring. Fuck me, Jesus. Why did they go and turn this into a goddamn RACING game? Who asked for this?

At least you can strap guns to your car and blast the other cars when driving around the wasteland

 

[samuraigaiden]

At least you can strap guns to your car and blast the other cars when driving around the wasteland

Do I at least get to run people over at some point?

 

[Hellraiser]

At least you can strap guns to your car and blast the other cars when driving around the wasteland

Do I at least get to run people over at some point?

Not from what I remember.

 

[baud]

At least you can strap guns to your car and blast the other cars when driving around the wasteland

Do I at least get to run people over at some point?

I don't think so.

But if I remember right, you can mostly just use the car to drive from a to b. Though you'd passed on a potential revenue source, as destroying other cars get you cash.


I played and finish Minit, which kinda is a 2d Zelda (bare-bone combat system, pick up objects to unlock exploration, a few puzzles), but each time you spawn, you have a 60 s time limit before restarting to your spawn point. Killed monsters re appear, but picked up object are kept and map changes stay. The game is designed around the time limit, so you're never too far from your objective, but respawning every 60s was frustrating when trying to understand how to solve a puzzle.
It's very short, I finished it in less than 2 hours, but there's a new game +, which might change a few things.

 

[Wunderbar]

Last few months i've been playing 3D Zelda titles to find out what the fuss was all about.

Zelda (and nintendo in general) were never huge in Russia, and being a cheapskate PC gamer i've never played any of those games before. Each time i stumbled upon another "Top 10 most influential games of all time" or "Top 10 best videogame series of all time" and saw one of Zelda titles there, i thought "oh poor western kids with duckling syndrome who grew up with zelda, never played any of proper PC titles and now think of zelda as the best thing since sliced bread". After finishing Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, The Wind Waker and Twilight Princess i'm both pleasantly surprised and disappointed.

I really liked Ocarina of Time. Honestly, can't blame gamejournos for their "top 5 best videogame franchises", OOT must have been a mind blowing experience back in 1998. Great puzzles, good exploration (even if the overworld is just an empty field), cool tools to play with, great use of verticality despite it being the first properly 3D game in the series. The first couple of dungeons were meh, but once you get enough tools to play around with it picks up the pace and never lets you go. Even the dreaded Water Temple wasn't that bad, in fact i consider it the best dungeon in the game (and i emulated an N64 version where you can't put iron boots on a hotkey).

There were a couple of places where the game showed its age (such as slow unskippable dialogue text, stupid owl who kept repeating same useless hints, or a few unobvious moments where i had no idea what to do and had to look up a walkthrough after wasting a few hours), but other than that it was a breeze - OOT was one of those rare games that held me tightly up until the credits, the only few times i felt like that in the last 5 years were when i played KCD and Underrail.

-------

I liked OOT, and I loved Majora's Mask.
Not sure why it's not common in gamedev to take a game, and just make a big stand-alone expansion that builds on top of existing mechanics, instead devs usually throw everything away and start from scratch. Thief 2, Fallout 2, Fallout New Vegas, etc - you already have the engine, assets and systems, just expand on them! Majora's Mask is one of such games, and it brilliantly builds and expands on everything in Ocarina.

The difficulty is just right, because the game picks up where OOT left off, and keeps raising the challenge. Dungeons are cool as fuck, and this time they aren't just a linear sets of rooms with simple puzzles - they require you to keep track of a certain dungeon-related gimmick (like direction of water current in the Great bay temple, or flipped gravity in the Stone tower). Instead of adding new items, MM just reuses OOT's items and adds magic masks that transform you into different beings with their own unique abilities (each of 3 transformation masks give more abilities than a regular new Zelda tool). There are less dungeons, but the game makes up for it by adding side-quests with an almost RPG-like journal and a time management mechanic.

The story didn't blew me away, but it was surprisingly dark, psychedelic and oppressive, which was a welcome change after the rather generic heroic fantasy of OOT. The city is doomed, everyone you meet is going to die, there are only three days left until the Moon hits the earth, you can travel back in time but it will undo everything you've accomplished.

Majora's Mask is like if Pathologic was made by Tim Burton who grew up in Japan.

-------

I felt very enthusiastic going into The Wind Waker - surely nintendo will further expand on the amazing OOT and MM? Nope, for some reason they have tried to pull a complete 180 instead, and ended with a rather lackluster result. What happened? Did some behind the scenes trouble forced them to cut 50% of content and replace it with filler? I don't know but the final game is fucking boring and is padded with the worst kind of filler, i'd rather grind witcher 3 question marks over the wind waker nonsense. The dungeons were alright, but there are only five of them, and when you are not in the dungeon you are "exploring the sea". When i said "exploring", i meant "slowly trudging through the sea without anything interesting happening.

Need to get from one island to another? You equip the wind waker (magic wand that allows you to change the wind direction), use it to perform a magic wind song, listen for that wind song playing again, watch a cutscene of wind direction changing, sit on the boat, equip a sail, and then wait for ten or so minutes of real time. Oh, there is some other unexplored island nearby? Don't bother, because chances are that you don't have a tool to unlock a secret of that island, and it will take another five minutes to make a detour, reequip the wind waker, change the wind direction again, etc. Oh, there is a pillar of light indicating an underwater treasure chest? Don't bother, because the chest will contain useless rupees. A wooden tower with enemies? Rupees. You've found a treasure chart? Rupees.

After roughly 2/3 of the main campaign you get an ability to fast-travel (well, you still need to go through the wind waker routine, but it's still somewhat faster than sailing), and then the game is like "hah, now that you have a fast-travel option, i can finally unleash the true grind - revisit every square of the world map to find clues and collect 8 triforce shards". FFFUUUU! And then you find them, but the game pulls bait and switch bullshit - those aren't triforce shards, those are just triforce charts, and you must use those charts to revisit half of the world map again in order to unearth chests with the actual shards. FFFUUUU! But you can't even read those charts straight away, you must decipher them first. And the guy who deciphers them wants a ton of, previously useless, rupees. FFFFUUUUU!

Fuck that game.

-------

My experience with Twilight Princess was polar opposite of the wind waker.

TWW had excellent cel-shaded graphics and from the visual standpoint looked like a game that could've been made yesterday. The introduction was brief (you were sneaking through Ganon's fortress like an hour after the start), and a fresh new "waterworld" setting was cool. Twilight Princess, on the other hand, looks dated and screams "sixth console gen game" (the twilight segments are especially bad because of horrible bloom). Introduction in TP is painfully slow and unnecessarily cinematic - the game assumes you're a retard and takes it time to teach you how to walk, how to jump, how to aim with a slingshot, etc. And the setting-wise TP is an Ocarina rehash, a nuStarWars trilogy of Zelda - you start in some village, shit hits the fan, you visit the same locations from OOT, you must clear Forest temple/Goron mountain/Water temple/etc, even most of your tools are the same as in Ocarina. Member Hyrule? Member kakariko village, Gerudo desert, Zora domain? Member Skull kid? Member Saria's song? Well, at least the bad guy isn't Ganon this time around... aaand turns out the bad guy is just a henchman and the real baddie is Ganon again. Spoilers, i guess.

Eye-melting bloom, railroaded and overly long tutorial, derivativeness - hell of a first impression, but thankfully TP improves where TWW failed. Dungeons are well-designed, lengthy, memorable (for every derivative forest temple and water temple there is a snowpeak mansion or a city in the sky), and most importantly there is a lot of them. Most of the reused OOT tools have a neat twist - for example, a boomerang now creates a small whirlwind which can be used to spin rotating levers and snuff out torches, a bow can be combined with bombs creating bomb arrows, hookshot can be paired with another hookshot allowing you to spiderman around the dungeon, etc. Overworld traversal still feels like a meaningless filler, but at least this time around it's not slow, and can be skipped with a fast travel function.

It's kinda of a shame how a potentially great game became an Ocarina of Time retread, with most of its unique features buried. At first i hoped that the new Twilight realm is gonna work like shifting from Soul Reaver, but nope - it's barely explored. Wolf transformation has less new abilities than a single mask from Majora's Mask, and you don't even find new skills/equipment later into the game. The new antagonist looked interesting, but then turned out to be a pathetic freak who works for Ganon.

Twilight Princess is a mechanically enjoyable and competently made game, but the over-reliance on Ocarina of Time drags it down.

-------

tl;dr
Ocarina of Time
Majora's Mask
The Wind Waker
Twilight Princess

Sadly not going to play Skyward Sword, seems like it is impossible to play it with keyboard and mouse.

 

[samuraigaiden]

Twilight Princess

It's a 40 hour game with something like 5 hours of genuine gold that you have to grind through mountains of mind numbing garbage to get to.

 

[Catacombs]

Last few months i've been playing 3D Zelda titles to find out what the fuss was all about.

Any plans to play Breath of the Wild? Apparently that is the crème de la crème.

 

[Wunderbar]

Twilight Princess

It's a 40 hour game with something like 5 hours of genuine gold that you have to grind through mountains of mind numbing garbage to get to.

The Wind Waker fits that description closer than Twilight Princess.

Last few months i've been playing 3D Zelda titles to find out what the fuss was all about.

Any plans to play Breath of the Wild? Apparently that is the crème de la crème.

current version of CEMU doesn't support mouse for some reason, and i'm too lazy to install and configure a ton of different utilities, gamepad drivers and plugins to make it work.

 

[HansDampf]

tl;dr
Ocarina of Time
Majora's Mask
The Wind Waker
Twilight Princess

Pretty much agreed.

I liked OOT, and I loved Majora's Mask.
...
The difficulty is just right, because the game picks up where OOT left off, and keeps raising the challenge. Dungeons are cool as fuck, and this time they aren't just a linear sets of rooms with simple puzzles - they require you to keep track of a certain dungeon-related gimmick (like direction of water current in the Great bay temple, or flipped gravity in the Stone tower). Instead of adding new items, MM just reuses OOT's items and adds magic masks that transform you into different beings with their own unique abilities (each of 3 transformation masks give more abilities than a regular new Zelda tool). There are less dungeons, but the game makes up for it by adding side-quests with an almost RPG-like journal and a time management mechanic.

The story didn't blew me away, but it was surprisingly dark, psychedelic and oppressive, which was a welcome change after the rather generic heroic fantasy of OOT. The city is doomed, everyone you meet is going to die, there are only three days left until the Moon hits the earth, you can travel back in time but it will undo everything you've accomplished.

Majora's Mask is like if Pathologic was made by Tim Burton who grew up in Japan.

The best thing about the masks are the movement options. No more A-rolling as Link when you want to go somewhere. Just roll around as a Goron at high speed and try not to bump into anything. Very satisfying. And (I might be repeating myself) no other game, at least no other Zelda game, has better swimming mechanics than the Zora mask.
Side quests > main story. It's all about the small character moments, like when you have to wait with Anju for Kafei until the last minute, and then you have to reset everything.

I felt very enthusiastic going into The Wind Waker - surely nintendo will further expand on the amazing OOT and MM? Nope,
...
Fuck that game.

It's obvious that there was supposed to be a dungeon at Great Fish Island but it got cut for some reason (they probably ran out of time). Same for the Triforce hunt. The game feels unfinished. It's also too easy and boring.

Twilight Princess is a mechanically enjoyable and competently made game, but the over-reliance on Ocarina of Time drags it down.

Also repeating myself that TP is the blandest and most uninspired Zelda game. Perfectly fine game to get into the series, but there is nothing special about it. It's like, after WW they tried to appease hardcore fans and make the next game darker and more mature but then relied too much on fan-service. And it's still not as dark as MM.

Sadly not going to play Skyward Sword, seems like it is impossible to play it with keyboard and mouse.

Don't bother. SS has some cool moments, but overall it's the worst 3D Zelda. Introduction is even longer than in TP. Lots of hand-holding. Annoying sidekick. Redundant dialogue. The sky is emptier than WW's sea. There are 3 main areas you have to visit 3 times each. And the motion gimmick turns combat into awkward puzzles.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Way of the samurai 3 and 4. Mostly 3.

Spoiler

Not since Metal Gear V have I been interested in completing a game to 100% like this.
3 is particularly guilty of this, haven't seen such attention to choice and consequence since Alpha Potatocol, perhaps. And while Alpha Prot had gameplay that didn't measure up, this one has a reasonable combat system and the nearest cousin to an rpg system with all the waffens, parts to build your own sword of doom, moves, stances and what not.
22 endings are a hell of a thing. A lot of them can seem like minor variations where you get the same ending slide with a slightly different cutscene before, but that the game can account for these differences is quite cool in and of itself. Sure, at the end the big villain will commit sudoku if you choose to own him non lethally, but other characters can live or die depending on various things, and you can kill anyone you meet at any time as long as you can hold your own against them.
After beating the game and forging a weapon that makes the game your bitch, it is still fun to run around and see if the game will account for this action or that, no matter however how small the acknowledgement.
The music for fightan gets old pretty quick though, no two ways about it. Thank the heavens it does not loop.
4 makes great changes to the combat, at the expense of a more streamlined story and a little more hilarity than 3. Great fun though.
Fight music is a lot more tolerable too.

 

[samuraigaiden]

The Wind Waker fits that description closer than Twilight Princess.

I don't doubt that, but I never played that one.

 

[BLOBERT]

BROS LOVED EVERY ZELDA I TRIED UNTIL TWILIGHT PRINCESS I JUST COULDNT DO THE TUTORIAL SHIT IT SEEMED SLOW AND BLAND

I REPLAYED LEGEND OF ZELDA THIS YEAR AND STILL HAD FUN

OCARINA OF TIME FUCKING AMAZED ME WHEN IT CAME OUT

WIND WAKER HAD SOME COOL PARTS I REMEMBER SOME FUN

 

[BLOBERT]

BROS OTHER IMPORTANT NEWS LOLLOLOL

GETTING A GAMING PC TODAY

I7 WITH RTX 2070 LOOKING FORWARD TO SWITCHING MY POPAMOLE FROM FAGBOX TO PC

GONNA HOOK IT TO 30 INCH MONITOR AND SOUNDBAR WITH SUBWOOFER

 

[Caim]

I felt very enthusiastic going into The Wind Waker - surely nintendo will further expand on the amazing OOT and MM? Nope, for some reason they have tried to pull a complete 180 instead, and ended with a rather lackluster result. What happened? Did some behind the scenes trouble forced them to cut 50% of content and replace it with filler?

Yes. Remember the fire and ice islands? Those were supposed to have dungeons. That's why you get the power bracelets and iron boots there. But they ran out of... well, something and cuts had to be made.

 

[octavius]

Finally completed Unleashing the Bloodthirsty for HoMM 3. Took me over two weeks in all, since I had to restart it. You can't afford to make many strategic mistakes or to lose too much from your best stacks.

Except some small maps that really are impossible on Impossible, this is the most challenging HoMM 3 map I've played so far, and also one of the best. But I'm worried that most other HoMM 3 maps will be an Heroes Chronicles anti-cllimax now...

 

[baud]

I played and finish Minit, which kinda is a 2d Zelda (bare-bone combat system, pick up objects to unlock exploration, a few puzzles), but each time you spawn, you have a 60 s time limit before restarting to your spawn point. Killed monsters re appear, but picked up object are kept and map changes stay. The game is designed around the time limit, so you're never too far from your objective, but respawning every 60s was frustrating when trying to understand how to solve a puzzle.
It's very short, I finished it in less than 2 hours, but there's a new game +, which might change a few things.

The new game + might change a few things, but you only have 40s and 1 life, whatever the number of hearts you collect. Meh.

There's also a mode without a time limit, which remove a lot of how focused the gameplay is.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

The 3rd person marble madness physics puzzles in BotW were a lot of fun. Very unique for an RPG though I did end up quitting about half-way through because of trying to play every side quest, like the poster above. That's the most important tip I can offer about BotW: DO NOT TRY TO DO EVERY SIDE QUEST IF YOU HAVE ANY INTENTION OF COMPLETING IT.

 

[Nostaljaded]

Started playing King's Bounty Crossworlds with Huntiro's Mod (version Bitter Moon stable - 20201019), together with other QOL mods.

Notable changes:
- Nearly all Warriors of the North & Dark Side units ported back; campaign remains as Orcs on the March
- Added many new unit talents & abilities tweaks
- Added many new items (I like the vanilla handcrafted items before, so wouldn't mind more variety)
- Bugfixes (e.g. a simple but glaring bug in the last official version is the wrong text for the dialog choices in the Royal University building [one of the 1st buildings on 1st island])

Changes from vanilla that I like:
- Swapped leadership amount and growth rates for the Warrior [Might/Brawn] & Paladin [Mind/Brain]; Paladin now have the highest leadership/largest army
- Reworked & adapted from later series' skill trees that's fits more to each skill tree & rune usage, e.g. Tactics [arrange troops before combat] moved from Might to Mind skill tree
- Each class now has 2 exclusive end-of-node skills, instead of 1; better class differentiation.
- Larger (again differentiating) effects for picking one of the colored pet dragon

Screenshots on some of the changes

Might Skill Tree changes
Moved: Tactics [arrange troops before combat] to Mind skill tree
Merged: Caution [1st round damage reduction portion] merged into Resistance
Replacement: Sense Weakness [increase critical hit chance] & Blood Rage [chance of inflicting double damage]

Mind Skill Tree changes
Moved: Neatness [Effective item destruction for magic crystals & talent runes extraction] to Magic skill tree
Changed: Prayer [from increase critical hit chance to increase in all non-astral resistances & chance of avoiding critical hit]
Removed: Absolute Balance [Max Rage & Mana increase]
Replacement: Art of Leading [Lower Leadership requirements and Morale penalties for race & units]

Magic Skill Tree changes
Merged: from Wisdom & Linguistics to Bibliophile [Intellect and Scroll increase]
Removed: Alchemy [reduce Magic Crystal requirements for learning & improving spells], becoming exclusive Mage class hidden skill starting at vanilla max level (50% reduction)
Introduced: Winds of Magic [Mana recovery for spell casts]

Pet Effects changes

Unit tweaks - e.g. Flight now comes with a situational liability

Huntiro's Mod link & its changelog: http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showthread.php?t=230265

 

[PulsatingBrain]

I'm like 4 hours into Bioshock remastered and it's decent. I can't really compare it to the original since I only played it a little and don't remember it too well. I got 2 remastered and infinite as well, so I'm going to play the whole series. Grabbed Metro 2033 redux and Last Light redux and Exodus in the Halloween sale so they're next after that.

Also Redeemer which is a 3D brawler which i hadn't heard of until it was in the sale. It's pretty simple and easy to pick up and the combat has a really satisfying kind of weight to it. Certainly worth the £2.50 I paid.

I keep going back to Bannerlord for another 10-20 hours then getting frustrated that it's not more finished. It's nice to be able to fuck around, but there's no point settling into a proper compaign with so much shit still half finished or less, or just missing.

 

[Yldr]

[Medal of Honor: Allied Assault]

Great game when it was released, but it hasn't aged well.

You really think so? On the contrary I think it's among the easiest old-school linear shooters to go back to.

First mouse&keyboard shooters age well in general: as long as you have customizable controls and 60FPS you can't really fuck that up. Second it has a very good balance between scripted events and long no-gimmick firefights. It's also in the ideal spot where it's old enough that you don't ruin it via high expectations, but it's still beautiful and elaborate 3D in its own right (especially with modern HD resolutions and a slight ReShade touch-up).

As a side-note that's also why I think Enemy Front should get more recognition among fans of WWII shooters; it's technically competent, does nothing wrong in particular, with long uninterrupted shootouts between story sequences; it really felt like what a true 7th-gen Allied Assault sequel would have been.

 

[Catacombs]

I finished playing Medal of Honor Allied Assault a week ago. It's heavily inspired by Wolfenstein 3D, even down to enemies looking and sounding similar.

Great game when it was released, but it hasn't aged well.

I remember playing the demo on what I considered a “good computer” at my local Best Buy. Good times. I spent hours on that thing while my parents shopped around.

 

[flyingjohn]

Mythgard.

Playing a strong women viking biking deck to battle the patriarchy.
Also has this card:

Edit:One of the few 2 vs 2 free card games.