What game are you wasting time on?

[Sceptic]

He was a tough cookie but ultimately it was unsatisfying. Plus, the game gave me the "you broke the prophecy" message despite having fulfilled it already.

This message isn't tied to scripts that check whether you have or have not broken the game's main path, it's just flagged to display whenever you kill specific NPCs that are essential for the MQ regardless of whether they're still needed or not. More like a "in case you hadn't guessed this person is important, you may or may not still be able to complete the game". I actually like that the message is vague like this, and needless to say it's light-years better than unkillable NPCs a la Oblivion. In any case the messages are not true, since there's a back-path through the MQ that only requires a single NPC that isn't normally required for the main path - and of course even you kill that NPC and break the back-path you can STILL complete the game if you know what to do and understand the mechanics of the endgame enough to bypass the need for Wraithguard.

I don't remember if many NPCs notice you killed Vivec, but it doesn't really change anything in the game (I was hoping the Ministry of Truth would crash into Vivec city but I don't think Gamebryo can handle this kind of thing). I think Almalexia does have some special lines if you kill Vivec before doing Tribunal. Otherwise yeah killing Vivec if you've already completed the game is anticlimactic, less so if you kill him when you first meet him and go through the back-path (and for some of us who did this back when the game was new, we didn't really know what we were doing or what the strange artifact was for and had to figure things out ourselves; I don't think you can recreate this kind of situation almost 20 years later, but if you have no idea what the back-path is then trying to find it can be a lot of fun)

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Metal Slug - Starting the trend of playing some shorter games, I played this thing. I think I got for free at some point years ago. Took me less than 1 hour to beat. I get that arcade games are supposed to be replayed. But Metal Slug kind of sucks. The game is just too easy. I can see it being a super fun game for co-op for this exact reason, but as a single player side scrolling shooter it pales in comparison to NES Contra, for example.

Metal Slug is just the first game, try the other games in the series and tell us if you think the same applies to them.

The Expendabros - This is a free game made by the Broforce devs as a marketing thing for the movie The Expendables 3, which I did not watch. The game is pretty much Metal Slug with terrain deformation - and much shittier pixel art. But it plays way better! 40 minutes or so to beat. Fun game, tough boss fight in the end, not gonna play this ever again. OK, I guess.

Have you played Broforce itself? It comes with its own level editor and player-created maps, and some of those maps include assets from The Expendabros, so in some ways those have earned an extended lifespan. But the main game itself is an absolute and total blast - only handicapped* people object to its near-perfect mix of action, randomness and humor.

*While mostly applicable to people physically incapable of playing a run'n'gun shooter properly, the mentally handicapped people in gaming journalism also take issues with it for obvious reasons.

 

[NerevarineKing]

I'm currently playing Elminage Gothic and Dragon Quest 9. Elminage Gothic is a great blobber so far and I'm enjoying it more than Original. The monster designs are so much more interesting and the game has a darker atmosphere to it. Just unlocked the church and a couple two-skull dungeons. Dragon Quest 9 is about what I expect from the DQ series. It's not mind-blowing, but it is very comfy to play. I'm going to be starting Icewind Dale pretty soon and I think I'm just gonna stick with the original, not the Enhanced Edition.

 

[lightbane]

These days I'm playing ML: Bowser Inside story. For a JRPG, it's fun to play, funny, avoids the standard clichés from other Weaboo games and you don't need to grind to progress. It also uses relatively small numbers compared to FF series.

 

[Quilty]

Well, I would LIKE to be wasting some time on Gangsters: Organized Crime but I can't seem to get that GOG version of it to run on Win 10...

 

[Harry Easter]

Replaying Ys: Oath in Felghana and after that I will continue with Trails in the Sky SC. Felghana is just relaxing, even I get my ass handed to on hard :D. This is my personal Zelda. I never knew I needed it, until I bought it.

 

[Villagkouras]

The Expendabros - This is a free game made by the Broforce devs as a marketing thing for the movie The Expendables 3, which I did not watch. The game is pretty much Metal Slug with terrain deformation - and much shittier pixel art. But it plays way better! 40 minutes or so to beat. Fun game, tough boss fight in the end, not gonna play this ever again. OK, I guess.

Broforce is one of the best games ever if played with friends, at best in the same place, not online. Hilarious stuff. In single player it's not so good.

 

[Kabas]

Warhammer Mark of Chaos -Gold Edition
Empire/High elves and Chaos/Skaven campaigns are completely piss easy on normal. In both of them you will eventually reach the point where you have way more money than you could possibly spend even if you decide to purposely treat your expensive high elf units as cannon fodder. Doesn't take too long to level up a new regiment anyway.
The last mission was a joke in both of them. "That was a costly victory" my ass, the chaos horde didn't even manage to approach the walls of my castle, Demon prince Thorgar was blasted with arrows, cannons, bolt throwers and spells in less than a minute.

Duel system is a kinda neat idea but a bit junky in execution and i never felt the need to invest even a single point into the duel skill tree. Duels don't happen that regularly and you won't have a trouble winning those anyway with all the amazing gear you will be getting(especially on the empire side). You better off investing into either combat or command trees depending on what abilities each individual hero can provide you.
You don't need any of the siege machines like battering rams and stuff. The only thing you need for a successful siege is pair of cannons(or it's analogue, chaos hellcannon and eagle bolt thrower all work the same here) to snipe the enemy artillery and make a hole in the wall and you can consider the siege to be practicaly won.
The chaos campaign has a cool part where you need to choose between Nurgle and Khorne, shame that the only thing it seems to affect is your army colour scheme, one unit and some of the avaliable secondary hero options.

As for Greenskin/Dark Elf expansion campaign, i am currently in the middle of it. They really rumped up the mission variety here and for the first time i am actually struggling with gold. Can't afford everything i want, need to balance my finances between replacing my losses, upgrading them, buying new units and the occasional nifty item at the store. Like, you have a mission here where you're given a squad of dark elf dominatrixes with whips and told to kidnap a bunch of poor sleeping imperial soldiers and take them as a sex slaves to Naggaroth, i don't think i should add anything more here. The expansion campaign is way better than the original one so far.

I think i prefer the "manage you warband between missions" formula to the "paint the map with your doomstack" formula of the total war warhammer.

 

[Jvegi]

Hades
I'm wasting so much time. It's tons of fun and I'm not even good at the game.

 

[Ezekiel]

Enjoying Sly Cooper, but might have to quit at the dog race. Near impossible with these (emulator) controls.



Never mind. Done. Gonna probably check out more PS2 games I missed out on after this.

 

[samuraigaiden]

Metal Slug is just the first game, try the other games in the series and tell us if you think the same applies to them.

I will.

Have you played Broforce itself?

Nope. But if it's bigger better Expendabros, I'm sure it's amazing for co-op.

 

[Ghulgothas]

Went back and 100%'ed Call of Juarez Gunslinger after leaving it half done a year ago. Good little game. Popamole, but fun pulp-western, arcade attack popamole.

It has reignited by hunger for another slow-paced RPG though. I've been eyeing Spiderweb Software's catalogue as part of my ongoing mission to get into more older RPGS from before my time, and their games have got the neat little isometric dioramas that drew me into UnderRail. Currently thinking over whether to start with Avernum or Avadon, since I hear Geneforge's first game is in the middle of a remaster.

 

[Cael]

Went back and 100%'ed Call of Juarez Gunslinger after leaving it half done a year ago. Good little game. Popamole, but fun pulp-western, arcade attack popamole.

It has reignited by hunger for another slow-paced RPG though. I've been eyeing Spiderweb Software's catalogue as part of my ongoing mission to get into more older RPGS from before my time, and their games have got the neat little isometric dioramas that drew me into UnderRail. Currently thinking over whether to start with Avernum or Avadon, since I hear Geneforge's first game is in the middle of a remaster.

You should probably play the original Exile Trilogy first before going Avernum.

 

[Kalin]

Just play original Geneforge series from 1-5.

 

[Abu Antar]

I beat Fable as a goody-two-shoes. While I have the 360 hooked up, I'm also going to try to beat Metal Arms: Glitch in the System. Why the hell not? I also have Arcania that I got out of curiosity, but I'm not sure I'll try to beat it. It was one of the biggest disappointments as far as games go. I never got far as I couldn't stand it.

On PC, I'm mixing up Geneforge 5 and Troubleshooter.

 

[Twiglard]

I played Horizon Zero Dawn recently. The game is getting too much undeserved flak here. The combat mechanics are unique and make interesting what would otherwise be dull derivative gameplay. The grey goo story works since they didn't pad it out. Which they would if the entire game was about it. Reminds me of SOMA but with less vapid navel-gazing.

Normally I hate consolized boss fights and enemy move sets (say, Witcher 3) but here the progression comes not from equipment, but understanding how the enemy is built and dispatching it quickly using that knowledge.

 

[JDR13]

Just play original Geneforge series from 1-5.

Waste of time imo. Just play the first one. The others all use the same recycled assets like all his series do.

I played Horizon Zero Dawn recently. The game is getting too much undeserved flak here. The combat mechanics are unique and make interesting what would otherwise be dull derivative gameplay. The grey goo story works since they didn't pad it out. Which they would if the entire game was about it. Reminds me of SOMA but with less vapid navel-gazing.

Normally I hate consolized boss fights and enemy move sets (say, Witcher 3) but here the progression comes not from equipment, but understanding how the enemy is built and dispatching it quickly using that knowledge.

HZD was easily in my top 5 last year. I doubt most of the people bashing it even gave it a try. They just saw a female protagonist and immediately dismissed it.

 

[Fedora Master]

I installed Crysis 2 on a whim.
What an odd period for FPS games back then. Movement is "realistic" (=slow) even when you sprint, there's no dedicated grenade button but regenerating health. It offers multiple approaches to combat but always leaves them rather limited - You can do A, B or C but it all ends in you either completely avoiding enemies or killing the lot of 'em.
Looks good for the most part but it's also obvious that some of the blemishes are hidden behind copious amounts of lighting effects and such.

 

[cosmicray]

Football Manager 2020 - I'm playing ungodly amounts of it just by clicking the fucking "next" button. It's fun, though.
Dragon's Dogma - Tried playing it. Took dozen mmorpg-style quests "kill monsters", "gather flowers". Not sure if I'd like to continue. Doesn't grab me, but combat is supposedly good. I think I just want to play some story-driven jrpg at this point.

 

[Malamert]

I installed Crysis 2 on a whim.
What an odd period for FPS games back then. Movement is "realistic" (=slow) even when you sprint, there's no dedicated grenade button but regenerating health. It offers multiple approaches to combat but always leaves them rather limited - You can do A, B or C but it all ends in you either completely avoiding enemies or killing the lot of 'em.
Looks good for the most part but it's also obvious that some of the blemishes are hidden behind copious amounts of lighting effects and such.

What an absolute disaster Crysis 2 is. The game where you can literally walk past enemies on the highest difficulty without using the cloak and survive with ease. The game that received its DirectX 11 patch and High Resolution textures months after releasing. The game that had insane levels of water tessellation to gimp performance on AMD cards. What a fucking insult of a game.

 

[Strange Fellow]

Silent Storm Sentinels, also known as S3 for retarded reasons. When I played it for the first time, I didn't think Sentinels was notably better or worse than the first game, just different. I'm finding my memory to be accurate so far. A few things have been made worse: it's much more linear than its predecessor, both in terms of the overall campaign and the missions themselves, which sometimes get too restrictive with their objectives. It's also a lot harder, idiotically so at times. I also dislike the addition of inventory management costing AP. I know, it makes the game more grognardy and tacticool and yadda yadda, but I'm finding it to be too finicky and overall not an improvement. In general, the amount of fiddling with inventories you have to do has been increased considerably.
On the other hand, the economy system is a lot of fun, and the attribute system seems to be... working as intended? I could have sworn it worked the same way as it did in the main game, which is to say not at all. Then again, the main problem with it there was that the recruits you DIDN'T use quickly outpaced the ones you did in terms of attribute growth, but since recruits are no longer free and attribute levels of unused recruits remain static, it's no longer a problem.

Speaking of recruits, one thing that struck me when I replayed Silent Storm last year, and which strikes me again now, is how good the roster is. There are a number of soldiers in this game that could slot right into Jagged Alliance 2 without dragging the quality of that game down at all, which is no mean feat.

For motherland! For Stalin!

 

[Mark Richard]

Managed to pick up Terminator: Resistance in the GOG Christmas promotion as it went on sale for the first time in living memory. Resistance is arguably the most faithful adaption of the Terminator franchise since Terminator 2, with a sublime presentation that includes renditions of iconic music, the crisp sounds of plasma fire, a terrifying first encounter with T-800s, and fanservice up the wazoo. Higher difficulty levels give you that sense of being a human cockroach scurrying through the remains of post-apocalyptic LA while dodging patrols of cybernetic killers.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

There are a number of soldiers in this game that could slot right into Jagged Alliance 2 without dragging the quality of that game down at all, which is no mean feat.

Same dude wrote the bios for these dudes and so on. I don't think he's around anymore or he was pretty ill last I remember, though.

 

[Kabas]

*Duel of fates starts playing in the background*

I lost it unfortunately because i forgot to swap some of the gear. Was forced to restart the whole mission.

Spoiler

For the final mission you get to choose between Orcs and Dark Elfs. I chose the orcs because:
1) Da only good elf is a ded elf
2) Assassin guy was objectively a cooler character compared the sorceress. I still lament the loss of him when his inevitable betrayal happened.
3) I mean, the sorceress is stupid enough to blob up after i brought two rock lobbers

She is just asking for it

The game could use a bit more of unit variety but all in all, i think it's a good game.

 

[NerevarineKing]

Just play original Geneforge series from 1-5.

Waste of time imo. Just play the first one. The others all use the same recycled assets like all his series do.

I've only played Geneforge 1, but is the asset re-use that much of a deal-breaker?