What game are you wasting time on?

[HoboForEternity]

Playing this free horror game on steam, a (now standalone) half life mod called cry of fear. On chapter 4 now it's pretty good. The setpiece are great and the atmosphere are excellent and the combat is pretty tight. You can fight back but with limited ammo.

 

[BrotherFrank]

Been on an emulator craze lately and remembered a game I played briefly as a kid and was really hooked into, but only made it mid way through the story: dark savior on the saturn. I played it on holiday and by time I had to go home I had just arrived at a crucial story point where had finally caught up to the big bad right as shit was getting real and it was always one of my eternal regrets not to have found out what happened next, and finally 20 years later I can right that wrong.
Game itself can be described as a quirky isometric platformer-very light rpg-fighting game (you engage enemies in 1v1 beat em ups).

I don't know if it's the power of nostalgia (it sure made me love the ost at least) or game just holds up well but had an absolute blast, one of the gimmicks of the game is you are in a groundhog day type scenario (based on how you do in the frst sequence of the game you proceed to 1 of 4 major story variations) so went ahead and beat all "parallel" storylines, each providing a clue to the overall storyline and how it all fits together is down to the player's interpretation. Indeed looking up on the internet I was horrified to see people in boards having interpretations of the story that just didn't make sense to me and I feel like a smarty pants for putting together the clues and figuring out which ending was the "true" one that closed the time loop protag is stuck in.

Of course this is a game from 1996 that barely anyone played because it was an obscure title on the saturn so I have 0 people to discuss it with, fml.

 

[FreshCorpse]

Started Ori and the Blind Forest, Definitive Edition last night. Holy shit the animation and music...

Yeah, the hype is justified on that one. The only problem is those escape sections which are like something out of some other, unrelated, game the developers wanted to make. Ginso tree IIRC is the first properly hard one. I don't think they are bad - though they are very hard - they are just tonally wrong.

I wonder whether they kept them for the sequel.

 

[BLOBERT]

Been on an emulator craze lately and remembered a game I played briefly as a kid and was really hooked into, but only made it mid way through the story: dark savior on the saturn. I played it on holiday and by time I had to go home I had just arrived at a crucial story point where had finally caught up to the big bad right as shit was getting real and it was always one of my eternal regrets not to have found out what happened next, and finally 20 years later I can right that wrong.
Game itself can be described as a quirky isometric platformer-very light rpg-fighting game (you engage enemies in 1v1 beat em ups).

I don't know if it's the power of nostalgia (it sure made me love the ost at least) or game just holds up well but had an absolute blast, one of the gimmicks of the game is you are in a groundhog day type scenario (based on how you do in the frst sequence of the game you proceed to 1 of 4 major story variations) so went ahead and beat all "parallel" storylines, each providing a clue to the overall storyline and how it all fits together is down to the player's interpretation. Indeed looking up on the internet I was horrified to see people in boards having interpretations of the story that just didn't make sense to me and I feel like a smarty pants for putting together the clues and figuring out which ending was the "true" one that closed the time loop protag is stuck in.

Of course this is a game from 1996 that barely anyone played because it was an obscure title on the saturn so I have 0 people to discuss it with, fml.

BRO I WOULD TRY TO D DUSCUSS IT IF YOU TOLD US WHAT IT WAS

 

[DeepOcean]

I'm on a FPS binge lately, played a bunch of them but the only ones that annoyed the hell out of me was when I tried the Halo Collection recently, played Halo 1,2 and 3. This is only about the single player, could care less for multiplayer competitive games.

Halo 1: Fighting the Elites was fun, those motherfuckers are indeed a pain in the ass and smart as fuck, especially when they start lobbing granades at the end, doing three way fights between Covenant and Flood was fun, some encounters allow you to steal vehicles like banshees and fly around that was fun, the shotgun was a fun weapon, what wasnt fun was the copy pasted enviroments with whole levels composed on endless copy pasted hallways that never end, backtracking on the second half through the same levels that were on the first half wasnt fun, most weapons being only barely distinguishable pew pews with different colors, that wasnt fun.

Based on the descriptions of the fanboys and the game having vehicles, I was expecting a sort of Crysis light gameplay where missions would have a hub like structure with multiple ojectives but that only happens twice in the entire game, the rest is endless linear corridors with no real level design in sight. If this was a PC only game at release, it would be rightly annihilated from outer orbit by the competition but as it was the first FPS game for teenagers and gaming journalists on the XBOX, it has a reputation it doesnt deserve.

It gets a: compared with other console shooters and a compared with PC shooters.

Halo 2: Halo 2 fixes one of the biggest issues of Halo 1, the lack of variation on levels, there is a ton of different textures and models on the levels this time and you arent walking nondescript hallways forever like on the previous one, however I mean textures and models because level design remains pedestrian. Actually, levels got better visually, level design got worse, even the few levels that provided some glimpse of freedom on Halo 1 are lacking here. Bungie has a tendency of doing this sort of bullshit: "This is the sniper level, so, here were will add alot of enemies with sniper rifles for you to snipe, do you want to use other weapons? Fuck you." "This is the tank level, you will press W to move forward and shoot fish on the barrel that come at your direction." "Now, we want you to hijack those tanks, do you want to explode them with missile launchers? Fuck you." Zero attempt at making truly sandboxy levels even if their games had tanks, spaceships, jeeps that beg for it... such a pity. Even Call of Duty is more flexible at this.

They also introduced long range accurate weapons and dual wielding, meaning elites can be easily overwhelmed at distance or at close range with superior firepower, reducing the threat they were on the previous game considerably, they also die faster, unless you play on Legendary but Legendary is so unbalanced that is as fun as grinding your testicles on barbed wire. They tried to compensate for that by introducing the brutes that are massive bullet sponges that charge at you when damaged, they are as fun to fight as you can expect. You also spend half the game fighting mostly the flood that is an enemy that was already getting tiresome by the end of the first game and are even more annoying here.

It is here where they also gone full popamole ditching health packs completely and making you die extremely fast, now that with the fact that they nerfed the shotgun (any FPS designers should be burned alive for this crime) and added weapons that can be safely used to popamole behind crates and can also kill the flood faster with headshots, imagine how the gameplay of this thing is...

So, I barely survived this game.

It gets: this thing is just awful on single player, it is obvious most of the money got to the multiplayer and they ran out of money for the single player.

Halo 3: So, usually people say Halo 3 is the best one of the three and that is sort of true but it is also sort of false. Yes, finally, after 3 fucking games, Bungie is starting to learn "Yes, there is this thing called level design, incredible!" and encounters are less rigid than they were on Halo 2, also, miracle!, there are sections where you actually use vehicles for more than press W to move to the next setpiece like on Halo 1 but a little better. Sure, most of the levels are just a chain of setpieces trying to one up the previous one without any stop for exploration or any care for pacing but hey, baby steps for Bungie, one day they will learn level design.

While the places where the encounters happen are better designed, the enemy Ai that made Halo 1 manage to be a somewhat tolerable game to play is completely gone, Elites were completely removed and replaced by brutes, however, they thankfully didnt want to torture your mouse so much like they did on Halo 2 so on Halo 3, Brutes gone from bullet sponges to second rate elites that barely avoid your shots, they also have really dangerous weapons at close range and now with the popamole long range rifles introduced on Halo 2, guess what type of gameplay this incentivizes... hiding behind boxes popamoling them away that was already a problem on Halo 2 that wasnt fixed.

It isnt that bad on some encounters, Jackal snipers make your life hard and you actually need to find them and neutralize them so they kinda support the brutes and ammo for long range weapons isnt always available, still, a TON of times you will do better to just hide behind boxes with your regenerating health popamoling them away. Elites on Halo 1 are still the most fun enemy type to fight on Halo, after that, enemy design or stagnated or got worse. Guess what? There is also flood on this game, they were okay on the first game, annoying as fuck on the second and boring as fuck on the third... such joy.

I gets: as it improved somethings like level design but made the gameplay itself worse than Halo 1 by not having a proper replacement for the Halo 1 elite, those motherfuckers on legendary could humiliate you and make you shit your pants, since that only decline from something that wasnt that great to begin with, it ends on a tie with Halo 1, still compared with PC shooters.

 

[FreshCorpse]

I'm on a FPS binge lately, played a bunch of them but the only ones that annoyed the hell out of me was when I tried the Halo Collection recently, played Halo 1,2 and 3. This is only about the single player, could care less for multiplayer competitive games.

Halo 1: Fighting the Elites was fun, those motherfuckers are indeed a pain in the ass and smart as fuck, especially when they start lobbing granades at the end, doing three way fights between Covenant and Flood was fun, some encounters allow you to steal vehicles like banshees and fly around that was fun, the shotgun was a fun weapon, what wasnt fun was the copy pasted enviroments with whole levels composed on endless copy pasted hallways that never end, backtracking on the second half through the same levels that were on the first half wasnt fun, most weapons being only barely distinguishable pew pews with different colors, that wasnt fun.

Based on the descriptions of the fanboys and the game having vehicles, I was expecting a sort of Crysis light gameplay where missions would have a hub like structure with multiple ojectives but that only happens twice in the entire game, the rest is endless linear corridors with no real level design in sight. If this was a PC only game at release, it would be rightly annihilated from outer orbit by the competition but as it was the first FPS game for teenagers and gaming journalists on the XBOX, it has a reputation it doesnt deserve.

It gets a: compared with other console shooters and a compared with PC shooters.

To take a big risk of negative ratings and step in to defend Halo 1, at least on a relative basis...:

Halo released in 2001. It does have online multiplayer but that required a lot of complicated networking and no one did it. Besides couch multiplayer the main feature is the single player campaign. In the year 2001, what significant PC FPS's released with a decent singleplayer campaign?

HL1 released in 1998, several years prior. Then Quake 3 came out the following year in 1999 with no real single player campaign and de facto ended the practice of making single player campaigns for PC FPS for several years. As a result, the great PC FPS's of the early 2000s had no real SP: Tribes (I never played) didn't, Unreal Tournament didn't and Battlefield 1942 didn't. Counter Strike didn't either. My recollection is that the BF1942 bots were so risible that it was pointless to play offline at all. The exceptions are the first Wolfenstein reboot and Medal of Honor which aren't exactly what I imagine Codexers would think of as seminal. Admittedly the first Serious Sam did come out in 2001 but I didn't play it because I - like many PC FPS players at the time - thought single player was a waste of time.

I think you can't compare Halo unfavourably to the great single-player PC FPS's of its own era because there weren't any. Unless there is something great that's slipped my mind, PC FPS didn't start coming out with single-player campaigns again until Call of Duty released in 2003. We all know how that ended. (I will add parenthetically that the first Call of Duty campaign is much much worse than people seem to remember: CoD was shit long before it migrated to consoles.)

My personal reflection on this is that realistic (military) shooters in the Arma tradition are good games, unrealistic (arena) shooters in the Quake tradition are good games but semi-realistic shooters that split the difference are shit and a developmental blind alley. CS was realistic for the time. BF1942 was not but I loved it because it had the biggest maps (64 players was a big deal in 2002).

As for your remarks on the Halo 1 campaign: I think you're spot on. I played though it in co-op recently and thought the same things I thought in the early 2000s: it'd been streamlined too much and that Bungie ran out of time to develop the game. The latter half of the game is the first half of the game in reverse. Sometimes that works out fun like in Two Betrayals where you have three-way skirmishes but mostly it is a drag. The flood are a huge fucking drag when it's just you vs them. The library is one of the weakest FPS levels of all time. This is all frustrating because I think H1 generally has the mechanics and AI to support larger skirmishes really well but with a few exceptions (mostly in the Attack on the Control Room/Two Betrayals map) the level designers give you corridor after fucking corridor.

I only play Halo games in online co-op with mates and they love it so much they make it fun but without that I would never punish myself by playing through the campaigns alone so to you for suffering through them.

 

[Deflowerer]

Playing Blood for the first time on Well Done difficulty. Jesus christ, being torn a new asshole.

 

[NerevarineKing]

Well I played until you killed Hitler in Wolfenstein 3D and then got distracted by Duke Nukem 3D. It's a really fun game so far with some neat level design and cool weapons. Playing the Atomic Edition instead of the one on Steam since it seems bad.

Playing Blood for the first time on Well Done difficulty. Jesus christ, being torn a new asshole.

Blood is something I really want to try as well, it seems like such an interesting game.

 

[Billi205]

Falling back to some casual gaming with Nova Drift. That game is oddly addicting given it's a space shooter type of games

 

[Jrpgfan]

Still playing Zelda. I don't think I've ever disliked a Zelda game and this is no different. These games are really well designed and a lot of fun to play.

Grimoire is on hold atm. Got a little burned with the random encounters. This reminds me why I've never been a big fan of the genre. I usually like everything about it(exploration, combat systems, character creation, puzzles etc...) but the random encounters really get to me eventually. I'll probably resume it at some point(I stopped after 30 hours in).

 

[Trithne]

Decided that since I somehow missed it at the time, it was time for me to play Ultima Underworld.

Tossing up between playing it raw (getting used to the controls), or being more casual and playing it in UnderworldExporter. I like how UE mimicked the mouse look mode of the SS mod, but I prefer the original textures. Also somehow the text in UE is fucking unreadable.

Never mind, decided to see if there was a mouselook mod for UW itself and lo and behold there was, so the dilemma is solved.

 

[JDR13]

I think you can't compare Halo unfavourably to the great single-player PC FPS's of its own era because there weren't any.

So an "era" is only 1 or 2 years now?

 

[curds]

Gave up on The Witcher 3 with about ten(?) hours left to go (40-something hours in right now) after completing the first two games for the first time.

In my opinion TW1 is one of the greats alongside PST and Gothic 2, and TW2 was enjoyable despite being streamlined, but TW3 just didn't do it for me. I don't think The Witcher needed an open world, and most of the problems I have with TW3 are, I think, symptoms of it being an open world game. For example, level restrictions on items and monsters above Geralt's level being buffed massively. It's also much longer than the ~30 hour first two games (which is the sweet spot for me, for this type of game), but it feels padded out to me, not naturally lengthy. Again probably because open world.

Now I'm literally wasting time with a bunch of other games. Replaying Dragon's Dogma, Gothic 2 and Dark Souls 2, and playing Kingdom Come for the first time. just dabbling until something else grabs me like The Witcher 1 and 2 did.

KCD seems quite promising after making it through the two hour tutorial.

 

[FreshCorpse]

I think you can't compare Halo unfavourably to the great single-player PC FPS's of its own era because there weren't any.

So an "era" is only 1 or 2 years now?

I would say the four years between Quake 3 (1999) and Call of Duty (2003) count as a distinctive era, yes.

More or less it is the era of the online-only PC FPS and the majority of them were arena shooters like Q3.

Things moved exceptionally fast by present standards: NVidia released five GPU generations during this four year period; clock speeds (remember those?) went up 5x so people threw away their entire computer and bought a new one each year; internet latencies dropped massively and deathmatch on broadband was night and day compared to 56k (though ISDN was noticeably better).

Even one year was an age at the time and games released >1y ago were "old". And throughout this period I played a lot of PC FPS but I don't think I played any single-player campaign on PC. Honestly, didn't care to.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

Gave up on The Witcher 3 with about ten(?) hours left to go (40-something hours in right now) after completing the first two games for the first time.

In my opinion TW1 is one of the greats alongside PST and Gothic 2, and TW2 was enjoyable despite being streamlined, but TW3 just didn't do it for me. I don't think The Witcher needed an open world, and most of the problems I have with TW3 are, I think, symptoms of it being an open world game. For example, level restrictions on items and monsters above Geralt's level being buffed massively. It's also much longer than the ~30 hour first two games (which is the sweet spot for me, for this type of game), but it feels padded out to me, not naturally lengthy. Again probably because open world.

Now I'm literally wasting time with a bunch of other games. Replaying Dragon's Dogma, Gothic 2 and Dark Souls 2, and playing Kingdom Come for the first time. just dabbling until something else grabs me like The Witcher 1 and 2 did.

KCD seems quite promising after making it through the two hour tutorial.

Open world can be tedious but I do love the idea of being a lone wolf and wandering from town to town and having a different adventure each time, like Kwai Chang Caine. It's when you're shoehorned into a badly conceived, badly written, cliched or insipid main quest in that open world where things typically go oh so wrong in RPGs. W3 wasn't too bad as far as these these things go but by the end of the first DLC I was completely burnt because of the game's length. It's a shame too because I heard Blood & Wine was actually good and had a quite reasonable length to prevent burn out.

 

[FreshCorpse]

You can play Blood and Wine in isolation. I got burnt out partway through B&W and am planning to revisit it in that way.

Witcher 3 main quest gets all sorts of silly in the middle. There's a point where you're looking for Dandelion so you have to find X but to find X you have to find Y and to find Y you need to save Z who is...whatever. And of course you're meant to be finding Ciri.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

You can play Blood and Wine in isolation. I got burnt out partway through B&W and am planning to revisit it in that way.

Witcher 3 main quest gets all sorts of silly in the middle. There's a point where you're looking for Dandelion so you have to find X but to find X you have to find Y and to find Y you need to save Z who is...whatever. And of course you're meant to be finding Ciri.

I've considered playing B&W as standalone someday, but then I remember how much I hated the Netflix series so I'm kind of done with Geralt and likely wouldn't even play the earlier games though what I remember of W1 where I played about 5 hours was that it was kind of decent. It was also at a time when I was having driver issues with my ATI video card and had to try 4-5 different drivers to find one that didn't cause artifacts with W1. The Witcher series seems to be one great big ball of "eh, forget it" with me now.

 

[curds]

likely wouldn't even play the earlier games though what I remember of W1 where I played about 5 hours was that it was kind of decent.

I'd recommend giving the first one another go, it gets better and better as you progress through the game and it has likely become one of my "replay every year" games.

Another thing that disappointed me about the Witcher 3 was the portrayal of various characters; a lot of them felt like they'd lost a certain something, especially Roche and Triss. Roche was my BRO all through Witcher 2, now we hardly see him and when we do he's lacking a lot of his personality from Witcher 2. Triss, who has been with us since TW1, has been shoved to the side to make way for Yennefer, who appears out of nowhere and is really hard to give a shit about if you haven't read the books. Also she's a bitch.

 

[Ivan]

Enderal is a worthwhile total conversion of Skyrim, influenced by Gothic in the gameplay department and reminiscent of Obsidian in the story department. The game features a small cast of well-written and fantastically voiced characters with a noteworthy amount of depth. While the game is weighed down by sluggish combat and menu based healing/buffing, you're free to explore the world map at your heart's desire. I did this and later found that I had inadvertently advanced questlines that I wasn't aware of until hours later when I'd meet the proper questgiver. That said, I quickly grew tired of exploring just for the sake for exploring since the dungeoncrawling bits of the game were largely boring. The game features a huge city reminiscent of the one from Baldur's Gate 2. Questgivers are everywhere and it's genuinely impressive how logical and well structured it is. I do wish the main world map was smaller. I did run into my fair share of invisible walls during exploration, frustrated that the game has some clear cut routes it wants you to take to reach certain locations. To ease my irks with the game I installed a fast travel mod, otherwise I wouldn't have bothered completing the side quests, which would have been a shame since there's a lot of humor and pathos to be found in them. I particularly loved the mini-pig quest NO SPOILERS. In sum, I'd recommend Enderal to anyone looking for an RPG that features a strong story/characters. I would skip this if you were hoping to a proper Gothic successor, although you'd probably know that if you're familiar with Skyrim (I am not, having only played Morrowind for a fair ten hours or so and not finding it to be to my liking). Other small bits: the music is well done, each of the game's dungeons felt unique, nothing felt recycled, except for that fucking aggravating line of dialogue "MY SIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIR." I did suffer a few crashes here and there but nothing to drag my score down. I did reach a pretty hilarious endgame bug where, b/c I was a mage who relied on fireball, I aggrod some friendly NPCs and had to redo a bit of the endgame.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Accidentally picked another title in way of the samurai 3. Only 4 more to go.
Once I have done those I can fully spend time on finding the perfect sword.

 

[flyingjohn]

Finished grim dawn co op.
Started out strong then went to shit quickly.
Act 1 is excellent both theme and gameplay wise.
Act 2 is a boring drag.
Act 3 is a weird mix of just solid to mediocre.
Act 4 is shit with one of the worst final bosses and levels i have ever seen in a arpg.
Loot wise, i have gotten more shit not tied to my class which annoys me.Hate also how the only solution to trading items for other items is expensive and tied to dlc.
Coop has a lot of bugs when it comes to quests.
The game has plenty of rpg customization which is great.Dual class system with devotions give you plenty of room to build what you want.
Faction system sucks.It is boring and grindy and the reward i getting stuff to bypass said boredom when your replay with another class.

I expected much more from the diablo 3 killer.

 

[ferratilis]

Finished grim dawn co op.
Started out strong then went to shit quickly.
Act 1 is excellent both theme and gameplay wise.
Act 2 is a boring drag.
Act 3 is a weird mix of just solid to mediocre.
Act 4 is shit with one of the worst final bosses and levels i have ever seen in a arpg.
Loot wise, i have gotten more shit not tied to my class which annoys me.Hate also how the only solution to trading items for other items is expensive and tied to dlc.
Coop has a lot of bugs when it comes to quests.
The game has plenty of rpg customization which is great.Dual class system with devotions give you plenty of room to build what you want.
Faction system sucks.It is boring and grindy and the reward i getting stuff to bypass said boredom when your replay with another class.

I expected much more from the diablo 3 killer.

This is their main way of adding replay value to the game. You find a cool item and then start theorycrafting a new build around it. I also don't like it, especially since you have to play the same game on three difficulties. If it were just 10 straight acts like they did in PoE, it would be more interesting. But still, GD is a very enjoyable game to play through once a year or so.

 

[Zibniyat]

Just finished Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines.

Played as Gangrel, focus on physical attributes plus Stealth. In the end I chose to side with the Anarchs (but nearly went independent), killed everyone else. The game was rather easy, thanks to my use of Stealth, but some boss fights were quite difficult. Overall I very much liked the atmosphere, the music was good, the plethora of choices on how to deal with things (despite my talkative skills being pretty low all the time), and the breadth of lore it tries to bring to life.

I STRONGLY disliked the ending, however. I also checked on YouTube all the other possible endings, and none of them are very satisfactory. It all comes a bit too abrupt, and siding with the Sabat or Asians isn't fleshed out enough and comes as an option too late. The ending as such, by which I mean the contents of the Sarcophagus, came from out of nowhere. Yes, it's quite a surprise, but I dislike surprises that aren't at least hinted at, it all just comes as a "fuck you, look how we tricked you hahahaha" from the developers, and that I find distasteful. I nearly never communicated with Jack throughout the game, and him being portrayed as a mastermind behind much of what happened is just "made up" shit that isn't "there" in the game, but is instead taken from a magical hat when the developers felt needed to happen. I want it as part of the game, NOT some literature device of conjuring up something or someone who's literally nowhere to be seen most of the time.

Coupled with a broken stealth, which enables you to fight even bosses from the shadows where they can't see you or do anything against you, and some other issues, I give this game a very good 8 out of 10. Worth multiple play-throughs even. Too bad it feels not quite finished, there was a much greater scope here that got scrapped.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

but I dislike surprises that aren't at least hinted at,

Don't open it.

Spoiler

 

[Zibniyat]

but I dislike surprises that aren't at least hinted at,

Don't open it.

Spoiler

Becket seemed like a nice guy, for a Vampire, and so I chose to heed his advice and not open it. I was intending to either just take both the coffin and the key for safekeeping, if the game allowed it, or to just give it to LaCroix when he's so obsessed about it. It's not the literal content or the consequence that I dislike, it's that it just comes out of nowhere. But whatever.

I do like games teaching real-world truths, and this one had many lessons, especially for the confused youth of today:

But when all you play are garbage fast-food games of today, no wonder you turn into a soycunt.