What game are you wasting time on?

[JDR13]

I'm about 30-40% through Metroid Prime using the PrimeHack build of Dolphin and the HD texture pack. Runs like a dream and looks like a fully remastered version of the Wii classic but with all the extreme annoyances and no QoL of the era (early 2000s). Still, I'm enjoying myself despite MASSIVE backtracking and outrageous cock-blocking of fun with all those puzzles almost every step of the way. And I encountered a balls-hard boss already that made me truly feel like the incredible shrinking man if he was fighting gargantuan rock god monsters instead of adorable little house tabbies.

You playing the original or the Triogy version? I didn't know there was an HD texture pack for those games. I checked it out and it looks pretty good, although I don't think there's a huge difference between that and Dolphin's built-in upscaler.

 

[Rincewind]

k, fair enough.
Does that happen with classic titles like the original RE or Silent Hill as well?

Nope. The weird thing is that it didn't used to happen when I was younger. This is something that has come up in the past five years or so. Maybe my body can't handle stress. I don't know, to be completely honest.

Well, the body slowly breaks down as you get older. Plus it's not natural to sit in a chair for hours, only your hands and fingers moving, and be exposed to unnaturally high stress levels. In nature you either win a fight, outrun your enemy, or just die, then the stressful period is quickly over.

I started and aborted Silent Hill 2 a few times for that reason. Fuck that shit, I'm playing a game for enjoyment and relaxation, not to feel worse in my normal everyday life.

Turn-based battles give me all the excitement I need these days, even RTS is too much, they make me feel stressed and nervous and overwhelmed.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

I'm about 30-40% through Metroid Prime using the PrimeHack build of Dolphin and the HD texture pack. Runs like a dream and looks like a fully remastered version of the Wii classic but with all the extreme annoyances and no QoL of the era (early 2000s). Still, I'm enjoying myself despite MASSIVE backtracking and outrageous cock-blocking of fun with all those puzzles almost every step of the way. And I encountered a balls-hard boss already that made me truly feel like the incredible shrinking man if he was fighting gargantuan rock god monsters instead of adorable little house tabbies.

You playing the original or the Triogy version? I didn't know there was an HD texture pack for those games. I checked it out and it looks pretty good, although I don't think there's a huge difference between that and Dolphin's built-in upscaler.

I'm playing the trilogy version. Yeah, I'm using the upscaler too and while there's a noticeable difference with the HD texture pack, it's not a dramatic one. The important thing is that it plays great and looks fantastic and is a major improvement compared to the original wii/gamecube releases. I watched a few old YT videos of people playing the originals and man does it look murky and blurry as shit. And wow, is this a loooong game. I only just got the grappling hook with a shit ton more to go, I suspect. I think I have like only 5 or 6 of the 12 artifacts but the game keeps throwing new things at you so I'm not bored... yet.

 

[Great Deceiver]

Banner Saga. I bought it on release and for some reason it had just been sitting there unplayed all these years. It's surprisingly atmospheric and I like it a lot so far.

 

[Ninjerk]

Banner Saga. I bought it on release and for some reason it had just been sitting there unplayed all these years. It's surprisingly atmospheric and I like it a lot so far.

The only thing that irked me about the 1st game was the feeling that the results of some choices seem to blindside you with totally unpredictable results. I think there was one in particular where I lost a character and it just felt like thinking about which choice to make didn't matter because something like that could come out of left field.

 

[Rincewind]

Banner Saga. I bought it on release and for some reason it had just been sitting there unplayed all these years. It's surprisingly atmospheric and I like it a lot so far.

The only thing that irked me about the 1st game was the feeling that the results of some choices seem to blindside you with totally unpredictable results. I think there was one in particular where I lost a character and it just felt like thinking about which choice to make didn't matter because something like that could come out of left field.

I kinda liked that, it's like real life in a way. You can rarely predict what will lead to what exactly, and often there's no optimal or good choice.

 

[Gamezor]

I started playing Stranger of Sword City Revisited on recommendation of I think Aweigh and Fluent in the shoutbox. Playing it on my Vita which is ideal here because it's easy to suspend, and you can play it in either long or short bursts. It's my first real Wizardry-like unless you count MM1, and I love it. Not that far in, but it's great. Things I like:

-Interesting turn based combat. Can be very challenging and rewarding.
-Love the blobber abstraction of positioning.
-Combat can be super fast against trash mobs, because blobber, abstracted positioning, and QOL features.
-Tension of only being able to save in town.
-New skills and level up can make a big difference.
-New gear can make a big difference.
-Many options for character building and class switching.
-Limited exposition but enough of it.
-Nice art style.

Can't find anything I don't like yet. No long story exposition getting in the way of gameplay. I wish AAA games had developed more in this direction than in the direction of something like FF7 (which I like).

 

[Puukko]

Jumped into DMC5 as my first foray into these games. I have obviously been well aware of the series for a long time, and it's been on my backlog forever. I played up until the point Dante gets his second devil trigger a good chunk in one go.

I'm having great fun. The game never stops being entertaining and having to learn multiple movesets for different characters really activates the neurons. Dante has so many layers to him, it makes Nero and especially V look simple in comparison. Not a clue how Vergil compares, but considering he apparently gets to play through the whole campaign just on his own, I imagine he has to be on the same level as Dante. This is definitely a game with good replay value but I have quite a lot of games on my plate at the moment so we'll see.

On the technical side, the game's a marvel. Well above 100 fps most of the time at good settings on my ol' 1070. Makes for probably the smoothest and most responsive action game experience to date for me. This is how it should be.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

Can't find anything I don't like yet. No long story exposition getting in the way of gameplay.

You mean there are post-FF6 jRPGs that don't have a minimum of 2 pages of dialogue in every new character interaction and/or 2+ hours of cut scenes of story exposition???! I didn't think such a thing existed.

 

[JDR13]

Playing XCOM 2 for the first time. Seems pretty great so far, but some of the missions are really frustrating on the first try.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

You mean there are post-FF6 jRPGs that don't have a minimum of 2 pages of dialogue in every new character interaction and/or 2+ hours of cut scenes of story exposition???! I didn't think such a thing existed.

Stranger of Sword City is a turn-based blobber, i.e. a Wizardry-like, not part of the JRPG subgenre, although it is a Japanese-developed game.

 

[Gibson]

Urtuk the Desolation

It's really hitting the spot atm.

 

[YldrE]

Finally rolled the ending credits on FF7.

The production values are off the charts for a PS1 game: the gigantic scale, the constant setpieces, the cutscenes, the varied and detailed environments, the huge bestiary and elaborate combat visuals...

...but on the other hand the writing is trash, the combat system isn't anything to write home about, the world and dungeon design offers neither challenge nor depth (in part owing to how story-driven the game is: gameplay is a vehicle, not an end) and everything is just so fucking slow. I can't emphasize this enough, this has to be one of the most tedious games I ever played, I can't even imagine slogging through it without constantly hitting a fast-forward button.

AAA games in a nutshell: a shallow experience wrapped in ungodly amounts of production money. Had the writing and/or the gameplay been any good I would have been the ideal audience for it. Granted, I did like FF9 a lot so I'll give them that they were still in the process of figuring shit out.

 

[Fedora Master]

Im fairly impressed with Xenonauts (Community Edition, that is) - It recreates the feeling of the old UFO games very well while modernizing stuff in a sensible manner. You don't need to keep stock of every single grenade and clip of ammo, for example and there's an actual air combat minigame. It's essentially what Long War claims to be but isn't. I also enjoy the fact that not all civvies are helpless. Plenty of midwestern farmers with shotguns and jihadis with AKs that give the xenos a warm greeting!

 

[Gamezor]

Finally rolled the ending credits on FF7.

The production values are off the charts for a PS1 game: the gigantic scale, the constant setpieces, the cutscenes, the varied and detailed environments, the huge bestiary and elaborate combat visuals...

...but on the other hand the writing is trash, the combat system isn't anything to write home about, the world and dungeon design offers neither challenge nor depth (in part owing to how story-driven the game is: gameplay is a vehicle, not an end) and everything is just so fucking slow. I can't emphasize this enough, this has to be one of the most tedious games I ever played, I can't even imagine slogging through it without constantly hitting a fast-forward button.

AAA games in a nutshell: a shallow experience wrapped in ungodly amounts of production money. Had the writing and/or the gameplay been any good I would have been the ideal audience for it. Granted, I did like FF9 a lot so I'll give them that they were still in the process of figuring shit out.

I love the gorgeous 2d background art in the ps1 ff games. Im not sure many modern games have anything similar other than adventure games. I need to do full playthrough of ff9 and give 8 a fair shake.

 

[curds]

Trying to get back into The Witcher 3 and finish it off but, fuck, it's so long. I struggle with games much longer than 40 hours, I'm 50 hours into this one, and I'm not sure the end is in sight any time soon. Just finished the battle of Kaer Morhen, which I thought was gonna be the end, but it wasn't. Still got the expansions to deal with, too. It doesn't help that the game has very little to offer aside from taking in the breathtaking scenery.

I really wish CDPR kept the formula of the first two games; not open-world, broken into distinct chapters, and about half the length of this monster. Less is more.

Playing as Ciri is a drag, too.

I also have like ten other games installed, too. Nothing's really holding my attention at the moment.

 

[OSK]

The last few weeks I played through Avernum: Escape from the Pit and Avernum 2: Crystal Souls. Just started Avernum 3: Ruined World.

 

[NerevarineKing]

I was playing Chronicles of Myrtana but then got distracted with Underrail. Underrail is really fucking good so far and has much better combat than any Fallout game. I've been using a gun/armor build and seems to be working so far.

 

[ZodoZ]

I started playing "Life" the saga of The Dragon again. Can't seem to escape this one. Gotta admit it has been kind of slow going recently but there has been some interesting moments and some progress is being made. I made it to a new expansion area with an interesting and complex economy and culture. This is a "actual" playthrough meaning actions have consequences sometimes unknown until much later. Combat is mostly voluntary unless venturing in to hazard areas or joining a combat guild.

Highly recommend
4*

 

[Belegarsson]

37 hours into Days Gone, I never expected to like it this much.

On paper it's a generic story-driven zombie game with generic mechanics, gameplay is looting resources to craft stuff, Red Dead Redemption-ish slo-mo shooting, traditional open world structure with camps to clear, credit to earn and zombie, I mean freakers' nests to clear. The first 1/3 of the game is terrible, the way the game zigzag through 3 or 4 storylines at the same time made it difficult to follow what the hell was going on, especially a flashback cutscene so confusingly stitched together gave me an impression that there was a lot of cut playable content.

Then the Lost Lake plot begins and boy it started to get real. For once, I really appreciate a zombie game that's not too dark and inhumanly desperate, the game doesn't pretend to be a dark gritty modern age medieval shit with grey morality, it makes clear who the bad guys are, who the good guys are, and between them is a shockingly likable protagonist who's stubborn, desperate, has trust issue but also acts really real, acknowledge his flaws and is actually not as selfish as he thinks he is. Deacon reminded me of a time when I was a stupid kid dropping out of college and insisted on living alone because I didn't want to bother anyone, but time goes on and I simply accepted that I couldn't hold a grudge on everything forever. He can survive on his own, but surviving isn't living, and being desperate enough to hold out hope, in this case his wife, is still worth a reason to live.

This is easily one of the rare cases where the longer the game goes on, the better it plays. At first it played like a generic The Last of Us open world clone, sneak, one shot headshot, preserving your ammo and shit. But when you get better guns and finally get to fight the horde, shit gets real. Memorize explosive barrels, set up gas cans and mines, hoard enough resources to craft napalm molotov, then try to find high grounds, lure them into choke points, there's a particular nuance in these horde fights and it's always exhilarating when you clear one. The bike also reminds me of your car in Mad Max, there's a lot of upgrades that make traversing a flexible experience the longer you play it genuinely feels like a trusty companion. The devs cleverly designed the first map with a lot of hills to let save gas by freewheeling, so there's this "rhythm" when it comes to driving your bike.

Two things I'm not a fan of: those NERO missions where you have to infiltrate a research team, get detected and you must restart back at checkpoint, pretty boring and repetitive. Second, playing on PC definitely broke the combat, since the game relies a lot on slo-mo shooting, it's really easy to aim and headshot everyone John Wick style with pinpoint accuracy even on hardest difficulty.

Did I mention that it looks pretty? It does look pretty.

 

[Chippy]

Just started Shadows of War.

It looks promising.

 

[JDR13]

37 hours into Days Gone, I never expected to like it this much.

On paper it's a generic story-driven zombie game with generic mechanics, gameplay is looting resources to craft stuff, Red Dead Redemption-ish slo-mo shooting, traditional open world structure with camps to clear, credit to earn and zombie, I mean freakers' nests to clear. The first 1/3 of the game is terrible, the way the game zigzag through 3 or 4 storylines at the same time made it difficult to follow what the hell was going on, especially a flashback cutscene so confusingly stitched together gave me an impression that there was a lot of cut playable content.

Then the Lost Lake plot begins and boy it started to get real. For once, I really appreciate a zombie game that's not too dark and inhumanly desperate, the game doesn't pretend to be a dark gritty modern age medieval shit with grey morality, it makes clear who the bad guys are, who the good guys are, and between them is a shockingly likable protagonist who's stubborn, desperate, has trust issue but also acts really real, acknowledge his flaws and is actually not as selfish as he thinks he is. Deacon reminded me of a time when I was a stupid kid dropping out of college and insisted on living alone because I didn't want to bother anyone, but time goes on and I simply accepted that I couldn't hold a grudge on everything forever. He can survive on his own, but surviving isn't living, and being desperate enough to hold out hope, in this case his wife, is still worth a reason to live.

This is easily one of the rare cases where the longer the game goes on, the better it plays. At first it played like a generic The Last of Us open world clone, sneak, one shot headshot, preserving your ammo and shit. But when you get better guns and finally get to fight the horde, shit gets real. Memorize explosive barrels, set up gas cans and mines, hoard enough resources to craft napalm molotov, then try to find high grounds, lure them into choke points, there's a particular nuance in these horde fights and it's always exhilarating when you clear one. The bike also reminds me of your car in Mad Max, there's a lot of upgrades that make traversing a flexible experience the longer you play it genuinely feels like a trusty companion. The devs cleverly designed the first map with a lot of hills to let save gas by freewheeling, so there's this "rhythm" when it comes to driving your bike.

Two things I'm not a fan of: those NERO missions where you have to infiltrate a research team, get detected and you must restart back at checkpoint, pretty boring and repetitive. Second, playing on PC definitely broke the combat, since the game relies a lot on slo-mo shooting, it's really easy to aim and headshot everyone John Wick style with pinpoint accuracy even on hardest difficulty.

Did I mention that it looks pretty? It does look pretty.

Days Gone surprised me as well. It ended up being one of the best games I played this year.

 

[curds]

I finally beat The Witcher 3. I won't say too much since I've posted about it already in this thread.

On the whole, a decent game, but a huge let down coming straight from the first two games. As far as popamole open-world action RPGs go, it was better than Skyrim, etc.

I liked the ending, until,

Spoiler

Ciri turns out to have lived. I thought it was cool to have the game end on a bit of a down-note, so I found it a bit lame to have that turned around at the last second. But it was cool to have the trilogy end with all that White Frost shit that we first heard about way back in The Witcher 1, chapter one. Full circle shit.

 

[somewhatgiggly]

Modded NV a bit, lots of quests mods. Mostly bounties. New Vegas Bounties I, II, III. The Inheritance. Headhunting. The North Road. The Depths of Depravity. Headhunter. The Collector. All of these are great, though NVBIII has problems by the climax.

Other quest mods didn't grab me as much. A Difference of Opinion, New Vegas Stories, Fortune Canyon, A simple Package Delivery, Sweet Home, The High Desert, Boom to the Moon, and fucking Autumn Leaves - meh to ugh. Might try out the New Reno stuff. See, what I think it is, is that modders are some creative people, but finding something that complements or adds to New Vegas is hard. All those above mods barely fit New Vegas for one reason or another. Added too many new factions, big ideals, or whatever. Or languished for too long, or the tone was just too off. The High Desert has you make a new brothel-inn in Primm, then shoves you into a religious commune-cult, cursing all the while. Eh. But Bounty Huntin'? That's easy. It's combat, with some lore, maybe some choices, some fucked up set up. Voice Acting goes a long way too, but it's easy to find something that works with just killin' folk than musing on something bigger. Treasure huntin' might be good, too, but what treasure is worth it to a level 50 Courier already with high end weapon mods and damage mods and 300,000 caps?

Mods that expanded the wildlife and so on almost always tacked on some BS I didn't care for. A World of Pain, I remember, did not have a huge Underground Faction thing going on before, but now it does, and I hate feature creep like this. I just wanted more shit to shoot or come across that felt organic/natural to be there. A huge underground city and a faction of tech raiders doesn't fit that. Faction Reloaded mods were the same. Legion, Followers, Raiders would bloat too much. Radio mods were fun. Radio Mayak, Radio Ghosts, Radio Indigo, Combined Syndicates of America, Conelrad, Surf Radio, Pacific West, OWB Expanded, People's Radio of China....

There might be some house mods that add quests, but I dunno. I liked a little hotel mod for the courier and that was it. No bullshit mods about the Enclave, Brotherhood or Steel, or whatever, either. I killed the Enclave in 2 and the BoS got killed by their own stupidity by 2 and I sent the rest of them packing in NV, but nooo. Everyone loves the goddamn Brotherhood of Steel or wants to bring back the fucking Enclave. I would get it if the Enclave was supposed to be like, the whole sum of Post-War America's government, but they were a bunch of deluded asswipes on a rig and Navarro. Dead and gone, stop trying to shove them into everything.

But hey, there's always new New Vegas mods at least. I finished another house ending, but my character is beefy and when another good quest mod comes along, I'll reuse 'em. Or just need something to shoot. Maybe I can try TTW...?

 

[jackofshadows]

I liked the ending, until

Spoiler

She might die if you were a "bad daddy" to her throughout the game. Like didn't play snowballs with her, wouldn't let to trash Avallac'h lab, groped her ass a few times - there're several specific points and the ending depends on whether or not did you check enough of them and did or did you not make a detour to the Empreror after the Imlerich business