What game are you wasting time on?

[Zizka]

CP2077. Fucking great, I'm having a grand time.

Are you going to review bomb this like you did Atom RPG?

 

[jackofshadows]

Are you going to review bomb this like you did Atom RPG?

I'm aware, that's why I couldn't buy it anyway so no hard feelings. Would rate it down if I had it though. This is a different case however because of the company scale and other stuff.

 

[Ezekiel]

Nearing the end of Ocarina of Time again. Have 18 1/2 hearts and 82 skulltullas. Played it several times but never completed it completely. Will try this time, even though it gets pretty boring towards the 100 percent point.

Water Temple is the best dungeon. Sad that's the one that gets so much hate when many others are structurally blander.

The game has some 4:3 things baked in, even outside of the obvious pre-rendered backgrounds. I don't know of a way to force 4:3 in this "port."

Spoiler

 

[Abu Antar]

More Tales of Xillia 2. Game is pretty easy. The Elite monsters and one or two bosses have been the only real challenges. After this game is beaten, I will take a break from the PS3 backlog clearing, and start Elden Ring.
I'm currently at chapter 11/16. I'm playing blind, without any guide, which for a Tales game can mean lots of missables, but I honestly don't care. For now, I have taken a break from the main story to do all character sub quests, which are marked on the maps.

In Avernum 5, I am done with the main task of Tranquility. Ready to move on, but I have a couple of things to finish before I leave. There's a quest or two left. The golem workshop was a pita. I think this is my favorite Vogel game. So far, I haven't felt like enemies have hp bloat, exploration is fun, and you're actually not an Avernite. Itemization is good enough, although I have barely bought anything equippable from stores. Quest rewards or dropped items have been a lot better than what stores offer to sell. Even the special items some people offer to sell if you have the right ingredients are quite underwhelming.

Previously played Vogel games are: Geneforge 1-5, Avernum 4, Avadon 1. I plan to play Avadon 2, Avernum 3 & 6 in the future.

 

[baturinsky]

Ion Storm. Tightly, well designed levels have confirmed my suspicions: the “open world” is a step backwards in game design.

You mean, Ion Fury?

 

[Wunderbar]

Ion Storm. Tightly, well designed levels have confirmed my suspicions: the “open world” is a step backwards in game design.

You mean, Ion Fury?

or maybe Iron Storm?

 

[Zizka]

Ion Fury.

 

[Azalin]

Finished Assassin's Creed Origins . This is the point where the series starts moving towards more of an open world action rpg,the stealth is there but it's not as important as before.THe setting is interesting,Egypt in the era of Cleopatra,the graphics are beatiful and you can enjoy the vistas and the pyramids if you have a decent pc.Personally I would have preferred more of a pure Egyptian setting and not the mix of anciept Egypt and Greece with some Rome sprikled in you get here because of the era,a game set during the New Kingdom for example during the time of Akhenaten/Nefertiti/Tutankhamun for example,that way they could have made an trilogy set in ancient time,AC Origins set in ancient Egypt,AC Odyssey in ancient Greece and AC Whatever in ancient Rome.The gameplay is fine,combat becomes more of an option and an emphasis since this moves towards the rpg genre,there is a lot of equipement you can get or upgrade like most modern games.The world is big with a lot of content in it and a large number of side quests you can get,more than you will need btw.Overall enoyable although it has the same generic Ubisoft Game tropes in it.Recommended for a sale

 

[Zizka]

After being disappointed by Wild West, I figured it’d try a cult classic: Stalker: Call of Prypiat. Overwhelmingly positive review on steam. Survival, my favorite genre of game. Installed the « Complete » mod. Apparently the best mod. So, really, the best of the best.

Intro is interesting, I need to find what happened to some helicopters which crashed in the zone. Right away, I meet another Stalker. I try to talk to him but he says that he won’t talk to me unless I holster my weapon. Ok, fair enough. I look up the key bindings… no key to holster the weapon. So I keep switching my inventory until I have my binoculars. Then he talks with me. From then on, when outside of safe zones, I systematically talk with people with my binoculars which is a bit odd considering they’re standing right in front of me.

So I learn that there’s a chopper on a plateau nearby. I head in that direction. There’s a wall on the side of a hill. I can clearly jump over the wall but some invisible force is blocking me… ok.

I investigate a nearby factory. This is going to be great, I can scavenge all sorts of scrap and bits and pieces to ensure my survival… The whole building is empty. I think even the dust has been looted. So my enthusiasm is starting to wane.

I walk next to a group of stalkers fighting off some mutant. At first I think he’s teleporting but as it turns out it’s a bug, he keeps clipping in and out of the surroundings. Ok.

Meanwhile game crashes twice hard, forcing a fresh restart.

Game is getting close to a shift+del but I figure I’ll keep going.

I get a warning: an anomaly storm is on its way, need to find shelter! I run to a nearby derelict building. Go downstairs, in the basement.

I die.

Im thinking, « maybe it was a bug », let’s try somewhere else. I try a cave, go down some tunnels. Underground.

I die.

Turns out I need to find shelter at some *specific* buildings. For on open world, they’re awfully strict on how you can react to your environment. That’s enough.

Next.

 

[Reever]

Installed the « Complete » mod.

It's 2022. How are people still getting baited into getting the complete mod, especially on first playthrough?

 

[Jack Of Owls]

I'm sometimes a slow learner when it comes to gaming, but one thing I discovered is that's very rarely a good idea to play a modded version of a renowned game on your first playthrough. Learned this lesson definitively with a M&B Warband overhaul mod last year by some arab guy I think that not only introduced new bugs but made the QoL features the opposite of what they were intended to do by having too fucking many of them, I suspect. It was my first playthrough. Best to familiarize yourself on a 1st playthrough with the vanilla game then move onto modded if you like it. Now if the game is shit or broken to begin with, even in its officially patched vanilla state, and mods can fix that, do your research and go for it. But games like Stalker SOC or COP aren't broken or shit on release.

 

[Zizka]

Honestly, the only thing that really bothered me was the fact that you can’t seek shelter wherever you want from those storms. Like why?

 

[flyingjohn]

Sacred 2,a weird Arpg.
Thought about dropping the game due to how meh it is but then i got a quest where i get teleported to random locations with a npc companion from a different quest and it finishes with a demon giving me a quest about game bugs.
Okey,you got my attention game.

 

[flyingjohn]

I was gonna write a wall of text about sacred 2,but nah.
Simply,the open world element completely butchers the game.Well truthfully it is the open world + level scaling(it never ends) + constantly re spawning enemies+ mmo quests + a combat system that feels janky + a level up system that punishes you for actually leveling up skills + horrible traversal options + horrible camera.
The open world just makes each one of these elements worse.
But i will talk about a simple thing that demonstrates how fucked up this game is:Teleportation.
There are three teleportation options:
-Checkpoint monoliths,where only one can be active at a time making teleportation useless.
-Gates that are actual teleporters. Unfortunately,they are mostly positioned outside of small towns and quest locations.
-Npc that teleport you to gates for some reason?
How do you fuck that up? The same thing applies to the maps as well.Three maps,all varying degree of useless and useful.

To not be completely negative,this game does a lot of good with skills and loot.It is the most unique loot(from lightsabers to varying ranged energy weapons) and each skill having its own level up mini tree is something that blizzard stole for diablo 3.

But the game is fundamentally broken and boring.If there was noz open world,might even be worth a play through.

 

[Abu Antar]

I only found Sacred 2 enjoyable while playing with my brother. There are a lot of things wrong with the game. This is the prime game of "mindless fun", and the fun part is very subjective. He stopped playing with me 2/3rds in, so I beat the last part on my own. I played an Inquisitor, and my brother used the Dryad.

 

[Silva]

Finished Hellpoint, the newest Souls-clone on the market, this time in SPEHS! More specifically, you're on a space station gone bad, Dead Space-style, tasked by the local mysterious AI with figuring out what happened.

At first it seemed rather uninspired, with just a veneer of sci-fi stretched over bog-standard slashy-dodgy Souls. It's faster than regular Souls, too, with the roll replaced by a sidestep like in Bloodborne or Nioh, which I wasn't too happy with, since I always thought these games are more fun when they're strategic endurance-runs rather than l33t action games.

Fortunately, the bad first impression faded once the game got going. The structure is quite different from the other big games in the genre: it's not a seamless open world like Dark Souls, nor a strict level-by-level affair like Demon's Souls or Nioh. Rather, there's a small number of levels, something like ten in total, separated by load screens. Each of these is huge, and contain a multitude of pathways to adjacent levels, probably more than even Dark Souls 1. A big part of the reason why the game grew on me so much is that as you go along and unlock more of the gameworld you discover all these paths that loop back to areas you've already been to, and in more than a few cases lead to sub-areas that are only accessible from particular entry points, making the act of navigating the station and remembering which route to take to get to particular locations a fun challenge. I was even tempted to draw a map. In addition to that, there's also the usual keycard-scavenging leading to backtracking to locked doors and such, and since this game has actual vertical jumping, there's a fair bit of platforming now and again, which literally adds an extra dimension to the whole thing. The result is that out of all the Souls-likes I've tried, this is by the far the one that gets closest to the exploration of Dark Souls 1, even more so that 2 and 3 despite those worlds being continuous and this being full of area transition load screens.

There's a lot to say about the story and the systems and the bosses and all the rest of it, but suffice to say that they range from good enough to very cool. The only other thing worth mentioning is the only thing about Hellpoint that is unique as compared to the rest of the genre, which is the orbit system. The game is set on a space station orbiting a black hole, which moves in real time. Depending on the station's location relative to the black hole, stuff happens in the game, like new enemies spawning, doors opening, and so on. Unfortunately, it feels a bit underutilized, and most of the time you won't notice any difference between the times when the station is in a significant orbital position and those when it isn't. Even so, it's a neat idea, and it ties into some of the game's more obscure secrets.

Really though, it's the world design that makes the game. If you want more of those "oh, so THAT'S how you get to that!" or "wait, I'm back here?" revelations that were almost entirely absent in Dark Souls 2 and 3, I can highly recommend Hellpoint.

Oh, and the free standalone epilogue sucks. Don't bother with it.

Thanks for this. I've dropped Elden Ring and looking for a good Soulslike and Hellpoiny seems exactly it.

 

[gurugeorge]

Hellpoiny

(Sorry, couldn't resist )

 

[Wunderbar]

Finished Doom 64 the other day.

It was an alright game, kinda easy and slow (on "Watch me die" difficulty). I assume most of D64's problems stem from the game being developed for Nintento 64 - due to N64's limited cartridge capacity, the devs had to omit certain elements from appearing in the game. Because of that, D64 doesn't have revenants, arch-viles and chaingunners (really game-changing enemy types), and doesn't even have shotgun reload/pumping animations. LAME

After seeing all those "doom 64 is a true doom 3!" reviews, I was let down.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

Finished Hellpoint, the newest Souls-clone on the market, this time in SPEHS! More specifically, you're on a space station gone bad, Dead Space-style, tasked by the local mysterious AI with figuring out what happened.

At first it seemed rather uninspired, with just a veneer of sci-fi stretched over bog-standard slashy-dodgy Souls. It's faster than regular Souls, too, with the roll replaced by a sidestep like in Bloodborne or Nioh, which I wasn't too happy with, since I always thought these games are more fun when they're strategic endurance-runs rather than l33t action games.

Fortunately, the bad first impression faded once the game got going. The structure is quite different from the other big games in the genre: it's not a seamless open world like Dark Souls, nor a strict level-by-level affair like Demon's Souls or Nioh. Rather, there's a small number of levels, something like ten in total, separated by load screens. Each of these is huge, and contain a multitude of pathways to adjacent levels, probably more than even Dark Souls 1. A big part of the reason why the game grew on me so much is that as you go along and unlock more of the gameworld you discover all these paths that loop back to areas you've already been to, and in more than a few cases lead to sub-areas that are only accessible from particular entry points, making the act of navigating the station and remembering which route to take to get to particular locations a fun challenge. I was even tempted to draw a map. In addition to that, there's also the usual keycard-scavenging leading to backtracking to locked doors and such, and since this game has actual vertical jumping, there's a fair bit of platforming now and again, which literally adds an extra dimension to the whole thing. The result is that out of all the Souls-likes I've tried, this is by the far the one that gets closest to the exploration of Dark Souls 1, even more so that 2 and 3 despite those worlds being continuous and this being full of area transition load screens.

There's a lot to say about the story and the systems and the bosses and all the rest of it, but suffice to say that they range from good enough to very cool. The only other thing worth mentioning is the only thing about Hellpoint that is unique as compared to the rest of the genre, which is the orbit system. The game is set on a space station orbiting a black hole, which moves in real time. Depending on the station's location relative to the black hole, stuff happens in the game, like new enemies spawning, doors opening, and so on. Unfortunately, it feels a bit underutilized, and most of the time you won't notice any difference between the times when the station is in a significant orbital position and those when it isn't. Even so, it's a neat idea, and it ties into some of the game's more obscure secrets.

Really though, it's the world design that makes the game. If you want more of those "oh, so THAT'S how you get to that!" or "wait, I'm back here?" revelations that were almost entirely absent in Dark Souls 2 and 3, I can highly recommend Hellpoint.

Oh, and the free standalone epilogue sucks. Don't bother with it.

Thanks for this. I've dropped Elden Ring and looking for a good Soulslike and Hellpoiny seems exactly it.

I bought this for like a buck when it was on a summer Steam sale. I should play it.

 

[Fedora Master]

Okay what the fuck is the deal with Mutant Year Zero?
The game's combat is retardedly "difficult". Yes, I take out as many single enemies as possible. Yes, I use stealth. Yes, I use disabling abilities to not get caught. And once I engage a group that you absolutely can not separate I still shit the bed because every enemy has more HP than my characters and my weapons do barely any damage.

 

[JDR13]

Thanks for this. I've dropped Elden Ring and looking for a good Soulslike and Hellpoiny seems exactly it.

GOG was giving away Hellpoint for free not too long ago.

I'd advise you go in with lower expectations compared to FromSoft's games. Hellpoint feels like a low-budget clone imo.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

Finished Doom 64 the other day.

It was an alright game, kinda easy and slow (on "Watch me die" difficulty). I assume most of D64's problems stem from the game being developed for Nintento 64 - due to N64's limited cartridge capacity, the devs had to omit certain elements from appearing in the game. Because of that, D64 doesn't have revenants, arch-viles and chaingunners (really game-changing enemy types), and doesn't even have shotgun reload/pumping animations. LAME

After seeing all those "doom 64 is a true doom 3!" reviews, I was let down.

I remember playing the gzdoom port (?) from a few years ago that seemed to really capture the look and feel of the original N64 game but I wrongly assumed that since it was originally a console game, and I was playing with KB+mouse, I could just set the highest difficulty (or second highest; Nightmare level respawns are the fun-killer) and breeze through the game, like I did with the PSX gzdoom port. At first it felt like that, I was blasting through the levels, until I ran out of ammo in mid-game and there I was; all dressed up, big guns in ma hands and no place to go. Might as well have been my pork sword I was a'holden.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

Because of that, D64 doesn't have revenants, arch-viles and chaingunners

I used to think "a doom game without archies (my favorite monster ever) is like a day without sunshine" until the day I played a Doom 2 wad that was really great until the difficulty spike in the last level where there were suddenly too many fucking archies so I ragequit. I don't think I've played a doom wad since then. And to think I helped that guy beta-test his Doom frontend.

 

[Zizka]

Deadloop: Arkane

Empress recently cracked the game so I thought I would give it a whirl. It was a game I was on the fence about buying. Anyhow, several hours later, I launch the game. The game was rated 10/10 so you can imagine I was expecting the likes of Prey and even better (Prey got 8/10 on ign). I loved Prey. Best Arkane game for me.

The presentation looks great and I’m hooked by the story. I like time loops story like Groundhog Day so this was definitely up my alley. Anyway, the tutorial is fun and I like it so far. Prey intro was better but still.

You know when you date a good looking girl and she seems really great at first but then when you live together for a while cracks start to show? Deadloop is like this.

Arkane has never been about borderland-style loot tiers. This game, for some reason, has that. I hate that. I don’t play Arkane games to find the same gun over and over for better dps. That made me groan but it’s not a deal-breaker.

Then I realised there four areas… total. Much smaller than Prey in that aspect (sure feels that way). So I’m kind of bummed about that having explored everything in the first few hours but ok.

Then… the loading times. Every time I die, I need to wait 2 minutes to restart another loop. That’s too much. It might not seem long but stare at the wall for two minutes and tell me it’s not too long. So there’s that too. On the bright side, I do my chores while the game is loading, like vacuuming and washing clothes.

I was curious about the enemy types. Prey had various. This one doesn’t. It’s the same grunt over and over again, the only difference being they have different weapons. Also turrets and dogs, that’s it. Maybe there are different enemies later on when you’ve progressed further? I doubt it.

Although the areas are limited, I thought: « Well, they change depending on the time of day you visit them ». From what I can tell, the changes are minor.

How this got 10/10 and Prey 8/10 is beyond understanding. This is a worse game than Dishonored as well. I hope they stop going for the looter shooter aspect and return to a solid narrative experience.

 

[Utfärd]

Lately I've been playing Imperialism II on nigh-on impossible using the classic European map and playing as Sweden. I had some trouble at this difficulty level at first but found it doable by ignoring the new world (aside from mapping it so I could later sell timber to the indians) and focusing solely on developing the starting provinces. I also used a neat trick in regards to the minor powers, you can declare war on them on turn one without incurring negative relations or interventions from the great powers, so I did that with Germany (they have tin) and Denmark, only to then ignore them for some one hundred and fifty years while just building away. It's not really sustainable to pay for tech early on, but a spy or two will help speed up acquisition of technologies. Teching to town growth, convoying and heavy weaponry in that order turned out to be most beneficial. I actually got galleons first and focused on getting 5-6 out.

Some people like to use artillery but I'm a heavy infantry guy. There's just something awesome about marching dudes straight up to the fortifications and shooting at the artillery to breach the walls. All you really need is musketeers, who can later be upgraded to grenadiers. Early on cossacks are also useful. By the time I attacked Denmark and Germany with 6-7 musketeers in 1650 or so England dispatched a rape fleet to blockade Stockholm. That lost me a previous game (starvation is brutal) but now I had the force of galleons out. Sunk the English task force and they immediately begged for peace. Portugal also honoured its alliance with me and started stealing English colonies. From there on it was just more of the same, expanding the fleet and industry.

When I did feel strong enough to take on the great powers I singled out their best new world provinces producing gems, diamonds and such and simply conquered them. The cash was quite handy to fund research and those were actually the only provinces where I bothered to increase fortifications. Eventually my merchant fleet grew quite considerably as my galleons would blockade enemy capitals and consistently capture their vessels. Once I got grenadier tech I ventured forth and conquered central and western Europe and that was that.