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What game are you wasting time on?

Kabas

Arcane
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Feb 10, 2018
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Finished the base Age of Mythology campaign - fall of the trident. Name didn't lie, trident did fall at the end.
Took a peek at the Golden Gift campaign and the expansion campaign in which atlanteans are their own faction now. Former feels very, i dunno, reminds me of certain warcraft 3 maps - i found at least one secret route to the enemy's rear you can access by invoking the forest fire power. As for the later i found the concept of atlanteans turning to titan worship after Atlantida sunk to be pretty cool.

Medieval 2 Total War, and wow! It's pretty impressive how little they changed things if you take a look at the latest warhammer games. Graphically it didn't age badly and it's also runs a lot better than the modern ones, which is a big plus for me.
So far i am sucking pretty badly at this game.
 

Abu Antar

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Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is. Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Me and my brother took turns playing WH40K: Inquisitor Martyr tutorial, so we cold play local co-op on PS5. You have to get past it for the local co-op option to appear. It was all in vain. Player two gets no inventory or progress. How shitty.

Instead, we turned to WH40K: Chaosbane. As soon as the game allows you to control player one, you can create a second character, that has their own inventory, and progress gets saved.

Chaosbane seems to have less customization from what little we have played, but also less bullshit to deal with. On the other hand, it has been a more buggy experience, with some enemies floating in the air. Bugs aside, it feels closer to the Dark Alliance games, than it does Diablo.

We planned to play both, and intended to start with the one we thought would be the least good of the two.
 

Abu Antar

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Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is. Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
We "solved" the floating enemies issue in Chaosbane. But before that, we hit a game breaking bug, where one of the floating enemies was a quest target, and we had to capture him. I read about bugs online, and it turns out that the Slayer class can cause this bug in co-op. Of course, I was playing as the Slayer. To solve this, my brother got to be player one, and I just created a fighter, and tagged along from where we had left. After getting one shotted for a while, I got enough exp to hold my own. We defeated our first boss/mini boss, and there are no floating enemies. Woohoo.
 

Kabas

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Completed the atlantean campaign in AoM, voice acting feels a bit rough in some parts compared to the base one but in terms of mission design it's just as good. Atlanteans can do a lot of cool shit.
In comparison, judging by the first mission, all chinese powers are lame as fuck.

Edit: Just finished the Golden Gift mini-campaign, it's pretty cool. My favourite mission is the second one in which you need to navigate through the sea in which two rival clans are duking it out. There was this big fight at the end that blocked my way so i freezed them with the god power and just walked through them unmolested.
 
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Hag

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Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming!
Medieval 2 Total War, and wow! It's pretty impressive how little they changed things if you take a look at the latest warhammer games. Graphically it didn't age badly and it's also runs a lot better than the modern ones, which is a big plus for me.
So far i am sucking pretty badly at this game.
I remember the AI sucking so much it made the game almost unplayable. Either the enemy so braindead you could make its units stay in the AoE of your siege machine, oblitering its army, or your own troops who suffered some heavy pathfinding issues, most notably knights aborting their charge most of the time for no reason and then running around aimlessly.
 

Kabas

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Medieval 2 Total War, and wow! It's pretty impressive how little they changed things if you take a look at the latest warhammer games. Graphically it didn't age badly and it's also runs a lot better than the modern ones, which is a big plus for me.
So far i am sucking pretty badly at this game.
I remember the AI sucking so much it made the game almost unplayable. Either the enemy so braindead you could make its units stay in the AoE of your siege machine, oblitering its army, or your own troops who suffered some heavy pathfinding issues, most notably knights aborting their charge most of the time for no reason and then running around aimlessly.
The game does indeed have some serious pathfinding issues, they're especially notable during sieges. Sieges ain't any better than the ones in warhammer total war.
At least ost is good.
 

Machocruz

Arcane
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Hyperborea
Was in the mood for a side scroller of some sort, so tried a little Ori and the Blind Forest.

Lovely game to look at. Stunning, honestly. It's pretty embarrassing that so many 2.5D/3D modeled side-scrollers from major game companies and famous directors look like cheap asset store trash, when you have smaller studios putting out the highest quality of visuals in that domain, like this game. Forest settings aren't my thing in this style of game (I prefer caverns, dungeons, castles, etc.), but it's rendered exquisitely. I'm interested in watching a making of video, if one exists.

Controls are precise and responsive, at least as much as I can expect on an Xbox One pad. Any problems with traversal are user error. Mostly. Things feel a little slippery at times. I've died quite a bit, but I also haven't played a platformer in at least 5 years.

A problem I'm seeing with "metroidvanias" lately is too many offering the same abilities. Double jump, wall jump, dash, some kind of block breaker. Maybe I shouldn't expect much creativity or individuality from people who begin from the mindset of "I want to make a game like that/those game(s)" in the first place, but it's pretty disappointing to see the same suite of powers over and over.

The tone of the game is very twee, sentimental like a Disney movie. Gentleness and (family friendly) darkness co-exist in a similar manner to classics like Fantasia, Snow White, and especially Bambi, which is an obvious influence in both tone and art direction. And you control a furry. I find it hard to believe so many adult males vibe to this sort of atmosphere, but T levels have been dropping over the decades.

Can't make a final judgment since I've only played a portion of it, but it seems like the definition of a good game. They play it too safe for me in a few ways, but it's thoroughly competent in every salient aspect (exceedingly great in one) and no design flaws standout in my mind.
 
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His Dudeness

Augur
Joined
Oct 17, 2010
Messages
222
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Quilmes, Argentina
Magic Arena and Slay the Spire.

As of late the though of entertaining another person's imagination in the form of narrative has become a chore. Only pure gameplay games have become viable.
 

Jack Of Owls

Arcane
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May 23, 2014
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4,279
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Massachusettes
I bought a key for Mudrunner for about a buck and was shocked that it was under 1.5 GB. How can such a big world be so tiny on the hard drive space? I thought this must be a masterpiece and record for the greatest compression... until I heard about .kkrieger which, in case you don't know, is a full 3D FPS that takes 95kb! Believe it, muthafuckers.
 
Joined
Dec 24, 2018
Messages
1,783
A problem I'm seeing with "metroidvanias" lately is too many offering the same abilities. Double jump, wall jump, dash, some kind of block breaker. Maybe I shouldn't expect much creativity or individuality from people who begin from the mindset of "I want to make a game like that/those game(s)" in the first place, but it's pretty disappointing to see the same suite of powers over and over.

The tone of the game is very twee, sentimental like a Disney movie. Gentleness and (family friendly) darkness co-exist in a similar manner to classics like Fantasia, Snow White, and especially Bambi, which is an obvious influence in both tone and art direction. And you control a furry. I find it hard to believe so many adult males vibe to this sort of atmosphere, but T levels have been dropping over the decades.

I don't really play metroidvanias so I don't know if this is common in them, but later in the game you get an ability that lets you do a sort of brief grab / time slow on enemies and then blast yourself in one direction and them in the opposite. The hardest sequence in the game (it's frustratingly difficult, which is good, because it feels great when you finally get past it) mostly centres around this ability.

Interesting point about the tone because I think I'd sort of subconsciously noticed the Trine series heading in that direction (the original was dark and vaguely apocalyptic, the second was sort of neutral, but trine 4 was pretty much exactly as you describe) but it didn't occur to me that this was part of a wider trend. But, personally, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing in the context of modern developers. I would actually prefer devs move back to more simplistic good vs mild evil than mire themselves in endless shades-of-grey or everyone is bad stuff. Morally ambiguous settings and stories require skilled and intelligent writers, and flat out "everything is shit and everyone is a bad guy" settings & stories require writers who don't give a fuck. But if you take some mediocre writer, and they try to do some shades of grey morally ambiguous stuff, they'll end up writing pretentious garbage, and if you take someone who's worried about offending people, and they try to write something grimdark, it'll just be bland and shitty and not very engaging. I would prefer writers like that stick to lighthearted Disney stories because those are a lot harder to fuck up for those sorts of writers.
 

Hag

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Breizh
Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming!
That's impressive even if the game itself looks like garbage.
T'was ok for 2004. But if I recall correctly it was more like a technical demonstrator. The idea was not to store any asset, but only instructions on how to generate models, textures or sound from primitives. Never tried, but always been curious of the loading times.
 
Joined
Oct 5, 2014
Messages
4,748
Location
New Zealand - Pronouns: HE/HIM
22.4 hours into chronicon

tight gameplay; a bit clusterfucky with the effects sometimes but you kinda always know whats going on

got my berserker boy to level 40 and its been fun so far

really scratches that stat-whore loot itch too; i swear ar least 10 of those 22 hours have been staring at inventory and trading screens.

options out the ass in settings too; you can pretty much tailor the experience even turn down the splodeys and numbers while smiting

doesnt like to alt-tab or stay in pause too long though; some real gameplay slow-down occurs so bear that in mind if thats your bag

overall recommended if you like your arpg's

2B53D026A8B83170D873E98FAE5BD21130BAFAB2


03C4AA6A4842C22A59113E96964E285BC34DC5DF
 

Jack Of Owls

Arcane
Joined
May 23, 2014
Messages
4,279
Location
Massachusettes
That's impressive even if the game itself looks like garbage.
T'was ok for 2004. But if I recall correctly it was more like a technical demonstrator. The idea was not to store any asset, but only instructions on how to generate models, textures or sound from primitives. Never tried, but always been curious of the loading times.
It takes about 5 seconds to generate a new lvl on my i9-based rig using an SSD. Visually, it reminds me of a cruder UT2004 but still impressive for what it is. Since it still generates assets from the tiny exe, I wonder what the full-size is on the drive/memory once it's been generated. I'm guessing at least still hundreds of megabytes before getting deleted... or at least I hope it gets deleted.
 

Jack Of Owls

Arcane
Joined
May 23, 2014
Messages
4,279
Location
Massachusettes
How can such a big world be so tiny on the hard drive space?
Why not?
Well, considering that Snowrunner, the sequel to Mudrunner, is literally 30 times the size Mudrunner is, I was impressed and not expecting that. But I've been conditioned to assume any game released within the last 8 years or so is far far larger than it needs to be (I think one of the games in my Steam library is close to 500 GB installed and I'm sure that's not even the worst). The days of Carmack and his optimized engine code seem looong gone.
 

Abu Antar

Turn-based Poster
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Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is. Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
I finished Eliza by Zachtronics. I mostly played their puzzle games before this. Went to check what they are doing next, and it seems that the studio is planning to close down.

My brother is leaving soon, so we're ploughing through Chaosbane. We started on normal but it became mind
numblngly boring, so we switched to very hard. The first two acts are cleared. Judging by the pace of the game, it doesn't seem like the campaign will last more than 10-15 hours.

I'm 45 hours into Trails of Cold Steel. While I like the general story, and the combat, I feel like Trails in the Sky series (2 and 3) were better games in general. It's still q fine jrpg, but too much of little girls, and "awkward moments".

I'm about 15 hours into my Grimoire run. I finally have decent equipment on my party members, and most things I fight go down fairly easy. As long as I buff/protect the mages, things go well. I haven't rested so much in a game in a long while.
 

ERYFKRAD

Barbarian
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Joined
Sep 25, 2012
Messages
28,242
Strap Yourselves In Serpent in the Staglands Shadorwun: Hong Kong Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Took me long enough but I finished the storyline of Yakuza 7.
But nevermind that, more importantly I scored 3 on 3 on the UFO catcher.
 

Ezekiel

Arcane
Joined
May 3, 2017
Messages
5,374
Max Payne 3 has such better flow when just replaying one level now that the abundance of cutscenes can be skipped with the mod. Shame most of it's such a corridor and there is so little room for experimentation. I've long thought it would have been cool if Max wasn't the only one shoot dodging, meaning leaping into the air.
 

Kabas

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Feb 10, 2018
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Tried Star Wars - Galactic Battlegrounds, aka age of empires with star wars coat of paint.
It's rather good for a reskin game, they took a bit of creative liberty with star wars universe in order to justify AoE mechanics and made an interesting choice of playable factions.
I like the unit design and i am suprised how good the voice acting is.

The only thing i dislike is how long it takes to crush the enemy base even if you bring some heavy artillery and slammers(battering rams). Trade Federation invasion must have been suprisingly tedious if it took that long to commit warcrimes against the population of Naboo. Missions overall tend to be very long, i prefer the Age of Mythology pacing.
Still, i am curous about that expanded front mod, last i heard they planned to further add some factions from the old expanded universe.
 

Machocruz

Arcane
Joined
Jul 7, 2011
Messages
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Location
Hyperborea



Interesting point about the tone because I think I'd sort of subconsciously noticed the Trine series heading in that direction (the original was dark and vaguely apocalyptic, the second was sort of neutral, but trine 4 was pretty much exactly as you describe) but it didn't occur to me that this was part of a wider trend. But, personally, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing in the context of modern developers. I would actually prefer devs move back to more simplistic good vs mild evil than mire themselves in endless shades-of-grey or everyone is bad stuff. Morally ambiguous settings and stories require skilled and intelligent writers, and flat out "everything is shit and everyone is a bad guy" settings & stories require writers who don't give a fuck. But if you take some mediocre writer, and they try to do some shades of grey morally ambiguous stuff, they'll end up writing pretentious garbage, and if you take someone who's worried about offending people, and they try to write something grimdark, it'll just be bland and shitty and not very engaging. I would prefer writers like that stick to lighthearted Disney stories because those are a lot harder to fuck up for those sorts of writers.
It's not bad, maybe too calculated or formulaic. I can appreciate the skill in which they wield the same devices as Disney, Spielberg, etc though. But my sensibilities go more towards the rousing, like Actraiser, Castlevania, Mega Man, Strider. Not grimdark or morally ambiguous either.

I only played the first Trine. Loved it, but it was already a bit twee at times. Can't say I'm into soft, tinkling music, but it did effectively evoke a children's storybook atmosphere. Both games are great successes in setting a tone, just not a tone that speaks to a hot-blooded alfa male poosy slayer like me bruh. Coincidentally, it's one of the few other 2.5D side-scrollers that don't have the lazy asset store look.
 

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