What game are you wasting time on?

[Great Deceiver]

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.

Ori really is great. The later portions of the game have some cool platforming, too. A gem.

 

[Corbin Dallas Multipass]

Playing Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead, BN version which is free from Kevin's bullshit. Love role playing in this game, i never found min maxing fun, someone should make a thread about this game, it's surprising that it doesn't have one with the amount of autism this game has.

It's so weird how that happens, community made games where the person who ends up in charge of it all seems to just utterly hate the game and its playerbase. Kevin for cataclysm, dpeg for dungeon crawl... ok it's only two examples but still...

Likely due to them dealing with fanboys which are usually insane.

Lol yeah obviously it's the evil players. They're just another type of gamer after all, and we know they're all problematic.

 

[Jvegi]

TFT. Rhymes with 'kill me'.

I have that IWD (not ee) installed.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

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.

I remember how impressed my brother was at the time the original Eliza came out on pre-DOS era machines. He acted like it was true AI like something out of a Harlan Ellison story instead of the crude text parser it was. Amazing, since he was a professional scientist, a fairly high level computer programmer and an electronics engineer that became a self-made man and millionaire selling his products via mail order. That's when I first realized that some people are so intelligent they're practically retarded (I see a lot of these types on the codex, tbh).

 

[Abu Antar]

I lost a 20 minute mission in God Wars around 4-5 months ago. Today, I replayed it and beat it. I wasn't observant enough. You had to succeed in 20 turns.

I looked through my DRM free Humble library, and decided to play Zodiac XX. A pretty basic submarine shooter that plays almost like a airplane shooter. The game itself wasn't anything special, but it had a bangin' soundtrack. Took me circa two hours to beat.

 

[MuffinBun]

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.

Imagine if each run some random enemy would get powers similar to Max's, Sifu style.

 

[Hammerite]

I've been playing Rabi-Ribi recently, it's a 2D plateformer (kinda like Super Metroid) with anime aesthetics and bullet hell elements of gameplay. It's cute and it plays well. I guess the game is somewhat niche? Because I never heard about it before seeing it on sale when I bought it.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

Been playing around with Minecraft RTX aka Bedrock edition, a "game" I never touched before because I assumed it was for children and adult autists. Man, does ray tracing run like shit on my RTX 3070/i9 with that thing, at least on some of the more graphically intensive RTX releases designed to showcase it. For contrast, Far Cry 6 runs far smoother at much higher resolutions with RTX on. Looks stunning though.

 

[Old One]

City of Abandoned Ships. Very fun, despite it's clunkiness.

 

[ferratilis]

Deus Ex, just vanilla with Kentie's launcher, DX10 renderer with classic lighting turned on and GOTY map fixes. I'm not a big fan of GMDX. Going for a nonlethal playthrough (a few guys will get killed here and there)

 

[Abu Antar]

Wilmot's Warehouse. Relaxing and super stressfull at the same time. You're a box dude, trying your best to organize your warehouse, and fullfilling orders. It's just a few hours long.

I'm playing a few DRM free games via Humble.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

City of Abandoned Ships. Very fun, despite it's clunkiness.

Great game. Hope you are running with the bug fix pack.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

CoAS was one of those DirectX 8 games that ran terribly on modern Nvidia GPUs because later geforce drivers didn't optimize its DX 8 code, but is a perfect example of how the Voodoo wrapper can fix these problems on modern platforms. So make sure you're using the wrapper for this unless you like microstutters every few steps.

 

[Carpincho Pampeano]

Every fucking time i play something before 2010 i check pcgaming wiki, even some GOG stuff has issues.

 

[Old One]

Great game. Hope you are running with the bug fix pack.

CoAS was one of those DirectX 8 games that ran terribly on modern Nvidia GPUs because later geforce drivers didn't optimize its DX 8 code, but is a perfect example of how the Voodoo wrapper can fix these problems on modern platforms. So make sure you're using the wrapper for this unless you like microstutters every few steps.

I'm just using the current GoG.com version. It seems to contain a lot of bugfixes from somewhere, because I looked up some bugfix mods, and the listed changes are definitely included.

I haven't had any trouble with microstuttering, but it does crash every now and then - less often once you become familiar with the kinds of things to avoid, however.

I captured the Bluebird and just finished getting it completely souped-up in Bermuda. It's fast! I love the ability to sail close to the wind, too.

 

[Hag]

Tried Nox. Well it is charming, I love its colorful and lighthearted take - that's the fantasy I'd love to see more often. Great art and voice acting. Also reminds me of Magicka but competently made. I'm still at the beginning and can't really find a fault with it but I somehow got bored quickly. Same thing that happened with Diablo, confirming that I'm not an ARPG guy. Still may come back to it, it has some wonderful vibes. Also level transitions are a masterpiece in design.

Instead I fell back in Underrail. Discover how good being in motion was. Best 90 charons ever spent. Will come back. Reminded me of my stoner days in Paris, long ago.

 

[flyingjohn]

Terrorist cooking simulator for the PSX . Or Syphon filter,for you filthy degenerates.
Things that will make you smile:
-First time using the taser and frying a enemy
-Little details everywhere.If you step into a enemy on fire from a taser death you will take damage.Gas lingers around and if you don't use a head shot on armored enemies you don't get their armor.
-Exploring and finding new weapons.Finding the grenade launcher in the subway was fun.
-The game grips you and never let's go in terms of levels.There is always something new either in the form of fire,hostages,stealth,lasers,etc.
-There is a dedicated lean button.
-An auto target system that actually works decently.
-The roll animation.
-Weapon feel good to use and sound very unrealistic in a good way(the silencer sounds unrealistic but it works for a video game).The shotguns especially are fun to use.Throwing gas grenades into a room full of armored enemies is satisfying.
-The music is actually decent.Minus the titular theme,i like the catacombs battle one the best.

-4 to 5 hour length is just perfect for this type of game.

Things that will make you a dirty neutral:
-The story is a big meh.Characters are decent in terms of a action b movie with the only one i actually remember being the French flamethrower anti American boss.Mostly because of the bad accent.
-The sniper-Night vision rifle should have been one weapon.
-Pure Stealth sections are not terrible but the game is clearly a action game first.They just don't really feel like they fit in.
-The difficulty for the begging and medium stages was a lil bit too easy.The later levels are much harder though.

Things that will make you frown:
-Bosses suck ass because they are broken in terms of AI.One of the bosses went all around me and hid in plain sight so i could just head shot him.
-Later levels reuse a lot of the objectives of their previous levels.
-Platforming sections are luckily brief,but they still suck.
-The stupid explosive crate in the third level which you can only see with a flashlight.
-Having to use the virus scanner to scan every single box was painful.
-The game loves giving you the anti armor weapon too much,it ruins some encounters.
-Fucking escort missions are atrocious because the escort is going to always eat up your bullets in one way or another.

All in all,i really liked this game.Usually not a fan of shooters anymore,but this one stands head and shoulders above other psx shooters.(although i should check out mdk psx port)

 

[Utfärd]

I'm playing Command and Conquer, made it to the Ezekiel's Wheel mission. For the first time I find it pretty challenging. Originally I tried to simply brute force with the commando by suicide bombing the right guard tower, but the damn harvesters would squish my engineers en route to the base. Seems I have to dodge the patrol boat and use the slow-ass artillery down south to bombard the guard towers instead. Will see how it goes.

 

[TC Jr]

About to finish Scarface: The World is Yours, for those unaware it's a GTA clone.
+ Money matters - You will be spending money on drugs/assets/weapons/cars/reduce heat, a lot of these clones and GTA itself is guilty of not letting you do anything with money.
+ Gunplay/Animations - Nothing to write home about but it feels great mowing down people, pressing the taunt button to hear Tony tell those dead cockaroaches to suck his balls. There's a lock-on system that allows you to manually aim for specific body parts which works well.
+ Balls - Basically a style/score replacement, taunt, nut-shot, power-slide etc to fill it up, once activated you enter first person, gain infinite ammo and health regains on enemies killed.
+ Difficulty - Subjective but I feel the game has a great difficulty, you can get one-shotted, blown up very easily and whatnot, you'll never feel invincible.

+/- Music - Got the movie soundtrack and a lot of other great tunes but there's an overabundance of reggae and some hip-hop, which I don't mind but doesn't really fit in a Scarface game.
+/- Juvenile - "Fuck this" and "fuck that" constantly, I love it but can see why same people would hate it. (It's Scarface though, what do you expect)

- Terrible port - All too familiar with this era of games, thankfully there are fixes but controller mapping is a pain in the arse (Resets sometimes on death).
- Repetitive - You'll be doing the same shit over and over again with little variety (Buy drugs, sell drugs, buy business...repeat). I personally don't mind the loop too much but it's starting to get boring at this point and I'm just finishing the game for the sake of it.

I don't see myself replaying this one anytime soon unlike say, The Saboteur, but I'd recommend it for at least one playthrough (If it doesn't click within the first 30 mins or so just drop it, it won't change drastically enough).

 

[octavius]

So what's the konsensus on Etherlords?
I installed it and took it for a spin, and had a very Codexian reaction:

Spoiler

Looks gay.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

I remember firing up Etherlords after buying it, having at the very most a bleh reaction, probably a very bad one, and then never playing it again. But admittedly now I remember basically nothing about it except that cheap cover art.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

So what's the konsensus on Etherlords?
I installed it and took it for a spin, and had a very Codexian reaction:

Spoiler

Looks gay.

When it first came out, I noticed that it was made by the same developers as Evil Islands and Rage of Mages I/II so I was excited at the prospect of playing it since these games were class. Then I read further descriptions that it was an early RPG-flavored deck builder-like or something. Lost all interest in playing it right then.

 

[Lady Error]

Rimworld with a bunch of mods. Probably the best game that came out in the last decade.

 

[Daemongar]

Playing Worlds of Xeen for the 2nd or 3rd time. This is the ultimate relax and play a game that I spend about 50% of my time at the merchants identifying and optimizing the party. Oddly complicated when I stop to think about it, but I'm not complaining. It's a game like Wizardry 6-8, MM(any), or Anachronix. I can fire up the game any time and just kinda zone out. Either way, I completed the Clouds of Xeen this last weekend and now am on the Darkside. Feel free to mail in my score to Hollywood if you've never finished MM4 - I have no idea if this is a righteous score or not.

 

[curds]

Got a new gamepad recently, went back and completed Elden Ring after a few months hiatus. Turns out I wasn't far from the end, anyway. Steam says about 12 hours played in the last two weeks.

It's an okay game, as far as AAA open-world action-RPGs go. But sad coming from the guy/company that made Demon's Souls/DS1. It's superficially the same as Dark Souls, but BIGGER, more EPIC!! and with the things that I liked most of all about the early Souls games either entirely missing or exaggerated to the point of parody. DS3 was already heading in this direction, but Elden Ring went all out.