What game are you wasting time on?

[octavius]

The problem with this cheesy approach is the same boring loot everywhere, ugh.

But random loot in Oblivion (and MW) is already boring.

 

[Ryzer]

The problem with this cheesy approach is the same boring loot everywhere, ugh.

But random loot in Oblivion (and MW) is already boring.

Also the butter knife combat as well.

 

[Vic]

In Civ 6, combat is meant to be punishing for both sides, and better treated as more of a sequence of skirmishes than an ongoing affair. Being at war for too long will take a toll on your citizens, and your diplomatic favor will be seriously damaged, much more so if you don't provide a proper "reason" to be at war. AI is still stupid though, but it's somewhat of a neat concept imo.

tell me about it, I was feeling sorry to start a war against a civ that was sandwiched between my cities because the leader looked like a big teddy bear, a few turns later he starts a war with me and I'm like "you little bastard, I'm gonna fuck you up now!"

Well, a few turns later after I built more military units and started to besiege his city, he started to plead for peace almost every second turn, right until I absorbed his last city into my empire. Meanwhile, every other civ kept denouncing me for being a warmonger for a war I didn't even start?

Dunno, I'm not really feeling this franchise, which I struggle to accept a bit due to its massive popularity.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

In Civ 6, combat is meant to be punishing for both sides, and better treated as more of a sequence of skirmishes than an ongoing affair. Being at war for too long will take a toll on your citizens, and your diplomatic favor will be seriously damaged, much more so if you don't provide a proper "reason" to be at war. AI is still stupid though, but it's somewhat of a neat concept imo.

tell me about it, I was feeling sorry to start a war against a civ that was sandwiched between my cities because the leader looked like a big teddy bear, a few turns later he starts a war with me and I'm like "you little bastard, I'm gonna fuck you up now!"

Well, a few turns later after I built more military units and started to besiege his city, he started to plead for peace almost every second turn, right until I absorbed his last city into my empire. Meanwhile, every other civ kept denouncing me for being a warmonger for a war I didn't even start?

Dunno, I'm not really feeling this franchise, which I struggle to accept a bit due to its massive popularity.

That's why you have to denounce your enemies. You proceed by denouncing them and then declaring war a number of turns later. Peace talks can start after a number of turns later. They'll try their best to make amends with you as you saw. That's why you have to pay attention at other player denouncing you, because a declaration of war might follow. If you want AI to become more aggressive, activate the secret societies mode, because belonging to different ones can trigger AI's belligerence in a very noticeable way. AI is stupid as fuk as I said, so you're just better off wiping them off the map. The way loyalty works though, you're better off destroying most cities and settling your own.

 

[Abu Antar]

I'm currently decided on beating Immortal Planet. Hopefully, I will beat it before the end of the weekend. Isometric. soulslike, with a lot of focus on keeping your stamina in check. It's not a very long game, so it should be doable. What I have played has been fairly enjoyable, so far.

I beat game #9 of the year, Broken Sword: Director's Cut. The best of the point & click adventure games that I have played in 2023. Looks good enough, good dialog, and story. Puzzles are decent, and the game didn't overstay its welcome.

I also put some hours into Solasta, today. The enemy HP sponges are becoming more frequent. It's not that I can't deal with them, and kill them off, but they overdid it. Still having a decent time with the game, but my overall fondness of the game has slightly dipped.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

I'm currently decided on beating Immortal Planet. Hopefully, I will beat it before the end of the weekend. Isometric. soulslike, with a lot of focus on keeping your stamina in check. It's not a very long game, so it should be doable. What I have played has been fairly enjoyable, so far.

I beat game #9 of the year, Broken Sword: Director's Cut. The best of the point & click adventure games that I have played in 2023. Looks good enough, good dialog, and story. Puzzles are decent, and the game didn't overstay its welcome.

I also put some hours into Solasta, today. The enemy HP sponges are becoming more frequent. It's not that I can't deal with them, and kill them off, but they overdid it. Still having a decent time with the game, but my overall fondness of the game has slightly dipped.

Did you play the original or the DC? The director's cut takes stuff away from the game and replaces it with other stuff nobody wanted. The OG is available as free dlc on Steam and as an extra download on GOG.

If by bullet sponges you mean undead, make use of divine abilities. They do work in this game.

 

[Abu Antar]

I'm currently decided on beating Immortal Planet. Hopefully, I will beat it before the end of the weekend. Isometric. soulslike, with a lot of focus on keeping your stamina in check. It's not a very long game, so it should be doable. What I have played has been fairly enjoyable, so far.

I beat game #9 of the year, Broken Sword: Director's Cut. The best of the point & click adventure games that I have played in 2023. Looks good enough, good dialog, and story. Puzzles are decent, and the game didn't overstay its welcome.

I also put some hours into Solasta, today. The enemy HP sponges are becoming more frequent. It's not that I can't deal with them, and kill them off, but they overdid it. Still having a decent time with the game, but my overall fondness of the game has slightly dipped.

Did you play the original or the DC? The director's cut takes stuff away from the game and replaces it with other stuff nobody wanted. The OG is available as free dlc on Steam and as an extra download on GOG.

If by bullet sponges you mean undead, make use of divine abilities. They do work in this game.

I have two characters with the spirit guardian, which helps tremendously.

 

[Kabas]

Currently still playing through HoMM2 with that fheroes2 port. I appreciate the "right" amount of simplicity this game has. Evil campaign is pretty entertaining.

Remembered that i left Supreme Commander on hold, just beat another mission. It's good but i find these kind of RTS to be rather exhausting to play.

 

[ferratilis]

Doom 64. Until a few years ago, I didn't even know that this is its own game, I always thought it was a port of Doom for N64. Been playing it for the last few days and, honestly, it's a blast. Despite some obvious design shortcomings due to limitations of the hardware, the game is much better than I expected. The atmosphere is amazing, some of the sprites look really cool (I love the plasma gun, BFG, chaingun, arachnotrons, barons; hate the fist and chainsaw), maps are quite big with sometimes devious level design, guns feel good. The biggest downside imo is that the game is a bit easy, probably because it was designed for consoles first and foremost. Also, Unmaker looks and sounds stupid, and is too weak for such a unique weapon. But still it's a great experience.

And I think Even Simpler is better than Dead Simple, pain elementals and all.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

Played through Swords and Serpents, a Co-op blobber for the NES by Interplay.

I remember playing this as a kid, and I wanted something to play with my daughter after she kept dying in Contra. The game was actually meant to sell the NES multi-tap, you could play with 4 players, each controlling a different character in battle. However only one person gets to move the party, and in combat all you can do is fight, cast a spell, or run away. I couldn't imagine playing this with three buddies, sitting around the TV trying to solve the mazes. Foolishness. But it was easy enough handing my kid a controller and telling her to mash A whenever a bad guy appears. One oddity, you can aim high or low when attacking, though most of the time I didn't notice a benefit. Headshots miss most of the time, but some human enemies did take extra damage from being punched in the dick.

-Plot: explore the 16 floor dungeon, collect 7 Ruby items, and kill the dragon at the bottom.

-Three classes (Warrior Thief Mage) and three stats (Strength Agility Intelligence). I found with some patience I was able to get the max starting roll of three 14s. There are no dump stats, the game apparently uses Int for turn order and accuracy. So higher the better. I originally started with some low Int fighters and they received noticeably fewer attacks.

-Max level is 16, we finished at 11 but only because the end boss gave us a free level.

-The interface sucks, too slow and too many button presses for common tasks like sorting your inventory. There was a very playable Pony Canyon port of Bard's Tale for the NES that runs a lot smoother. This was made directly by Interplay, which is kind of sad.

-Offensive spells suck; no screen clearing nukes. Again, coming from the Bard's Tale people I found this strange. MP needs to be saved for healing and utility. The game tells you to play with 2 mages and I can see why, we used two warriors, a thief and a mage and spell points were constantly running out.

-Thieves can use all the armor of a warrior plus they occasionally instakill. I'd guess it's about a 1/32 chance. They can also use almost all the weapons so I'd say there's no reason to use a warrior, but only a warrior can wield the Ruby sword.

-Four of the ruby treasures are best in class equips, three of them are misc items with apparently no use other than opening the final levels. Characters can only carry 6 items, with four of that being their equipment, so managing this was always a pain. Only the last hit in combat has a chance of getting a drop, and if their inventory is full they get nothing. Looting is the source of all the best gear so keeping slots open on all characters was a constant chore.

-Some pretty evil mazes. No resting, but free temples at levels 1, 5, and 10 heal everyone. Spell point fountains occur regularly later on but these are single use and there's no indication you're about to step on one. The game's automap only saves the last two floors, you're going to be backtracking around quite a bit so making your own map is key. I tried to get my kid to do it but she gave up early, and eventually I just started looking up the maps online.

-To get the last Ruby item you have to get a black crystal on 12, then go all the way back to 1 to teleport to 13. There is a shortcut for this but god help you if you're playing blind. Likewise on floors 14 and 15 there are stairway mazes across both floors. Playing blind you would explore and map both floors, only to realize the entire thing is a giant wild good chase and you need to cast Passwall to a hidden stairway on the bottom corner of floor 15.

-The last floor isn't hard but only if you found the Victory messages on all the preceding floors to tell you how to solve it. It's really the only level you're not meant to brute-force map. The dragon is the only hard fight in the entire game, it was the only time I had to stop and cast spells to heal mid fight. Everything else is just pure attrition.

-HP and MP are capped at 31, if I had to guess I'd say this was because the game lacks a save feature, only passwords. You get a separate password for each character, and they capped the stats and inventory to keep these passwords from getting too long. Beating the game gives you a winning password for each character, though I didn't check what happens if you load them back up. NG+ time?

Overall a pretty crap game but my kid liked it and got excited every time we beat zombies for some reason.

 

[Bigg Boss]

That Spider-Man Remastered port is not very optimized for PC (Sony sucks) but I did not pay for it so it is fun.

 

[Fargus]

Fallout Tactics with Redux Mod. Not really digging all the ludicrous portrait changes so far, i mean replacing Stitch portrait with David Beckham's pic? The reasons for it are pretty retarded if you bother to read the walls of text in the readme. Then there is an issue of author's autism getting triggered by the game having real world weapons so he just had to rename them into some prosperized shit like "colt" into "holt"... New menu looks like shit, i mean why even replace it? Usually i would send a mod straight into the trash based on silly changes like that alone, but Redux seem to be the only mod that does cut content restoration which is something i'm always interested in. Oh well if there aren't any more moronic changes like that i will continue on.

 

[Gaznak]

Ugh... Only yesternight I finally fine-tuned Heretic II to play as it must be played. Initially I thought that the abscence of music is intended :D Now the game shows itself in full glory.

I don't know has this game been underappreciated or something but now I know for sure this is the very good game. Not perfect by any means but very enjoyable and old-school in the best sense of words.

Raven Software are guys who know their art. I don't care about their CoD stuff but all the dark-fantasy epics from Black Crypt to Heretic II plus two Star Wars Jedi Knight games are gold classics.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

Completed Shivering Isles. I can see why people really like it, it's a really good expansion.
After that I finished the mage guild quest line and dunked on Mannimarco because I was level 33 with 65% magic resist and full Enchanted Madness Armour.

After some research it turns out that for some silly reason you don't get increased damage for fortifying strength or blade beyond 100, which means fortify blade enchantments are useless on armour once you reach your cap and fortifying your strength with magic and alchemy before a fight is pointless because it doesn't increase your damage output. It also means that there's an effective damage cap that happens much earlier before the enemy level cap, which would explain some of the stories about enemies becoming unreasonably tanky late game.
That said, there's no reason to level up past 30; it would seem that 30 is the maximum possible level for items to unlock their best stats, and by level 30 you should have your favored stats and skills maxed out. You'd either have to work really hard at leveling up or have a silly set of major skills (like Athletics) to get beyond that point. I only got up to level 33 because I used restoration a bunch of times for the Feather spell.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

Fallout Tactics with Redux Mod. Not really digging all the ludicrous portrait changes so far, i mean replacing Stitch portrait with David Beckham's pic? The reasons for it are pretty retarded if you bother to read the walls of text in the readme. Then there is an issue of author's autism getting triggered by the game having real world weapons so he just had to rename them into some prosperized shit like "colt" into "holt"... New menu looks like shit, i mean why even replace it? Usually i would send a mod straight into the trash based on silly changes like that alone, but Redux seem to be the only mod that does cut content restoration which is something i'm always interested in. Oh well if there aren't any more moronic changes like that i will continue on.

Yeah, I really don't understand why modders' are incapable of keeping it simple and insist on adding stupid shit just because they can.
Stalker mods are a good example of this; Autumn Aurora introduced metro armour sets for some stupid reason and Anomaly has lurkers which stick out like a sore thumb.
Then we have Skyrim's Requiem mod where the modder decided to add perfectly invisible enemies that you can't see or attack which just dunk on you because they deal so much damage for some idiotic reason.

Is it really too hard for them to just make improvements and mechanical changes where needed and not add a bunch of extraneous shit? Or at least keep the extra crap optional?

 

[Poseidon00]

Fallout Tactics with Redux Mod. Not really digging all the ludicrous portrait changes so far, i mean replacing Stitch portrait with David Beckham's pic? The reasons for it are pretty retarded if you bother to read the walls of text in the readme. Then there is an issue of author's autism getting triggered by the game having real world weapons so he just had to rename them into some prosperized shit like "colt" into "holt"... New menu looks like shit, i mean why even replace it? Usually i would send a mod straight into the trash based on silly changes like that alone, but Redux seem to be the only mod that does cut content restoration which is something i'm always interested in. Oh well if there aren't any more moronic changes like that i will continue on.

Yeah, I really don't understand why modders' are incapable of keeping it simple and insist on adding stupid shit just because they can.
Stalker mods are a good example of this; Autumn Aurora introduced metro armour sets for some stupid reason and Anomaly has lurkers which stick out like a sore thumb.
Then we have Skyrim's Requiem mod where the modder descided to add perfectly invisible enemies that you can't see or attack which just dunk on you because they deal so much damage for some idiotic reason.

Is it really too hard for them to just make improvements and mechanical changes where needed and not add a bunch of extraneous shit? Or at least keep the extra crap optional?

Bethesda games are by far the worst offenders in this regard.

I can't construct a mod list worth playing for lack of decent, low-key quest content. No good pro Thalmor stuff, no good Orc stronghold stuff, no good Forsworn stuff, I mean, what the fuck man? There aren't that many side factions in the damn game and after hundreds of thousands of mods nobody wants to touch this?

 

[Modron]

Alternating between Like a Dragon Ishin! and Dreams in the Witch House, good times.

 

[Kabas]

Zanzarah the hidden portal, aka pokemon with fairies.
Kinda dig the visuals and the creature's design. Also, heroine's big butt.

Only managed to capture one fairy so far

The other type i encountered, Blumella or something, just didn't want to enter the capturable state

 

[jebsmoker]

i finished dread templar. very good for a largely one-man project

why have only 1/40th of players beaten the game

 

[Vic]

why have only 1/40th of players beaten the game

that's common for most newish games

 

[NecroLord]

Still playing Thief and reached one of the best levels ever created - "The Sword".
Also playing Doom: Eviternity.
This wad is incredible, particularly the secret levels - "Imperator" and "Anagnorisis".
Anagnorisis is truly gargantuan. Might take you an hour or two to complete.

 

[Kabas]

The other type i encountered, Blumella or something, just didn't want to enter the capturable state

Scratch that part, i forgot that you need pokeballs to catch pokemons.
Fairies and combat system kinda lack the variety so far in terms of gameplay. Fairies don't have much in terms of interesting spells, unfortunately.

And the shop that sells spells for your fairies is essentially gambling. What is it with gambling and children's games?

 

[Humbaba]

Realms of Arkania 1 and not liking it much.

 

[Abu Antar]

Game #10 is beaten. That is Trials of Mana. It's a 3D remake of Seiken Densetsu 3 for SNES. It's a faithful remake, with some late game content added. I liked it for how faithful it was to the original, but cutscenes and story beats are probably jarring to new players, not knowing that it's a remake.

Good time to beat it, because now, I can focus on Like A Dragon: Ishin! and Octopath Traveler II.

 

[Tweed]

I was playing the Far Cry series since I bought them at one point on sale for reasons I can't seem to fathom. I finished Far Cry 1 a long time ago and it's not bad with a quicksave mod installed. I made it through Far Cry 2, 3, and Blood Dragon, but I don't think I really want to continue the FC shit parade right now because I already know FC4 is just going to be the same damn thing with a different coat of paint. I don't think I have it in me right now to do another collectathon while shooting up the same looking bad guy base 50 times for better guns.