What game are you wasting time on?

[ghardy]

For RTS, I'm enjoying Command and Conquer: Remastered, along with StarCraft 1 now and then.

For FPS, I'm going through Anomaly Report, a WAD for Doom.
And F.E.A.R., now and then.

 

[KafkaBot]

survival horror

cozy

It don't add up, Cap'n.

Some think it is weird, but I genuinely think projects like this make for cozy gaming sessions. The somber mood is excellent for cold nights.

 

[Kabas]

Mentioned already in the other threads but i have completed a couple of games recently.

Might & Magic 7 - Amber Island. Download link - https://mightandmagicmod.com.
A standalone mod for might and magic 7 that took me around 10 hours to complete. It's a pretty low level adventure with expert level teachers being the max here, by the end of it my party was level 10. Despite that the island itself is pretty dense and jumpacked with content, some pretty cool looking dungeons too.
I must confess that i didn't complete any of the M&M6-8 due the fact that micromanaging your inventory, finding the right merchant/skill trainer and other busywork takes way too much time. This was not an issue here as most of the skill trainers and merchants tend to congregate in a single place inside the rather gorgeous looking town and the mod itself is not very long.
Can recommend it to anyone who even remotely interested in some dungeon crawling goodness.


Another party based dungeon crawler that is inspired by Wizardry 8 and Might & Magic 6-8. Mostly M&M. Took me 8+ hours to complete.
Quite wacky tone, good variety of dungeon gimmicks and incredible diversity(good kind) when it comes to monster designs. Dev clearly hates the idea of you repeatedly fighting the same monster more than a few times or monster groups not fullfilling their own diversity quota, so your avearage enemy squad will always look something like this.

Skills work similarly to the way they work in M&M6-8 with expert/master/grandmaster/etc. The only difference being that weapon, armor and utility skills can also grant you "spells" like merchant giving you an ability to throw a bag of money that can cause confusion or spear letting you perform a vault that acts as a jump spell, dagger sneak attack ability is especially deadly.
Spells themselves are pretty fun too. You get your usual fire/Ice/Acid/Radiation elemental spells, buffs, debuffs, utilty spells like town portal or precognition that let's you predict a negative outcome in case you decide to interact in certain way with certain object and some more fun spell like teleport strike that lets you perform a melee weapon strike at range, spell that transforms your enemies into an edible sandwich or combines all your characters into a single abomination Ultimate Hero who has all their combined stats/skills.
The only bad thing i can say about this game is that by the time you enter the Unyielding Forge the game stops providing any challenge. Monsters of Mican is way too generous with XP and saving money for level-ups completely stops being a concern by this point. I also wish different classes had more differences than just a single special ability.
Thanks for reccomendation, JarlFrank.

Currently playing this one becuase a lot of people on Codex were saying how amazing Overload is and i saw a good discount.

First level and the game is already playing an aboslute banger of an OST. Pretty great first impressions from the first couple of levels.
Never played any Descent before by the way.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

That game looks fucking hilarious.

 

[flyingjohn]

Continuing my Bond games semi marathon with Everything or Nothing for the Gamecube. Now, it is a TPS game.
Well, i dropped it very quickly for one reason, you don't aim in this game, you just have auto lock on.That is disgusting.
Oh, and the level design is somehow worse then agent under fire. Missions don't really incorporate multiple stuff anymore and are just a 99% driving/shooting.
Nightfire better be worth it.

 

[Duplarius]

Just beat The Last Faith, it was slightly challenging but not too hard.

 

[Max Damage]

Finished Ninja Gaiden 2 (NES), it was fun mastering last level and then completely obliterating final bosses with triple shuriken throws. With that, I've finished the whole trilogy. For the third game I played JP release since USA one is brutally difficult + you get limited continues, may return to that one later for some extra challenge. Dropped Hollow Knight because I'm tired of endless backtracking, going to lab Street Fighter 6 instead.

 

[Average Manatee]

Finished King's Bounty: Dark Side as Neoline/Demoness, the paladin class of DS.

She's interesting. The non-unique Mind skill line is still kind of shit (so is the Might one for that matter), but her unique skills allow you to stack -leadership cost of units in a way that gets absurdly broken. It's feels a little underpowered early game (the unique skills are all expensive and have lots of pre-reqs so you tend to get to the bottom of the skill tree much later than other games where you can rush there by level 10), but with a strong mid game, and for me I had -85% to Demon's leadership costs and -105% to Female Demon's leadership costs for the last 4 areas. This did allow my cap of female demons to be literally infinite, not that it mattered much because having over 300k leadership worth of imps and scoffer imps with +5 morale pretty much won whole battles with 50k damage ranged aoe attacks on turn 1. But the female demons got to pull off cool 1M damage numbers and one shot the final boss, so cool I guess. It is kind of weird that literally no weapons are better than your starting -10% leadership to demons weapon though.

To be fair, the itemization for -leadership costs looks pretty good across the board. I think the other classes could get at least -50% to -65% for their specific races or for dwarves/humans which is still really OP (sadly not elves with their tons of powerful archers, unless I got really unlucky on their equipment rolls).

I think that Orc (Warrior class) is probably the weakest class overall. Non-unique Might skills are still pretty shit, you basically only see a big impact from Anger (more rage growth) and Rage control (more rage cap), which are both immediately available. Everything else is barely noticeable. Orc unique skills get stronger rages and the chance to proc an extra rage usage every time he uses a rage in a turn. Problem is... nothing I can see fixes the issue of Rage moves having really long cooldowns eventually. The good thing is that 2 rages deal percentile damage while another makes any size enemy start fighting their own kind, so those moves do scale past the point where flat damage sucks. But Orc gets no unique way to reduce their 2/4/5 turn cooldowns so even if you have the rage and luck to do 5 rage moves per turn, most of those will be weak or everything will be on cooldown. So I dunno how to get around that. Orc does get +15% universal resistance to his army eventually though, resistance stacking is always super powerful in these games. Probably stronger than in any other game here since you can get multiple +20% resistance armors, it wouldn't be hard to get your army to 65% or so baseline resistance level which is stupidly broken.

Vampire (the mage class) still looks to be pretty OP and probably the overall easiest class from beginning to end (I think every class is going to end up overpowered in the end game, only question is how long it takes). He gets mad intellect and spell bonuses. Though Higher Magic (doublecasting per turn) takes a lot longer to get to in this game since it's locked behind the exceptionally overpriced unique skill line. But just getting basic magic skills down early is a huge power buff.

So overall, class balance is great and actually feels like there's a choice here.

Like WotN you get multiple companions this time, but unlike it they not only give you the base 4 item slots that companions gave in previous games but the next 2 companions give another slot each. So that's 2 more slots over the baseline that we're used to getting. I do like this a lot, but for Neoline the slots were Regalia and Regalia are kind of... shit. They tend to be +leadership items, but +leadership is the worst stat for the already leadership-heaviest class and -leadership troop cost items is what really matters. The other modifiers you want are either +stats or +resistances. Unfortunately all of these things exclusively come from weapons, armor, artifacts, etc, but not regalia. I expect a lot more of the better slots with the other classes would be a big power boost to them.

As far as the quest design it's... interesting. It's clear the devs bit off more than they could chew which is probably why the game feels buggy/unfinished. There's a lot more running back and forth to get quests finished, you've got a home base that you develop over time, tons of questlines that intersect and can hold up another or require going to multiple places. Your rage companion (Blackie) constantly chimes in offering advice on how to scheme and subvert the "good guys" you come across. I think the reason for this is that with 3 different characters the devs didn't want to have to write so much unique dialog and so offloaded a lot of it onto Blackie. It works, and probably ~90% of the time its quite clear what you should do and how to do it from your discussions with him. The issues arise when you have 30 quests going because lots of them can't be finished without doing prereqs or going somewhere else, and the quest log is a lot more vague about where to go than your dialog with Blackie was. Sometimes it will say "talk to the merchant (name) in (location)", sometimes "talk to the (name) in (location)", sometimes "talk to (name)", sometimes "talk to the merchant". You can see how some of these easily lead to confusion. I did have exactly one quest that seemed to bug out, which was really annoying, but in general if you just keep progressing and searching around you'll eventually figure out things. The other annoying thing is that there's a few important characters who aren't marked on the map, and other points of interest that are just "x inn" and you have to remember what the character's name is there. But ehh, I can deal with it. I guess you can say its not properly casualized with quest markers at least.

Overall I liked the plot. Pulling tricks on people is fun. Some areas also get "corrupted" once you've overthrown them which is cool (though this seems to be limited to early game areas, I guess they ran out of time?). The running back and forth is annoying but you can teleport anywhere for 1k money (which is nothing) once you've visited it once. On one hand this does kind of completely defeat the purpose of in-game time as a scoring method, which is also kind of the only difficulty in the game. In previous games its not like winning on Impossible was that difficult (aside from the spider fight in WotN), but if you took significant casualties it meant constantly running back and forth to previous islands to restock troops and taking both in game and out of game time. There's no reason you NEED to care about score, but I treat the in-game time as a sort of soft goal the same way I'll try to limit resting in an RPG even if I can do so infinitely and it takes only 2s to do it. So Dark Side kind of taking an axe to this mechanic was annoying and feels like its its breaking the conventions established by previous games. On the other hand the way quests are designed would be absolutely infuriating if you had to spend time sailing back and forth with all their intricacies. So I dunno. I guess you could say in-game time is a bad thing to care about though.

My final number of battles was 493, which puts this game roughly equal in length as TL, shorter than WotN and longer than CW I cleared basically everything except a few of the artifact battles. It probably would have felt a bit too long if not for being overpowered and wiping the last hundred or so fights in 2 turns. The game definitely takes longer in terms of figuring out quests. I guess you don't really have to do all the quests but... I like to? The writing in these games is often fairly amusing and its fun to see what happens. The last few areas were kind of a drag though, with quests that spawned more enemies to fight on the island several times over, and one island where you have to go to a dungeon area inside an area inside an area to talk to a quest giver, then run back out, fight some guys, and go back in. Several times over. Yeesh.

Overall a very bad game if you haven't played King's Bounty before, but I quite liked it and will probably try replaying it again as a different class in a few years.

 

[NecroLord]

I finally started a System Shock run.
I am playing the original enhanced version and I must say that it is even better than I remember it.
One of those games made in that era where you actually had to use your brain to progress further.
Be sure to listen carefully to the emails and thoroughly read the logs you find, as they contain clues about what you should do.
I finally jettisoned the Grove containing Shodan's vile experiments and the virus she planned to release on Earth.
Now I have to plant plastique explosives at four key points in engineering.
Game can also be quite tough, you will die a few times, so you should make it a priority to restore the Restoration Stations, otherwise you will be turned into a cyborg upon dying, resulting in a Game Over.

Cyberspace is also quite interesting, I have yet to see a game devote so much effort into making cyberspace so interesting.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I finally started a System Shock run.

...

Cyberspace is also quite interesting, I have yet to see a game devote so much effort into making cyberspace so interesting.

I hope you don't fire up the remake next, and see a game devote so much effort into making cyberspace so dull and boring.

 

[NecroLord]

I finally started a System Shock run.

...

Cyberspace is also quite interesting, I have yet to see a game devote so much effort into making cyberspace so interesting.

I hope you don't fire up the remake next, and see a game devote so much effort into making cyberspace so dull and boring.

No.
I do not like remakes, as a general rule.
From what I've seen of the remake so far it looks really dumb.
Did they really butcher cyberspace that badly?

 

[Unkillable Cat]

In OG System Shock cyberspace is a place where you sorta drift about, but also try to steer yourself into getting things done and involves some shooting.

Remake System Shock cyberspace is 100% shooting gallery. Enter space, watch enemies spawn in front of you, shoot until they're all dead, repeat until end.

They might as well have replaced the cyberjacks with an arcade cabinet.

 

[MaxPaint]

It's too warm to play video games. It feels like every summer gets hotter and hotter.
Anyway, I finished a couple of games and did a sorting of my backlog by genre. The plan is to play shorter games first starting with shooters and horrors, followed by platformers and metroidvanias, then adventures, unsorted emulation, rpgs, strategy games and finally some chosen games and endless ones.

Finished Project Warlock.

Spoiler

My impression of this game was severely smeared by the hell levels and the last boss. The color palette for hell was trash. Again with all the visual clutter sometimes it was hard to see. It seems like the dev also gave up on even trying to make interesting levels at that point and every hell map feels like one giant arena with enormous monster closets after another. I'm not sure how I feel about the bottomless death pits without the ability to jump. They were not that bad, but I did die to one of them once when strafing backwards. Also there was a weird death when I went into a teleporter fully expecting an ambush — and there was an ambush but I died basically the moment I teleported in. So the next time I was dreading that same place, jumped in ready to shoot and it was nothing special, just a regular closet. What've killed me the first time then?

And the final boss, oh boy. I don't know what went wrong: did I fuck up the leveling up, choose the wrong perks and weapon upgrades? Maybe I should've bought any spells beside light, I don't know. I know that I've died 3 times prior to him and THIRTEEN TIMES to this mf. For me it's just badly designed. Even if it was wrong perks etc. that just means that you can't beat the game however you want. The ammo and health pickups for this fight are too scarce. In his last phases he endlessly spawns top level monster (which give you some ammo and health on death but you spend more if unlucky). His third phase when he menacingly walks at you shooting rockets was the worst because of too big aoe. I nearly rage quit a couple of times. In the end, I decided I'm done trying to kill him normally, kited him around the column in the middle of the map, throwing fucking knives for ten minutes (because otherwise no ammo to finish the battle), and only used weapons on two final phases. Jesus, it was not satisfying.

Next I played Unsharted 4 Collection.

Spoiler

My last console was PS1 and I mostly emulated older games, so it was my first Sony© Cinematic Experience™ game.
First of all, this game was released in 2016 and it still looks very good. If anything, ND have very good artists. A couple of times I just stood in place, moving camera around looking at things in awe. A beautiful game. Next, I really enjoyed main characters. I didn't know shit about Drake, his wife or Sully before and they were still very likeable. Drake's brother was Troy Baker though, and the black woman mercenary leader was mary sue bs. The story was also pretty lighthearted and had that Indiana Jones-y sense of adventure.

The unfortunate thing is that games have gameplay and in these two games it's serviceable at best. I almost dropped U4 in the beginning of the game because I was bored to death by the slow walking-n-talking, constant wall hugging and just stuff where nothing happens in general. I shot a gun twice in the first two hours of the game, and the first one of these two was in a prologue, basically a tutorial. Now I realize why the generous people who kindly lent me this game put it into the adventure and not the TPS category. It got better later but not by much, the pacing was bad until the final credits.

Most of the U4 you spend climbing and jumping walls. K, fine by me but make it at least somewhat hard. It was so mind numbingly easy, seriously you can just turn your brain off and still not fail the climbing. There's only one way to go, no dead ends, almost no timed events where you can fall to death, nothing. The jumping is also trash — when I realised you don't really need to time the jumps, you just need to press the jump button whenever, I lost all the interest. Also, a lot of times you can clearly see you charcter is too far from the kdge and won't make a jump and then you see how it magically adjusts the trajectory right in the air, all with weird animation. What a wasted opportynity. Especially so after I got to the clock tower level. This is what platforming in this game shoud have been. Th cogs are constantly moving, you need timing, if not precision, you need to do some stuff quickly or you will die. It was such a breathe of a fresh air, but sadly that was the only moment in the game.

There were not enough puzzles for an adventure game like this. They were very easy but I would've still loved to have more of them. MUCH more. It felt like there were 6-7 puzzles in the whole game. Maybe it felt like that because of the bad pacing.

I also didn't understand the praise for the shooting part. The arenas all felt the same, very formulaic. I tried to play without using covers which you can do btw, the game gives you all the tools to be on the move constantly and you have to change weapons all the time because you can't carry that much ammo. But the thing is, there's like no impact in shooting. It felt like Max Payne 1 but less cool. The movements are rather floaty, you can't feel weight in any of the guns and they all for some reason have a giant spread so they feel very same-y. Like you're shooting replicas. I dunno, I didn't like it. Didn't really use stealth, have no idea about it.

The add-on was somewhat opposite of U4 for me. I didn't like the story, I didn't like the characters but the gameplay was better. Better pacing, less jumping, more puzzles (I personally enjoyed the shadow puzzle), shooting is still unsatisfying. The game is much shorter than U4 and that's a good thing, U4 was bloated and should have been cut in half.

Overall, I don't regret wasting times on Uncharted, but I most likely will never replay these two games again.

Installed The Last of Us and this shit is unplayable without FSR and frame gen, also Amid Evil, Forgive Me Father and Far Cry 4.

 

[ghardy]

Remake System Shock cyberspace is 100% shooting gallery. Enter space, watch enemies spawn in front of you, shoot until they're all dead, repeat until end.

Ugh.

The old version was rough, but it was inventive. With zany music.

 

[NecroLord]

You also get access to some cool items and their upgraded variants, namely the Hover Boots (which allow you to hover in the air and access upper areas on a map), the Sensaround (which grants you the ability to see what's behind you) and the Shield (to absorb damage) and the one item which greatly increases your speed.
Be sure to carry some batteries with you, as those items require energy to operate.

 

[ghardy]

You know, while System Shock 2 is a better game in some ways, the original System Shock will remain unsurpassed for its soul, for the craft that went into its making.

The setting makes more sense. The music is far more on point. You feel much more vulnerable. And SHODAN's antagonism takes on an almost cosmic significance.

(And I think the voice acting was more effective.)

(I just realized I could say the very same things for Diablo set against Diablo 2.)

 

[Sweeper]

I've been spending every waking second of my free time playing Stalcraft for the last week.
A fucking F2P, seasonal shit, PvP/PvE open world FPS game based on the Stalker franchise.
It's the lowest IQ thing I've done in a very long time.

 

[NecroLord]

Alright, so I finished the System Shock run.
It's been a while since I last played it, but I did pretty well overall.
Level 9 - The Bridge is quite tough, but I beat it without dying once (there are no health recharge or Restoration chambers here, so be careful).
The finale has you entering cyberspace as a virus, I believe, and finally "killing" Shodan for good...
Great game.

Onward to System Shock 2.

 

[NecroLord]

Oh, if you take too long to kill Shodan in cyberspace, your screen will gradually become more and more pixelated until all those pixels coalesce together to form Shodan's face on your screen, resulting in a Game Over!
Actually quite creepy.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

At least it doesn't perform a Stardock destruction of your hard drive.

 

[Naraya]

Finished my Icewind Dale + HoW playthrough. What a great adventure, what a gorgeous looking game!

As someone not well-versed in the DnD rules, spells etc., I was certain I will have a bad time and lot of problems, knowing that IWD is a combat heavy game, but it was very enjoyable and not too hard at all. Maybe that's because I played on Normal, with a party of 6.

Being an IE game it's not without flaws though - the pathfinding made me facepalm and utter minor curses irl more than once. One of the most frustrating bugs is when the whole party is literally IN the transition zone, but somehow you need to back everyone up, and enter in the proper order. Ugh.

Recommended!

screenshots

Some screenshots - sorry for the cursor in the middle but capturing screenshots wasn't a simple process.

 

[MaxPaint]

Yeah, I don't think I'll finish TLOU. This game is bad on so many levels. Usually I at least understand why people like the things I don't, but not in this case. So far, the most overrated game I've ever seen.

 

[Krivol]

Usually I at least understand why people like the things I don't, but not in this case

Graphics, man. It's a 99% good score for AAA games.

 

[MaxPaint]

Usually I at least understand why people like the things I don't, but not in this case

Graphics, man. It's a 99% good score for AAA games.

I agree that there are a lot of great views last this

but then you get some very obviously game-y stuff like this which I can't say looks any good

This whole game is a mess. The story is just a Cormack McCarthy ripoff. The gameplay is a bare minimum and it feels like a filler in-between plot scenes. None of the small talks add anything to the character developments and in fact they are just here to mask the loading screens to NOT RUIN THE IMMERSION. Yeah, sure, the loading screen ruins it and obvious tetris block waist-high cover arenas with bottles and bricks all over them don't. I'm so mad that this game is what general population thinks a game (A GAME ART even) should be. Even turning your brain off like in Uncharted is not helping, you need to actively do the mental gymnastics inside your head to not see all the cracks. I'm far from being a smart man, but you really need to have zero erudition to think this is a Citizen Kane of Dark Souls of video games and better than Schindler's List. I'll try to play it some more because I wanted to finish it so that no one could say that I didn't understand it and it gets good five seconds before the credits roll, but it's one of the occasions where the game actively pisses me off.

 

[AndyS]

Random game pick from last night: Spidercide for the TRS-80 Color Computer. Sort of a cross between Asteroids and the Tholian Web. It's pretty good!