What game are you wasting time on?

[rumSaint]

Finished second campaign in Fantasy General 2 (Empire Aflame), pretty good.
Finished Hellbound - shit. Not recommend.
Currently playing Ion Fury. Solid.

 

[Azalin]

Finished The Case of the Golden Idol and the DLCs.I have heard it described as Obra Dinn-like and it's pretty accurate. It doesn't have the graphics,music and production values that Obra Dinn had but it has mysteries that will remind you of Obra Dinn,trying to figure out what happened and the identities of the people involved. A good game ,recommended for anyone that liked Obra Dinn

 

[Raghar]

Tried blades of shogun expansion. It felt like story was added ad hoc when they needed some expansion or sequel. They should create new game with new story instead.

If the main "villain" is really a random character that they added into story just to have a new boss to defeat and then they continue the story of original game. That's kinda stupid.
If the main "villain" was doing it for different reason than being on the side of their opponent, it would be decent story. But frankly, it felt like they were bit creatively deficient.

 

[Just Locus]

Finished Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 1

---

I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought, my complaints mostly amount to minor stuff like
-the long kill animations
-dumb squad AI
-lacking visual variety (either manufactorums or destroyed manufactorums)
-(One major complaint) The entire Nemeroth boss fight being a QTE-fest
-Chaos Daemons are more annoying than hard

Everything else though is solid, combat feels weighty and satisfying for the most part, and all ranged and melee weapons have an appropriate use. Music was alright, no memorable tracks but it served its purpose. The story was okay, nothing groundbreaking but again, it served its purpose and was a good enough excuse to crush billions of Orks to pieces.

 

[Raghar]

I played chessbot, and that bastard said. "I know what you are planning." Like these bots are crazy when I don't know what I'm doing, how could you know what I'm doing?

 

[Svejk]

Spent an embarrassing amount of time taking selfies in Stellar Blade. There's apparently 2-3 recently new quests that if you go around the Wastelands and Great Desert, you look for images of some little graffiti pics plastered in random places scattered about you're suppose to take a selfie with. It's pretty dumb, but finding 12 of each lands you a new outfit. To get the Nier Gear, you have to find these other random scattered items (Stellar Tears) to purchase the Neir stuff. The collect-a-thon is driving me nuts, but I'll be content once I get the A2 outfit.

Tried the Dynasty Warriors Origins demo. It was much more overwhelming than the likes of Hyrule Warriors, which is probably the last musou game I've played. Seems pretty cool, but nothing I would want to jump on day 1 or anything.

Dragons Dogma 2 - Jumping back in this makes me second guess whether this or Astrobot is my GOTY. Sweet jeebus it's fucking tight.. It sucked me right back in. About to take on the Sphinx riddles again tomorrow, since I fucked up getting it's key last go round. Also downloaded the custom music pack for it. Didn't know it was a stand alone. It's neat having the title music and sound effects of DD:DA.

 

[Fargus]

JA 1.13

Recruited the "holy shit can't be omg it's Mike himself" during particularly nasty SAM site retaking, after 40-60 something elite soldiers raped my militia to death.

Pos has some script to make him very hard to kill? Because you can murder 10 elites with the amount of firepower we unleashed upon him: bullets, multiple 20mm thermobaric grenade explosions, SVU sniper shots in the face, suppression and stat decrease with flechette swarms... and he just bounced back and kept shooting. After recruiting he takes 12k per day. Don't know if i'm gonna keep this dude, too expensive for an overhyped clown. Maybe i'll just execute him somewhere in the desert later.

Also, how the hell i never used 20mm underbarrel grenade launcher before? It's like cheat mode in mid game.

 

[__scribbles__]

I'm currently playing Dead Space (2008). I don't really know why, but some thoughts nonetheless:

+Resource management is actually present. If you play like an idiot and miss all your shots and don't pay attention to where enemies are, you will burn through your resources in a heartbeat. I honestly can't tell if it does that stupid thing shooters from this generation did and adjusts ammo drop rates based on the amount you currently have, but if it does it's subtle. There aren't any free healing stations AFAIK and the stations for refilling your stasis(which is really strong because it lets you freeze any enemy in place and can hit multiple targets) are rare and only really connected to using it on a malfunctioning door.
+Combat feels really meaty and tense. Both you and the enemies are fragile like paper which, combined with the above point, makes fighting have stakes and consequences.
+Atmosphere is pretty cool.
+Sound design is nice, with the caveat that that's if you turn off the music. I like that occasionally some quiet whispers play and your footsteps feeling oddly distant, which puts you on edge constantly as you're not sure if you're alone or not. The music kind of kills that aspect of it as a shitty stinger sound plays whenever you find an enemy.
+Level design loops back around onto itself, and due to the sparsity of shops and benches it feels rewarding to return some place safe to upgrade and restock.
+No repetive, constant minigames shitting up the core gameplay loop, unlike a lot of other games from this time period. Genuinely elated over this.
+/-Zero-gravity is a cool concept and fun in bits, but also disorienting and confusing. It does make for some tense fights though as both you and the enemies bounce around the room as you try to take mid-air potshots before they kill you.
+/-The enemy roster is hit-and-miss. I don't find the necromorphs scary and the big guys are annoying, but the little guys that revive the various corpses you find are actually kind of fun since the reanimated guys are really strong and often drop decent loot.
+/-Movement is clunky, which helps atmosphere, as you feel sluggish and helpless compared to the lightning-quick enemies, but hurts the gameplay. The narrow hallways are just not a good fit for third person shooters, would've been better in first-person.
-Waypoint system. It's actually way more disappointing in this game than it is in many others, because they actually label the rooms and areas you visit with signs. But none of the characters mention the specific rooms you need to check, you just hold down the button and the game shows you where to go. It's braindead, but it's worse because it didn't have to be.
-Exploration kinda sucks and revolves mainly around going where the waypoint system doesn't point you to immediately, and there's no real cool, secret stuff to find. It's linear and narrow and there's no verticality to the levels which makes it feel overly claustrophobic in a way that, again, helps the atmosphere but hurts the gameplay.
-Audiolog overdose. They lack all the personality of the ones in the System Shocks.
-Cartoonish gore.
-Intrusive and immersion-breaking handholding in the first couple of chapters. The prime example is that the game tells you that shooting the enemies' limbs hurts them more than shooting them in the stomach or head through a message written in blood on a wall. Then they tell you that three more times during the intro sequence alone! Absolute madness.
-Brown and dark art direction. I get that it's the bowels of an industrial ship but is it really too much to ask for some colour?
-Mandatory turret section. Has there ever been a good one in any game?

Overall I think it's decent but I'm not sure if this is because it actually is a good game or if it was because the last System Shock-inspired game I played was BioShock(which is a terrible game that should've never gotten popular). It's at least way better than I expected from a peak decline era console third-person-shooter.

 

[Average Manatee]

I honestly can't tell if it does that stupid thing shooters from this generation did and adjusts ammo drop rates based on the amount you currently have, but if it does it's subtle.

I don't think it does this. What it does do is adjust the type of ammo dropped to what you are carrying. So if you want to only use the rifle you'll get like 90% rifle ammo drops.

I recall there were some min-maxing tricks you could do early game, where a certain weapon (iirc the line gun?) had the best resell value for ammo drops and you could just equip that, abuse stasis, melee/stomp things to death and sell a bunch of ammo in a few areas.

 

[Average Manatee]

Needed a short break from the LP and started up Tamriel Rebuilt mod for morrowind. Having a grand old time, it's even better than I was expecting. My only complaints are the inherent jank in the base game; stuff like alchemy and potion chugging being too good, stealth being retarded 'I go invisible in front of you, open a door and loot a chest while you watch' and the awful levelling system that compels me to stop what I'm doing and wander around finding trainers to make sure I gain 15 stats each level up without also wasting a bunch of skill gains. I'm sure there's mods that can fix that but my willingness to mod the game petered out after a dozen or so, and some of those are already introducing their own issues.

But god damn, I love stumbling onto a quest, deciding the person is an asshole, and having the freedom to just doublecross him, loot his house and fuck off onto another adventure. All RPGs should have this level of freedom and quantity of quests. I might even do another playthrough at some point with a dunmer to join all the slaver/xenophobic factions and try doing an ironman run or something.

This got me to check out OpenMW again, I was pleasantly surprised to see that they have a few modlists and a semi-automated installer. After checking out some of the more extensive modlists and quickly being disgusted at each one (ugly filters, UI reworks that destroy a completely functional UI, camera mods), I settled on I Heart Vanilla Director's Cut. Which on the surface might sound minimalist but it actually includes Tamriel Rebuilt and a bunch of other quest additions. So I'm working my way through that now. Haven't actually gotten to the Tamriel Rebuilt stuff since I've just been enjoying classic Morrowind that I only faintly remember from over a decade ago.

 

[Frank Capicoli]

CRUELTY SQUAD

Great shooter. Enjoyed scouring the levels for secret weapons on body augments to complete missions in different ways.

 

[what am i doing]

I had vacation this past week, after a few days visiting my father and then a couple days porting my game dev project over to macOS (replaced my Thinkpad) I spent the remainder of my vacation mostly playing Cyberpunk 2077, mainly Phantom Liberty (which I hadn't actually touched when it came out; was waiting on having a solid chunk of time). I haven't played all the Phantom Liberty content, just the main quest line (both branches) and a couple gigs, but overall I really enjoyed it. I like the base game quite a lot but I found PL to be generally higher quality in terms of effort put into quests, NPC interaction, and so on. It was kino, if you will.

Phantom Liberty Spoilers

Both ending paths were pretty great. I liked Songbird's better as an experience (more combat, and the spaceport was neat) but I think narratively Reed's made more sense; there's little in-character reasoning for V to side with Songbird over Reed at that point. The player works with Reed for most of the quest and barely has any rapport built up with Songbird, so siding with Songbird feels like kind of an out of character decision even if it's the path I prefer. Additionally Reed's side actually gives the player more insight into Songbird's character and can give Reed a redemption arc if Songbird is killed. But I preferred mowing through waves of NUSA black ops troops.

I was expecting the Tower to be a downer ending based on all the feedback I saw online, and it really wasn't. I think the main reason for this is probably that on this character I basically beelined straight for Phantom Liberty and didn't have any phone calls with anyone besides Vik, and most of the negativity in that ending seems to be delivered in the phone calls (except Vik's, which is the only one I got at the hospital). If you just go directly for Phantom Liberty and go to the Tower ending as soon as it's available then it seems like a generally happy ending, and only a little bittersweet. Gave me the same vibes as Temperance, actually, which I think makes sense given that they're both about someone getting a second chance at a full life and perhaps learning something along the way; Johnny in Temperance and V in the Tower.

It was also the first time I ran a tech sniper build after having mostly played either netrunner or melee sandevistan builds, and I found the tech sniper extremely fun. I'd planned to use tech precision rifles but after getting Breakthrough I found it so good that I just stuck with it (later swapping between it and Rasetsu). I really enjoy WW1 bolt-action FPS games where you have a low rate of fire but extremely high damage per shot and tech sniper basically gives you that experience. I had so much fun with it in fact that after finishing PL I rolled up a fresh character to do the whole game with that build. I haven't actually done Don't Fear The Reaper before, so I'll be going for that this time.

 

[Spukrian]

I finished Ctrl Alt Ego, I had decided to do a Ghost Pacifist run and succeeded. It went better than I thought, was much less reloading than I had expected (except in the last level, eh). Immediately after I started a New Game+.

I finished the main game of Talos Principle 2. I have some opinions but I'll save them untill I'm done with the extra content.

 

[Abu Antar]

I will never again have to write about Like A dragon: Infinite Wealth. Yesterday, I beat the toughest optional boss fight of the game. In general, I liked the game. There are improvements from the previous installment, but also some things are worse. For instance, they added movement in combat, but then they made fights easier. I died a couple of times by trying some tougher fights, with enemies 10-15 levels above me. The story was merely there, it felt like. There were good moments, but in the grand scheme of things, it felt like a nothing burger. Sub stories were a mixed bag. Some were fun like you would expect, while others felt like filler. Mini games were decent, if you're into that sort of thing. In general, I am a massive fan of the series, and I am more forgiving than others, so I would maybe give it an 8/10. That would place it in the lower end of the list of Yakuza games.

In Blade of Darkness, I bit my knuckle in anger. There was this boss creature that regenerates when it blocks your hits, or lands a hit. I kept messing up, and probably tried it 5+ times. You can't get too cocky in this game, because you can die to anything. I was on a good streak of not getting hit, and disposing of tougher enemies, only to die to three skeletons. I can definitely see similarities to (mostly Demon's) Souls. The barbarian felt weak at the start, but he gets some cool weapons, and his combos are good, when I actually pull them off. The atmosphere gives me a sort of Conan vibe, which I like. Levels are nice, with secret areas scattered around. I go out of my way to find everything, but I am not going to look up anything online. I probably have a future playthrough in me, in a few years. I could do a "100%" amazon run. The game is very dark, which means that I try to have a torch a lot of the time.
Btw, lighting in this game is impressive, considering its age. The same goes for all the gibs.

I looked through my PS4 backlog, and saw a game that I have been thinking about playing for some time. It's a jrpg from Tri-Ace, makers of Valkyrie Profile. The game is Exist Archive. It is not similar in any way graphically, but the combat is VP inspired. I'm very early on, so I don't have deep impressions to share. Dungeons are side scrolling affairs, and you do quests in them. You pick quests from the overworld menu. There is no real world traversal. I have four characters in my party, and each one represents a face button on the controller. In combat, you take turns with the enemy, you attack, then the enemy attacks. When it is your turn, you combine the attacks of your characters to get as high a combo aas you can get. The highest I got is 51 for now. In the defending phase, you guard enemy attacks by pressing the corresponding character button. You can time your guards for perfect guards, or some characters can even do counter damage.
From what little I have played, I expect the standard T-A of mediocre writing, with many cringey characters, and a few good ones. Story setup itself could be interesting.

 

[Ezekiel]

Music in 26 year old Sonic Robo Blast sounds better than most modern indies. Probably partly because back then they didn't consider indie as some badge of honor, knew they had to put in effort regardless.

Not my first time playing it. That was a few years ago. Didn't quite make it to the end that time. Think the last level or almost, because it was all metallic.

 

[Sigourn]

A list of all games I've finished this year. Including F.E.A.R. because although I haven't finished, it's what I'm playing now.

 

[Perkel]

A list of all games I've finished this year. Including F.E.A.R. because although I haven't finished, it's what I'm playing now.

Me right now:



Only Dragon's Dogma 2 finished. Rest are started, touched but not finished.

 

[Jason Bright]

A list of all games I've finished this year. Including F.E.A.R. because although I haven't finished, it's what I'm playing now.

I admire your dedication to finishing metroidvanias. I have a need to 100% those types of games which means I can't play more than one in a row and get sick of them for months afterwards.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

There was this boss creature that regenerates when it blocks your hits, or lands a hit. I kept messing up, and probably tried it 5+ times. You can't get too cocky in this game, because you can die to anything

Aye, that vampire is a pain even when you negate his life gain.

 

[Sigourn]

I admire your dedication to finishing metroidvanias. I have a need to 100% those types of games which means I can't play more than one in a row and get sick of them for months afterwards.

I don't 100%, but I used to have that need. Then I realized that if I always look to 100%, the game would have nothing else to offer me, so I've stopped seeking for 100%. If it comes naturally, so be it lol.

 

[cioran]

I admire your dedication to finishing metroidvanias. I have a need to 100% those types of games which means I can't play more than one in a row and get sick of them for months afterwards.

I don't 100%, but I used to have that need. Then I realized that if I always look to 100%, the game would have nothing else to offer me, so I've stopped seeking for 100%. If it comes naturally, so be it lol.

And here I was, thinking new porn just came in.

racofer

 

[Ezekiel]

Sonic Robo Blast, in Black Core Zone now. Once again, the amateur designers lost their heads, weren't reigned in. So many weird obstacles that are confusing in the moment or need some kind of precursor to prepare the player. Have to take a lot of it slowly, so not really Sonic, and there's a problem of depth perception in places, actually being able to discern what is ahead. Feel more mixed about the music now, although some tracks are pretty good.

 

[Ezekiel]

Spoiler

A list of all games I've finished this year. Including F.E.A.R. because although I haven't finished, it's what I'm playing now.

Think that's everything I beat. Breath of the Wild and The Last Guardian for the second times. Crazy Taxi, who keeps count? Arkham City only replayed to give me more to complain about. Thought it was like a 3/5 at best, but now think it's a 2 and I was too forgiving before because it's Batman. Metal Gear for the MSX completes all the main games in the series. Meaning I have also beaten its first sequel, MGS1 to 5 (and Ground Zeroes), Twin Snakes, Peace Walker and Revengeance.

Will keep a list next year, because it was hard to remember. Might have forgotten one or two.

 

[Just Locus]

Games I finished this year

---

 

[lametta]

Was too lazy to make a picture collage.

Games I finished in 2024:

2024

Games finished in 2024:
Remnant from the Ashes + all DLC 8,5/10
Remnant 2 + all DLCS 8,5/10
Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance 8,5/10
Ghost Recon: Wildlands 8/10
Death Stranding Director's Cut 8/10
Alan Wake 2+ All DLCs 8/10
Cyberpunk - Phantom Liberty 8/10
Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree 8/10
Monster Hunter World (Base Game) 8/10
Granblue Fantasy Re:Link 8/10
Resident Evil 8: Village 8/10
Last Epoch 8/10
Horizon Zero Dawn Complete Edition 8/10
The Last of Us Part 1 8/10
Star Ocean 2 Second Story R 8/10
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain 7,5/10
Star Ocean: The Divine Force 7,5/10
Death Must Die 7,5/10
Armored Core 6 7,5/10
Forgotten City 7,5/10
Metal Gear Solid Peacewalker 7/10
Metal Gear Solid 3:Snake Eater HD 7/10
Yakuza Kiwami 2 7/10
Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII -Reunion- 7/10
Final Fantasy XVI + DLCS 7/10
Valkyria Chronicles 4 7/10
A Plague Tale: Innocence 7/10
Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance 7/10 (Coop)
Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance 2 7/10 (Coop)
High On Life 7/10
Octopath Traveler 2 7/10
Metal Gear Solid Ground Zeroes 7/10
Citizen Sleeper 6,5/10
Devil May Cry 5 6,5/10
Hellblade 2: Senua's Saga 6/10
Zone of the Enders The 2nd Runner 6/10
Returnal 6/10
Dungeons of Sundaria 6/10
Bloodstained 6/10
Stranger of Paradise 6/10
Deus Ex Invisible War 5/10