What game are you wasting time on?

[Svejk]

Still chugging away at Stellar Blade. The amount of filler fetch quests in the Wasteland and Great Desert are only tolerable due to watching Eve move and her combat. The “story” tidbits and so forth you find in digital pads and notes, are painfully uninspired. Nothing like Nier Automata, or Horizon even. Needless to say, I’m starting to b-line the game. I got most moves and the outfits and accessories I like unlocked, so the fomo is gone. So far, it’s been a soft 8/10 game. The old school PS2 design standpoint is great, but the modern open hub/world-ish quests feels a bit forced and unnecessary… especially when the story doesn’t really branch off in any way.

Slowly making progress in Dragon’s Dogma 2 trophy hunting. Trying to trigger a cyclopsian bridge when you’re OP, makes it a bit challenging. Also realized that I never came across a Dulahan in my initial playthrough. Moving the regular quests along to get to another quest that can supposedly lead to one. At least these open world side quests are more engaging and feel appropriate for the game.

Lords of the Fallen – I loaded up and tried this game again for like the 4th time.. It still just does not click with me. It’s not sparking any Souls feels for some reason. Just feels unusually off, and I can’t pinpoint why. The wise thing would be for me to pick up Dark Souls 1 Remastered, as it's the one Souls game I have yet to try.

Contra: Operation Galuga – Picked this back up to do more Arcade runs; to unlock more characters and upgrades. Unlocked Sheena from Contra:HC. She has unique gun fire, similar to what she had in HC, which is pretty cool. Getting Spread will give her her “>>>>” shot, but holding it down charges one giant “>” shot. She even has unique animations; like ducking for example, she’ll lay on her back instead along with different stage complete poses. Nice little touches. Working on unlocking Browny next. It’s not the end all, be all Contra… Far from it, but it’s easily right up there with Contra 4 goodness.

 

[v1c70r14]

STOLKOR 2 holds little interest for me, but I've been like others using the release of it as an excuse to revisit the first game. It's both better and worse than I remembered, the semi-open format isn't as impressive as it was back in the day now that every other big budget release aims for a 400 hour big open world experience, with polished but highly repetitive content. The repeatable missions are the part of the game that has aged the worst. Characters keep referring to sneaking in, but I've been clearing entire camps of soldiers. Important characters have been dying to swarms of mutants left and right, and when a Duty guy asked me to clear out a sniper nest of Freefags he had been shot by the sniper when I came back for the reward. There is a genuine dynamism to the game, the long stretches of walking isn't worth it most of the time though, and it's easy to see why Metro did away with the scope and ambition of a fully simulated large area to focus in on the best bits, even if it did lose some of the downtime and ambience for it.

The last part of the game when you start fighting Monolith guys was the most tedious but also the most fun, other than the underground horror areas, since you're not dealing with a few guys hiding in the bushes a large distance away. Instead you fight snipers in urban environments and cadres of soldiers in both close quarters and over longer distances and the AI is pretty good, taking cover, ducking from hails of bullets. Even if the graphics are less impressive now, the soul of the game remains, right up to the very end.

Still a good game in 2024, even if I find this sort of blend of science fiction, USSR ambivalent nostalgia and post-apocalypse to have gotten pretty stale due to overexposure over time.

 

[Ezekiel]

July 4th:

I wonder how many Zelda players didn't know how to get to the third maiden temple. I hate this part. Have had the game on hold here for months and months and months, because can't access northwest in dark world and get bored looking.

This is bullshit. You can't even see the skull rocks across the river that you need to hook from the far side, and they don't appear in the light world. Progress finally after a year! Hopefully, I can add this to my list of finished games before the year is over.

 

[Frank Capicoli]

I've been sucked in by Heads Will Roll Reforged. Each run get's better yet more bullshit.

Gud turn based game.

 

[Puukko]

After a whole lot of unproductive back-and-forth over which game in the series I should play first, I finally grabbed Armored Core 6 and so far I think it's doing a fine job as a first entry. It has enough optional tutorials to get you going and encourages trying out new gear by allowing you to do it mid-mission if you die, so the boss at the end of the mission doesn't become a complete roadblock if you've got a poorly suited AC. No real issue with the combat, every time I've died has felt like it was my fault and that it was time to get good.

I like the setup for the story, where you're a rootless merc who works for everyone willing to pay, including the people you just majorly screwed over in the previous mission. Corporations are essentially as powerful as nations, with their own armed forces. Everybody wants to snort magic red powder despite the planet having undergone nuclear winter due to it.

The scale in this game is pretty insane and it does a good job with its art style to immerse you.
If doesn't hold up the best to close inspection but scaling a walking mile-long death laser factory sure makes up for that.

 

[Jvegi]

Moonring

Had to learn things the hard way a couple of times in the first dungeon before I got through it. No idea what the game is like yet. Heard good things. The dungeon was ok, but a bit mobile gamey. I guess it's Ultima for you.

 

[Zlaja]

I'm going through Persona 5 and I had to switch from Hard to Normal difficulty during two bossfights (Okufume and Shido). Fucking retarded shit! Damage values of both of these bossfights don't seem properly balanced to me on Hard. I'm playing the original version which is supposedly a bit harder than the Royal version of the game, so I don't know whether they changed something in the new version.

I was able to get the final form of both of these bossfights down to last 25%, but at that point I could no longer keep up both attacking and healing properly 'cause of the bonkers damage values.

On Normal you do like around 50% more damage and take 50% less damage, so the fights were a breeze on this difficulty.

*throws a chair*

 

[Ezekiel]

"Take me outside," she said.

Worst maiden ever.

 

[Abu Antar]

Had a good old gaming night with my younger brother.

We started out with the latest Sackboy game. It's a decent platformer, that would probably be boring on your own. We haven't managed to ace many levels (complete them without dying), because weäre being asses to each other. We still manage to do well, other than that.

After seven or eight levels, we moved on to Borderlands 3. It only took an hour to make us sure that this is better than Broderlands 2. We both enjoyed BL1 in co-op, but both of us also disliked BL2. Our initial impressions on BL3 are that it looks, and plays better. I picked the character that can be a Hitman, and my brother plays as the one who gets a pet. So far, so good.

Last, but not least, we booted up Streets of Rage 4. It's decent, old school beat em' up. I don't know how much difference there is in playable characters. I chose the busty lady, and my brother picked the dude with metal arms. This is probably a game that we will play through a few times, so we started with the normal difficulty, and then work our way up, once we are familiar with the game, and especially the bosses.

On my own, I am going through Brigand: Oaxaca, which is causing me copious amounts of stress, good and bad. Wrote a little blurb in the appropriate thread.

TOEM is a chill photographing game. It's black and white graphics, with very cartoony style. My chilling game.

There are a few others, but none I feel like writing about at this moment.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Last, but not least, we booted up Streets of Rage 4. It's decent, old school beat em' up. I don't know how much difference there is in playable characters. I chose the busty lady, and my brother picked the dude with metal arms. This is probably a game that we will play through a few times, so we started with the normal difficulty, and then work our way up, once we are familiar with the game, and especially the bosses.

How often did you 'accidentally' hit your brother's character?

 

[MerchantKing]

Last, but not least, we booted up Streets of Rage 4. It's decent, old school beat em' up. I don't know how much difference there is in playable characters. I chose the busty lady, and my brother picked the dude with metal arms. This is probably a game that we will play through a few times, so we started with the normal difficulty, and then work our way up, once we are familiar with the game, and especially the bosses.

How often did you 'accidentally' hit your brother's character?

When I played multiplayer games back in the day with friends, I accidentally hit them every chance I got.

 

[deuxhero]

Onirism
Cute little girl's plushie is stolen away and she chases the thief into a dreamscape, which she then proceeds to rip and tear her way through. It's a crazy mix of collection platformers like Mario 64 (but not collectathon: The collectables are limited to the currently useless dreamshards, upgrades for health/stamina/the four types of ammo, and a few new abilities that are part of the crit path, and a few bonus costumes awarded for clearing bonus levels. There are however chests with currency and free weapons that can be obtained elsewhere) and late 90s/early 2000s first/third person shooters, with very solid combat+platforming, and a really big variety of weapons (most of which aren't just variants of others). Carol's ill-tempered and violence prone bratty personality is a fun personality, and the writing does well with it.

Only con is it's not yet finished (small team of five people+lockdowns+illness prone lead. Lots of content regardless.) and it's in Unity so it runs way worse than it should (it's stable 60 FPS at 1440p on a 6700 XT with near max settings for me, but runs hotter than would expect for the level). Worth your 10 bucks.

 

[Abu Antar]

Last, but not least, we booted up Streets of Rage 4. It's decent, old school beat em' up. I don't know how much difference there is in playable characters. I chose the busty lady, and my brother picked the dude with metal arms. This is probably a game that we will play through a few times, so we started with the normal difficulty, and then work our way up, once we are familiar with the game, and especially the bosses.

How often did you 'accidentally' hit your brother's character?

After the shithousery in the Sackboy game, we both agreed to turn off "friendly fire", because we both knew what would happen if we had that enabled.

 

[Ezekiel]

Took me much too long to figure out this final puzzle in the ice dungeon. But it was smart. Have to activate the barrier switch in the other room again, go back upstairs, go around a few rooms, back downstairs, then upstairs again and then (with the barriers that you switched earlier down) drop a block that only moves one space down into this room, allowing you to keep the button depressed. Nice dungeon. Deeper and deeper underground, eight floors used creatively.

 

[v1c70r14]

I had to give up on my STALKER marathon not because Clear Sky was bad, but it was more of the same and reaching the center of the zone a second time wasn't as appealing a proposal as the first.

Instead I booted up Shadow of the Colossus on my PS2 during the weekend and the game doesn't just hold up but set a bar that no other game has yet cleared. It's not just a technical achievement to have a game run from the disc and render an open world as beautifully as it does, but also without loading times, and no noticeable pop-in on a CRT television. The gameplay minimalism goes well together with the bare-bones story and the windswept large open landscapes. There's an attention to detail in the virtual environments that not even Rockstar came close to replicating. The horse is also still the best animated horse in a video game.

They released a remake for the PS4 with "enhanced" graphics but I think the old way of doing things was superior. The large brushstrokes the environments were made with are just inherently better in giving you a sense of scale and in terms of scope than the newer industry standard of very detailed but messy models, which might look great up close, but the copied hyper-details give you asset fatigue over time and doesn't look as great over the distance as the textures do.

The underwater screen effect blows even current year AAA titles out of the water. I found a lonesome lake up in the plains to the north-west and it was populated by large fishes and stray turtles moved about in the grass next to it. Birds of different kinds are found in the world, doves populate some locations, while in other places you might be accompanied by an intrigued eagle as you ride. Massive ruins are at times encountered, broken columns, suggestions of things that was. The lush hair of the colossi look better than anything produced by the short-lived meme of Nvidia hair physics. The hero's feet connect with the ground no matter the angle and his cape moves in the wind and with his movements.

In 2005 the Japanese did the video game equivalent of the first moon landing and it's still a wonderful game to play, the total removal of fat and filler is still refreshing, the indulgent vistas breathtaking, the technical and artistic skill even more impressive than back then, but knowing that such heights were not reached after it makes the experience bittersweet. It's far removed from the increasingly bad competency crisis of modern video game development, the minimal story and setup is akin to a Slavic/Germanic hero myth but still got good press. Revisiting the game is just like climbing on top of one of the ruins in the game, taking in some half-buried monument, like standing in the shadow of a giant, or colossus even.

It's one of few game I'd rate 10/10 and it's a testament to that the artistic and technical skill of the people making a game is more important than hardware or budgets.

 

[Beggar]

Just finished Lies of P. It's the closest thing to Bloodborne, tbh it rips it plain vulgarly. But this time your enemies are puppets that are set in a world of Syberia. All those homages would be a bad thing if the game was bad, but it really isn't. It's pretty long compared to Bloodborne but very well balanced and polished. The only complain I have it turned into a monster killer in the second half, where are the puppets man.
7.5/10

 

[Morgoth]

Doom (2016) - First time the game is actually clicking with me.
Mask of the Betrayer - A masterpiece from a bygone era.

 

[Ezekiel]

I guess accessing maiden dungeon 6 is my last major obstacle. Already entered maiden dungeon 7 but didn't have the required magic item that's presumably in dungeon 6. No idea how to get through the wall on the east side of the number 6 area in the dark world. Fighting the temptation to look up the solution, but getting bored with this literal brick wall.

Fifteen and a half hearts. Two bottles.

 

[rubinstein]

i am playing a bit of wh40k chaos gate (1998). i have never played it before, but i like it so far, despite the game being rather frustrating at times with its "unclear" rules. or at least they seem unclear to me. like some chaos space marines with heavy bolters are able to snipe my troops across the entire map, while my devastators cannot reach them, even after closing distance significantly. is this... normal? or the way blind (smoke) grenades work seems slightly cryptic. for example i throw blind inbetween me and enemy, i put my marine on overwatch and he kills enemy charging through smoke, but then during my turn i want to aim through smoke and i cant shoot enemy troops hidden inside or behind it. a lot of oddities here and there that dont help me in assessing the situation on the battlefield. as i said, this is annoying in a tactical game, but it's been bearable so far. i wouldnt mind occasionally losing soldiers to mistakes or randomness, but in the campaign it seems rather costly.

 

[POOPERSCOOPER]

Was playing Colony Ship as a supreme talker but found it too easy just picking the speech button so I restarted it as a combat/talker mix and turned on the normal difficulty (was doing the easy one). Game is okay, takes a bit to warm up to. I like the story which is a rare thing but you definitely get indie vibes from the game.

 

[Max Damage]

Just reached Master rank for the first time in Street Fighter 6. Finished Deadfire a few days ago, now playing Divinity: Original Sin 2 in breaks between SF6 sessions. First impressions on D:OS2 weren't good, now I'm enjoying it more, but I'm still early in the game, killing remaining hostiles before I move to Act 2.

 

[kites]

Just picked up Jagged Alliance 3, and there's lots to like if you aren't comparing it to JA2/1.13. It has many issues I could whinge about so far after playing for 14 hours, but the "one more move/day/# go up" aspect of certain games has always been addictive to my lesser brain. Also playing Nemesis: The Wizardry Adventure. It's been more of a comfort game before bedtime as it certainly doesn't excel in many categories, yet it still tickles that certain itch..

Next up is "Ripper" thanks to Darkozric's FPP Adventure game musings

 

[Darth Roxor]

HoMM2 stopped working all of a sudden after 2 weeks for no apparent reason. Thought it was very fishy, tried switching to fheroes2 but that doesn't support saves from the original game so fuck it, I'm not playing through the entire campaign again, and it doesn't have cheats to skip to the final mission where I got stuck either. It's actually pretty funny that the game would refuse to work on the final mission, because the last time I played it 15 years ago, I also stopped on the final one and never finished it, though back then it was the Roland campaign, this time Archibald.

So I started thinking what it could be. It's been like this for two days now, so just rebooting had to be out of the question. I also thought about a rare bug I once had with Gothic 2: NOTR where it would stop launching after I installed anything, but given that this HoMM2 was on my HDD for 15 years and worked without trouble when I launched it like 2 weeks ago, that also seemed unlikely.

I hit the internets for answers, and stumbled upon one extraordinary bug that matched my symptoms - if you don't reboot your PC for 25 days, the game will get stuck whenever you pickup any resources or finish any fight. Yep, that checks out. But I sure as hell haven't had my PC running for 25 days straight. But I figured whatever, let's try rebooting... and it worked. Turns out Windows 10 is fucking retarded or something and shutdown + start does NOT equal rebooting. WTF.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Turns out Windows 10 is fucking retarded or something and shutdown + start does NOT equal rebooting. WTF.

I have a secondary machine that runs Win10. I noticed that within 5 minutes of powering it up, it would lose internet connection for about 30 seconds.

It soon became apparent that this was an OS issue, but I couldn't imagine how to fix it.

Then one time, by accident, I did. How? I sent the computer into Sleep Mode instead of powering it down. Internet hasn't been bothering me since.

 

[Puukko]

Half-Life + MMod. It's refreshing to go back to simpler games from simpler times that still manage to be more engaging than modern ones. This one's a tasteful overhaul, focusing on weapons and combat. Consequently the graphics are nearly vanilla, and in fact the HD models toggle does nothing. I think it's mostly the weapon effects and gore that have been changed. Some 4-5 hours in, the game keeps layering on the challenges beyond simple gunfights and the difficulty is tough but fair. Funnily enough I find headcrabs to be tougher to deal with than soldiers a lot of the time.

My main gripes are technical. First, the HUD does not scale well and at 4K it's barely legible. Consequently I missed out on weapon upgrades for a while as I was simply not reading those tiny notifications, but damn did they enhance the gameplay once I did. Apparently the anniversary update fixes the HUD scaling, but I guess the mod is based on an older build. Secondly, while the audio design is quite good, the sound quality does the game no favors. I use Thief as a 90's sound design benchmark and while that game also suffers from compression, it's way more noticeable in Half-Life and on top of that everything is quite loud and filtered. It lends the game a unique soundscape for sure, but also makes it rather fatiguing to listen to. Also, the game is still quite janky, particularly when it comes to the NPCs. The first guard post-incident I came across, I didn't realize I could toggle him to follow so he followed me after I talked to him and he proceeded to unload half of his bullets onto me while trying to hit a headcrab zombie. Using ladders is an art onto itself, as they like to magnetically grip you if you get too close, but descending one is always a bit harrowing as you just have to trust the drop.

Funnily enough the mod comes with a couple fan campaigns built in, rather than the official expansions. I don't know if I'll go through the trouble of playing through Blue Shift or Opposing Force since I'd rather not adjust to the vanilla gameplay but who knows, I may give these fan creations a fair shake. HL2 is also on my list and going with MMod there too would be a natural fit, but we'll see.