I‘ve been enjoying the heck out of Bowser’s Fury. While I agree it feels a little microtasky, the presentation is so damn charming that I don‘t really mind. It feels like the final evolution of the Mario 64 design, with the way the little puzzle box islands slightly warp towards the next objective every time you return to them. That it’s all seamlessly done in the backdrop of this huge open map feels like it should have been done years ago. Highly recommend it, especially if you missed 3D world which is as chill a hangout game as a Mario game ever has been.
@MichaelDMcGrath#17299 I should have clarified, this game is excellent. It might be the first 3d Mario I collect everything in.
Gave up on Map Pack 1 of Quake. I kept getting stuck in the levels and they were all the same enemies. Quake doesn‘t have a lot of mechanics so a lot of it’s variation is from different enemy types, and if you take those away it really loses the formula. Map Pack 2 thankfully realizes this and gives most of the old enemies back. I also installed a sourceport, quakespasm, so I can at least play them decently. The improvements are incredible, but I do miss the chunky lo-fi look of Stock Quake.
Lately I‘ve been chipping away at Steins;Gate, which I’ve been wanting to play since the PC version was first localized. I‘m not very far along yet but I have enjoyed what I’ve read.
In other news I've ordered Ring Fit Adventure and I'm hoping to make it a routine since it's been way too cold to do anything outside.
I just finished blasting through Shadow of Mordor. I had been interested in the nemesis system and decided to track the game down after watching a Game Makers Toolkit video about how it creates player-driven narratives.
I thought the game was fun but I quickly became bored with the combat and exploration. Tracking down enemy captains who I built a rivalry with and manipulating the rise of loyal orcs was very fun, but the story missions didn't offer much enjoyment. The game ends very abruptly and without a challenging boss encounter. I also found myself becoming far too powerful by the end game. I had much more fun being killed and then seeking the reaction of the orc who slew me when I returned to face them. I really like how they gamified death and gave failure more interesting consequences, but no one could touch me after gaining a few skill upgrades.
I hear the sequel improves on pretty much everything the first game had to offer but I'm not really interested in checking it out.
Nobody in my life cares so I will share with all of you that I have finally placed the lord vessel in dark souls after approx. 35 hours of play. Now I'm trying to figure out which area/boss I feel most capable of tackling next. Reinforced Club Team Shout me out.
Additionally, my coworker is a pretty normal dude who has not played a videogame since x360, but he acquired a ps5 recently so I have been playing COD Cold War Zombies with him on a weekly basis. That has been a lot more rewarding than I thought it would be, but I feel like the systems & menus in that game are heinous and nearly unusable as someone who hasn't played a COD game since the original Modern Warfare.
I just finished “G Sting”, because of @yeso s mention. Gonna do a little write up about it and JG Ballard for my cyberpunk thread.
It's very good!
@KingNothing#17365 i recently gave mordor a shot. on ps3 lol so maybe that had something to do with it, but like most third-person action games where you can do a lot of stuff I was initially bewildered by the control scheme, so had a lot of instances of “ahhh some dudes see me what should I do ahhh fuck i'm dead!!” think this has more to do with my own abilities though. games are leaving me behind
worst part about the game, at least on ps3, is that there's an agonizing like 2 second pause every time you exit the menu. i hate it
@kylebrizzown#17399 Id do the catacombs first, probably. Also check out the helpline thread for some sick Dark Souls advice.
i‘m playing through the japanese release of steambot chronicles slowly (i do not know japanese, though i have played the north american release way too many times and memorize the game by heart). while there aren’t too many differences, the fact that you can actually name your character rather having to stick with the name “vanilla” threw me off and the voices for some of the characters in japanese def. suit them more than the english voices did. i do not own a japanese ps2, so i had to rip the iso, burn it onto a blank dvd-r and get a freemcboot memory card to play it
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I just played through Florence. Finally had a reason to play through it. My partner and I had a fight this weekend and I knew the game was about a relationship starting and slowly, painfully ending. I guess I just felt like I deserved to feel bad by seeing this potential future with a person I love more than anything. It worked, it made me feel awful and triggered a lot of relationship anxieties I have. A useful tool for self-flagellation but also not something that I think is going to stick with me. It‘s entirely what you’d expect from a game the creator describes as being very inspired by 500 Days of Summer. Some of the touch screen mechanics were okay.
(sorry for therapy posting)
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@sabertoothalex#17540 It’s entirely what you’d expect from a game the creator describes as being very inspired by 500 Days of Summer
thanks for the warning, running at a full sprint away from this game
@KingNothing#17365 I will go to bat for Shadow of War and say that it makes Shadow of Mordor obsolete. The first game is a variation on Assassin's Creed. Shadow of War makes everything so much bigger and more chaotic that the game almost becomes a brawler. Fighting a boss and his horde of goons and then another two bosses burst into the battle? Sure you could run away, but the real joy is in seeing just how far you can push it and stay alive (plus you can rack up bigger combos and do more damage the more hectic things get). Even turning a downed general against his fellow orcs mid battle make the first game a stealth action game and the second a chaos simulator. I feel fortunate that I ended up playing Shadow of War first.
@tapevulture#17413 Shadow of Mordor is already a so-so game, but I tried the PS3 / Xbox 360 version and it basically shouldn't have been made for those systems. It is the Cyberpunk 2077 of its day, but with out all the hype etc. Def try the higher def version, but also maybe just jump to Shadow of War.
im playing guacamelee. has anyone played this??
i really like the difficulty curve in the game. gives you lots of time to get comfortable with the mechanics. there are a lot of them, probably too many for my tastes. by the end it's a little hard but not anywhere close to, say, a roguelite. no masocore vibes. has an interesting approach to 2D melee combat where the primary goal is to get enemies into the air and juggle them, since otherwise most attacks knock enemies away where you can no longer do damage to them.
it has a breezy feel which i think is typically an attribute for games that are easy at the same time that they are fun. not really the case with this game since there's more of a difficulty factor, but you can easily drop in and drop out, there are tons of checkpoints, and there is a commitment to regular inclusion of explicitly "fun" segments, like falling into a series of chained teleporters that push you across the screen in a quarter second, or a low ceiling with spikes that you're meant to toss a big group of easy enemies into. it's less than 10 hours. there is a chicken squawk sound effect that i really enjoy, sorry
on the other hand there is an omnipresent story that is dumb, at least for my tastes, there are tons of horrible jokes, there are innumerable references to classic retro gaming franchises and painful early aughts meme stuff like homestar runner. so that may be a turn off for you
@tapevulture#17549 I just finished the sequel about 2 hours ago lmao
I agree with everything you said and it's all true in 2 well. I don't remember the specifics of 1, but by looking at some reviews real quick I think 2 is more of the same. It has a nice grappling hook though.
The weird obsession with memes and references is still present. There's a section where they "make fun" of people who did not like this by... just showing quotes like "I was liking this but the meme stuff turned me off." It's all in jest but man, I guess they really love their memes. Good for them and anyone else who likes it, I prefer a bit more subtlety. A NPC straight up namedrops an Undertale character at one point and I felt my brain losing HP
Gonna agree with @tapevulture and @Snowdecahedron Guacamelee is a game where I remember as fun in the moving around and doing things (and I think I did everything in game), but totally a groaner when it comes to the story stuff. It aesthetically pleasing too. I generally like modern games more than retro games, but like once your on planet Zebes in Super Metroid, it sure doesn‘t waste your time with nonsense. I dunno SotN dialogue is funny because its earnest bad, not be cause it’s winking at you bad.
I just finished Pathologic 2 and that was a little too easy and breezy so I'm going to play a hardcore game, Stardew Valley
@robinhoodie#17591 I want to suggest in all sincerity that most games which feature dialog don‘t actually need any dialog, but that’s probably an exaggeration.
What percentage of total dialog featured in video games could be wiped from history before "beneficial overall" gives way to "detrimental"? 90? 80?
Okay, I've been waiting to post in this thread long enough.
I lost a lot of momentum after new years when it comes to utterly obliterating several rpgs in a row with over 90 hour complete save files.
Before I begin, I welcome anyone here with an original or hot take on Twilight Princess to come in and say something. There's a lot about this game that still hasn't been said, which is rare for a Zelda game. I think time will tell, since a lot of zoomers love this game.
So I took a break and decided to commit to enjoying Twilight Princess. Playing the Gamecube version for the first time. I haven't picked up TP since I played the wii version at launch and really hated it. This is because it came out in 2006, one year after I had played Shadow of the Colossus. SotC of course set a new standard for me, a big boy. It primed me for enjoyment of Demon's Souls. For everything SotC and Demon's souls did right, TP did very poorly. Blocking off areas, incessant tool tips for picking up what are essentially just coins, and a few other things really had me hating TP at launch.
Now, I'm a bit more ready to enjoy what is essentially Extra/Cut Wind Waker content molded into Ocarina of Time 2, with just a hint of Majora's Mask flavor. It's just so difficult for me to really enjoy this game for what it is. To me it represents when I started to hate video games, and I haven't stopped since. It represents the first step into three whole generations of diminishing returns in the industry. That doesn't mean it's not an excellent game. Even the worst FF or Zelda games are still great....
It's been a slog though. I'm doing a lot of hanging out, talking to animals, sidequests, and fishing. I have all but 2 of the bugs. This may seem counterintuitive if I just want this game to end already so I can move on but, I think rushing through is what made me hate it more the first time. The great parts of this game is all the chill side content. I'm enjoying it more by taking it slow. The combat is hollow to the point where I'm just hanging out with enemies tethered to me, encircling me, taking away only a quarter heart every 3 seconds. The dungeons are beautiful, but make me feel like my IQ is dropping as I go through the motions to complete them. So wether I Do or Don't, either way it's a rough time.
TP made space for so much awesome stuff to happen, without really doing much with it. When I saw the concept art of midna and the masks and stuff, it made more sense. They had so many excellent concepts for what could have been Majora's Mask 2, and I'm guessing miyamoto just had to water it down, or maybe Zelda had become too big a machine for them to do anything actually interesting and new.
I love the use of N64 sounds, like the singing voice on hyrule field at night.
I really want to get past this game, but I don't want to rush it, and I'd be lying if I didn't say _this game is comfy_. It has the same game feel as Wind Waker, for obvious reasons. I dipped my toe back into my NG+ file on Wind Waker though and well, it's just so much better in almost every way... The combat is especially more satisfying and well animated.