10 hours into Elden Ring and already into which was around hour 30 my first playthrough. Using all the summons and things plus the strategy guide tomes with my journal has been fun and very helpful. Very nice to stay off the phone/laptop when stuck and plan things out before starting a session. The experience of Bloodborne and DS1 definitely improved my melee abilities. Hoping to clear Raya tonight and get to the Capital or Radahan by end of tomorrow. Samurai is very fun!
Links Awakening is staring daggers at me on my night table but the Elden Ring calls to me…
I got Metal Gear Solid Master Collection on sale for $20 and started with Metal Gear but wasn’t feeling it, so I jumped into Metal Gear Solid and got hooked! I beat it over the course of a few days, which is pretty fast for me. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and I really appreciate how the game progresses with weapons, access, etc. in what it ultimately a small map. It was never too tedious, the atmosphere is great, and I enjoyed the bonkers story. I will admit that I did look up guides for any boss fight I couldn’t figure out after three tries. My patience for that kind of stuff is pretty thin these days.
I totally see why MGS1 is beloved. It has aged well IMO.
My relationship with MGS is kind of weird. I played 4 on PS3 in high school and loved it but didn’t have any context. Can’t be sure if I’d still love it now, but I did at the time. I played a lot of Peace Walker on PSP. And then a fair amount of 5. I’ve also read the plot summary a bunch for the whole series, I like the lore and story. Still surprises when playing tho because I forget or small details are missed.
I’m contemplating doing a full MGS and spin-offs playthrough, but we’ll see how long I stick with it.
For now though I’m all about Link’s Awakening for the game club!
I got ZeroRanger to work in Whisky today. Well I mean, I updated Whisky and now it runs without issue. I don’t know if this is down to the GPTK2 update that dropped at WWDC or what.
I’ve been curious about this green and orange vertical shooter for a long time. Its very stylish and I love the tunes I’ve heard so far—plus it’s got a sound test!! Nice sprite art and animation. I feel like the gimmick is going to take time to reveal itself (the first gameover was trippy). I hope I have the patience to stick through to the end because I am no good at scrolling shooters, certainly no good at bullet hells. It’s been very generous with lives and continues so far though.
I don’t know if this is a genre I’ll always have to admire from afar. Scrolling shooters look so beautiful sometimes, like moving wall scrolls and tapestries. I want to enjoy playing a fast-paced one someday.
Glad you had a good time with MGS1. What system are you on? Been curious since the Master Collection came out how they translated the hardware-specific stuff to non-PlayStation versions of the game; I gather they rerecorded button names but what about the Pyscho Mantis stuff? (I can look it up but it’s more fun to ask here)
This is obviously your choice but it is a lot of games. Playing 1-4 is definitely manageable, but don’t let completionism burn you out before getting to the other Solid games. Maybe the Game Club will pick Metal Gear Ghost Babel later this year… (November specifically)
Neither am I but I was able to beat ZeroRanger (I died a lot). The tunes are worth sticking around for. If you do run up against any walls you can always ask for cryptic advice, maybe @TracyDMcGrath can offer some tips.
I went to an arcade bar tonight and they had this Dragon Ball Z 2: Super Fighters cabinet. Did this even release in the US? The English seemed alright but it said Gokou instead of Goku. Anyway, this was actually really cool and fun. Simple enough to have a good time but you could tell there was some hidden depth to it. The rest of the arcade was standard fare but this felt like a legit unique game to find out here
Now taking a little break from trying to have a written response to every game I play with a casual playthrough of Final Fantasy VI (TWUE, Super NT.) Despite living it I never finished it so wish me luck.
After seeing that Monster Hunter Stories 1 got rereleased for Switch, I figured I would go back in on MHS2, which I’ve owned for a while but which I trailed off on back when I first got it. I still think it’s an excellent sort of game, and it reads a lot to me like a combo of a streamlined RPG, a 3D Zelda-like, and a Pokemon game. It’s probably never going to interest fans of ‘more serious’ RPGs but I think there are a lot of interesting systems in place that make it worth checking out. I’ve never once been able to have much fun with a main-series Monster Hunter game, and I’ve gotten exasperated about MH as a series and its fanbase in the same way I have with FromSoft games, but this one I think is exactly my speed. Will I finish it this time? Maybe! Or, maybe I’ll find out why it was that I stopped playing last time (my guess is that later game stuff will feel repetitive)!
Thank you for posting this! I remember @humblepopstar posting about Before the Green Moon too and it sounded really interesting, so you both convinced me to finally to pick it up this morning, and I got hooked. I feel like the codified cozy game you describe is because people are trying to make a game that appeals to everyone, and it loses its personality. While this one is not trying to appeal to everyone or be particularly cheerful, instead it’s going for a particular emotion that most farming games wouldn’t take a chance on. It feels very unique and understated, and it grows on you as you play.
I appreciate that it drops you in and lets you figure things out without telling you. It doesn’t gate you out of things, I think I had chickens for about 10 days before the chicken catching tutorial. The map is a little hostile to navigate at first, but I think it’s a good choice. At the start of the dry season I spent three in-game days looking for apples and vending machines before I found them and I was getting concerned about my chickens’ health! I also like that this game has a finite goal that you’re pointed toward that is big enough that you can’t just rush toward it, and the pace that you are making tradeoffs seems worth it.
I will say, the very low-key music and rain did almost put me to sleep at one point. I feel like there’s not as much pressure on the player to be productive as in something like Stardew Valley, so I think it would be a good bedtime game.
Thanks to all the Bioware talk in the gaming news thread, it made me go back and poke around Baldur’s Gate 1 a bit. I’m only in Beregost, and I think what stops me from really getting immersed is that it does the Skyrim thing where it gives you too many sidequests at once that pull your focus away from the main story line. Since Baldur’s Gate can be punishing when you’re low-level, it makes it feel like you should be doing all the sidequests even if it’s not so interesting. Would any experienced BG1 players recommend just focusing on the iron crisis?
You can certainly do so—and in fact, early on there are some light incentives for doing so. Several of your early companions will grow frustrated and leave if you take too long getting to the “main scenario” (though you don’t have to go too far into it to mollify them). There’s quite a bit of time before they’ll leave, but I can see a new player still running into that if they aren’t careful
The first major dungeon can be a bit difficult if you make a beeline for it, but it’s absolutely doable. Personally, I think Baldur’s Gate and Bioware games more generally often work best if you do the quests that seem fitting or interest you most, since the strongest parts of their games tend to be the narrative throughlines of the critical path and companion quests (though these are a much smaller slice of Baldur’s Gate itself, with the sequel and Bioware’s future games placing greater emphasis on them)
Resolving the short term part of the crisis (by completing that first major dungeon I mentioned) also takes care of the trouble with weapons breaking over time, for what it’s worth, which is another reason to focus on it early on
With that said, the “iron crisis” is a pretty open-ended thing in the beginning of the game, and it’s set up as a sort of systemic problem that can be solved over time (as opposed to far more pressing main quests that can be a staple of the genre). There’s narrative room to explore and tackle sidequests as you find yourself with the taste for it, and since quests can be fairly rewarding in terms of experience if nothing else, you’ll probably have a better experience if you don’t ignore them completely
Wow, I didn’t know that. I got the sense that things might be time sensitive, given how the days are logged. The ambition is crazy. I admire how many details and potentially missable stuff they put into these things even if it does make it feel a bit more intimidating haha.
A number of early companions have time sensitive quests of this nature, though most of them aren’t tied to the main quest so closely as the first handful are
It’s not the worst thing in the world if anyone does leave, though. The game has something like 25 available companions, so it’s sort of assumed you’re going to miss or lose some!
What’s better than a murder mystery? How about a grand conspiracy? But, wait, what’s better than a grand conspiracy? How about, two grand conspiracies which are unrelated and non-overlapping in conspirators and methods, but with equivalent goals, and which occur at the exact same time?
I’m playing on the Switch! It’s been nice for playing a bit on the TV and handheld. They updated the graphics to have the proper icons per system, but for the dialogue in MGS1 and 2 (at least from what I can remember), the dialogue either stops for where they’d say the button or the voice actor uses a generic name like “the action button” to speak about the button.
On this topic, I’m about 3.5 hours into MGS2, roaming around the Big Shell. The leap from MGS1 PS1 to MGS2 HD is really impressive and staggering—I can imagine it being really impactful at the time. I find that MGS2 plays a lot smoother than 1 while maintaining a lot of the same systems and feel. The Tanker part was great, felt a bit like Ground Zeroes as a sandbox to explore for a bit. Loved the bit during the presentation, was pretty funny.
For both of these games, the gameplay highlights are when I accidentally trigger a guard and then start panicking going “oh shit oh shit oh shit” and manage to barely escape.
I liked the opening of Still Wakes The Deep and I have faith it will wind up being at least a decent game and perhaps this is an unfair complaint to level against it in particular, but man alive can we do something other than eldritch. I think we need to hit pause on lovecraftian. It’s been 100 years and it’s a dead end it never goes anywhere good lord
My brother got me into Balatro, the “poker roguelike.” I spent much of the weekend playing around with it. It has a similar gameplay loop as FTL: 8 game segments, takes 15-45 minutes per run, it’s very easy to play consecutive runs. It tickles that part of me that likes making the numbers go big through discovering ways abilities and modifiers go together.
Talking in detail about the gameplay feels a little like telling people about weird dreams, but just to get at some of the strategic range I’m finding, I’ve won so far by
Building a straight-generating machine.
Making almost every card in my deck the same suit and doing flushes
Two pairs, all the time
Getting bonuses whenever I used tarot cards, to the point I could play a single card and win every time
There are lots of possibilities, and it’s fun to sift through them. The following screenshot is from my straight/flush run.
Balatro is so good. The way that more jokers become available keeps opening up new strats and challenging me to get out of bed habits.
My current goal is trying to get the 1,000,000 points in one hand trophy. Trying to get a good run of jokers while stacking my deck full of enhanced cards but it is tricky.
I even brought it along on our last road trip!
bit during the presentation, was pretty funny.