What Video Game Are You Currently Playing?

[scalliano]

Finally decided to give Pacer another chance (it was still named Formula Fusion the last time I fired it up). For the uninitiated, it's a game made by R8 Games, comprised of former Psygnosis/SCE Studio Liverpool members and was meant to be the "spiritual successor" to WipEout. Spoiler: it isn't. There's a lot to like - the game opts for a loadout/upgrade system which places more emphasis on player ability rather than the Mario Kart-inspired randomized chaos of the WipEout games. The problem is that it's broken, both from a design and technical perspective with some absolutely boneheaded creative decisions that ruin the fun. Add in some awful UI bugs which flat out break the game if you don't know the workarounds and the whole thing falls apart. A shame, because the game's physics model is spot-on.

 

Interestingly, it was while I was browsing the web earlier today for a solution to the UI issues that I discovered that, just in the last week, the entire IP has been bought out by a crypto company and all support for the existing versions on Steam and consoles has been dropped. Get ready for some AG racing NFTs, I guess...

Edited June 17, 2023 by scalliano

[Jello]

I decided to try finishing Wolfenstein: The New Colossus. I bought it when it came out and maybe I was just burned out on Wolfenstein, maybe I had something better to do in 2017 (I know I did), or I got sick of cutscene after cutscene without enough Nazi killing, but for whatever reason I lost interest once I got to Venus. 

 

So I'm trying to finally go back and finish it, I got up to the point where you can either go to New Orleans, or use the Enigma Machine to kill more Nazis last night. So I spent some time killing Nazi Oberkommandos before I called it quits. I don't think I ever used the Enigma Machine when I was first playing it, so they're a fun distraction.

 

I am going to finally finish it this time, but the combat still just doesn't feel that fun. I like killing Nazis as much as the next guy, but there's something wrong with the feedback. The weapons seem like they should be really powerful (and they're certainly ridiculously over-modeled to give that impression, the MP looks like it should weigh ten pounds at least), but it still seems like it takes too many shots to down even your most run of the mill Nazi. 

 

Oh well, it does occasionally provide some really enjoyable moments of killing Nazis, and that's what's important I guess.

 

edit: I just realized I really abused the apostrophe when I was typing Nazis.

Edited June 18, 2023 by Jello

[Daytime Waitress]

Taking it slow with Tears of the Kingdom. Genuinely enjoying being back in this universe, so I'm in no rush to have it over and done with. Exploring and getting distracted are great ways to avoid the bloody awful main narrative anyway.

 

And because I occasionally need a break from farming items or getting one-shot by practically every enemy in Hyrule, I've just restarted HROT, because it's been over a month since it got out of Early Access and I plain up and forgot about it. Definitely forgot how fast it was, and how satisfying the weapons feel. Real happy I waited til all episodes were out to give it a proper shake, though.

Edited June 18, 2023 by Daytime Waitress

[Jello]

1 hour ago, Daytime Waitress said:

Taking it slow with Tears of the Kingdom. Genuinely enjoying being back in this universe, so I'm in no rush to have it over and done with. Exploring and getting distracted are great ways to avoid the bloody awful main narrative anyway.

 

And because I occasionally need a break from farming items or getting one-shot by practically every enemy in Hyrule, I've just restarted HROT, because it's been over a month since it got out of Early Access and I plain up and forgot about it. Definitely forgot how fast it was, and how satisfying the weapons feel. Real happy I waited til all episodes were out to give it a proper shake, though.

I wouldn't mind trying Tears of the Kingdom, I did enjoy my time with Breath of the Wild. But I had a Wii U, haven't invested in a switch yet. I had some problems with BOTW (aside from the miserable frame rate at times on the Wii U), but I would still love to try Tears of the Kingdom at some point. I think Legend of Zelda could work really damn well in an open world game, but the lack of well built dungeons in Breath of the Wild kind of threw me off. The Zelda series is known for it's clever puzzles and it's strict order for completion, so not having that was really odd. Just haphazardly running around the world looking for things to do isn't exactly the first thing I think of when Zelda comes to mind. But it worked well enough for BOTW for just faffing about and completely ignoring what you were supposed to do. But to me, that doesn't really seem like a Zelda game.

 

As for HROT, yeah it's pretty damn good. Aside from a few complaints I had about the end of E3, it's a fantastic game. My only real complaint is that I can't get the fucking "Just You Wait!" achievement. I haven't played those little handheld LCD games since the early 90's.

Edited June 18, 2023 by Jello

[WorldMachine]

DOOOOOooooooom.........

 

Constantly been playing it for the past 3 months!!! The lack of burnout is making me confused...

 

I need to go play Diablo of smth before John Romero comes out of my screen in his Icon of Sin gundam suit and makes me his bitch!

[Ubik]

Re-re-re-re-replaying System Shock 2, after the System Shock remake whetted my appetite for it. The remake was good, but it made it even more obvious that System Shock 1 walked so that System Shock 2 could run.

[Rudolph]

2 hours ago, Ubik said:

The remake was good, but it made it even more obvious that System Shock 1 walked so that System Shock 2 could run.

Eh, I disagree. System Shock 2 is a very different game that just so happens to feature SHODAN. Even its connection to the original is tenuous at best; those who are familiar with System Shock 2's inciting incident will know what I am talking about... :P

Edited June 19, 2023 by Rudolph

[siliconn]

Midnight Club Los Angeles, just bought an Eclipse

[Cynical]

18 hours ago, Ubik said:

Re-re-re-re-replaying System Shock 2, after the System Shock remake whetted my appetite for it. The remake was good, but it made it even more obvious that System Shock 1 walked so that System Shock 2 could run.

Aside from the crap controls/interface, SS1 is a better game than SS2, though.

[hybridial]

6 hours ago, Cynical said:

Aside from the crap controls/interface, SS1 is a better game than SS2, though.

 

Nah, I don't agree, I had a much better time with SS2 than I've even had trying to enjoy the SS1 remake, which well, I think loses quite a lot of charm after the first couple levels when it starts to run out of different enemy types, relies on enemy spawns more and more and honestly, the whole thing gets a bit obnoxious for me. 

[Cynical]

SS1 doesn't run out of different enemy types after the first couple of levels, though?  I mean, you don't even see the first Cortex Reaver until halfway through the game, and you don't see most of the organic enemy types until the Groves.  There's also enemy types that you see early but aren't supposed to actually fight until later, such as the invisible enemies on Maintenance, and enemies you've already seen start getting new weapons and behaviors later in the game.
 

SS2 relies more on random spawns than SS1 does, actually!  SS1 has a *lot* of hand-placed enemies and setpieces where Shodan taunts you and then triggers something, and will only start respawns once certain hand-placements have been killed.  SS2 is mostly random spawns from the start, with very few hand-placed encounters.  Also, in SS1, you can stop the random spawns on most floors if you explore adequately (Cyborg respawns can be stopped by dropping security on a floor to 0%, robot respawns can be stopped by turning off robot maintenance on Research), while in SS2, you can't.

 

SS2's only real advantages over SS1, aside from interface/controls (which really *are* crap in SS1, and the remake fixes), are the excellent stealth mechanics it inherited from Thief (although you don't get as many chances to use them, since there's only a few rooms with deep shadows; the few areas where you do get to really use them are the highlights of SS2) and the lack of cyberspace (which some people would debate me on, but having a real-time risk-reward game that you can get attacked during is better than having to play a crappy version of Descent).  Otherwise, SS1 is pretty much better in every way; less linear/handholdy, more interesting ways to play with and use the environment, better story/writing/lore, levels are larger and have fewer loading screens for a more "contiguous" experience, no endgame level-design quality collapse with the Rickenbacker/Body of the Many levels, etc.

[hybridial]

23 minutes ago, Cynical said:

Otherwise, SS1 is pretty much better in every way; less linear/handholdy, more interesting ways to play with and use the environment, better story/writing/lore, levels are larger and have fewer loading screens for a more "contiguous" experience, no endgame level-design quality collapse with the Rickenbacker/Body of the Many levels, etc.

 

You don't make as remotely a convincing argument as you probably think you do. I mean for one, whilst SS2 shows that it was quite rushed towards the end, I still liked those segments of that game more than a lot of SS1. SS1's level design is obtuse and designed to feel tedious to traverse. Now, they explain it in the lore, but that's not making me enjoy my time playing the game more. SS2 simplified the level design a bit but not to the extent it was a detriment, in fact I'd call is quite a major improvement; progression was satisfying in that game and in SS it feels so piecemeal and directionless. 

 

Also no, the SS remake's enemy respawning is atrociously constant, it's just frustrating and tedious and SS2 was nowhere near that bad. Yeah, you can totally stop it which is good, but until then you have to deal with it and it sucks; like it's really bad, multiple times has the game spawned like 4 or 5 enemies behind a door on a level after I respawned, so when I go up the lift to return back to where I died and open whatever door in the vicinity, the enemies have all grouped up and I'm left with the choice of using all my resources to plough through or try and go elsewhere (though that isn't always an option). It seems to be a consequence of how they handled both the enemy respawning mechanic and the AI, but all I can say is SS2 didn't do things like that, that make me legitimately hate it. Not even at the end. 

 

It also had the character building mechanic which, whilst unbalanced, was still pretty deep and satisfying to explore and SS feels kind of simplistic and empty without it. 

 

I'm not gonna say Nightdive didn't do a commendable job updating this game, but like Powerslave I find that I just don't like it very much, and System Shock 2 is way better, so I'm just gonna wait and see how the Enhanced Edition turns out. If they do a really good job with it that'll at least be something for me. 

[Cynical]

The log that gives a lore explanation for the level design being "mazelike" is new in the remake (the original made no such attempts at explaining this), and is one of the few areas where I think the remake made a minor misstep.  If you've ever been on a ship that's not specifically designed for tourists (like a cruise ship), you know the paths are cramped, convoluted, and mazelike; no explanation was necessary for this, it's just a completely needless bit of Fallout 2 in my System Shock lore.

 

SS2's simplification goes beyond the level design itself, but also the mission flow through the levels.  In SS1, there's nothing stopping you from going "off the rails"; get security low in Med, and then there's basically nothing stopping you from going wherever you want.  You can find some fun tools early by searching lategame areas early (like exploring Maintenance ASAP for the laser rapier), you can choose what order to do most of the tasks in, you can choose whether to prioritize story objectives or exploration (should I head to Flight Deck ASAP or really explore Executive?), once you clear Flight Deck you can blaze your own path for pretty much the entire rest of the game... meanwhile SS2 makes you do the whole thing step-by-step just how SHODAN wants you to.  "Turn on the power, go to engineering since it's literally the only place you can go, turn on the elevator, OOPS YOU GOT STUCK IN HYDRO LOL, do Hydro because you're literally forced to."  Then you can do 4 and 5 in any order... and then it's back on the rails for the rest of the game.  SS1's freedom is simply much more interesting.

 

The only spots I can think of where you can get 4 or 5 enemies in one spot on a respawn are on Research, and that's actually a quest-driven event; complaining about those spawns would be like complaining about the spawn rate in SS2 if you get caught by a security camera.  Read your logs more closely, one of them will tell you how to turn those spawns off.

 

The character building mechanic both gives and takes, but ultimately it's a net detriment because it limits what they can do with the "Metroidvania"-ish aspects that SS1 had.  SS1, by making character upgrades just things you find in the world, can put things behind the jump boot upgrades, it can create areas where the combat is insane if you don't have the enemy scanner, it can create areas where you need the environment protection upgrade to traverse safely, etc.  SS2 doesn't have any assurances that you'll have a particular upgrade at a particular point in the game (or at all), and thus can't do any of this.  It does add some juice to second and third playthroughs, but SS1's approach leads to a much richer first playthrough.

[WorldMachine]

Diablo 1, because I needed a cure to my crippling addiction to 90's demon slaying, with more 90's demon slaying...

 

It's like trying to fix your smoking addiction by vaping instead, it didn't work

Edited June 23, 2023 by WorldMachine

[Daytime Waitress]

On 6/18/2023 at 2:29 PM, Jello said:

I wouldn't mind trying Tears of the Kingdom, I did enjoy my time with Breath of the Wild. But I had a Wii U, haven't invested in a switch yet. I had some problems with BOTW (aside from the miserable frame rate at times on the Wii U), but I would still love to try Tears of the Kingdom at some point. I think Legend of Zelda could work really damn well in an open world game, but the lack of well built dungeons in Breath of the Wild kind of threw me off. The Zelda series is known for it's clever puzzles and it's strict order for completion, so not having that was really odd. Just haphazardly running around the world looking for things to do isn't exactly the first thing I think of when Zelda comes to mind. But it worked well enough for BOTW for just faffing about and completely ignoring what you were supposed to do. But to me, that doesn't really seem like a Zelda game.

 

I can't tell you it's worth picking up a whole console for, but overall I'd say that if you enjoyed the first game, you're gonna enjoy this outing.

 

It's definitely not perfect, though: a lot of the niggles from BOTW are still here (Z-targeting is still somehow worse than in 1997's Ocarina of Time), exacerbated (I don't remember the BOTW camera lodging itself in Link's colon as often), or entirely new (the party [?] system is complete dogshit). As enjoyable as it is, it definitely feels like more has been glued onto the existing structure, rather than smoothing over any cracks. Which is appropriate given how the fusion mechanic takes prominence.

 

And that loops back to what you said about it not feeling like a Zelda game. I skipped the series post-Majora's Mask, so maybe I didn't get burned out on the Zelda formula of dungeon-key item-dungeon. But here I don't feel like Link anymore - I feel like modern sandbox adventure game shmuck buggering about with physics puzzles and farming items because drop rates are abysmal. It's great. I am enjoying it. But when I dropped a boss's defenses and it was transformed into a completely helpless creature, Link and the four sages just started beating the living piss out of it, and I actually stopped and thought, "these are the saviours of Hyrule?". It's just not about the classic hero's quest anymore.

Edited June 23, 2023 by Daytime Waitress

[BGreener]

Playing a shooter simply called SLAYERS X: TERMINAL AFTERMATH: VENGEANCE OF THE SLAYER and it's cute as the dickens. It's styled as if the game was created by an edgy teen in the fictional universe that spawned from Hypnospace Outlaw.

 

 

Super cute, gives me some "Redneck Rampage meets Cruelty Squad" vibes.

 

On 6/20/2023 at 1:35 PM, hybridial said:

You don't make as remotely a convincing argument as you probably think you do.

Aw that's harsh, fam.

[hybridial]

13 hours ago, BGreener said:

Aw that's harsh, fam.

 

It just comes from having a frustrating time with the game, I was annoyed. System Shock 2 just clicked with me far more and I really think it's the better game. 

[Lizardcommando]

I was recently replaying Slipstream. It's a fun racing game similar to Outrun, but with a neat drifting mechanic. The soundtrack is really good too.

 

I also caved in and bought Battlebit Remastered after seeing a bunch of gameplay clips on Youtube lol. It's basically Battlefield 2/Battlefield: Bad Company but with simpler graphics. It's pretty entertaining so far. I kinda wish there was an unranked singleplayer mode to mess around with bots.

[Rudolph]

Finally finished Mega Man X3 with the Zero Project romhack. To my relief, Sigma's fights are nowhere near as irritating as his X4-X5 forms.

 

But speaking of Sigma, it just occurred to me that Sigma's presence in almost every Mega Man X game past X1 is simply not necessary to the plot: we keep having to be told that he masterminded the games' events, but aside from showing up at the very end for a couple of boss fights, his involvement is usually minimal and it only serves to take away the other villains' agency. With the exception of X5 and maybe X8, every game could have done away with him altogether and played pretty much the same.

 

X2 could have just been about the Shadow Hunters reviving Zero to get revenge on X.

 

X3 and X4 could have just been about Dr. Doppler and the Repliforce starting a rebellion on their own.

 

X6 could have just been Gate trying to take advantage of the power vacuum left by the Eurasia Incident.

 

X7 could have just been Red trying to get Axl back.

Edited June 26, 2023 by Rudolph

[Cosmic79]

Mostly Just cause 3 and Deep Rock Galactic/Halo Infinite with friends these days.

[Azuris]

On 6/23/2023 at 10:16 PM, WorldMachine said:

Diablo 1, because I needed a cure to my crippling addiction to 90's demon slaying, with more 90's demon slaying...

 

It's like trying to fix your smoking addiction by vaping instead, it didn't work

 

Muaha i am also playing it, made a second run to get some additional Stuff and XP on  Normal and now i am on Floor 6 on Nightmare.

Playing  mostly on my Smartphone with a Controller, but here and there i am throwing the Save Game back to the PC.

 

I am also started to play Yakuza 0 on PC, as those Gamed camed to Gog.

Fun Time with it! Such Games truly aren't made normally nowadays

[eltiolavara9]

ive been playing street fighter 3 and by playing i mean picking random characters and mashing buttons and looking at the animations and music and going like "wow"

[Mr. Freeze]

Playing Battlebit Remastered and loving it. This was my best streak, wound up going 49-8 at the end. 

[whybmonotacrab]

Herald of Havoc looks like absolute garbage but trust me it's one of the best Boomer Shooters out. It actually reminds me of level concepts you'd see in the doom mapping scene. It's challenging and changes between classic feeling boomer shooter levels, more combat puzzle oriented stuff, and all out slaughter fests. The levels are short and incredibly moreish though. Highly recommend.

[Rudolph]

54 minutes ago, whybmonotacrab said:

Herald of Havoc looks like absolute garbage

Nah, such title goes to the likes of Cruelty Squad or, more controversially, Nightmare Reaper.

 

I have yet to try out Herald of Havoc, but it looks fine in a low-budget, bare-bones kind of way.

[Midway64]

Ultrakill Demo, because of the same reason as WorldMachine said.

Curing a hellspawn killing addiction by killing more hellspawn... Jeez

[whybmonotacrab]

10 hours ago, Rudolph said:

Nah, such title goes to the likes of Cruelty Squad or, more controversially, Nightmare Reaper.

 

I have yet to try out Herald of Havoc, but it looks fine in a low-budget, bare-bones kind of way.

I didn't mean in terms of graphics. I guess my gut reaction was "that looks generic af." Like there wasn't anything to hook me on the steam page. If it wasnt for guys talking about it on discord I wouldn't have given it a second look. Cruelty Squad and Nightmare Reaper are ugly, but in an interesting way. They have an identity.

[Midway64]

Dreams PS4

 

It's a beautiful UGC game made by the same team* that made LittleBigPlanet (another UGC game for the PS3), most creations you find will give some good vibes coming from C64 days (as a rough unproved example), making little things you could share with your friends or BBS locals.

The game has been dropped from live support, meaning there's not gonna be more major updates, which means no PC port, no online multiplayer, etc.

That doesn't mean it has been discontinued, it's far from that, there's a pretty active player base which keeps making some good hits, and critical bugs will be ironed out.

You can check https://indreams.me out for more details.

 

Honestly, thinking about it, I wish I had my PS3 to play some LBP GOTY, or better yet, LBPK, to relive my early childhood.

 

*Media Molecule, and yes, IT IS MADE BY THE SAME PEOPLE, there's still a good amount of employees coming from the early LBP days.

[MrFroz]

Warcraft 3: Reforged. It took years, but I really feel the game is in very solid condition right now in comparison to the mess it was at launch.

[Sunroses]

Doom 2, lmao. But also Luck Be A Landlord, Obduction, Hi-Fi Rush, and Minecraft.

 

Our taste in games might be incredibly all over the place >>