demagogue on 3/1/2020 at 12:21
I'm slow playing Red Dead Redemption 2. No use giving an opinion this early, but here are some early impressions anyway. The world is fantastic, characters are very credible, the gameplay is functional, the story is better than GTAV, the flow is kind of railroaded so far (no pun intenteded), but I haven't really ventured off to explore yet.
Sulphur on 3/1/2020 at 16:25
It's not like you have the option to fast play it, anyhoo! While I suppose that's a criticism, I find myself in the surprising position of liking how measured and unhurried the entire thing is. It's almost meditative, lolling around the land and having easy conversations and getting into difficult situations, just trolling around and bumping into the next new thing or person or contextual event around the corner. This is good partly, I suppose, because I love breathing in detail, and they've put in all these unnecessary odds and ends all over the place that end up enriching the world all the same. It's a nice game to marinate in as long as you accept how restrictive some of its things can be in the context of verisimilitude. But again, I find I don't mind that I can, for instance, only carry so many pelts - it makes a certain sort of tactile sense in the game.
Though, yeah, some of its things are fairly irritating/stupid. The controls are stoopid: one time, I wanted to shift focus onto an NPC who I'd saved from bandits, ended up aiming my gun at him, and he went 'OH SO THAT'S HOW IT IS, TINKERBELL? NOW DIE, YOU PISS-RIDDEN MANGE URCHIN'. Lost my goddamn hat in that fight. 'course, I could magick it back off my horse, but these folks just don't have them scruples. It's the kind of thing that makes me go, 'yeah, these controls aren't particularly a benchmark for common sense.'
Still, though. Those forests. Those canyons. That fog. Everything's forgivable when you gallop into that pea soup and all you can hear is the night closing in around you, alone but for the steady beat of your horse's hooves on the earth. It's a special thing.
Thirith on 3/1/2020 at 16:47
Yeah, the slowness of RDR2 is something I love about the game. I'm fine with being forced to slow down, because I think it fits the story, characters and world. What I would absolutely criticise is the mission design and how restrictive it is, and while I don't think the controls are quite as nonsensical as you do, Sulphur, they definitely could've done with another iteration or five. But the slowness is something we so rarely get in games and it fits so well here.
Renault on 3/1/2020 at 20:00
Quote Posted by icemann
* Super Mario Odyssey - Played for a couple of hours, then not played since.
This is actually a great game, you should give it another go.
Renzatic on 3/1/2020 at 20:35
What Brethren said. Odyssey is awesome.
Anarchic Fox on 4/1/2020 at 07:06
Quote Posted by Brethren
This is actually a great game, you should give it another go.
I got it for Christmas, and wholly agree. [spoiler]The Darker Side of the Moon is tormenting me, though. :([/spoiler]
EvaUnit02 on 2/7/2024 at 00:40
Diablo IV is such a boring game. The 25-47 hour campaign feels like it's been balanced for play by primary school kids, so easy. I'm playing Necromancer on World Tier 2 (almost lv 50) and I haven't even died once and probably haven't had to use health potions more than a dozen times. Started playing about a month ago to keep my co-op partner friend happy, so just in time to benefit from the June 2024 "Loot balance 2.0" update which supposedly "made the game good" according to influencers/media.
Currently I play it ~30mins everyday to farm for Bing Rewards points to spend on free Game Pass subs for when I need them. You get Bing points for playing 20 mins on Xbox Series every day, with 250 combo reward for playing 5 days a week on Xbox Series console.
Positives: The art direction and Siberia-esque frozen Slavic setting are pretty cool, IMO.
The game that I actually want to be playing? Far Cry 6 replay in co-op on Xbox Series X, but my friend is sick a lot lately or tired from family obligations so I don't get to play much these days. Through the Ubisoft Connect app cloud servers I retrieved my old PC save, so I've benefitted from NG+. We're currently 3/5ths of the way through the campaign.
Over the recent months we've been playing every Far Cry game with co-op in succession, starting with FC5, followed by New Dawn, FC3, FC4 and finally FC6.
FC3 has a dedicated co-op campaign but IMO it's the worst of the lot due to technical issues. The Ubisoft servers are as flaky and unreliable as ever, so we'd have to replay whole swaths of areas after connection drops. I'm still considering buying my friend a copy of FC3 on PC so that we can play the PC/PS3 exclusive co-op campaign levels, which they released through DLC to finish the storyline. The storyline is pretty barebones, the player characters want to get revenge on their ship's captain who left them for dead for gold they were transporting and he's subsequently teamed up with the various enemy factions in Far Cry 3's story (Vaas' pirates; the Dutch guy's PMC organised crime/human trafficker group.) The main co-op campaign deals with them getting said revenge and gold; the DLC levels are supposed to deal with them escaping the Far Cry 3 pacific islands.
Only so much you can do in FC4 since only the open world activities you can do in co-op, not story missions. The best time in FC4 we had was the Valley of the Yetis DLC, which is fully available in co-op. FC5 + subsequent released games were all smooth sailing, fully co-op playable.
Xbox Series is the best place to play this series (if you don't have PC) from 3 onwards, thanks to the backward compatibility FPS boost. Xbox Series can push all of them to 60fps. PS5 should be fine for FC 5 + 6, since they received a native current gen update patch + launched natively on current gen, respectively.
Warning for PC players: the games older than FC5 (maybe even FC5 itself) have trouble with issues newer/modern CPUs, exceeding the number of CPU cores common place when each said games were new. You need to disable hyperthreading in the BIOS and/or restrict CPU affinity through Windows Task Manager/an etc app else your performance will be hugely tank.