What are you playing? (2024 Edition)

WingedKagouti on 25/10/2024 at 23:15

Hades 2 recently got a new area and boss (7 total now) as well as the final weapon and a bunch of other content, story and otherwise. If you enjoyed the first game, the sequel is almost certainly going to entertain you as well. It's more of the same but tweaked in many ways (and more content). It is still Early Access.

Jason Moyer on 27/10/2024 at 03:24

I gave up on Torment: Tides Of Numenera because it was boring the hell out of me. Next on the backlog is Mass Effect: Legendary, which is fun but I dislike almost every change they made to the first game so far. It doesn't look as good as the original, because for some reason they decided that the great lighting and post-processing that makes the first game look great even today had to go in favor of having the ugly high-res models/textures from ME3 that looked bad the day it shipped. The controls for the Mako kinda suck no matter which you choose (I don't remember the original controls being as bad as the classic controls are, but I could be forgetting as it's been like 10 years since I replayed it) and being able to use the new thrusters to power over sheer cliffs is weird and solves a problem I never had with the original (if you look at the map there were ways to get to where you wanted to go by staying in traversable terrain). Thresher Maws are somehow even more annoying now. I think the enemy AI is more aggressive or at least more likely to randomly strafe around like you're playing Quake on a bad connection and it's weird being able to use any gun with any class when the proficiencies still exist, so I have to keep looking at the character sheets to remember which weapons I should be focusing on for each NPC. And it was weird being able to complete the "scan the keepers" objective before having the "I think my partner is trying to kill me" quest.

henke on 27/10/2024 at 17:30

I should still get back to Grunn and try to get the good ending. Closest I got to a good ending was doing the yardwork and taking the bus home. Which apparently, did NOT count as the good ending. Because I was taking the bus, I'm guessing. Too much loser energy. I imagine in the good ending I peel outta there in a Ferrari Testarossa.

Quote Posted by Aja

I like Harmony of Dissonance a lot -- I assume that's what you mean.

That was indeed what I meant. Haven't gotten back to the collection yet because I got into another kinda retro collection...

[video=youtube;CQKwj_hi-Gc]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQKwj_hi-Gc[/video]

Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration

I never had any Ataris. Was a C64 kid. But I'd heard so much good about this collection and how it presented the history of Atari in an engaging manner that I had to try it out. And yeah, I was pretty hooked for the 6 hours it took me to read/watch/play my way through Ataris history, from the 70's arcade origins to the 80 home consoles/computers, to their last fumbling steps with the Lynx and the Jaguar. A lot of this info was new to me. A lot of these games I'd never even heard of. I tried playing everything but by the 5th or 6th re-packagings of Asteroids or Breakout I started skipping these.

I know we have plenty of old nostalgic bastards here who enjoy Youtube shows about retro gaming as much as I do. Check out this collection. You'll dig it. :thumb:

Sulphur on 27/10/2024 at 17:37

My most important Atari moment of nostalgia is my dad deciding to play a video game finally when me and my brother were kids, and he played Space Invaders so hard he broke the joystick in two. Ah, memories.

In other news, who the heck was going to tell me that Asscreed Odyssey's Atlantis DLC had a third episode? Jesus Waterwalking Christ, at this rate I'll never play another Asscreed again, because this is enough for several lifetimes. I might even become the first person to have been gifted so much ennui from a video game that it also gave them the slowest heartbeat in the world.

Tomi on 28/10/2024 at 12:25

Some games that I've been playing on the XBox lately:

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNKpOdq56nU) Cities: Skylines: Now I get it why this is/was such a big hit, and I'm a bit addicted to it right now as well. There's a lot to do and many ways to screw up your city, but it's still delightfully casual. Even though you screw up, you can just demolish a few buildings and start again. You'll make a few hundred people homeless, but they're not even mad at you! I'm already starting to get a bit bored of the vanilla game though, as the selection of the things that you can build is quite limited, but the DLC is sooo expensive. I think that I'll just wait until they fix the sequel.

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2snVijCkgY) Chants of Sennaar: Such a unique game with some clever puzzles. Trying to decipher the strange languages is challenging but also feels very rewarding when you start figuring things out. Currently my problem with Chants of Sennaar is that it's not a game that you can sit down to play for fifteen minutes at a time - it requires more time and full concentration, and with two kids in the house, that's not always possible! Definitely going to finish this game at some point though.

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVigxxN_C1o) Go Mecha Ball: I was expecting Go Mecha Ball to be a bit more like Marble Madness or Spindizzy - you know, a skill game where you have to carefully move your marble through challenging levels and avoid traps and pits, but this is more like a non-stop action game where you shoot hordes of enemies and bounce around at an insane speed. It's not bad, but it's one of those games where the gameplay feels more like just random button mashing while you watch things explode. It's too hectic for me. Or maybe I'm just getting old.

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_tmwz-AhgQ) Death's Door: Death's Door is a fun top-down action game that for me feels like a crossover of Little Big Adventure and Tunic. Its story maybe isn't as captivating as LBA's and it's not as clever as Tunic, but the strength of Death's Door lies in the combat. It's just fun to play. It's not very long and not very hard, the game doesn't really punish you for dying, but I think it's perfect that way. Death's Door is a bit of a hidden gem and deserves more recognition.

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDBhLd4TL1k) Mineko's Night Market: I thought that MNM would be a nice game to play with my 5-yo daughter, but even she found it too boring. I think the genre of games like these is called "cozy games". The humour in the game is not for me, it tries too hard to be funny and clever and whimsical. The gameplay loop is very simple; first you pick materials such as flowers or wood or whatever, then craft them into all sorts of items, and once every week there's a night market where you sell these items. All that feels incredibly dull, however. I don't find the NPCs and their conversations interesting either, and contrary to popular belief, the fact that you can pet cats and wear cute cat costumes isn't enough to make up for bad gameplay. Everything in Mineko's Night Market is just so damn whimsical that it makes me feel sick. Yeah, this one's not for me. :D

Briareos H on 28/10/2024 at 15:07

Quote Posted by Aja

I like Harmony of Dissonance a lot[...]

Not the first time I remark how similar many of our tastes seem to be. I knew exactly what that first OST link was going to be.

I've seen a lot of undeserved hate for both Circle of the Moon and Harmony of Dissonance over the years, but:

- I think HoD is my favourite Igavania after Symphony of the Night. It does everything SotN does except more distorted, more arcane but also super funky. I've read laments that it feels aimless and confusing but I love that. If you're going to let the player figure things out, give them a weird and bold aesthetic as a backdrop. The common complaints I can agree with is that the boss fights are too easy, and that some of the map layout reuse is a bit too obvious.

- As for CotM, it is the closest an Igavania comes to classic Castlevania in mechanics and feel. The movement is slow and limited but predictable (some call it clunky) which helps with the balance and a nice difficulty curve. I also love the idea of the DSS card system to balance the whip being the only weapon, although it unfortunately comes with a grinding problem.

Really, the GBA Castlevania trilogy is very strong. All three games have areas where they excel and made a lasting impression on me, more than the later DS games.

I've left Fez aside for now. It is nice to revisit the world and find new areas to explore but I've reached a point where figuring out where to go next requires more investment than I'm willing to give. I'm not sure if I want to piece everything together. Maybe later.

I found myself thinking back about Pentiment and appreciating how much I loved it. I'm still giving myself at least one more year before a replay so instead I'm looking for games with similar qualities. Besides the obvious and awesome Disco Elysium, I've shortlisted:

(https://store.steampowered.com/app/874260/The_Forgotten_City/) The Forgotten City
(https://store.steampowered.com/app/1578650/Citizen_Sleeper) Citizen Sleeper
(https://store.steampowered.com/app/1677770/The_Case_of_the_Golden_Idol/) The Case of the Golden Idol
(https://store.steampowered.com/app/774201/Heavens_Vault/) Heaven's Vault

The first two are on sale so I'm downloading them as we speak.

Sulphur on 28/10/2024 at 15:33

Fair warning, just so you're not disappointed: The Case of the Golden Idol is very much in the same genre of The Return of the Obra Dinn, which are primarily puzzlers where you go over a scene and determine what happened, and to whom. The story and characters aren't the draw in Golden Idol, the snapping together of all the individual elements in your head to solve the scene is, so it's an almost perfect opposite to Pentiment in that way.

demagogue on 28/10/2024 at 18:45

That, Case of the Golden Idol, is our (Aerothorn's) game for game club this or last month. They were saying the same thing; it's like Obra Dinn. It looked like a '90s point & click throwback to me, which didn't make me that interested; but I really liked Obra Dinn, so evidently I should pick it up.

Speaking of logic games, I got Zachtronic's Solitaire set, and the last game in that, Fortune's Foundation, is a pretty good logic puzzle by itself, basically solitaire with a tarot deck (so two separate lines, the major and minor arcana), and you can't move a whole stack of ordered cards. You have to move one at a time from the bottom up with 2 ~free spaces at the start. It's the kind of game I'll actually write out the branches on a notepad, which is kind of nice when you want to play a game that makes you work for it like that. (Once you play it enough, you can start doing it all in your head.)

I guess I have too many Atari 2600 & C64 nostalgia moments to pick any one out. I still play Adventure and a C64 game called Rags to Riches on my phone still today. But the moment that hit me recently was actually going back to a C64 game called Shogun, which was notoriously opaque and always handwaved over as "impossible to figure out much less win" when anybody's reviewed it. I played it a lot, figured out how to win it, and then wrote up a tutorial. That's the kind of thing nostalgia can do, like finally cracking a game, even if it's years later.

Aja on 28/10/2024 at 19:05

Quote Posted by Briareos H

Not the first time I remark how similar many of our tastes seem to be. I knew exactly what that first OST link was going to be.

This makes me happy.

Briareos H on 29/10/2024 at 08:13

Quote Posted by Sulphur

Thanks for the heads-up. If it's like Obra Dinn then I want to play it (I had it on my wishlist just for the art style anyway), but you're right that with Pentiment, what drew me in was the fantastically written and meticulously crafted small world of characters and locations you bond with over the duration of the game. Being structured like a murder mystery or being rich in real-world history helps but is definitely secondary.

I've started Citizen Sleeper. As a visual novel it's reasonably well written but I'm not yet sold on the resource management mechanics. They certainly make a point but I'm not sure I need to be reminded of the point with every single action.