What are you playing? (2024 Edition)

Yakoob on 31/10/2024 at 19:59

Quote Posted by Aja

Everyone's right, though; the story unfolds through following the various distress beacons (and exploring the ship that exploded). Usually whenever you get a new piece of tech, it helps you to reach a beacon or biome you couldn't before.

Gotcha. I guess I'll pay closer attention to the beacon and follow the directions. I swear after I cleared the first beacon I triggered the machine again and it played some audio but didn't give me any new beacons or objectives, so I thought that was done until I explore more. I will try it again.

henke on 1/11/2024 at 12:38

I replayed Frostpunk over the last couple days. Still a captivating city builder. We made it through another winter.

Quote Posted by Yakoob

Well I recently played Thronefall and loved that one, stayed up till like 4am at one point, does that count :( ?

Glad to hear it! I hadn't heard of Thronefall, but it looks a lot like the Kingdom games, with a bit extra complexity. Wishlisting!

demagogue on 2/11/2024 at 05:34

AI Minecraft is kind of interesting.
You can play it yourself (https://oasis.decart.ai/starting-point) here (on Chrome).

Evidently the AI engine can support other kinds of realtime generative games too.
The game world doesn't have persistence yet, so it's kind of dream like and I'm not sure it can really work as an actual game, but even that's interesting for what it is. Whenever these engines do get world persistence, though, then whoa nelly, that's going to be a revolution all by itself.

Here's a video talking about it.

[video=youtube;z_9z1MWY8C8]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_9z1MWY8C8[/video]

Thirith on 3/11/2024 at 22:32

I finished Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown today. While I don't think its last few hours were its best part, I'd still say it's one of my favourite Metroidvanias on the strength of its platforming puzzles alone. The combat is also fine, with some very enjoyable bosses, but I'm less into combat altogether. Its greatest weakness is its writing: the setting is fine and the character work reasonably well, but the story and storytelling are middling at best and often less than middling. But it's nonetheless my favourite Ubisoft game in years.

Not quite sure what to play now. I got started on the Call of Duty Black Ops 6 singleplayer campaign, since it's included in the Game Pass, but the first couple of missions make me doubt I'll finish this, because there doesn't seem to be anything that's of much interest in the gameplay. Which may just be what Call of Duty campaigns are like, but I'd read some surprisingly good thing about this. I might persist for a bit, but otherwise it's uninstalled faster than it was installed. And there's this Silent Hill 2 game that I finally want to check out - the original, not the remake. (Then again, the shock of going from CoD storytelling to Silent Hill 2 might just kill me.)

Edit: Yeah, no. One submission of CoD BO6 later and I've noped out. I remember enjoying the first couple of Call of Duty campaigns a fair bit, up to and including the first Modern Warfare, but the mini levels don't allow for any kind of sustained tension or excitement. I don't mind shooters being shallow every now and then, but this feels like the worst kind of spy action thriller split up into TikTok-style chunks. From what I've seen and read, it seems like there are larger, semi-open environments later on where you choose how to approach things, but if the instant-gratification shooter doesn't instantly gratify, it'll have to make way for, oh, pretty much anything else.

Tomi on 4/11/2024 at 09:23

I've been playing EA Sports WRC quite a bit again recently, and I think it has become my favourite rally game by now. It just feels better than Dirt Rally 2 and the stages in EA WRC are so much better than the ones in Dirt Rally 1. Rally Trophy still has a special place in my heart, and I absolutely loved its Finnish pace notes, and I kinda miss those in EA WRC. I'm obviously familiar with the numbers 1-6 in English and I know what's "left" and what's "right", but I've realised that it's harder to actually memorise those in a foreign language, especially when the co-driver gives you something crazy like "left three half long over crest sixty into don't cut right four into small cut left two rocks outside".

I just finished a 30-minute stage in the Chilean rally, and oh man, that was glorious! You need to enter some sort of a flow stage to even get through a monster stage like this, because you have to stay focused all the time, but I can think of no other game that offers this kind of excitement. Halfway through the stage my mind started wandering for some reason (and my race almost ended in a disaster because of it) and I started thinking about how different EA WRC would be with manual saving. I think it'd be enough to pretty much ruin the whole experience. Anyway, at the finish line I was about two minutes slower than the fastest human driver out there, but I was still pleased with my fairly respectable yet average time, and the fact that I had no accidents today.

Great game, I'd just like to get even better at it. Obviously the best times out there are by drivers who have tons of experience and also remember these stages by heart, but I still wouldn't know how to shave more than two minutes off my time. Maybe the other players have discovered manual saving and I haven't. :p

Neb on 4/11/2024 at 19:26

Funny you should bring up rally, because I was planning to post that I was playing a bit of Richard Burns Rally recently, and how it's my own favourite. I'm no rally super-fan or anything like that, but the pure feel of the physics and car handling is above any of the other rally games I've tried. The difficulty is moreish in a similar way to games such as Stalker - where you often get knocked down and jump back in for another go. I've been playing it for a couple of months now, and I'd say it's easily on my short list of mandatory racing games.

[video=youtube;3Krp0O_-g1c]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Krp0O_-g1c[/video]

Jason Moyer on 4/11/2024 at 21:41

RBR is still king. I wish Kunos or iRacing or somebody focused on authenticity would put out a new rally sim. My favorites since RBR are probably the last few KT WRC games, and they leave a lot to be desired.

Tomi on 5/11/2024 at 16:14

Quote Posted by Neb

Quote Posted by Jason Moyer

I must confess that I've never played Richard Burns Rally. :o It came out at a time when I didn't have so much time to play games, and later I thought that I already missed the RBR train. Looks like the game has a very active modding community and their work looks very impressive, so perhaps I should check it out some time. I'm always suspicious of "real fans" going on about their old favourite game though (how it's the best game ever and how any modern games are dumbed down for stupid console kids who can barely hold a controller in their hands, etc.), because nostalgia can be a funny thing. Also, I'm not sure if I'm willing to "learn" a new rally game right now.

I have no experience in driving a real rally car, but to me EA WRC does feel realistic enough. Some people call it a "simcade", and while I suspect that the developers have taken some shortcuts in realism to make the game more fun, I have a feeling that EA WRC still has a much stronger emphasis on the "sim" than the "cade". The EA Sports brand probably isn't doing the game any favours here, and I too was worried when I heard first heard about the EA takeover, but so far I've only been impressed with what they've done so far.

Anyway, if you turn off all the assists in EA WRC and crank up the damage model, someone who hasn't got a fair amount of experience in rally games probably won't even make it to the finish line. And if you want to challenge any of the better than average human drivers out there, you'll have to dedicate a lot of time for the game and actually learn how to play it. I've played all the both Dirt Rally games + EA WRC for more than 500 hours, but I'm still scared to death of Lancia Stratos, because how the hell are you even supposed to handle that car? :D

Jason Moyer on 8/11/2024 at 17:17

Finished Mass Effect 1LE a week or so ago. Most of the gameplay changes and bug fixes were decent, I think the biggest negative is how bad the lighting is compared to the original game. I think the next time I play it, or if I do a trilogy renegade run, I'm going to install the MELLO mod that apparently restores the original's lighting, so you get the higher res textures and ME3 models but with the amazing ME1 lighting/atmosphere. The gameplay is still a bit janky and hasn't aged well, but it's still a decent game.

On to Mass Effect 2LE...man I forgot how fucking amazing this game is. I'll have to revisit KotOR and Jade Empire and the first 2 Dragon Age games again, but this has to be the best thing Bioware has ever made. It just hits the sweet spot of streamlining needless bullshit (ME1's inventory comes to mind), great third person shooting mechanics, having a nice mix of explorable but not pointlessly massive hubs and more linear objective based missions, surprisingly great writing and humor that still holds up, a solid cast of interesting characters, etc. The only real busywork is the planet scanning, and unless you're OCD like I am when playing RPG's the game throws enough resources at you that you don't really have to spend much time on it. The biggest negative is it adheres to the usual Bioware thing where nearly every choice boils down to "am I a Ying guy or a Yang guy" which is fine, that's their thing,, but there is a part of my brain that wonders how much better the game and series would be if it had Obsidian-esque choices and consequences instead of forcing you into an optimal good guy/bad guy path for 3 games. But damn, it's such a fun and entertaining game.

Aja on 8/11/2024 at 18:18

"(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7sAFyp31cc) I'm Commander Shepherd, and this is my favourite store on the Citadel."

Mark Meer's performance is criminally underrated by gamers. Maybe I'm just biased because he lives here and does improv at the local theatres.