Topic: What are you playing?

[Fatty The Hutt]

Catrap is the most stupidly addictive puzzle game I've played in ages.

But the most important question is:
Do you pronounce it cat-trap or cat-rap?  :

[ejamer]

Ugh... after beating a few recently, having a hard time picking up a new game right now. Just too much other stuff going on.


That said, still managing to enjoy a few bite-sized games thanks to PICO-8 -- a computer-based "virtual console" that makes it easy to develop, share, and re-work simple games.  (link: http://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?cat=7&sub=2)


A PocketChip portable computer from KickStarter arrived recently. The computer is kind of like a Raspberry Pi, but with some built in storage, wireless, and bluetooth. Then that chip is dropped into a simple interface (with touch screen and keyboard) so that you can easily use it while on the move.  Pretty geeky... but perfect for playing and developing PICO-8 stuff...

[ejamer]

Finally settled on a game to play:


Scurge: Hive (GBA) - A couple hours in, and this is just a great action title. Remember making comparisons between this game and an imagined isometric Metroid, and that still feels apt. Plenty of exploration in an isolated lab, but a strong focus on fast-paced action and a few gentle puzzles along the way.  The different weapons are enjoyable to switch between.


One interesting thing is that you have been infected upon landing on the planet, so are essentially on a timer - if you don't find a save/heal point quickly, the growing infection can start to cause rapid health loss, so you end doing quick runs into different rooms to always find that next checkpoint. Level and enemy designs are solid. Even though I'm not usually a fan of isometric perspective games, this is really good.


Also spending some time with Lego City Undercover (Wii U) for the retroactive, and having a great time just exploring the world and finding stuff we missed when focusing on the story initially. It sounds lame, but this remains one of my favorite Wii U exclusives - it's just such a cute and enjoyable virtual world to be in, and it's filled with stuff to see and do.


Finally, playing a few games with my kids: 
* Pikmin: New Play Control (Wii)
* Scooby Doo and the Spooky Swamp (Wii)

[pokepal148]

Been playing Nano Assault EX and my C-stick mod makes it an absolute dream to play.

[pokepal148]

Been playing a bit of Kirby's Block Ball on the 3DS VC. It started off slow but then I got to the first boss battle where things started to get interesting.

[Oedo]

After seeing the new Mario Kart footage in the Nintendo Switch reveal, I had the sudden urge to go back to Mario Kart 8 and played it for a few hours over the weekend. Man, I forgot how frustrating this game can be. The blue shell nonsense has been covered more than enough times and I can usually brush it off, but when I get hit with a blue shell, followed by a red shell, followed by a green shell all within ten seconds on the final lap of a race, that's just silly. The randomness does lead to some funny moments like someone sniping a banana peel I was about to slip on and accidentally saving me, but it definitely needs some rebalancing.

That aside, it's still a really fun game and I'll probably keep playing it some over the next little while in between the other games I'm playing. It still looks great as well, so I wouldn't be surprised if what saw in the Switch trailer was an enhanced port and not a full-fledged Mario Kart 9. At the very least, I think it's safe bet that the Switch game will heavily leverage Mario Kart 8.

[Phil]

I'm playing Azure Striker Gunvolt 2, and it's a great improvement over the original. The levels have more exploration to them, a lot with verticality which is great. There's a reason to explore the levels for medals, as some of challenges in the game require them. Plus, to do challenges, all you have to do is beat a level once, and then instead of picking which challenges you want to try (like you did in the original, but you could only do a max of three at a time), you can just try as many challenges as you want in one run to unlock new content.

Copen is really fun to use. It's a joy dashing from foe to foe without touching the ground in order to get more points. Speaking of points, the grading system is much kinder, so getting S ranks isn't a huge pain this time around. It isn't automatic, of course, so you will need some level of skill to acquire them.

[TGT]

I'm still playing Metal Gear Solid 5 for my blind timeline playthrough of the Metal Gear Franchise.

[lolmonade]

Prompted by the recent reveal, I went back into my backlog of unplayed games and started up Red Dead Redemption.  Droves of friends have been touting this game as a "one of the best games of all time" candidate.


Firstly, this game is essentially Wild Wild West GTA.  While this would be aggravating to me, the A) Fact that it's a sprawling landscape with little traffic, B) Riding Horses instead of driving cars, and C) The Western motif deviate it from a formula I don't like enough to make it an overall good experience so far. 


John Marston as a character is relatively uninteresting so far.  I expect or hope he gets some depth throughout the game.  Alluding to a shady past isn't enough for me.


Bonnie can go catch her own damn cattle from now on.


That said, the characters outside of Marston are relatively interesting and varied.  I think if this game latches onto me, it'll more be because of them than anything else.


Finally, the gunplay is pretty satisfying, and this is a case which I think the way the reticle locks-onto the enemy works really well.


I'll have more thoughts as I get farther than 5 hours in.

[rygar]

I was playing Castlevania III: Dracula's Quest for some Halloween themed gaming. I had planned on beating it, but I'm stuck on the Block 7 final boss. I can kill it with 2-3 ticks left on the game counter, but the game charges the post-death animation sequence against the player, and I can't seem to squeeze anymore ticks out of what I have left in the save state. My interested has dwindled too much to enjoy restarting the level. My larger ambition was to play through four times using each playable character full time from the moment they are recruited. This was my first time playing, and I didn't do any initial research, so I realize now that I may have made my life substantially harder by trying to clear it first with the combat gimped Grant DaNasty.  I still want to try something similar, but probably with more switching back with Simon Belmont, and I'm going to slow play it over several months or even years.

I do enjoy the improvements to the game from the original Castlevania quite a bit. Obviously, the new characters and branching paths add a lot more depth to the game play, as well as substantial replay value. But equally important is the greater clarity of the environment vis-a-vis the sprites. There is far less bleed in this game and far better color and shading juxtaposition. There isn't the same saturation of drab yellow and brown everywhere either. Even if the game is just as hard as the original, the combat and platforming seems fairer since you can see everything more easily. For me, the background design of the environments have always been the star of the NES portion of the series anyway, and CIII is a substantial upgrade in that area.

[Fatty The Hutt]

Prompted by the recent reveal, I went back into my backlog of unplayed games and started up Red Dead Redemption.  ...
 the gunplay is pretty satisfying, and this is a case which I think the way the reticle locks-onto the enemy works really well.

As I recall, if you sort of double tap the gun/trigger button it will do "snap-to" aiming. This saved the game for me. The aiming reticle is super tiny and very hard for me to see, and I don't give a crap about making headshots and whatnot. So the snap-to (borderline cheat) was a good option for me. Double-tap and start shooting, occasionally making minor adjustments with the control stick when more precision is absolutely required. Without that, the game would have been not-fun, despite all the high-quality trappings.

[MagicCow64]

It's been a while, but as I recall the Red Dead shooting system keeps evolving quite a ways into the game as the Dead Eye ability expands.

[Fatty The Hutt]

Oh yeah, Dead Eye is cool too. I was just talking about "regular" shooting in the game.

[ejamer]

Ugh. Got sucked back into Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate (Wii U) again. Some of these G-rank quests where you have to beat between 2 and 4 monsters in a time limit can be tough for a mediocre bow user fighting solo.  I feel tempted to cheese my way through some of the fights... but don't really enjoy fighting that way.


Anyway, not really playing with any goal in mind. Just trying to clear out any quests that I had skipped previously.

[Wah]

Just finished Mega Man X and Katawa Shoujo, the latter is a very powerful visual novel/dating sim. It focuses on disabilities and how people cope with them, very good ****. It hits very close to home. Check it out its a free download. A love it so much I think I've figured out what my next review is.

[lolmonade]

Prompted by the recent reveal, I went back into my backlog of unplayed games and started up Red Dead Redemption.  ...
 the gunplay is pretty satisfying, and this is a case which I think the way the reticle locks-onto the enemy works really well.

As I recall, if you sort of double tap the gun/trigger button it will do "snap-to" aiming. This saved the game for me. The aiming reticle is super tiny and very hard for me to see, and I don't give a crap about making headshots and whatnot. So the snap-to (borderline cheat) was a good option for me. Double-tap and start shooting, occasionally making minor adjustments with the control stick when more precision is absolutely required. Without that, the game would have been not-fun, despite all the high-quality trappings.

Yeah, that has been a godsend.  This game can't be played like a general 3rd person shooter.  Like you said ,the reticle is too small, and maybe it's just my game settings, but anytime a mission has taken place at night, enemies are near impossible to see.


The Sheriff missions are much more fun than the Bonnie missions at this point.  Just met the crazy treasure hunter and snake oil salesmen as well, so there's finally some more fun personalities to interact with.


Red eye is pretty darn useful, there's been a level so far with hordes of bandits coming at me, really useful in downing a handful of enemies real quick.  Makes me think there'll be several levels like that.

[ShyGuy]

I tried PS VR tonight. The picture is a little off. like 3D.  It's kinda neat, but not there yet for me.

[pokepal148]

I tried PS VR tonight. The picture is a little off. like 3D.  It's kinda neat, but not there yet for me.

Why do you hate the future?

[ShyGuy]

[ejamer]

I've played this game before, 20 years ago when Virtual Reality was supposed to be the future of gaming, TV, the internet, and everything. That failed because it was ridiculously expensive and the technology wasn't anywhere near ready at the time.


Then 5 years ago 3D was the future. Of course most people weren't that interested once they saw the hoops required to make it happen - who wants to wear special headsets/glasses just to watch TV?


But I'm sure things will be different this time around.  At least the technology is much closer to being ready than it was years ago.

[supermario2k]

I've played this game before, 20 years ago when Virtual Reality was supposed to be the future of gaming, TV, the internet, and everything. That failed because it was ridiculously expensive and the technology wasn't anywhere near ready at the time.


Then 5 years ago 3D was the future. Of course most people weren't that interested once they saw the hoops required to make it happen - who wants to wear special headsets/glasses just to watch TV?


But I'm sure things will be different this time around.  At least the technology is much closer to being ready than it was years ago.

While these are all legit comparisons, they fail to describe what people who are into VR want. A much deeper and more immersive experience. Yeah 20-30 years ago the tech was not ready, but at least people were trying it. But maybe the reason the tech wasn't ready was because the two companies that were working on it, Atari, and Sega, fell into dire financial straits and had to shift focus? If They both went forward with their VR plans and managed to get something workable then it might have evolved more naturally by now. Who knows? But we do know that it was expensive as hell back then, know what else was expensive as hell then? HD, and LCD screens. None of those are expensive these days, technology moves forward.

VR is not going to replace TV, I think people who think that are dumb. There I said it. I didn't want to but you are dumb if you think anyone is expecting VR to REPLACE TV. It is not going to do that, it is going to be there to compliment TV. VHS had a 30 year lifespan and it was a terrible product. DVD is going on 20 years right now, still not a perfect product and yet people still buy it.

The difference between 3D and VR is 3D nobody was asking for that, ever. People have been wanting VR for a long time its just been out of reach for a long time. 3D was bad, because they, the tech companies, were expecting it to replace HD. It didn't. VR is not going to replace HD, it is not going to replace TV, it is going to have a place in the market forever moving forward. While people don't hook boxes up to stream movies off cassette tapes anymore, they do still hook boxes up to stream content to their TV's. And while not everyone is going to want the individual and immersive experience of VR, enough people will want it not all the time, but enough of the time to keep it around. Pokepal fan **** off, I get it your a dick we all know it but you can't predict the future anymore than I can stop acting like you can dude. But I do think that the people who don't want VR, fine nobody is going to force you to, this is different entirely than 3D so stop comparing it to 3D.

But the people who do want it are going to keep asking for it and will enjoy it. Don't like it don't buy it but Jesus stop shitting on the people who do like it!

[ejamer]

...
The difference between 3D and VR is 3D nobody was asking for that, ever. People have been wanting VR for a long time its just been out of reach for a long time. 3D was bad, because they, the tech companies, were expecting it to replace HD. It didn't. VR is not going to replace HD, it is not going to replace TV, it is going to have a place in the market forever moving forward. ...

This seems like a good point.

While I'm still unsure that VR tech is ready for mainstream acceptance, I agree it's something that people do want. Even if it fails to take off and become a permanent thing now (which is kind of my expectation) it will just keep coming back around until the experience is cheap/convincing/compelling enough to stick around for good... It's only a matter of time.

Also, I'm pretty sure that Pokepal was just messing around. Don't get pissed, he's just yanking chains to yank chains.

[oohhboy]

I like 3D in my games as it works really well for that use case, just not really for films, almost nobody does it right and the closest is Dredd. Even then elements of it didn't quite work.

Home VR isn't very good right now and needs another generation or 2 to shake things out. The uses will be pretty much limited to "Cockpit" and "Walking sims". You simply need too much hardware and space to expande the use cases.

[supermario2k]

I know that, Pokepal just feeds on my daily **** you's so he'd starve to death if I neglected him.
Sorry guys its been a tough week at work, we're cover a murder trial and we're a small community paper so its very sensitive and emotions are running high all around. I'll probably be much calmer once this passes and Nov. 9 rolls around. Working in a newsroom is great except during an election cycle.

[ejamer]

Playing New Super Luigi U (Wii U).


Not really a fan of the whole "New Super Mario Bros" series - the controls always feel kind of off, and in this particular case worse than usual.  But the games always manage to show off some interesting levels and I do like the short time limits in play with the Luigi version.


I haven't played New Super Mario Bros U yet. Are the levels identical in these games?  I'm assuming they are more like remixes than direct copies...