Topic: What are you playing?

[lolmonade]

I started playing Stardew Valley, though I'm torn as to whether I should keep playing or stop and wait for the Switch version. As i was led to believe, it's a really good Harvest Moon clone, and that's a style of game I'd much rather have on a handheld. The problem is if the Switch version is coming at or near launch it'll be coming around the same time as the new Story of Seasons, and I don't know that I want to be playing two Harvest Moon games at once.

I got Stardew Valley as well.  My thoughts exactly on thinking that game makes a lot more sense on a portable way to play games, I found myself digging for an old laptop I had in my closet so I could sit on the couch or in bed while going through one more day of the season without having to sit in my office chair.


To be honest, Its the kind of game I wouldn't mind double dipping on to get on the Switch.  I also felt myself getting a little annoyed that I couldn't work on my farm last night because my wife had started sinking her teeth into the game herself, so in a way I suppose it would benefit me to get a 2nd copy on a different platform, anyway.  My only concern would be whether the developer plans on releasing additional content for the game and if some versions (PC, namely) will end up with a larger breadth of content.

[pokepal148]

I'm playing a game called Rogue Galaxy on PS2. It's really damn good so far, I'm on the second chapter.

[NWR_insanolord]

Since the developer confirmed Stardew Valley isn't coming at Switch launch and made it sound like that version isn't that far along, I caved and started playing it elsewhere.. It's really good, though I feel like it's been oversold a bit. It's a very good Harvest Moon clone, but isn't the revolution some people made it out to be. i get the impression a lot of the people playing this hadn't played a Harvest Moon game in a while, because outside a really nice art style and a more fleshed out mining system than some of the recent games, it's really not better than something like Story of Seasons. I'm enjoying it, and will continue to play, but it's kind of a letdown after all the hype.

[Stratos]

Thanks for the tip Insano, I was on the fence with Stardew and will probably pass it up for Story of Seasons.

[NWR_insanolord]

Update on Stardew Valley: This game is really starting to get its hooks into me. This game, while very derivative, is incredibly well-crafted. It pushes all the right buttons for Harvest Moon fans, and everything I've seen so far is really fleshed out and deep.

[ejamer]

Mario and Luigi Superstar Saga (GBA) - Just started the game (again) and have enjoyed the early moments. Absolutely loved Bowser's Inside Story because of the delightful presentation and humorous story, and this precursor to that adventure feels like familiar territory in that regard.


Although I've been playing through my GBA collection with an intent to get rid of it afterwards, there are a few keepers. (For example, I expect to always hold onto a GBA Micro with the Final Fantasy 4 and 6 remakes. Those games were some of the first RPGs that I fell in love with during the SNES days, and having these highly portable versions available is a point of pride for me.) This game feels like it might fall into that category? Guess I'll have to play more to find out.

[pokepal148]

Just send all your GBA games to me. My backlog consumes all.

[Evan_B]

Yo, I'm about 80% through Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag and I honestly don't know how much longer I can go on.

The action in this game is so boring, the plot, so bland. On one hand, sailing around the sea in my unstoppable god-killing machine, The Jackdaw, is fun, if only because nothing except legendary ships can stand in my way (and some of those are cheap as hell. Seriously, armor everywhere except on the back? That's ridiculous!), and collecting things certainly is... time consuming, but the fact that very few collectible items contribute to tangible upgrades and the world-building is so unnecessarily dense, the reason I've been playing this game for the better part of a year and a half in between much more exciting releases is because it wears me out so much. Yet the completionist, obsessive-compulsive part of me wants to stop at every sliver of beach to pick up stupid treasure chests and Animus fragments.

Also, the controls are wonky.

[MagicCow64]

Yo, I'm about 80% through Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag and I honestly don't know how much longer I can go on.

The action in this game is so boring, the plot, so bland. On one hand, sailing around the sea in my unstoppable god-killing machine, The Jackdaw, is fun, if only because nothing except legendary ships can stand in my way (and some of those are cheap as hell. Seriously, armor everywhere except on the back? That's ridiculous!), and collecting things certainly is... time consuming, but the fact that very few collectible items contribute to tangible upgrades and the world-building is so unnecessarily dense, the reason I've been playing this game for the better part of a year and a half in between much more exciting releases is because it wears me out so much. Yet the completionist, obsessive-compulsive part of me wants to stop at every sliver of beach to pick up stupid treasure chests and Animus fragments.

Also, the controls are wonky.

This game was something of a "watershed" for me. For the first two-thirds or so I greatly enjoyed the sailing, whaling, fort attacks, treasure dives, large scale ship battles, etc., and paid little mind to the lousy but kind of ancillary main mission line. But I made the terrible mistake of 100%ing it, and by the time I swam to my last sand bar to open a pointless chest it burnt me out on this type of game forever, or at least playing this type of game with OCD. I managed to finish The Witcher 3 and AC: Unity, but found the sprawl of those games at time sickening, and those were the last two open worlds I've bothered with. I'm actually a bit worried about Breath of the Wild as a result . . . 

[Evan_B]

At least Breath of the Wild seems to have elements other than the characters that react to physics. Also, I feel as though Nintendo isn't stupid enough to include shrine bonuses that contribute little to character progression.

At least, I hope.

[MagicCow64]

I hope too! Red Dead Redemption is still the only open world game I look back on fondly, and it would be difficult to establish just why that is. Certainly Zelda will be very different, but I hope the team has that game in mind to some extant. They managed to make riding a horse for tens of hours fun.

But now for my own entry!

Resident Evil 7 (PC) (spoilers?):

I haven't played a major studio game in a long time, and I am a big RE fan up til 5  (which I disliked so much I never even tried the maligned 6 out of curiosity), so I pulled the trigger on this and was delighted to find it ran well at medium settings on my untested laptop. Loads super fast off the SSD too!

I think I'm about a third of the way through at about 4 hours (two sessions). I kind of fucking hate it! It's technically competent (and again is surprisingly well optimized, which is rare), but it's pissing me off in a weird way.

The first chunk of the game feels like the VR analog of watching a bad 3D movie on a 2D screen, with **** being thrust in your face, extended bits where you lose control or have very limited control while animations and "story" moments play out. It does open up at a point and has a structure a bit more like a traditional Resident Evil game.

But it's really not working so far. The setting is bland (and has noticeable repeating assets), an uninspired combo of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and older RE games (I've yet to see anything I thought was strikingly done or original).

It's small on purpose, but by insisting on old-style RE progression design (within pretty narrow ranges) it makes it feels oddly absurd and on rails. I think it might be the first-person apparatus, it really highlights the sillyness of special keys and puzzle objects and magical item boxes. The circuitous routes become annoying and repetitive in a way that they don't in the classic games.  It certainly doesn't help that the evil family is extremely cartoonish, and that you are dousing yourself in magical healing juice and having body parts slapped back on.

The combat feels pretty shitty, retains some sluggishness from the older games but applied to a first-person perspective and focused on aggravating enemies who sway around the reticle (coughRevelationsGooMonstercough). And it's often unclear what the rules are surrounding monsters, so resource management feels haphazard. For instance, I suddenly hit a sequence that threw enemies at me like a classic game, and I burned all my ammo blundering through it. Instead of reloading the save, I just kept blundering, had to run past enemies, ended up in a silly ass boss fight I blundered through, found the enemies gone afterward. So how long do they stick around? Do I have to kill anything other than family members in clunky, partially scripted boss fights? I don't know.

So far I'd describe it as an unpalatable mixture of Condemned, Outlast, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, and one of the Revelations games.

[ejamer]

Didn't think I could enjoy Tropical Freeze any less... but now I've hit the ice levels at the end of stage 5 and start of stage 6.  Whoever thought that making momentum and controls even worse in a platforming game like this deserves a stiff slap with a halibut.


Glad I got this game for free from Club Nintendo, because the idea of paying for this (admittedly quite pretty) dreck would drive me nuts. Not enjoying my time with the game at all, but too stubborn to quit.

[RarityGamer]

Been playing some older games lately and having a blast.

Dreamcast:

Power Stone - still great and a real shame we haven't seen more of this series
Silent Scope - arcade fun
Sonic Adventure 2 - Still a fun game to play around with. I actually completed the whole story again. The story is tosh, but I enjoyed the gameplay for the most part. Think a lot of people just jumped on the Sonic franchise because...well, some people are sad like that.

Shenmue 1/2 - itching to play the third later this or (most likely) next year.

Wii:

Nights - awful script and voice acting, but a fun game.
Ghost Squad - brilliant on rail shooter


If any of you wanted to pick up a certain wii game, now is the time. People are still trying to get rid of them all and they're going cheap. It won't be long however till they start getting more expensive.

[Order.RSS]

Been playing some older games lately and having a blast.

Dreamcast:

Power Stone - still great and a real shame we haven't seen more of this series

Great game yeah! Did you ever get a chance to try the sequel? I never did but it supposedly supports 4-player too.

[Triforce Hermit]

Picked up Kingdom Hearts 1.5 + 2.5 Hd Final Mix (damn that is a mouthful) last week. Square was smart to rerelease all of this as I am rekindling a lost love. For the first time after numerous playthroughs I 100% KH1. Watched the 358/2 Days cutscenes and kind of want to get the game now. Going to start playing ReChain of Memories for the first time so this isn't entirely nostalgia riding. Will probably grab the 2.8 game afterwards as I never got Dream Drop Distance.

I didn't care for KH3 before I got this since it had been 6+ years since I played a KH game, but now I'm back. For all the cheesy dialogue, voice acting, and story.

[ejamer]

Star Ocean: First Departure (PSP) - Keen to sell off my old PSP, but really wanted to try this well-regarded RPG first. Early going it's been a bit heavy on dialogue, but I like what I've seen and am keen to play further.


Runner 2: Big Crazy Subtitle (Wii U) - Has gotten better as I'm a bit further in (fourth level now). Boss stages have been pretty garbage, but otherwise it's been a decent enough game. I'm kind of opposed to runners and rhythm games in general because I don't consider timed button presses to be much of a game... but love the Bit.Trip series and am happy to make an exception here.


Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Wii U) - Still playing with the kids. They've made me promise not to play without them, so we haven't really accomplished anything yet other than getting off the plateau. Seems like a good game though.

[ClexYoshi]

I've been hitting up Starbound 1.0 pretty hard. I played a TON of this game in it's earlier stages, and I gotta say, I think all the testing and feedback they got on earlier versions of the game really paid off and it feels great now!

[Evan_B]

Well, you'll never guess what I've been playing.

Paper Mario (Wii U Virtual Console):
Even though I hold The Thousand Year Door in very high regard, I have a lot of love for this N64 title. In fact, returning to it recently has left me quite impressed, especially in terms of the progression from the first entry to the second. While I do think that the Star Power system is somewhat flawed (executed much better in the sequel, with 'stylish' moves increasing star power gained- this is exactly how I would want a MP system to function in an RPG of my own design!), the pacing of the game, as well as its customization options, are top-notch. There's a lot of freedom of choice, here, and alternatives for players to take should they want to build Mario in a certain way. Of course, the partner characters don't operate as independent characters from Mario, and one might argue that they serve the same purpose as the Pixls of Super Paper Mario. However, the variety in their method of attack and separate usefulness in both combat and traversal makes them feel like separate entities, and gives them identities, unlike the Pixls. Of course, the partner system was expanded in the sequel, which contributed towards the modification and balancing of the item system.

Overall, its great to return to this game and see all the brilliant touches in the vignette design and aesthetic Intelligent Systems was going for, as well as the solid combat foundations which were improved upon, and then unceremoniously ditched in later entries. It also makes me hate Sticker Star and Color Splash more!

[MagicCow64]

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (PC):

Got this for like $1.50 on a GOG sale at some point, and finally booted it up. I'd consistently heard that this is one of the best Bioware-style RPGs; I really liked Mass Effect 2 while hating 3 and thinking the new one looks terrible, so I'd been hopeful about KOTOR as a pre-lapsarian sci-fi treat.

But man, this really feels like a relic of when a "PC" game was partially a genre description. It's ugly as hell in that weird bad early PC 3D game way, incredibly clunky to control, and utterly festooned with annoying systems, a billion stats, and endless micromanagement, with stupid dice role combat (hitting a mutant dog with a lightsaber point-blank, "miss" "miss"). I get now why this would be appealing to people into this level of role playing, and you seem to have an interesting level of control over your character's alignment (I enjoyed successfully lying to the Jedi council about my intentions to become a Sith mass murderer), but damn this thing is a headache to actually play. I impressed myself by getting through the opening world, but now I'm on Dantooine and looking at another hub full of annoying monster enemies that take too many resources to avoid taking damage from during combat or else healing from combat. And a lot of the more seemingly fun stuff, like hacking solutions and such, takes an obnoxious amount of resources to mess with. I guess I could be playing it wrong or something by auto-leveling, but it's too niche/archaic for my threshold. Similar to System Shock 2 in that respect. So that's probably it for me. 

Yooka-Laylee (PC):

And my current jam. I did not have any particular hopes for this one and find the naked nostalgia pandering kind of distasteful, but as a platformer fiend I figured it would be a time sink at least. At about 5 hours in it is that, and I will probably at least clear the minimum page collection threshold to get my money's worth. But boy, this is kind of depressing/cringey. Something about it feels like watching people re-enact a Monty Python sketch. Plus it does not feel good to play a lot of the time just on a visceral level, and the actual act of collecting stuff is weirdly lacking that good old dopamine punch. There's a large variety of activities to do, but few of them are particularly fun. The worlds so far evoke that mildly nauseating Banjo-Tooie feeling of being lost among a big scramble of ****. Like, oh here's some locked gim-gam I can't get yet, and will have to come back for, except I will never remember where this is. On top of that there's an unpleasant gummy feel to the whole enterprise, with its shitty camera, clumsy non-platforming-activity controls, annoying save system, inability to skip through cutscenes and certain (random?) dialogues, inability to resent mini-games after fucking them up off the bat, etc. Regardless of where you come down on the value of a slavish recreation of a collect-a-thon, there's just a ton of **** this game could and should be doing better that wouldn't diminish any Banjo-clone authenticity.

[Order.RSS]

Figured I'd kill 20 minutes by trying something new, so I downloaded the demo for Monster Hunter 3: Ultimate on Wii U. Well, I've heard on the RFN podcast how awful these demos supposedly were, and I can confidently report that they indeed are. Allow me to describe its crapness.

The demo gives you 2 quests to try, an easy one and a hard one, you select a class/fighter and then you're off. No explanation for controls, no way to check the button mapping, the options screen only lets you switch controller and language. Great start.
So there's like 30 classes it seems (not at all overwhelming), I just picked the top one (swords & shield) since I figured it'd be a nicely average class. They send you off with 2 lil' Turtwigs to find what turns out to be a giant gerbil, and you need to kill it in 20 minutes.

So while I'm sure/hopeful this is just a demo thing, the controls are pretty awful here. Why is the camera mapped to D-Pad and right stick? Why is the X-axis not inverted like it should? Why does moving the y-axis just toggle between three levels of zoom (ranging from decent to awful)? And why do we also have the L button to center camera behind our dude? Seems like overkill.
Could've really used the d-pad to cycle through potions, instead of the weird "hold L, then cycle left or right with the Y and A buttons" thing they have going on now. For those keeping track, yes the L button serves two purposes, but we also have two trigger buttons doing nothing it seems?

Furthermore you sword & shield dude appears to have no way of defending with his shield, so that's great. Attacks are really slow, and although there's some heft behind them, I just can't see myself getting into such a slow system. Especially since thanks to the fast enemy monster and slow camera you'll frequently miss too. It just feels a tad sluggish sadly.


Then the world the quest is set in is pretty sparsely populated with just a few animals, and like 9 different zones all connected through brief loading times. Really annoying because the monster runs away every now and then so you gotta chase it through these loading barriers, ugh.
Lastly I wasn't sure what your little animal buddies are supposed to be doing, sometimes they create puffs of green smoke or suddenly disappear, other times they spout "cutesy" dialogue boxes that already felt grating after the demo was over.

TL;DR: I think I can see the appeal of Monster Hunter, with its crafting and very frequent bossbattles. The slow combat is probably meant to be quite deliberate instead of the Soul Calibur button mashing approach I was going for. But this demo really solidified why it isn't for me, which I'd already expected. If there's gonna be one on Switch I hope for any new fans trying out that demo that Capcom puts more effort into it though, I can't really see anyone being won over by this demo... Rather the opposite in fact. But I'm glad it gave me the opportunity to try out a popular franchise at no cost, even if it didn't sell me on the game.

[Mop it up]

Furthermore you sword & shield dude appears to have no way of defending with his shield, so that's great.

When your weapon is drawn, hold R to block.

If I recall, the only thing that ZR and ZL are used for is during swimming, to move directly up or down.

I didn't like the game mechanics at first either, and even now I still think some things are stupid. But I've come to appreciate them more for the planning and strategy they can provide, and how success can't be had from mashing buttons and tanking hits. Plenty of other games allow me to do that already. It was quite some time before I got to that point however, and I know I can't recommend a game based on giving it a lot of time to get into it. Not when so many other games can provide fun much earlier.

Still, if not for having a group to play with then I wouldn't bother with the series, so if you'd just do single player then I would personally say it isn't worth it at all for single player. It can be fun in multiplayer though which is what the game is designed and intended for. The demos for MH4U and MHGen actually let you play online, so they can provide a better taste of what the game is really like. I have no idea if that online functionality was only temporary, however.

[Order.RSS]

When your weapon is drawn, hold R to block.

If I recall, the only thing that ZR and ZL are used for is during swimming, to move directly up or down.

Ah okay thanks! Weird, you'd think I would've figured out the shield at least. There was no water in the demo level I don't think, so that explains not figuring out the triggers. Pretty cool that they let you swim and presumably hunt for oceanic monsters?

And yeah I mean it was more about just trying out something that's popular for me. I'm not really the type of person to regularly play online with friends, so Monster Hunter just isn't very suited to the way I play videogames. Can deffo see why it took off on portables, the relatively short and sectioned off quests probably make it much easier to dip in and out of for short periods of time.

[pokepal148]

I'm going through Apollo Justice right now and my goodness the Ace Attorney series just dived right into madness like scrooge mcduck into his money bin after the third game. 

[ClexYoshi]

SPARK THE ELECTRIC JESTER!!!

I know what this game looks like, and... it fits that label far more than Freedom Planet does. However, Spark actually borrows a ton from the Kirby, games, particularly from Super Star and the Return to Dreamland-likes. Give it a shot, folks! It's hella fun!

[ejamer]

All gaming time is being spent on Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Wii U) right now.


Twice caught myself playing until early the next morning by accident as I'm having a hard time putting the game down. Not pursuing main story developments very much yet, mostly just exploring the game world and doing secondary stuff - although starting to run low on non-quest things that I care about.


Very much getting a Xenoblade feel from the game where you go somewhere just to be there - climbing mountains, crossing lakes, exploring ruins, etc. The only concern I have at this point is the balance between story/exploration: I loved Xenoblade in part because it told a stronger story and forced a mix of narrative and exploration instead of focusing on one or the other. Zelda might be a little bit too open for my preferences - although it's still a breath of fresh air right now and deeply enjoyable.


Kids still engrossed by the game, but we've comfortably broken away from the "don't do anything without us, Dad" condition.