What are you playing right now?

Assassin's Creed: Rogue. I have a bad problem for hoarding games anymore. Kind of an obsession, like playing, acquiring, thinking about to bury my other thoughts. Anyways, I never did play Rogue when it first came out, and going back to it, it's mixed. The thing about those old games is that you come to see how much little things change, like the graphics aren't the big thing, it's the entire way games present themselves, how they'll be more arcadey in the past.

I like that Rogue starts off basically immediately with letting you roam around, but I dislike that it also almost immeidately yanks you out for its garbage metastory. You'd think they would have learned that shit after Black Flag and how much everyone hated it. So stupid. I had forgotten how silly the naval stuff is, ships melting like butter before your fire/turning like speedboats and apparently a fucking ship, a thing with dozens of people on it and a dedicated lookout tower, cannot see except in the direction of the bow. Like, it's the fucking ocean, one of the notable features of the ocean is that ships can detect each other potentially from many miles away, nobody is hiding shit unless you're right up on islands. And there's just chests and treasure maps laying around, like this great thoughtlessness in world design, at least the sea shanties in Black Flag were presented like music that had been blown in the breeze with a little chase to catch it.

But you choke down that and just enjoy it as dumb gamey arcade stuff and it's good, really good. The AssCreed formula was tired and I feel tired just looking at it, even after years, but the Black Flag formula ages well. It didn't get whored out for as long (I've not played Odyssey*, anyways). Great being able to sail around, whale, pirate, shanties, pull into a town, explore it, get into fistfight, loot a plantation (haven't gotten far enough to know what Rogue offers yet), play games in the tavern. I already like that the taverns have been made into more of hubs than just the place with the drinks. And one of the great things about Black Flag was how it did make it feel like a great adventure just wandering around, with the ability to "brace" (even if it made no damn sense), the wild storms you could run into, the tons of little things you could find. The little loot crates on the water are a perfect example of something I argue about, games should have (thematically appropriate) "free cash" laying around to incentivize paying attention to your environment. Adding icebergs was cool.

It's a comforting thing to go back to. Ubisoft sure was retarded to have caught lightning in a jar and then throw it away. They could have whored that formula so long in so many different settings (and it is nice having a fresh setting, that cold, colonial Canada vibe).



I also really like how Chivalry's elimination mode feels like a HEMA match.

*I'm not a fan of Origins and Odyssey's depiction of naval warfare. They lazily copy-pasted everything but with bows and arrows somehow making ships explode. It would have been perfectly fine if it just had been that bows reduced the amount of enemies you face during a boarding. It is some of the worst fantasy naval warfare I've ever seen.
 
Steep seems okay. It's a neat idea (probably an old one, but new to me) to have a non-narrative sports game still build progression into it with the idea that you build towards unlocking the tallest mountain. I'm not into extreme sports (but that's part of the point, use this stuff to cultivate interest in new things) but I do like the skiing and snowboarding and tricks, I wish someone would make a more general game that has that stuff in it (Finland and Switzerland being obvious settings which heavy use of skis for commuting, Far Cry 4 and 5 both could have had snowy areas with skis if they'd thought of it). Just seems like one of those nice "pick up and play for half an hour" deals, listen to a song and try to improve on your score.
 
With the advice of a friend and it on sale, I picked up Callisto Protocol. I understand a game from the team that made Dead Space, but not Dead Space makes people mad; but so far the biggest problem I have is the camera wants to be helpful by swinging towards whatever enemy is coming at you to attack (and I fucking loathe combat cameras that fucking fight you). But with how piss easy the dodge mechanic is, I've been relatively untouched and melee'ing everything, to include shit that tentacle morphs... and because of that I'm selling just about everything I pick up to upgrade my gear. Outside of the lack of balance and camera, to me, this isn't a bad game. The atmosphere and lighting is creepy space alien aesthetic... but I'm not afraid of the enemies, since I can dodge 99% of shit without proper timing, and the other 1% I can just grab enemies and throw them around. Not gonna say it's great, but so far it's a competent game... if you ignore all the walls of spikes and other obvious environmental traps just sitting around like it's normal.

Edit-Update: Well I finished it on normal difficulty; aside from learning every new part, nothing really stuck out to me. The combat is simple enough; wait for enemy to attack, dodge 1-3 times, attack on the enemy's recovery frames, repeat. The only skill is learning to recognize if an enemy is done attacking or if they're gonna follow up, and outside of one boss fight (that happens twice) I've yet to see any enemy swing more than 3 times in a row, the boss did up to 5 times; but tactic is literally the same, wait and counter. Getting swarmed can be a little hectic, but the game's balanced well enough that if you keep nudging left or right to dodge, you can dodge without being able to understand what's going on; if you can notice the camera do the jerk with the dodge, you can understand what's going on and fight blind until the enemies thin out. There's also a ton of environmental setups for easy kills if you want to use the GRP. Game has great atmosphere, lighting and sound, really looks and feels like a desolate infected hell hole that will eat you alive; but enemy variation and tactics leave much to be desired. There is a lot of gore and what the cool kids call body horror, so if that's your thing, feel free to check it out, just not at full price. Going through it on highest difficulty now for all the trophies and such, and aside from being powered up via New Game +, there's nothing new. You just need to whack the enemies a few more times to put them down. It's a competently put together game, just, nothing that really stands out.

And the sad part is, with how games are going, I'm okay with that.
 
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Iron Harvest is baaaaaaaad.
I don't get it. I think what it is is it's basically Company of Heroes meets Command and Conquer, it wants to be C&C in terms of being dieselpunk cheese and it wants to be COH in terms of its gameplay. But everything about the gameplay, compared to Company of Heroes 2, feels bad, tactics barely matter, just fling more troops at them, ugly graphics, asinine story. COH2 plays really crisp, gritty, and realistic, combat racks up a body count but only when troops aren't in cover and cover is everything, positioning is everything, tanks handle slow enough and are powerful enough to feel very important yet still fragile in a way. In this everything feels "floaty."

Is this what we have to blame for the (alleged, I haven't played it) arcade vibe of COH3, like Anno 1800 was what ruined Victoria 3?
 
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Just completed F.E.A.R. for the first time since it came out, been a long time coming. Not sure what to do next, I have far too many games sat there in various libraries unfinished. I have Primehack installed and the Primes are the only Metroid games I haven't played and completed, so we'll see.
 
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Decided recently to dip into the Final Fantasy back catalogue to some games I never played/finished.
FF2: Skill leveling is... different. I dread playing the original Famicom version.
FF5: Feels a bit grindy. The job system is fun though.
FF9: I got to Gizamaluke's Grotto as a teenager while underlevelled, got pissed because I didn't want to go back and do tons of grinding, and quit. Just restarted this one.

I've been playing Final Fantasy Legend III on my phone during downtime. The most normal SaGa game anyone can play. I just love how strange the world building is in the GB titles.
 
Tarka Dhal said:
After years of putting it off, out of fear that I may one day run out of new old JRPGs to play. I finally started on Chrono Cross.
Click to expand...
I have now finished Chrono Cross.
The plot feels like it was written as entirely standalone story that was retroactively made into a sequel, and the more it tried to tie itself back to Chrono Trigger - the worse it got.
 
Shadow Warrior 3, which is the most 6/10 game I've played in quite some time. Nothing great but nothing terrible either, a blatant Doom Eternal clone with unfunny humour and the mandated "wacky" sidekick and protagonist who never shut up. Is also somehow far too short but also manages to outstay its welcome by the time you get to the final level.
 
Just finished Octopath Traveler 2. I enjoyed it quite a bit. Took about 60 hours to complete everything but the super boss. Final boss was pretty tough, but that was mostly due to me having a few characters grossly under-leveled. Overall I give it a 7/10, it doesn't break the mold very much, but is a solid enough JRPG.
 
Street Fighter 4 and Soulcalibur 6. One's dogshit and the other is amazing, I'll let you figure out which.
 
Finally gave into the hype and started playing Nier Automata. I'm still in part 1, and I just fought A2.

I really want to like this game, but I'm having a very hard time wanting to continue. I know part 2 is a repeat of part 1 but through the POV of 9S and is generally considered the worst part of the game (before it supposedly gets good), which is discouraging.

I've been skipping the side quests, but then I learned there's apparently lore in them. I'm not sure how I feel about that, because running around the mostly empty world with an unintuitive map (that has an in-game explanation for why it's so awkward) is what I like the least about the game so far.
 
Been grinding world of tanks blitz on my phone while my girlfriend watches trashy shows. Has been somewhat enjoyable but as usual teammates are generally retarded, making progressing more difficult than it has to be.
 
I finally beat Returnal and it was pretty good. I think I might have spoken a bit too early when I said the game was too easy. I mean it’s not exactly hard it just tries your patience after a while. The third act however was pretty much just blatant filler to pad the length of the game out. Basically after to beat the final boss you have to go all the way back through the different biomes and collect 6 artifacts. Then you’ve got to bring them back to the house for the final “house sequence” at which point I thought for sure the game was over. However that’s still not enough, you have to go all the way through the final and most difficult level again and fight the final boss for a second time after which you finally get the real ending. The game was really great up until that point but doing all that shit was just annoying. That final underwater level is so frustrating with those stupid kamikaze squids I was just about ready to quit. Despite all that it was a pretty decent game and probably worth picking up during a good sale.
 
I've gotten back into HoI4. Been binging Max Hastings audiobooks though a free Audible trial which got me wanting to play again. In true PDX fashion I have had to relearn everything from scratch since its been a long time since I last played (whatever the last DLC that came with the super duper pack from launch, so whenever that was). Thank god for gg.deals for getting back up to date with DLC.

Have a save I'd been building up in the evenings where I am about to embark on everyones favourite Austrian painter's wild Eastern Europe lads weekend which I'll continue this afternoon.

On the plus side, since anything I remember about the game is out of date, I'm not using gamebreaking division templates and can RP a little bit.
 
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Got a bunch more crap on the Steam Spring sale. Have way too much stuff as is, it's crazy how you can regularly get those 90% off deals. Focused on just stuff that had extremely cheap sales, but even a bunch of $3 games nickel and dime you. Two that were small enough to already download were 100 vacas and Westerado: Double Barreled. Both in a mini-genre of goofy Western indie games. 100 vacas is like an old arcade game, you have to save your cattle herd from rustlers without the cattle dying in the crossfire. Sort of thing you lose a million times but the goal is to first be able to beat it and then improve score (save all 100 being perfect), sort of a puzzle shooter you might compare to something like Hotline Miami.

Westerado was made by Adult Swim, which I find really weird. It's basically like an old isometric pixely GameBoy RPG. Randomly-generated murder mystery where you run around talking to people and doing quests to try to figure out which one of the many NPCs was the murderer. Has this gimmick where you can escalate in steps by drawing and cocking separately.

Both are pretty fun so far. 100 vacas is nice to pick up and play for a few minutes. I'm focusing on short games again, I used to like open world but even if I was just going to use the time to game short means more variety for the same time. Like having something I can actually finish in a week.
 
Flipping Death is great (so far).

If you never played/heard of it, Stick it to the Man was this modern adventure game. I say modern, I mean the old adventure games were a lot more brutal with their puzzles and were just walking around, but contemporary adventure games make the puzzles a lot easier (the logic isn't as deranged, you usually have some sense of how to proceed) and give you some movement gimmick or other shit to fill in the gameplay. Stick it to the Man's thing was that it was a cartoony, paper/cardboard looking world with a great big swingy soundtrack where your hero has gained the ability to read people's minds and can take objects from their imaginations (like cartoon thought bubbles). It was really stylish, pretty funny, good time. People compare it to Psychonauts but that was long before my time.

Filpping Death was their new one, you're the new Reaper and you're trying to solve ghosts' problems to help them finally reach their rest. You can possess the living, need to in order to influence the real world, different characters ahve different physical abilities. Flip back and forth between the real world and the ghost world. A lot more of its humor is cringe, but the ghost world is AMAZING. Eyes on everything, weird monsters, living buildings, it's a real visual treat. I strongly recommend it if you like cartoony stuff.


Guacamelee, on the other hand, disappointing so far. Some of Flipping Death is cringe, ALL of Guacamelee is, it actually reminds me spot on of a certain kind of teenage humor from back in the day, is very dated but even back then would have sucked. Gameplay, it's okay, just only being able to fight with fists makes it kind of boring. I think one of the things that puts me off of it is I'm a huge sucker for Mexican stuff and have been since I was a small child, architecture, music, their skeleton bullshit (I love everything with calacas in it), food, language, etc. I have an affection for the culture, so I should be the target audience here. But the game has this vibe that I think of as "I fucking love Mexico" (like there's "I fucking love science") where it feels like it makes way too many references to food and jokes about chickens and goats and stuff, and my intuition told me this game was made by Whiteoids, and sure enough its a Canadian studio.
 
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Rain World, currently the "Hunter" difficulty. I won't even bother touching the DLC until I got that done. And holy shit, is it hard.
 
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