What are you playing right now?

Mr.Bucket said:
The wandering tribals start out as neutral but get more aggressive as time goes on, or depending on what you do to them/in response to them.
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Apparently (looking it up) you can keep most of their aggression away by not acting intimidating (no buildings, no cutting down trees, stay far away from them). Like a real tribe. Fascinating.


The Forest may have been a big disappointment so far, and Strange Brigade ($2.50) sucked immediately, but Dead Rising has been awesome so far. Kind of tough and driven by trial by error (you just blunder into fights you can't win), but interesting. I could tell it was made by Japs the moment I saw text bubbles with no voice acting pop up. But only Japs would put in the effort to make something like this. It's a great (and I knew this was its reputation going in) fuck-around game. In fact, it's a shitty game otherwise, but as soon as I got into the mall proper I started immediately finding things to giggle about. Big Lego man helmet to wear. A FUCKING SKATEBOARD TO RIDE. BUSTING UP JEWELERY COUNTERS AND THROWING THE JEWELS LIKE IT'S DALE GRIBBLE'S POCKET SAND. It's good stuff, the embodiment of a sandbox in a much more literal sense of being a cozy little box full of toys to play with.

Remember all those shitty meme games that spawned out of Goat Simulator? Why couldn't we have had a trend of Dead Rising clones instead? Maybe we did and I just never noticed because I had my nose turned up towards Japanese pop culture. This would have been a more natural way for the GTA clone to have evolved, like this on a larger scale.


I also said some time back I was playing Alice: Madness Returns. I was kind of liking, but apparently not enough because I just stopped playing one day weeks ago and haven't gone back to it. The weird thing is that it actually seems like the perfect thing to make into a game franchise for kids (if it had been clean), and even in its edgelord goth form it still makes a lot of sense. Lot of natural trippy scenery and what not. The problem is that it just doesn't have a core gameplay loop that feels good. 3D platformer, one of a few things that still has yet to really be revived. Combat got frustrating. And the levels drag on forever (too long, a level shouldn't take more than an hour) and in some ways its so trippy that there's nothing to latch onto, nothing to grab ahold of. I still like the idea of it. I'll finish it one day.
 
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Steam is having a Halloween sale, so I went and got myself a game from my wishlist, Infernax. It looked good on paper - a Castlevania 2 tribute with a rudimentary level-up system and cool bosses - but the contents are not what it says on the tin.

The intimindating-looking bosses are piss easy and can usually be toppled over on the first try, but good luck getting to them through the dozens of screens that require pixel-perfect platforming and where failure sends you back to entrance to the entire dungeon unless you enable casual mode. Remember the frustration when a medusa head ended your run by knocking you over mid-jump? Infernax is exactly that but all the time and somehow worse because each bloody gauntlet has to be traversed twice, first to get the boss key, then to get back to the boss door near the entrance.

I think I will beat it eventually, but I am limiting myself to one dungeon a night so that I don't get too mad on the internet.
 
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Finished Spider-Man 2 (probably my GOTY) and am working on 100%ing Super Mario Wonder. Only thing left is to grind flower coins for those stand things.
 
Right now I'm finishing up Bravely Default 2. Aside from the story being a bit bland the game is still fun.

No airship or boat is kind of gay though ngl.
 
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I got frustrated with Dead Rising so I closed out that save, bank that level for the next run. Right now I've switched to The Flame in the Flood.

I played it YEARS ago and couldn't get into it. Now I'm really enjoying it. A big part of that, I think, is that I'm playing with a controller on the computer. I hate third-person, in any form, with mouse and keyboard and the controller is basically necessary.

So what is it, it was an artsy isometric roguelike about rafting down a pseudo-Mississippi. Vague apocalyptic setting where society has collapsed and population densities are low. Strong Americana theming, light acoustic country music, allusions to American literature and features of Southern culture (that feel shallow), and an art style that I really don't know how to describe, but you get the idea. It's kind of like Don't Starve or Wytchwood mixed with O Brother Where Art Thou.

The gameplay is like a generic survival game mixed with FTL. Keeping yourself alive means hunger, thirst, and dealing with status effects. I actually played 10 days in game and I can't say as I even noticed a health bar, I think you just get statuses and if they go untreated long enough you keel over. That includes a mechanic for dealing with the cold, which isn't totally inappropriate - higher up the Mississippi River Valley, in Autumn, it would be cold enough to die - but doesn't fit well. It's the sort of realistic survival game - what I like - where you scrounge up twigs and stones and herbs. Most of the time you're eating cattails and drinking dandelion tea, starvation food, huddling around fires, setting snares hoping to catch a rabbit, amidst both wilderness and the wrecks of mid-1900s American small towns.

In between you sail your little miniature raft, Pirates! style, down the river, avoiding obstacles, choosing a path that you can't know in advance, does depend on your rafting skill, and must weigh the prospects of different types of locations against each other. You totally can sink your raft; it mostly comes down to another resource pressure (getting the repairs in).

The last time I played I got really frustrated with the animals, but it turned out I was just completely retarded, like, DSP levels. See, there's a couple of predators, but for all it really matters it's boar, wolves and bear (guess it didn't occur to them to do gators), and I've never run into a bear. I could barely cope with boar and couldn't deal at all with wolves, which made playing grueling, Turns out the game just doesn't want you to fight with weapons - you play as a literal Girl Scout and stock survival game weapons like spears are a huge deal to make - but with traps, poisoning, stuff like that. Like, you can pump a wolf full of arrows, or you can one-hit kill it with meat bait poisoned with deadly flowers. You can lay traps to kill the boar. I don't know how I was so fucking dense that I didn't figure this out years ago.

I still maintain that the game is 99% style and 1% substance in its setting, but it's relaxing (when you know how to deal with wolves) and charming.
 
Warframe got its claws into me again. Spent most of Saturday doing the relic stuff and sold the proceeds to buy the remaining parts for a bunch of Prime Warframes I had half finished. I expect to spend the next few weeks learning how to play and build those correctly before going back to my comfy frames.
At least now I’ll have Ivara Prime and not be a liability in Spy missions.
I’m pretty sure the new frames will get me to Mastery Rank 14 so I can build a bunch of weapons I’ve had waiting to be built.
 
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I'm trying - really trying - to get into Foxhole. I read that article about Silver Island from a week or so ago, and the game sounded really interesting. I got it and joined the Wardens because I figured all the press would be pushing people to the Colonials for the meme and wanted to balance out.

The game seems really interesting - I love the logistics side of things, all of the neat details and things you can do - but it seems really hard to actually get in and do anything cool without a clan. I join the discord and try to find a clan to join. I see one with a description that appeals to me, join their discord, and I get a popup. Weird. It wants me to select my pronouns. Huh. I know discord is pozzed as hell, maybe it's just a new thing I've somehow avoided. I click through and get to the server proper and on cursory glance I see the most common posters all have "Sapph" or "sapphic" in their u/ns. Click their profiles, just for a larf, and it's trannies all the way down.

Literally how do I play any social/multiplayer game in Current Year without being involuntarily subjected to an autistic man's ERP?
 
A few mods I've been looking forward to updated on Starsector, so back to space war crimes. High-tech ships are still the most fun to fly. Only really annoying bit is hunting down and removing the "trans rights!" tooltip people insist on shoving in.
 
M3xus said:
A few mods I've been looking forward to updated on Starsector, so back to space war crimes. High-tech ships are still the most fun to fly. Only really annoying bit is hunting down and removing the "trans rights!" tooltip people insist on shoving in.
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I literally cannot overstate the radicalizing effect this shit has had on me. An inordinate amount of my cognitive energy is consumed by an anti-fedposting filter.
 
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I feel you. I'm lucky it's just a line I can remove from the text file in this case, one mod I never used went overboard and had a ship colored with each genderspecial flag.
 
Mini Metro. Went ahead and got it for $5, I've realized those sort of cheap small games, stuff that can run on the worst potatoes, are often the best value propositions. Have a way of being ridiculously engaging. How do you describe it: action puzzle game?

It's a very abstract game about building metro systems. I say abstract, you've got lines that you can reshape at will for free, and people basically spawn in at stations with a type that they need to be delivered to. First one they reach of their type is good enough. More stations pop in, more types start spawning, game runs until you get too many undelivered passengers waiting at a station. 100% of the difficulty comes from rivers, because in addition to the limits on number of trains, number of distinct lines (the trains automatically follow a line, which can also loop on itself), you have strict limits on how many bridges/tunnels through rivers you can have, and it will use that to fuck with you as much as possible, keep you from designing a halfway decent system.

Every level is a real city, but for as abstract as the game is, that basically just means a different river layout.

Overall, it's okay. Very hard. There's a mode where you don't get to change lines you've laid down, making it much more hardcore and methodical, but it locks that behind some unreasonable challenges.


I also started playing This War of Mine again since I finished The Flame in the Flood. It's the reverse situation, so far: I was impressed with it on the first go before it lost my interest, and this time I'm quite unimpressed.
 
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When I'm not wasting time in Factorio I've been playing Super Mario Bros. 3 (GBA).

I can't imagine playing it in the original NES form with no save feature, and a lot of the levels are unfair bullshit.
 
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Been playing Fire Emblem 3 houses like mad, 30 hours at least by now. Getting my money's worth out of my Switch now lol
 
Finished Echo of Starsong. Honestly, think a more "visual novel" presentation would have been to it's benefit since the mechanics are so mundane once you are up to speed it just becomes tedious. Also, may just be a cultural thing, but though I saw the chemistry between Jun and Eda, it was way too muted for the sort of love the game expects me to perceive. Going into spoilers now

That they never seemed to have a proper heart to heart outside of lewd hand holding and some "MAMORU DA!" exchanges makes me not really fully commit to how Jun could be this dedicated to her. I also was missing some post Eda saving Remi and Jun scenes, Remi is such a hateful bitch most of the game to Jun that both having a breakdown together was something that I think was sorely lacking, same deal with a few interactions before Remi dies of age. Though I wasn't that invested in their love, I will admit the scene when Jun sees the flower field has great impact and the little animations you see at the start screen if you watch all of the opera really got to me, sweet vignettes of what should have been...

Outside of that, it's the story of 3 very broken youths that form a family of sorts, but the one that leads them is unable to let go no matter how much she is spitting in her master's face for obsessing about her. Eda was a walking tragedy that was blind to the happiness next to her and ended up dooming it and all of them. I guess the little vignettes in the Lumen let you think they managed to all sort each other out, but still, a bit too much bitter in my bittersweet ending...

I did enjoy my time with it but would have shaved a couple of hours out of it and had a few more moments. Also, the metalore about the religion of Ignis Terra and the Lumen was honestly wasted window dressing as far as I'm concerned, I'm reading there was supposed to be a "reencarnation" and "cycles" part into it, but I found it too obtuse yet overly present to engage with it.

Soooo. Outside of that, still chipping at AC6 NG+, already beat Ibis again so should be a quick finish to start NG++ and Mario Wonder is a nice "lets play a few levels" here and there as well as Enter the Gungeon (which I still suck ass at, haven't gotten beyond floor 3 yet).

Aside from that, I'm at a proper crossroads, ideally I should focus on P5 Strikers and Lisa the Painful since it's the last shit I bought on steam, on the other hand, I still have Atelier Rorona looking at me with sad eyes since I've only done the first 2 big assignments. I also have a mean bucket list in the emulation front with Project Rain Code, Ar Tonelico, Xenoblade Chronicles, Triangle Strategy and Skies of Arcadia all things I would like to start and focus on proper. And that's ignoring I'm in the middle of playthroughs for Magic Knight Rayearth and Pokemon Clover which I'd still like to continue. Modern gaming may be shit, but ignoring it I'm absolutely spoiled right now.
 
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Dieter Laser said:
I’ve probably put 75 hours or so into Darktide over the last month.

Now that they fixed the game it’s absolutely amazing.
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Is the gunplay still shit, specifically the autoguns and any gun that maintains a reticle instead of an iron sight when ads? That doesn't strike me as something they could "fix".
Fatshark is still a collective of niggerfaggots.
 
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