What are you playing right now?

[The Last Stand]

Destroy All Humans...

Does NOT hold up.

Edit: I take that back, at least partially, it's getting better.

I cannot speak about the original as I haven't played it, but the remake is a great game to fool around. DAH is chockfull of pop culture references relative to the 50s from NPCs that never fail to crack a smile. "My mind is saying Marilyn (Monroe), but my nightstick is saying Betty Page." Being an alien that can read minds, anally probe humans, lift and toss them with telekinesis and destroy buildings with a saucer is cathartically liberating to experience.

 

[marvlouslie]

Right now I just started a playthrough of Batman Arkham Asylum. It's very weird going back to this era of gaming again. Really good single player experiences, good voice acting all around, Mark Hamill wasn't an insufferable cunt (I mean, he was always a weird Lefty, but he hadn't quite lost his fuckin' mind yet).

Fuck, I miss you, Kevin.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

I cannot speak about the original as I haven't played it, but the remake is a great game to fool around. DAH is chockfull of pop culture references relative to the 50s from NPCs that never fail to crack a smile. "My mind is saying Marilyn (Monroe), but my nightstick is saying Betty Page." Being an alien that can read minds, anally probe humans, lift and toss them with telekinesis and destroy buildings with a saucer is cathartically liberating to experience.

Yeah, it's fine. Mind, it was maybe the first pseudo-adult game I played. My brother gave it to me when I was fairly little. I felt terrible when i killed the farmer and cows and by 10 minutes later I was blasting people left and right. The weird thing is that I found it a lot funnier back then despite not understanding it. Now, it's just weird. But it was a good game for it's time, just old as hell.


I've gone back to Isonzo a bit after Verdun. Isonzo suffers from the age old problem of any multiplayer game that rolls its maps out gradually. Maybe this strictly improves it by resulting in more maps (although we know that's not fully the case, of course games ship with less content these days), but especially with a niche product it means you have to play nothing but it for a week and it wears its welcome out, or - as it is here - you can't hardly play it because it's in a rotation and there's only enough people to staff one decent server at the moment. For an Italian Front game they waited a long time to roll out snow maps. I got tired of hearing nothing but Italian and Austrian voices and operatic music. There's something almost comical about the premise of a game focused on such an obscure (to Americans) front of an obscure (to Americans) war. By God, they set out to make the best Isonzo Simulator in the world and they knocked it out of the park.

As an actual game it has Verdun beat by a mile. Verdun's easier and that can make it a better mindless shooting range, but Isonzo is better to actually sit down to. I never could bring myself to uninstall it because, for all its flaws, it was much more playable than the other militaria games I own. Like my go-to since Battlefield 1 sucks on PC (people claim there's servers, but I never see them, and tactical shooters have sucked any fun I could get out of games where I shoot people and they don't die).

It's interesting to compare Verdun and Isonzo maps to Battlefield 1. The latter was always much more beautiful, but Isonzo pulls out some truly unique stuff BF1 never dared to try with its cave levels, drastic changes in terrain. One Isonzo map feels like several maps stitched together seemlessly.

 

[The Last Stand]

Yeah, it's fine. Mind, it was maybe the first pseudo-adult game I played. My brother gave it to me when I was fairly little. I felt terrible when i killed the farmer and cows and by 10 minutes later I was blasting people left and right. The weird thing is that I found it a lot funnier back then despite not understanding it. Now, it's just weird. But it was a good game for it's time, just old as hell.

I wish there was a DAH! thread. I don't think enough people know of the series for it to garner interest. Hmm...

 

[GeorgeFloydFentanylStash]

Right now I just started a playthrough of Batman Arkham Asylum. It's very weird going back to this era of gaming again. Really good single player experiences, good voice acting all around, Mark Hamill wasn't an insufferable cunt (I mean, he was always a weird Lefty, but he hadn't quite lost his fuckin' mind yet).

Fuck, I miss you, Kevin.

AA is probably the best out of the bunch. The map wasn’t too big and it didn’t go overboard with combos IMO. Plus the riddler challenges weren’t as bad as later games.

Still love this franchise and feel it’s a proper sequel to Batman TAS.

 

[Sharpeteer]

I'm playing several games right now.

- Crysis Remastered (PC). When it first came out, I hated the remaster due to them not actually fixing the underlying issues carried over from the original, performing worse despite having the opportunity to fix the optimization issues this time around, and the visuals not really being any better, and I just kept playing the OG 2007 version. But it seems that over the past few years, they actually fixed the performance, and while the visuals still don't look all that much better, it performs much better on my RTX 3080 than it did when it first came out. Having a good time, and I'll go through the remastered version of the trilogy this time around instead of the originals. I go through all three games once every couple years or so.

- Star Wars Dark Forces/Jedi Knight games (PC) - I love all the Dark Forces/Jedi Knight games - Dark Forces, Jedi Knight (Dark Forces 2), Jedi Outcast, Jedi Academy. It's a bit of a pain getting them to work on modern hardware, but once you get it, they work great. These games come from the golden area of Star Wars games imo, and I don't think I will ever grow tired of playing these.

- Star Wars Battlefront 2 (original, PC) - haven't played this in like a decade, and am remembering how much I love it. I'd like to get the multiplayer function working again thanks to private servers, but for now I'm having a blast in the single player.

- GTAV (PC) - beat this not that long ago, but I really like the single player campaign, and want to play through it again while trying to get good ranks in the missions this time around. I couldn't care less about all the GTA Online stuff, which is good considering my purchased Steam copy from many years ago no longer works because Rockstar apparently doesn't have a proper system in place to recover Social Club accounts from long lost email addresses. So I got it working another way. Lol.

- Sonic Unleashed (Xbox 360) - I already beat it, but I'm trying to grind all the achievements. Obviously this game hates letting you have fun, and you think you're going to have fun because you get to do a Daytime running stage, but because the devs hate you, they make you play several night stages in a row, are obsessed with QTEs, and make you collect a bunch of shit if you want achievements. The parts of the game where you're allowed to have fun (Daytime stages, boss fights, etc) I like a lot.

I have a lot more free time this year than last, so I want to get more games in.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Empire: Total War. Usually I wind up getting put off by the Morton's fork of playing with completely braindead (as in, sits there unresponsive) AI or awful Darthmod naval gameplay (where you can run out a 60 minute timer just doing a single pass). I also sperg when I see the map because it isn't to Paradox standards of accuracy. But it occurred to me to just disable the battle timer. Naval is clunky (unfun), but I think I can get used to it.

I'm playing Britain. Compared to other Total Wars I like the combat of the era the most - I have a strong intuition for it - and the theming, but you can tell it doesn't have the care with things like the agent system or economy building. Feels like it would be made to have the Rome 2 style if it ever got a sequel (it won't). Playing is also rather different with many great powers having far-flung empires from the start, no map discovery (which I hated in other Total Wars). War breaks out and it feels like a clusterfuck right from the get-go with multiple fronts everywhere and no money to pay for this junk.

10/10 my company cavalry slew many Mughal jeets

 

[Belvedere]

Iconoclasts: a semi-Metroidvania styled platformer. Great pixel art graphics, perhaps some of the tightest and most responsive controls in a 2D game I've ever played. The feedback is amazing, there isn't much in the way of combat but instead focuses on very creative and tough boss fights and diabolical but rewarding puzzle platforming. I'm also fascinated by how good the story and world building is so far despite it all being shown via text and sprite animations.

It's a crime against humanity that Vanillaware refuses to port their games to PC

Agreed, I love their games but the fact that no a single one of them has been ported to PC shows there is no intention on their behalf to ever do it in the future. The "reason" they give upon being asked is that they are too small of an studio and lack the budget to do ports.

I gave up on waiting and I just emulate them.

 

[Blue Miaplacidus]

I was playing PoE2 with a friend and somehow the topic of Darkest Dungeon came up, he was describing a completely different game however. Upon googling what he was talking about, it turns out he meant Darkwood, an indie game I never heard of. It was given away for free last year by Epic and GOG and was already in my library so I decided to try it because I saw that it was favoured very well on steam, it's really good. It's like a decade old I guess, but I never heard of it until yesterday. It's pretty spooky and since I know nothing about it, genuinely interesting. I'm sure if I was to look up a guide or watch some youtuber it would completely ruin the mood of the game, but playing it while knowing nothing about it has been an entertaining experience. I have the feeling this is the type of game where there are lots of secrets and hidden side quests to discover.

 

[BradeRunna]

playing Cyberpunk 2077. I bought it late last year on Steam for $50. I got the base game plus the Phantom Liberty DLC which at the time was $25 alone.

I have a little over 21 hours in the game. While it is fixed up enough to play it's still a bit of a mess. It's not the completely borked slop it was at launch. But it still has issues. Cars in traffic just disappear at times. I saw a person moon walking in mid air the other day. I don't know if these are issues caused by the recent patches. I would say the biggest issue is the poor optimization. I am running it with a 4070 Ti Super. It's installed on a M.2 NVME SSD. I still can't manage to keep a steady 60fps in the game at least with ray tracing on. I turned it off the other day and just play it that way. I think the ray tracing in the game is just totally fucked. It just kills performance no matter what settings I put it on. I set the ray traced lighting to medium and turned off path tracing and it didn't do much. I even turned down some of the settings in the non RT graphics settings and didn't see much performance gain. I'm using DLSS and still won't run well with RT on. I got sick of the game dropping below 60 fps and stuttering and turned the RT off. It's better experience. With RT off I can get 70 to a little over 100 fps while using high ultra and pyscho settings when available.

It's still slop. lol

 

[Miller]

Dying Light 1
The devs are celebrating the 10-year anniversary of Dying Light with a bunch of events, double EXP, etc. so I'm back to Harran (the game runs really well on Linux).

 

[The Evil Midnight Bomber]

Well I didn't. And I understand why the first hours are how they are, and it makes sense from a narrative and gameplay perspective, but nonetheless not a great impression.

But I am approaching the 30-hour mark, and I am quite enamored with the game. Probably because it shares a lot of similarities with Morrowind.

The third act is a complete slog. The game makes you do a bunch of tedious fetch quests before the last battle.

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

Skyrim with over 400 mods. Having fun.

 

[Arthur Morgan]

- GTAV (PC) - beat this not that long ago, but I really like the single player campaign, and want to play through it again while trying to get good ranks in the missions this time around.

My issue with GTA V, and something that worries me about GTA VI, is that the campaign, and especially the side missions, repeatedly have the characters end up with nothing to show. You do those car retrieval missions, and at the end Franklin points out he got screwed over. You do Trevor's first heist mission, you have to put back what you stole and don't even find out what it is. You rob a plane in mid-air, the cargo goes down and you get nothing for it.

What the fuck is the point of having a game where you play a criminal doing jobs to make money if you're also trying to do a "Crime doesn't pay" moral? It's fucking Grand Theft Auto for fuck's sake!

 

[CyrusHowler]

Dying Light 1.
Titanfall 2 Multiplayer.
A Pokémon clone called Nexomon that is really awesome.
Valheim with my cousin once a week.

Just played Sniper Elite Resistance on the cloud via Game Pass and it’s literally just Sniper Elite 5 with minor differences, less guns and an annoying limey protagonist. It’s not bad, it’s more Sniper Elite if you like that but the franchise is in desperate need of a new setting like The Pacific or something Not World War 2.

 

[Douglas Mortimer]

I've been playing Tenchu Z using the Xenia emulator and 60fps patch. It plays and runs great. All that was needed was one tweak in the config to fix a graphical glitch and it's good to go.

 

[IDontLikeLiberals]

I just finished West of Loathing, and am a few hours into Shadows Over Loathing.
They are a bit repetitive in combat, but they are reasonably entertaining, inoffensive games with a goofy sense of humour.
I like that Shadow has an actual list of what you need to do, whereas you have to constantly talk to your partner in West to remind yourself of what to do.

 

[Miller]

Just played Sniper Elite Resistance on the cloud via Game Pass and it’s literally just Sniper Elite 5 with minor differences, less guns and an annoying limey protagonist. It’s not bad, it’s more Sniper Elite if you like that but the franchise is in desperate need of a new setting like The Pacific or something Not World War 2.

A Sniper Elite game set in Vietnam could be fun.
I was watching Worth a Buy's review of the game and to him it felt like a DLC with a character who can't keep his mouth shut.

 

[Roast Chicken]

Stray. Cute kitty game with charming robots against the backdrop of decrepid, grotty cities that can sometimes look oddly beautiful.

 

[The Last Stand]

Just beat DAH! and will now mop up the remaining side quests and objectives for 100%. I have the sequel ready to play.