What game did you finish today?

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Somewhat fittingly, I played as a Necro Boner.
 
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finished the main story for Rance IX, the Revelation of Helmania. its a TRPG that is nothing special but im a big fan of the series so the story and characters made it worthwhile. now i have to wait 8-10 years until X comes out.
 
I've finished Dishonored for a second time, I was aiming for a pacifist run. I failed. I guess I'm not allowed to kill the targets. Fuck that, at least I got the 2 endings.
 
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Finally got the platinum trophy for Fallout Shelter.

I think I will continue playing though; if only to make a shelter of nothing but white/blonde vault dwellers with maxed out stats.
 
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I finished Westerado: Double Barreled.

It was okay. I paid $3.00 for it, but mind, few things are not worth $3, at that level your main cost is time. It's short. Probably meant to be replayed, you can take different sides in the quests and I still had three large areas I hadn't cleared. The premise of the game, made by Adult Swim for some reason, is that it's a comedy top-down game, can't really call it an RPG but it plays like old GameBoy games (but really smooth, since for PC). Western "comedy" (it's not particularly funny) about finding your family's killer, you solve quests, you get clues, eventually you want to confront the guy (have to find him, hidden as just another NPC) and then you have the boss fight. Gameplay is the simplest thing in the world, you buy health, a few guns that all have meaningful tactical differences, and that's it. I like how it's pure gamey like that.
 
A Plague Tail: Innocence. I went into it more or less blind, which is how it's probably best to as the only reason to play the game is it's story. It's a mixed bag. I thought it was interesting, I didn't mind playing it, glad I finished it. But the gameplay was pretty dull and in the end the plot took a nosedive. The premise is that it's an action-adventure "stealth" or "survival horror" game about Black Death France, but a supernatural, fantasy-like version of it where the plague is some sort of evil entity that is spread by hive rats that flee from/are killed by the light, keep nests they build out of nasty gunk and corpses, make rat tornados. You play as a preteen girl and her little brother trying to survive being hunted by the Inquisition (no, not a specific inquisition, just "the" Inquisition) and uncovering the alchemy plot involved in it.

The thing feels like a game version of some of those young adult novels, you build a band of teens and kids, save your mother, it's very much got that kind of vibe, but also half the time you're looking at corpses everywhere or feeding people alive to rats. The gameplay is like The Last of Us or other action-adventure games with less combat, you mostly are solving something that could be called an environmental puzzle, but is usually so straightforward and with so little room for experimentation that it's hard to call it a puzzle, and then occasionally stealth sections that work the same way. It opens up over time, and around the mid-game it reaches a sweet spot of level complexity and variety (also around the time the tone starts to switch from horror and despair and constant bleakness to more like adventure intrigue). It's still sort of like a corridor shooter in terms of how it's funneling you through the level.

The setting is okay, the graphics are beautiful and when you're allowed to slow down and look at it the worlds are really detailed and believable, rich depictions of Medieval cities, forests, vast cathedrals and universities. The rat environments are all fleshy, gross things that bring to mind a mixture of a charnel house and a bee hive, but it's hard to call the rats themselves scary. One thing that annoyed me a bit was that the weather seems to always be dark and dreary, I like daylight horror and other horror that doesn't try to sell you on atmosphere. The characters are likable enough.

The last level was a good idea on paper (the specific setpieces), but it suddenly shifts to an action game then - a shitty one - and so ruins itself. The main villain is also a cartoon, muh evil church man. And I felt like there was going to be some big lore payoff explaining the story behind the plague, the Inquisition, all of that, but no, it's a video game, fuck you.

So okay game, would recommend to someone who specifically likes Medieval stuff, would not specifically recommend otherwise.


Edit: Something it really missed was having more actual plague, and not just muh rats, in its plague game. Whether monsters, atmosphere, or scenery, some sort of body horror, buboes, things like that. There's a real lack of it. The villain is piss, the only reason he's the villain is because he cackles a lot, makes those grandiose threats you see in the movie, and tortures people. There's no conflict of ideas set up, it's just another evil-dictator-grabbing-power story.
 
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I finished RE4 remake on Saturday, if that counts.

I really don’t play very many video games anymore. That was the last one I played. If I’m really interested in something I play it. If it’s something pretentious like life is tumblr, I avoid it like a disgusting troon on the street.
 
I finish Atomic Heart, I enjoy it. The shotgun and Zvezdochka are great but the rocket launcher, whew you can stun-lock bosses with it.
 
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Yesterday I finished Flipping Death. It was the spiritual successor to Stick it to the Man which was supposed to take comedic inspiration from Psychonauts. Both games are adventure games/platformers based in some fashion around manipulating people's minds. Both have an art style that looks like a wacky cartoon made out of cardboard/paper and swingy soundtracks, with the afterlife side of the map being a fleshy hell-world of monsters and eyeballs. Aesthetically they're fantastic.

Flipping Death's gimmick is that you're a reaper who's trying to solve problems through a mixture of possessing people (to use their abilities, or get them in the right place/right interaction to make something happen). The adventure game aspect of it is very modern, in the sense that it's easy. If you play adventure games, you know how the old ones were exercises in frustration where you might have to traipse all around many different maps clicking on different shit, interacting different things, and the chains of logic are extremely convoluted. It seems to me like adventure games in the modern day realized that that shit isn't acceptable design anymore and instead have the solutions to things be more intuitive than require leaps of logic. You still get delightful goofy Rube Goldberg machines of solutions to problems, but the solutions aren't things you have to agonize over. A big part of it is having a very limited range of options and clearly marking them out, you can even teleport between people so you're not forced to trek around as you try to figure out what to use.

The game's platforming aspect is mostly just there to make it look like there's more gameplay. You can fuck around with the environment and sometimes have to dodge enemies (that can't really hurt you, it's sort of like a Kirby game) or take things on a chase. It succeeds in making navigating the map fun.

Comedically, it's hit and miss. It's a rated T for teen game and so that sometimes comes through with some of the dumb shit, the worst characters probably being the guy whose gimmick is trying to be cool about liking ice cream (lol /sneed) and the guy whose thing is being dressed up like a supervillain and poking things (<groan>). Has a bad habit of dropping in these out of place rambles about toxic masculinity and goes up its ass, especially in one chapter (the shittiest chapter) about metanarrative. But there's a lot of stuff in it that's just amusing, even funny. And it always has the atmosphere of being fun.

I thought the modern day levels were all great and the peasant village levels sucked. Unfortunately, the peasant village levels were a third of the levels, and it built up to a big wet fart of an ending, a disappointing resolution to the mystery it was supposed to solve at some point (and I was genuinely invested in it).

Decent game
Not better than Stick it to the Man in my memory, but I played that over 10 years ago

Stick it to the Man's gimmick was ripping off objects (like they're stickers) to paste on other things, and being able to rip things from/put things in people's minds (like a newspaper cartoon thought bubble).
 
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Beat two games while Kiwi Farms was spazzing out, Sniper Elite 4 and Roundabout.



Sniper Elite 4 was frustrating, especially because I found it a mediocre experience only to realize I had been playing it wrong and have Cuphead journalist tear gaming skills in the very last level. You are Karl Fairburne, muh German-American superubercommando sent to kill all Germans while looking grumpy and folding his arms and jutting out his godly square jaw. He is a creatively bankrupt ripoff of BJ Blaskowicz with none of the charisma. And the plot might as well not exist, as in, it actively worsens the game while also not being there. You can watch a few characters with little animation and horrible voice acting talk a bit before you go off to do some mission that's sort of tied into the other missions. It's boring shit about guided missiles being developed to sink the whole US Fleet before Husky.

Okay, so the plots piss. What about the gameplay and world design? Well, the shooting mechanics seem good, at least detailed for what it is. Adjust your range, reconnoiter the land with your binoculars. Sound actually plays a huge role and the AI is pretty damn impressive. You take a shot, it takes several shots before they triangulate your position, but regardless, enemies that are in war mode use actual tactics to protect themselves and flush you out, and you can't just run around. Sometimes you want to shoot when there's loud noises, cover the sound of your gun.

Problem is, the maps are way too large to sneak through - it is excruciatingly long, I could only stand playing like once a week - with a million enemies and no good sniping spots. I'd have fun at the start of a map and then it would just grind me down by outstaying its welcome 4x, eventually just start running and gunning. And it's a faithful representation of Italy, but the terrain's hilliness and tight streets mean it's actually about the worst environment for the sort of long trick shooting you think you're going to do.

Well, I get to the very last mission, and only then did I figure out how the fucking range adjustment works. Or rather, I had seen it, I had seen the marking with binoculars, but at no point did my tiny monkey brain figure out to use the two together. See, I had been using "empty lung" (bullet time), which shows you exactly where to point the gun but also takes any feeling of accomplishment or challenge out of the act of shooting. On the other hand, I don't fuck with bullet drop, I hate it in games and don't care to learn. Well, what you're supposed to do is mark the guys, then range adjust to the distance it says. Then the game "has bullet drop," but you just correct for that. Suddenly it becomes a really fun action shooter where you blow your way through crowds, but at medium-to-long distance ranges! There is no explaining how goddamned stupid I must have been to have not figured that out. But when I see a stealth game, I always kind of assume the stealth is the INTENDED experience.

For $6.00, was good. Sort of thing you pick up and play just to fuck around in. It has a multiplayer mode about sniping and people still play it, shockingly, but it's also not very accessible at this point.


Roundabout, on the other hand, really good game. It was one of those stupid joke things that came out around the same time as Goat Simulator. You are the world's first revolving limousine driver, as in, your car mysteriously revolves about a vertical axis while also responding perfectly to your controller's thumbstick, basically just operating on cartoon logic. It's the 1970s, the cutscenes are all in FMV done in an intentionally bad 1970s style with a mute protagonist that just stares back at her passengers. If that sounds charming, it's not. I found most of them so cringey - not aggressively cringey, just so unfunny it hurt - it actively detracted. But, the plot grew on me, it just takes a while to get moving.

The gameplay is rock solid, since the car revolves the challenge basically comes from "swinging" your car around objects, which may themselves be revolving, with the right timing and angle to clear them. Ain't really much more to say than that. Lot of levels with the stupid little FMV cutscenes, collectibles, nonsense. It layers on a bit more complexity over time with things like having the limo jump (for platforming and such) and chases. It's one of those things that is intentionally awkward as hell when you first pick it up, but once you get the hang of it is deeply satisfying.

Unfortunately, it's pretty short. The way the map was laid out I thought it was going to have six areas, ended up with just three, and I didn't figure that out until the credits rolled. It just rushes to an ending abruptly, and you know how when watching a movie your mind will be working ahead predicting what will happen? Yeah, I thought it was going to set up this thing with the villain turning out to have faked his death and a redemption arc and all that. No, it just up and ends. But definitely a great idea, wish they had made a sequel that was bigger.

Got it for $2.50 YEARS ago, picked it up, immediately hated it, never bothered playing it again until now. My loss, it's great if you're getting it cheap like that.
 
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What did you think of Deliver Us the Moon? It's really low on my list of priorities, but I'm interested in it on account of the realistic space exploration theme.
It was interesting but its quite short I got all achivements and explored all I could in 14 hours of play time. Some of the controls were a bit janky when off ship and for most part you are not exploring space itself.
 
It was interesting but its quite short I got all achivements and explored all I could in 14 hours of play time. Some of the controls were a bit janky when off ship and for most part you are not exploring space itself.
That's fine for me. If I got it it would be on a huge sale, and I like short games, short games means I can play more games total.
 
Finished Darkest Dungeon 2 over the weekend. It's not as good as the first and it's not worth $40. It's not worth the $30 you can get it for if you own DD1 either.

I know its been in early access on EGS for the last two years and I've been deliberately keeping myself in the dark although in retrospect that was maybe a mistake. During the week, I combed through the feedback concerning the early access and it seems that the bewilderment over the complete change in direction was near universal.

Darkest Dungeon 1 was a fairly lengthy experience. You assembled a relatively large roster of heroes, often with duplicates, you crawled dungeons for gear and resources, your heroes got stressed out, got shitty quirks (personality traits), and died, you beefed up your town, you kitted out your A-team (and B-team and C-team because you needed them all), and you finally took on the Darkest Dungeon itself to atone for the sins of your ancestor.

DD2, in contrast, is very much slimmed down. So much so in fact that the game more resembles Slay the Spire from a macro perspective than its predecessor.

Dungeon diving has been tossed in favor of a Slay the Spire/Curse of the Dead Gods style encounter map (node has 2-3 different paths leading to another node with some minor encounter/obstacle along the route, only to split again; repeat 8-12 more times per area).

Instead of training up a roster and progressing over the course of tens/hundreds of in game weeks, runs in DD2 are one and done. You beat the act or you fail, you start again with some more of the meta progression resource. Your heroes are fleeting. They are not the same ones you built up before. Technically, if you clear an act, you get some minor carry over effects, but as soon as you fail or abandon a run, those effects are kaput.

The combat is the same for the most part. I actually like it better. DD1 didn't have a good way of displaying what buffs/debuffs were affecting units (you had to mouse over the icon which would present a list of all the effects on a character which very easily can become quite long) and that has been retooled into an easy to learn visual token system. Units no longer have dodge values, protection values, accuracy values, etc, they have dodge tokens, block tokens, strength tokens, and so on and so forth. These tokens can be interacted with in interesting ways. They're single use but most of them can stack up to three. Some combo off of each other. One hero can steal enemy tokens, another can move negative tokens off of allies onto himself and throw them at enemies. It's really neat and easy to pick up. Enemy design is excellent although it's somewhat lacking in variety. The new bosses absolutely knocked it out of the park. They're way better than most of the DD1 bosses.

For some reason, Red Hook decided to abandon the hand drawn sprites for Borderlands-style sort of 3D models that might be more detailed but don't have nearly as much charm.

All in all, the game feels so much more fleeting. You don't really feel like you the player are building up anything for a final assault on a big bad but are rather just throwing bodies at the wall until you get all the right things in place and your meta progression reaches critical mass so your best heroes shit on everything.

I have to wonder if Epic had any say in the direction as a stipulation of the exclusivity money up until now but I know nothing about how any of that has played out in the past to base a serious query on.

I also wonder how friendly the game will be to modding. DD1 is extremely mod friendly (the Black Reliquary mod might as well be the real DD2). It'd be dope as shit if someone managed to remake DD1 in DD2.

EDIT: Lord help you if your hero who isn't your position 1 gets the quirk that causes them to rush forward and taunt. Lord smite you if you took that at the beginning willingly.
 
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finished Metroid prime. it was alright. had enough exploration and lore to make looking around interesting. i liked how the game just lets you wonder around while also drooping small hints were to go next. liked how every weapon had its use but some of the upgrades were indeed inferior to others (like flamethrower and wave beam sucked compered to the super missile.
 
I've finished the story of Dying Light 2. It was meh. I was disappointed when I found out that I was about to enter the final part of the game and I still had not explored the last 3 sections of the map.
 
Battle Network 4. For some reason, the worst in the series was the easiest for me to get through.

Funny foible of the series is how xenophobic and racially-aware it is. Foreign characters are very identifiable and more likely than average to be boorish or petty criminals.
 
Dishonored 2.
100%.

Will probably be going back to Dishonored 1 to do everything again on game pass.
Can't believe it's been 10 years already.

EDIT: Fuck The Last Case of Benedict Fox. I stopped playing at the Librarian Boss fight. I feel like DSP on a slow aspirin day. If I can score all endings and work through Dishonored games, play Halo on heroic and play Shank (starring Danny Trejo) solo and enjoy it, then I don't see a problem with me, game.
 
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Played through Amnesia: The Bunker a minute ago. I'm kinda mixed on it. For $25, it's not a bad game, but it's got some flaws to it. I finished in just about 5 hours, but I saw other people finishing their first runs in 3-4, so it's short. The game reminds you that the items/codes/traps change each time you play, but I don't really know how much that would affect replayability. If the key items you need to progress move (which I don't think they do), then the game would have its own randomizer and that'd be pretty cool. But I think it's just miscellaneous stuff, like medkits or ammo.

The monster's appearance in the artwork they show on the store page is a bit different than the in-game one. Maybe that's intentional to keep it a mystery. It looks okay, though the death animation has you shoved so close to it you're basically just staring at its chest, so not as much spectacle as it could be. Sometimes it'll clip its head through doors, which ranges from terrifying to unintentionally hilarious. It's fairly smart (it won't just hear you, walk into the room, and then forget you exist), but the store page oversells it a little bit. "It reacts to your every move and sound!" Yeah, it'll go investigate noises and chase you if it sees you.

The WW1 setting is a good choice for horror, but it feels a bit underutilized. Same goes for the ruins you go into, which don't last very long. You could transplant the game just about anywhere or when and have the same result. A few places, like the pillbox, are neat, but I think there should have been a bit more in that vein. The game's main conceit of having you trapped underground and needing to maintain a generator in a central room works well in some ways, but does seem to prevent having more disconnected areas and variety (descending further and further into the ruins as the game goes on, for example).

If you're a big Frictional Games fan (which I can't say I am, since I only played half their games), you'll probably enjoy it, but otherwise, I might wait for it to dip to $20 in October or something. I'll be interested in seeing if anybody makes something good with the Steam Workshop support.
 
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