What game are you playing?

[Zess_T]

Playing Monster Hunter: Wilds. Grabbed it on a steep discount. A lot of eastern games do this thing where they hold content or mechanics back from you until you are either 70% of the way through the game or completed it entirely, and this game is no different. In order to access the true “game hub”, you have to beat the story. Unfortunately, the story is terrible, so it’s a drag to try and get the full content of the game.

To counteract MH: Wilds being ****, I’m playing EYE: Divine Cybermancy along with it

[Manny V]

Playing Monster Hunter: Wilds. Grabbed it on a steep discount. A lot of eastern games do this thing where they hold content or mechanics back from you until you are either 70% of the way through the game or completed it entirely, and this game is no different. In order to access the true “game hub”, you have to beat the story. Unfortunately, the story is terrible, so it’s a drag to try and get the full content of the game.

To counteract MH: Wilds being ****, I’m playing EYE: Divine Cybermancy along with it

join us

[stormvermin]

Playing Monster Hunter: Wilds. Grabbed it on a steep discount. A lot of eastern games do this thing where they hold content or mechanics back from you until you are either 70% of the way through the game or completed it entirely, and this game is no different. In order to access the true “game hub”, you have to beat the story. Unfortunately, the story is terrible, so it’s a drag to try and get the full content of the game.

To counteract MH: Wilds being ****, I’m playing EYE: Divine Cybermancy along with it

join us

You guys are playing EYE coop? Sheeeeeeeeit

[Manny V]

Playing Monster Hunter: Wilds. Grabbed it on a steep discount. A lot of eastern games do this thing where they hold content or mechanics back from you until you are either 70% of the way through the game or completed it entirely, and this game is no different. In order to access the true “game hub”, you have to beat the story. Unfortunately, the story is terrible, so it’s a drag to try and get the full content of the game.

To counteract MH: Wilds being ****, I’m playing EYE: Divine Cybermancy along with it

join us

You guys are playing EYE coop? Sheeeeeeeeit

no, the other one

[Zess_T]

join us

You guys are playing EYE coop? Sheeeeeeeeit

no, the other one

Perhaps once lent is over, I have church essentially every other day, so I only really get to spend an hour or 2 on the game a night.

[Tweed]

Replaying The Darkness Below since technically it's 1.0 now.

[WhiteShark]

I'm playing Metal Gear Ac!d. It's a stealth-tactics-card game for the PSP. It's turn-based and played on a square grid, you take actions by playing cards, and you can customize your deck between missions. Stealth is highly incentivized by the scoring system, which grades the player on three metrics: number of times spotted, number of enemies killed (fewer is better), and speed. A higher score gets you more points to spend on card packs. Going loud and blasting makes things pretty easy, presumably by design, so it's not hard to brute force a bad run, but the difference in point rewards is huge.

The gameplay is fun. I'm starting to get the hang of enemy vision, movement, and using noise for distraction. The starter set is heavily biased toward combat for some reason ("Snake, I hate to sound like a parrot, but this is a top secret mission. It's very important that you move forward without being detected by anyone." -Roger, your CO who sends you in with a pile of frag grenades in your deck), but I'm now beginning to get some nice cards for stealth, such as the Magazine, which distracts the enemy who stumbles on it for a large number of time units.

The UI and camera, on the other hand, leave much to be desired. The default view is third person, but the camera is too zoomed in to see very much, and it gets pressed in even further by walls. The toggleable top-down camera affords a much better view, but it can't be rotated, and you have to go back to the regular camera to play cards. Camera wonkiness has lost me time in several missions as I fumbled around on what turned out to be the wrong side of the room while trying to figure out where to go next. As for the UI, there's no way to see what equipment enemies are wearing, which can screw over stealth runs when you try to snipe a guy from behind and he turns out to be wearing armor that nullifies the attacks.

The character art by Tsubasa Masao is great. The style reminds me of Castlevania, though apparently he never worked on that series.





I don't know where the story is going, but it's intriguing enough: someone has hijacked a plane with several American VIPs on board and is demanding something called 'Pythagoras', which turns out to be the code name for a secret research project. Snake is sent to infiltrate the facility where the research is being conducted in order to steal the data and meet the demands of the hijacker, but (shockingly!) there seems to be more going on in the facility than was expected.

This is the only Metal Gear game I've played besides Revengeance, so I'm likely missing some context, but I don't feel lost. I was surprised to learn that psychics are an established part of the setting. I'd heard the name 'Psycho Mantis' before, but for some reason I'd assumed that such cases were Scooby Doo-esque technological trickery. This makes it confusing to me that Snake expresses resentment over being required to work with one such psychic. Isn't this something he's encountered before? I don't know the timeline, but it's established in the opening that Snake has already been doing this special operative thing for a long time by this point, so it seems strange.

I don't know why all my posts in this thread turn into mini-reviews. I just can't help myself, apparently. I'll stop here before I start feeling the need to add screenshots and expand even further.

[Bertram_Tung]

I'm playing Metal Gear Ac!d. It's a stealth-tactics-card game for the PSP. It's turn-based and played on a square grid, you take actions by playing cards, and you can customize your deck between missions. Stealth is highly incentivized by the scoring system, which grades the player on three metrics: number of times spotted, number of enemies killed (fewer is better), and speed. A higher score gets you more points to spend on card packs. Going loud and blasting makes things pretty easy, presumably by design, so it's not hard to brute force a bad run, but the difference in point rewards is huge.

The gameplay is fun. I'm starting to get the hang of enemy vision, movement, and using noise for distraction. The starter set is heavily biased toward combat for some reason ("Snake, I hate to sound like a parrot, but this is a top secret mission. It's very important that you move forward without being detected by anyone." -Roger, your CO who sends you in with a pile of frag grenades in your deck), but I'm now beginning to get some nice cards for stealth, such as the Magazine, which distracts the enemy who stumbles on it for a large number of time units.

The UI and camera, on the other hand, leave much to be desired. The default view is third person, but the camera is too zoomed in to see very much, and it gets pressed in even further by walls. The toggleable top-down camera affords a much better view, but it can't be rotated, and you have to go back to the regular camera to play cards. Camera wonkiness has lost me time in several missions as I fumbled around on what turned out to be the wrong side of the room while trying to figure out where to go next. As for the UI, there's no way to see what equipment enemies are wearing, which can screw over stealth runs when you try to snipe a guy from behind and he turns out to be wearing armor that nullifies the attacks.

The character art by Tsubasa Masao is great. The style reminds me of Castlevania, though apparently he never worked on that series.





I don't know where the story is going, but it's intriguing enough: someone has hijacked a plane with several American VIPs on board and is demanding something called 'Pythagoras', which turns out to be the code name for a secret research project. Snake is sent to infiltrate the facility where the research is being conducted in order to steal the data and meet the demands of the hijacker, but (shockingly!) there seems to be more going on in the facility than was expected.

This is the only Metal Gear game I've played besides Revengeance, so I'm likely missing some context, but I don't feel lost. I was surprised to learn that psychics are an established part of the setting. I'd heard the name 'Psycho Mantis' before, but for some reason I'd assumed that such cases were Scooby Doo-esque technological trickery. This makes it confusing to me that Snake expresses resentment over being required to work with one such psychic. Isn't this something he's encountered before? I don't know the timeline, but it's established in the opening that Snake has already been doing this special operative thing for a long time by this point, so it seems strange.

I don't know why all my posts in this thread turn into mini-reviews. I just can't help myself, apparently. I'll stop here before I start feeling the need to add screenshots and expand even further.

This brings me back. I was probably 14 or something when playing this. Loved it.

This makes it confusing to me that Snake expresses resentment over being required to work with one such psychic. Isn't this something he's encountered before?

Yes that is why he resents it. Psycho Mantis was not a good experience for him.

[Bertram_Tung]

oysters gay

[WhiteShark]

This makes it confusing to me that Snake expresses resentment over being required to work with one such psychic. Isn't this something he's encountered before?

Yes that is why he resents it. Psycho Mantis was not a good experience for him.

I didn't phrase it very clearly. He's portrayed as resenting it because he's skeptical. The skepticism is what seemed odd to me if he's supposed to have encountered it before. It is possible that it's not real skepticism, just a cover for his dislike. He hasn't complained about it in a while, though, so maybe he's gotten over it.

[Bertram_Tung]

This makes it confusing to me that Snake expresses resentment over being required to work with one such psychic. Isn't this something he's encountered before?

Yes that is why he resents it. Psycho Mantis was not a good experience for him.

I didn't phrase it very clearly. He's portrayed as resenting it because he's skeptical. The skepticism is what seemed odd to me if he's supposed to have encountered it before. It is possible that it's not real skepticism, just a cover for his dislike. He hasn't complained about it in a while, though, so maybe he's gotten over it.

Imagine if you fought a deadly battle to the death with the world's most powerful psychic, and then many years later some broad starts telling you she can read minds. Snake remains skeptical.

[WhiteShark]

Finished Metal Gear Ac!d this morning. The plot became rather convoluted toward the end; it might have been better to write down important revelations because it was starting to become difficult to keep track of it all. The ending contains setup for the sequel, but finishing the game also unlocked a higher difficulty mode, so I'm a bit torn as to whether I should move on or replay. Assuming I get to keep my cards, it would be fun to retry the early missions with my refined late-game decks.

I pretty much gave up on pacifism halfway through. I still tried to be sneaky (though I managed to complete only very few missions without being spotted at all), but many missions felt impossible to complete both quickly and non-lethally. It was much more efficient (and, ironically, stealthier) to just gun down every guard in my path from a blindspot. In the typical case, a stealth approach requires several extra steps:

• press up against a wall;
• use the 'knock' action to make a noise and draw the guard's attention;
• move to another spot;
• (if the new spot isn't out of vision) put on a cardboard box;
• wait for the guard to come investigate; and then
• slip past him.

That works, but it's a lot of extra cards (moving uses a card), and it can put you in a difficult situation if there be another guard immediately beyond the first. It's much, much easier to just walk up from behind and spend one card to blast him. The noise will sometimes alert other guards, but even that can work to your advantage if you reposition after shooting.

There is a card that makes you invisible for 20 time units that obviates many of those steps, but I only found one copy of it before the very end of the game, 20 time units isn't really that many, and it doesn't help in cramped corridors that offer no space to bypass a conscious guard. Having two copies will probably help if I do a second run on Extreme difficulty, but a really efficient stealth-pacifist run would probably require the maximum four per deck.

[DemoGraph]

Minesweeper.

[Rand]

SurrounDead, Pillars of Eternity, and Everwind are the main rotation this week.

[Breathe]

SurrounDead, Pillars of Eternity, and Everwind are the main rotation this week.

Is Surroundead any good?

[Rand]

SurrounDead, Pillars of Eternity, and Everwind are the main rotation this week.

Is Surroundead any good?

Yes. It's decent at the moment, but still missing a lot of intended content. Progress is moderate-slow, but quite steady. Dev is a good guy.
He uses the Synty store assets with some additions. I actually like the style. He's adding custom skeletons and animations, so his skills are improving all the time.
It will be a very good game when it reaches completion.

[DemoGraph]

Minesweeper.

Mkay.
There's a minesweeper online with ladder, tournaments, grinding and whatnot.
https://minesweeper.online
It also features replays. And the fastest ones are pretty mindblowing. I'll never be young enough again to ouchink the best of them.

I've realized that MS is pretty addictive to me these last days, because it has a very short feedback loop and the games are a minute or two long.
I was so overworked lately that my attention span both narrowed and shortened and I couldn't get any satisfaction from "ordinary" games.

[WhiteShark]

Minesweeper.

Mkay.
There's a minesweeper online with ladder, tournaments, grinding and whatnot.
https://minesweeper.online
It also features replays. And the fastest ones are pretty mindblowing. I'll never be young enough again to ouchink the best of them.

I've realized that MS is pretty addictive to me these last days, because it has a very short feedback loop and the games are a minute or two long.
I was so overworked lately that my attention span both narrowed and shortened and I couldn't get any satisfaction from "ordinary" games.

Oh yeah, now that you mention it, a friend of mine was into this for a bit. He likes speedrunning, so he sometimes falls into games like this and continues until he sets a personal best he finds satisfactory. I'd forgotten all about it. Not my cup of tea, but I hope it gets you through the stress.

[Algol]

I've deleted Hearts of Iron 4 because it's boring. Nothing satisfies anymore.

[Oyster Sauce]

I've deleted Hearts of Iron 4 because it's boring. Nothing satisfies anymore.

I'm going to increase your dosage of HRT and see if that improves your mood

[WhiteShark]

I've deleted Hearts of Iron 4 because it's boring. Nothing satisfies anymore.

I'm going to increase your dosage of HRT and see if that improves your mood

This just reminded me that the US military force deployed in the beginning of Metal Gear Ac!d's story was called HRT.

The game said it was a specialized anti-terrorism branch of SWAT, which makes no sense to deploy internationally, and the only real-life counterpart I can find to it is the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team, which again makes no sense in context.

[Rand]

He likes speedrunning

Has he bought long women's socks yet?

[jdcp]

Not an RPG but CS2 just got done with it.

I've deleted Hearts of Iron 4 because it's boring. Nothing satisfies anymore.

The only thing pulling me away from this one is the ridiculous amount of DLC lol.

That aside it's a good game, sadly I'll just stick to HOI2 because I ain't paying that much money for some "extra content" that should've been there in the beginning (and that for a game that's a decade old already, they're still releasing more).

[Algol]

I've deleted Hearts of Iron 4 because it's boring. Nothing satisfies anymore.

I'm going to increase your dosage of HRT and see if that improves your mood

You're closer to the truth than you realize.

[Oyster Sauce]

I've deleted Hearts of Iron 4 because it's boring. Nothing satisfies anymore.

I'm going to increase your dosage of HRT and see if that improves your mood

You're closer to the truth than you realize.

[Algol]

I'm going to increase your dosage of HRT and see if that improves your mood

You're closer to the truth than you realize.

Not that, you assholes. Low test from being old/genetic trash.

[weaselus]

Finished Wasteland 2. Should be called Adventures in the Redditocalypse. As previously mentioned, most of the people you meet are irritating to the core. Girlbosses, *******, ****** girlbosses. Lots of casual faggotry that everyone turns a blind eye to in the lawless wastes, including the militant christian faction (which is really based off of some heavily altered gobbledygook that Avellone wrote up in a pre-release novella). Nothing comes together in a meaningful way and it's clear that they wanted to make it obvious as hell what was going on before the not-so-big reveal at the end. I enjoyed how my companions from their varied walks of life all seemed to be of one accord over their dislike of religion, their love of pot, and just about every other reddit-tier talking point you could think of. Also, remember the 80s? Remember the 80s? Like, dude, the 80s!

Then there's the beloved choice and consequence. You know it's going to be great when they spring this on your right out of the gate with the choice between Ag Center and Highpool. In the end I should have let them both burn. When I had a chance to make peace with Red Skorp Milita, I chose to gun them all down instead because they were annoying as **** on top of being stupid. Gave the nuke to the Diamondbacks because they were only slightly annoying compared to the le wacky suicidal monks. Also love how if you decided to take the peacenik option and disable the nuke some random new faction sweeps in and kills them all which is another thing I got sick of. Someone really, really must have been in love with the original endings for Junktown in Fallout 1 because almost every conflict resolution in Wasteland 2 has a dark TWEEST because the waste is a harsh mistress. At least I can say they weren't as predictable as the ones in Pillars of Shiternity. Also enjoyed how the best option for Hollywood and God's Militia is —of course— a middle of the road compromise to let them keep prostitution and DUDE legal while snuffing out le slavery and putting an end to nuke salt. Stronk dominatrix womyn helps Spanish Inquisition leader see the errors of his ways, a match truly made in heaven.

Combat is alright, but pretty simplistic. Stolen almost 1:1 from XCOM because everyone was stealing XCOM's combat system. Shotguns are ******* worthless, energy weapons are mostly worthless. Pistols are kind of alright because of precision shots. Snipers and assault rifles are OP. SMGs aren't great, but aren't terrible. Melee can be alright if your guys can actually reach the enemy before your other members shoot everything.

The game could have been made 50% more tolerable if my fuckers could move faster outside of combat. Getting from A to B is a trudge and there's a fuckton of backtracking.

Anyway, there it is. A le wacky, reddit-induced, nostalgia-baited slog. 15 dollars wasted.

I think yours is a valid take on the game, but note your point-by-point description is of a deep and well-designed game. It is the liberal bent of the package that has you kicking and screaming.

One of the things I don't like is the balance of weapons. Two shots from an assault rifle? Six shots from a machine gun? Only snipers feel good. The "balancing of weapons" was a stupid idea because these guns are not balanced in real life. How can handguns compete with squad support weapons? They can't, and Fallout 1 and 2 reflected that.

"Then there's the beloved choice and consequence. " - at least there is choice and consequence in these titles. How many newer titles even have that.

While we are on the subject, I think Pillars of Eternity 2 is much more liberal than Wasteland 2.


***
Spent the last couple of weeks on Fallout Sonora and was underwhelmed. It never became good. The moment-to-moment experience is Fallout-like, but all the quests were boring. After it turned out late game that I needed a Spanish perk to get the power armor, I uninstalled. Had spent dozens of hours running around the wasteland, trying to break into the power armor quest without antagonizing the Arizona rangers. But that quest was the eye of the needle. I went and wiped the Mexican army fort, and it still wouldn't register it as having being scouted. I had to speak Spanish to some hobo in a different town so as to ingratiate myself with the rancher who could "spill the beans on army outpost". Which was required for Brotherhood of Steel initiation, which was required for the armor. I had no idea how to get the Spanish perk. My alternative at that point would have been to go berserk on the BoS base so I could grab the armor. Typical amateur jank while the rest of the game was quite mellow. Also, the Brotherhood of Steel being the archenemy was a boring twist.

Overall, Sonora is uninspired. All the Fallout-inspired mods (I have played three) are uninspired and janky. The Fallout universe does not seem to lend itself to interesting characters and situations, or more likely, the Fallout fans that are enthusiastic enough to become developers are dummies. Sonora feels like a less-thoughtful retread of Fallout. What Fallout 1 and 2 did well was up the stakes as the game progressed. All the mods I have played and the ATOM game felt flat and static and you couldn't even become overpowered.

Verdict: the original Fallout 1 and 2 are groundbreaking. Newer iterations, excluding Wasteland 2 and 3, feel obtuse and amateurish. No suspense was experienced in the course of 30 hours of Sonora. Just the never-ending trawl with the same tired Fallout 1 tunes.

Wasteland 2 and 3 adhere to a higher standard than any of the fan-made Fallouts. Certain quests and situations are clever and engaging (the end of the Arizona chapter and the start of the California chapter; the enemies in California), and unlike @Tweed I consider the new Wasteland games more palatable (and less liberal) than Dragon Age: Inquisition.

[Tweed]

Still playing The Dankness Below and so far I'm not impressed in the slightest. It's still hard to get a grip on what this game was trying to be. Like the dev wanted a turn-based version of MM6 or 7 and didn't bother to balance around anything. I keep finding piles of crap I can't use and probably never will because of how you learn skills. It all ends up being vendor fodder and my huge stacks of money do nothing for me because there's nothing to spend it on except books. Books are the only way to raise most skills, stats, and resistances and book stores restock very slowly. I only just recently got some of my magic skills to apprentice so now I need to find some apprentice spells to learn.

One big problem I'm noticing is that spells don't scale with skill level as far as I notice so my damage spell stays at whatever it is forever and so does my heal spell so they've long since been outpaced by the amount of damage my melee and bow dude does and healing is a nightmare as I have to cast heal over and over and over and over. I'd bring this up with the dev, but he iggy'd me months ago on the codex because my other feedback hurt his widdle fee fees. I guess I could still bring it up with him on Steam so he could block me there.

EDIT: I don't get why this game has such high ratings. Are people just so impressed with nostalgic bait and nice aesthetics? Are people afraid of hurting someone's feelings? This game sucks so far, sorry.

[Vaako]

nice game if you like shiny loot and see numbers go up for a few hours and available cracked and not $70

[Mortadela_Viva]

I'm playing Divine Divinity, it has the worst pathfinding I have ever seen in a game. But it's fun seeing so much stuff I saw in DOS 1 and 2 already being in the very first game, like teleport pyramids you can drop anywhere, extraplanar imps, the ability to carry a whole barrel with items in your inventory, or a whole bed to sleep in. Transforming into a frog to quickly go from one place to another is also great.
It would be great if this game received community patches over the years like BG1 and 2 did, so you wouldn't have to follow a guide to not break like half the quests in the game, click a thousand times over some object you want to interact with, or run the game through CMD to force it to run in a single core and with dgvoodoo2.