Video game(s) you're playing

[Thomas Eshuis]

[quote="Animavore";p="2768625"]

This is great. My first Yakuza game though I believe it's somewhat different with it's change to turn-based combat.[/quote]
It's on my wish-list.
I've finished 0 through 3 this year.
Started 4 last month but couldn't quite get into it.

[Animavore]

I'm playing The Surge 2, a sci-fi Soulsborne with some interesting mechanics like targeted attacks (like arms, head, torso, etc..), dismemberment of body parts for their cybernetic implants, and directional parrying (not unlike For Honour).

It's a pretty swift and fluid game compared to the somewhat clunky original. The story leaves a little to be desired, but having a story at all in this type of game after 7 From Software games seems odd in the first place and I'm happily ignoring it. Mostly it's just a lot of fun.

[Animavore]

Why do developers change buttons up from popular series? It's something I never got. It's not like a button config is copyrightable.

In playing The Surge 2, a Souls-like game, they have all the buttons more or less the same except X is dodge instead of O. O is where our twitch muscles are. It's where I'm going to hit reflexively in a bind. Of course it's getting changed.

Similar with every other shooter that puts buttons any where but the COD template many, probably a majority of us, are used to. Straight to the controller config options when they start that nonsense.

And don't get me started on games with no button mapping options...

[Animavore]

I wish I could get my girlfriend into games.

[arugula2]

Re-discovering Diablo 3 on PC - a mistake. It's stupidly addictive. Lots of quality of life changes since the old days... the map immediately pings locations of bounty targets & keywardens... bigger stash (936 slots?)... Kanai's Cube (a suped-up version of the Horadric Cube in D2)... several tasteful new maps... the Not the Cow Level... the vault where all those asshole treasure goblins apparently escaped to when you didn't murder them in time... picking up a gem or crafting mat from the ground automatically picks up nearby items of that kind... an armory that lets you save gear/spell presets... a bunch of other tweaks that make farming/progression interesting.

Re-discovering the game right as the current season ends, of course. (It ends in a few hours, new season starts April 2.) But made it just under the buzzer to get the gift armor set. I have 2 pieces of advice for anyone wading into casual D3 or returning to it... save that armor. It's packaged in 3 gifts delivered in the mail - 2 armor pieces per. The pieces don't roll for a specific class until you open the gift. So you can send the gifts to your other characters. I didn't know that. I'm farming using a necro, and I don't even have use for the necro version (Masquerade of the Burning Carnival) anytime soon, even though it's supposedly great. I would've rather sent it to a baby crusader. Apparently, this season's crusader gift set (Aegis of Valor) is #1 or #2 overall, come next patch:



The other contender for #1 set next season is... the necro seasonal gift set (Bones of Rathma). Because of course. So now I'll be rerolling another necro in seasonal play, both to farm & to dip my toe into endgame... and I probably won't have time to farm the crusader set (which could've existed on a nonseasonal crusader, if I was thinking). Brilliant.

The other piece of advice is: when doing bounties on necro, use drive-by Decrepify curse + Opportunist rune. The more targets are cursed, the faster you move, to get to where you're going. I wasted many brain cells trying to move faster by other means, and... they suck. Decrepify is your friend.

...
ETA: season 23 does a massive revamp of the followers, allowing you to equip 14 slots on them (compared to 6 until now) & allowing some legendary item attributes to ‘emanate’ to the player. It’s a bit like wearing extra gear vicariously through your follower, but your follower is immortal.

[Animavore]

The new update of Disco Elysium came out today so I'm going to be playing it on night shift this week.

I've decided on my first playthrough to do something I never really do in these games, due to my moral compass which is affected even by pixels, and that is to play my detective character like a fascist piece of shit. I'm going to pick that all brawn no brains archetype and I'm just going to bully my way through the whole game.

Like a real cop.

[minininja]

Has anyone else played Noita? It's just had supposedly its final major post launch update. I've been playing it since early access on Steam. It's the main game I've been playing for the last year, over 400 hours so far. It's very challenging and almost all the progress you make is in learning how to survive and eventually dominate its incredible complexity. You will die a lot, brutally and unexpectedly. But each time you do you will learn a new lesson. And it only takes a couple seconds to restart the game to try again, though the procedural generation and random seed elements can make each attempt quite different. I have a few dozen "wins" in the game, but even after that there is so much more to do, to learn, to explore. Deep secrets that can unlock new powers or take you to other hidden places. The pixel by pixel material physics that the engine works on is very enjoyable to interact with, but for me it's the wand crafting that really makes it. Creating different weapons and utilities by rearranging spells and modifiers that you find and balancing their stats against the wands you put them on. It takes a lot of careful experimentation to work out how it works and turn it to your advantage.

[arugula2]

^ this post is a great motivator. It's been on my wishlist for months... I'm just casual enough to wait for a price I can't refuse.

[arugula2]

Diablo 3 season 23 launches as I'm posting this, here in N.America. I'm way behind in understanding how all the new mechanics work ("new" as in, from the past few years). It's mostly figuring out efficient ways to collect mats & gear, and knowing which dungeons are worth farming, etc. I've learned a few general tips (like for inventory management) and other secrets from youtubers, but the main issue I'm having is figuring out what last-minute changes Blizzard made to the endgame armor sets, following feedback from PTR testers. (Necro) Rathma set, apparently, is now garbage.

I've never done Challenge Rifts... which are the easiest way to get a jumpstart on gear progression, because of the mats reward. They also allow you to equip a randomized full gear set, copied from an actual player. A test drive.

I've never done a Set Dungeon. Green portals. Eek. Never even seen one.

I've never seen a rainbow goblin, much less killed one. It takes you to Whimsydale (which looks exactly like Whimsyshire), with a chance to spawn Princess Lilian, a pink unicorn who sometimes drops the rarest cosmetic item in the game... sparkling butterfly wings. This is sort of an extension of Jay Wilson's joke in response to complaints pre-release that D3 was looking too colorful. The joke iirc started out as a t-shirt:

The town of Whimsyshire was created as a secret level, accessed by crafting a Staff of Herding - an homage to the Secret Cow Level in Diablo 2, which in turn was a joke in response to an urban legend about there being such a level in Diablo 1, accessible by clicking the single cow in Tristram repeatedly until she relented & opened a portal. (There wasn't, and she didn't. She just got angry.) Incidentally, the Cow Queen finally decided to spawn in my game... underwhelming. But the Secret Cow Level in D3 has to be the best way to get quick gold... looting the corpses of slain farmers triggers obscene gold drops. Also, it's easy to create a portal to the level - all you do is fashion a few rare polearms at the blacksmith, and use the cube recipe to upgrade them to legendaries. Since the Bovine Bardiche is 1 of only 4 legendary polearms in the game, odds are great.

Anyway, the fastest way to "farm" rainbow goblins (or to move about, period) is the monk & Dashing Strike using the 4-piece bonus from Raiment of a Thousand Storms set. Insane mobility:

[arugula2]

Kanai's Cube + Challenge Rift on a fresh char = OP. You can use the mats from the (weekly) rift to craft/upgrade items that make leveling to 70 absurdly easy. My baby barb was 2-shotting bosses at difficulties that should've been prohibitive, much less breezy... thanks to a lucky cube roll on a crafted weapon (I think on the first try?) issuing a Gavel of Judgment:

Felt weird to then immediately destroy it in the cube... extracting the legendary property (+800% to attack damage), which then follows you into battle. The weapon itself would've been unusable at level 1-69 anyway.

Last season, the cube let you carry 4 extracted properties with you, this season it's back to 3 (extracted from weapons, armor, jewelry). Still... I'm new to the concept, so that's 3 more than I'm used to.

The possibilities are many, but it manages not to feel overwhelming. Blizzard has a knack for exactly this kind of balance.

[arugula2]

Resident genius Alex, and resident game-breaker Other Joe review It Takes Two.

In the end, I cannot recommend this game any more highly. Go get this game, find somebody - force them if you have to - and play it.

[Animavore]

This game is making me feel like Dark Souls used to. It's another challenging but fair games that relies on skill and map awareness, this time in the form of a very polished rogue-lite. This one is quite arcadey and reminds me of games of old like Space Harrier, MDK, and every twin-stick, bullet-hell game you can think of. Add to this the 3-D sound design and the Dualsense controller reacting to the environment. Quite impressive and addicting.

[Spearthrower]

I caved and bought Anno 1800 complete full bells and whistles.

My god it's a stress inducing game. So many things demanding your oversight or attention, and no pause and play.

[Animavore]

I had my eye on Anno so many times. I thought it was a turn-based game like Civilization. Is it real time strategy?

[Thomas Eshuis]

[quote="Animavore";p="2770509"]I had my eye on Anno so many times. I thought it was a turn-based game like Civilization. Is it real time strategy?[/quote]
Real-time city-planning/building game. You start with basic resources and a hub (town or ship depending on the specific title) and have to construct an ever expanding city from it.
It's got historical titles (1404, 1800) and modern/futuristic titles (2070/2205).

[Spearthrower]

[quote="Animavore";p="2770509"]I had my eye on Anno so many times. I thought it was a turn-based game like Civilization. Is it real time strategy?[/quote]


It is real time, not really a strategy. It's basically a city builder taken to the extreme. Different islands have different fertilities, you need those fertilities to grow crops that let you produce different goods. Your citizens rank up through access to goods and services provided by buildings and then have new needs you need to fulfill. Meanwhile, your routes are being attacked by pirates, your expeditions are turning cannibal, and your island towns are either burning down or rioting.

If I could pause & play, I think it might rank as one of my favourite ever games, but the lack of it make the exercise quite stressful and not really what I want a game for.

[Animavore]

I think I'll stick to my pew-pew game for now.

[Animavore]

The rogue-lite game Returnal has no save function. Seriously. If you have to leave the PS5 you have to either just abandon your run and lose all your non-carrying progress, or put the PS5 into sleep mode to suspend the game. If you want to play another game you have to abandon your run. This, believe it or not, is by design.

Loads of people are asking for a save feature, which is understandable enough, though there's a group of players completely antagonistic towards this for no good reason.

Last night loads of players put their console into sleep mode as the game suggests, many in the middle of great runs, when Housemarque dropped a patch. By default, when in sleep mode, the PS5 will close any apps to install an update. Loads of people woke up this morning to find their game wiped. Lots of angry tweets and posts today.

Just in case you thought not being able to pause and play was the worst developer decision.

[Spearthrower]

[quote="Animavore";p="2770525"]
Loads of people are asking for a save feature, which is understandable enough, though there's a group of players completely antagonistic towards this for no good reason. [/quote]

Some people are so weird about these things, it converts immediately from an option in a game to an indication of the masculinity, penis length and ability to give sexual pleasure.

I looked up about a pause & play function for Anno 1800, and while there are lots of pleas for this function, there's a steady cabal of respondents telling others that it would ruin the game. I don't really understand how it's meant to be credible that the addition of an option like this that lets people choose to do something in their own games ruins the entire single-player game experience for others.

[Animavore]

Apparently there's a mod that slows the game to a crawl.