What games are you currently playing?

[cidbahamut]

Re: What games are you currently playing?

Street Fighter: The game I play that makes me contemplate what it would be like to literally chew through the veins in my wrists.

- - - Updated - - -

I'm not even joking.

[Armando]

Re: What games are you currently playing?

It's not that the intro stage is bad, they just don't do a good job of actually explaining things to me.

I start up the game and I'm immediately thrown into a character creator. I don't even know what the game plays like and they're already asking me to pick one out of like a dozen classes. Hell, one of them is apparently useless and serves no purpose but to make the game harder. And it's not just picking a class, but a starting "gift" too, even though some of them have no obvious purpose (e.g. Witch's Ring.) At no point do they tell me "Hey, don't sweat it - you can always change later."

Halfway through I'm going up some stairs and a giant iron ball runs me over. I'm not sure what to make of this; that there might be traps I just can't see coming? I guess I'll have to be extra paranoid every time I see a flight of stairs.

At the top of the stairs there's two scribbles saying something along the lines of "Left Stick + RB = Kick Attack" and "Left Stick + RT = Jump Attack". By the time I even figure out that I'm supposed to tap the left stick, not hold it, I've already killed the mooks that were hiding around the corner. I never figure out what either attack is for.

Right afterwards I find the scribble explaining how to riposte. I wasn't able to pull one off before killing the armored undead so I still don't know what a riposte even looks like.

Right after that I go into the white mist and - fuck - I'm in the boss chamber. While I ponder what to do the boss breaks the platform. I get killed, but no biggie. I go back in and try jumping down instead. I took fall damage. So apparently there's no safe way to get down? I ask the guy who gifted me the game in the first place and he says I was supposed to use the Jump Attack to facestab the boss on the way down. Did they really expect me to figure that out? I didn't even know the jump attack hits downwards. As far as I knew, it was some Zelda shit. Even if I knew, I sure as hell wasn't going to try using the Asylum Demon as my first victim.

That big-ass crow drops me off at another campfire and tells me I can level up and kindle the fire. Uh, great I guess? No one's bothered to explain to me what the stats do or what kindling the fire does or what else I could do with my Humanity.

I get that this game is supposed to be hard. I don't mind that there's traps, or that I'm going to get my ass handed to me a lot. But this shit isn't intuitive, which is a damned shame, because I actually want to like it. Mega Man X makes sure you've got the basics nailed before you proceed; you can't beat the stage if you don't wallkick. Dark Souls innundates me with decisions that I can't make yet and its idea of pedagogy is to leave cryptic little scribbles and slap me in the face if I don't figure it out.

[cidbahamut]

Re: What games are you currently playing?

If I can figure it out without wanting to ragequit the game it's probably fine. They could have done a better job of teaching it organically, but aside from ripostes requiring absurd timing everything's fine as is.

I say this as the host on our podcast who complains about goddamn everything for being unintuitive and poorly designed.

[Malacite]

Re: What games are you currently playing?

Yeah so Ultimate Vault Hunter is total bullshit.

All that horrendously OP gear I had at level 50 on TVM that allowed me to basically wreck face without breaking a sweat, and was a complete PITA to farm?

Worthless. Enemies are just so stupidly strong, it took well over an hour for my friend and I just to get through to Captain Flynt...


Gearbox did a really shitty job balancing BL2, even in co-op. It's like Diablo 3 pre-nerfs to Inferno, but rather than having ridiculously OP affixes on mobs they just have absurdly high HP, damage and regeneration. I thought I was all that with my +35k damage Bee shield and 30k damge sniper rifle, popping criticals for over 1.2 million HP... only to see that chip off maybe 1/5th at most of a Bad Ass' HP bar.


GTFO.

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: What games are you currently playing?

Basic starter tips for a Souls game:

Proceed with caution in new territory, always with your shield up.
Assume you can fall to your death just about anywhere.
Assume anything is fully capable of killing you, because it really can.
If its bigger than you, the first sound strategy is to run or climb upward.
While you run or defend, observe attack patterns. They're pretty basic in this game, but charging in blindly will not help you.
Never take a Dark Knight head-on.
Buy a bow. Sometimes being shooting something from where it can't get to you is a perfectly viable strategy.
Even if you don't pick the class, its in your best interest to learn pyromancy later.
Don't swing your weapon all willy-nilly near NPCs, the game will remember who you attack and flag them as hostile for the rest of that game's cycle.
Blighttown is as bad as it sounds.
Ceaseless Discharge is a funny name for a boss.

[Armando]

Re: What games are you currently playing?

Even if you don't pick the class, its in your best interest to learn pyromancy later.

Why? I mean, as opposed to something ese like sorceries or miracles or whatever. Because the fire damage doesn't require me to invest in a stat?

Don't swing your weapon all willy-nilly near NPCs, the game will remember who you attack and flag them as hostile for the rest of that game's cycle.

By cycle, do you mean until I die? And damn, that's good to know. I didn't even stop to think if there was friendly fire against NPCs.

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: What games are you currently playing?

Pyromancy is leveled up with souls, IIRC. Its also rather powerful and pretty much the end-all magic of that game.

As for "cycle" I mean the whole run of that particular game until the story is completed and you start over in New Game Plus - only then will NPCs reset to their original state. Dark Souls is a game that constantly autosaves every action you've taken - including when you hit an NPC. No take backs there. Even if they kill you, they'll attack again when you return.

They only follow you so far, though.

[Firewind]

Re: What games are you currently playing?

Been playing a lot of Total War: Rome 2. It was broken at release but they finally patched it to a playable state.

Now they have patched the most glaring and game breaking issues, the game is very fun. It has done a lot of streamlining without dumbing down the game. Focus on the provincial level is great as all cities in a province benefit from a building and it allows for some really interesting gameplay in contested provinces when inciting unrest due to cultural differences etc. It also puts the focus on strategy so it feels a lot more like a Paradox game in the city building regard.

There's also a ton of units ti use, especially as Rome as they have auxilliary choices from every province. Units will also develop their own army traditions and there are far more elements when developing generals and agents.

That said, the game still feels a step down from Shogun 2 due to poor optimisation and barebones multiplayer, especially given how much fun it was to build your general in SHogun 2's multiplayer! It was llike playing Warhammer all over again. It also has on disc day one DLC which is just bullshit especially given how popular a faction Sparta are.

Pros:
Still the best strategy series out there
Epic Campaign map with lots of improvements and locations to battle over
Even more factions than Shogun 2 and even more Units than Empire!
Focus on the provincial level and the whole province benefiting from buildings means that you can focus more on Grand Strategy and not less on "Should I build a castle or marketplace here?"
Each Faction his its own internal politics and subfactions which as potential for a lot of fun and intrigue.

Cons:
Still has graphics and optimisation issues post-patch
AI is still buggy and glitchy as hell but at least it is starting to work now
Game is obvioulsy rushed and barebones and it shows
Barebones Multiplayer that simply does not work
Units don't attempt to keep formation, not even your elite Veteran Legions
Family Tree and Faction Politics were sadly dumbed down to the point where you can ignore them if you just focus on your own faction.
No ingame cutscenes for agent actions and a lot of the factions don't feel unique compared to Shogun 2 that managed to pull it off despite everyone getting the exact same units!
Day one on Disc DLC...Really Creative Assembly?

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: What games are you currently playing?



Dunno why I started playing FFVIII again, but I'm off to assassinate a sorceress.

[cidbahamut]

Re: What games are you currently playing?

Blew out my finger again on Street Fighter. Now I need a game that's all thumbs. Seems like a good time to install Remember Me.

[Malacite]

Re: What games are you currently playing?

Tetris?

[cidbahamut]

Re: What games are you currently playing?

Finished Offspring Fling today. It's a solid game about throwing babies. Kinda short though.

[Malacite]

Re: What games are you currently playing?

<insert dead baby joke here.>

[Icemage]

Re: What games are you currently playing?

Currently playing:

Lone Survivor on PS Vita. Ye gods this game is creepy with headphones on.

Cookie Clicker on PC. It's like... ProgressQuest with cookies.

Kingdom Hearts 1.5 HD ReMix on PS3. Very pretty, but some occasional screen tearing makes me wish they had made this for PS4 instead.


Icemage

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: What games are you currently playing?

Valhalla Knights was free at one point on PSN this week. Free is the only good part about it.

After storing it away on my HDD, I loaded up Dissidia Duodecim to play alongside my run through FFVIII. I'm currently trying to find away to abolish Trabia Garden's "random" rule for Triple Triad.