What are you playing?

Yoshimickster

Yoshimickster

Psychonauts 2

Outside of the continuity issue of Raz's mom being alive, I am LOVING THIS GAME-the humor, the continuity, the prejudice metaphors and how it can cause generational grief, the god damn mother fucking GRAPHICS holy shit I needed to take a break on the Jack Black level it was just TOO intense!
 
Fun Size

Fun Size

I finished Disco Elysium and was bummed because I know I missed a ton and I also know I'll likely never have the time to play through again.

Moved on to Spirit Hunter: Death Mark because I needed a mindless palate cleanser with no consequences, and it's pretty much what I expected. Creepy visual novel based on making the proper choices when faced with urban legends. It bums me out though because while 13 year old me would have been thrilled, at least twice now there's been a "and then most of her clothes were gone for no reason" moments. Like, they didn't even bother justifying it, and it was not like a sexy moment or anything. At least put a little effort into your gratuitous anime drawings people.
 
Frank

Frank

I played some of my pirated copy of Elden Ring a bit. I'm just gonna shelve it till I can afford the full game. I want to play with ghosts and messages and invasions and coop partners.

Allowing your game to be pirated but without all the features is smart in my opinion if I'm any indicator.

Boy the title screen music is fucking awesome.
 
Dave

Dave

Staff member
I play in offline mode so I DON’T see ghosts or messages. The messages are inane and stupid and the ghosts break immersion.
 
Squidleybits

Squidleybits

Moonlighter is super cute so far. It feels a bit like Garden Paws meets the Stardew Valley mines.

If anyone knows of any other games where you manage a store like this, I would love to know about them :)
 
ThatNickGuy

ThatNickGuy

Squidleybits said:
Moonlighter is super cute so far. It feels a bit like Garden Paws meets the Stardew Valley mines.

If anyone knows of any other games where you manage a store like this, I would love to know about them :)
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I might have suggested this before, but have you tried Graveyard Keeper? It's a Stardew Valley style game, only you maintain a cemetery and church (eventually even performing sermons, and raising zombies to do a lot of the tedious jobs). There's DLC for running the local pub, but I haven't played that, so can't say much for it.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
Castle crashers is by far the worst fucking side scrolling beat em up that was ever created and I am appalled that the same company that put out battleblock theater and pit people produced this garbage.
 
ThatNickGuy

ThatNickGuy

GasBandit said:
Castle crashers is by far the worst fucking side scrolling beat em up that was ever created and I am appalled that the same company that put out battleblock theater and pit people produced this garbage.
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Wow, I greatly (and respectfully) disagree. I grew up on side scrolling beat em ups and I LOVED Castle Crashers.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
ThatNickGuy said:
Wow, I greatly (and respectfully) disagree. I grew up on side scrolling beat em ups and I LOVED Castle Crashers.
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All I can tell you is that every single other beat em up I've ever played, going back to the NES, had snappier controls and less useless crap cluttering the screen. The input lag drives me nuts, the inertia of movement is excruciating, and when things get going it's impossible to tell what's going on for all the explosion smoke or tall grass waving between the camera and the action. All the AI relies entirely on bullshit, obfuscation and cheap shots to cheese you down.

I've not had a game that made me such a salty ragequitter in 20 years.
 
Squidleybits

Squidleybits

ThatNickGuy said:
I might have suggested this before, but have you tried Graveyard Keeper? It's a Stardew Valley style game, only you maintain a cemetery and church (eventually even performing sermons, and raising zombies to do a lot of the tedious jobs). There's DLC for running the local pub, but I haven't played that, so can't say much for it.
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I will give it another try for sure. I wasn’t a fan of Stardew the first time ever and now I have it on three systems and have an embarrassing amount of hours in it.
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ThatNickGuy said:
I might have suggested this before, but have you tried Graveyard Keeper? It's a Stardew Valley style game, only you maintain a cemetery and church (eventually even performing sermons, and raising zombies to do a lot of the tedious jobs). There's DLC for running the local pub, but I haven't played that, so can't say much for it.
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I will give it another try for sure. I wasn’t a fan of Stardew the first time ever and now I have it on three systems and have an embarrassing amount of hours in it.
 
Ravenpoe

Ravenpoe

The biggest game in the world just came out, and it took me a little bit to jump on the bandwagon but I finally got it... Square-Enix's Guardians of the Galaxy.


What? Elden Ring? No no, I refunded that, turns out I still don't like souls games. But GotG is finally free on game pass, so I decided to give it a try and holy fuck, this game is great!

An in depth single player experience with a great story and great characterization. I don't know what I was expecting going into this but I wasn't expecting such a heartfelt tribute to these characters, which are not the same versions of them from the James Gunn movies. I've seen people call these versions comic accurate but the guardians lineup especially tends to be very malleable in the comics, so I prefer "comic inspired." Peter Quill is less self depreciating manchild and more of a Han Solo himbo, with ok a little bit of manchild still sprinkled on top. Drax is surprisingly intelligent and is basically a violent Vulcan, Groot is less innocent and seems far older with some strong Wookiee vibes, and Gamora is a secret nerd girl with a doll collection.

Oh, and Rocket has a lot of issues.. like a lot.

The actual gameplay is very video gamey in a good way. It's nothing special but it's some solid combat with synergy attacks as you play as Peter while issuing commands to the rest, in between your basic exploration and puzzle solving using the guardians powers, but the real shine of the game is the interaction between all of the characters and your choices in how you interact with them. And who you side with and what quips you say do actually seem to have impacts in the story, so at the very least they've done a great job in the illusion of choice.

The game is free on game pass pc right now, give it a try
 
Ravenpoe

Ravenpoe

Ravenpoe said:
The biggest game in the world just came out, and it took me a little bit to jump on the bandwagon but I finally got it... Square-Enix's Guardians of the Galaxy.


What? Elden Ring? No no, I refunded that, turns out I still don't like souls games. But GotG is finally free on game pass, so I decided to give it a try and holy fuck, this game is great!

An in depth single player experience with a great story and great characterization. I don't know what I was expecting going into this but I wasn't expecting such a heartfelt tribute to these characters, which are not the same versions of them from the James Gunn movies. I've seen people call these versions comic accurate but the guardians lineup especially tends to be very malleable in the comics, so I prefer "comic inspired." Peter Quill is less self depreciating manchild and more of a Han Solo himbo, with ok a little bit of manchild still sprinkled on top. Drax is surprisingly intelligent and is basically a violent Vulcan, Groot is less innocent and seems far older with some strong Wookiee vibes, and Gamora is a secret nerd girl with a doll collection.

Oh, and Rocket has a lot of issues.. like a lot.

The actual gameplay is very video gamey in a good way. It's nothing special but it's some solid combat with synergy attacks as you play as Peter while issuing commands to the rest, in between your basic exploration and puzzle solving using the guardians powers, but the real shine of the game is the interaction between all of the characters and your choices in how you interact with them. And who you side with and what quips you say do actually seem to have impacts in the story, so at the very least they've done a great job in the illusion of choice.

The game is free on game pass pc right now, give it a try
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Also I forgot to mention that unlike the terrible avengers game which had you facing against no name robots all the time, this game very heavily leans into the cosmic marvel stuff. If you're the kind of person that knows who Richard Rider is you'll love this.
 
Frank

Frank

I enjoyed GOTG till I got stuck in the world geometry like 9 times in the same area and kept having to restart. I also fell down an instant death pit and instead of respawning the game just left me down there while the rest of the crew was chatting. There's some VERY annoying bugs.

Also, the game is too quick to repeat combat barks and jabs at you when you're exploring (which I like to explore every nook and cranny). I get it, I'm wasting fucking time Rocket, thank you for the repeated jab for the 13th time.

Storywise it's a neat blending of MCU and 616. Starlord is a prince, not a god, Drax killed Thanos, etc while still maintaining their familiar movie personalities mostly. I wish Gamora had more of a personality though. She's...there.
 
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Vrii

Vrii

New free DLC for Battle Brothers got me playing again. I love this game, and the new origins do a good job of changing up the basic formula and giving me different things to worry about, without removing the (crushing) difficulty that makes the game compelling.
 
Frank

Frank

Those fucking giant hands in Elden Ring are making me want to eat glass shards. I've fought a lot of annoying enemies in video games before, but I'm close to smashing my controller to pieces. They attack with no build up, are too fast to use magic on and once you're hit, you're staggered to death. They are the actual legit worst. They are worse than every boss I've faced and they don't even give flask recharges when you kill them all.

I hate them.

I hate them so much.
 
bhamv3

bhamv3

So I decided to play Might and Magic 4+5: World of Xeen again for nostalgia's sake. These two games came out in 1992 and 1993 respectively, and can be combined to make one big game. (Well, big by the standards of the time, they're not that big by 21st century standards.) And I found out that there's a mod called Ludmeister's Monster Spawn Mod, so I decided to install it and give it a try.

First, the good. This mod made some changes to classes, equipment, spells etc. to make them more balanced and useful. Previously useless classes have been buffed, redundant equipment has been overhauled, useless spells have been replaced with more useful versions, etc. The XP rewards and difficulty levels of the Clouds and Darkside have been rebalanced, so that a brief trip to the Darkside will no longer completely trivialize the Clouds side. And there were a few QoL changes such as one annoying dungeon being removed, the copy protection (where you had to look up a word in the manual) being removed, trainers and blacksmiths being more useful now, etc.

But unfortunately, the biggest change this mod made, as its name suggests, is that more monsters spawn in the game world now. Furthermore, these monsters have been buffed, and they even respawn now. This respawn behavior has been implemented in a really weird way, in that when you step on certain locations in the game world (there's no indication of where these locations are, nor any logic to their placement) then all monsters respawn. Sometimes if you find one such spot, you can stand there and watch monsters respawn ad infinitum. This means that exploring the overworld is less "exploring" and more "find a way to get through a constantly respawning horde of enemies". Every time I set foot outside the starting town of the game I'd get gangbanged by a dozen hostiles, and then after I finally managed to kill them I'd have to head back into town to heal up, and then of course they'd respawn. Just leaving the starting town was a chore, and trying to navigate to dungeons or other locations, much less clearing them, was downright painful at times.

This mod allegedly wanted to provide a more difficult experience for players who have mastered the game, but it's definitely gone overboard and is simply not enjoyable. It's a pity, because the rebalancing and overhauling changes it made are good, but this respawning monster behavior is just not fun.
 
figmentPez

figmentPez

Staff member
Middle Earth: Shadow of War

Got this one from @ThatNickGuy a long while ago, finally getting around to playing it. Thanks again!

So far it seems a lot like the first game, only bigger and even less focused. I'm enjoying it, though. I'm not very far in, though. I haven't even started recruiting my own orc army yet. I'll see how I feel after I get to the grindy part of the game that so many people complained about.

There were two reasons I put off playing it for so long. One is that a game combining stealth, difficult combat, and loot farming, has the potential to really put a strain on my health, my anxiety in particular, and I've been waiting to reach a point where I feel strong enough to not get sucked into playing more than I should and ending up making my anxiety worse. So far I don't notice my heart racing when I've finished playing, and I'm able to put it down without playing too much, so that seems to be good.

The second reason was that I'd heard that, unlike the first game, it doesn't allow mouse input while using the gamepad, which is not ideal for Steam Controller usage. What I'd heard is accurate. I'm not sure what the reason is for the change, because the first played really well on the SC, but this game just won't do it. The game does allow joystick deadzone to be set to zero, though, and to adjust some other settings, so I'm still able to get pretty decent control for camera control. Sniping with the bow doesn't feel as good as it did in the first game, with "mouse" input, but it's still better than using a thumbstick, and that's good enough.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
Well, discovered the hard way that when you have a dedicated The Forest server, the game does not stop when all players are logged out.

It'd been a week or two since we played it, but we had a pretty good base going. We went back to play more last night, and it was all gone, with a dozen cannibals standing around where it used to be. The only reason I didn't suspect the whole map had wiped was because the log sleds we built to haul lumber around were still there. And to make matters worse, I think the game "killed" us while we were logged out in the base when it was destroyed because it made us start over again from the plane crash with empty inventories. Which sucks because we'd really gotten some nice stuff.

The Forest is a game that has a really good hook and a lot of potential that will never go unrealized because it never got more than half finished before its development was abandoned. It's buggy, it has bad design decisions that end up being game killers, and it's a shame.
 
AshburnerX

AshburnerX

GasBandit said:
The Forest is a game that has a really good hook and a lot of potential that will never go unrealized because it never got more than half finished before its development was abandoned. It's buggy, it has bad design decisions that end up being game killers, and it's a shame.
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I think it's more that they realized that they'd need a whole new engine to REALLY do what they wanted with the first, which is probably why the sequel, Sons of The Forest, is coming out in May.


For what it's worth, it looks like they learned at lot of lessons from the first game, including making crafting a bit more intuitive.
 
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