What game are you wasting time on?

[adddeed]

I finished Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings a moment ago. It was a short-ish game - thankfully.

Firstly, the boss battles. The absolute worst I've ever seen in my twenty years of being a gamer. That's not hyperbole either. To label them as being plain awful would be a compliment. Secondly, the combat. Roll, roll, click, roll, click, roll, click. If this is what people want in their RPGs in this day and age then they can have it. I won't have any part of it, however. They can wallow in their Mountain Dew and Doritos all they want. I don't give a fuck either way. Thirdly, the story. Something-something-something... oh hey Geralt, you're in this game? Something-something-something politics etc. Once again the game wasn't really about Geralt of Rivia. It was more about politics in a fantasy land that I couldn't give less of a shit about, with poorly written characters, contrived situations, deus ex machina, plot holes, immaturity and the list goes on. I was a fan-fiction writer back in the day in my teens. I know bad writing. I know bad fan-fiction writing. This game reminded me of those days. It reminded me of me when I was feverishly churning out overly dramatic crap, thinking it was the best shit ever. I digress. At times the writing was servicable and decent, often when it involved Geralt and his friends. Hint hint. Otherwise it was just fucking awful. Some of the worst I've suffered through in quite some time, in fact. It's just bad and uninteresting. It's quite amazing how they managed to make everything so bland. Geralt turned from a mildly interesting character in the first game into another vacuous Hollywood faggot with cheesy punch-lines. Oh, and the stealth sections too - we gotta have those. QTEs and timed dodges and combos and whatever. Then we have the general AI conversations. In the first game the NPCs only said a few words every now and then, sometimes in reaction to something. It was there to bring flavour and it was - for the most part - unintrusive. Now we have the classic scripted Skyrim conversations that repeats again and again and again and again.

So did I like anything in this game? The graphics were pretty decent, I guess, and the voice-acting was mostly good enough.

Meh, just another popamole piece of shit. By the week's end I'll probably have forgotten about it entirely. As it should be. Strangely I am kind of glad I gave it a fair chance and trudged through it to the end. Otherwise I would have that seed of doubt in my mind, whether this game really is hype or not. Other people might see this game as the second coming or whatever. Good for them. We all have different tastes. For myself, I see it as a poor excuse for a game, from beginning to end.

Edgy.

 

[Shackleton]

Also, Dying Light is surprisingly decent.

Been playing this myself after picking up the complete edition on the Humble Store recently and I agree, it's pretty good for an action rpg-ish fix.

Playing it on 'Hard' mode and it's challenging if you lose track of zombies and the human enemies are tough in bunches unless you go at them with a gun. The skill trees provide actual useful (mostly) skills and abilities that do help the feeling of getting progressively more powerful. Mind you, the 'kick in the head' to instant kill zombies seems pretty OP and means that virals went from 'oh shit', to 'climb onto a van and kick them in the head for easy XP'.

Plus I like that getting around is pretty interesting and the city isn't too big that it becomes a chore, but it is packed with little sights to see and places to explore that keeps it entertaining, (so far). I've just got the grappling hook and access to the Police Rifle which means it could all change into BSB any minute, but I don't regret the purchase at all so far.

 

[Trash]

Well, to my own immense surprise I am enjoying COD: Infinite Warfare. In fact, I'm having a blast. Yes, you can bitch about the game for hours and be right. The power fantasy role you get as the grunt made captain of his own space ship who orders missions, goes to do ground assaults, infiltrations and every other single combat mission there is. The fact that the basic gunfight has barely changed from Modern Warfare. The flying bits that are fun but far from being an x-wing, freespace 2 or even Halo: Reach. But. I am having a blast. The variety in missions, the zero gravity combat bits, blowing up big ass space ships and shooting out windows to see hapless grunts get sucked into hard vacuum. The campaign is well made with a lot of fun side missions and you are constantly doing something different. It's genuine good fun. Never expected this from a COD in this day and age.

 

[tormund]

Why would you be surprised? We of the Codex generally loved it, and most journos saluted COD: IW as a part of resurgence of old school SP FPS, alongside Doom and Titanfall 2 SP, as well as Wolfenstein reboot before that!!

 

[GrainWetski]

Don't forget Destiny.

 

[tormund]

Shadow Warrior 2 bears a mention too, with some reservations...

 

[DeepOcean]

Finished Witcher 3.
Art design, technology, setting, game is a visual feast.
Not on all games you see enemies flying then diving under the sea, the care with animations, realistic flocks of birds everywhere, wild fauna, there is a ton of care on the little details.

Story has its strong points, but it drops the balls hard sometimes especially near the end.
The best part of the story is by far Velen, after that it becomes something something about abstract politics of abstract fantasy kingdoms with no interesting consequences beyond somewhat different ending slides. I could care less about Witcher 3 politics, wished they focused less on it. There is alot of time destined to make this epic storyline that falls flat because it isn't focused on the characters and the consequences of their actions on game , but on consequences after the game ends, what I could care less of.

Writing is solid but they should stop using modern cursing words so much.
I don't like the over modern way some characters talk on the Witcher 3, this is a problem on many RPGs, just because it is fantasy it doesn't mean you should make your characters talk like foul mouth modern people with modern curse words, this is lazy and sometimes jarring as I tought I was on Novigrad black guetto edition sometimes. Invent some fantasy curse words for fucks sake.

Choice and consequence were done better on Witcher 2
Most of the choices you make on Witcher 3 follow those patterns: 1)Do you want your ice cream blue or white? It doesn't make much of a big difference anyway. 2) Do you want your ice cream blue or white? Nah, your choice is invalid, you want blue. 3)Do you want your ice cream blue or white? If you choose blue, this character will die and there is zero reason for you to do it beyond be a dick for no reason. Do you want your ice cream blue or white? Oh my God, there all those incredible consequences, kindoms will be conquerewd, people will die, all sort of things will happen... on the ending slides of course and you won't see any of it. Witcher 3 felt alot closer to a Bioware fake choice game than Witcher 2 did.

You will hardly have to make choices that will impact your playthrough, like you did on Witcher 2, most of the important stuff happens after the game ends.

Gameplay... how the QA department let this through?
Damage per second abilities that escalate with the life of the target allowing you to make 3000 damage per second and make most fights trivial. Loot with level requirements that make them useless as you will have better stuff by the time you reach that level and make exploration for loot kinda pointless. Spammable instant knockdown power with instant execution attack on the ground with huge area of effect. Boring +5% for magic farts kind of talent tree. Spamable dodge button that doesn't consume resources. Crazy enemy placement, you can face level 5 enemies on a village, turn around and face a level 35 enemy right at the corner that is probably guarding a level 35 sword that you won't be able to use.

 

[tormund]

Edgy.

 

[---]

Edgy.

We have the fabulous button system to avoid useless posts such as this.

 

[Trash]

Why would you be surprised?

Because the COD games long ago turned into derivative corridor shooting galeries with HURRAH plots that would make even Clancy spin in his grave. I gave up on that series a long time ago. To actually find that they made a decent game is a bit of a shock.

 

[tormund]

Edgy.

We have the fabulous button system to avoid useless posts such as this.

Meh.

 

[DeepOcean]

Edgy.

Well, I liked the art style, liked the world, some parts of the story, some characters are really well done, dialogue really hit the mark many times... If this is to be edgy for you then you suffer from "Don't offend my waifu game." syndrome.

 

[DramaticPopcorn]

Well, to my own immense surprise I am enjoying COD: Infinite Warfare. In fact, I'm having a blast. Yes, you can bitch about the game for hours and be right. The power fantasy role you get as the grunt made captain of his own space ship who orders missions, goes to do ground assaults, infiltrations and every other single combat mission there is. The fact that the basic gunfight has barely changed from Modern Warfare. The flying bits that are fun but far from being an x-wing, freespace 2 or even Halo: Reach. But. I am having a blast. The variety in missions, the zero gravity combat bits, blowing up big ass space ships and shooting out windows to see hapless grunts get sucked into hard vacuum. The campaign is well made with a lot of fun side missions and you are constantly doing something different. It's genuine good fun. Never expected this from a COD in this day and age.

Agreed, how are you liking constant tryhard armyman banter?

 

[Aeschylus]

Writing is solid but they should stop using modern cursing words so much.
I don't like the over modern way some characters talk on the Witcher 3, this is a problem on many RPGs, just because it is fantasy it doesn't mean you should make your characters talk like foul mouth modern people with modern curse words, this is lazy and sometimes jarring as I tought I was on Novigrad black guetto edition sometimes. Invent some fantasy curse words for fucks sake.

Did you know: the origins of most modern curse words can be traced back to as early as the 14th century (if not earlier, but text records from that era are a bit spotty), in a form not hugely different from how they are used today? Since The Witcher games do not have people talking in Ye Olde Englishe, and I can only be baffled by the idea that people in previous centuries somehow did not curse as much as we do, it's actually reasonably realistic that they would be cursing up a storm. Sorry it offends your tender sensibilities.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Not quite exactly. Back in the olden times they didn't use the same bad words we do today, instead most of their expletives were religious in nature, hence "swearing" or "cursing". Some of them are valid to this day, like "damn it all to hell", but most are not, such as "by the arms and the blood and the bones of Christ" (muh Chaucer) etc - and those are all still much different and tamer than all assorted twitcher kurwas.

 

[Trash]

Bull. We always used different words for sex and a lot of horrid diseases in our swearing. Our word for fuck can be found in official documents (about a lawsuit) from centuries ago. Society became more tame if anything.

 

[Dedup]

Well I'm back to doing another run of Pool of Radiance. Using Gold Box Companion to bypass demi-human level limits and to hack in a Paladin and Ranger into the party. Unfortunately, since the Paladin and Ranger weren't fully implemented into the game, they are pretty much just crappier fighters who take more XP to level up. I used the save game editor to add the Paladin's protection from evil effect, but the Ranger's bonus against giants doesn't appear to be implemented into the game. Another issue I ran into with the hacked in classes was that they weren't getting their sweep ability against weak creatures like fighters get. I managed a work around for this by hex editing the save file to add the appropriate fighter levels to the characters. It's probably not worth all the work to have the character's but I find it interesting to muck about the systems some.

I'm trying out a first roll party except for maxing out spellcaster requisites so they're not gimped if I end up playing them in the later games. I'm also not rerolling HP. The party consists of a human Paladin, human Ranger, human Cleric, human Magic-User, gnome Fighter/Thief, and half-elf Cleric/Magic-User. Just finished Sokal Keep and only had a couple of difficulties up to that point.

The Rope Guild trolls were pretty tough with the party's somewhat mediocre stats and the fact that I didn't want to hire any meat shields from the training hall. I ended up buying some two-handed swords to try and get rid of the front troll quickly, while I put the two ogres to sleep to block the other trolls. Then everyone just pelted the other trolls with missile weapons until they fell.

The big fight with the orcs on Sokal Keep was also pretty rough though I shoulder a lot of the blame for not using proper tactics and getting the party into a bad situation. In the end only my Ranger, who has the highest HP of the party, was left standing with about 5 HP remaining when I got lucky and the orcs started to flee.

The Library is the next stop. It shouldn't be too problematic but the spectre could be an issue.

 

[pippin]

re: swearing

SPECIAL INSTRUCTIONS TO PLAYERS.

In a contest between two leading clubs during the championship season of 1897, the stands being crowded with patrons of the game, a gentleman occupying a seat in the front row near the players' bench, asked one of the visiting players who was going to pitch for them. The player made no reply. He then asked a second time. The gentleman, his wife who sat with him, and others of both sexes, within hearing distance, were outraged upon hearing the player reply in a loud, brutal tone, "Oh, go fuck yourself."

On being remonstrated with by his fellow-players, who told him there were ladies present, he retorted he didn't give a damn, that they had no business there anyhow.

This shocking indecency was brought to the attention of the League at the Philadelphia meeting in November, 1897, and a committee was appointed to report upon this baseball crime, define and suggest for it a remedy.

In response to nearly one hundred communications addressed to umpires, managers and club officials, soliciting definite, positive and personal knowledge of obscene and indecent language upon the ball field, the committee received a deluge of information that was so appalling as to be almost beyond belief, showing conclusively and beyond contradiction that there was urgent need for legislative action on the part of the League.

That such brutal language as "You cock-sucking son of a bitch!" "You prick-eating bastard!" "You cunt-lapping dog!" "Kiss my ass, you son of a bitch!" "A dog must have fucked your mother when she made you!" "I fucked your mother, you sister, your wife!" "I'll make you suck my ass!" "You cock-sucker!" and many other revolting terms are used by a limited number of players to intimidate umpires and opposing players, and are promiscuously used upon the ball field, is vouched for by the almost unanimous assertion of those invited to speak, and who are competent to speak from personal knowledge. Whether it be the language quoted above, or some other indecent and infamous invention of depravity, the League is pledged to remove it from the ball field, whether it necessitates the removal of the offender for a day or for all time. Any indecent or obscene word, sentence, or expression, unfit for print or the human ear, whether mentioned in these instructions or not, is contemplated under the law and within its intent and meaning, and will be dealt with without fear or favor when the fact is established by conclusive proof.

By Order of the Committee.

[UNMAILABLE. Must be forwarded by Express]

 

[Aeschylus]

Not quite exactly. Back in the olden times they didn't use the same bad words we do today, instead most of their expletives were religious in nature, hence "swearing" or "cursing". Some of them are valid to this day, like "damn it all to hell", but most are not, such as "by the arms and the blood and the bones of Christ" (muh Chaucer) etc - and those are all still much different and tamer than all assorted twitcher kurwas.

They most definitely had equivalent words for 'fuck', 'shit', and 'cunt' in late middle English with similar usage, which were eventually adapted to a more modern usage in later centuries (which we have more evidence for). Literature like Chaucer can give you a good idea about some of the phrases of the time, but I'd be skeptical of calling the Canterbury Tales representative of how people actually spoke at that time. But as I mentioned, concrete evidence for such things from that era is a bit spotty and gets worse the further back you go towards early middle English and old English, as a lot of things are either second-hand or sanitized due to not-so-great levels of literacy among the population, or highly stylized (as Chaucer). Not to say that you're strictly wrong, but I don't think it really gets the whole picture.

 

[baturinsky]

Watch Dogs 2.

There is actually nothing innovative in this game - RC toys, calling gangs/cop to rough up other gangs/cops, Spy View, pipe rotating game etc were in countless other games. Though, being able to use RC whenever you want is nice.
Protagonist(s) are ugly, except Raymond. I'm ok with Niggers (CJ and Franklin were pretty cool), and Hipsters, but Hipster Nigger is just awful. And other Dedsec members (except Taymond) manage to be even worse.
Plot is actually not bad. Well, not plot itself - it's silly and devoid of logic, but the real modern issues it (caricaturically) touches, unlike ancient and/or abstract shit in most other games.

Overall, worth playing once.

P.S. Also, one thing I liked is that enemies are quite strong and can dismantle you very fast if you don't pay attention, and they have nearly infinite reinforcements. So, it encourages you at least try the stealth approach.

 

[laclongquan]

I wish that there's more button to press. As it is, please receive my salutation and a

re: swearing

SPECIAL INSTRUCTIONS TO PLAYERS.

In a contest between two leading clubs during the championship season of 1897, the stands being crowded with patrons of the game, a gentleman occupying a seat in the front row near the players' bench, asked one of the visiting players who was going to pitch for them. The player made no reply. He then asked a second time. The gentleman, his wife who sat with him, and others of both sexes, within hearing distance, were outraged upon hearing the player reply in a loud, brutal tone, "Oh, go fuck yourself."

On being remonstrated with by his fellow-players, who told him there were ladies present, he retorted he didn't give a damn, that they had no business there anyhow.

This shocking indecency was brought to the attention of the League at the Philadelphia meeting in November, 1897, and a committee was appointed to report upon this baseball crime, define and suggest for it a remedy.

In response to nearly one hundred communications addressed to umpires, managers and club officials, soliciting definite, positive and personal knowledge of obscene and indecent language upon the ball field, the committee received a deluge of information that was so appalling as to be almost beyond belief, showing conclusively and beyond contradiction that there was urgent need for legislative action on the part of the League.

That such brutal language as "You cock-sucking son of a bitch!" "You prick-eating bastard!" "You cunt-lapping dog!" "Kiss my ass, you son of a bitch!" "A dog must have fucked your mother when she made you!" "I fucked your mother, you sister, your wife!" "I'll make you suck my ass!" "You cock-sucker!" and many other revolting terms are used by a limited number of players to intimidate umpires and opposing players, and are promiscuously used upon the ball field, is vouched for by the almost unanimous assertion of those invited to speak, and who are competent to speak from personal knowledge. Whether it be the language quoted above, or some other indecent and infamous invention of depravity, the League is pledged to remove it from the ball field, whether it necessitates the removal of the offender for a day or for all time. Any indecent or obscene word, sentence, or expression, unfit for print or the human ear, whether mentioned in these instructions or not, is contemplated under the law and within its intent and meaning, and will be dealt with without fear or favor when the fact is established by conclusive proof.

By Order of the Committee.

[UNMAILABLE. Must be forwarded by Express]

:brofist:

 

[The Decline]

Taking a small break from SRW and started playing Gundam Breaker 3, another english asia release. You build and customize Gundam model kits for use in battles. The main draw is the level of customization available. Once I unlock more parts I'll attempt a Codex troll build.

 

[Siveon]

I beat Gundam Breaker 3, it is essentially a Gunpla builder simulator with some Monster Hunter/Phantasy Star-like gameplay. It's painfully easy sadly, but I had my fun with it.

 

[sullynathan]

Already 16 hours into MH portable 3rd and its definitely a large improvement over freedom. Lots of new weapon types with their own unique attacks, reminds me of Dark Souls. I read that the fans say this game is easier than the Freedom games, it is and isn't. The combat is far better and more fun and so far the bosses haven't been the same wyvern with different skins, they actually have a decent amount of movesets now.

The sane farming exists but they've gone a long way in making the farming less boring now.

 

[Ovg]

Sea Dogs / Pirates of the Carribian / Age of Pirates 1 and 2

With mods from piratesahoy and some GPU tweaking it's heavanz for sailing fans.