What game are you wasting time on?

[Prime Junta]

Talk about LTTP. After all these years I finally went and bought an Ass Creed game, Origins. Derping around in the tutorial oasis. So far it's actually a bit better than I expected -- there's some RPG-lite stuff in there, the gameplay is nice and fluid, and it's very pretty. Stabbed some soldiers in the neck, hunted a few deer, murdered some hyenas, good clean fun. Crafting mechanics seem built for OCD grinding which is worrisome; I hope it's not actually necessary.

 

[Valky]

How is it even possible to play those hentai games? I always try to lose.

 

[RK47]

one playthrough complete at 6 am.time to zzzzzzzzzz
white sauce unleashed

 

[octavius]

Funny, they say your gaming performance get worse with your age but I get quite opposite impression.

Depends on type of game in my experience.
I'm worse at real time games now than 20+ years ago. For example, I used twice as many hours to complete System Shock 1 when I was 45 than when I was 25 (I wrote down my original score in the manual).

But I'm much better at turn based strategy games now, which is not only a good thing, since the poor AI in nearly all TBS games can be frustrating. And I don't play multi-player any more (doctor's orders; it's not good for my health).

 

[hellbent]

But I'm much better at turn based strategy games now, which is not only a good thing, since the poor AI in nearly all TBS games can be frustrating.

Agreed regarding TB wargames for me. Used to lack the patience to play them, now they are among my favorite games to play. Always enjoyed and played TB RPGs well going back to the Gold Box series, probably because I cut my teeth on PNP D&D. Wargames, though, made me for years and years.

 

[Grauken]

Funny, they say your gaming performance get worse with your age but I get quite opposite impression.

Depends on type of game in my experience.
I'm worse at real time games now than 20+ years ago. For example, I used twice as many hours to complete System Shock 1 when I was 45 than when I was 25 (I wrote down my original score in the manual).

But I'm much better at turn based strategy games now, which is not only a good thing, since the poor AI in nearly all TBS games can be frustrating. And I don't play multi-player any more (doctor's orders; it's not good for my health).

For me it's not such much lack of skills, but often lack of patience to develop the skills for real time. As a kid I could play for hours the same parts again and again until I could do them in my sleep, these days I rather do something more interesting with my time

except when a game really grabs me, but fewer of those every year

 

[RK47]

Yeah I absolutely cannot stand RTWP games after finishing POE1.
Playing RTWP felt like a chore to me because the visual cues tends to not describe clearly what actually happened.
So it'd be an exercise of pausing to read combat log, react, unpause, watch some stuff unfold, pause again to make sense of what happened. Repeat.
It did not feel like a good gameplay loop.

 

[unfairlight]

Went through Gothic 2. Pretty great game, although I feel like being a mage was a bit of a pain in the ass and mana should have not been scaling up in LP cost unlike every other skill due to the sheer amount of it you need. I gathered and bought all the King's Sorrel in the game just for mana potions and I learned the highest level of stone tablet reading with the highest mana boosting gear in the game that I could find, while eating all the dark mushrooms I could find and at the end I still had under 270 which I still felt was too little against the highest level enemies, and you awkwardly have to drink mana potions mid combat and tank some hits. At least fire rain was incredibly fun and carried me through the end.

 

[Beastro]

Bros, I'm having a hard time keeping interested in Soul Reaver 2. I was having a blast with the Kain games, finishing Blood Omen and Soul Reaver 1 the past week, but Soul Reaver 2 (which I had never played before, by the way) seems to be a lot less engaging. The gameworld is very linear, puzzles seem lamer, it just doesn't have the same atmosphere as previous games. I guess I'll keep playing for the story, which is interesting since you get to visit characters and locations from Blood Omen before the events of the first game, but I'm not feeling it.

I just got done with SR2 and am taking a peek at Blood Omen 2, though the tutorial isn't encouraging.

Both BO1 and SR1 are perfectly flawed in that they both leave you wanting more. Going from SR1 to 2 felt like going from Everquest to World of Warcraft, in both graphics and gameplay. You can feel the decline of games setting in with Soul Reaver 2....

I must say about Soul Reaver 1, it is the perfect blend of gameplay and story with everything fitting except for the portals and the glyphs and fire forge, though the latter two are more secret content rewarding you for exploring. It's also lovely with the pace given that it's a game where you cannot die with stuff to impede you, but little to wear the pace of switching plane stats and shit around. Even the much hated block puzzles are like that. I can't see why they are so hated given how fluid they are to do.

Soul Reaver 2 had the story dominate too much and the gameplay effectively be tons of backtracking over and over between cutscenes and forge dungeons.

I have a feeling I won't be able to stand Blood Omen 2 given how awkward the controls, and especially the combat, is. I will forego Roxor's recommendation and give Defiance a go too regardless.

 

[Darth Roxor]

I will forego Roxor's recommendation and give Defiance a go too regardless.

YOU FOOL

TURN BACK BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE

I will have you know that Blood Omen 2 is better than Defiance, just btw, just fyi. Also I have no idea what you find awkward about BO2's combat, I remember its being pretty slick.

 

[Beastro]

I will forego Roxor's recommendation and give Defiance a go too regardless.

YOU FOOL

TURN BACK BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE

I will have you know that Blood Omen 2 is better than Defiance, just btw, just fyi. Also I have no idea what you find awkward about BO2's combat, I remember it being pretty slick.

Animation transitions seem very regimented with one having to end before the next will suddenly kick in. Compare that to the Soul Reavers where the animation is very fluid and enough to mask when the animations slip up.

Combat wise, coming from the previous three games, I find it weird to have to engage auto-face to even attack. It feels very, very mechanical. Despite the flaws of both Soul Reavers combat they at least allow you the option of free form combat, which in SR1 is good because it allows you to interrupt enemies that you can then avoid while you run by them, while in SR2 it seems enemy blocking AI only really triggers when you auto-face enemies. In SR2s case, that makes some enemies a fucking pain in the ass, like the giant fire demons, which are better tackled by free running around them spamming attack. Same goes for the final fight against yourself and how you can work around to the flacks of Raziel as part of defeating his OP blocking. With that and timed blocks I could mange to land chains of 3-5 hits that appears to have massively cut down on the length of that fight compared to what others have faced.

Back to BO2 there's also the blood drinking to power up shit that turned one of the most beloved aspects of the original game into a tedious chore.

I'll have to see how things go with Defiance. If it comes down to it, I can always fall back on watching Alexey's excellent LPs with his Kain lore dumps and shit he likes to add into em: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjfE2Spxo-CIu4Vk3u1YvWQ

In the end I suspect that the better treatment of the story and dialogue will somehow manage to let me slog through Defiance. ATM having played the opening of BO2 the plain, pedagogical way both the story and gamelpay are revealed is awful. In the case of the story it leaves no hook to make me want to put up with anything else I find annoying.

That human base always felt like it needed more...something.

You'd probably already know that, but the Citadel was supposed to be the setting for a fight against a cult of vampire-worshipping, sewer dwelling humans (the cultists we get in the Silent Cathedral are the only remaining piece of that). I still smirk at remembering how avoiding combat with the first human hunter makes you some kind of "hero".

It wasn't. There was an underground city that was supposed to have the cultists and priestess and I don't think it's been talked about where exactly that would have been.

The human thing I find interesting in that it's a bit of neat world building given how they could have removed those humans entirely and it wouldn't have effected the game at all.

 

[Zenith]

The description of enemies blocking in SR2 sure brings some flashbacks. Did you play it with M&Kb? If so,

Spoiler

did you manage to figure out that moving the mouse forward/backward (absolute direction) controls how close you are to the enemy?

 

[Beastro]

I played Blood Omen emulated, so kept using my controller through the rest of the series. Plus I had a gut feeling that being more a console game series it would be wise to stick to the controller even when they offered M&KB.

 

[Zenith]

Wise call.

 

[Deflowerer]

Just cleared Contra III: The Alien Wars on Hard Mode. It's badass. I even have the American box art set as my wallpaper. Optimism and high hopes abounded as I reached the final stage with seven lives remaining which I was confident by then I wouldn't even need half of, until I pulled the sine wave attack from the final boss lottery and panic set in because I never took the time to practice avoiding that one. Double panic set in when I drew the same lot twice, leaving me with only two lives and one less C. Now that's terror. The only thing that kept me from ending my run then and there were nerves of steel.

I hope you play / review Hard Corps next.

 

[Baron Dupek]

Finished Unreal.
Don't know if DX10 render from kentie makes the game darker, but I almost missed Minigun in the lectern on Sunspire map.
I would be screwed because the only way to get it again is to take down some random alien goon in Mothership level, which is one of the final levels.


Played Normal because fighting with bullet sponges is not my cup of tea. Had more problems with Titans than last time, their unpredictable rock fragments were a pain in the ass if you don't check your six and sides.

Jumpboots were activated randomly, depleting them when least expected. Just walk around the map when suddenly you hear WOOSH! and your boots are gone. Good thing most hidden stuff are nearby the boots so you can snatch them asap.

Forgot to mention but I hated camera in Divinity OS2 DE even more than NWN2. For me all that hate for the latest is overrated, at least you can control it, awkward but still. And there were few instances where it stuck permamently in the wall. Never got something like this in any other game.

People responsible for meshes in the game screwed the job, camera shakes often and I had to make a breaks in some levels. It wasn't a problem in DOS1 iirc.

Spoiler

 

[laclongquan]

Icewind Dale 2, insane difficulty complete.

Starting Heart of Fury mode. Let's see how shit goes with average party level 20.

 

[Pound Meat]

Playing Sega NFL 2k1 because my PS3 broke. Cade Mcnown is a god rusher despite being left handed.

 

[Gregz]

WoW WOTLK

 

[MicoSelva]

After finishing Batman: Arkham City I stumbled upon my old save games for Legend of Grimrock and decided to check why I never finished it.

So, I loaded the save, descended to level 6 of the dungeon and met this guy:

And when I tried to outmaneuver him in the Grimrock waltz, I got horribly raped by spontaneously spawning spiders (try saying this out loud fast).

Several party wipes later I realized why I haven't finished the game back in 2012, and was close to abandoning it forever, but decided to give it a couple more tries (which turned into a couple dozen more tries). At one point I got lucky, and ogre went far away enough from the entrance to the level, so I could kill the spiders without his presence.

After that, it was waltz time.

Spoiler

tl;dr: I am plaing Legend of Grimrock now.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Are you playing it vanilla, or with the Master Quest mod?

 

[MicoSelva]

Are you playing it vanilla, or with the Master Quest mod?

I've never heard of this mod before, and my save games would most likely be incompatible with it anyway (I played LoG on launch).

Looks interesting, though. Stuff like that is why I am taking my time with starting new RPGs these days - 99% of the time it is better to wait for patches/expansions/mods.

EDIT (Re: down): It is unlikely I will play this twice, so I might restart with the mod. Lack of achievements does not bother me (I have the GOG version).

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Most people will say something like "You have to play vanilla first, that way you'll appreciate the Master Quest mod so much better!"

The problem is that 95% of all players will be burnt out after having finished the vanilla game, so it'll be a few months at the least until they have a go with the Master Quest mod.

Also, achievements only work in the vanilla campaign, so if you're gunning for those...

 

[octavius]

Playing worthy games chronologically I have so far managed to play all calendar years up to 1998 in less than a year each, but 1999 is really a peak year in computer gaming, with so many good games (and so many borderline worthy games), so many time consuming games (llike SMAC and JA 2), and so much quality user made content, and it will probably take me nearly three years to get through. I started on my 1999 play list in summer 2017, and now I've reached August 1999.

Next major game is System Shock 2, but I'm also playing old Thief missions, FRUA (next up is Keep on the Borderland), and HoMM 3 maps.

Just completed GoldHeart for HoMM 3, made by Timothy Duncan. Duncan was one of the major map makers for HoMM 2, but he got increasingly more verbose, and the story faggotry got so bad I couldn't play his HoMM 2 campaign Agent of Heaven. GoldHeart was an improvement, though, but not quite as good as the Pride trilogy by Jason Russell. But I couldn't bring myself to read the epilogue after having won. It's funny how amateurs can make better levels and maps than the pros, but when it comes to writing there's a striking difference in quality between amateurs and pros. And I personally have very little patience for fan fiction.

 

[Prime Junta]

Played a bit more Ass Creed Origins. I'm still kinda liking it, largely due to expectations I suppose. Reactions so far

-- so this is where the retardation with levels everywhere (loot, quests, enemies, everything) comes from
-- are all mainstream games this easy?
-- it is purty, Ptolemaic Egypt feels much more alive than I would have expected
-- the Greek and Coptic sound stilted -- I think they could've substituted modern Greek and Amharic and then gotten native speakers to speak the lines; the MC has an Ethiopian accent anyway so it couldn't be that hard

So basically a sightseeing tour, with much stabbing, a tragic back story, and a weird modern-day flash-forward thing I don't get but which has obviously been explained in the other Ass Creeds. This plays uncannily like Witcher 3 or DA:I, except completely linear. It is a shame if mainstream AAA gaming has indeed blandified gameplay down to this common denominator. Even so I remain engaged with it this far.