What game are you wasting time on?

[Nael]

Played some Alien: Isolation tonight. Fuck. I don't know if I can get through it. I'm such a little bitch.

 

[mastroego]

Played some Alien: Isolation tonight. Fuck. I don't know if I can get through it. I'm such a little bitch.

Yeah the first encounters with that thing are scary.
Great game.

 

[PeachPlumage]

Techland Torment

 

[octavius]

Tried to play Deathkings of the Dark Citadel, the expansion for Hexen, but the vastly accelerated respawn rate compared to the core game is just too annoying.

 

[WhiteGuts]

I'm playing "This is The Police". Simplistic gameplay and story, okay art design. I've always wanted police drama games so this will have to do I guess.

 

[SuperSonicGd]

Sonic Adventure DX because I have a Japanese Wii that is also Gamecube compatible.

I like Sonic games not because they're incredibly good, but there's never a shit Sonic Game. I'm never going to pop in a Sonic and compare it to Resident Evil 4. At absolute worse a Sonic game is maybe Mass Effect bad.

Also been finding some ROMs of pinball games. Because I have a very sophisticated pallet of gaming taste that is too exquisite for the likes of those fapping to the next Steam sale.

 

[Deleted member 7219]

I'm on my nth play through of Bloodlines. I know everything that is coming but I still enjoy playing the game. It is so good.

I also have Divinity 2 on the go. I'm still in the Valley, not that far in, but I like it a lot more than Divinity: Original Sin in terms of presentation and writing. The combat is worse though, lots of clicking and jumping.

Still have Trails of Cold Steel on the back burner. Got to the Nord Highlands but I don't have access to the PS3 right now. Wouldn't be a problem if they had released it on PC.

I recently played and finished Uncharted 4 over a few days. Longer than Uncharted 1-3, with more varied gameplay, and infinitely better writing. More than a few of the conversations were genuinely well written - not surprising considering this was written by the guys behind The Last of Us. There were still combat sections but not the seemingly endless waves of enemies like there were in the previous games. Overall, a very good action game and the right way to end the series.

 

[Ninjerk]

You're going to make me play Bloodlines again!

 

[Deleted member 7219]

You're going to make me play Bloodlines again!

Doing my first Nosferatu playthrough!

 

[Carrion]

Finished No One Lives Forever for the nth time, and it was as enjoyable as always. I ended up installing the sequel after all (thankfully it seems to be much more cooperative on Win 10), and although I don't like it nearly as much as the first game for the reasons I mentioned earlier, it's still a whole lot of fun to play. I had forgotten some of the clever stuff the AI does in this game: the guards might briefly leave their post for a cigarette break, become curious when seeing footsteps in the snow, notice opened file cabinets... All those little details just make the stealth gameplay all that much enjoyable aside from the horde of other improvements and additions to the first game's barebones stealth system. But, alas, I guess this kind of stuff has become extinct in shooters since then.

After the intense endgame of NOLF1 it does feels kind of... hollow, though, and it's a shame that the plot and the characters aren't nearly as interesting.

 

[DeepOcean]

Needed an easy, brainless game to kill time and nothing better than an AAA game at 75% off to offer that.

Shadows of Mordor, this thing was gathering dust on my steam playlist as a result of a stupid steam consumerist binge I did last year, those 75% sales just appeal to my lizard brain on an irrational fashion. So, the game was there and as I had a decent time playing Mad Max, why not another dumb open world AAA game?

Gaming journalists and youtubers being the shallow creatures they are praised this game for being some sort of revolution on open world action games because of the Nemesis system, obviously they just forgot to mention how the rest of the game was.

Shadows of Mordor wants to be Batman Arkham Asylum, Assassin's Creed and ape all popamole mechanics in fashion these days what is expected as WB Games want those millions of copies and Godforbid gamers on this age willing to try something challenging and different, so they must NOT be different and challenging. However, you must not be completely similar or people are going to go ape shit and accuse you of boring plagiarism and not innovating enough after giving 10/10 on metacritic to Assassins creed 25.

So, you need to be different, but not much. You need only ONE mechanic that is different and on Shadows of Mordor, the WB Marketing department chose the Nemesis system (Well, the trick worked well judging by the reactions of the retarded press and youtubers). On Shadows of Mordor, the orks work on an hierarchy system, common orks, captains and warchiefs, supposedly they fight for power and dominance and you can affect those disputes. You need to interrogate orks to discover the weaknesses and strenghts of those chiefs to plan an approach to each one. At random times, special missions appear where different captains are about to duel and you can interveene on those fights. Even when you die, the ork that killed you get levels and is promoted. Later you can brand orks to be your personal little green men inside the ork hierarchy, sounds fun, right?

Well, the problem with this is as I said, EVERYTHING else is a dumbdown copy of another game that was already dumb down. You can interrogate orks to get info on the war chiefs but why is that important if most die to the ole spam the left mouse button trick anyway? The only thing you gain is to make easy fights even easier (You even get a quick time event when you are about to die so you can escape death, no, I'm not kidding.), you need to be a monkey brain ADHD child to die on this game. You can manipulate the fights between the orks and place your stooges where you want them but so what? The world doesn't change because of that, your stooges are mostly there for show, it remains a lame Ass Creed game on Disneyland Mordor at its heart.

Speaking of Disneyland Mordor, I can almost hear some Marketing department guy at WB games thinking: Let's pick some generic elven ruins, add alot of greens so the players feel on their safe space and not too opressed so we still can sell to teenagers but you know... we still need to show how Mordor was oppressive and unique, how? What? We figuring out a decent art style with world design? Nope, too much work, just throw some greens, some ruins and a few edgy orks being mean to human slaves and everything will be alright.

 

[SerratedBiz]

Do you remember when someone wrote an article criticizing the fact that the sneak tutorial had you sneaking up to your wife to kiss her, and how equating it to the same mechanic as a stealth kill was mysoginistic or something?

Them were the days.

 

[Sceptic]

Tried to play Deathkings of the Dark Citadel, the expansion for Hexen, but the vastly accelerated respawn rate compared to the core game is just too annoying.

I think the spawn rate is more reasonable on lower difficulties. Try playing on difficulty #4 instead of #5 and see how it works.

 

[circ]

Tried Rise of the Tomb Raider. What anamazing game. LOOOOOL. Not really. What a piece of shit. 9/10 LOOOL 10/10 11/10!!! Best game evah! Did reviewers even play this game?? For comparitive purposes of course, I played through it twice, checking how the difficulty varies and if some of the challenges that claim to make changes to gameplay like say - rally the greek zombies against Trinity actually do that. They don't. Big difference in difficulty then? Not really. Unless hp bloat is your idea of difficulty. Ain't my idea nigga.

So comparing it to the first one, which I reinstalled and played through quick in-between ROTTR playthroughts, and got a surprisingly high competion percentage (got 96% in ROTTR second time. Huh?). Guess that wasn't much of a challenge either.

In the first one you will have all skills done before you're done with SP campaign. Also your weapons should be all done. That's not how you do it devs. Add more weapons if that happens. Stretch out weapon acquisition like ROTTR instead but still get all weapons before done? No. That's lazy developing. The weapons are shit. In the first one it didn't really matter because an improved weapon replaced your old one when you got parts for it. In ROTTR you get to keep all weapons and can switch between them. Except there's really no reason to switch most weapons at all. Shit, you could finish it with first tier weapons, even non-upgraded ones. Headshots are instakills and so are sneak kills. Ok.. Unless they wear head protection in which case it's almost an instakill. How helmets protect vs armor piercing bullets though is anybody's guess, but hey, you suck. Oh also skills. They're recycled from the first one, literally. Some skills got so lazily remade that they split a single skill with two uses into two skills. Holy shit that's some lazy design. And this time you also get skills for completing tombs. But they're nothing special either. The skills offer nothing interesting. NOTHING. What the fuck. Also weapon animations and meshes. LOOOOL. The bolt-action rifle has a fucked up mesh that shows the surroundings through parts of it (WTF), and it's held in some weird way where you wonder how Lara can hit jack shit with it. And why does it have a rail system but no scope add-on? Oh wait, that would have actually been interesting. Can't have that.

Music is nothing to write home about but it's not something you necessarily turn off like in Bethesda games. But the rest of the audio takes a special shit cake prize. It's like they randomly added reverb to audio and randomly placed it in the game. None of the environments sound remotely like they should. The voice acting isn't much better. And how is it greek travelers living in russia speak perfect english? Shruuug. And the british english. OH LOOOOOL. I guess it sounds fine to americans?

Graphics are kinda improved from the first one. TR 2013 had really crappy bloom and lighting, and the textures - specially characers - was crap. As in, are you sure this is a 2013 game? This one fixes bloom somewhat, the lighting does look pretty realistic most of the time, but it gets a little Oblivion bloomy at times. I guess quality assurance got axed?

One graphical thing that wasn't improved are animations. It seems they too got recycled from the first one, and in some cases they're even worse as they likely upped the character poly count but didn't give a fuck about adjusting the old animations. Good job. Then again, 2 years development time, what can one expect? Better than this shit, that's what. Also Crystal Shitnamics don't seem to know jack shit about memory flushing, because after an hour or two you're looking at some major memory leaks, even if you turn down textures to medium - which by the way don't look massively different from ultra either. The fuck? Did you read a Bethesda game development book or something? Admittedly, I'm playing the game with 6 gigs of RAM when it asks for 8, but if I can play it fine for the first hour or so before it turns into a stuttery nightmare on occasion, you fucked up your memory handling.

Area design is horrible. Just horrible. The first one was bad I thought before I played this, but compared to the new one, it's GOTY material in areas. The new one has no sense of scale. The first one had parkour objects in reasonable places. The new one seems to pull shit out of its ass and just place them anywhere without caring for how it looks. There's also no tension in parkouring in the new one, as I discovered playing through TR 2013 again - which does it way better. Then again, both are pathetic compared to the pre-reboot games in design, which I guess got a little too ridiculous at times but still. Did Crystal Diarrhea fire all their old employees and hire Bethesda rejects? Probably. The new areas in their unoriginal form just feel like ideas for the first one that got scrapped in favor of far more interesting areas. Also how the fuck do the villagers move from place to place? Are they all superhuman acrobats like Lara? Lara's endurance is also just fucking unbelievable. I get that it's a game, but seriously, this game should be marketed in the superhero genre.

Also challenges. How are these challenging? I did not even once check the interbutts for help in how to finish a tomb. Some took longer to figure out than others, but shit, I should not be able to do it alone. No wai.

That said, the interface got improved for the better and some other little tidbits, and now you can craft (some) ammo. Although how you can craft arrows in under a second whilst moving I don't know. I like how the (shitty) outfits show upgraded items - like ammo pouches, shotgun belts and stuff. First one had that too in some capacity, only now it's a little more detailed. If only they had actually put a little more effort into it as you'll have it done in no time. QTE's are gone more or less. That's something. I don't understand though how they couldn't figure out it's fucking retarded during the development of the first one.


TL;DR LOOOOOL. Feels like a DLC for the first TR really. With unimaginative, poorly developed new areas. But at full price! (?)

And speaking of DLC. There's apparently some endurance - read survival - DLC available. But knowing modern game devs, it's probably like Bethesda's implementation - aka, shit. Also youtubed some Baba Yaga DLC. LOOOOL. This passes for paid content? You niggas is serious?

Oh shit, forgot about the story. With good reason. It's recycled from the first one. Zombies make a return. Why? What the fuck is Rhianna Pratchett doing ruining the Pratchett name? I could rationalize that she was responsible for the good parts of the story and characters, except there aren't any. What a horrible mess of a story. Not that the old TR games were masterpiece storytelling, but this shit, with the bad voice acting. Oh man. Pulling your pubic hair out is less painful.

Maybe, maybe, the third one will finally bring it together nicely. Better, more interesting areas. Good graphox, good sound, fire that fucking horrible Lara Croft voice actress, good writing? Probably not. We're stuck in a lake of shit and there's no way out.

editoloool: how could I forgit? Lara's new face? WHAT'S WRONG WITH UR FAAAAACE? WHAT THE FUCK DID THEY DOOO? COULDN'T YOU JUST TRY TO RECREATE LARA FROM TR 2013 CUTSCENES INSTEAD OF COMPLETELY BUTCHERING HER FAAAAAAAAAACE? COCKSUCKERS.

 

[mastroego]

Well, too long to answer it all, but I disagree.
I'm almost finished with ROTTR and I have to say, I've had good fun. Sure it's popamole, not at all difficult, but it kind of is if you want to do things with "style" (you should).
(I have to say that I avoided all the "thick skin" skills and such to make damage resist less of a stretch).

Yeah the weapons don't seem that different (in each category), but they're satisfying to use.
For an AAA product, it's made with great care, and it's long (if you're a completionist).

I do find somewhat annoying the voice actress as well. Too "perfect". Then again, the whole character is.

 

[torpid]

Finished No One Lives Forever for the nth time, and it was as enjoyable as always. I ended up installing the sequel after all (thankfully it seems to be much more cooperative on Win 10), and although I don't like it nearly as much as the first game for the reasons I mentioned earlier, it's still a whole lot of fun to play. I had forgotten some of the clever stuff the AI does in this game: the guards might briefly leave their post for a cigarette break, become curious when seeing footsteps in the snow, notice opened file cabinets... All those little details just make the stealth gameplay all that much enjoyable aside from the horde of other improvements and additions to the first game's barebones stealth system. But, alas, I guess this kind of stuff has become extinct in shooters since then.

After the intense endgame of NOLF1 it does feels kind of... hollow, though, and it's a shame that the plot and the characters aren't nearly as interesting.

Yeah--NOLF2 is a better stealth game, but NOLF1 is the better game by far.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Well, too long to answer it all, but I disagree.
I'm almost finished with ROTTR <snip>

Please don't refer to Tomb Raider with an acronym, especially that one. For a moment I thought you were talking about Rise of the Triad, which has been called ROTT for over 20 years now.

 

[Blonsky]

Ray Gigant
Another Wizardy like game, i just started it but im having alot of problems with lags so probably wont play it for long. The combat system is good, the items system is interesting and the leveling system is really disappointing. Also maps are almost corridors with very little exploring in it.

 

[mastroego]

Well, too long to answer it all, but I disagree.
I'm almost finished with ROTTR <snip>

Please don't refer to Tomb Raider with an acronym, especially that one. For a moment I thought you were talking about Rise of the Triad, which has been called ROTT for over 20 years now.

I was just replying to the previous post, hence no harm

 

[spekkio]

Finished first Onimusha.

To my surprise, after quickly giving up on DMC1, I really liked this one. Olschool Crapcom represent.

Pros:
- Basically Resident Evil but in ancient Nippon AND with decent melee combat.
- Combat system: you can't block and aim at the same time, can counter enemies' attacks and insta-kill them or use special attacks. Devouring enemy souls is crucial, but you can't do it while blocking / attacking. Shit isn't overly complex, but fun to use and works as intended (fuckup is mostly your fault).
- Fixed camera angles aren't as infuriating as in DMC.
- Varied enemies, requiring different tactics: fast ones, strong ones, teleporting ones, shielded ones... You name it.
- Maze-like level design.
- Story is decent.
- Kaede's outfit, bouncy tits and special attack (finisher).
- You can't buy "upgraded" items, just use souls to upgrade regular ones, which have to be found.
- Perfect length, almost no forced backtracking.

Cons:
- GUI is a little bit bare-boned, requiring too many clicks sometimes (item use confirmation, switching weapons).
- When one enemy is downed, auto aim often switches to another active enemy, which fucks you over (unable to use finisher).
- Healing items are IMO too sparse. You can absorb healing souls from enemies, but good luck with that in more heated battles (3-5 enemies).
- Fucking archers.

Verdict:



Don't make them like that any more / Looking forward to next games in series.

 

[Carrion]

Yeah--NOLF2 is a better stealth game, but NOLF1 is the better game by far.

Yeah. I was also wrong about the respawning enemies earlier — there are certainly some levels where they seem to respawn at regular intervals even if you don't set off any alarms, and while it is nice that a guard might "wander in from outside" after you've committed mass murder in an office building without bothering to get rid of the bodies, it becomes kind of ridiculous when that happens every two minutes and the bodies slowly start to pile up. Aside from that, the good and the bad things are pretty much like I remembered them.

It has always kind of pissed me off when people refer to NOLF1 as some sort of spy parody, because I don't think it ever really was one. I think the abundant humour (which was rarely aimed at the spy genre itself) combined with the 60's aesthetics just resulted in the wrong connotations in some people's heads. Or maybe that image is caused by the fact that the sequel takes such a radically different approach, undermining itself on purpose at every turn and turning the whole thing into a big farce. While this does result in many absolutely hilarious moments, the game can be such a mood-killer at times. The long infiltration mission in Siberia is in many ways one of the highlights of the game, full of classic NOLF humour ("this is the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, people don't just disappear without a trace!"), and it's such a downer that when you finally reach your goal, you're only given a throwaway joke and a "revelation" that you could've guessed before you even installed the game. Then you get a "debriefing" that consists of about two lines before it's time for the next mission. And this is actually the best part of the storyline. It's like they were afraid to even try.

Fortunately the game redeems itself from that quite quickly with a certain ruggedly handsome vacuum-cleaner salesman (R.I.P.) and the greatest assassin in the history of computer games.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Each time someone says that NOLF1 is supposedly not completely ridiculous, unlike its sequel, I can say only one thing: Frau Wagner in bulletproof valkyrie armour.

 

[Carrion]

Each time someone says that NOLF1 is supposedly not completely ridiculous, unlike its sequel, I can say only one thing: Frau Wagner in bulletproof valkyrie armour.

Inge Wagner is by far the most over-the-top thing about NOLF1, but she still has a rather tragic backstory that explains the opera singing among other things. She's a comedy character, of course, but she is still treated rather seriously in terms of the plot. NOLF2's bad guys don't get the same luxury.

I guess the difference between NOLF1 and NOLF2 is that in NOLF1 you've got ridiculous stuff emerging from a rather serious premise, whereas in the sequel the entire premise is ridiculous from the get-go. In NOLF1 you've got an actual, serious threat that serves as your motivation. It's not supposed to be funny when Volkov murders someone, or when H.A.R.M. blows up thousands of people as a punishment of you getting in their way. On the other hand in NOLF2 the first thing you see is a super villain lair and the main bad guy talking to his angry mom on the phone, and the less said about their master plan the better. NOLF2 is like Austin Powers to NOLF1's James Bond.

 

[Baron Dupek]

Finished Beyond Divinity after getting boost-up from beating 1st chapter in Divinity OS EE.

How the hell Larian released this (and then develop Ego Draconis with similar result) and didn't went bankrupt is beyond me.
People complained about voice acting, but for me - it was better than Original Sin's voices. Sure, sound amateurish like Deus Ex but it didn't bother me in the latter.
Finally - alt+tab is working. But still need 3rd party programs for windowed mode...
We know that in RPGs there are some useless skills or spells. But in BeyDiv - whole magic is utter trash. Weakest spell in BeyDiv cost as much as the strongest spell in DivDiv. And you can't kill rats with it, in the very first dungeon!
Who need repair and identify, when you can jump into Battlefields and ID item for few coins and sell with huge profit.
But cherry of the top is skill crafting system. Sounds cool on paper but in the game it's
Oh and you have summoning dolls. It can carry all your loot and fight, but it's weak like shit. Sure, you can upgrade summon but you need to spend your own skillpoints to do that. Who the hell though it was good idea??
It was weird playing it after DivDiv where spells shows a lot. I rarely saw magic presence outside of some areas in last act. Really weird.

Battlefields is special pocket plane where you can grind for loot and experience but you need to clear it asap before you get almost no reward due level difference.
High difficulty is borked. You can't kill shit and you need to sneak around (to my surprise - sneaking works good here) because there is 2-3x more enemies than usual.
For some reason clicking on fauna make it hostile toward you, kicking shit out of local animals and mutants for no XP is not fun.

There is almost no level scalling except final boss, who is always at least nine level above you. And geezus he need a lot of Agility to get hit. You might get best bet with Bow+Power Arrows, hit more ofter. Or you, by any chance, found viable magic build. But I don't know anyone bored enough to look for valid magic build in that game...
They didn't gave final boss his own portrait and voice. How cool is that?
BTW. how do you think the final act looks like? Huge dungeon full of powerful enemies? Nope. You got to finish boring exams. Pffff...

The demo version to the game had radically different voice acting (at least, for Black Knight

there is one rift map in act4, where they use old DK voice, the moment when he touch bricks on the wall. Nice touch, I guess?

For now - got decent GPU, got bored with Grim Dawn (Titan Quest trauma is still haunting me) and reinstalled Path of Exile. Made some build in that offline skilltree app and just trash stuff with occasional assaults on my character.
Lot of stuff to learn but I don't feel overwhelmed for now, maybe because I have too low level to care about anything except badly invested skillpoints....
I don't know why but now game runs good except loud HDD munching noise for the first few minutes when game is launched. P. irritating....

 

[Humppaleka]

My save files got corrupted in BeyondDiv just before the final fight. Decided to call it a day and watched the rather miserable ending on Youtube. I count it as finishing the game.