Currently Playing

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Sly Boots
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Re: Currently Playing

Post by Sly Boots » Fri Jan 27, 2023 3:26 pm

Hi-Fi Rush

Announced the same day it was released and available on Gamepass, this is incredible fun. It's a rhythm-fighting-action-game type thing, basically you get bonuses for attacking enemies in time with the beat of the music playing throughout. I'm a bit crap at the timing of it to be honest, but I'm still having a blast. It's colourful, funny, the characters are likeable and while they joke around often, it doesn't get too Marvel/Joss Whedon. The whole thing is light and breezy and as soon as I stop playing the first thing I want to do is fire it up again :lol:

Single-player, no MTX, no day 1 DLC, no bugs, no year-long hype campaign... who'd have thunk in 2023?

98% positive on Steam:



Going to be playing it on the channel, first episode will go up Saturday evening if anyone's interested in watching a rhythmless middle age man flail about but still have a good time :lol:

Edit:


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Raid
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Re: Currently Playing

Post by Raid » Sat Jan 28, 2023 10:21 pm

A few recents:

Assetto Corsa Competizione
I finally sat down to play this with my newly refurbished racing sim rig (now the entire pedal assembly doesn't move when I brake!), and while I'm obviously rubbish at this hardcore racing sim after only a couple of sessions, if you haven't set your personal best around the Circuit de Catalunya in an Aston Martin GT3 car while slightly tipsy and headbanging to Uptown Funk, have you ever truly lived?

Final Fantasy 6 Pixel Remaster
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If you haven't ever suplexed a steam locomotive's ghost, have you ever truly lived?

It's another beautiful remaster of a stone-cold classic JRPG, and while I don't have anywhere near the same amount of nostalgia for 6 as I have for 5 - for the first few hours at least it feels more like an interactive novel than an RPG, it's still really well done. The soundtrack is glorious, and they've almost entirely remade the famous opera scene (still I think one of the finest pieces of 16-bit gaming ever made) while remaining true to the original.

Overload
A wonderful throwback Descent clone from, well, some of the people that made the original Descent games. I did originally buy this as a Steam Deck game, but it has full VR support so I've given it a whirl in that, and while it's not something I'd really want to play in its entirety with a headset on, realising that the robot enemies you're fighting are actually the size of hatchbacks instead of the small animals they're more reminiscent of on a handheld is quite entertaining. It's also surprisingly safe for my stomach - for a genre that involves flying through zero-gravity 3D environments with no real sense of which way is up, it doesn't actually cause me any nausea.

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Animalmother
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Re: Currently Playing

Post by Animalmother » Sun Jan 29, 2023 2:01 pm

Sly Boots wrote:
Fri Jan 27, 2023 3:26 pm
Hi-Fi Rush

Announced the same day it was released and available on Gamepass, this is incredible fun. It's a rhythm-fighting-action-game type thing, basically you get bonuses for attacking enemies in time with the beat of the music playing throughout. I'm a bit crap at the timing of it to be honest, but I'm still having a blast. It's colourful, funny, the characters are likeable and while they joke around often, it doesn't get too Marvel/Joss Whedon. The whole thing is light and breezy and as soon as I stop playing the first thing I want to do is fire it up again :lol:

Single-player, no MTX, no day 1 DLC, no bugs, no year-long hype campaign... who'd have thunk in 2023?

98% positive on Steam:



Going to be playing it on the channel, first episode will go up Saturday evening if anyone's interested in watching a rhythmless middle age man flail about but still have a good time :lol:

Edit:

That's a really nice looking game, the art style is amazing. But don't think I'll be playing it, anything that requires timing or hitting a beat quickly dissolves into expletive laden frustration for me.

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Sly Boots
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Re: Currently Playing

Post by Sly Boots » Sun Jan 29, 2023 2:09 pm

If you have Game Pass give it a go, I have zero rhythmic ability but am finding it quite forgiving.

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Animalmother
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Re: Currently Playing

Post by Animalmother » Mon Jan 30, 2023 5:40 pm

I might have a look at it soon then.

Alien: Isolation
So this game is 9 years old already, it has Kinect options in the settings menu... I played a bit of it about 5 years ago and put it down fully meaning to return at some point. Showing it's age a bit with slightly clunky controls and AI that can be very frustrating at times, but I'm really enjoying the often pant shit inducing sound design. The game also manages to feel like it's set in the Alien universe in a way that none of the modern adaptations have managed. The tech is 70's analog with green crt screens and big chunky keypads and tape drives wiring in the background. The alien itself is usually a fleetingly seen menace lurking in the shadows until it decides to start stomping about a room like a toddler in it's dad's boots, slightly ruins the emersion.

Going to give it a proper attempt this time and no doubt spend most of it panicky fumbling with a chunky keypad.

arqueturus
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Re: Currently Playing

Post by arqueturus » Mon Jan 30, 2023 8:17 pm

Hi fi rush.

Gave a a 20 minute try but just found it tedious. I didn't feel like I was controlling much and know whether I was on beat or not wasn't obvious.

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Re: Currently Playing

Post by DjchunKfunK » Wed Feb 01, 2023 8:31 pm

arqueturus wrote:
Mon Jan 30, 2023 8:17 pm
Hi fi rush.

Gave a a 20 minute try but just found it tedious. I didn't feel like I was controlling much and know whether I was on beat or not wasn't obvious.
You can turn on a UI helper that will show you when the beat is if you are having rouble hitting the beat.

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Abs_McBain
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Re: Currently Playing

Post by Abs_McBain » Fri Feb 10, 2023 12:41 pm

Theres a Radio the Universe demo on Steam if anyone is interest, or has been waiting for the game to be released after 12 years.


It's pretty good. Yeah.

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Wrathbone
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Re: Currently Playing

Post by Wrathbone » Wed Feb 22, 2023 5:16 pm

I've just discovered Clone Hero, which is a free Guitar Hero / Rock Band clone for PC which lets you use existing peripherals (my old Xbox 360 Rock Band Stratocaster just plugged in and worked) and has community versions of all the songs from the official games available for free download, plus tens of thousands of other songs. It just works, and it works incredibly well. As someone who used to play these games a massive amount and drifted away as consoles got old and calibration on modern TVs became less reliable, it's amazing to have ALL the songs I used to love playing in one place on a system that is hassle-free.

I've become extremely rusty in the years since I last played, though. :lol: Free Bird was more Incarcerated Pigeon.

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Raid
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Re: Currently Playing

Post by Raid » Wed Feb 22, 2023 8:47 pm

I finished Final Fantasy 6 Pixel Remaster, meaning I finally completed a game I guess I started 20-odd years ago and have been meaning to go back to ever since.
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The remaster's just as good as 5's was, although I don't think this one needed quite as much work as it was already (debatably) the best looking 16-bit era game ever made. They've added 3D sections to the opera scene, and the newly recorded soundtrack has said opera's lyrics which obviously couldn't be done on the SNES sound chip.

But despite this being lauded as the best of the 2D Final Fantasy games, I didn't enjoy it as much as 5. The story is far richer than its predecessor, sure, the player characters actually have personalities and backstories and progression, but there's nowhere near as much gameplay. FF6 was famously launched as FF3 in the US because the folks at Nintendo thought that three of the preceding games were too difficult for a Western audience and just didn't translate them, and the sixth instalment was designed to be more palatable for this reason, but I think there was maybe one boss in my 36 hour playtime that gave me much of a challenge. It feels more like an interactive novel than an RPG.

And it doesn't help that the game features more than three times as many playable characters as 5 had. I made absolutely sure to grab all of them (I used a guide for some of the more hidden ones), and if you do likewise you actually have to just entirely ignore two of the fourteen in the final confrontation. You split the team into 3 parties, and each one takes a different route towards the final boss, at which point you set an order for them to appear with you controlling four at any one time. I knew it was pretty likely that I wouldn't actually lose anyone given the ease by which I was destroying bosses at this point, so I had to pick my four favourites (Terra, Locke, Celes and Relm for anyone that's interested) which was actually quite difficult. But the problem is that if you want to keep your entire team equally levelled, as I did, you're going to be too powerful for the game's difficulty. It's not as if I even had to try particularly hard to get to this state; there's nowhere near as much grinding required as in 5.

But damnit if I didn't get a little weepy-eyed at times. The game really does make you feel for your little pixel people, and it's a story full of tragedy and regret. The entire second half of the game takes place in
Spoiler
the ruins of the first following a quite spectacular cataclysm, with you travelling the world tracking down all of the player characters that it scattered,
gives it a very different feel to 5. Sadly it doesn't quite hit the mark in the ending; there are just too many characters to have a fulfilling epilogue, and while 5's ending gave you a glimpse of the world a year after you saved it, 6 just shows you the characters escaping from the final dungeon followed by a flyby on the airship.

I'd still highly recommend this though. Pixel art games have made a huge comeback in the last few years, so why not treat yourself to one of the games half of them have nostalgia for. It's still extremely playable and the story's worth the time investment. I reckon I'll probably pick up the Pixel Remaster of 4 (which I half-completed on the Vita years ago) at some point because these are perfect Steam Deck exercise bike fodder, but I'm probably going to move onto the PC port of Final Fantasy 7 next. As with every Final Fantasy game I played in my youth apart from 5, it was left half-completed, and given it's regarded as one of the best videogames ever made (and the remake doesn't look like finishing within the decade), I suppose I really ought to actually play it all the way through.

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Re: Currently Playing

Post by Lenny Solidus » Wed Feb 22, 2023 11:05 pm

Nioh: Complete Edition

My god do I want to like this game, but after just hitting the ten hours played mark I remain at the exact same point that my cranky old gamer arse had been stuck at since I last played it - something like two years ago...

Image

I would give anything, well almost anything to finally crack the absolute mental block I have for enjoying these types of games. I know exactly how much they have to offer yet they make me feel as if I’ve never touched any form of hands on game at all in my entire adult life, I am so fucking poor at executing anything in them and I quite literally feel all fingers and thumbs trying to master the control scheme and in game mechanics. But I know if I don't attempt to persist I will never feel that sense of victory finally reaching the next shrine advancement, one that I still have yet to come even within view distance of for my entire experience. The pathing in this game drives me absolutely fucking nuts, I can't find anything and I die and am shoved back to the last shrine before I manage to do anything of any true significance. :lol:

At this point I positively envy anyone who can play games such as Elden Ring because I sure as hell will never even contemplate buying such a game until I can finally make some actual headway in something else - such as this, first. I know exactly what I would be letting myself in for otherwise.

I must have run this section a good 50 times so far and I am fighting the growing urge to simply uninstall yet again, conceding to the notion these games are not and never shall be for me. Man do I suck.
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Re: Currently Playing

Post by Animalmother » Fri Feb 24, 2023 5:39 pm

My constant battle with most modern games is I just can't get into them or I'm just utterly shit at them. Not just you mate.

DayZ
I tried this a while back and bounced off it very hard. Was in the mood for a survival game and gave it another punt. Much to my surprise I'm really enjoying it despite all the annoying shit it throws at you. Food is extremely difficult to find, you're more likely to die of starvation than a bullet. There's also the random chance of getting food poisoning which rightly fucks you up. Gear and weapons are also very hard to locate, this may have been due to an update that reduced resources.
The zombies are now hyper aggressive and move really fast, they are the main cause of death so far.
I've only rarely come across other players, first two times was a friendly waggle at each other and move on. The other 3 were wankers swinging wildly with a hammer trying to get my loot. It's best to just run away.
I never last very long, about 2 hours is my record for survival. No military grade gear/weapons found yet but I'll plug away until I've had my fill.

Also playing with a controller is ballhang...

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Re: Currently Playing

Post by Snowy » Sat Feb 25, 2023 6:57 pm

Definitely not just you. I bought the complete edition of Nioh for pennies in a Steam sale and though I have tried on a couple of occasions I simply don't get the appeal of it. It is just one of those games I don't like. Or get. Or both.

The Yakuza series is another - fucking gaming sites rave about these titles like they are landmark epics. I have only played one, Yakuza 0, and it was absolute gash. Awkward camera, clunky combat, an incomprehensible story (this is me, I cannot wrap my noodle around Japanese storytelling) hung together on a series of utterly shit minigames. What the fuck?

Also most Roguelikes and all Soulslikes - just no.
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Raid
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Re: Currently Playing

Post by Raid » Fri Mar 10, 2023 10:29 am

Final Fantasy 7

I don't get it. I'm 15 hours into this and I just cannot understand why quite a lot of people consider it one of the very best games ever made. The story's reasonably compelling, sure, but it's just so tedious to play. Coming straight into this from the SNES games makes FF7 feel like an absolute slog, with fights five times the length they could be because the game forces you to look at the enemy polygons gyrating in what can generously be called animation. Ok, that's a feature of it being a first generation 3D game where developers were still working out what animation worked and what didn't, fine.

What I find less defensible is the way the game hides paths in the rendered landscapes, where it's a total crapshoot as to whether the developer chose to include a spot the characters can cross a tiny jump, or whether the path between two pillars is wide enough to fit through. I'm even playing with the assist function on so the game highlights exits from a screen and climbable ladders or pipes. It only takes a few moments of movement to get to and from routes you think might work, but you're basically guaranteed a random battle or two, stretching a few seconds of checking into five minutes depending on the enemy types.

And let's mention the enemies. The game has far too many effects that just completely disable a character, whether they be stuns or sleep or toad spells. They don't add any difficulty, they just make the fight take a lot longer. There was one random encounter I had which included six little toads; they would take turns casting a spell (with an animation length of a few seconds per use), and turning them into toads too. When a character is a toad, they can't use magic or most abilities, and they hit for less damage. The next enemy would punch my character, removing the toad status. And then the next toad would cast the spell again, each time delaying me from acting. When I *could* act, I was maybe taking off a quarter of an enemy's health per attack. I couldn't use my screen-hitting magic attacks, because even if I managed to select it, by the time that character came to act, they'd be a toad again and the spell just fizzled. That fight, a standard encounter, took nearly ten minutes.

Then there are minor irritations, such as when changing a party member out, you first have to strip them of their materia rather than it just happening automatically when you put them in reserve, and the pointless little attempts at minigames that don't work. I spent ten minutes trying to get Cloud to march, because every single attempt I made had another character yelling at me and resetting it, but without the game giving you any indication whatsoever of what you're doing wrong (and there really not being many ways to do it in the first place), and the "example" of what you're meant to do being totally misleading and unrepeatable.

I know I'm being quite harsh on a game that's 25 years old now, but I feel like people who still praise it are doing so entirely out of fond memories for it rather than a critical eye. Besides, the SNES games still hold up and they're several years older. Honestly it's making me respect the remake a lot more, because I'm realising now just how badly the game needed one. I may not agree with the direction they took with the story, but the gameplay was a vast improvement.

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Re: Currently Playing

Post by Rusty » Fri Mar 10, 2023 10:38 am

100%. It's still one of my favourite games but having retried it recently glad I don't have to play it now. I played it so much and got all the secret bosses and powers. I love FF8 too but would probably feel the same way about it now.
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