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Alan
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Re: Currently Playing

Post by Alan » Sat Apr 06, 2019 10:24 pm

I think the Christian in you is being fat too kind to Altered Beast ;)
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Medicine Man
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Re: Currently Playing

Post by Medicine Man » Sun Apr 07, 2019 12:36 am

Indeed. Altered Beast was, is and shall always be a terrible, terrible game.

It came with the Mega Drive I got for Christmas and it was the only game I had until Sonic came out the following summer. A truly brutal 6 months forever seared into my memory.

Despite all that wise fwom your gwave is still moderately funny though. :D

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Re: Currently Playing

Post by Animalmother » Sun Apr 07, 2019 1:28 am

Altered Beast does indeed rank highly as one of the worst games ever made for the Mega Drive.

I also never knew that "Rise from your gwave! " quote was from this game. Last Podcast on the Left intro makes a bit more sense now.

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Re: Currently Playing

Post by Alan » Sun Apr 07, 2019 2:49 am

I always thought that was a strange pull for them considering the innumerable movie quotes they could have pulled that would be more relevant but then I’m pretty sure “this is the” in the intro is Picard so whatever! :lol:
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Re: Currently Playing

Post by Stormbringer » Sun Apr 07, 2019 9:41 pm

I don't know guys, Altered Beast is really, brutally hard, but there is something about it I really like! My kids seem to really enjoy it too.

The only thing that bugs me is that something seems to be wrong with the "change into a beast" animation on level 2. The dragon's face seems to be off-centre and thus hidden behind the "fire", so you can't see it.
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Re: Currently Playing

Post by Sly Boots » Sun Apr 07, 2019 10:00 pm

Medicine Man wrote:
Sun Apr 07, 2019 12:36 am
Indeed. Altered Beast was, is and shall always be a terrible, terrible game.

It came with the Mega Drive I got for Christmas and it was the only game I had until Sonic came out the following summer. A truly brutal 6 months forever seared into my memory.
Replace Altered Beast with Shadow of the Beast 2 and MegaDrive with Amiga 500, and that's a significant chunk of my childhood right there.

Also, in the spirit of the thread topic: Return of the Obra Dinn

Wow, this game is awesome. If you've been put off by the graphics, don't be... you quickly forget them as you're playing and they actually work really well. In fact, I'm not sure it would be the same game without them.

I won't delve into the story at all as it's best to go in blind as I did... a couple of hours in it flipped in a direction I really wasn't expecting, resulting in a proper "what the hell?!" moment, which was great.

It makes you feel like a real detective, hanging on the nuances of what people are saying, their accents, the clothes they wear, distinguishing marks - heck even who they stand or sit next to, sometimes across multiple vignettes and death scenes... all of which helps you pick away at the mystery of what happened while identifying members of the 60-strong crew and working out what happened to them.

I don't think there's another game quite like it, and well worth a play.

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Re: Currently Playing

Post by Sly Boots » Mon Apr 08, 2019 2:15 pm

I don't know whether it's because Train Valley and then Obra Dinn have tickled the thinking part of my brain, but suddenly decided to take the leap and buy Tides of Numenera, which was only £4 from CDkeys.

Only a couple of hours in, but liking it so far. There's a lot of reading but weirdly I've found it more accessible in that regard than PoE, where the constant spamming of made-up names and terminology had my eyes spinning after a while. Maybe because it's so obviously alien so there's that sense of discovery you get from good sci-fi, whereas PoE at times seemed to be complicating standard fantasy fare and so conversely became more opaque? But I digress.

Early days, but I'm finding myself sucked into the stories and backgrounds of the people I meet, and one recent encounter with a couple and their adopted son in the marketplace near the starting area has me wanting to pursue their story more deeply... and pleasingly it seems I can do so by returning to someone I had a brief, slightly odd, chance conversation with previously. Not doing so merely to earn XP and level up, but because I'm invested in what's going on.

Then in the same zone there was a minor side quest involving a couple of explorers and a beast they'd captured, and a priest who wanted me to release it so he could study it. In other RPGs I might have just seen the possibility of XP, but here, having spoken to all involved and understood their various relevant back-stories and motivations, I went a different path because just doing what I'd been asked to do didn't sit right with me, and in the end I was able to bring it to conclusion I found satisfying.

I can't remember which of our regular forum RPG afficionados has already played this, but I think certainly Wrathbone would enjoy it (I know by the fact he reads all the books in Elder Scrolls, something even I'm never tempted to do, means he's not put off by excessive reading in game :lol:)

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Re: Currently Playing

Post by Sly Boots » Wed Apr 10, 2019 12:58 pm

15 hours in and I'm upgrading Torment: Tides of Numenera from 'liking it' to 'this is fantastic'.

Is it as good as Planescape? Probably not. It is, however, a worthy sequel and I'd have no hesitation in recommending it to anyone who enjoyed PT.

Only £4 on CDkeys.

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Re: Currently Playing

Post by Alan » Sun Apr 14, 2019 7:56 am

After owning it for oh... 2+ years? I finally fired up Offworld Trading Company and its really enjoyable! I thought it would be an almost "clicker" type of game that would be relaxing and fairly mindless but man it can get quite stressful! Its not a massively deep game, its more a game of spinning plates better than everyone else. It has a lot in common with Frostpunk except for it being a fun experience. Its definately not hard to pick up but I'm 100% sure I'll get obliterated if I ever venture online so it will probably remain as a game to play on the side while I watch TV or listen to podcasts.

I did notice you can play the multiplayer completely free now if anyone wants to try it. I hope they at least give you the tutorials because I can see it being harsh just tossing you in.



We also played Its Quiz Time which is an awful name but a really decent quiz game. I do enjoy these kind of games but I feel most pad out the game time with rubbish that isnt a question where this just quickly hits you with question after question (of which there are 40,000 so shouldnt run out or repeat much). It uses the Jackbox style phone system and has some interesting modes. The only one I wasnt sure of was "describe it" where you are given a topic and you have to talk about it for a minute and the other players have a list of keywords they tick off when you say them so for example I chose the topic "System Of A Down" and got points for "serj tankian", "chop suey", "toxicity" etc... Its fun but feels like the weakest of all. The host is an "ai" with a synthesised voice which works well and never gets old if you name yourself Jobby.

I think its the most fun we've had with a quiz game since Buzz was took out back by Sony.



Then I also got a hold of The Messenger and Sekiro. The Messenger is the better of the two. Sekiro annoyed me not by the combat difficulty but by the "ok, where do I go now?!" map design. I wasnt having fun trying to work out where I should go so I went back to The Messenger. The Messenger has utter gash attempts at humour but the gameplay is solid and well designed.


And finally Ive been back playing a lot of Luftrausers on my Vita on the go and that game is still fantastic. I'm still kind of at a brickwall as far as completing the last few challenges but its just so much fun to play. I know theyre bringing Nuclear Throne to Switch but Luft really should be on all current gen hardware too.
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Re: Currently Playing

Post by Sly Boots » Mon Apr 15, 2019 7:57 am

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney

Having quite a bit of fun with this. I'm going to assume that everyone at least knows what it is, even if they've not played it. After Obra Dinn, it's nice having another game that scratches the deductive itch. Have played the first of the three games this is bundled with, so the first PW game basically. The first case is a gimme being the tutorial, but in the other three there's been at least one moment where I'm having to sit and think for a few minutes going through the available evidence to pick apart a witness testimony.

Every so often it suffers from that traditional adventure game problem of you knowing the solution but having to spend ages tinkering trying to work out the way the game wants you to have figured it out. There was one bit in the last case where you had to prove something in a particular photo wasn't what it appeared to be. You go to one scene and immediately I knew 'that's the actual thing in the photo'... but from there it took about 30 minutes of wandering around the available locations, talking to everyone over and over about the same things and showing them everything in my pockets to try to get Phoenix to realise it too.

But despite the very odd occasion like that it works well, it's fun to piece things together and then expose a witness' lies and get them squirming. Probably the highlight was cross-examining a parrot :lol:

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Re: Currently Playing

Post by Wrathbone » Wed Apr 24, 2019 10:30 am

Sly Boots wrote:
Mon Apr 08, 2019 2:15 pm
I can't remember which of our regular forum RPG afficionados has already played this, but I think certainly Wrathbone would enjoy it
I did play it (for about 10 hours), and I went in with admittedly high expectations that it unfortunately didn't live up to for me. I gave it the best shot I could but against all the odds it wasn't for me. The main problem I had was that the inherent weirdness seemed to be there for the sake of being weird, whereas in PS:T the weirdness was used to explore facets of the Nameless One's character that wouldn't have been possible in a conventional fantasy setting. Numenera felt more like a carnival sideshow of sci-fi abnormalities that had little relevance to the story.

The other problem I had was that the combat system was almost completely sidelined to the point where the game virtually sneered at you if you somehow managed to get into a fight. PS:T was never a combat-heavy game but combat was a part of it, and it didn't shy away from fights when the story called for it. In the 10 hours I played, I think I had maybe two combat encounters.

I'm honestly jealous that you liked it - I really wish I did! On paper I should have been its target audience but somehow it didn't click with me at all.

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Re: Currently Playing

Post by Sly Boots » Wed Apr 24, 2019 11:29 am

Wrathbone wrote:
Wed Apr 24, 2019 10:30 am
Sly Boots wrote:
Mon Apr 08, 2019 2:15 pm
I can't remember which of our regular forum RPG afficionados has already played this, but I think certainly Wrathbone would enjoy it
I did play it (for about 10 hours), and I went in with admittedly high expectations that it unfortunately didn't live up to for me. I gave it the best shot I could but against all the odds it wasn't for me. The main problem I had was that the inherent weirdness seemed to be there for the sake of being weird, whereas in PS:T the weirdness was used to explore facets of the Nameless One's character that wouldn't have been possible in a conventional fantasy setting. Numenera felt more like a carnival sideshow of sci-fi abnormalities that had little relevance to the story.

The other problem I had was that the combat system was almost completely sidelined to the point where the game virtually sneered at you if you somehow managed to get into a fight. PS:T was never a combat-heavy game but combat was a part of it, and it didn't shy away from fights when the story called for it. In the 10 hours I played, I think I had maybe two combat encounters.

I'm honestly jealous that you liked it - I really wish I did! On paper I should have been its target audience but somehow it didn't click with me at all.
Ah, that's a shame. Maybe it helped that I went in with quite low expectations based on what others had said about it, and almost straightaway for me it was a case of "this is alright, actually", rather than "oh, this isn't anywhere near as good as PST".

I found myself really engaging with the world and the story of the Changing God and the impact he'd had on various people and places. And some of the stories that unfold for the party companions are great, particularly the one written by Chris Avellone. I won't spoil anything, except to say that if you ever attempt a replay make sure to have Erritis in your party.

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Re: Currently Playing

Post by Wrathbone » Wed Apr 24, 2019 12:13 pm

I think I will give it another go at some point, but I've a load of games I want to get through at the moment. I'm finishing a replay of Mass Effect 1 to 3, which has been enormous fun, then I'll be playing Paradox's new grand strategy, Imperator, which comes out tomorrow. And I also want to finally get round to Assassin's Creed Odyssey. Yet in the middle of all these gaming intentions I've been putting loads more time into Battle Brothers, because it's ridiculously good! I've just got the DLCs - I have no idea how you're meant to kill the new evil tree monsters (schrats?), but I'm guessing I need more axes.

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Re: Currently Playing

Post by Me99 » Wed May 01, 2019 8:46 am

Stormbringer wrote:
Sun Apr 07, 2019 9:41 pm
I don't know guys, Altered Beast is really, brutally hard, but there is something about it I really like!
I liked it too Stormy, you're no alone.

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Re: Currently Playing

Post by Medicine Man » Wed May 01, 2019 3:03 pm

Nooooooooooooooooo. I think I finally see what it was like to not like Far Cry 2. :)

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