Whatcha Been Playing?

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Marlew
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Marlew »

Alex79uk wrote: August 13th, 2021, 3:54 pm I'm currently up to chapter five on Bayonetta 2 for Switch. Interested to know what the general consensus is for this game, as whilst I'm really enjoying it, and it's a great action game, I don't think it's as good as the first.
That was my impression, as well. Very colourful and flashy and OTT but it starts in fifth gear and I don't feel there's anywhere for it to go. It's a long plateau which gets a bit tiring. It feels much less dynamic and varied than the first game, as you say. It polishes some stuff and gets rid of the roughest edges (the chronic vehicle/flying stuff) but it definitely loses the impact that the first game had - and still has when I go back to it.
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stvnorman
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

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Away on our hols this week, so a rare bit of Switch handheld love, and mostly all-time favourite arcade stuff like Thunder Force AC, P-47, Out Run and loads of Virtua Racing, where, after 50 hours of play on its three tracks, I got an unexpected best ever time on Big Forest - twice! Also played about 4 hours of story-heavy throwback puzzle-platformer Horace. Not sure I can face another 12+ hours if How Long To Beat is correct, plus it’s gone all stealth, but it only cost about a £1.50 in a sale so I’ve had my money’s worth either way!

More Cotton Reboot too, which is still a marvellous supernatural cute ‘em up in handheld mode, and it’s bright and bold enough for even the more bullet-hell areas to work fine on the small screen. I’ve actually got to the end now, but there’s so much depth to scoring big that I’m still only really scratching the surface - I’d battered my end-game score before I was halfway through stage one when I put my focus on multipliers!
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Alex79
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

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stvnorman wrote: August 15th, 2021, 8:45 am Also played about 4 hours of story-heavy throwback puzzle-platformer Horace. Not sure I can face another 12+ hours if How Long To Beat is correct, plus it’s gone all stealth, but it only cost about a £1.50 in a sale so I’ve had my money’s worth either way!
Horace is a funny one. At several points during my playthrough I thought I'd had my fill, but then it changed or added something to keep it interesting. I think it does this right up to the end of the game. The cut scenes did my head in a bit just due to how long and frequent they are, but overall it did just enough to get me through the 12-15 hours it took me to finish.
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stvnorman
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

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Alex79uk wrote: August 15th, 2021, 11:04 am Horace is a funny one. At several points during my playthrough I thought I'd had my fill, but then it changed or added something to keep it interesting. I think it does this right up to the end of the game. The cut scenes did my head in a bit just due to how long and frequent they are, but overall it did just enough to get me through the 12-15 hours it took me to finish.
I’m done! Played a bit more, but I really don’t like stealth, I’ve done enough of its platforming, and I’m fed up with the cut scenes too. Had I paid full price, and not looked at the time to beat, I might have kept plodding on, but no regrets. Had a good few hours out of it.
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Scrustle
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

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Got deeper in to Forza Motorsport 7 and I have some more thoughts on it. I'm still enjoying it, but I'm starting to see some of the things people didn't like about this game. The homologation system is pretty restrictive. Almost every events in the career has these very strict limitations on what car you can use, only allowing certain styles of cars, with each style of car only allowed to be within a certain class, and with certain upgrades. I don't mind racing to a specific spec in principle, but it does mean that what you have access to in any event is pretty narrow, and you'll never see those types of cars in any other level of racing than the one they are homologated for. But on top of that, the few events that do supposedly have an open rule set only allow you to pick which homologation class you drive, with that class still being tied down to the same very narrow specs. It basically makes those events more or less the same as any other, and overall the event types feel like they have less variance and imaginativeness as a whole, compared to some other entries in the series.

Another issue I've had is how the number of cars on track clashes against how long the races are. The grid is huge, 26 cars total, and it feels like too much a lot of the time. This is an issue in some of the other games too, but it comes in a unique form here. At standard race length, that's simply not enough time to get past everyone cleanly. So it makes every race kind of a desperate struggle to get to the front by any means necessary before the race is over. It doesn't give you the space to race respectfully or get a chance at a clean lap. Luckily, this game actually allows you to set how long the races are, so this issue can actually be solved by making races longer. The problem is that the next step up from normal length is huge. It more than triples the number of laps you have to do. That's taking it way too far. So even though now you will have enough time to pass everyone, you end up doing so way before the race ends, leaving you alone miles ahead in the lead again, and massively slowing down progress through the game. I struggled to find a good balance between different levels of AI and race length that still felt like I was getting a fun challenge. But it would be fine if it just changed a 3 lap race to like a 5 or 6 lap race, rather than 10.

I also noticed the game doesn't reward you with more XP or credits for turning off assists. The only thing that affects that is the AI level. Or at least, not in normal circumstances. The race mods you can apply do give you bonuses for assists and such, but they are limited use so you can't get rewards from them every time, and the rewards aren't consistent either. That said, I do appreciate that it seems the mods in this game have ditched the style you could find previous games had that could increase your grip or acceleration ability, etc. Those things seemed strange and out of place in a game that was supposed to be about serious competitive racing.

And speaking of assists, there is another thing I was pleased to find with this game. The change in making the handling easier also means that I can finally drive without ABS again. I used to be fine without it back on the 360 entries, but had to turn it back on with FM5 and 6 becoming way more punishing with that sort of thing. So even if I'm not getting a bonus for it most of the time, it's fun to have that little bit of the game back.

And while I'm talking about this franchise, I also did a little bit more fiddling with Forza Horizon regarding the issues with control input that I talked about the other day. I did some experimenting and I realised that it's possible to mitigate the problem of the throttle being too sensitive on the XB1 by tweaking the deadzones. Increasing the inside acceleration deadzone to about 30% or so makes it so the throttle isn't applied so suddenly at lighter trigger applications. It doesn't fix the problem entirely, but it helps it a bit. I also noticed the steering deadzone is weirdly big by default, at 24%. I turned that down to just 20%, and it helps make it feel a little more responsive. Much more than that and it makes the game feel too twitchy.
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Alex79
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

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Scrustle wrote: August 16th, 2021, 5:50 pm Got deeper in to Forza Motorsport 7 and I have some more thoughts on it. I'm still enjoying it, but I'm starting to see some of the things people didn't like about this game. The homologation system is pretty restrictive. Almost every events in the career has these very strict limitations on what car you can use, only allowing certain styles of cars, with each style of car only allowed to be within a certain class, and with certain upgrades. I don't mind racing to a specific spec in principle, but it does mean that what you have access to in any event is pretty narrow, and you'll never see those types of cars in any other level of racing than the one they are homologated for.
That's always been my main criticism of that series. I only played up to the third game (on 360) but it was always a case of needing a very specific car for each event, and lo and behold, winning the previous event awarded you the very car you needed for the next.

Part of the appeal of Gran Turismo for me, and even this series has lost this to some degree over the years, was picking up a 'used' old banger, and tuning the fuck out of it to win the events. I'd have a knackered old Toyota Yaris or something leaving Subaru's and Nissan Skylines for dust. That's what I loved about the game, and never got that from Forza, as good as the actual racing was.

Even Project Cars is guilty of it. There doesn't seem to be a racing series left that had the same spirit of the first three or four Gran Turismo games.
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Scrustle
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

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Alex79uk wrote: August 17th, 2021, 5:32 pm That's always been my main criticism of that series. I only played up to the third game (on 360) but it was always a case of needing a very specific car for each event, and lo and behold, winning the previous event awarded you the very car you needed for the next.

Part of the appeal of Gran Turismo for me, and even this series has lost this to some degree over the years, was picking up a 'used' old banger, and tuning the fuck out of it to win the events. I'd have a knackered old Toyota Yaris or something leaving Subaru's and Nissan Skylines for dust. That's what I loved about the game, and never got that from Forza, as good as the actual racing was.
I find that a strange take because I never found that a problem on the old 360 games. More the opposite. When I'm comparing FM7 to better examples in the series, the 360 ones are generally the ones that are setting the bar. In fact the kind of approach of building your own car how you like to compete in a certain event is one of my favourite things about the old games. While different events vary in the strictness of the ruleset, there were loads of examples where you could do stuff like taking an absurdly upgraded Yaris against much more expensive Skylines and such. Like a lot of events would limit you to a certain class and a general region, but that would be it.

FM7 however narrows things down much more. It forces you in to only cars of around the same age, size, and body style. Body styles are pretty arbitrary and narrowly defined as well, that also frequently include country/region of origin too. And you're allowed to be above a certain performance index number, or horsepower, or tyre width. All of which only come in mutually exclusive categories. So like you can't have one event that's A Class European sports cars and another of S Class European sports cars. That category of European sports cars will only ever be allowed to be at a single spec no matter what the event is.
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Alex79
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

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Hmm that's interesting, I guess I could be remembering wrong, but I definitely felt at the time that Forza 3 particularly began to feel much more restricting than Forza 2 (those were the only two I ever played). I could be getting confused but I remember posting on another forum back in the day that I didn't like the progression through the third game compared to the second because it felt so much more prescriptive with what you could do. Either way, that's a shame that the series has become much more restrictive than it was (or wasn't!) back then as this was one of the main things I was looking forward to playing when I pick up a new Xbox at some point.
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Scrustle
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

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Alex79uk wrote: August 17th, 2021, 8:46 pm Hmm that's interesting, I guess I could be remembering wrong, but I definitely felt at the time that Forza 3 particularly began to feel much more restricting than Forza 2 (those were the only two I ever played). I could be getting confused but I remember posting on another forum back in the day that I didn't like the progression through the third game compared to the second because it felt so much more prescriptive with what you could do. Either way, that's a shame that the series has become much more restrictive than it was (or wasn't!) back then as this was one of the main things I was looking forward to playing when I pick up a new Xbox at some point.
I guess the confusion might be coming from how FM3 and 4 present their career modes. Both those games have a huge list of events that is unreasonable to really ask any player to fully complete in order to "finish" the game, so both games have a separate career mode that is presented as being the main campaign. A kind of world tour type thing where it gives you a small number of events to choose from each time you finish the last. What options it gives you are pulled from the larger event list though, and are based on certain things like what cars you currently own and what one you happen to have selected at the time. It's possible to change what options you get by backing out and changing your car. Failing that, you can still go to the event list and pick what you want manually too.

I think 5 and 6 have a similar system, but the overall event list is much smaller. Those games are no more restrictive in terms of what car you can drive than previous games, but they have their own problems. Although I'd say 6 isn't a bad game. 5 felt kind of unfinished, lacking a lot of features and content, and with bad feeling handling. 6 either solved or mitigated most of those issues, but even so it ends up just feeling like "another one" in the series. Not bad by any means, but more like the series is spinning its wheels (ha) at a time when fatigue was starting to set in. The homologation system in 7 was an attempt to fix that by trying to focus down on certain things, but it doesn't seem to have paid off. The actual on-track experience is still good though, and I think I might even prefer the easier handling in this game too. I definitely don't miss the uncontrollable lift-off oversteer that plagued 5 constantly.
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

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I haven't had a lot of time to play much lately. I've got five days left of my free trial of Final Fantasy XIV and I've barely used it. I've gotten to level 18(?). So, not a great use of the trial but the base game and it's expansions were $20 on the PC (not the Steam version), so I had to try it out. It's enjoyable, smooth and I love the music. I just wish I had more time to devote to it at the moment.

I made the mistake of listening to the C&R episode about Marvel Puzzle Quest and now I've spent more time AND money on that game. It's too quick and satisfying to not become addicting. I'm only level 27 and only have 38 heroes, I want more!
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

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I've played some 12 minutes. Quite an interesting take on a point and click game. It reminds me of the sims but with an intense 12 minute long story which can go any way based on your actions. Neat.
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Scrustle
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

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For some reason recently I got the urge to play some Tokyo Xtreme Racer 3 recently. I've played a bit before, but I got bored and dropped it. Started fresh, not sure I'll finish it this time either, but I've been drawn to it more than I was expecting. This is a weird, janky game in a confusing, extremely iterative, and narrowly focused series. It is based purely on the highway racing scene in Tokyo, and that's it. I kind of appreciate that though, being such a dedicated recreation of an extremely specific part of Japanese car culture. The last one was on 360 and I actually had quite a bit of fun with that one, but this was the last one on the PS2 and has quite a lot more content.

The handling is pretty awful. Cars are very sluggish and floaty, but at the same time twitchy and squirrelly. Like there's a lot of input lag, but when your car does respond it swings out wildly and it's really hard to just get your car going straight. Getting stuck in a tank-slapper is very easy. The game expects you to be extremely fine with your inputs, but doesn't back it up with precise controls. It can be mitigated by upgrading suspension and setting it to be as stiff as possible, but it's still never good. Graphically it's pretty bad too. While it's a pretty accurate recreation of the roads it's set in, detail is very low, and there's loads of obvious flaws. Lots of pop-in, and points where you can clearly see almost nothing is modelled off-track. Although to be honest I'm not entirely sure if some of this isn't because of emulation bugs.

But something about it keeps me coming back, so far anyway. Roaming around the C1 loop, challenging racers with amusingly ridiculous names, driving cars that were never sold outside Japan. The whole vibe of it recreating this scene that no other game even attempts. Apart from the tie-in game for Tokyo Drift which was basically just an attempt to rip off this series. That doesn't have the same accuracy though, and the handling is arguably even worse.
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stvnorman
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

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Loads of Space Invaders Invincible Collection this week, partially played for review, but mostly because I love Space Invaders! Not sure I’d spend £55 on it, but there’s no denying there’s a lot of classics spread across its eleven games. One really nice surprise was Space Cyclone, which was built on the Space Invaders board far too late to make any impact in the arcades, but turned out to be really fun shooter - more like Phoenix than Space Invaders - with a couple of cool original mechanics and some awesome early synthesised speech.

Played and finished star-studded but slightly janky point and click thriller Twelve Minutes, just launched on Game Pass. I’ve never seen Groundhog Day, but it’s a very focussed version of that. A very compelling tale (until it makes no sense!), and for the most part, each twelve minute time loop allows you to unravel a clue to take into the next and progress the mystery. The repetition does start to drag though, especially when you’re doing trial and error through one of the more complex scenes, and sometimes there’s just too much trial and error, which meant either look it up or bin it. For the sake of where it goes I’m glad I didn’t bin it though.

Also been playing the Madden NFL 22 trial on EA Play / Game Pass. There’s not really much new there for me, and I still don’t think it looks great, but I’m a sucker for Franchise Mode and this 10 hours will tide me over until the full game appears on there.

Had a great time with Art of Rally, also new to Game Pass, which is a very stylish almost top-down racer that provides a stripped-down but very “rally” experience. Finally I went back to GameCube Luigi’s Mansion and inched a bit further forwards, and started yet another game of Silent Hill 2, but in my defence it’s the much maligned HD version on Xbox that I’ve never played before!
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

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Sorry, this was created in error and because it got a reply I can’t delete it. It was just a duplicate of the last post!
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Alex79
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

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Bet you 'like' your own posts on Facebook too, don't ya :lol:
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stvnorman
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

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Alex79 wrote: August 22nd, 2021, 11:15 am Bet you 'like' your own posts on Facebook too, don't ya :lol:
Can you do that? I’ll have to try! No idea what happened there. I’ll edit it down - can’t delete it now you’ve replied!
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Alex79
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

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stvnorman wrote: August 22nd, 2021, 2:27 pm
Alex79 wrote: August 22nd, 2021, 11:15 am Bet you 'like' your own posts on Facebook too, don't ya :lol:
Can you do that? I’ll have to try! No idea what happened there. I’ll edit it down - can’t delete it now you’ve replied!
:lol:

And yeah, you can like your own posts, it's the sort of thing my mum does all the time, haha.
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seansthomas
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by seansthomas »

In a real fug with gaming right now. Can't seem to bring myself to want to play much, bar the odd GTAV session with friends.

Only got a PS4 last year so have an insane wealth of great games to play bit just can't bring myself to plough the time in.

Beat MGS: Ground Zeroes but couldn't find the energy to start MGSV proper. Gave up on Hades as I got close to the end. After three chapters of Yakuza 0 I can see it's merits and charm, and want to see how it unfolds, but when I realised I'm only on Chapter 3 and there's about 14 of them, I couldn't face going back to any more cut scenes or random encounters.

Managing the odd half hour here and there of Tony Hawk's or SORage4 but yeah... just not sure I can ever see myself tackling stuff like Hitman 2, HZDawn, Outer Wilds, Days Gone, FFVII remake, God of war etc anytime soon.

Not sure what game I could play right now that would get me excited again? I've had these lulls before but never for this long.
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shadowless_kick
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

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I recently revisited Enter the Gungeon after several years of it gathering dust and I've finally understood why I didn't/don't care for it: it's too slow. back then, I just figured rougelikes weren't for me, but after subsequently sinking 'nuff hours into Dead Cells and ScourgeBringer (which deserves more attention than it seems to get, imo), I realized I get on with the genre just fine as long as things move at a zippy pace.

EtG is just too sluggish for my tastes, and it's especially an issue when a run ends and I wanna try again—that needs to happen fast to keep me hooked. by the time it restarts, I've already decided I don't wanna be bothered. I wish the game had a Turbo function or something.
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Truk_Kurt »

Onto the final boss in Skyward Sword now, just need to do some side stuff to get the Hylian Shield and some more hearts before attempting it. Had a really good time with the game but must admit that with the exception of the final dungeon which is one of my favourite ever dungeons in any Zelda game, the last quarter of the game feels a bit too much like filler as there is a lot of going between places with not much interesting gameplay wise going on at those locations or in between, they're essentially fetch quests but part of the main story. Not so bad if fast travel was available but it isn't unless you have the amibo. It's the only time in the game where I have felt I could have done with it. So only a slight disappointment in what has been a fantastic experience and will be in my top 3 Zelda games (granted I have only played BoTW, WW, Links Awakening remake and Phantom Hourglass).
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