Whatcha Been Playing?

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Alex79
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Alex79 »

One annoying thing on Forza is sometimes the announcer will be like, "Yeah! You've unlocked a new chapter!", which I assume progresses the loose story framed around the game, but there appears to be no indication on the map of how you find this story mission...
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Truk_Kurt
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Truk_Kurt »

Started and have been really enjoying The Forgotten City on Game Pass. I can see why it's so highly praised as the writing is absolutely fantastic. The best I've seen since Red Dead 2. I just love how the quests have some moral ambiguity to them. What I love most though is the premise of the game and world building. For those that don't know, the game is set in an underground Roman City whereby if anyone living there commits a sin, everyone dies by being turned to Gold. As you walk around the city you can see past people as golden statues and their poses tell a story. Both this and other aspects make it the best world building I've seen since Bioshock. Cannot wait to play more and if it carries on as it is, I think it will be my GOTY.
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Scrustle
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Scrustle »

Alex79 wrote: November 11th, 2021, 12:45 am One annoying thing on Forza is sometimes the announcer will be like, "Yeah! You've unlocked a new chapter!", which I assume progresses the loose story framed around the game, but there appears to be no indication on the map of how you find this story mission...
When the game tells you that you have a new chapter unlocked, you still need to go in to the Horizon Adventure menu and choose what chapter you want to do next. Once you have that it'll appear on the map as either the yellow icons that usually have a checklist symbol on (Stories) or unique icons that are usually coloured by the discipline they fall under (Showcases and Expeditions). It can be hard to pick them out on the map and often don't stand out if you don't filter for them. It will automatically set your GPS to any of those events when you first unlock them though.
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Alex79
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Alex79 »

Scrustle wrote: November 11th, 2021, 11:07 am
Alex79 wrote: November 11th, 2021, 12:45 am One annoying thing on Forza is sometimes the announcer will be like, "Yeah! You've unlocked a new chapter!", which I assume progresses the loose story framed around the game, but there appears to be no indication on the map of how you find this story mission...
When the game tells you that you have a new chapter unlocked, you still need to go in to the Horizon Adventure menu and choose what chapter you want to do next. Once you have that it'll appear on the map as either the yellow icons that usually have a checklist symbol on (Stories) or unique icons that are usually coloured by the discipline they fall under (Showcases and Expeditions). It can be hard to pick them out on the map and often don't stand out if you don't filter for them. It will automatically set your GPS to any of those events when you first unlock them though.
Ah-ha! Thanks :)
Truk_Kurt wrote: November 11th, 2021, 10:09 am Started and have been really enjoying The Forgotten City on Game Pass. I can see why it's so highly praised as the writing is absolutely fantastic. The best I've seen since Red Dead 2. I just love how the quests have some moral ambiguity to them. What I love most though is the premise of the game and world building. For those that don't know, the game is set in an underground Roman City whereby if anyone living there commits a sin, everyone dies by being turned to Gold. As you walk around the city you can see past people as golden statues and their poses tell a story. Both this and other aspects make it the best world building I've seen since Bioshock. Cannot wait to play more and if it carries on as it is, I think it will be my GOTY.
I really want to play this, but at the same time not really in the mood for it. I do want to play it before the end of the year though just so I can think about it for my own GOTY list (which will probably consist of every new game I've played this year since I hardly ever play 'new' games...)
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Alex79
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

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Saved myself £50 by playing a bit of San Andreas on Gamepass last night. Oh boy, where to start? It's absolute garbage. It looks terrible, controls terrible, the dialogue is grainy and tinny, the entire package is a lazy, lazy effort from Rockstar. They've supposedly modernised controls, but the shooting is horrendous and nothing like the more modern Rockstar games (which is what we were promised). The driving feels bad, and there's just nothing good about it whatsoever.

Now, I get that these games are 20 years old, but Rockstar have done so little that calling these The Definitive Edition is a flat out joke. I'd been really looking forward to playing these on Switch, but if it's this poor on Xbox I doubt I'll bother.

Maybe I'm being too harsh, maybe I expected too much, but that's largely irrelevant to how playing this last night left me feeling. Loved them back in the day, and that's where they'll stay.
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ReprobateGamer
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

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A recent injury to my back has meant that video game playing had been taking a back seat for a few weeks and I'm only just in the last few days starting to get back into things.

I'm finding that a lot of the time I'm more inclined to just be watching Youtube/Disney+/Amazon Prime but there have been a couple of games this week.

One was Unpacking - my thoughts on that in the games completed thread.

The other main one was Forza Horizon 5 - again a common choice this week. The game itself looks lovely, the opening section was a somewhat more truncated version of the FH4 tutorial (and the better for it) and as nice as the UK looked, Mexico allows for some remarkable landmarks. The game plays as well as ever, and I think the handling may have been slightly more balanced for the casual driving gamer like me - I do seem to be a little more in control than on the last game.

It's got a number of gripes - the loading screens have exhibited some truly shocking screen tearing and a couple of instances of starting driving with only low-res textures. There is a lack of focus as a plethora of icons, events, and driving tasks are present all over the place - I would love for these to be more filtered down by default. I'm also a little surprised that there was no option to import your previous character model into this one. It's the same person in both games, and the extra cars that unlock for having played earlier Horizon and Motorsport games show there is some game tracking happening in the background.

Back around Halloween, myself and the family did also get a little bit of Minecraft Dungeons in for the seasonal loot. This continues to play well but there seem to be more difficulty spikes now - the Raid Captains can make a simple run much more of a challenge. It still gets a little too busy which means it can be hard to pick out enchanted mobs. I think we were as likely to die from deflected arrows as anything else and the inventory system is still about the worst of any game since the original Mass Effect - in fact possibly worse.
Also the underwater levels are horrible - we still haven't touched one of those as the poor map screen means that you don't know when the next air pocket is until you are already almost upon it.

I still like the general idea of a family friendly Diablo-like but I think that this seems to not be getting the QoL support that it really needs
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SludgeWizard
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

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Just started Final Fantasy IX on Switch.
I hear it's not the best version, but hey, any port in the storm.

I'm not entirely sure what made me pick it up, it wasn't even on sale. And I've never been a JRPG fan, Octopath Traveler and Final Fantasy Tactics are the only ones I've ever completed (does FFT count?). One day I woke up and decided my next game would be FF9.
I've always been more attracted to 9 than say 7 or 8, because of how it looks like it's having a little more fun with itself than some of the more self-serious entries in the series, and I hear it's full fantasy and I'm not big on the steam punk elements of some of the FF games.

I have avoided or forgotten hearing any and all plots points, spoilers, characters, etc over the years, and have absolutely no idea what is coming. I'm excited to give it a go!
(why do I have a tail?!)
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by stvnorman »

Being a frames per second philistine meant there was never any hesitation about sticking Forza Horizon 5 into Quality mode from the outset and enjoying what is possibly the best-looking game ever created! I reckon it might be one of the best driving games ever created too, striking a perfect balance between simulation and outright arcade racing, and the amount to get your teeth into is as gloriously bewildering as the attention to detail absolutely everywhere you look. Mexico plays the perfect host this time too!

Hypnospace Outlaw on Xbox Game Pass has become more than the stylish point-and-click detective and early internet tribute game it began as. Still doing that, but it’s evolved into a more complex and multilayered puzzle narrative that really suits dipping in now and again. Did have a go at Kill it With Fire on there too, a first-person spider hunting game that has you ransacking various locations to find spiders to kill in fiendish ways. It’s a lot like Untitled Goose Game, and finishing the first chapter confirmed that like that, this wasn’t really for me. Same for River City Girls, about to leave Game Pass - I like a beat ‘em up, but I’m not listening to that crap for hours!
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ThirdDrawing
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by ThirdDrawing »

Nothing. I've been playing nothing because Atlus decided to arbitrarily move the release date of SMT V and not bother to make an announcement or tell anyone about it. So I've been binging Taskmaster instead, angrily.
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KissMammal
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

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Hotshot Racing

Feel a bit torn about this one. I've been waiting for this exact kind of game (throwback early PS1-era over the top arcade racer) for the longest time, and it's a solidly made little game. I really want to love it, but something just feels a bit 'off' about the gameplay compared to the games that inspired it.

I think it might be the way that the pack of racers always feels so tight, which makes the game feel really unforgiving, even on the easiest difficulty. You always feel kind of crowded and hemmed-in going round corners - feels almost like bumper cars at times - and one wrong move always seems to result in dropping at least 4 places. It makes playing it feel kinda stressful compared to the satisfying rhythm of Ridge Racer, where you would gradually overtake the pack one by one, each time feeling like a one on one duel.
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Scrustle
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

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I attempted to play Wolfenstein 2, but I think I've already decided to drop it. It's a real shame, because I so wanted to like this game, but I ended up having a very similar experience as with the previous one. The start is extremely strong, with really great presentation and characterisation. It hits really hard with some shocking scenes. The antagonists are absurdly over the top and cartoonish, but at the same time the whole thing has a very earnest and sincere feeling to it, where somehow it pulls of both these ridiculous caricatures, but also really believable and subtle character moments. It's kind of like Yakuza in a way, with how it can blend these two very different tones together at once and it just works. Although here it's a lot darker and more serious.

But actually playing it is a horrible experience. Honestly I'm not sure how they ended up with these same flaws twice in a row without doing something about these huge glaring issues. Three times if you count Old Blood, but I haven't played that one. The controls feel terrible. Aiming is way too fast and twitchy. It's impossible to get your sights on an enemy. Turning down the sensitivity to get it anywhere near reasonable then makes turning around way too slow, it's impossible to get a good balance. The level design is so narrow and pokey too. You have basically no room to move around, no room to avoid taking damage, and it makes that slow turning problem even worse. You run at a pretty fast pace too, but it's wasted as you just end up getting caught on scenery every other second. Visual signposting is really bad too. Levels have so far been very linear, yet on multiple occasions I haven't been able to tell which way to go because the game doesn't draw attention to important things. It's also very easy to miss items on the ground, most of which is essential resources. On top of that you have to be looking at stuff directly and press a button to pick stuff up. It's unnecessarily fiddly, and you have to be doing it a lot. Really bad in the middle of a firefight too. On top of all that your character is absurdly fragile. You die so quickly from being shot from every angle, barely able to navigate these tiny cluttered corridors, struggling against awful aiming. It's a miserable time. All of this stuff was true of New Order as well, and while I suffered through that whole game trying to look for redeeming qualities, I don't have the energy to make that same mistake twice.

On top of all that is also runs terribly. Or more accurately it runs bizarrely. Despite being within the recommended specs my PC was really struggling with it, but in a strange way. The game has awful micro-stutter that comes up really frequently. It has a notification saying it's running out of memory, yet when I uncap my frame rate it can consistently run well above 60fps. And when it does stutter, it never actually drops below that, but it feels like it's chugging really badly. So it must be some of the worst frame pacing I've ever seen. Messing around with graphics settings seems to do little, and it's even a consistent problem at the lowest presets. It also has a bug where if you turn off motion blur, any explosion makes the screen go totally black. Usually I don't mind motion blur too much, but in a game like this where you're constantly swinging the camera around, it helps a lot to be able to turn it off. Not an option here.

So I quickly ran out of patience for it. It's such a shame, since the story and general mood of it seems really cool, and I want to see where that goes. And these games are the closest thing to a true successor to The Darkness, sharing many of the same devs and having a similar character in some ways. But it's just a really bad time in practice.
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Feirsteax
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

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I'm absolutely loving Halo Infinite multiplayer. It's really amazing. It's classic halo but with new twists, and the new guns are all super cool and weird, which I'm loving. The heatwave is surprisingly good vs. vehicles!
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Truk_Kurt »

I've really enjoyed all the Wolfenstein games since The New Order, I didn't have the same issues with the gameplay as you Scrustle but my biggest problem with all 3 games (less so The Old Blood) was the difficulty spikes and bosses. Even on whatever normal difficulty is called, some of the levels are brutally hard and not fun at all. In the first game it was the final boss which took me about two weeks to do as I didn't want to lower the difficulty just for the final boss. And then in the second game there was a level in a theatre and the final boss. The theatre level was so frustrating that in the end I lowered the difficulty. From what I heard, many other people had similar experiences. Had these difficulty spikes not been in there, the series would be my favourite FPS series of last gen behind Doom and Doom Eternal as the story and characters are fantastic and for the most part I found the gameplay fun. I'm looking forward to seeing their Indiana Jones game.
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Feirsteax
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Feirsteax »

I loved the first Wolfenstein game but I think it was Wolfenstein II I played recently and yeah, I had a lot of the same issues as you Scrustle. I couldn't figure out what was going on, the game just felt really annoying to play. At a certain part I was just pushing through it to get to the next story beat.
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

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After skipping the PS4 and Xbox1 entirely (in favour of Switch) I must admit I'm kinda tempted to get a Series S. $24.99 a month for 24 months seems like a pretty incredible deal given that it includes Game Pass....

I'm very out of the loop with the modern AAA scene, but Halo Infinite and Forza Horizon 5 look very tempting.
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

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KissMammal wrote: November 18th, 2021, 8:01 pm After skipping the PS4 and Xbox1 entirely (in favour of Switch) I must admit I'm kinda tempted to get a Series S. $24.99 a month for 24 months seems like a pretty incredible deal given that it includes Game Pass....

I'm very out of the loop with the modern AAA scene, but Halo Infinite and Forza Horizon 5 look very tempting.
That's exactly what I did, got the All Access Series S. No regrets so far.
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OneCreditBen
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by OneCreditBen »

Image

It's fun for all the family!
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

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😯🤔
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KissMammal
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by KissMammal »

Alex79 wrote: November 19th, 2021, 12:30 am
KissMammal wrote: November 18th, 2021, 8:01 pm After skipping the PS4 and Xbox1 entirely (in favour of Switch) I must admit I'm kinda tempted to get a Series S. $24.99 a month for 24 months seems like a pretty incredible deal given that it includes Game Pass....

I'm very out of the loop with the modern AAA scene, but Halo Infinite and Forza Horizon 5 look very tempting.
That's exactly what I did, got the All Access Series S. No regrets so far.
Nice!

Went ahead and ordered. All this Halo nostalgia has sucked me in.

Actually weirdly excited about the upcoming rerelease of GTA5, among other things. Also really excited for the Master Chief Collection and Rare Replay - two titles that almost convinced me to buy an XB1 a few years back.
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Alex79
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Alex79 »

My tip for Master Chief Collection to save space on the small hard drive is once its downloaded go in the settings and you can delete every game except the one you're playing at the moment. It's handy, you can download each game individually from within the menu, but for some reason can't seem to do that in the first place, you have to download the whole thing initially and it's about 120gb.
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