Whatcha Been Playing?

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stvnorman
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by stvnorman »

I finally finished Hypnospace Outlaw care of Game Pass (after being led there by its Cane and Rinse podcast), and if you like the sound of a slow-burn sleuth puzzler set in a deep and thoughtful simulation of the early internet, I can’t recommend it enough!

Apart from that, lots more Forza Horizon 5, and I did have a go at Halo Infinite multiplayer too. Not sure why though - I’m useless, and as a result don’t particularly enjoy that stuff. Moving about and shooting at things feels nice though, and it’s all looking a bit prettier than that original trailer, so things looking up for the single player campaign when it comes!

Also making an attempt at Haunted Castle, the outrageously difficult 1987 Castlevania arcade game! I’ve beaten stage one after years of never even seeing the first boss, but simply by stubborn repetition rather than any great skill. Hoping to see a bit more at least if the rest follows suit.
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Alex79
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Alex79 »

X-Cloud has gone live on consoles, which is nice. Easier than ever to try out a Gamepass game without having to download it. So far it seems to work a lot better than PS Now streaming too. Much quicker to get in to a game, not noticed any resolution issues or artifacts in games, and lag - to me so far - has been imperceptible.

I tried out My Friend Pedro last night. Played about 40 minutes before giving up. I felt like I'd probably seen everything the game had to offer, and didn't really get much fun out of it. Still, saved time downloading it!

I can see my kids using the cloud service, especially. They used to really like being able to browse the PS Now collection and just playing anything they wanted there and then. The X-Cloud service hasn't got all Gamepass games available for it yet, but there's a lot of choice on there.

The best feature for me though is total syncing between saves for cloud and installed games. Whereas on PS Now it was an absolute faff to carry over a save from a streamed game to an installed one, which involved manually uploading the save to PS Plus, then redownloading it to apply it to a saved game, on X-Cloud it's all just instant and flawless. Move between as many devices as you like, between streamed game and installed version, you're always up to date.
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ratsoalbion
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by ratsoalbion »

I've had a play on a few titles. It's handy and works OK, but I don't find the artifacts and latency to be imperceptible (my internet is decent but not top end at 220Mbps p/s).

It's fine and dandy for quickly checking stuff out, but I would never choose to play something this way 'properly', if I have the alternative of downloading and installing; the image just isn't as crisp as playing natively, and nor is the feel.

I'm curious too, would playing an entire long game via streaming be massively more economical on the amount of data downloaded? I genuinely don't know.

It's also a quick and efficient way of grabbing easy Achievements if you care about that sort of thing!

Overall my feelings are: Cool and convenient, but far from optimal.
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Truk_Kurt
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Truk_Kurt »

Alex79 wrote: November 21st, 2021, 6:54 pm I tried out My Friend Pedro last night. Played about 40 minutes before giving up. I felt like I'd probably seen everything the game had to offer, and didn't really get much fun out of it. Still, saved time downloading it!
I'd give it another go Alex if you have time as it does add in new mechanics as you go through the game and it's only about 4-5 hours anyway.
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Switchsayer
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Switchsayer »

Played GTA San Andreas Definitive Edition on Switch. I don't get what people are moaning about, it plays fine and looks exactly as I expected. I'm still having fun with it and since I never completed it back in the day, I am looking forward to getting to the end of the main story missions!

I have also been having an absolute BLAST playing Riders Republic. I was a big fan of the SSX games back in the day (particularly SSX 2012 and SSX Tricky) so I had to get this. I've never played a MMO before and it works just faultlessly. Quick loading times, a colossal world map and good controls. The mass online races are so much fun! Especially the downhill bike races, when switching to first person mode, FEEL the adrenaline! Throw in skiing, snowboarding and wingsuits and there is much to love here.
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Alex79
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

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Truk_Kurt wrote: November 22nd, 2021, 9:14 am
Alex79 wrote: November 21st, 2021, 6:54 pm I tried out My Friend Pedro last night. Played about 40 minutes before giving up. I felt like I'd probably seen everything the game had to offer, and didn't really get much fun out of it. Still, saved time downloading it!
I'd give it another go Alex if you have time as it does add in new mechanics as you go through the game and it's only about 4-5 hours anyway.
I didn't really enjoy what I played to be honest, it was weird actually, I felt almost... 'nothing' as I played it. I wasn't having fun, I wasn't hating it, I just felt really apathetic towards it. No fault of the game, I can see that another time I might have really enjoyed it, but I'm just not in the mood for it at the moment. Genuinely I think it's because of Forza - any time I'm playing anything else at the moment I stop after 20 minutes because all I'm thinking is, "I could be playing Forza right now" :lol:
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Alex79
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Alex79 »

ratsoalbion wrote: November 21st, 2021, 7:05 pm I've had a play on a few titles. It's handy and works OK, but I don't find the artifacts and latency to be imperceptible (my internet is decent but not top end at 220Mbps p/s).

It's fine and dandy for quickly checking stuff out, but I would never choose to play something this way 'properly', if I have the alternative of downloading and installing; the image just isn't as crisp as playing natively, and nor is the feel.

I'm curious too, would playing an entire long game via streaming be massively more economical on the amount of data downloaded? I genuinely don't know.

It's also a quick and efficient way of grabbing easy Achievements if you care about that sort of thing!

Overall my feelings are: Cool and convenient, but far from optimal.
Hmm that's an interesting question; I bet someone has researched this somewhere.

I've only played a couple of small indie titles on it so far to be honest, and it was good for those. Not sure how well a big open world game or something that needs super quick reactions like an FPS or racing game would fare, but will try it out. My connection is quite slow, too. Only 50mb since I cut back trying to save some cash a few months ago, but it's ethernet rather than WiFi, not sure how much difference that makes. (As I'm sure yours probably is too, anyway).

Yeah I can see myself using it more as a 'demo to see if this game is worth downloading' more than anything else, as well as it being handy for the kids to use without having to sit and wait for a download. All in all though, definitely found performance to be serviceable so far.
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Scrustle
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Scrustle »

I've been playing Zelda: Majora's Mask lately. First time I've played this since the Gamecube. I've been thinking about replaying this for ages, and eventually I decided I wanted to wait until Nerrel's HD texture mod was done and play it that way. So I ended up waiting around for over a year until that finally released not long ago. It's definitely been worth the wait though. This texture pack looks amazing, and is extremely faithful to the original. It manages to make everything look very highly detailed, yet completely natural and not clashing against the original art style at all. One might be tempted to say it looks like how you remember the game looked, but honestly I'd say it even looks significantly better than that. It also has some subtle post-processing shader effects that enhance the look in a nice unobtrusive way too. Just giving it an extra hint of richer colours and more shadows, which works really well with the mood and aesthetic of the game. I don't think there's any way this mod could possibly look any better without serious remodeling of assets.

It also comes with another mod that tweaks some of the game features too, which have been a great addition to the experience. Adding proper widescreen support, bug fixes, and quality-of-life changes like allowing you to map the transformation masks to the D-pad. There's a lot of smart changes that makes playing the game a much smoother experience, and there's a lot of freedom to customise exactly which features you want too. I really can't praise this whole mod pack enough. If there's one downside, it's that getting everything set up takes a while and is somewhat fiddly, but it's actually simpler than the tutorial first makes it appear. And if all you want is the textures, that step can be done on its own very easily.

I also played a bit of Racing Lagoon, the subject of another long-running fan project that I've been following the progress of. This one was simply an English translation patch, as this game was never released outside of Japan. It's a strange mix of PS1 JRPG and racing game. Very story focused, a lot of dialogue, an overworld to explore, etc. But the overworld is set in Yokohama of 1999, and street racing takes the place of battles, with car parts acting as gear. I've been aware of this game for a while, being one of those exotic curios that we never got to experience, and the concept seemed really cool. The game definitely has a very distinctive character to it. It goes for an almost romantic tone, with characters monologing for paragraphs about the deep emotional weight of street racing, set to artistic panning shots of a low-poly cityscape at night. The music is this interesting blending of jazz and 90s house that is pretty cool. But it has a charming sense of jank to it all. The characters are all pre-rendered 3D models, all highly stylised in an old school anime way, with absurdly extended limbs. But you can tell it's from that era when devs were still trying to get to grips with these new techniques, as they look incredibly goofy and distorted, like knock-off Barbie and Ken dolls in bad anime wigs. The animation is laughably bad too, not that there's much of it. But it's hard not to appreciate it for what it is, like a perfect time capsule of the era. It definitely has a vision for what it's trying to be and it goes for it hard.

The actual racing however I was less forgiving of. It's also extremely of the time, in all the bad ways. Cars feel extremely stiff but also very spongy and unresponsive. There's no subtlety to the steering, as the game doesn't have analogue support. It's very sluggish and inaccurate. It sort of feels like it's trying to have a somewhat realistic handling model, but it just doesn't feel good. It's nowhere near robust enough to pull that off. It's also extremely hard, with AI being very fast and hard to beat. On top of that the draw distance is so bad that you often don't have enough time for a corner to even be rendered on-screen before you need to start braking for it. The map isn't very helpful either, with how poorly detailed it is. As well as all that, if you lose a race you can also lose any upgrade you have equipped on your car, making you even slower. It got to a point where I was using save states every few seconds to avoid racing anyone. Progress through the game is arduous too. Everything takes forever to get through, loading screens all take an age, text scrolls really slowly, and menus are very clunky. Finding out how to progress the story is really tedious too, as you basically have to go around the city between every story beat trying to find the one location you need to visit, having to sift through so much irrelevant guff on your way to finding what you actually need to do. So unfortunately I decided to drop this one. It's still kind of a fascinating cultural artefact, and the translation is impressive and full of humour, but it's pretty clear why this didn't get great reviews in Japan and why it never made it overseas officially.
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by ThirdDrawing »

45 hours into Shin Megami Tensei V. Certainly the easiest Megaten game I've ever played because of certain tweaks, but enjoying it overall. Performance is a little rough though, and I'm not even one who usually notices or is bothered by that stuff.
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Truk_Kurt
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Truk_Kurt »

Alex79 wrote: November 22nd, 2021, 3:45 pm
ratsoalbion wrote: November 21st, 2021, 7:05 pm I've had a play on a few titles. It's handy and works OK, but I don't find the artifacts and latency to be imperceptible (my internet is decent but not top end at 220Mbps p/s).

It's fine and dandy for quickly checking stuff out, but I would never choose to play something this way 'properly', if I have the alternative of downloading and installing; the image just isn't as crisp as playing natively, and nor is the feel.

I'm curious too, would playing an entire long game via streaming be massively more economical on the amount of data downloaded? I genuinely don't know.

It's also a quick and efficient way of grabbing easy Achievements if you care about that sort of thing!

Overall my feelings are: Cool and convenient, but far from optimal.
Hmm that's an interesting question; I bet someone has researched this somewhere.

I've only played a couple of small indie titles on it so far to be honest, and it was good for those. Not sure how well a big open world game or something that needs super quick reactions like an FPS or racing game would fare, but will try it out. My connection is quite slow, too. Only 50mb since I cut back trying to save some cash a few months ago, but it's ethernet rather than WiFi, not sure how much difference that makes. (As I'm sure yours probably is too, anyway).

Yeah I can see myself using it more as a 'demo to see if this game is worth downloading' more than anything else, as well as it being handy for the kids to use without having to sit and wait for a download. All in all though, definitely found performance to be serviceable so far.
Coincidentally I was reading an article on the environmental impact of streaming and it's actually worse than playing a game locally on a console in terms of emissions, this changes however depending on the device you're streaming to and the source of energy the data centres are using. If you're streaming to a mobile or tablet instead of a PC or games console, it is much better. And if the data centres are using renewable energy (as Google's do for Stadia for 80% of energy they use) then it also much better. Not answering the question about data downloaded here but kind of related.
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Truk_Kurt »

Nearing the end of Paper Mario Origami King now and whilst I have enjoyed it, I think it is starting to drag on now with a few too many times you think you have gotten to where you need to be, only for something to happen forcing you to back track to get a key or something. It's a good job I don't mind the puzzle style battles otherwise I think I'd have given up by now. I feel it could have been a far more streamlined game.
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Rhaegyr »

Truk_Kurt wrote: November 23rd, 2021, 9:30 am Nearing the end of Paper Mario Origami King now and whilst I have enjoyed it, I think it is starting to drag on now with a few too many times you think you have gotten to where you need to be, only for something to happen forcing you to back track to get a key or something. It's a good job I don't mind the puzzle style battles otherwise I think I'd have given up by now. I feel it could have been a far more streamlined game.
I was really up and down on this one.

The script, aesthetic and soundtrack were all fantastic but I didn't really enjoying playing it - it felt as deep as a puddle and the lack of challenge gave it a 'going through the motions' feel (though the boss battles were decent).

Add me to the countless others still hoping for a sequel in the vein of Thousand Year Door.
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Truk_Kurt »

Yeah the boss battles have all been good, I'm surprised just how much variety they got out of the rotating board mechanic for the boss battles.
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

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Downloaded and played a few rounds of Halo Infinite multiplayer this evening. It feels really nice to play, and it's obviously a really good quality multiplayer game, but it's difficult for me to get enjoyment out of it because I'm just no good at competitive online shooters. I mean really bad, first game I had a kill death ratio of 2:11. The second game wasn't as bad, got 5 kills, but was still bottom of the board and our team lost, and I start feeling really self-conscious that I'm letting other players down so just turn it off.

I never understand with online shooters how I can stand an unload an entire clip in to someone and they just fire back a couple of shots at me and I'm the dead one.
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

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picked up Donut County on Switch last night out of nowhere, saw it was under $4 and thought I'd pull the trigger.
I only played it for about an hour or so last night in bed, and I liked what I played. A pastel-colored, soothing anti-Katamari. If it's relaxing the whole time, excellent, if it ramps up, that's okay too. I'm just here for the ride.

Still (slowly) making my way through FFIX. I'm enjoying it enough, but I feel like I'm trying to will it into getting its hooks in me. I want to be hooked and thinking about it when I'm not playing it, but we're not there quite yet.

Also somehow Red Dead Online has made its way back into my life. Easily my most played game this gen. I just can't get enough of the world, even if Rockstar doesn't do much in the way of updates.
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by markfm007 »

SludgeWizard wrote: November 25th, 2021, 2:28 pm Still (slowly) making my way through FFIX. I'm enjoying it enough, but I feel like I'm trying to will it into getting its hooks in me. I want to be hooked and thinking about it when I'm not playing it, but we're not there quite yet.
I'm coming towards the end of this game, been playing it on and off for a while now. It's worth sticking with, it develops its world, characters and story well. Not sure if it'll live up to your expectations but I think you'll have a great time with it.
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

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markfm007 wrote: November 25th, 2021, 7:00 pm
SludgeWizard wrote: November 25th, 2021, 2:28 pm Still (slowly) making my way through FFIX. I'm enjoying it enough, but I feel like I'm trying to will it into getting its hooks in me. I want to be hooked and thinking about it when I'm not playing it, but we're not there quite yet.
I'm coming towards the end of this game, been playing it on and off for a while now. It's worth sticking with, it develops its world, characters and story well. Not sure if it'll live up to your expectations but I think you'll have a great time with it.
There was something about Vivi that hooked me from the beginning, and I can't explain what it was. I found the idea of a character facing their mortality and going through an identity crisis really interesting and unusual.

Eleven days after purchase, still playing SMT V. Having to grind now, the new area is challenging.
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

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ThirdDrawing wrote: November 27th, 2021, 6:42 pm
markfm007 wrote: November 25th, 2021, 7:00 pm
SludgeWizard wrote: November 25th, 2021, 2:28 pm Still (slowly) making my way through FFIX. I'm enjoying it enough, but I feel like I'm trying to will it into getting its hooks in me. I want to be hooked and thinking about it when I'm not playing it, but we're not there quite yet.
I'm coming towards the end of this game, been playing it on and off for a while now. It's worth sticking with, it develops its world, characters and story well. Not sure if it'll live up to your expectations but I think you'll have a great time with it.
There was something about Vivi that hooked me from the beginning, and I can't explain what it was. I found the idea of a character facing their mortality and going through an identity crisis really interesting and unusual.
Agree 100%, I've loved that aspect of the story. Vivi is such a great character. It's really impressed me how well this game has told its character's stories and made them resonate, how they all reflect on each other. Particularly when you consider how limited they were with the tech.
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

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Not sure what I was I thinking when I decided to make an assault on Haunted Castle, the brutal Castlevania arcade game, but actually, once you’re past stage one - apart from a couple of insane difficulty spikes - it’s beatable, and ends with about the easiest Dracula you’ll find across the whole series! Looks great, sounds great, just a shame it’s so unwelcoming!

New to Game Pass sci-fi exploration game Exo One has you controlling an alien ball thing as its obtuse drama slowly unfolds across huge, surreal and often stunning planetscapes. Reminded me of my old mobile favourite Tiny Wings, mashed-up with Journey, but unlike either of them it unfortunately starts dragging before you’re even halfway through its couple of hours duration. So nearly beautiful… It did lead me back to playing through Journey again though, which is still one of the most beautiful games ever created!

Apart from that, more arcade Bubble Bobble than I’ve ever played before, slightly ruined by getting bogged down in its ridiculously deep high score mechanics, but still the same timeless gameplay that gave me so much joy on ZX Spectrum and Atari ST so many years ago!
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Alex79 »

Just loaded Viewtiful Joe on to my Series S via Retroarch, and fuck me it looks incredible at 4 x the resolution (can push it higher, but usually get frame rate issues in most games, but I might try it out later). Man alive, absolutely amazing! I've been asking for a remaster for years, well here it is!
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