Whatcha Been Playing?

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Jon Cheetham
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Jon Cheetham »

Ah the Blood Starved Beast. Susie Skinflaps, as it's sometimes known. Old Yharnam is one of my favourite levels in well, anything.
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Scrustle
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Scrustle »

Feirsteax wrote: August 6th, 2021, 4:47 pm I too have been playing Re[in]carnation, and I have to say you've pretty much described exactly how I feel about the game, as well.

Personally I just stuck on auto-battle and fast-forward for all of my battles so far, they're completely meaningless. I've upgraded my team force to 40K-ish now and am actually finding it getting difficult to push it any higher (not that I would need to right now since I'm still steamrolling all the enemies I face). So I am interested in finding out how to push that number higher and higher, though like you I'd also rather avoid paying any money for it.

The story is still fun though, and coming into chapter 9 now I'm pretty interested to unravel the mystery of the cage and the characters within it further, so I'm enjoying it as almost a story with a few buttons you have to press every now and again rather than a deep strategic RPG or anything like that.
How did you manage to get your force to 40k? Right now I'm at the end of chapter 9 and I've hit a brick wall because my power is stuck at just under 30k and I can't figure out any way to get it up without spending money. I've mostly run out of character upgrade items, and weapon upgrades aren't good enough to make up the difference. Drops from battles are pitiful too. I need amounts in the thousands, and each battle only gives rewards in the single digits.

Starting to feel like this is the intentional point where the game balance is intentionally broken to get you to cough up to see the ending...
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stvnorman
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by stvnorman »

Tried stylish cyberpunk twin-stick RPG The Ascent, newly to Game Pass, but it didn’t seem to be for me and the clunky UI didn’t encourage me to persevere just to be sure - hold B for 3 seconds every time you need to close one of the hundred messages that pops up in the first hour? Really?

Also played a load of Microsoft Flight Simulator. I’ve done the near-enough sights around rural North Bedfordshire, as well as the glamour of Milton Keynes, but what I’ve really enjoyed is picking places like Tombstone, Arizona or Fouke, Arkansas and just exploring the backwaters of somewhere I’ll never go, and when you don’t know any better, it’s utterly captivating!

About 13 years ago I played the first two chapters of Dead Space then binned it because it was boring. It’s nagged at me ever since because it should be right up my street, so with the new game announced I thought I’d try again. I got about as far this time, but I just can’t face any more of it. It’s still boring! As was Crimson Skies, also new to Game Pass, and life’s just too short! Same for Katamari and Curse of the Dead Gods also added in there this week.

I had few play-throughs of ZX Spectrum Renegade for a piece I’m writing, and decided to have another go at the arcade version, but as always, I just can’t get my head around the separate left and right attack buttons. Completely ruins what would otherwise most likely be one of my top ten games of all time, just like its definitive Spectrum port! Then more Cotton Reboot and DariusBurst Another Chronicle EX+ on Nintendo Switch rounds off my week.
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ratsoalbion
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by ratsoalbion »

Double Dragon II reverted to those controls as well, after dropping them for the first DD.

Not sure I've ever heard from anyone who finds Dead Space boring before.
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Alex79
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Alex79 »

The Amstrad version of Renegade was even more annoying; you had to move with the joystick and attack and jump on keyboard buttons. Fortunately the sequel, Target Renegade, just let you play with the joystick and fire buttons for attack.

Re: Dead Space, I abandoned it about halfway through but can't remember why, other than I know I'd spent ages wandering around one location getting bored. I don't think I found the first part boring though, but I did enjoy the second game a lot more (and never played the third).
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ratsoalbion
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by ratsoalbion »

The Amstrad CPC port of Renegade was a pretty darn good conversion though, control issues notwithstanding. It even predated Mortal Kombat by several years in that you had to input a sequence to turn the blood from grey to red.
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Feirsteax
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

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Scrustle wrote: August 8th, 2021, 5:29 pm How did you manage to get your force to 40k? Right now I'm at the end of chapter 9 and I've hit a brick wall because my power is stuck at just under 30k and I can't figure out any way to get it up without spending money. I've mostly run out of character upgrade items, and weapon upgrades aren't good enough to make up the difference. Drops from battles are pitiful too. I need amounts in the thousands, and each battle only gives rewards in the single digits.

Starting to feel like this is the intentional point where the game balance is intentionally broken to get you to cough up to see the ending...
It may have been down to my starting pull. A friend of mine helped out with it and she rerolled a few times for me and between the two of us we ended up getting 2P after a few minutes. It has definitely helped a lot because 2P is a good bit stronger than my other characters.

Asides from that I just kept boosting character levels, enhancing weapons etc. I did also do a few sidequests which may have given me the materials to push me up to 40K. Using the free gems I got from general play I was able to do loads of summons and get all level 3 weapons which helped as well.

Make sure you exploit elemental affinity weaknesses / resistances as well, since that will help for the harder battles.

There's a guide here that might help, it's all common sense stuff for the most part but towards the end is some good advice for companions and memoirs.

https://www.leveleditors.net/nier-reinc ... r-loadout/

If you do dungeons and sidequests you can get more memoirs and materials, and then if you make sure your memoirs are paired or tripled up into memoir sets it may be enough to give you the stat boost you need to finish off the main story.



Just finished Chapter 9 myself last night, it was fun. I feel like there's more that could've been done with the story but for a small mobile game it was good enough, and they will be continually adding to it as is the norm with these kinds of gacha games, adding new substories and chapters as time goes on, so I might check it out every now and again to play through them.

I'm actually inspired now to do some grinding on dungeons and sidequests myself now to see if I can get my force any higher... Let's see how it goes.
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Feirsteax
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

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Feirsteax wrote: July 28th, 2021, 11:26 am ... Doom 64 ... think I'm on level 12 now, it's really brilliant. Soundtrack has that PSX Doom vibe, completely different from the thrash metal inspired soundtrack to the original DOS games. And apart from that it's pretty much just DOOM with a few different sprites and stuff. It's great.

And I'm slowly making my way through the latter half of GTA V now too. I don't know how I feel about this game...
Updates on both:

DOOM 64 still going through it slowly but surely. Levels are getting really difficult now, the one I'm on now (15 or 16 I believe?) has you going into a kind of arena of corridors in which loads of high-level enemies keep spawning once you grab the blue key. I keep restarting it and running in blasting everything with the BFG 9000, but I get the feeling I should be being a bit more careful lol. It's great fun but I'm getting my ass kicked repeatedly.

GTA V is finished. I was a little harsh on this in the last post. I still stand by my assessment of the satire being pretty mediocre and weak, but there's still some funny, cinematic standout moments that kept me going.

On top of all that, the actual open world is still incredible, it's such an immersive world to just jump in a car and drive round. Speeding down the highways, flicking through the radio channels and doing whatever takes your fancy. The moments you have to spend in the oceans are all still completely terrifying as well. You get a real sense of scale in this world.

That being said, I'm kind of glad to be done with it. Won't be 100%-ing it or even playing any more beyond finishing the main story, I uninstalled it after I finished the last mission. I really didn't like any of the characters, and I didn't believe their relationship at all for the most part. Not sure if I'm just not "getting it" or what, but it just didn't work with me.

E.g. There were times I felt like the dialogue was trying to get me to empathise with Trevor as some kind of tortured soul with a heart of gold, but he quite clearly proves himself to be a homicidal, abusive asshole repeatedly throughout the story so it just fell completely flat for me.

There's probably endless holes I could pick in the plot and the characters, but by the end of the game I got the most enjoyment from it by not really thinking about the story in any deep manner and just treating it as a series of flimsy excuses to do mad stunts, heists, shootouts and all the rest of it, and that worked for me!
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ReprobateGamer
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

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With Xbox allowing game streaming via browser, I recently gave Slay The Spire a quick go, aiming to try out both the streaming service and the touch controls.

and I may have become just a little hooked on this game ...

Right at the moment, I know that if I switch it on, I'll absolutely fall into the 'just one more bit' trap - as I have done already for the last few nights. It's fascinating to see how the various synergies work within the game and seeing how quickly you can go from just playing two or three cards a turn to all manner of auto triggering status effects wiping the enemies out (and how quickly playing the wrong card get shift you from being fully in control to desperately trying to stay ahead of the next damage spike.

Haven't quite made it to the end yet - I mistakingly took a path that brought me to an elite right before the Act 3 boss last night but I'm beginning to get the idea.

I've also been playing Raji - the concept seems to be an Indian slant on a dungeon crawler. I'm enjoying it to some extent but am finding the actual gameplay a little clunky. To be fair, there is just a little too much narrative to it. My knowledge of Indian epics is pretty limited (bits related to Hanuman, and scattered fragments of the Mahabarata) so while I'm finding it interesting to learn more about the lore, I would also like the pace of the story to either pick up (if it's going the dungeon crawler route), or to fully embrace the frankly lovely landscapes and go more of the Journey route.
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Alex79
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

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ratsoalbion wrote: August 9th, 2021, 12:17 am The Amstrad CPC port of Renegade was a pretty darn good conversion though, control issues notwithstanding. It even predated Mortal Kombat by several years in that you had to input a sequence to turn the blood from grey to red.
Ah yes, totally forgot about that! Otherwise the enemies seemed to leak water when you punched them :lol:

Totally agree it was a good port, looked fantastic too, one of the best looking games on the system I'd say.
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Seph
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

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ReprobateGamer wrote: August 9th, 2021, 5:45 pm With Xbox allowing game streaming via browser, I recently gave Slay The Spire a quick go, aiming to try out both the streaming service and the touch controls.

and I may have become just a little hooked on this game ...

Right at the moment, I know that if I switch it on, I'll absolutely fall into the 'just one more bit' trap - as I have done already for the last few nights.
That's exactly why I uninstalled the game and never played it again after trying it on game pass. I enjoyed the hell out of it, but I could feel my time just vanishing on this one game to the detriment of everything else.

I started There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension yesterday as it was half price on Steam. Excellent game so far. It has that knowing Stanley Parable humour and plays like something Daniel Mullins (the Pony Island bloke) would do, which is exactly the type of game I'm into.
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Feirsteax
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

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Also to anyone playing NieR Re[in]carnation, if you want to add me as a friend here's my Player ID!

311013832477
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stvnorman
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

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ratsoalbion wrote: August 8th, 2021, 9:33 pm Double Dragon II reverted to those controls as well, after dropping them for the first DD.

Not sure I've ever heard from anyone who finds Dead Space boring before.
Didn’t know they went back to those controls again. I’ve still never played any version of Double Dragon II though. Not sure why. Maybe the controls! There’s been a lot of control systems that I either don’t like or have had to get used to, but this one… my brain just doesn’t work that way!

To expand a bit on Dead Space, I found it to be sci-fi horror by numbers, and for all the tension I’ve heard is there, I struggled to find any. I know it’s not quite the same, and you could accuse it of being a first person shooter by numbers, but I’ve had a much better time doing something similar every time I’ve played Doom 3.
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stvnorman
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by stvnorman »

Alex79uk wrote: August 8th, 2021, 11:14 pm The Amstrad version of Renegade was even more annoying; you had to move with the joystick and attack and jump on keyboard buttons. Fortunately the sequel, Target Renegade, just let you play with the joystick and fire buttons for attack.

Re: Dead Space, I abandoned it about halfway through but can't remember why, other than I know I'd spent ages wandering around one location getting bored. I don't think I found the first part boring though, but I did enjoy the second game a lot more (and never played the third).
Oh yeah, that used the cursor keys with the joystick. Leon’s right though, was a good conversion otherwise. Or actually, good conversion full stop because it overthought the controls just like the original!
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Scrustle
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

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I picked up Forza Motorsport 7 a few days ago, since it's getting delisted from online stores very soon and is currently on deep discount as a result. Although it seems the sale ends much sooner than the game will become unavailable, so that's a bit cheap. But anyway, it's interesting to finally get around to this game. It's the only one in the franchise I didn't buy on launch. General fatigue with the series along with negative stuff I heard about certain design decisions lead me to skip this one before.

But finally actually playing it, first impressions are actually pretty good. The lighting and atmospheric effects are great, and it really helps give tracks personality. There's lots of little details that bring the game to life too, like subtle audio design flourishes, or stuff like how your spoiler will wobble around in the air at high speed. The soundtrack in menus had me feeling a little nostalgic for the first game way back on the original Xbox, with its use of off-brand rock tracks. The big thing that I heard that people didn't like about this game was how it restricted what cars you could use for most events, but so far I haven't bumped in to that being an issue, so I'm not really sure how it factors in to things yet.

Something that really shocked me though was how strangely easy it is to control the cars. They hold on to grip really well, and when they lose it it's still pretty easy to keep on top of. It's really odd comparing it right next to the original Forza Horizon as I'm playing that at the moment too. That game uses the same engine as the other entries on the 360, which were generally less complex and thus easier to control than the XB1 games. And on top of that it's in the sub-series that is meant to be more approachable and forgiving. Yet I'm having a way harder time trying to control grip in that game compared to this. The other XB1 Motorsport entries always had a problem with being extremely delicate and hard to control, but this one might have overcorrected to the point where it's the easiest out of the whole franchise. Although I would need more time with the game and to refresh my memory of the others if I was to say for certain.
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

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ReprobateGamer wrote: August 9th, 2021, 5:45 pm With Xbox allowing game streaming via browser, I recently gave Slay The Spire a quick go, aiming to try out both the streaming service and the touch controls.

and I may have become just a little hooked on this game ...
Come! Join us! I have 270 hours on StS since Christmas on Switch...

Anyway, I'm playing Crash Bandicoot 4 and I'm quite conflicted. I feel like small adjustments would make this game a lot of fun but it doesn't quite feel right, I'm not quite happy with the jump yet.

Yakuza: Like a Dragon is trundling along. I've unlocked jobs and the story is starting to build. Ijincho is possibly a bit too large for my liking.

I've started Etrian Odyssey IV on the 3DS. I'm enjoying the dungeon crawling and map drawing so far. Difficulty has been gentle enough so far and I'm building my party nicely.

All this Renegade talk is making me wish the Kunio-kun bundle on Switch would get a price drop. It hasn't gone on sale once in Europe.
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Truk_Kurt »

ColinAlonso wrote: August 10th, 2021, 10:13 pm
Anyway, I'm playing Crash Bandicoot 4 and I'm quite conflicted. I feel like small adjustments would make this game a lot of fun but it doesn't quite feel right, I'm not quite happy with the jump yet.
I can really relate to you on this, I always knew that the Crash games were pretty hard as far as 3D platformers go but I have found this to be quite unfair with its difficulty at times. Crash feels very twitchy to the slightest stick movement which is particularly annoying when in the air, even with the aid of the little shadow under Crash, it doesn't help that much. The standard levels are hard enough, I've no idea how people do some of the secret level stuff. I ended up giving up on the game just over half way through during a particularly frustrating bit which had me biting my pad, at that point I just realised I wasn't having fun anymore.

One thing I will give the game though is that it looks absolutely gorgeous.
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

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Yeah, I started on PS4 but when the free upgrade was announced, I waited. On PS5, I stopped when I saw some of the shadows falling over Crash and just stared at them. Pretty sure those changed.

I'm just beelining the main levels myself.
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Feirsteax
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

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Finished up Last Stop last night. It's on Gamepass, and can be completed in a few nights' playtime. I'd recommend it, it's got very good characters and the story works well. There's not really much to the gameplay beyond choosing dialogue options but that's fine.

The final chapter didn't really work quite as well for me compared to the rest of the story, I preferred the relationships etc. that were being built up in the first part of the game. But it wrapped things up fairly well, and there are a set of alternate endings to see which is fun as well.

Overall I really enjoyed it, loved some of the characters a lot, and was a bit meh on others. Donna's story was great, it had a real YA dark fantasy novel kind of vibe to it.
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Alex79 »

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.

There seems to be far more focus on just fighting giant monsters on their own - boss fights I guess - and much less of the taking on multiple opponents in the kind of battle arena areas. It just seems to be missing something from the first. I loved stringing combos and zipping from one enemy to the next, but so far there's been so little of that.
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