Whatcha Been Playing?

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ThirdDrawing
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by ThirdDrawing »

Magical_Isopod wrote: March 10th, 2022, 1:08 am
So I'm not the only one! I've been saying this for years, and was summarily dismissed as some kind of moron. Sony has this tendency to make all their games "more epic" with the second entry, and it's just tired at this point. The first Uncharted really feels like some schmuck stumbling into a really bad day. And it's great for that - especially during the twist at the end. But in the second one, he's suddenly Rambo, some immortal government super agent punching yetis in the face. "Bigger and louder" does not always mean better.
It's nice to hear someone else who has a semblance of sanity regarding this series. ;)
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SludgeWizard
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by SludgeWizard »

Really enjoying Triangle Strategy so far (8 or so hours in).

I had unfairly high expectations for this game, somehow equating it to some sort of sequel to Final Fantasy Tactics in my head, and while it is similar to FFT, it is not the same game.

But even though it's not the exact game I thought it was going to be, it has still met those high expectations I had for it. Instead of giving me the game I wanted, they gave me one that I wanted just as much, I just didn't know it at the time.

Dialogue and story play a much bigger role than I expected, which I'm enjoying, I just think people should know not to expect a ton of battles, at least not up front. I think at the 2.5 hour mark the only combat I had seen was the tutorial battle. Thankfully the story is very interesting so far, and the writing is 10x better than it was in Octopath Traveler
I've read every journal entry, spoken to every character, etc. I am making an effort to dig myself as deep into the world and story as possible.

One wrinkle I didn't see coming was that if a character dies in combat, poof!, they're out of the battle. There is no perma-death that I've seen so far, so that was a panic attack I didn't need to have, but there's also not the opportunity to res them and get your healer back. I just took for granted that some Phoenix Down type item would be in there.

Doesn't seem to revolve around a job system as much as there are just a ton of characters you can recruit and they all have their own unique class type deal.

So far it's not perfect, but it’s scratching my tactical RPG itch like no game has in years, probably since XCOM: Enemy Unknown

But again, I'm still fairly early in so this could all change.

edit:
I forgot to mention one of my favorite parts! If you fail a battle, you still keep all of your experience from that fight. So you're always progressing, even if you're losing.
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Magical_Isopod
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Magical_Isopod »

SludgeWizard wrote: March 11th, 2022, 7:08 pm edit:
I forgot to mention one of my favorite parts! If you fail a battle, you still keep all of your experience from that fight. So you're always progressing, even if you're losing.
I'm running for City Council in my city later this year, and weirdly, I got the same advice. :P Losing isn't a loss, it's building profile for the next time.
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stvnorman
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by stvnorman »

I couldn’t take poring over reviews and videos and getting started guides anymore and ordered the Elden Ring Launch Edition before it became any harder to come by - my justification for being too weak-minded to wait for my work bonus to hopefully arrive at the end of this month as was originally planned! Anyway, too late now, and worth every ounce of guilt! It’s jaw-dropping, staggering, bewildering and way above my pay-grade, but I absolutely love it so far! I’ve had such a good time tip-toeing my way around its opening hours, getting to know its systems, exploring every glorious nook and cranny and trying not to get myself into too much trouble before I’m ready for it. And I can confirm that it’s not bad at all so far!

Slightly less stressful, after being surprised at how engaging it was when I was just about curious enough to download Far: Changing Tides on Xbox Games Pass last week, I’ve now finished it, and what a fantastic surprise it turned out to be! It’s a melancholy puzzler that rewards observation, whether in its sometimes large-scale set pieces, or in the extensive and mostly meditative journeys that link them. There were a few occasions when it bit off slightly more than it could chew, both with movement mechanics and also graphically, but on the whole it’s a stunning game in a Journey kind of way, and the above to below water transitions never ceased to thrill!

Loads more Mushihimesama on Switch, and I seem to be getting alright at negotiating its insect bullet-hell. I did quickly play through the Kirby and the Forgotten Land demo on there too - ultra-polished and highly accessible 3D gadding about as you’d expect, but I’ve never really got the appeal of Kirby. The new Triangle Strategy Prologue Demo did a bit better, but for all the looks and the depth I reckon I can hold off on this for a rainy day
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Scrustle
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Scrustle »

Thanks to combination of factors I found myself feeling the desire to dig out the old 360 again and go back to Forza Motorsport 3 for the past few days. It's fun coming back to these older games in the franchise, as I have sporadically done over the years. Each time I'm pretty impressed how well they hold up visually. The resolution is a bit low, but other than that it still looks pretty good. Plays well too, the handling model still holds up as being pretty decent. One thing I do appreciate about these older games is seeing tracks that were lost in later entries too. There's one in particular that has been on my mind lately, Twin Ring Motegi. But on this revisit that one is actually standing out as being a bit overused. I've been chipping away at the some of the massive post-game career events I never did before, and that track keeps coming up over and over. It's come up twice or even three times in a single tournament several times. It's a bit much.

I also played a little bit of Shadows of the Damned, but I doubt I'll be playing any more. It has some cool aspects to it. I do like the aesthetic of it, this vision of the underworld it is set in is pretty interesting, and it has some good music too. Gameplay seems decent enough as well. It starts off with a pretty gross scene of the protagonist's girlfriend being killed off-screen before she's even introduced, and then her body being brutalised by demons. Then when you chase the demon king to the underworld to get her soul back, she appears around levels dressed in lingerie. Hitting all the sexist objectifying tropes it can. So aside from an admittedly very cool track backing the post-prologue intro screen, it makes a very bad first impression. I steered away from this game when it first came out, despite being a big No More Heroes fan, because it seemed like it was going to be pretty puerile, and just an excuse to crack dick jokes at every opportunity. That impression has turned out to be fairly accurate. Although I will admit that Johnson is a fairly entertaining character. The final nail in the coffin though was that it kept repeatedly crashing on the emulator. Most of the time it runs fairly well, but then it just started hard crashing repeatedly. Even though I did enjoy some parts of it, it wasn't good enough to push through the gross stuff and the game locking up every 30 minutes.
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Alex79
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Alex79 »

I've spent a few hours with the 'enhanced and expanded' version of Grand Theft Auto V. Now it's worth bearing in mind I'm playing on Series S, but I'm genuinely unsure of what they've done to add to it. Series S gets two graphical settings; performance and fidelity. Fidelity mode is naturally the better looking of the two, but locked to 30fps. I prefer to play in 60fps performance mode, but boy, it doesn't look great. I'm quite sure my memory is playing tricks on me, but I honestly think it looks worse, in performance mode, than the PS4 version released last gen.

The game itself is still fun although even in the first couple of hours the jokes stick out like a sore thumb. Homophobia, misogyny, stuff that just doesn't fly in 2022, and honestly, I'm surprised it got a pass in 2013. Much has been made of the quicker loading times and yes, getting in to the game from a cold boot is a lot quicker. GTA V was notoriously slow loading, but I've read in multiple places that switching between characters is now so quick it's barely noticeable. This simply isn't true, it takes a good few seconds to change over. Again, I may be misremembering, but it doesn't seem much quicker than it used to be to me.

I love the GTA games, and I will pretty much 100% this one again, I'm sure. But I feel they could have done more. Honestly, the upscaled 360 version of Red Dead Redemption is a better looking game. I don't regret buying it (and actually it cost me nothing because I traded in my MS reward points), but if anyone has the PS4/XBO version of the game it's hard to recommend this as an upgrade. I suppose the price is a plus, only a tenner on PS5 and £17 on Xbox, but even so, I'm not sure they've done enough to warrant paying unless you're coming from the PS3/360 version.
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ratsoalbion
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by ratsoalbion »

I completed both the PS3 and PS4 versions and, while it is still clearly a 9 year old game built for two generations prior, higher resolution + 60fps + raytracing on PS5 is a very visible upgrade to my eyes.

Free would have been nice, but for £8.75 I'm fine with the boost its been given, it's pretty much what I expected.
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Alex79
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Alex79 »

Oh yeah, I bet having the high resolution along with the 60fps and ray tracing looks a fair bit better than the 1080p running on the Series S. I keep switching between the 60fps of performance mode and 30fps but with upscaled 4k and can't decide which is better. I think I'll play most the game in performance mode.
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dezm0nd
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by dezm0nd »

I've not played much GTA V since the 360 launch and i'm loving it on PS5. It looks lovely considering its age and think it beats out most open world games in terms of mission design and writing. A true modern classic with a nice polish up for my PS5!
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Jobobonobo
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Jobobonobo »

Getting closer to the end of Chicory: A Colorful Tale and I have to say it has really grown on me now. Getting access to new brush powers opens the game up tremendously and I love exploring the world when you have a multitude of ways to navigate and solve puzzles. It is also a lot more hard hitting emotionally than I was expecting as well. I also love just going around solving little tasks for people like taking photos, decorating, finding lost kittens, delivering letters, etc. It combines the exploration and puzzle solving of a 2D Zelda with the laid back customisation and world of Animal Crossing. A weird mixture that works. Glad I have given this a chance to let its charms grow on me. I am even ignoring poor old Dragon Quest VIII to play more of this which is a big reversal of events from two weeks ago! Having said that, whenever I do play DQ VIII I still am enjoying myself a lot. Pretty happy with my gaming time at the moment, have to say.
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stvnorman
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by stvnorman »

Mostly Elden Ring! Notes full of stuff to do, drawing maps, studying how to level stuff up, working out how to use a hundred different upgrade item types… even had a good time playing it too! I’m about 25 hours in and it’s still remarkable, it’s becoming slightly less bewildering, and I’ve finally beaten the first big boss. After he literally beat me. Over and over and over!

Apart from that, still working at beautiful bullet-hell shooter Mushihimesama on Switch, where the number of credits needed to get to the end is slowly reducing! Also a load of Super Hang-On and MUSHA on Megadrive, as well as a wonderful new homebrew sequel of sorts to a dear old arcade favourite, Bagman Strikes Back on Commodore 64. Good times!
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Alex79
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Alex79 »

I'm a couple of hours in to Guardians Of The Galaxy and struggling with it a bit. There's nothing wrong with it, but it's not pulling me away from Elden Ring and GTAV at the moment. Trouble is because it's Gamepass I feel like I need to play it before it's removed from the service.
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Jon Cheetham
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

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Any time I can get actually sat at the PS4 I’ve put into Elden Ring which has been consistently astonishing in terms of quality.

For the little bit of time here and there on the Switch however, still on Loop Hero building up my little town and grinding materials, it’s easy to get absorbed in this game just helping the little character get round the track.

I also started Dungeon Encounters on Switch, a minimalist party based dungeon crawler. It’s from Final Fantasy VI and IX director Hiroyuki Ito and it foregoes any cutscenes or even game world, you just explore a grid and hit battle numbers or event numbers and grind through the game’s 99 level dungeon. It uses Active Time Battle and despite being so thoroughly pared back your imagination fills in the rest and I find it fun and soothing just going from one battle to the next. The only downside is the music which I think is quite annoying, but I’ve just been listening to other stuff while playing.

All three of these are highly addictive time thieves it must be said!
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DeadpoolNegative
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by DeadpoolNegative »

Alex79 wrote: March 20th, 2022, 2:59 pm I'm a couple of hours in to Guardians Of The Galaxy and struggling with it a bit. There's nothing wrong with it, but it's not pulling me away from Elden Ring and GTAV at the moment. Trouble is because it's Gamepass I feel like I need to play it before it's removed from the service.
I'm having quite a few problems with it as well; I think it's well written, maybe even better written than the second movie, but actually PLAYING Star-Lord himself is pretty dull. He simply shoots and the game has the Gears-style "time the bar for a faster reload" thing, only it's not as refined as Gears' mechanic is. Granted, the game wants you to use the other Guardians as much as possible to vary things up, and that's cool, but the battles can be so chaotic you just want to focus on one thing and that's... shooting. Over and over again.

I feel kind of bad for the voice actors because, even though like Avengers it's set in its own continuity, unlike Avengers the voice cast, comprised entirely of locals as opposed to names, have been directed to sound as much like the film actors as possible. And they generally do a good job (Well, the actress playing Gamora sounds meaner than I think they intended).

--Dan
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Truk_Kurt
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Truk_Kurt »

Alex79 wrote: March 20th, 2022, 2:59 pm I'm a couple of hours in to Guardians Of The Galaxy and struggling with it a bit. There's nothing wrong with it, but it's not pulling me away from Elden Ring and GTAV at the moment. Trouble is because it's Gamepass I feel like I need to play it before it's removed from the service.
Well you do have a minimum of 6 months so you've plenty of time if you're not feeling its pulling you away from Elden Ring and GTA right now.

In terms of Star Lords combat which Dan brought up, it does evolve as you go through the game and unlock new abilities for him as well as the other Guardians.
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Alex79
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Alex79 »

Oh cool, didn't realise it was that long, sometimes games left PS Now after 3 months. Might come back to it later then :)
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Truk_Kurt
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Truk_Kurt »

Yeah, when a game gets signed up by Xbox for Game Pass, the minimum period is for 6 months although some choose to go 12 months, or maybe they renew after 6 months.
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DeadpoolNegative
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by DeadpoolNegative »

Truk_Kurt wrote: March 21st, 2022, 10:18 am Yeah, when a game gets signed up by Xbox for Game Pass, the minimum period is for 6 months although some choose to go 12 months, or maybe they renew after 6 months.
Dragon Quest XI has been on GamePass since its release in December 2020 (and it's a great game you should all play)

--Dan
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Rhaegyr
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Rhaegyr »

Scared to play it as I'm worried it will be removed when I'm around 40 hours in...
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Seph
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Re: Whatcha Been Playing?

Post by Seph »

Playing Pyre before the show about it in a few months. Not exactly what I expected really. Is that a good thing? Find out on the show... (if they read my garbled mess out loud, that is).
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