The "What Are You Playing Today" Thread

[Dracos]

I am bamboozled by the sight of Yulia account playing Lufia 2.

My shipping details say Lufia DS arrives on wednesday for me.  Rock on.

And Kam doesn't get these folks that aren't all arounders.  What do you mean you have to choose between skilled, strong, and magical?

[Dracos]

Lufia DS.

I just got Selene.  My it's compact, but hey, at least someone finally casts something that seems magic associated.

Funny that they made maxim fire when I think fire was one of the things he was most stringently banned from in the original.

[Anastasia]

Fire and holy were the two types of magic Maxim couldn't use. Considering Dual Blade is holy and his hair is fire red, one needs not look far to see the irony.

[Dracos]

So last save is right before the Point of No Return run for Doom Island. 

At this point, I don't want to save anyone.  I hate everyone in every town in the game (with possible exception of snarky Jessie and helpful Jaffrey).  But really, the rest of them can all bite it.

Criticism below:

Spoiler: ShowHide

The game really, nostalgia aside, seems like a failure that didn't deserve to do well and thus didn't do well.  It's got strong puzzles.  Big Respect there, even if sometimes they camera fail on them.  Combat can be quite fun but the normal enemies are ridiculously easy and the bosses are a big leap up from them (usually).  This leaves it sort of very vague if you're prepped for the bosses or not.  Not a huge deal as they are not hard generally, but bad design that you're not learning from the level if you're sufficiently strong or not.  Paired with time attack dragon eggs (Boo) it makes those more a reflection of taking a super aggressive style of play and/or overleveling then actual diligent puzzle solving and dungeon crawling.  There's a lot of sections in the game where they simply stall for time.  Aggressively.  If they're trying to make sure you spend the most time sitting around waiting for shit to happen, they succeeded and screw them.

Mystic board is something that I'm almost glad is 'mostly' failproof.  Well, that's really too kind.  It's weighty.  There are 560 different variations of blocks that can go into nearly 200 different spots.  You can't ignore it as it can represent between 10-60 percent of your overall setup.  End game level 70 stats will be around 100 in each of 4 categories, where individual blocks can represent upwards of 20 points of difference.  Each entrance into the ancient cave wipes the board entirely, so you have to put it back together or lose abilities and stats.  Heavy.  It doesn't benefit the game at all.  Simple accessories and level based bonuses would've been way better.

[Dracos]

I've been playing Devil Survivor non-stop of late.  It's tremendous awesome and worth a look if you haven't.  It's pretty compact being playing out a seven day rush toward the apocolypse in a sense with the ability to save folks or totally let them get murdered.  I'm kind of surprised it won't let you drift entirely and skip major plot points for the lulz but it does want you to be a major player in the Ordeal so you do have to at least encounter some things.  Everyone is locked in an area the size of tokyo and nobody is allowed to leave.  Some people can see what day folks are going to die.  You have an email telling the future.  And there's lots of demons.

Last route I broke the lockdown.  I grabbed my scared girlfriend and we killed a bunch of people and got outside.  So did a couple of folks too.

Lockdown ended.  A broken man found that his son had died while he was there...and got tired of it.  He had demons, he was powerful.  You guys were heroes.  You let folks like him out...to become little gods on the world!

This time I'm going to work with my bro Naoya.  I'm gonna stand on the board and not take shit from anyone.  Gonna save everyone and sock every demon or angel in the face.  Gonna stand as a benevolent demon god, taking on all comers.  Everyone who's befriended me has been protected by my growing demon army and they've been joining my team in swarms.  Supposedly they abandon me when I decide to take the throne, but for now I've got a pretty big party that's kicking ass and taking names.  Weirdly, the guy who's all about power hasn't joined me.  But that's fine, we're friends and nobody is getting to lay a hand on him.

Sure, the angels in heaven are going to be annoyed, and the world is going to be forever changed.  But sometimes that's how it goes when you step, Kon slugs you back.

Next time I think I'll be the lonely messiah, walking the path of heaven, the sword of the tyrant, alone...

ANyhow, yeah it has a bunch of end routes, even though most the game remains the same whether or not people die horribly.

[Brian]

Hmm.  I'll be picking that up this weekend then, thanks, Drac.

Myself, meh, been playing Angry Birds HD on the train.  Some Plants vs. Zombies.  So, I'm years behind the curve. :D

[Jon]

Last few days, I have done a lot of science. Portal-related science. The co-op mode is fun, but single-player is really where it's at.

[Dracos]

I've been back in borderlands for my rare gaming time these weeks.  Co-op campaign :)

Brian and I have just finished crushing game 1 and then we'll move onto the DLCs.

[Brian]

I've been back in borderlands for my rare gaming time these weeks.  Co-op campaign :)

Brian and I have just finished crushing game 1 and then we'll move onto the DLCs.

Heh.  For values of 'crushing' equal to 'Brian plays support until finding the legendary combat rifle, whereupon Phil can just loot or make a sammich while everything gets turreted'.  Also, it's fun to lob transfusion grenades at Phil when he's in a firefight.

Ah, good fun, though.

Myself, I'm playing Okami-den, which is an awful lot like someone said, "We can't really justify a new port, but we could still reuse almost every asset in making a new game, right?"

And yeah, they're right.  Okami-den is a smaller, but otherwise just as entertaining take on the original.  The fact that all of the original zones had to be chopped up into pieces small enough (even simplified) to fit on the DS, AND that you're controlling a smaller dog (slightly :p) do conspire to make the game _feel_ bigger than it really is.

A lot of the awesome visual impact is lessened, so it's not quite the 'whoamg; I'm playing an ancient japanese woodcut that happens to be in millions of colors!' to 'Wow, this looks a LOT like Okami!', but in the end, I'm still cool with that.

Plus, they changed and revised some of the powers to make them more interesting; nothing to complain about there. :)

[thepanda]

About to beat Y's: Ark of Napishtim. All in all, it is a great way to kill time before Dynasty Warriors Gundam 3, the new EDF, and Catherine crowd the rest of my summer.

[Dracos]

Deep into Dragon Age 2 at the moment.  Having fun this time around.

[Merc]

Been amusing myself a fair bit with Terraria.

I'll admit, I'd probably enjoy Minecraft more for sandbox/building stuff from what I've seen/heard of that one, but first person perspective games kind of give me nausea (I just get horribly dizzy after a while of watching/playing them), so this 2D clone initially attracted me with having a decent looking set of options for that sort of thing after seeing an LP of it in youtube. Minecrafters may find this game disappointing though because it's so very much unabashedly a clone even with it's other game elements.

The game's got it's own charm though due to it's RPG elements to exploration, where the deeper and farther you dig means you get new tools, armor, and things like increased mana/hp...which tends to lead to events like bosses spawning.

For example, while I was aware the game had bosses (I do use the wiki for info on recipes for crafting though I try not to use it for other stuff besides the new player guides since the NPC guide that comes with the game is more annoying than helpful), I thought they were all summoned/triggered manually.

So it was kind of a surprise for me when I suddenly see the text "You feel an evil presence watching you..." while I was fighting off some zombies and building a new house/room for new NPCs. Shortly after, a jarring screech and the relatively cheerful night music changes as a giant bloodshot eyeball appears from below me and starts attacking me and it has 3000HP and oh, hey, it's called the Eye of Cthulhu.

I go through -much- of my healing potion inventory over the course of the night as I struggle to survive against it with nothing but a golden broadsword which seems to result more in me getting way more hurt in the exchanges than it, and an enchanted boomerang...which tends to leave me defenseless for a few seconds whenever I miss.

As I'm slowly whittling away at it, chugging my potions along the way, suddenly the eye spins...and it's pupil transforms into a gaping maw of sharpened teeth and with a roar, I get charged in a repeated series of blitz attacks, finding that the damage it was doing has doubled. OW! Well, at least it's not summoning little eyeballs anymore but it's much harder to hit it and not taking a hit back, and my supply of potions is running lower and lower...

I don't manage to kill it before dawn arrives, unfortunately, and the eyeball flies off, fearful of whatever light brings with it (it's just slimes as far as I know, and bunnies as of the latest patch, but maybe it just hates slimes?). But hey, I survived! And I can prepare!

It gets better.

As mentioned, I start preparing for my next encounter with the giant eyeball. I build an arena to fight it in where I won't have to worry about zombies (zombies spawn during the night, same as that boss), stock up with more healing potions, get better weapons/armors with the stock of ores I have...but when he does eventually spawn 2 nights later, I get him down to only 1100HP and dawn is looming in the background, and I know what that means, which is terribly disappointing. =(

It looks like he's going to be the one surviving the encounter due to his flight on daytime mechanic...except a falling star SLAMS DOWN FROM THE HEAVEN INTO IT!

BAM! That falling star? -1000HP right there. I actually almost die from gaping in shock at how much it's health has dropped, but I chug down a potion and start wailing on it, counting down that HP meter with every shot I make at it's mouth with a flaming arrow. SPLUT, the eyeball explodes (to be fair, -everything- explodes on death in Terraria, but that was a particularly satisfying splut) and as I start collecting my loot, the daytime music starts chirping. Sure, not a clean solo victory, but I'll take it.

The game has a lot of faults too though, lacks things it clearly should have like craftable windows and seeing hairstyles disappear under helmets (even the ones where the face is visible can eat beards apparently) and it added some bats in the latest patch which are an incredible pest underground and need to have their attack damage dropped hard.

Those bats hit extremely hard even with armor, come in groups, are very small, and fly fast and randomly. I'd be surprised to see a new player without armor and added HP survive long with exploration with those bats due to the damage they do.

Overall though, I'm enjoying this little game for the sandbox/building, the exploration, the rewards for exploring, and the random events.

[Dracos]

I watched a friend play through that.  I have to admit though, the whole 'we're constantly updating this' is a bit of a push off.

[Merc]

Some of the updates are pretty nice, and it's nice to get new stuff to discover after a while during patches, but some of the balance changes can also get annoying admittedly.

Updates tend to come every 1-2 weeks too (gone through 5 patches since its release), and a lot of the changes tend to require you to build a new world, which can either be fun if you like rebuilding or annoying if you grow attached to your world/creation, although you can usually import stuff from new worlds to old worlds.

The RPG aspect of the game is unfortunately also really short, there's only three boss enemies right now, and once you get the current end-level gear, those bosses are incredibly simple for the most part (don't need to rely on falling stars anymore!).

I've currently been amusing myself trying out some of the adventure/challenge maps that people build, although some are broken from time to time due to patch updates too, which sucks. Still enjoying the game at least, and I feel I've been getting my $10 worth out of it. =)

[Dracos]

Oh yeah, no question it is worth the money.  For me it's more attention :)