The "What Are You Playing Today" Thread

[Dracos]

Yeah, I honestly think had I not been ridiculously powergaming, I would've gotten steamrolled there.  Possibly even if I just charged into the horde and ignored Shiva slowly moving forward to murder me.

I don't even know how brutal shiva may have been.  He was never allowed to move.  I dedicated one of my guys to nuking him from out of his range until he went down.  That was just too many enemies for a reasonable fight against 2 characters, especially with offense beating defense.

Edit: Maybe if I had Null Phys or something, that would've made sense.  But I didn't, and didn't see any way to get it.

Admittingly, I think this is intended as a harder route.  Most routes you get 4-6 guys for it, but still, it was open.  I went down it.

[Brian]

Well, my main problem with the Devil Survivor series is that it's kind of unforgiving because as far as I can tell, the design is balanced around your later playthroughs.

It would benefit vastly from a stronger first-play railroad saying, "No, really, you don't want to choose option X without tremendous powerleveling your first time through," to guide you on the relatively 'easy' path.  But it doesn't, so if you play by, "This seems like the cool choice," well.

What you ran into there, or I ran into with the stupid keychain thing in the first game.  Then it becomes _doable_, but where's the _fun_?

[Dracos]

Each consecutive fight in day 7 has been easier.  And I really haven't been upgrading since my initial power level at the start of the day.

Fight 1: 2 characters versus 1 super boss + 2 heroes + 7 parties.
Fight 2: 4 characters versus 1 boosted hero + a passive boosted effect for everyone + 1 hero + 7 parties
Fight 3: 4 characters versus Boss Fight that you're supposed to run from.  Almost 1 shot the boss before he triggers his plot power ("Hey, I'm immune to humans...AND I can banish all your demons") and I have to run.
Fight 4: 4 characters versus 3  heroes, 2 parties, and 3 groups of demons (that are constantly resummoned by one of the heroes until I murdered a ton of them.  Sweet xp)
Fight 5: 4 characters versus 2 heroes and 7 parties.  No special tricks.

So far, each fight has dropped the number of special 'gotcha' elements.  By fight 2 I was steamrolling.  The last fight, I just had one of my characters beat two groups of enemies to death with her fists, since she was out of mp but they couldn't hurt her.  Everyone else just sat around and watched.

Agree with Brian.  An easy route would be wise.  It also helps with getting a good story setup on your first run, since  each special boss fight yanks time away you would otherwise spend on that.

[Merc]

I've been having fun with Dungeon Defenders and Vessel, two of the games I picked up on the steam summer sale.

Dungeon Defenders is actually a bit more fun for me playing solo, as I've found the community to be the typical "You're doing this wrong! WTF?!? Do you even know your class?!?" etc type community. That's likely to be the case with -any- multiplayer game, of course, but it's still annoying if your group doesn't consist of just you and friends. And, of course, the one friend I have that plays it likes to play in hard mode and public matches.

There's also the fact that players are competing for available mana and limited resources with which to place towers, which can make it a bit annoying to join a running game and not be able to place anything (unless you're playing a Barbarian).

Still, I've been playing this game a -ton- in solo mode, and it's fun to figure out set-ups to kill the mobs of spawning enemies. And I'd love to play it with other people in SR if people pick it up next time it goes on sale (hopefully before winter sale time).

As for Vessel, that's just a typical puzzle platformer, but it's still fun, although a lot of it really takes time to figure out because there is -zero- tutorial on what you're trying to do, how to get upgrades, where to progress, etc. You very much have to poke and prod everything. Or flood it, as the case may be in a fluid-based puzzle game.

[Dracos]

Just finished my no-deaths run of devil survivor 2.  Got a good chunk of grade this time.  Cool.  Kind of a nice ending for a "Screw You God / Freedom" ending.  The world is nearly destroyed, but Humanity Lives On. 

I really enjoyed the last dialogue with Polaris.

Spoiler: ShowHide

Polaris: "Oh, so you've arrived.  Are you ready with your request for god?" 
Hero: "Yeah.  Die asshole." 
Polaris: "What?  You can't be serious." 
Hero: "Okay.  Seriously, Die in a fire.  We hate you." 
Polaris: "You've won my attention, and you are going to do this with it?  Befoul my presence with such?  I could restore your world."
Hero: "Yeah.  We're all here to kill you.  So let's get down to thumbtacks and stop wasting time."

Next I think will be my superboss run and hopefully finishing out the list of moves and monsters.  I have 2 of 5 endings gotten.  I'll probably team up with...  I dunno.  Haven't decided with which.  The real fun endings are gotten.  I guess we can become egalatarians maybe.  I've gotten all the reduce cost things, so hopefully I can get the remaining 30 demons I don't have yet.  Well, 30 or 35.  I'm pretty sure Alice is a recruitable Fiend, even if I haven't seen her in any route yet.

I probably can also follow the Mystery plotline now.  Hmm.

[Dracos]

Killed 4 of...9 fiends?  Forget how many.  Anyhow, killed Q, Sage of Time, The golden foot kid, and Trumpter.  Still have the necromancer, belial, beelzulbub, and Alice left.  Maybe someone else.

Anyhow, at the start of Wednesday, wandering through Nagoya.  I think there's a 4th fiend waiting for me somewhere if I hunt well.

I feel a real difference on playthrough 3 of this versus DS1.  DS1 I cheated on later playthroughs to speed up XP gain.

Here I don't, and my human characters come off as vestiges of the demons they're alongside.  None of them have even gotten to move once as my demons murder everything.

I think I kind of liked my cheating go through more there.

[Brian]

Civ V can be kind of fun, but it always crashes on me in the end-game.

[Brian]

I just finished Sega's Binary Domain.  It's basically a B-movie, action/sci-fi specifically, about humans vs. robots in a future that's varying degrees of dystopian.

Nothing particularly special about that.  Squad-based combat, third-person shooter, cover elements form the core of most combats.  Not that spectacular there, either.  You can upgrade your character (and his squad) with money you get from destroying robots, and you get extra money (and the respect of teammates) for doing particular things.  Headshots, melee, and one-shot-kills.  Interestingly, you can really maximize on trust/money by shooting a robot in the head and then meleeing it to destroy it.

Neither the gameplay or story art particularly deep, and a few points in the plot caused some real snickering.  It does skirt around some interesting philosophical issues, but in the end....  Actually, I'm not sure.  They claim the game changes depending on how much trust you build up, so i may just have coincidentally ended up getting the most pro-nakama ending the game had to offer.

Not a surprise for nakama-bot, I guess.

Anyway, it hints toward some interesting questions, though doesn't explore them as much as, say, Ghost in the Shell.  I found the in-game answers reasonable for that universe, at least.

So, I got it on a steam-sale for not very much, I think 14.99, and it was well worth that.  Don't know if I'd say go for full price, but I'd say it's worth putting on steam-sale watch list; it was 75% off last Friday.  The only way the game could have been better was if it had a multiplayer co-op mode.

Oh, wait, it does~!  Now to find someone to play it with....

[Dracos]

Beat Alice today in Devil Survivor 2.

Kinda sad they don't let her keep her supermove, but it is pretty crazy:

She has a move that party wipes.  Almighty.  To anything without almighty resistance, it does 100 percent hp and mp damage.  For the whole party.

Made it kind of a race to finish her off when she started using it.  Especially as she could do it to two parties per turn.

So, reasonable they don't give it...but at the same time: What's left?  There's nothing that's gonna compare against Alice as a boss anyway and with that I believe I've unlocked every single monster in the game.

[Jason_Miao]

Played Jagged Alliance 2, with the 1.13 mod for the first time.  I'd read that the mod had some great features, and the few youtube clips I skimmed were all using the mod, so I did as well. 

It's a turn-based tactical shooter, like X-Com, where you, a mercenary commander hired to conduct an insurgency, must retake the Island of Arulco from a tyrant.  Unlike X-Com, where you are hiring and training an army of nameless minions against the alien horde, the JA series centers around quirky mercenaries, with unique voice-acted dialog, etc.  The mod not only fixes many of the original bugs, but ended up rebuilding the combat and inventory mechanics from the ground-up, added in what is probably every firearm since WW2 (I read somewhere that EVERY AK variant is in the game.  I'm not Iddy, so no clue as to whether or not that's actually true, but I believe it) and many hand-weapons (you can even buy katana and shuriken).  The micro-management levels of this patch are high, but if that's your thing, then you may enjoy this game.

Anyway, there's this event called the Drassen Counterattack, that the original developer, Sir-Tech, removed for being far to difficult for the early game.  The 1.13 developers, naturally, re-enabled it, and I hadn't realized that it was enabled in the default install.  What does that mean?  Here's a video to explain.  You don't have to watch the entire video (unless you really enjoy tactical squad-based games, I suggest you don't), but at least check out the running-time. 

In contrast to that video, I was playing on "experienced" difficulty rather than "insane", so I didn't have nearly as many enemies to deal with (2 waves, maybe about 80 enemies in total, rather than the 150-200 elite troops in Insane).  But since I didn't know the Drassen Counterattack was enabled, I failed to prep for it whatsoever, so: (1) That guy had 40 vet militia supporting him.  I had 25 green, and 3 regular.  (2) That guy armed most people with sniper rifles.  Since I did a hard push towards Drassen on day 1, the time-variable function that unlocks available weapons wasn't in my favor.  No sniper rifles; my best weapons were my two custom-characters that generated with MP5s (and one with a shotgun), and the three mercs I hired had pistols. Also, no LMGs for suppressive fire (which the 1.13 mod models).  (3) That guy had 8 or 9 characters in total, including Wolf and Scope, who are top end (and correspondingly require $).  I had 5 (cheap-ass medic, budget shooter, the obligatory native recruit, and two custom).

What I gather you were supposed to do was fall back to guerellia war tactics: pick off the stragglers, fade back into other areas when pressed, and keep harassing from different points until you've picked off most of the occupying.  Then, invade in force.  What I did was scavenge some nice ammo (glazer and HP rounds), fortified the mine foreman's building (which only has one window), and used it as a secure base  to fall back on  while sending one sneaky merc with a Calico-960 to tag enemy troops, then lure them into ambush.

After I'd finished, and was dealing with the mechanics of retraining my militia and fixing my gear, I wondered what was that annoying glow on the screen.  It was the sun: I'd played through until 6 in the morning.  Which is simultaneously annoying as hell (for throwing off my sleep schedule) and pretty cool (I don't know of any games released in the last couple of years that have grabbed my attention in the same way)

[Kt3]

Diablo 3 updated a couple of days ago.

I kinda washed my hands of it a couple of months ago, but there's a lot of really good changes put forth, so I gave it a try.

It's almost like a mini-expansion.

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/7029347/Patch_104_Now_Live-8_21_2012

Edit: And I do like the changes.  I really do.  I just wish they had done most of this in the first month, instead of waiting so long.

[Dracos]

I started Skyrim a bit ago.  Enjoying the atmosphere.  Some of the fights.  But I got a stone to grind.

I think the Spikiness of the difficulty is terrible and I don't understand why it is not addressed in any mod.  I am 5 dungeons in, and so far all but 1 has been filled with ineffectual helpless mooks combined with a boss that can one shot me.

I can appreciate dynamic scaling and all that, but what the fuck is with the group being so disconnected?  I should have a feel from fighting the very first mook in an area whether or not I am over my head.  I shouldn't get all the way to the boss before suddenly getting flung around like a rag doll.  It's not like the mooks are fighting me at the same time as part of a grouped encounter.  Instead, it's almost always a one on one with me having sniped or brawled through everyone on the way.

What I want:

____--__--^|
|                 |

What I get:
          ^
         |  |
         |  |
_____|  |


Stupid design.  Anyhow, likely to keep playing a bit longer.  Prolly cheat.  I still like the stealth god gameplay from Oblivion, but I dunno if there will be a sensible middle ground where I survive long enough to use potions and poisons in a fight and yet take enough damage where I care to bother.

[Anastasia]

Tales of Graces F. I'm not far in, just got Richard to join the party for real after that cliff fall. I'm not a huge fan of childhood arcs after the fuckmobile that was Breath of Fire 3's first half, but this one isn't so bad. The writing's good and it's doing a really good job of establishing Asbel's character. Kid's a self absorbed dick, but most kids that age are.

[Brian]

We must have played different versions of BoFIII.

[Anastasia]

My two cents? BoF3 was a step back in every way (barring SNES to PSX graphics). The childhood arc was particularly interminable, a constant drumming of uninteresting scenarios and getting into unbeatable boss battles all while a horrible Muzak style OST played.

So yeah, I'm guessing different versions.