The "What Are You Playing Today" Thread

[Dracos]

Iddy was talking about that a while ago I think.

[Iron Dragoon]

Age of Wushu.

What an incomprehensible game.  I'm not sure if it's deliberately incomprehensible or not.

Yeah, I played the beta. Any english instructions that are provided (and it's not provided) are horribly disjointed. There's english instructions that have been made and posted in forums that you have dig around and find.

I will say this, once you manage to figure it out a bit, it becomes a pretty fun game. But that figuring things out thing is a *real* pain in the ass.

[Dracos]

Beat Reckoning.  I should yammer on that.  Maybe later today.

Started  Ni No Kuni.  Spent more time reading statistics on it than playing so far.  >_>  <_<  Yeah, I bad.

Started One Piece: Pirate Warriors.  Not quite as fun as I was hoping.  I like the musuo and the boss fights, but I think Sengoku Basara has been more fun.  Main detractor is that there isn't a block (just a dodge) so I've been getting used to that, not having a good response if you get pinned by gunfire (Thankfully few bosses have it), but mostly Quick Time Events.  It has a bunch of actiony/puzzle segments that are sewn together with QTEs.  They're tremendously forgiving and pretty much can sit there for 15 seconds thinking on some of them...but they really delay the whole "Okay, there's a horde of guys, lemme thrash".  Actually, cuz I bitch: The whole delayed event setup bugs me too.  It's a minor thing, but you'll reach an event spot, look around and realize what it wants you to do...meanwhile it will be telling you it and won't let you do it until it tells you to.

I haven't tried the co-op mode yet.  I suspect all of the QTE puzzlers don't exist in that mode because they'd be very incompatible with an actual other person waiting around.

[JonBob]

Tried out a new game one of my friends recommended: Warframe. It's free-to-play on steam, but has a cash shop to accelerate gameplay. It's a 3rd person shooter where you pretty much go through a map and slaughter stuff. When you start, you can choose from one of three warframes which are kinda like classes. As you go along, you collect materials and blueprints that allow you to make new warframes.

So far, it's kinda repetitive. There are 3 types of enemies (soldiers, machines, infested) which do add a little variety. I happen to like machines the least. So far, the rate of "getting cool new stuff" is kinda low, so I'm not sure what kind of staying power it has.

[Brian]

I downloaded that game and got through the intro.  It looks like it has co-op, which is a plus.

Slow grinding is less of a plus.

[Dracos]

More Ni No Kuni.

I am overleveling in 'the game that can't be overleveled'.  Just passed the jellyfish boss, who basically went: Bolts from the Blue, Bolts from the blue, Army of Helpers, Bolts from the Blue, Dead.

Actually not sure if he got the third one off.  I do know that at the army of helpers, pretty much gold glims came out everywhere, resulting in two Mitey super attacks and one Bonehead super boost.  He went down real fast.

[Brian]

Man, I had to do some real work to get through that fight alive.  Used so many consumables....

[Dracos]

Mmm, I do observe that basically if you're seeing Gold Glims, you are already slaughtering or dominating the fight, and so they're mostly irrelevant.

When you could really use them, odds are they won't be showing up because you're not doing enough damage to trigger Nice counters of sufficient magnitude.

[Brian]

I've seen that as well.

Kind of like Tidy Tears only generally kicking off after you've lost one or two party members, instead of, you know ... _before_ then, when it'd be a bit more useful. :\

[Dracos]

I'm wandering around Hamelin at early level 40s.

Monolith has finally classed up to Megalith.  It is a ridiculous monster that gains +6 defense per level and already had 100+ points of defense over the nearest contender.  Also awesomely just has defensive slots and magic buffs.  It also has 'everyone attack me' as a move.  That's pretty nutsy.

It'd be awesome if he ever had a reason to come out as my front line is a horrible death dealing rush squad that vaporizes everything in front of it.  Even the Drongo hits for 20+ damage when not cheaply throwing lightning bolts around.  I haven't bothered to up-tier its magic since its better to be cheap and it almost one-shots things anyway.

Bighorn has passed mighty and will firmly be dominating when mighty has to switch over to tier three.  I got a Naja and it's remarkably fast in how its catching up in attack power, despite being 20 levels back still.

Metal slime island is a rather convient combination of both best xp and gold per time.  I went to go get money for hamelin there and in the meanwhile classed up Naja and Monolith...where Naja then gained 20 levels in 5 minutes.  Admittingly, five awesome minutes of almost constantly running into the Tokos.  Currently using Toko strategy of "See toko, use Slice 'n dice, have dead toko without worrying about pathing."  400 auto-hit damage seems to be pretty much an instawin on them.  Haven't missed a toko since I tried it.

[Kt3]

So out of my nostalgia for Ragnarok Online 1, I gave the newly released NA version of Ragnarok Online 2 a spin.

Ugh.  Basically everything that eventually drove me away from RO1 was still there and present in RO2.  I could go on about it, and if anyone asks I will, but it's safe to say that it's a WoW clone with Ragnarok Online nostalgia slapped on it.  Nice music and I enjoyed the graphics, but loads of other terrible things.

I have started playing Wild ARMs 4 last night.  It's fast on track to being a beloved game of mine, in the same way Wild ARMs 3 was.  I'm not sure if my enjoyment is also due to the fact that I'm older now and there's a lot more subtext I can catch, but the development team for this game tried a whole slew of different gameplay concepts that is a lot more popular now, that wasn't so much back when it came out.  The music is also great.

[Brian]

Made a discussion thread for Ni no Kuni, since we were taking over the entire thread. :p

[Brian]

Playing Resident Evil/Biohazard 6 with a friend.  I like the co-op idea, but the game has problems.

I think it was really designed for a controller, for one thing.  For another, while it's really the RE design in general, the toughness of zombies is frustrating -- especially when it's combined with one-hit-kill-traps.  Zombies are also always smart enough to avoid the traps, and some zombies are armored, making them invulnerable in some areas (time to play guess the weak point!).  I have the gamma set to 'OMG, you're cheating; nothing will be hidden' and it's still frequently dark and hard to tell where you're supposed to be shooting on the zombie.

I think the pinnacle of frustration was chapter 3 of Leon's mission, when you and the other player are forcibly split up (a recurring theme in all chapters, really), and have to navigate both sides of a labyrinth.  No ability to use your healing items on your buddy.  If positioning is right, you _may_ be able to activate a trap, but you can also kill your ally (instantly, in one hit) with that trap.

I was fighting a red zombie that after taking 5-6 shots to the head would become vulnerable (it otherwise regenerates all damage after a short period of being staggered).  Once it's 'vulnerable', it takes 7-8 shots to the chest to actually kill.  A zombie hiding underneath a spinning blade trap (so, prone, very hard to hit), was spitting at me, timing it's very-long-duration stun to hit after the fourth shot against the red zombie's chest, staggering me long enough for the red zombie to recover (which resets all your damage to its core).  I tried hitting the spitter, but it had a metal helmet on, so the head (the only part I could really actually shoot, since it was prone, underneath a spinning blade trap) ... was invulnerable.

Great.  The next three tries to solve the area met with similar frustrations, most of them involving context crouching suddenly not working while I was trying to crawl underneath the blade trap myself, and once _that_ was finally lucked through, a corpse that I had shot several times to confirm was just a corpse suddenly sprang to life to shove me back into the blades as I passed it the third time.

That last gimmick is the one that really irritates me about the game.  You'll see a body, you'll know it's going to become active and attack you later ... but the game won't let you do anything about it.

It's really not that hard to make a co-op game with zombies.

But in my opinion, Capcom managed to totally screw it up.

The only reason I'll keep playing it is because I want to chat with my friend....

...but I have to call him with Steam, because the in-game voice is brokenly awful, dropping around 60% of all sound data.

[Kt3]

I've given up hope for any sequel that Capcom touches.

Just like I've given up hope for anything EA and Activision touches.

[Brian]

Playing X-Com.  I'm not a fan of difficult games, and even on Easy it's very easy to lose guys.

Found out how to mod it and found an 'easier' mod, but it made some things too easy, so got some help from Pax to manually mod the details (and now have a mod patch for my own easy-mode).  Basically, turn the arc thrower into a pistol instead of an item, increase health from armor, add some movement to power armor, remove random will gains, reduce weapon fragment costs for most research, and increased alloy/elerium costs for most research.

The base mod I was using has you swimming in alloy, with a comfortable bank of elerium, so that worked out fairly well.

Also, it was suggested that I remove the random element from psi and just make everyone gifted, so I did that too.  Given that it's otherwise just a massive time-sink, yeah, that works for me.

Having fun so far!