The "What Are You Playing Today" Thread

[Altes]

Struggling with Syobon Action 3. Sadly, some obstacles require too much time to figure out how to bypass them, so I occasionally watch the walkthroughs in order to find out how to do it. Doesn't make pulling off all the stunts easier, though.

Hope to return to playing The Witcher after the finals.

[Brian]

Finally getting around to beating Saints Row III.  Now in the DLC stuff.

The base game is hilariously over the top.  You start out a crime lord and as Drac says, you really do end up as a supervillain.

Beat the Genkibowl challenge, was was amusing and bizzare.  Working on Gangsters In Space DLC, which has an amusingly jerkish director-character, and the player character is a painfully bad actor.  Funny stuff.

Once that's done I'll move on to Weird Science.  Almost done with all in-game challenges.  Have a few base jumps left (easy), and 13 more survival challenges (really annoying to find).

[Dracos]

I am farming the upgraded hidden boss.  The hardest thing by a good margin in the game.

I can kill him in about 4-5 minutes on average.  Which means that finishing the last quest will still take a godawful amount of time.  We shall see if my patience holds.  I have 6 of the 10 items needed for the horrible alchemy quest.  By the time I get the tenth, I probably will have all other supergear.

[Dracos]

I have destroyed Ni No Kuni.

Well, only 92 percent monster collection and alchemy creation.  But destroyed everything else.  If there was variety left, I'd probably max the remaining monsters or alchemy, but basically it'd just be more fighting the super post game boss.

Which I already killed 45 times.

Anyhow, last quest, get.

Mmm, I have this one piece game already on my system.  *starts playing*

[JonBob]

A friend pointed out Precipice of Darkness 3, and I seem to have been sucked in. Story and movement are pretty railroady, but I do like the class system. Eventually, each of your guys can have 3 classes (1 set, 2 variable) and you aren't able to have duplicate classes.

[Rezantis]

I got hold of Monaco, and I've been playing it mildly obsessively over the last week.

I think I'm in love.  This game is brilliant.

[Dracos]

Monoco is awesome.  I'm up to playing it again sometime :3

[Rezantis]

I have (almost) finished Monaco - trying to do a full clear of the final level, Identity.

I feel like the dev has completely outsmarted me.  In a good way.  That bastard.

[Dracos]

Playing some Mario RPG.

Also, Monoco, Tonight.

Za Crew is gonna get together and take vegas.  Vegas!

[Dracos]

I just about burned out on monoco last night.  Went from Oh Yeah to "I...could do without" in a matter of hours.  There was the beautiful arc of "Oh, this is how I control things again" to "Okay we're a capable robbing duo" to "Man, this is getting really hard and there's like no hiding spots anymore" to "You know, those new mechanics would be nicer if we didn't learn them by trial and error" to "Well, disguise is just above useless in a level where everything is flooded with lights and it at least is better than what lookout is putting up with." to "Man, it sucks we didn't quite understand how that mechanic worked and now are asked to redo the last 12 minutes of getting every coin on every previous floor."

[Brian]

I really want to like Monaco a lot more.

There's just this thing where I'm not very good at it.

Played a bit of Torchlight II today; it's really actually quite fun.  Found some mods I like that add variety and make certain things more reliably rewarding (fighting mimics, locked chests), and add respec in as a real mechanic instead of something you need to cheat in.

[Iron Dragoon]

Okay, so, Marvel Heroes came out, free to play. I recently just beat it, with about 15 hours into it, maybe a little more. Over-all, I did enjoy the game. It was fun, I liked the story, and enjoyed it. I have some reservations and disagreements with their choices, however, but that's later.

Game play wise, anyone who'd played Diablo will be comfortable with it. Works the same. Mouse 1 is basic attack, no Energy (read: mana) cost. Mouse 2 is whatever special ability you want to assign to it. Instead of using the number row, they chose to use WSADF for additional hotbar abilities.

When you start the game, you pick one of five starting characters: Hawkeye, Scarlet Witch, Storm, Thing, and Daredevil. Once you pick, you're locked in until you get another hero token drop, buy the character, or beat it.

So, let me start off the comments by saying that while I enjoyed the game, Marvel Heroes made some poor choices.

Like I said, it's set up like Diablo. But unlike Diablo, which had side areas that are entire dungeons on their own, the side areas in MH are single rooms, with one, maybe two groups of five or six mobs to kill. The main areas are pretty large on their own; large enough to be solid maps. However, each area only has three or four side rooms, and one or two actual dungeon areas, those dungeons being main story line dungeons.

However, I beat the game with about 15 hours of play into it, with 100% mission/quest completion. Maybe a little more. So, in essence, this is about a 15-ish hour MMO.

And, after you beat the game, the end game reward is a randomized token for a new hero. As I mentioned, at the start of the game, you get to pick 1 of 5 starter characters. There are 20 characters total you can get, either via drops or micro transactions.

From what people are reporting, the token you get for the end game reward has a *much* higher percentage chance to be one of the other five starting characters. So, your reward for beating the game is loaded dice to get a character you can make a second free account to play.

They have also included a function to reset the story line back to the prologue after you beat it. However, doing so will not allow you to get the end game character token reward again. You only get that once.

Once you beat the story line you get access to the PVP portion of the game, which is currently still in beta and says so, as well as three tiers of Daily missions. The daily missions are basically just individual/group boss runs and events. The first time you roll through the missions, you get a Cube Shard from the boss loot drops. The boss loot drops, from what I've seen, are higher level gear and a low chance for a hero token to drop.

These Cube Shards can be collected and turned in for a Fortune Card, which gives you a randomized bonus reward. The list of possible rewards includes various boosts, like XP or drop rate, or costumes and possibly a token.

I personally have gotten two of these cards so far, my brother has gotten one, and our buddy has gotten one. All of us received either a boost to XP or boost to drop rarity.

A good point for the game is that they made everything you can buy through their store 100% available for in-game drops; if not a very high chance of actually seeing any of it.

Now, as I said before, I enjoyed the game. I really did. Boss selection was cool, and they did an amazing job with the graphics on the environments and characters.

My main two complaints are these:

1) The game is *ridiculously* easy. You mow through groups of 10-15 mobs with no real issue (Diablo has this, too). Bosses are really easy to beat in comparison, too. Basically, you wind up with someone getting aggro, running in circles around the boss, with someone else plinking away and occasionally moving. For example, in fighting Juggernaut, the fight lasted less than a minute and I think our group of three used 2 medkits/potions; and Juggernaut is supposed to be one of the toughest guys around in Marvel.

2) Content vs. Cost. I have no issues with paying for characters. I would *happily* pay $10-$15 for a character; on this note, at launch all characters were around $20. They have since lowered the price for *some* characters down to around $10, as response to forum postings. An additional costume for your character is $10. I would like to see this drop to about $5, with special edition type stuff staying at $10. Some characters have few options: Storm has 4 costumes; while Iron Man has something like 12-15.

Their pricing is off base, I believe, and forum postings tend to agree. I don't see the value in paying for a new character to play in a game that has only 12-15 hours of content, and absolutely no variation or exploration in it.

Over-all, the game is good and has plenty of potential, but the *content* level of the game is just not in-line with cost of additional things in the game. They may, in time, fix this with expansions, but what people are worried about in forums is that the current high cost of the additional characters and pieces of the game against the low content means that their micro transaction model won't make much money.

Paying $20-30 for a character is perfectly fine, but the game length is currently not even acceptable for a single player game, much less an MMO.

And without additional money coming in, the chances of them shutting the game down without releasing expansions is high. With that in consideration, it's even further weighted against buying anything, as everyone is sort of expecting the game to shut down quickly.

Pretty much everyone agrees that it's a fun game, but the content is not worth what they're asking.

But, it's a free game. I know they want to make their money, and I fully support them. I think this is a combination of poor pricing and poor production management; if each area had 4-5 *full* side dungeons that were randomly generated like Diablo does, it would more than double current game content. Why they didn't do this, I have no idea, as Diablo shows it's fully achievable. How they didn't make this happen with four years of production, I have no idea.

[Dracos]

I've been playing Mark of the Ninja.

Which is every bit as awesome as its reviews have suggested.  Very fun stealth/platformer/Ninja goes and murders a bunch of screaming guards simulator.

[Dracos]

I'm score scumming Mark of Ninja.

Doing all sorts of murderous tricks.

I thought my 1 dart, six deaths was pretty epic.

But today I did 1 stab, 14 kills.  It was extremely epic.

[Brian]

We used to have a scale of awesomeness that capped at epic.

Now we have a scale of epic.

The times, they are a changin'.