The "What Are You Playing Today" Thread

[Dracos]

Continuing at Saga 3 DS (Translated for more awesome).  I forget now what's not translated as it feels like its been a while since I've seen anything.

Having a lot of fun with it and particularly power gaming in it.  As far as getting all skills for all characters, it seems pretty weighted toward spending a lot of time as Esper (and as little time as possible as Monster and Robot). 

Monster can be really powerful if time is sunk getting it ready, but it is almost always a weak step in.  You never end up starting as a monster that is anything but fragile against the current enemies and so switching someone into monster basically means you got to carry that character around for a number of fights.  You also don't get to step out of it without losing your current state.  I try and step someone in every so often to keep filling in my monster guide, but it also seems clear that pretty much I should be doing that with each character once per general worldish spot, since folks easily get locked into few monster loops from their starter.  One or two super meats can easily put a beastman or monster into an unstoppable power though.

Robot is the FFL2 Robot and I just have trouble seeing the point.  Maybe I'm not seeing something but since you already have restore inventory?  Well, maybe its strength is the ability to be strong based on equipment rather than grinding?  It still has skills though to build up.  It feels like the math isn't in its favor, so I haven't really bee using it.

Cyborg is halfway between human and robot.  Weakened stats, but its boosted by equipment.  They seem usable, but sort of inferior to the other three big classes.  Mainly their slowness hurts them since it makes them hard to combo with and even their strength is matchable by a trained Human.  Good early game and just asking to take damage later on.  Basically, because Number of actions is what makes you advance, it's handicapped hard in late game where the first 2-3 characters could end up killing everything and preventing an action at all.

Beast is Beastly.  They build hp and agil the fastest, have the fastest agil, and martial arts moves are easy to build and effective.  They're just absolutely a solid type to have everyone spend some time as.  It's especially beneficial for espers as it quickly builds HP, which they suffer for.  Basically, just a really solid character class that always contributes well and only has a slight strength penalty.  I suspect the only reason they don't also get magic experience is that they already are that good.

Human is your baseline.  Like everyone else they get 2 weapons they specialize with, but they also can gain tiny amounts of experience with any weapon as well.  Kinda useless there, but they get the best strength and the most valuable weapon categories, so really they tend to be awesome to have in the party anyway.  Their real disadvantage is getting stats above 100, since they are the baseline and the baseline generally can't go over 99.

Esper has 2 weapons like everyone else...but gets nine magic categories too.  Fire, Water, Earth, Wind, Darkness, Buff, Heal, Revive, Ancient.  So everyone else has 2 categories for leveling skills in and the esper has 11.  They also have the lowest hp and halved strength and spells can be really slow to level.  They also don't play nice with other characters, since they have low tier stuff that can be 'hit group' or 'hit everyone', which most weapons don't have for only 1 usage cost.  They're easily the most expensive class beside Robot (and I only say that because I haven't played around with Robot).  Despite that, having spells is just too valuable and once you have the spells unlocked, you don't need to be an esper anymore.  Having an entire team capable of casting Risera makes defeat sort of impossible save instant wipe, since everyone can cast Revive everyone.  Having an actual magic score also boosts your restoration and resistance to magic damage anyway, so it makes whoever gets left as an esper much more effective if they have to heal.

I forget why I started to ramble.

Viva La Graces.

End za Fodra.

[Brian]

Working on my way through the Rachet and Clankathon in preparation of game ... nine, I guess, technically?  Let's not count all-4-1, and the arena game isn't really part of the continuity.  So I guess it'd be ... seven by that count.

Anyway, I recently finished games 1-3, remastered in HD.  In all honesty, it was a shovelware port, and as far as I can tell, they farmed the job out anyway.  So, yes, the game renders in HD, but they didn't do a lot of work on the textures, and they ... are not optimized for HD.  Also, the old pre-rendered video can be oucherifically non-HD as well.  The gameplay is actually just exactly the same original three games, with none of the improvements backported.

The name of the game is economy, though, so I shouldn't be too surprised.  I didn't notice many bugs, but I did encounter one particularly glaring and constant one.  The 'water' in most levels where the water is a death plane didn't render right, making it look like the world abruptly ends in a faint wavering shimmer; I seem to recall those effects being much tighter in the original game.  It was interesting seeing the approach on boss design shift as the games progressed, as well as how they planned on handling the ship segments, or if they were going to have racing segments at all.

The third was clearly the pinnacle of the original series, introducing numerical health tracking, the best exp system for weapons so far, and reducing the gold/titanium bolts to costume unlocks, instead of tying them into upgrades (especially grating in 2, where you had to win races for some of them).  More importantly, it also introduces Nefarious as a villain, and since he came back for the second game of the Future series....

The weirdest thing to me is Angela being left behind in the Solana galaxy without a backward glance after game two -- then again, the president's daughter vanishes after game three.  Also, Angela sure looked like a lombax, so I ... guess she was retconned out?  Just some very lombax_like_ species?  I'm curious enough to see what the fanboys on the Rachet and Clank wiki say, so let's find out.

...well, that was a mistake.  Nevermind.  Pretend I didn't mention it.

Anyway, after finishing the original trilogy, and the first game of the future series, I finally got a chance to try Quest for Booty, the interum originally download-only title.  I bought it off Amazon for like ... six dollars.  It arrived from some company called 'Fleshworx' or something similar to that, so my best guess is some skeevy sex shop thought it was porn, and then realized it wasn't, and then unloaded it on Amazon.

Weird, but true story.  I almost didn't open the package.

That being said, Quest for Booty has some interesting moments, but is four hours of gameplay at best.  It really plays like a demo of Crack in Time (minus Clank) more than anything else.  If you don't have it ... I don't know that I'd suggest getting it.  But I think it may be included free if you pick up Into the Nexus ... which means I have two copies.

So, yeah.

Rachet and Clank!

[Brian]

Finished the new Rachet and Clank.  It's basically a long episode, not a full-fledged game.  5 planets, 12 weapons (and gold bolts), and a very, very short story arc.

Had some good, like the art details, the weapons all being fun, and the new gravity related mechanics.

Really, my only complaint is that it's so freaking short.

[Brian]

Finished a Steam sale game called 'Castle Storm'.  It's a sort of canon game (like Rampart).  It's basically 2d (with 3d graphics; you know the type), with you firing rocks, spears, and sheep (or boars) at the enemy castle and sending out your troops to defeat the enemy.

It's pretty engaging; most canon games don't really give you troops.  The purpose of them is to get the flag from the enemy base and bring them back, since the troops can't actually destroy your castle -- only the gate.  Well, each side gets one unit that can attack the entire enemy castle, but it's not typically as effective as what you can shoot at it yourself.  You also get an array of spells to use on the battlefield, with varying effects.  Direct damage, aid, some utility, and a unique spell that summons your hero as a troop unit that you then control to run around smacking the enemy units into oblivion.

It's a surprisingly fun game, though it's not hugely long; I beat it in two days.  They mix the levels up quite a bit, and have the main storyline (in campaign mode, anyway), and some side missions.  The side missions sometimes progress a side-arc, and are sometimes just relatively silly, "Shoot a bunch of turkey or boar," things.  The only time the game bogged down for me were some of the very few missions where you only controlled a hero and had to defeat either a lot of enemies, or a specific enemy, but you could backtrack to previous missions to grind spells to upgrade the hero in question (making it a lot easier) in all but one or two missions.

Other than the sometimes jarring mission format, the only real complaint is that the castle editor can be a bit clunky ... but that's a learning curve of only a few minutes.

I think it's worth the price, but it'd absolutely be worth it if it goes on sale.  I enjoyed it enough I'll probably grab the DLC for the extra missions at some point....

[Halbarad]

Picked up Disgaea D2 during my week off. It's... got some odd changes to the way the Disgaea mechanics have changed over the years, and I'm still working out whether I like them all or not.

Good:
- HL sinks. Item World bills can be passed without having to luck into getting an Innocent Town floor, although I'm still extremely early in the postgame and haven't pushed this to its limit yet. Both stats and growth rates can be raised, and it takes a lot of HL (rather than Mana) to pass these bills. This isn't a bad thing, since in all the previous Disgaea games you usually end up with trillions of HL by late postgame and absolutely nothing to spend it on.

- A lot of effort seems to have been devoted to eliminating savescumming. Numerical rarity values are gone (THANK YOU) which means much less effort in trying to find matched-rarity items for rarity bonuses - you just need rare/legendary items matched on a character to get this now. Mystery Gates (another source of savescumming frustration for the perfectionists) are also gone.

- Ranking items up to legendary. It's now possible to run a common or rare item to the bottom of Item World and raise it to the next rank up (Rare/Legendary). You do lose the level-up bonuses from the previous IW run, but it

Neutral:
- Weapon mastery is back. This got thrown out after the original Disgaea, and was always one of the most tedious things to grind. I'm reserving judgement for now, since I haven't really started the serious grind on this and they seem to have included some decent mechanics to help with it (the Cheat Shop and the Dojo).

- Reverse Pirating (intro'd in Dis4) returns.... kind of. Instead of choosing to go on a reverse pirating run in a leveled item (which you can prepare for), you get randomly dumped into a reverse pirating-style stage, with a partially healed team and (if you're optimizing item growth) almost no space for spare innocents. So far the need for reverse pirating seems a lot lower (it was the only source for certain rare but essential innocents in Dis4), so it's not as big a deal, so reserving judgement for now.

Bad:

- Item duping tricks are gone. This was actually one of the best things to be added in Disgaea 3 and 4, since it makes actually keeping a team of powerful characters a viable strategy.

Disgaea 1 and 2 kind of suffered from a tendency towards making a single godlike character that could run the table by themselves, simply because of the amount of work required in getting a full set of maxed-out equipment for them. It also makes getting maxed-out stacks of innocents a lot harder (since you used to be able to dupe an item, then combine the innocents from all the dupes).

Now, to get a max-equipped character, you'll have to get the ultimate armor (a Trapezohedron), then run Item World through it three separate times, stealing another Trap from the Item God at the bottom each time. Repeat this process for every additional character you want to have capable of dealing damage at the top end and it's a pretty draining time investment.

- It's not a huge feature of any Disgaea game, in fairness, but the main storylines have been getting progressively more annoying/hard. The first two games were somewhat challenging (although a joke if you spend any time in Item World at all), but starting with Dis3, the trend has been towards building story maps with highly annoying and obtuse geo panel arrangements.

In addition, powerleveling during the main story is almost required now, where it wasn't previously. I did manage to basically solo the final with Laharl, but I was triple the final's level. The sad part is that if I was anything significantly -less- than that (I'd guess around 2.5x), I would have been one-shotted and lost. Disgaea pulling these kinds of stunts is expected, but generally not until the postgame, when bosses start handing you your rear as a matter of course.

[Sierra]

Yeahhh, I went into the final thinking I was overleveled (60-65 for most of the party) because of some Item World shenanigans and got stomped on the first attempt. Enemy levels seriously ramped up in the last couple chapters, such that you would not keep up with them from plot missions alone.

(Of course, I also maintain a team of like 20+ characters, so resources may be comparatively thin.)

[Dracos]

That's really unfortunate too as I think the cutesy little narratives were one of the early game's strengths.

Been playing Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker.  Near end-game again, in that part where getting from the monsters you have to anything new and possibly better gets really tough (Going from B to A is easy.  From A to S is hard, and without cheating going from S to X for even one monster is almost impossible).  I'm cheating to accelerate things (Faster XP rate), but otherwise limiting to what I can find.  Managed 1 S rank, and should soon manage another, but unsure I'll manage any X before beating the main game.

Comically triggered the "You Can't Start Endgame Yet~" block which happens if you complete the big scavenger quest portion of the game without actually concluding the background plot, so some beaurcrat shows up to block the way and let you know that you are a finalist of the competition, but you can't go ring the victory bell right now.

[Brian]

Been playing a lot of Far Cry 3.  Not a perfect game, but a surprisingly decent one, so far.  Skill tree, really big world, lots and lots of weapons.

There's a mod that I forget the name of that adds/changes a lot; I'd suggest getting it before playing the game.

The game also has co-op, but you have to jump through Ubisoft's hoops (login names, their own friends lists) to be able to do it, so I haven't even gotten to try.  Not sure what it's about.

It pains me to say this, but....  It's something Mass Effect 3 got right.  If you're not going to use steam, don't sell your game on it.

[Brian]

Tried to play State of Decay a bit, which is a zombie-survival game.  Kind of weird in some ways, as you don't get a single character, but instead switch characters, but also interesting because you maintain a base, monitor resources, and get upgrades.  Characters have friendship stats with one-another, and other survivor groups (enclaves) have trust ratings with your group of survivors.

The game is generally a good concept with some truly crippling flaws:

* The only difficulty is Hardcore
If a character you are playing is killed, they are dead forever.  If a player you are not playing is out doing something (because the AI will have them doing stuff ... which is almost 1/10th as effective as any actual player action), they are dead forever.  You cannot manually save and make backups without cheating (which I did, but not regularly enough, it seems).

* Time passes even when you don't play
The game calculates the last time you played, and the current time, and simulates that much in-game time.  It also evidently takes the number of real-time days you've been gone and uses them to calculate how many resources your group has gone through.  The game also works so that one real-time hour is a day (and the next real-time hour is the night), but you can't just stop playing every other hour to only deal with daylight -- despite the resource drain/allies getting themselves killed while you weren't there factor, if you stop playing at dusk, it'll always be the exact time in the day/night cycle that you left.

* Special zombies and encounters are either too easy, or too hard -- there's no good balance
This is generally the state of the game.  Either you're killing everything without too much trouble, or your character gets jumped by a 'feral' (a super-zombie with an instant-kill attack), or a 'juggernaut' (like the feral, but bigger, so can be terrain-exploited with doorways ... sometimes).  Otherwise, the SWAT zombies barely register as specials (I guess they're bullet resistant?  Melee is so superior, you're not likely to notice), screamers are only a real problem if there is a horde nearby (one of the few cases where you'd bother using a gun), and bloated zombies are so-far so rare that I'm not sure what their deal is.  In all cases, running them over with a car trivializes them (though, the juggernaut will destroy smaller cars).

* Night time is pitch black
Zombie eyes glow, which helps, but even with the gamma turned all the way up, it's freaking impossible to see at night.  You have a flashlight, but it really doesn't help as much as it should.  This wouldn't be so much of an issue except that you don't have any options to sleep, or otherwise do anything to make the time pass other than either playing, or just running the game and going AFK for the full hour it takes for the day/night cycle to shift.

* Balance issues like you wouldn't believe
Other than the aforementioned specials, the game gives you melee and gun options ... but melee weapon durability is vastly superior to ammo, and guns also have durability anyway.  You could have your character specialize in either guns or melee, but ammo is so scarce that I cannot imagine unlocking rank four of shooting before rank four of fighting, and you only get one specialty.  Melee is also practically silent, and even though supressors are cheap (for the seemingly slim selection of guns that can get them), they don't make guns quiet enough.  Add in a realistic reload time (read: VERY LONG), and melee is simply the superior option.  If every shot to a zombie were a kill, heavier weapons did splash damage, or ammo were relatively plentiful to offset the noise factor, it might be worth it, but as it stands....

I want this game to be good, but it's incredibly resistant.  If you get it, get Zombie Standard Time to make backups of your saves, and also dismiss their real-time/game-time nonsense, and I'd get the brimstone mod for more durable weapons.  I can't say that getting the Romero mod would be bad, either, since it evidently gets rid of specials, and they just don't add enough.  I wish this were the game it deserved to be.

[Dracos]

Been a busy gaming season :)

Played through Link Between Worlds.  Aside from the minigames it was amazing start to finish, a fantastic re-invisioning/sequel/thingee of Link to the Past, with nice but unsurprising punches.

Tried Shadow Warrior but my comp wasn't being agreeable.

Tried Scribblenauts Unlimited and well, I just wasn't jiving with it.  Sort of in the way I expected too.  Both that it really is a kid's game and geared toward them as well as it's vocabulary just regularly not being up to snuff.  About one in three nouns I'd add would need to be rewritten, and it got old on that very quickly.  It also had very little caring on whatever I was doing, part of it's flexibility I suppose, but it got a bit annoying to have the positive end results sometimes being horribly opposite whatever I'd put in.  It's a result of things going to set end results mostly rather than a reactive object system.  They tried really hard, I can see that at least and they really did get a pretty large vocabulary in there.

Went back to Dragon's Crown for a bit.  They broke cheating skill points and generally put sanity caps in everywhere they could.  Added in a neat Ultimate mode... but sadly the ride to get a character there is just too ridiculous.  I hacked some equipment and found it went from overcrazy to pretty casually fun with it.

[Brian]

While experimenting with egg nog and trying to figure out how to properly add alcohol, I evidently thought it would be a good idea to renew my World of Warcraft account.

Damnit.

[Dracos]

What have you done?

[Dracos]

Went back to my Amazon character in Dragon's Crown and gave her the same super equip treatment.  Unlocked ultimate and intended to do a double loop and ancient dragon run before swapping games.

I discovered that actual ultimate is way different than the tower of mirages.  I lost a life pretty much every screen and twenty on the pirate boss.  Most hits were almost fatal by themselves from sheer damage (Zombie grabs did 400ish after damage reduction).  The Pirates got Parry, Evade, Berserk, Throwable bombs, and cannons on both sides of the map in addition to spellcasting, the genies, their sheer numbers, and a multi-million hp pool.  I was soloing, so their stats were lower, and perhaps a group might've made a difference, but basically my takeaway was that proper ultimate made the already insane Hell look like a cakewalk.  I can't believe there are people that normally get through it without cheating.  I went through 3 million gold worth of continues just getting through one level.

[Anastasia]

Picked up Disgaea d2. I agree with Hal so far, albeit that I'm only at the start of chapter 3. I sort of got derailed by leveling, item world and oh hey, is that the Cave of Ordeals? It's a lot of fun so far.

[Dracos]

I played through Phoenix Wright 5: Dual Destinies.

It's an okay, but not stellar entry in the series.  Definitely a nice move to 3D + animated movie.  That's a cute touch.  The new character Athena is not bad, adding sort of a punchy charm in her own way.  It's good to see a sort of teamwork vibe going on.  It was also nice to see a lot of the old prosecutors around in non-antagonistic roles.

They really went hard on 'powers'.  Apollo's is Perception of course, and Athena's is Psychology.  Phoenix's... is Bluff.  Which they really hammer on hard and it gets annoying.  Certainly, it's not new, but the tone is unpleasant.  In Ace Attorney Investigations, the Deduction angle they went with for Edgeworth was far more flattering.  It's sort of annoying that now, years into his career as an expert who's called in for the toughest things, that everyone still calls him a bluffer.

The prosecutor for the drama this time is a convict who comes across really poorly.  Proceeded by whipping and coffee throwing, the focus on swinging an imaginary sword just didn't do it for me.  It felt like he was missing a prop the entire time and everyone was acting as if he held it.  He also always had chains on, except when he broke them.  Like constantly.  I don't think he particularly stands well among the rivals of the series, even after all the reasoning gets trotted out.

The game is definitely stronger into the "We're a drama" bit.  Amusingly, it's the first game to even mention Perjury, despite that lying under oath has been a staple of the game since the very earliest bits.  It's a little disappointing, since I actually like the court feeling more like a puzzle, but it's not new.

The game works around two narrative points, The Dark Age of the Law caused by the bullshit Phoenix flipover and this prosecutor ruining people's trust in the law (for some reason relevant, despite them dropping the Juror system thing which could make it relevant) and the actual murder that the prosecutor was tossed in for.

A problem of course is that one case is totally irrelevant to both (and would normally stand as an intro for Athena, except it's the second case), and one case is irrelevant to one, leaving it feeling weird when they say they were only involving the prosecutor in relevant scenarios to the overarching situation.

The game does play neat with time (even if not as well as Apollo Justice did), interleaving the cases to slowly reveal why certain things were taking place.


Playing Torchlight 2 now.  Finding it fun.