The "What Are You Playing Today" Thread

[Brian]

Yeah, that lines up with my experiences, Grahf.

[Brian]

You mock my pain! =p

Actually ... I was thinking of Gate.  I didn't know you had the same issue. :(

But I meant it as a fair warning, not something to sucker you into getting the game only to find out too late.

[Merc]

Don't take it seriously.

I do have the issue also (and I didn't know Gate did!), but it's not like I'm going to be buying more games any time soon anyway.

I have more than enough games just sitting in my steam account or bookcase that need to get played some day, that I can do with missing certain titles. And I tend to check for the first person perspective thing before I buy a game anyway.

[Grahf]

Playing Hotline: Miami. What a strange, frenetic, hyper violent thing it is.

Dying easily ten times or more a minute seems to be the norm, relatively expected since with the press of a button you're plunked back down at the beginning of that particular section. Given that enemy A.I. is somewhat sporadic at best -- ranging from incredibly stupid to borderline prescience, sometimes in the span of a handful of seconds -- it can lead to some incredibly frustrating moments. Still, given the explosive outburst type of action the game seems centred on said frustration is often short enough lived.

The story ... I'm not sure where the story is really going to be honest. I've only done up to about mission six, but even with what little you're given things don't seem right. The fact that

Spoiler: ShowHide

the shopkeeper you encounter after your missions is the same one regardless of whether you go to the pizza place, the convenience store, the bar, or the movie place

must mean something, because it's not just lazy art direction, I'm sure of it. Given how the game begins I'm starting to wonder if

Spoiler: ShowHide

the entire thing is an incredibly long psychotic break of some sort that the player character is experiencing.

[Brian]

Playing RAGE which seems to be ... kind of halfway between Fallout 3 and Borderlands?  So far, the equipment variety really falls behind, and I haven't unlocked the crafting system.  Sliiiiightly more depth in gameplay than Borderlands, but less than FO3.

Really only just gotten through the first half (presumably) of Tutoria, so I'll have to see.  At least reasonably fun for the relatively mindless run-and-gun action so far.

[Anastasia]

Darkest Hour

This is a revamped Hearts of Iron 2 mod released awhile back. I picked it up for cheap on Amazon. It's Hearts of Iron with some tweaks and much better AI, so it's fun for the same reasons Hearts of Iron 2 is. The decision system is a huge step forward and allows some elegant options events can't handle as smoothly. I'm playing as America from 1933 on and it's pretty fun. It's easy, but a human with America's resources (also the resources are upgraded over HoI2, which I completely agree with, game balance be damned. America in WW2 wasn't balanced.) can bulldoze almost anything. I'm aiming to take out Japan as normal, hopefully by about '43 or '44. Meanwhile, Germany will depend on how they do. If Germany forces Russia to the Bitter Peace, I'll focus from '45 on with liberating Europe. If Russia's won, I'll make some new suns over Moscow, St. Petersburg and Vladivostok before getting down to stamping out the commies. Should be fun either way it goes. 

[Merc]

Playing La Mulana. It makes me feel nostalgic. It's Indiana Jones + Metroid!

[Kt3]

So I've finished Wild ARMs 3 lately.

I can't remember the last time I've felt this way, but that game has absolutely grown on me.  In the beginning it suffers from having split perspectives among the four characters, and just not really having a strong hook.  However I kept playing it because I found the gameplay intriguing, as healing items are limited, gold and experience from random fights are limited (and you, in fact, get far more gold just by exploring than by grinding) and items being really useful, but limited.  Oh, and no weapon/armor equipping to futz about with, but you instead shift around guardians, the things that give you spells, and they can have a big impact on your stats, the guardians you have equipped.

Anyway, as the characters were rather limited and hampered in the beginning, all four of them, I didn't care for them.  But character development happened, gradually, and I found myself genuinely enjoying these characters that I previously felt ambivalence for.  I didn't even realize how much they had grown until, after I beat the game, I restarted the game in a New Game+ just to play around, and the previous boring character interactions that I had chalked up originally to bad writing suddenly meant a LOT more, compared to how they ended up.  That is, the way they were introduced and and who they talked to and what they did was actually pretty significant.

The more I remember it, the more I like the game.  And I haven't had that kind of reaction to a game in... well, I'm not sure if I ever have.  And it wasn't a situation where it was awful until some magic moment, it grew better steadily until I absolutely loved it.

[Brian]

WA3 went some weird places toward the end -- and with the ending -- but all-in-all was a really fun game.  The optional bosses are kinda....

Well, anyway, I enjoyed the WA series until that point quite a bit.

[Kt3]

I enjoyed it precisely because it went weird places - those places that I couldn't easily predict, but made sense when I looked at it in hindsight.  For me, the entire Wild ARMs 3 experience was about how many tropes existed and got subverted when I wasn't expecting it.

[Jason_Miao]

Last week, I dug up Angband 3.0.6 and tried playing it again (the Windows client appears to work perfectly on Windows 8).  This afternoon, during my lunch break, I lost a really promising character in an unseen 1-hit kill.  After about five or six days, my high-elf wizard had managed to slap together a set of fairly badass gear, and was diving pretty (and surviving) far out of depth dungeon level 72 at clevel 38.  He had all the resistances except Nether, Chaos, Disenchant, up to +31 speed, ESP...basically, I was set to win, as long as I was careful.

I wasn't careful enough.  While running back to land the finishing blows on a Ringwraith, the Mouth of Sauron (a unique monster) 1-hit killed him with a mana storm.  And my first thought was "Huh.  Well, that sucks.  Time to roll up a new character."



And then I remembered that according to the industry, I'm not supposed to react this way.  I'm supposed to get pissed off and ragequit.  It was a fairly surreal moment.

[VySaika]

Man, if that's how you react to roguelikes, you are EXACTLY the kind of person who should be playing them. Ever given Tales of Maj'Eyal a look? It's my favorite of them right now.

[Brian]

And then I remembered that according to the industry, I'm not supposed to react this way.  I'm supposed to get pissed off and ragequit.  It was a fairly surreal moment.

No, according to the industry, that is how you should be reacting.

Most people who actually play the game don't fit within the spectrum of the industry's target audience.  They like other parts.  Then the industry adapts to cater to their actual playerbase instead of the one they wanted.

See also: Dwarf Fortress.

[VySaika]

Fire Emblem 13 is a thing that I now have. It is very good. Only beef with it thus far is low deployment numbers for the maps. I'm not used to getting more people then I can field THIS early in an FE. Also that it has no Normal mode. It has Hard, which is in fact Hard. And it has Easy, which they apparently mislabeled and are calling it Normal. It's pretty comedicly easy. Ah well, I'll just play on Hard then~

[Dracos]

The last two days I was playing Cave of Bugs with Hal and Brian.

Apparently we had a fantastic experience with only having one game unsolvable bug on our first playthrough.

As opposed to a half dozen we encountered in the very first puzzle space on our second.

Overall, despite the interesting writing and cool narration, despite the neat co-opness and clever artstyle, it is a puzzle game that has regular game stopping or experience changing bugs.  Given that puzzle games naturally tend to walk into walls anyway, I can't recommend anyone touch this.

With 3 folks it definitely has camera/keep the team together awkwardness that could be solved with more controllable cameras, camera indicators, and most relevantly, the auto-suicide bringing you to the person who has the camera (and being usable off screen), rather than just  bringing you to the last checkpoint.

We certainly had more of our fair share of 'all 3 of us go down this ladder, one misjumps and dies, and now he's carried off camera and can't do anything until we play the camera juggling game again.'  And while the puzzle solving was fun, the camera juggling game (played often) was not.

Also, designwise?  Give a shake head to the waterways in the game.  No real indicator whether or not going through them would drown you or not.  Camera juggling alone could cause a death there from having you stall for even a second in the water, but also just some of them being too long without any indicator until you've already swam a ways and drowned.  Coloring of the waterways would've done wonders there.