The "What Are You Playing Today" Thread

[Dracos]

I went through Mario and Luigi 4: Dream Team while I was away.

I found it a pretty good game, with lots of Luigi manning up focus.  The Giant battles weren't my speed though.  I think 3 was better, but this was still a good game.

[Brian]

Playing Magrunner.  Basic premise, "What if we had a Portal-styled game where instead of a silent-protagonist and a hilarious psychotic AI, we instead used a slightly more traditional cast, and copious amounts of Lovecraft?"

So far, I've been liking it.  The game has no combat, at least, so far.  The main character and his mentor/guide seem cool.  I've only run into fishmen and ... uh ... I've got no idea what the hell that other thing was.  I think it was dead.  The character I was playing really did not want to look at it, and the game got me good enough I didn't even think to quicksave and jump at it to see what happens.

Fun.

[Dracos]

So beaten main game dragon's crown.

Unlocked hard.

Conclusion of thoughts so far:

Dragon's Crown is a good game, that deserves to be a better one.  It's overall a fantastically playable co-op action rpg dungeon crawler with online and offline modes.  It's got gorgeous art, lots of awesome bosses, tons of tributes to the D&D nerdy culture of the last many decades, tons of tributes to the old school game's its carrying the torch for.

But it also has a lot of annoyances.  Hit detection (and particularly depth) can be really a pain in the neck, sometimes enormous creatures just being obnoxiously difficult to land any attacks on.  The controls are really sensitive, such that it is still a challenge to fully control/articulate what characters will do.  Some of the timed bosses are a complete nuisance.  The disconnect in progression and loot distribution for local multiplayer is frustrating (1.02 patch hopefully fixes the latter at least).  The ui could be more informative on the bag menu (1.02 hopefully fixes too).  Respec'ing is a post game thing, and the build system is actually pretty complicated, which sucks since it makes experimentation and figuring out builds so difficult.  Repitition is a huge part of the game, and so very much of it is by requirement rather than by option.  Unlocking the full depth of available play is a massive time sink.  I'm pretty sure it's impossible to get a new character to 'respec' and 'special dungeon' available levels in less than 5 hours, and probably generally more like 10-12.  So it's not like you can just go "Hey, bob, play the tutorial, and then lets roll through the crazy areas".  No, if they have a character capable of say, rolling through the B-routes on Normal with you, they've spent several hours on that character already.  The characters are big, and while that allows for beautiful art, it makes the screen very full for the chaotic level of action.  The action can get very chaotic and also the effects can start obscuring a large portion of the screen.  It's not uncommon for a full half the screen to just be on fire in the middle of a combat at any point.

Every patch has been making really dramatic improvements as well though, so maybe it'll hit there soon.  No, I think it never will. 

[Brian]

I'm done with Magrunner.  The later puzzles boil down into unrewarding tedium where one you figure it out, it's a numbing grind of repetition to get the solution to stick.  There's a fair bit of bad design, too.  At one point I had to make a long range shot at an object to assign it a magnetic field to solve a puzzle.  You get a zoom and a targeting laser, but that was the worst possible location to include the game's 'you're looking at some unspeakable horror, so your targeting and the screen jitter occasionally' mechanic.

I get it, game.  I'm some place beyond the spheres, and _C'thulu itself_ is occasionally appearing in the background of the level to stare ominously.  _It_ doesn't cause me madness and screen jitter, so why does the stupid lobstrosity next to my target?  After all, the only consequence of missing is deploying a magnetic field somewhere I didn't want, thus destroying all of my progress thus far, and giving me incredibly tedious setup time to undo the damage and get right back to the point I was before.

Took me ten tries of knowing what the solution to the puzzle was but needing to get lucky with the mechanics to complete it.  After that, the next room had something even _more_ annoying....  Game doesn't have cheat codes or console commands, and I don't trust website offering a download for the 'trainer', so unfortunately, I'm done with it.

Time to watch a video of someone else's playthrough to see how it ends.  If you're not put off by tedious elements like that, this may be the game for you, and it's pretty cheap when it's on sale.  Otherwise I suggest paying only the time it takes to youtube search a playthrough video.

[Grahf]

So, I actually important JoJo All Star Battle, because when I found the series a short time ago I immensely enjoyed it. Even with the language barrier, I find it to be quite enjoyable. Is it the  best of deepest fighting game out there? Not by a long shot. It's still quite entertaining though.

Ruminating on it somewhat, I think that this is actually the epitome of a fanservice game (although in this case fanservice takes on the somewhat rarer non-sexual connotation) in that if you like the series, you'll like this game. If you're indifferent, then it's probably a middle of the road fighter.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go beat up some super vampires with a sexy president.

[Dracos]

Went through Dragon's Crown Labryinth of Chaos yesterday with Brian.  Then did it again, swapping characters.

This is clearly meant to be the middle ground between finishing Normal and being ready to play Hard (which is just a really brutal difficulty hike otherwise, primarily due to things being balanced for 10-15 levels above the Normal level cap).   Compared to my brutal slog with my Amazon to get up to level 50, we did it rather trivially, not really struggling at any point in the dungeon and we got cool equipment for it too.

[Brian]

Actually, in fairness, some of the bosses were super tough.  For me as the dwarf, the majority of the difficulty was anything out of the dwarf's reach (which turns out to be an unfortunate percentage of the bosses), and other than that, some bosses just hit insanely hard.  Though, the killer rabbit's really tough even on normal, so....

[Dracos]

Well, I was comparing versus the Amazon run I did where not only were the bosses, but also the random encounters, a complete battle for survival.  We exited both of our runs with upwards of 5 lives each.  I exited my amazon's run with 0 lives left and dozens of completely spent npcs who had been resurrected several times.

[Rezantis]

Played Bioshock Infinite through.  I actually don't mind the ending. 

Spoiler: ShowHide

It's the best of all possible worlds.  So I'll take it.

[Ergoemos]

Played Bioshock Infinite through.  I actually don't mind the ending. 

Spoiler: ShowHide

It's the best of all possible worlds.  So I'll take it.

I liked it too, but either the ending seemed too rushed, or the shooting seemed to kind of drag. Not sure which yet.

[Iron Dragoon]

Played Bioshock Infinite through.  I actually don't mind the ending. 

Spoiler: ShowHide

It's the best of all possible worlds.  So I'll take it.

I liked it too, but I have to agree with Ergoemos. Something in there felt either really rushed, or not quite fleshed out enough.

[Anastasia]

Ducktales: Remastered.

Got this on PSN today and gave it a whirl. I haven't gotten far beyond the intro stage, had to quit out of Transylvania midway and had some bullshit happen on the Moon. It's fun, looks gorgeous and has high production values, but damn I wish I could scene skip. It's all well and good that it's like playing an episode of Ducktales. Nevertheless, I wish I could focus on pogoing off things and collecting filthy lucre instead of having constant interruptions.

My death on the Moon was pogo-ing on the spikes over a pit section (the part that had a bonus super treasure in the NES version) and having it not pogo. Take one hit and plummet into oblivion. I forget if this is NES faithful or just random bullshit. I haven't heard any complaints about the controls, so I'm chalking it up to random bullshit. It still killed my momentum to play it today. I'll give it several hours tomorrow evening and see how it goes.

[Dracos]

Went back for some DC co-op tonight.

Brian and I rushed 18 consecutive dungeons, killing somewhere around 25-30 bosses, collecting some 13 million xp, enough to level us from 67 to 77 in one go.  We got an amazing amount of high tier treasure...some of it even for us :P

[Anastasia]

Ducktales: Remastered

Gave this another play today. Got to the boss of Transylvania and lost my last life on her. One death was my own fault (didn't jump out of the minecart) and the others were due to pogo glitching. I've read up on it online and there's reports of pogo randomly failing. It seems to vary from person to person, but I've taken a bunch of hits from arbitrary pogo failures. It's annoying as hell. I don't mind the difficult parts at all, but the random deaths due to the pogo not working sucks. Ducktales NES is an awesome platformer in part because the controls are good. Unreliable controls sap the fun out of any game double-quick.

I'll give it some more playtime tomorrow.

[Brian]

Beat Psychonauts with a 100% clear.  Was pretty good, though some of the very end-game segments got a little tedious.  Could see what they were going for; generally a very enjoyable game.

Some of the sets and level themes were just brilliant, especially toward the end.  Black Velvetopia, Lungfishopolis, and Waterloo especially.