The "What Are You Playing Today" Thread

[Brian]

Almost as bad as most of the story.

[Dracos]

Which isn't quite as bad as the villains.

[Grahf]

Sat down and played Antichamber. I don't know what I was expecting, but I walked away disappointed. The entire thing just struck me as kind of pretentious, and not even all that challenging. I had more frustration with the controls during my playthrough than anything else. Some moments were kind of cute, but those were pretty few and far between.

[Dracos]

About 1/4th through the Tales of Xillia NG+.  The Devil weapons pretty much make everything disintegrate right now even on unknown difficulty, meanwhile buying other good gear is sort of a funding mess.  Sort of falls back to Grade Shop being bad.

About 80 percent done with the collectibles on SR4, which means it's probably an hour or so left to get the rest.  Then actually collecting the rest of the crew.  Sorta unimpressed with it versus SR3, and the weapon challenges are obnoxious.  You can end up having to do a dozen full engagements to get enough kills for one challenge, and also deal with that most of them cause explosions, which don't seem to count for the value.  So you can shoot one guy, they can explode and kill 3, and that counts as 1 point instead of 4 toward the 250 that might be needed.

[Sierra]

Yeah, I didn't try with most of those for mainly those reasons. Also, the game seems finicky about not counting sim-cop kills on your tally, has to be aliens...or something like that, I was definitely over the required limit for each weapon associated with the Future Tech trophy (the challenges list testified to this) and the trophy didn't trigger until way later. I blame the Inflato-Ray being ass.

SR4 is notably less engaging than SR3. I still had fun with it, but for some reason it turns out that flying around on a hoverbike is cooler than just flying. It's not without a few fantastic comedic moments, though.

[Dracos]

Being able to move faster and fly better than any of the vehicles can offer pretty much eliminates the entire vehicle portion of the game, and really they feel like they control even worse than SR3, if that's possible.  Having everything be Aliens basically reduces from 5 main enemy groups (with specials and otherwise) to 1, and that decreases considerably the variance available in a random encounter.

The numbers for the weapons challenges are just stupid high.  A mass encounter going from no aggro to miniboss showing up might only net a total of 30-40 enemies to kill.  Taking that and putting 250 kill per single weapon reqs is just silly. 

Got a bit further yesterday.  Have almost all collectables (Still some locked).  Some of the main missions are fun, some seem like sort of disconnected.  Getting past villains as callables just seems weird and a lot of the callbacks just sort of drift by me as not being into the earliest games in the series.  Half the cast sorta doesn't feel like they have my back which is annoying.

I've got 48 of the challenges done.  Not sure if I'll actually get to 65.  Having some of them tied to abilities you only get if you get other challenges seems sorta weak from my view, but at least it isn't a map completion blocker like the last one.

[Brian]

Map completion blocker?  Not sure I ran into that.

Unless you mean weapon challenges.

Some of the non-weapon challenges suck anyway.  You can fight a horde of aliens any time you want just by causing havok.  The real issue is the unreasonably high number of guardian kills you need for that particular challenge.  Because that means you have to cause havok enough to summon a guardian, and then you have to play the annoying 'actually kill the guardian' minigame/QTE ... something like, 25 times?

Arguably, it's the grindiest part of the game, to me.  I think it's where I gave up on completing all the challenges, anyway.  They seemed doable until looking at the required time investment there.

[Dracos]

Map completion blocker?  Not sure I ran into that.

Unless you mean weapon challenges.

Some of the non-weapon challenges suck anyway.  You can fight a horde of aliens any time you want just by causing havok.  The real issue is the unreasonably high number of guardian kills you need for that particular challenge.  Because that means you have to cause havok enough to summon a guardian, and then you have to play the annoying 'actually kill the guardian' minigame/QTE ... something like, 25 times?

Arguably, it's the grindiest part of the game, to me.  I think it's where I gave up on completing all the challenges, anyway.  They seemed doable until looking at the required time investment there.

30.

I got that as part of doing Inflato-ray and Abduction.  In the enemy base area, they basically show up every 10 seconds sometimes if you just start killing back to back.

[Brian]

I mean the enemies that if you beat, wipe out your notoriety gauge thing.  Maybe I was just doing it wrong...?

[Dracos]

I mean the enemies that if you beat, wipe out your notoriety gauge thing.  Maybe I was just doing it wrong...?

Most of the time it is a nusiance.  There's a small part of the map where the notoriety gauge fills so quickly and enemies are always present, it doesn't matter that they wipe it, it's practically instantly refilled, so you can have one appear, kill it, wipe the notoriety gauge, turn around and shoot immediately at the freshly spawning enemies that will show up as soon as the combat ends there, and end up pushing your noterity right back up to max.  At the smallest, I basically would shoot one vehicle, killing 3 things and the next warden would just fall right from the sky.  The game would actually take a bit to realize it'd show up and sometimes have the warden joined by the just spawning enemies too.

[Brian]

Huh ... too bad my interest in the game already ran out.

I ... don't have high hopes for the DLC saving it, either. :(

[Merc]

Playing Hearthstone. Got an invite to the beta yesterday, and tried it out. Seemed a bit buggy yesterday (and well, it is a beta), but seems to be working better today.

Wish you could turn off some of the animations, but otherwise a fun enough card game.

[Iron Dragoon]

So, played Beyond Two Souls.

*Really* damn good story. Really damn good graphics. And absolutely mind-boggling work done on character faces, expressions, and the eyes. Amazing.

The only down side to the game is that it's not a game. It's an interactive story/movie with QTE. The QTE isn't *terrible,* though.

A good note for it is that it is two player. Real two player. No split-screen crap. There's two characters in the game, and each person controls one. Pretty neat how they did it.

In hind-sight, my suggestion is to Red Box it and play it on the easy difficulty so that there's less of an interruption from the QTE. If you like the game after Red Box'ing it for a day, the direction it helps push gaming towards is worth supporting by buying it, IMO.

[Brian]

Trying to replay the original Rachet and Clank.

After two hours of fighting the final boss, I remembered just how unfun the original game was, and why I'd never bothered replaying it.  I really wanted the unlockables I'd gotten before in the second game in the remake, but obnoxiously large boss health pools, and multiple stages of the final boss fight including instant-death falls without checkpoints....

...so I'm going to learn how to save edit, because quite bluntly, the challenge of the final boss wasn't fun when I beat it years ago.  I really had managed to forget how poorly that fight was designed, but playing the remake, where they took advantage of zero opportunities to improve the original game up to the quality of any of its sequels....  Really, really disappointing.  They remastered it for HD, and I don't believe they really even improved texture qualities.

As much as I'm a fan of the series, this was a blatant shovelware move for cash.

Very disappointing.

[Brian]

Finished part I of the Bioshock Infinite DLC: Burial at Sea.

It let you carry all your weapons instead of only two, which was nice.  Seeing Rapture again was kind of neat, though I think it was a slightly AU Rapture.  Story wasn't super consistent.  Uh ... I didn't figure out the secret to getting the new weapon, and the new plasmid/vigor didn't show up, either, unless it was the frost one.  That was in Bioshock, so ... nothing special there.

Otherwise, the narrative wallowed in the worst parts of Infinite.  The ending was utter crap in every sense.

Yeah.  I want the two hours it took to finish that back.

Your grade is dropping, Ken Levine.