henke on 21/6/2023 at 15:42
Been playing a bit of The Evil Within 2. Bounced off the game pretty hard, but I recently had a hankerin for some RE2make-ish action, and instead of replaying that I figured why not give this a whirl. I liked that Ghostwire, maybe Tango Gameworks really turned things around with this sequel? Well... I'm enjoying the gameplay a lot. Prowling around a small town, scrounging resources, sneaking up on zombies. Looks and feels good. But everything story-related is pretty offputting. Everyone's emotions are so extreme like it's a dang anime or something. And the whole thing takes place inside some kinda The Matrix??? Honestly, I feel about the whole story structure the same way I feel about the Animus time travel nonsense in Assassin's Creed games. Why does this shit gotta be here? Why can't I just be a dude trying to survive a zombie apocalypse? That'd be less annoying. I'm like 3 hours in and I suppose I'm sticking with it for now.
WingedKagouti on 22/6/2023 at 16:36
Got 3 months of Game Pass Ultimate with my shiny new ROG Ally, so I've been looking through the catalogue and tried out a couple of titles from there (that I didn't already own) as well as games already owned on Steam & GOG.
No Man's Sky does not play well, but only because a lot of the text is very hard to on a 7 inch screen. Especially some of the UI elements being slightly slanted. I could probably find some way to make it work well, but it's a lot less annoying on my main gaming rig.
TMNT Shredder's Revenge feels like it was tailor made for the system, or maybe the system was made for this type of game. I spent a couple of hours yesterday just playing it and having a ton of fun.
Dead Cells and Kung Fu Strike: The Warrior's Rise are in a similar situation, though I didn't play either for long they do play quite well.
Tekken 7 runs smoothly at 60 fps and controls about as well as on my main PC.
Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous. I saw that it had controller support, so I wanted to give it a go on the handheld. It controls decently well and the text is reasonably easy to read (much easier than NMS), but the thing that keeps me from playing it more on the Ally is battery life. If I have to be hooked up to play for a decent session I might as well just play on the stationary machine instead.
Games installed that I'm also going to try out: Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty and Tunic are new games I haven't tried yet outside demos while Bayonetta is a game I've completed several times.
Overall my first impressions of the Ally are positive. Setting it up did take a while since it's an actual Windows system which means OS updates as well as several (day 1) updates for the BIOS and hardware. The Armory Crate front end included works nicely, with relatively simple means to install and integrate the various clients for the major stores (EA, Ubisoft, XBox, Steam, GOG and Epic) as well as having the option to just install any Windows game and then add it to the library for easy access.
henke on 23/6/2023 at 11:07
Mars First Logistics just came out in early access.
[video=youtube;6JIn1KIHLkY]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JIn1KIHLkY[/video]
It's like Spintires meets Zelda Totk's vehicle building, with Sable graphics. What's not to love.
Malf on 23/6/2023 at 12:55
I finished off Bioshock 2, and loved it, but playing them back-to-back, even with the gameplay and graphical improvements, I think my opinion has now switched, and I think I prefer the first game to the second now. The second's just too linear.
I immediately started on Minerva's Den, but almost as quickly, it started crashing-to-desktop on me, and after 5 such crashes in quick succession, I gave up on it for the night and instead decided to plonk down the cash on Baldur's Gate 3.
Initial impressions are cautiously optimistic.
I rolled up a Tiefling bard and played through the start, and it's feeling very polished (after all, it's less than a month away from release).
But I noticed that it would appear they intend for the player to be able to play as one of the companion NPCs upon release, something I have mixed feelings about.
They did the same in DOS2, and I felt it discouraged playing through as custom characters as the narrative would be written with pre-defined characters in mind. Coming from a table-top background, I've always preferred creating my own character.
Sure, they're leaving in the option to play as a custom character, but there will always be the niggling feeling that I'm missing out on something if I'm not playing one of the character's Larian created. I don't know, maybe I've misinterpreted things.
So far, it hasn't done anything to offend me, but there's still plenty of time for Larian to hang themselves. I tried playing DOS2 again recently, and it just rubs me up the wrong way whenever I try.
Hopefully, being constrained by someone else's established, mature ruleset wil help reign in some of Larian's more irritating tendencies.
I will get back to Minerva's Den and subsequently Bioshock Infinite and Buried at Sea this weekend after seeing if some of the fixes people have posted online help.
Tomi on 27/6/2023 at 06:36
I spent most of the first six months of 2023 traveling on the other side of the planet, so I haven't played a lot of games this year. I did bring my laptop with me, and found out that I can actually play many of the XBox Game Pass games on PC too. Yeah, that's most likely not news to anyone else in here, but I didn't know that! :D So I went and installed Football Manager 2023 and it's been more fun than I expected. I haven't played these games in years (I think my latest one is FM 2012) so a lot of things have changed. The actual matches are a lot of fun in this new one. But then they've gone and added even more micromanagement and the amount of stuff that you can do feels a bit overwhelming sometimes. You don't have to do it all by yourself of course, just let your assistant manager sort things out, but there's still an awful lot to do. I don't find the menus very user friendly or intuitive either, but I'm only halfway through my first season, so perhaps I'll get used to it. All in all, it's a very good game if you're into this sort of stuff... but not as good as Championship Manager 1997/98 - the GOAT of manager games. :p
Since I returned home I've been playing games on my Xbox. I finished Redfall and it wasn't great, but not terrible either. Already uninstalled it and can't see myself getting back to it again. Then I played Weird West and really wanted to enjoy it, but it's just quite disappointing really. When you don't get the gunplay right in a wild west game, then you're already doomed. I mean, it's so chaotic and just not very fun. It's also entirely possible that I'm just not good enough at it, but I find the aiming system really awkward, especially when you're trying to throw stuff. And don't even get me started on your companions. They're the dumbest ever, and I often wish that they would just go away, but on the other hand two meat shields make the fights a lot easier. The "stealth" in this game is terrible and the fact that your companions just fool around you while you're trying to be stealthy (at least they're invisible to the enemies, but it also makes things look even more ridiculous) just makes it all feel even worse. The story is somewhat intriguing at least, and I'm at the end of chapter 2 (of 4?) now, but I'm not sure if I want to proceed any further, since I just don't seem to get this game.
I also played and finished The Gunk. It's by the SteamWorld devs so I've wanted to see what it's like for a long time, and now it's on the Game Pass. Well, it's a nice adventure, but really nothing special gameplay-wise at least. The characters are as charming as I expected, and the alien planet that you're exploring actually feels like an alien world. The soundtrack is really nice! The actual gameplay is about as simple as it gets though, in both good and bad. The platforming hardly offers any challenge, the puzzles are mostly just "find the hidden button that you're supposed to shoot to open the door to the next area", and the combat exists just because there has to be some kind of combat in a game like this apparently. The Gunk is a nice relaxing experience and it only lasted like five hours (I even got all the achievements in that time) which I thought was the perfect length for it - any longer would have been too much.
henke on 27/6/2023 at 06:44
Quote Posted by Tomi
Then I played
Weird West and really wanted to enjoy it, but it's just quite disappointing really. When you don't get the gunplay right in a wild west game, then you're already doomed. I mean, it's so chaotic and just not very fun. It's also entirely possible that I'm just not good enough at it, but I find the aiming system really awkward, especially when you're trying to throw stuff.
Enable the "lock view behind player" option. I found that made the aiming much less aggravating when playing with gamepad.
henke on 2/7/2023 at 13:13
Wot I been playin roundup
Two Point Hospital - got this hoping for inspiration for the hospital-side of the flying sim/hospital management game I'm trying to make. It did not inspire me. Good news is that it's really fun tho. I never got into Theme Hospital, but this feels easier and better at on-boarding the player and gently ramping up the difficulty. Good game!
Bramble - Swedish folklore adventure. It's fine.
Trek To Yomi - samurai action-adventure. It's fine.
F.I.S.T. - sci-fi furry metroidvania. It's fine.
Inscryption - I'm usually allergic to anything involving the phrase "deck builder" but this has such good buzz I decided to give it a whirl and ya know what? It's pretty good.
Summer Trip Cruise - cruise ship arcade action. Finshed it already. Pretty good.
Tomi on 2/7/2023 at 19:49
Quote Posted by henke
Bramble - Swedish folklore adventure. It's fine.
I played and finished
Bramble (The Mountain King) too! Yeah it's fine. I love the Nordic vibes and the folklore stuff. For an indie game I think that Bramble looks fantastic! Especially the forests and the nature are gorgeous. The soundtrack is great, and in particular I loved (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZD_af70oH-g) this scene. Never thought that I'd hear the good old '
Suvivirsi' (in Swedish) in a video game! :D
A word of warning for the faint-hearted though: Bramble must be one of the most disturbing (and disgusting) games that I've played! I think it's kind of a cheap move to have little children as protagonists in a horror game, but I gotta admit that it is somewhat effective. The game starts off as a kind of a nice fairytale, but soon turns into something totally... different. I almost felt physically sick during some of the scenes, and sometimes felt that the game probably went a bit too far. I still sort of liked it all though, but sadly towards the end it seemed that the devs had run out of new ideas, and it turned into a pretty generic horror game.
It's also worth mentioning that Bramble is not much of a
game; you just follow the story and do whatever simple things to keep the story going, but sometimes I like a straightforward experience like this where I can just enjoy the ride. The cinematic camera was a really nice touch and actually worked most of the time. In a way Bramble felt like a poor man's
Plague Tale, but with even less gameplay. It's on XBox Gamepass so give it a try if you're subscribed! :)
henke on 3/7/2023 at 05:40
Yeah I played a bit more of it last night and got to some of the darker stuff, and also that scene with "Den blomstertid nu kommer". Both raised my appreciation of the game. I wish there was a Swedish spoken language option. I bet all the gaming hipsters who play Assassins Creed Unity in French and Japanese games in Japanese would dig it too. With how dark things got the game kinda feels kinda like a Limbo 3D at times.
Thirith on 3/7/2023 at 09:09
(I recently played AC Unity in French and feel seen, though I hide my hipsterness pretty well in RL...)
Bramble definitely looks very, very nice, and I think I might put it on my wishlist. Can't remember having heard of it before henke's mention.
While I wanted to get started on System Shock, it didn't immediately click, so I've put it aside for now - and I'm replaying Hollow Knight instead. I watched Mark Brown's video about it last week, and the moment the music set in I knew I wanted to get back to that world and that vibe. Having played through it twice before, I think I should be able to get through it reasonably quickly (the first handful of bosses were still challenging but not nearly as difficult as when I first played the game), but even just five to ten hours in that world should give me what I want right now.
