Aja on 27/8/2024 at 17:11
I've been playing Dark Souls and Dark Souls II lately, and more than once I've wanted to throw my controller at the wall for some bullshit too-long boss bonfire run or enemy that uncannily tracks your movement as it swings or mob of skeletons that stunlocks you and kills you in an instant. But five minutes after I put it down, I've got the urge to pick it back up and try again. For me that's a mark of a good game.
I've been thinking about whether or not all the quality of life improvements in newer games like Elden Ring make it better overall, and I find myself leaning towards the notion that some amount of frustration, of friction, to tie it back to the discussion, actually improves the whole experience even if it sucks in the moment.
For all the hype and excitement about the new AstroBot, I just think about the PS5 pack-in, and, eh, game practically played itself.
Kamlorn on 28/8/2024 at 21:35
Wasteland! Right from the eighties, baby! Probably the oldest game I have ever played.
Interface is a mess. But Ima still making my way through it.
What hooked me right from the beginning is that after character/group creation screen my ass have been kicked right on the Wasteland. No journals, no arrows, just your dummy in a green costume and...WASTELAND. Green squares, yellow squares, oops, they're hot, so keep going green squares... Iove it! I mean those games which are brave enough to just throw you out, without further ado. ( Spoonman FMs comes to mind if we talk about this certain aspect )
I really apreciate that I dont need any walkthroughts yet. That's kinda rare for this game era, I suppose .
Of course I read the manual, and that's all. Feeling pretty good for my 13-hours deep run without any abuses. Yeah, except 1 for free health points and it completely unnecesary, but I dont wanna waste my dollars for medical attention, even after nuclear apocalypse.
My God there are multiple playstyle options for at least 2 missions yet! Two different stealthy, 1 kill them all and 1 nerdy "say a pasword" ways.
Thirith on 29/8/2024 at 09:55
I had a moment of hating Thief 2 last night. I'm in the final mission, "Sabotage at Soulforge", and I sneaked past a guard and a robot to climb up a chute and take an elevator up to the roof, where I switched an antenna. When I then took the elevator back down, though, I found that for some reason the chute had been closed up at the bottom by a grate. Apparently this is something that can happen, but I was stuck on the wrong side of the grate, with no way of getting out, so I had to reload an earlier save file. On my second attempt, it all went off without any problems, but I was no big fan of the soft lock that happened.
Edit: Just finished "Sabotage at Soulforge". I'm in two minds about the level: I sort of wish the game had ended on something that plays more to the strengths of the games, the various systems coming together to create a varied stealth experience. Instead we get something that's like a distillation of what Thief 2 does in particular: a set of environmental puzzles where the usual Thief tricks (water arrows to create darkness, knocking out guards) don't work. When I relaxed into what the mission was doing rather than being annoyed that I couldn't play how I liked, I enjoyed "Sabotage", and I love how the space expresses the Mechanists and especially Karras so well; but I definitely like this much more than a one-off than as an example of why I love Thief.
I'll give the game a bit of a rest now before playing some of the fan missions people have recommended, since I want to mop up some of my backlog, especially the games that shouldn't take more than a couple of hours. But I am looking forward to playing some of the newer fan missions, to see what people have done with the upgraded version of the engine.
henke on 30/8/2024 at 12:22
I just bought Star Wars Outlaws. On PS5. For 80 friggin bucks! There are so many good recent indie games that'd be more deserving of my gaming dollar, but the weekend is here and I just wanna crawl in under a nice comforting blanket of predictable Ubi trash.
Tomi on 30/8/2024 at 15:37
I didn't even realise that it has been released already. Just shows how much attention I pay to all the ads I guess.
SW:Outlaws seems to have got pretty average reviews all over the place, and many of them mention the same thing. While the gameplay is a bit mediocre, the game is a proper Star Wars adventure and it oozes the right kind of atmosphere. That sounds good to me! I might even subscrive to the Ubisoft+ thingy for a while to play this soon.
henke on 30/8/2024 at 18:51
These days I rarely read reviews until after I've played the game, because I don't want anything spoiled and I feel like I can usually tell from a few gameplay videos + the overall Metacritic score if it'll be something I'd enjoy. Outlaws is sitting at 76%, which is good enough for me.
First impressions after a couple hours:
-the movement feels kinda stiff in comparision to Nathan Drake's smooth moves in Uncharted 4 (which I recently replayed).
-your animal companion Nix is like Watch_Dogs hacking ability + FC4+ animal companions combined into one entity. Very good.
-the hacking minigame is Wordle but with a string of symbols instead of a word. Which... uh... means you can't really guess the solution, but instead will just arrive there by process of elimination. I dunno. We'll see how this plays out.
-the lockpicking minigame is a rhythm based thing which I suck at. Thankfully the difficulty settings are highly customizable, and you can for instance just turn down the difficulty of this without turning down the difficulty of everything.
-the hoverbike is a very stiff thingy and not a very physics-based thingy which I'd like. You just point the thing in the direction you wanna go and it goes there. Any dummy could ride this thing. I'm not a fan.
-haven't done much open world exploring yet so I can't say much about it.
-stealth gameplay is ok, but you can't move bodies BUT the baddies WILL get alerted by fallen comrades and go investigate. Eh.......
-action gameplay seems ok. There's a RDR style deadeye system that gets charged up when you're in cover under fire? No thoughts on that yet.
-this whole thing is more or less what I expected and I'm enjoying it.
Aja on 30/8/2024 at 19:54
I hit the hundred-hour mark in Balatro and finally beat a gold stake run, and now I've got the urge to get gold stakes for every deck variation. Lots of people say things like, "This game is pure crack." I don't agree with that because unlike a drug addition Balatro gets more fulfilling the more I play it, the more I learn how different jokers synergize with each other, the more strategic my game becomes. As I said before, luck is a factor, but winning feels mostly the result of managing the odds and knowing how to adapt when your circumstances change, and that's a skill you can only get by internalizing the game's rules to the point where you can make snap decisions and pivot when your plan doesn't go according to plan. That being said, I've also had some heroic, last-minute strokes of luck that won the game and were way more thrilling than they had any right to be. Balatro is barrelling towards my game of the year spot, and I'm not sure what else can stop it.
Malf on 31/8/2024 at 06:57
With the release of the newest expansion, Janthir Wilds, despite previous rantings about the game (and wider genre in general), I've fallen head-over-heels for Guild Wars 2 once again.
I played through the previous expansion Secrets of the Obscure to get to this one, and that one was messy and continued the trend of the one before that, End of Dragons, where the entire expansion seemed to be focussed around funnelling the player into the excessively expensive and long-winded Legendary gear system. But it at least made one of the mounts a lot easier to get for new players, the Skyscale.
Janthir Wilds on the other hand feels like a return-to-form for the game, and takes everything I love about it and turns it up to 11.
Due to the new way Guild Wars 2 develops its content now, so far, we "only" have two new maps, the Lowland Shores and Janthir Syntri.
But those two maps are densely packed with things to see and do, and deliver a much more "chill" experience than anything since the base release.
It's a Northern-hemisphere mythological culture inspired setting, with heavy celtic undertones and more than a nod to Witcher 3 in feel. The race you're interacting with are an off-shoot of the game's Bear people, the Kodan, who unlike the polar-bear inspired people of the base game, are Brown bear versions. There's one character in particular I think they've done an excellent job on, Stoic Alder, a patriarchal figure who speaks in a slow, sonorous manner, with more than a hint of overwhelming physical power behind his delivery.
Also, this time they've revamped one of the game's mounts that was previously pretty much used exclusively in its massive PvP mode, World versus World versus World.
That's the Warclaw, giant cat-like mounts. As well as retaining all of the abilities they had in WvWvW, they've sped them up for PvE, and added the awesome ability to jump while in the air, a kind of double-jump-plus. Combined with this mount also not taking fall damage (I mean, they're cats), that means you can stay airborne for a glorious amount of time.
Admittedly, in much the same way as in the previous expansion with the Skyscale, the improvements have ended up encroaching on some of the other mounts' roles, with the poor giant bunny-like Springer getting hit the hardest. But even so, I still find myself using all of the mounts, as they're each so unique.
And Guild Wars 2 still has the best mounts of any game, MMO or otherwise.
You want physics-based mounts henke?
Check out videos for the Raptor, Griffon and Roller-Beetle:
[video=youtube;LWGNHh60WwM]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWGNHh60WwM[/video]
[video=youtube;98kUgsXRpQY]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98kUgsXRpQY[/video]
[video=youtube;4568hez3_Kc]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4568hez3_Kc[/video]
Oh, and they also introduced their spin on another MMO staple with this expansion, player housing. It's ridiculously detailed, and they've even hired ex-Sims developers to get it done propery. I can't wait to see what some people achieve with this new feature.
One really cute feature is that you transform into a giant bumble-bee to better place things in the 3D volume.
That's all to say, when it's firing on all cylinders, Guild Wars 2 is still one of the best games out there as far as I'm concerned.
Damn you ArenaNet.
Just when I thought I was out, you pull me back in.
henke on 31/8/2024 at 08:22
Yup, those are some good lookin mounts!
Tomi on 31/8/2024 at 16:24
Quote Posted by Malf
I've fallen head-over-heels for
Guild Wars 2 once again.
Ah, Guild Wars 2. I truly fell for the GW2 hype before its release in 2012. I pre-ordered the game and hopped on during the very first day. (I couldn't really play though because the servers were so laggy!) After spending way too many hours on the first Guild Wars, however, I was really disappointed with the sequel.
More than ten years later, I can't remember what exactly it was that I didn't like, but I never felt like giving the game another chance. Even the first game was quite grindy, but GW2 felt twice as bad to me. I don't think that I ever even got any of my characters to the maximum level. I guess I wasn't ready for GW2 being a
proper MMO either. In GW1 you could just pretty much ignore everyone else and play on your own if you wanted to, but you actually had to tolerate other people in GW2
all the time (I may remember wrong though?). One of my first boss fights in the game was some underwater monster, and I felt quite insignificant in that battle, because there were so many human players swarming around the monster that I could hardly see what the monster looked like behind the huge ball of players and all the magic effects and stuff. It also didn't help that I hated the underwater areas, as I do in most games.
GW2 was not a terrible game by any means, but I think that it turned out to be too different than I expected, and so it failed to hook me in before I got bored.
