Discuss games you've been playing

[Solid Snix]

[Mr. Airplane]

I got my VR set back up and played some Beat Saber.

I wanna try to do a couple songs every day. It's decent cardio, and fun.

[Mew 101]

Originally Posted by The Colonel

halo 2 is worse than i remember

In what ways is it worse than you remember?

[DementedSun]

Finished Firewatch for the first game I've completed this year. I had watched a playthrough from...I think Sips aaaages ago when it came out, so it was good to finally play it myself. One of the few 'walking simulator' type games that I actually enjoyed.

Also been playing Monster Rancher DX. I started with the second game as a kid, so all my nostalgia is for that, and I had only gotten MR1 years after, so I decided to start off playing it first. My first monster is a Jell x Suezo that I decided to make an INT/SPD build of (without looking up if that was even a good decision) He's just over 3 years and is S rank so far, not sure how much longer he has but he should at least be able to beat S. Gonna just raise Monsters off of bands that I like - this first one was from Tally Hall -Marvin's Marvelous Mechanic Museum, thus he was named Marvin.

[The Colonel]

Originally Posted by Mew 101

In what ways is it worse than you remember?

the level design is inconsistent and the game is visibly half finished. the first half is solid, outskirts and delta halo are some of the best levels in the trilogy, but you start getting levels like quarantine zone and it's lots of incredibly repetitive environments which coupled with the huge size of them doubles how tedious it all feels. gravemind and high charity feel like they're repeating the same template of four rooms like three times in a row and it gets mind numbing. when they're not doing that, they're pulling the exciting level design trick of putting you on a big elevator, and making you shoot flood on a big elevator, for five minutes, with bad checkpoints that send you back to the start of the elevator if you die. plus all of the boss fights are the same brand of damage sponge, regret is annoying but not the absolute worst but the heretic is miserable and tartarus is just boring. the game's balance is also weirdly janky, its heroic difficulty feels as hard as halo 3's legendary

you can tell the game is really unfinished also cause despite being the longest of the original trilogy, not only does the level design quality drop off so hard but there's an entire unfinished and unused boss enemy and they had to cut the game's entire unique warthog run, which as it exists in the files is somehow more basic and repetitive than halo 1's still and feels entirely made up of those inbetween sequences of the warthog run from halo 3. halo 2 is a paradox of having a more established basis for making halo and being much longer than its surrounding games without having the crazy dev cycle halo 1 had, but it also gets much more exhausting than halo 1 or 3 and does not fix any of halo 1's problems while introducing its own

[Zondekel]

I've been pretty consistently going back to Animal Crossing since October and then especially the November 2.0 update. I've sort of exhausted everything I hope to do after re-terraforming the island again, but I keep hopping on hoping to find that one piece of furniture I need for my theme (a pile of bones from a skeleton) and that one DIY card I also need (a ruined broken column covered in vines- I found the ruined gate and non-broken column but).

Been playing Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance through the Advance collection. Only one of the four games I hadn't really played before and authentic carts are SUPER expensive now. Thank god I got the other GBA and DS games years ago when I did.

[Mandolin]

I officially have every single spirit in Smash Bros. Ultimate as of last night, including Evil Ryu. A gaming experience for the ages, that was. The only thing left to do now is 9.9 every character's classic mode and get every character into Elite Smash (if I can muster the energy, which I probably won't).

Next up... I could finish A Hat in Time but I'm honestly not really feeling that game. Maybe I'll give Breath of the Wild another go. I never finished that because I thought it was really slow and boring and has basically no progression, but I've been watching Korok-finding videos on YouTube and I think I'm ready to try again.

[neen]

taught myself how to record snes9x frame movies with save states and frame advance. made a short half-tas in the pal version, from ceres to just after bomb torizo.

this will be my weekend entertainment: a pseudotas for ntsc any%, to practice each room in real time as many times as i want but without slowdown or frame advance. just as many takes as i want per room. this should both provide me with a lot of practice and a goal to reach for rta speedruns.

edit: gonna take a lot more than one weekend to do it but i am practicing

[Nayib]

I spent all weekend playing Rainbow Six Siege and it felt good.

[DementedSun]

Only Chao racing emblems left for 100% Sonic Adventure DX. Although I guess you unlock Metal Sonic and have to replay Sonic's Stages with him for the last achievement? Should be no problem.

[Solid Snix]

I have finished Shin Megami Tensei V twice now. My thoughts are complicated.
Arguably the best the combat system has been. Like a solid 9/10. But the game is so unfinished.

The initially fun-to-explore stratums become a monotonous pain in the ass by the third stratum, because it just becomes a maze of cliff-sides where you're constantly trying to figure out how the hell you get up there. And the map doesn't do a great job of portraying elevation.

The story is more or less a skeleton of a plot that they never went back and filled. You don't spend a lot of time with the characters like you do in IV and IV Apocolypse. No one really gets to develop.

There's also some weird shit you notice that you can kind of tell they intended to do *something* with, but ran out of time or budget or something. You travel between the human world and the demon world, with the human world having the classic SMT overworld thing going on. But you don't really do anything in the human world. You just use it to travel between your dorm and the Tokyo Diet Building a few times.

There's also a full modeled school in the game that you go to, twice. Once at the very start, and once again very briefly before having the area closed off. There's a Very Special Episode bit regarding a character being bullied and everything quite literally going to hell, and it's kind of out of place.

But it turns out it that would have been perfectly in-place at one point. It was revealed in a Famitsu interview that the game was gonna deal with more real-world things like unemployment and classism, and none of that made it into the final game. I imagine they planned for something more persona-y, with going to school and then having a some sort of issue someone's having lead to demon world expeditions.

What we also know is, while the team was struggling with the game's direction for years, the music producers just kept making songs for the OST lol. So there's like a dozen different battle themes, a different theme for each section of each stratum, even two different Cathedral of Shadows themes. And it's all baller.





Anyway, game still fun to play just has a lot of flaws. Here's hoping they do a direct sequel like they did with IV where they can really go in and add more meat.

[Brian]

Been spending a bunch of hours in Hitman 3 lately, trying different things. Not sure why this game amuses me so much.

[pstriple]

Man I hate Cruisin' USA so much.

[neen]

learned how to spring ball jump today

[Solid Snix]

Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey Redux


Great game thus far. It's refreshing to play an Atlus game that isn't a mess.