Discuss games you've been playing

[pastiche]

Amanita Design is great

This is a nice free browser-based game of theirs from 2003 that offers a small taste of the very tip of the illustrious iceberg that they would eventually begin to carve

https://amanita-design.net/samorost-1/

[Danny Trabajo]

Can anyone advise what difficulty Death Stranding is best played on? I've set it to Normal for now

[Danny Trabajo]

It opens with a Kobo Abe quote... there is no way this won't be good

[Danny Trabajo]

My draft review barely an hour in is

Death Stranding: The last game of all time. 14/10

[AndyNPC]

Half-Life: Alyx is finally out. I'm already pretty used to interactive environments from Boneworks, but if you're new to VR you're going to be impressed. I only managed to play about 2 hours so far since I forgot to charge my Index controllers. The pacing has been pretty slow and focusing mostly on world building, but there were still a few interesting gameplay moments like this one tunnel that was rigged with explosives where I had to be mindful of where I was shooting, and also mindful of other creatures which might set them off.
So far the coolest thing was meeting a vortigaunt. It felt like I was on a Half-Life themed Disney World ride.

Then there's DOOM: Eternal. It's pretty much what I was expecting from it. Lots of high action combat where you're switching weapons and targets every 0.5 seconds, lots of secrets to look out for, and more enemy variety than the previous game. There's been some criticism over how ammo works, but personally I kinda like the new system. There's still ammo and health pickups scattered throughout the environment like before, but you can't carry as much without upgrades, so you can't keep to the same weapon for too long before having to use the chainsaw to turn an enemy into an ammo pinata. The chainsaw now also regenerates gas over time, so it's expected to be using it all the time to get ammo. I feel like this adds more choices to make over 2016 DOOM, since now instead of just shooting demons or doing glory kills for health, you might want to consider using the chainsaw for ammo instead. You also now have to consider when it's time to pick up ammo, as the stuff laying around might be safer and faster to get when in a pinch rather than looking for a weaker demon to chainsaw. Overall a pretty sweet game so far.

Also there's Animal Crossing. It's pretty cool. I found Paul Bunyan in my town/island. Pretty cool easter egg.

[pastiche]

Originally Posted by Danny Trabajo

Can anyone advise what difficulty Death Stranding is best played on? I've set it to Normal for now

You play it on Easy, you're a Wussie
You play it on Normal, you're a Normie
You play it on Hard, you're Pretentious
You play it at all, you're a Gamer
Either way, you're B!%&F#!%'d

[Danny Trabajo]

Originally Posted by pastiche

You play it on Easy, you're a Wussie
You play it on Normal, you're a Normie
You play it on Hard, you're Pretentious
You play it at all, you're a Gamer
Either way, you're B!%&F#!%'d

[Solid Snix]

I played through Makai Toushi SaGa on the Wonderswan. It's a remake of what we know in the west as The Final Fantasy Legend. While labeled as a Final Fantasy game, it's actually the first in the series that would spawn games such as Romancing SaGa, SaGa Frontier, and Unlimited SaGa.

The SaGa games are JRPGs inspired by Western RPGs, and they're infamous for having bizarre, questionable mechanics.

The first SaGa sees you scaling a tower to stop its flowing of monsters and find out what lies at the top. You create a party of 1-4 heroes with the classes of Human, Esper, and Monster.

Humans are your most reliable class. They can't learn magic or gain stats after a battle. Instead, you level them by purchasing upgrades for strength, agility, and HP. You're going to have a ton of money by the mid-point, so they're pretty easy to max out.

Espers, on the other hand, have a chance of gaining random stats after each battle. They may also learn spells, though the spells they learn are random, and you can have better skills overwritten by not so useful ones. Espers kind of fall off a bit at the end game IMO, but they're fantastic for breaking the early game. SaGa is a game where petrify can kill bosses, and it's pretty easy to get that spell at some point early on.

Monsters are, well, the game's monsters. At the start of the game, you can select Newt, Ogre, Skeleton, and Albatross. When you defeat enemies, they have a chance of dropping their meat. This meat, you can feed to your monsters, causing them to change into a different beast. IMO, Monsters have the opposite curve that Espers do; they start not great, but by the end of the game, they become some of your most reliable casters and damage dealers.

When climbing the tower you'll find yourself entering various new worlds, each as a little vignette. One floor might see you helping ask out an eyeball monster for the king. Another sees you riding around a post-apocalyptic city while avoiding a goddamn phoenix.

When you finally reach the top, you run into God, who congratulates you for being the first to make it all the way. God explains that they got bored, so they unleashed King Ashura to wreak havoc upon civilization. But then God got tired of that too, so they created this tower scenario to watch and see if anyone can defeat Ashura. Then you pick a fight with God.




SaGa is an incredibly janky game in some regards. The only reason you can chainsaw God is that they ****ed up the chainsaw weapon. It was supposed to be used for instakilling mobs that have a defense value lower than your attack. They reversed that formula, so the chainsaw does nothing on mobs and instantly kills bosses.

SaGa is janky in some regards, but if you like JRPGs from the NES/SNES era, I think it holds up. There's wasn't a whole lot like it when it came out, and there still isn't much like it today.

[Danny Trabajo]

Still like South Park 64, wish it had better controls though. Could have been pretty a good Turok 2.5 had the development not been so rushed.

[Solid Snix]

I decided to give One Step From Eden a shot.



It's a deck-building roguelike with combat similar to Mega Man Battle Network. It's good! It's also really hard! Though right now I'm at a point where I'm just trying to remember where the A and B buttons are, because I've been playing a lot of games where they've been swapped, and never in my life did I ever think I'd misplace the A button.

[Solid Snix]

I was getting worried that SaGa 2 wasn't weird enough

[dragon_kazoooie]

So I've finally been playing the most recent Prey game and, I gotta' say, it's super fun! I knew it would be going in due to the high praise it received back when it first released and I can definitely see why. The map is really well designed and each area seems to contain things about the world and crew on the spaceship you're on and it's really fun to turn off all the markers and explore the world. It reminds me of Bioshock quite a lot in that way and the exploration part was my fav part of 'shock (Though Bioshock still wins for me because I Looooove the ocean.) I'm betting it's similar to System Shock as well but I've not had the pleasure of going through that one.

Annnnyway that's not the important part. I was playing through the game and I ran across:

[img]https://**********/1QyG9bW/Glooey-Mcglooface.jpg[/img]

~Glooey-Mcglooface~

They did it for the meme and I can't even really be mad at 'em.

[Mr/Sir Norris]

There have been sales on and off for Tabletop Simulator lately, so finally took the plunge with friends to feed my constant growing boardgame obsession. It's been amazing to explore games at my own leisure and see if their mechanics are things that would click with me. Right now working on a Kingdom Death: Monster campaign and looking at starting a solo Gloomhaven campaign as well. Plus a whole lot of Welcome to... (affectionately known as Bingo amongst my friends)

[Solid Snix]

Disgaea is pretty fun. Lots of ways to interact with positioning.

Also you get a unique ending for dying on like level 5

[Solid Snix]

They started porting the disgaea titles to steam. I can’t speak for all of them, but the pc port of Disgaea 1 is pretty alright. It’s also got all of the additional content added in Disgaea DS, except for New Game Plus. The only thing about the pc port though is the new textures look kind of bad, but you can change them to the original textures in the settings menu.