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What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them?
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
Bomb Rush Cyberfunk
In case anyone here was worried, this game passes the vibe check, and it does so with flying, vibrant, beautifully cel-shaded colors and a perfect odd-yet-hip soundtrack.
It’s a Jet Set Radio game through and through. It doesn’t feel like a weak, limited, or lesser entry in the series. It’s smartly made, iterates on the previous games well, and feels like a full-fat sequel instead of a modest imitation. If I had played this without knowing anything about it, I’d have thought that SEGA put it out as an official title.
I’m five hours into the game and here are some scattered thoughts:
Movement is really great and satisfying. It feels like the original games, but with a bit more polish. The addition of an air dash really helps with on-the-fly adjustments. The trick system, using leans for multipliers and adding manuals/sliding, is clever and feels good for how simple it is. I also love that, to get the biggest chains, you have to continually use new parts of the environment. I also like that you can choose between blades, board, or bike. It doesn’t actually change the gameplay itself (I think?) but gives nice aesthetic variety.
The game itself feels old in a really good way. I feel like I’m playing something from the mid-2000s. I can see that putting some people off, especially modern players who have no nostalgia for the series, but I am loving the game’s ability to throwback and throwback well.
The environments have lots of nods to previous games. I see the fingerprints of the previous games all over what the devs have constructed here.
The game is really stable for a new release. I’m playing it on the Steam Deck and haven’t had a single issue so far. It feels finished (though I would love a QoL update that lets me change characters in the hideout).
I have been waiting three years for Bomb Rush Cyberfunk to drop and Team Reptile did not disappoint.
BRC is like a weird amalgamation of Jet Set Radio Future and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. The trick system is nowhere near as fleshed-out as a THPS game but unlike Jet Set Radio, combos, multiplier and score does matter to a huge extent.
If I had to give pros and cons for the game in a spoiler-free manner:
I'm so glad to hear this. I absolutely loved jet grind radio for dreamcast. I heard it moved to Xbox with a new game/features and I was psyched. One of my university roommates had it collecting dust on the shelf and he didn't know why I was so psyched that he had it. Then I played it... It lacked all of the soul of the first game. I've been dying to try a proper spiritual successor so I'm glad to hear these great reviews, especially since the promo ads for this game really didn't look good. I thought this was going to be another Xbox-like version. So glad to hear this.
I usually don't buy new games early on, but I've been playing Baldur's Gate 3 in couch co-op mode with my partner. We've been playing it on the Steam Deck docked to display on a 55" tv, and I'm not thrilled with the experience. Vertical split screen makes many things hard to see (on the map and field, the UI elements are pretty good). It also seems like a game that lends itself more to mouse and keyboard. So we're considering buying a separate copy so we can do multiplayer mode on our separate PCs. This would also require restarting the story from the beginning, but we're not super far in and feel like we may have not explored enough. The game itself is pretty cool, as someone who enjoyed D&D but struggled to commit to regular in-person sessions that would last for 6 hours.
On the lighter side of things, when I want something low-stress, I've been playing a bit of The Coin Game. Arcade and midway games are much more enjoyable when you aren't spending real money on them, and the survival mode is interesting but I think I'm at a point where it's smooth sailing now.
As far as I know, Baldur's Gate offers cross platform saves. You should be able to pick up where you left off. Although after learning the mechanics, a new start isn't a bad idea either. Lots of classes and races to choose from anyway.
Currently playing the 2013 game Eldritch for my next roguelike podcast episode
For the 45th overall roguelike game released on steam ever (out of like 7000 now), it's...fine. 2013 feels like a lifetime ago both in terms of gamedev tools but how the genre has evolved as well. Eldritch has an interesting premise of being a dungeon crawler with voxel graphics. It's mechanically very simple: get to the end of the level and void or kill Lovecraft-themed enemies. But it's brutally hard. Flying eyeballs do lots of ranged damage and it's kind of hard to defend yourself.
I think Eldritch can be beaten in like 2ish hours or so and I'm not totally sure if there's a lot of replayability just yet. At $15 normal pricing, it feels too tall an order but in deep discount sale for $2 it'd be fine. For a two-man team ten years ago, it's a perfectly cromulent game, just priced too high by default for what it is now.
I would be totally interested in an Eldritch 2, taking some of the ideas here, refining them in a way that Barony has done, and releasing in a world where the toolset has evolved a lot in 10 years. Other voxel-based roguey games of interest include Clone Drone in the Danger Zone, Paint the Town Red, and a VR-exclusive title Ancient Dungeon, all of which I could totally see being future episodes to cover on the podcast.
You've summed up my feelings on Eldritch exactly. I bought it sometime around release and spent a few minutes at most with it and then decided I'd come back to it later; later turned out to be this year when someone ported it over to the PS Vita, which seemed like a solid fit. But after a few runs, I definitely had a "Oh, ok, I get it" moment and pretty much put it down for good. It's neat, but there's just not a whole lot going on with it to keep me interested.
Barony is one I've been intending to go back to as well.
O glorious day, my Playdate has finally arrived! I preordered this little handheld, developed by the same people who made Untitled Goose Game, over a year ago and would forget and remember every few months only to be disappointed that my ship date was still beyond the horizon. Until a week ago when my order updated to “processed” and then “shipped” and then only a few days later to “delivered” and now it’s here!
Unfortunately, it arrived in a deep slumber, so it’s all tucked into it’s cute little magnetic case and charging, so I’ll dig into it after tonight’s Splatoon 3 Duos Challenge with my partner and then take it to work everyday to play on my breaks. I’ll check in with this thread again next week to go more in depth into the games themselves, but just to gush about the hardware for a second: it is so cute and so small and I just love it to bits. The button action is so satisfyingly clicky, the crank (yes!) is so smooth to turn and tuck away, and the device itself is small, thin, perfectly pocket sized, but also it feels sturdy, like something I really can carry in my pocket. I can’t wait until it wakes up and I can see the screen in action.
If any other Tildoes out there have a Playdate let me know what games in the Catalog you like. Have you made your own game? Let me know and I’ll play it!
I was about to correct you and say "It was the folks who did 'Firewatch.'" i googled it and blew my own mind.
Are the games just minigames, or do people make bigger games for it, too? It always looked like an insanely cool novelty to me.
So far I’ve only got Whitewater Wipeout and Casual Birder. Whitewater Wipeout is more or less a surfing mini game, but Casual Birder is more like an RPG where you talk to characters, do side quests, etc. I think there’s gonna be big variety in the Season One games, and I’ll probably start digging into Catalog games in a few days.
I googled it and found that Firewatch and Untitled Goose Game are not the same dev, they just share a publisher, and it's that publisher and not either dev who contributed to Playdate along with Teenage Engineering... so I wouldn't say "by the folks who did" before either Firewatch or UGG to be honest... feels kind of irrelevant to me.
Not to be like a sad party pooper, I guess I'm just saying to me it doesn't feel like enough relation to qualify for "if you like X, then Y" for Playdate, which is neat and cute though.
I started playing Amored Core 6 on my channel as soon as it came out yesterday! I have never played a mecha game before but I often replay the Soulsbourne games so I wanted to give this a shot.
It's funny how in an atmosphere were I generally distrust all new games until they've been out and tested for a while, AC6 and Elden Ring were both games that I purchased as soon as they were released based on the high level of trust I have for From Software.
The game itself looks beautiful, it runs smoother on my PC than Elden Ring did at launch, and I think the first mission and subsequent training session do a pretty good job of introducing new players to AC handling, the mission-based structure etc.
One thing in this game that is making me feel really nostalgic is the radio interactions with Handler Walter - for some reason it's really taking me back to the first time I played Metal Gear Solid on the Playstation!
All in all, the game has made a good first impression on me as a newbie to the series and I'm excited to carry on with my playthrough. 🙏
I played and finished En Garde!. It's... very short. Very very short. But honestly I didn't mind, I don't think there was enough game to go longer without making it feel like it was padding it out needlessly. It's a fun game for an evening, and the combat was really good.
You think it is worth the price? I was super interested in it, but game length was a question of mine. They also mentioned custom built arenas and whatnot, so I was curious on replayability as well.
I'll be honest: I pirated it. Also due to regional pricing I'm not sure how much you'd be paying vs me, and how much other games would cost, which affects the desicion of "do I spend my money on this or something else".
Played through Dave the diver last week, very much recommend. It's a great little "cozy" game with insanely good art direction and soul
Just finished a second playthrough of IXION, this time on the Challenge difficulty. For those of you that know what Frostpunk is, it's Frostpunk, but in space, and with less moral dilemma and more micromanagement. For everyone else, it's a city-builder that takes place on a prototype space station on a journey to find a habitable exoplanet. On the way you'll need to balance the station's hull integrity which is constantly degrading (it's a prototype), food and building resources, the power supply, crew housing and morale, while also dealing with obstacles you come across on the trip. Like many other city-builders, especially Frostpunk (it's VERY heavily inspired by Frostpunk), the difficulty of it isn't so much in the mechanics as it is in learning how things work and what to prioritize, so it's very rewarding to play through it again and easily conquer what used to be significant obstacles the first time around.
Also, the soundtrack is absolutely perfect for the game. It's done by Guillaume David, who also did the OST for Warhammer 40000: Mechanicus, and the man is a master at creating atmosphere through his music. Do yourself a favor and listen to it with some headphones on.
I finished up playing Armored Core: Nexus for the videos I was making, so I decided to keep making some as little one-off things, and today I played Tokyo Jungle. I totally love that game.
It doesn't really do anything complicated mechanically, nor is the gameplay anything especially cool, it's the premise and structure that appeal to me. Tokyo is in ruins after humanity disappeared and there's animals everywhere. So you pick an animal and participate in this arcade/roguelike deal where you have to claim territory, eat things, gain experience, level up, find a mate, and you continue your run through the children mating produces. They serve as extra lives while you go and try to do all of that again in a different spot on the map. Along the way you earn points and unlock challenges, like killing x number of a specific animal or collecting items.
You can find items that do stuff like restore health/hunger/etc, but you can also find equipment, which is mostly just random articles of human clothing. They give you stat bonuses. So I played as a pomeranian with a sun visor and headphones, tearing things up and breeding. The variety of animals is more "zoo" than "native wildlife". There's herbivorous animals like deer, cows, pigs, chickens, etc., and carnivores, like a tiger, wolf, beagle, cat, etc. Think housepets and zoo animals. Plus a bunch of unlockables like robotic animals, homo erectus, a japanese businessman, etc.
My only issue is some of that is paid dlc stuff, and while I have the files for the dlc, and rpcs3 installs them, the game doesn't recognize them. I found an old link claiming a fix, but the link was dead. I have the european version of the game too, apparently.
Oh man I loved Tokyo Jungle. I still think about it whenever I see a Pomeranian lol. I wish I could play it again on PC!
You can! It's a bit tough to find but once you've got it, rpcs3 runs it just fine. Works great both on my PC and steam deck too
Co-op hellcard. Works really well with 2 players, since you can do your actions at your own pace, until you're done with the turn. You also see which enemies the other is about to attack, which makes discussions easier. The card pool is a joyous mess; sometimes an upgrade is actually a worse card in your current deck.
Been spreading my time around quite a bit. When I'm feeling the need for something immediate, I've been going through the Quake 2 campaign, which has been great and makes me feel like, even at 40-years old, my FPS skills are pretty solid. I might actually be able to hold my own in Deathmatch, though I haven't tried it yet...
When I'm feeling a little more like being quiet and chill, I've been working my way through Atari 50th, which is fun. I'm not much of an Atari fan, but my sister and I had a console when we were kids, so it's interesting to learn a lot of the history behind it and play many of the games that I never had...even if it seems like a lot of them are primitive, at best. First generation games definitely are not a favorite for me.
Lastly, I was excited to see Darkest Dungeon 2 for sale again. I had intended to buy it months ago when they still had the supporter pack available, but I missed it, unfortunately. At any rate, as a person who spent over 200-hours in the first game, I'm excited to be checking out the second, though I've only played 4-hours now. I'm happy that Red Hook has addressed one of my biggest bugbears with the original game, which was the amount of preparation needed before heading into a dungeon. It's not necessarily the preparation itself, but that it was more like a memory puzzle. Remember to bring blight characters to this dungeon, as well as 18 torches, 12 food, no bandages, but 4 antivenom, then remember that you need to use a specific item on each curio and they all do different things. I love the game still, but I couldn't play it without the Darkest Companion app on my phone, which a lot of the time ended-up being tedious enough that many times I'd abandon the game before I even started playing.
Darkest Dungeon 2 does away with that tedious aspect and I feel like is much more open to experimentation, given that it's run based, so losing out on a run still gives you a few rewards and you can pretty much immediately start again. I don't have too many thoughts on it just yet, given my lack of playtime, but I'm looking forward to playing it some more. I'm hoping playing on the Steam Deck will be a good fit for me, as the PS Vita version of the original was.
I finally finished my playthrough of the PC version of Red Dead Redemption II yesterday, and it was fantastic. This was not my first time, having previously played it on Xbox, but that was back when it was a fresh release in 2018. I spent a solid 70 hours at it over the past few months. Both times I played as good guy Arthur, only killing bastards who needed killing whenever possible.
Today I started playing the PC port of The Last of Us Part 1, which happened to come free with an AMD GPU I bought earlier in the year. It is certainly living up to its reputation as a rough port, but I am still enjoying the experience despite the poor technical performance. I never played TLOU before on any platform, but I have watched the TV show. I am enjoying the game a lot, and I expect that if this level of quality lasts through the rest of the game that I will most likely complete it too.
I also played a few levels of Sayonara Wild Hearts for the first time today. That game is a rush, and a nice palate cleanser after the doom and gloom of TLOU. I enjoy the low-stakes easy progression nature of it, while it still retains the option to keep trying harder for the gold medal on each level, and the audiovisual experience is a blast.
Been playing a little bit of Baldurs Gate 3 and have been having fun so far. Not too far into the game, just got past the tutorial area basically but it's been a decent introduction to D&D so far.
I'm surprised by how well it performs on Linux so far actually. Under Ubuntu 23.04 with Proton Experimental, I haven't had any graphical glitches. I mean 0, which I am kinda surprised by. Glad Valve and tons of open source devs have put in this effort to improve gaming on Linux.
Still playing Battlefield 2042 and hopped back on to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II (2022). I have a game of Cyberpunk 2077, but I haven't played it in over a month. College just started back up today/yesterday and I have a full-time job at the moment, so my time to play story-based games is very thin.
Cleared all the levels of Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair and did one attempt at the impossible lair. Thought I did decentlyish but when I died it said I was only 33% of the way through the level lol. I'll give it a few more shots, but need to take some time off.
Finished The Darkness 2. Fun game with some frustrating design choices, incredibly short. I don't think it has aged very gracefully.
Played through A Short Hike recently as well, which was a very charming game. It reminded me in some ways of Alba: A Wildlife Adventure which I'd played through earlier in the year.
Started Maneater over the weekend, too. It's fun to control a shark and eat a lot of fish but after a bit it's like, okay you're a shark eating a lot of fish and that's about it.
I loved all of Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair except for the titular Impossible Lair. I never did beat it and stopped trying after only a few attempts. Everything else in the game was great though.
Yeah I'm not going to force myself to finish it. I'll be happy if I do, but I'm not the best at platformers to begin with and I don't want to get that tilted lol
Mostly Baldur's Gate 3. It's really, really well done and it's honestly the first RPG in the CRPG/strategy/D&D style I might actually finish in forever. Unfortunately I just hit Act 3 and it's been crashing a ton on the (re-released) latest patch. Turning down v-sync has helped a bit, but not 100%. Might need to take a little break there and hope for some fixes.
I've also surprisingly gotten into Minecraft on the PlayStation. I've played many times in the past on the PC Java edition, but this time I got it for the kids to try couch co-op style and it's been really neat. And in turn that's got me into playing it with them. It's a bit unfortunate that it's vanilla, but they've made some ok upgrades in the base game, and I don't think the kids will get super deep into it anyway.
I was a huge fan of BG1 and 2 (and the other old infinity engine CRPGs) and also enjoyed their successors (Neverwinter series, Dragon Age, Pillars of Eternity, etc), but the turn based combat in BG3 is causing me to bounce off of it pretty hard.
I understand that it's intended to be closer to the tabletop experience, but having to play as every character turn by turn leaves it feeling distinctly different from that and has me missing the traditional "pause and issue commands" structure where I could be a bit more hands off and combat encounters typically resolved in a minute or less (as opposed to 5-10 minutes here). Not to say that this more tactical style of gameplay is bad, but it isn't what I was hoping for from Baldur's Gate.
On the upside, the role playing aspect is meaty and there are a lot of non-violent solutions to encounters which goes some way towards mitigating the above.
Not the original person you're replying to but I have like 0 experience with tabletop D&D yet find BG3 so much easier to understand than the BG1&2 realtime with pause for the appropriately inverse reasons to why you like realtime. Even with auto pausing after rounds or turns, I just have a really vague sense of when the turns and rounds are happening and lack the confidence in the system that my characters aren't wasting time doing things I don't want them to between pauses. There's a vague sense that I don't have complete control if I'm not constantly pausing to input commands and trying to figure out if/when they happened so I can pause and issue the very specific next thing I want characters to do. I also feel like my party just drops dead in BG1 if I'm not trying to hard nitpick every single turn and action, but I've heard BG1 is just kinda brutal in the opening levels and I never got very far.
I don't know how to put it in precise words, so to speak in metaphor, the BG1 (I haven't touched 2 yet but I understand it's the same) gameplay style kind of feels like I've driven over ice, lost traction, but I have just enough control to sorta stay on the road. I prefer the feeling of exact precision of BG3. I get the full confidence that nobody does anything without me telling them exactly what to do.
Every now and then I get sucked back into League of Legends because they get something right again - Arena's scratching that itch for me, I've been playing more League these last few weeks than in the last year or two. Quick games, little to no scrambling over champions that you want to play, only need one partner to queue with, plenty of builds, the augments add that bit of luck factor that make it a fun discovery, and if you screw up then you're not crazy committed and can just jump back in.
I really wish league had some more game modes. Nexus blitz could have been the thing that could keep casuals around, but tencent refuses to make it a permanent game mode, or even bring it back for a patch or two. Hopefully arena sticks around.
After finally finishing Borderlands 1 (to the point I'm ok with), I started Stardew Valley.
I played Stardew Valley on PS Vita a bit and on Switch Lite for one game year. I have started it this time on Steam Deck and I'm very happy with almost 8 hours of battery life! The game is great, I how relaxed it can be. Or how stressful you can make iflt if you want to do everything and keep up with it. It really is for everyone as everybody will find their own pace of the game
I'm currently in the middle of first summer and I'm already pleased with my progress. I try to do as much as possible in each day, but I'm not stressing over it, actually. Sometimes I catch fish all day long, other times I spend whole day in the mines, some days I just go around town and gift people.
Next game in the line will be Fallout 1.
That's why I really dislike Stardew Valley. I can't play it relaxed, the days are too short. I wake up, do the daily chores, really play for like 5 minutes, then it's nighttime and I have to go back to my bed to save. And on the Switch the saving/loading was awfully slow so my playtime was constantly interrupted by this built-in frustration, which means I tried to do as many things as possible during the day :(
I see what you mean. I kinda take it as a one man competition too, but I don't really stress it out.
I spend the whole day being productive but I don't set daily or seasonal goals. Water the plants, pet the animals and then just decide what to do next. I tend to prioritize over one task though - ie. fishing all day, running with gifts all day etc.
Sometimes I go to sleep even earlier, as early as 8PM.
Right now, Disgaea PC. I bought it on Steam a long time ago and built a powerful "gaming PC" in January, recently I'm using Sunshine and Moonlight to stream games from my PC to my NVIDIA Shield and XBOX One so I can have a lean back experience with the large backlog of games I have, many of which are ports of Japanese console games.
Years ago I played some of the sequels on a PS3; Disgaea PC is the original game ported to PC. I love the character designs, I love the story and sense of humor (e.g. Angel Trainee Flonne is sent to the Netherworld to assassinate the overlord, who is already dead. She's naive so when somebody asks her "Who are you?" she replies "I'm an assassin, nice to meet you." As is the trope in many Japanese stories she starts out as an adversary but joins the party.)
I am a big fan of SRPGs in general but this has some particularly interesting elements like being able to visit the world inside an item to power it up. One thing that is challenging is that most of your party is going to consist of generic characters that you create and many of these have the same appearance of adversary characters and it is very possible to attack your friends or heal your foes so you always do have to watch out.