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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.
I bought Persona 4: Golden pretty much immediately when it released on Steam, ten minutes before its announcement on the PC Gaming Show. I've already played through it before, on the PS Vita. It took me approximately 95 hours to get through without much excess grinding. To quickly note, the PC port is very good. The game looks great for a PS Vita/PS2 game, and they put quite a bit of effort into cleanly translating the game mechanics into mouse and keyboard controls. It's become my preferred way to play the game.
I feel like I could go on about this game forever and not get bored talking about it. I'm not an anime person, especially not high school anime, and I'm not exactly a big JRPG person (though I do like the genre and have played more than most, I'd say) but this game is something else.
I checked it out because I kept hearing rave reviews, and I was interested in an interesting JRPG and I appreciated the SMT series' approach to monster/demon design that is very Eastern in influence. I went in almost entirely blind and it surprised me so much. It's one of those games that I feel transcends its genre and niche and is generally accessible to more people than its initial audience. I don't think Person 3 or even 5 match Persona 4 on this level, even though both of those games have also drawn in a fair number of people to the Persona series themselves. Persona 4, in particular, is just a cut above.
I don't really want to dive into the details of the game too much as it's very plot-heavy and plot-centric, and a lot of the adventure is in following it through as it goes into some wild directions, so I'll just highlight reasons I think this game will appeal to all kinds of different people.
A deep story that delves into some pretty complex themes about self-identity and self-assurance. This isn't a game for children, even though it seems like a super colourful, happy adventure. It opens with gruesome murder after gruesome murder to drive its murder highly supernatural and spiritualistic mystery plot. It's somewhere in the same realm as Twin Peaks in terms of how supernatural and spiritual it gets, though a lot more on the nose with its metaphorical aspects. I'd say this game is aimed perfectly at high school audiences but there's plenty in here for adults to enjoy. It goes very deep into Jungian psychology, introspective notions of being true to yourself for good and for bad, and there is a large importance placed on developing empathy and kindness for those around you. It's a remarkably sweet, kind game but with plenty of nightmare fuel, especially in some of the monster designs.
Amazing sense of style. The Persona games, especially 4 and 5, are just dripping with style. Some of the absolute best design work across any product out there, period. The bright colours, the limited pallette rainbow accents, and the music all come together very well. You'll never get bored of looking at this game.
Music. The music is very, very good. Upbeat, pop tracks alongside some more darker, sinister more orchestral or piano-based pieces you may expect from JRPGs. The pop tracks really stand out and are very catchy, I still find myself humming along to them years later.
Unique JRPG combat mechanics. The SMT series is very much about exploiting weaknesses and futzing with turn orders. It's not as simple as "grind until stronger and then hit them hard" as most JRPGs can be. It's entirely possible to have your party wiped out by low-level enemies that hit you just right throughout the entire SMT series. Your party members all have a limited assortment of skills, an an elemental affinity, due to their Persona while your player character can swap through Personas, and therefore many different spells and abilities, so you also have to plan out your team and approach everytime you go into combat. The game does a great job of easing you into it and it's totally possible to get everything you need from the tooltips alone.
Fantastic cast of characters. Most of this game is basically a visual novel, so you'll be doing a lot of reading while you explore the town and surrounding areas, meeting and talking with people, and developing your relationships with people more. This is game all about creating "Social Links", i.e. you develop relationships with many different kinds of people and grow them. It's not as simple as always checking in with them either, the game expects you to listen to them, understand their perspective, and then engage with them. It's entirely possible to stunt your relationships with others if you're just plain not listening to them and are just going "yeah, yeah, yeah" through all their dialogue. For a game that's about fostering relationships through empathy and patience with yourself and others, these mechanics reinforce the themes beautifully. But the characters are all great too! They each have unique personalities, stories, struggles, and aspirations that you learn more and more about over the course of the game, and there's so much variety to them all. I really felt upset that I wasn't able to max out all my relationships when I first played the game and I'm happy to replay the game now to finish those up, that's how invested I became into the characters.
The Persona fusion system adds a lot of system depth. Persona are basically the mechanic used by the characters to fight in the world, and while all the other characters get the one they are stuck with, your player character is special in that he can have as many as he collects. You can have up to a certain amount at a time that you can cycle through, but the real depth is in the fusion system where you essentially mix and match between them to fuse them into bigger, badder ones. There's a lot of depth to this system and it's crucial to explore and experiment with to truly grow stronger and progress through the game. Like the gameplay, this is also introduced to you gradually and competently enough that you'll have a great handle on how it works by the time you need to let loose with it.
If you have even a passing interest in any one of JRPGs, anime, visual novels, or a Pokemon/Monster Rancher/SMT style approach to collecting creatures that you engage in combat with, then I think you should give this game a shot. The only caveat is that it takes quite a while before the game opens up to you because of its gradual, slow-paced opening and visual novel intro. I'd say it takes 3 hours before you may decide if the game is intriguing enough with how its formatted to continue, but maybe 6 hours to start getting a glimpse on whether you'll enjoy the story or not. But, also, I'd be amazed if anyone got 10 hours or so into the game and found that it offered nothing for them.
It's been a while since I've responded to one of these threads, so I have more to talk about.
Mirror's Edge I picked up for cheap on sale. It's a first-person platforming/parkour game. I really enjoyed playing through, and while the story didn't really interest me that much, moving around was so much fun. The game still looks pretty good for a game released in 2008, although the character models have aged less well. Overall a pretty fun game, a little shorter than I would have liked. I'm considering playing the sequel, Mirror's Edge Catalyst, although the reviews aren't as good.
I'm almost finished with Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I've never played a stealth game before, so I've failed to remain... stealthy most of the time. The setting is almost cyberpunk, although it kind of seems to be more of a transition into a cyberpunk setting. The story is pretty interesting, the augmentations are fun to mess around with, the stun gun is objectively overpowered, and for some reason, the game lags pretty bad on staircases. The two boss fights I've done so far were garbage, since they were basically bullet sponges, which was a serious deviation from the rest of the game basically allowing you to approach a situation however you wanted. Also a pretty fun game, definitely would recommend.
I played Steel Division 2, a WWII RTS game. I'm pretty bad at it, as I generally have no idea what some of the units do, tend to lose track of the ones I have, and fail at aerial combat, but I've been having a lot of fun despite the pretty steep learning curve. I've been using decks that I've found online, but I might take a crack at building one of my own soon. The graphics are also pretty good, and it's fun to zoom in and look at the detailing on the units, although I tend to lose units while I'm doing that :p
I continue to spend far too much time with Europa Universalis IV. A new patch came out, wiping a pretty good France game I had going. I haven't bought the new Emperor DLC yet (or most of the DLC for that matter; it's pretty pricey), so I know I'm missing out on some of the new HRE mechanics. Even without the DLC, the HRE seems... pretty broken. I've seen the Papal States join the HRE 3/4 times, and playing as Austria, free Imperial Authority is given every time a new country joins the HRE, so it's pretty easy to force other countries to release new ones, who then join the HRE. I've seen guides where it's possible to Revoke Priviligia within the first 20-30 years of the game, so it definitely needs some balancing.
Yeah, the Deus Ex: HR boss fights were universally panned for turning all the choices into "how good can I shoot this dude?"
The development those boss battles was outsourced from Eidos Montréal ; that explains why they're so out of touch if the main game (if your style of play is stealth /talk).
And after I dumped all my points into invisibility...
IIRC the "Director's Cut" made them non-mandatory.
I liked it. It repeats the same pattern from the first one: you can ignore the story and skip all the cutscenes and just enjoy the running. It's hurt by the "it's an open world, gotta have skill trees" but you level up pretty fast and unlocking all of the important ones is fairly quick, the rest will follow. The other pain point is that you'll keep running around the same bridges that connect the areas a lot. Still, I like the atmosphere and the OST by Solar Fields is amazing, as always.
It is, it's a prequel to the first Deus Ex where full body augmentations already were commonplace, kind of "here's how it all began" story
They added alternative methods to beat the bosses in Director's Cut, but it's still looks very much out of place
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided - Been liking this so far. You play as a bionically enhanced soldier/agent (the series uses the term "augmented"), being able to do things like scan surroundings, jump high, turn on cloaking (a-la Predator), silence your footsteps, and much more. Decent story line, and several side missions one can choose to do in a semi non-linear order. An alright character development system (upgrades, etc.).
Exiled Kingdoms - An indie isometric single-player RPG. The script writing is a bit rough (you can tell they didn't have a native English proofreader on staff), but the game's price is so low, I can forgive that. It's advertised as open world, but the main quest line feels mostly linear to me. The combat system also feels a little too deterministic, as well, because there is essentially no such thing as missing (your swing or shot), so every encounter mostly comes down to which side has better stats so as to win by whittling down the other side's HP to 0 first. Very little room for victory by luck, and the mechanics do not allow you, as the player, to use any skill or finger agility. You just walk up to an enemy, and spam your combat buttons, and then trust that your victory calculations beforehand were correct. Nevertheless, I could recommend this as a decent RPG to pass time with due to the low price. Just keep expectations tempered, as this is no AAA title.
I have been playing two games:
Command and Conquer - Remastered: This game is so hard but I get so much satisfaction out of completing levels in this game. I had played the N64 version of C&C long ago, so this game brought a good amount of nostalgia to me. I'm slowly playing it and learning the nuances of the game but so far its good.
Sea of Thieves: My friends got me into this. There is a good foundation to this game but there isn't too much to do. Its beautiful, and makes me want to be out on the sea. You get money for completing things and selling things, but money is only bought on cosmetics. Each time you play the game, your inventory and such restarts as well, outside of the money that you have collected. So I can't spend some times going back to a base and stocking up on ammo and wood in my off time, to help me and my friends focus solely on missions when we play together. We do get into some intense ship battles which are ton of fun.
I've picked up Europa Universalis 4 again after a year and a half away, since the Emperor expansion was released.
It's good. It's still the same beast, with a huge amount of information within which you could drown, but there's been a huge amount of rough edges worn off of it. A lot of fiddly micromanagement has gone away, with the Estates having been overhauled so you're no longer dealing with them on a province by province level. It might actually be fun to play a large nation now, as it's much less necessary to manage individual provinces. If, like me, you liked the game but grew tired off the fiddly nature of it as your country grew, this expansion really turns the game around. There's so much streamlining of play without a loss of interesting complexity.
I've been playing The Sims 4, and slowly maxing out all of my Sims' career levels and skills. I like to tell myself that I'm planting the seeds of essential survival, combat and governing skills for the coming Simpocalypse. It's really just nice to be able to play a game that lets you actually play the game rather than worry about seasons, grind, dailies, weeklies and all that other foetid anal wind. Having said that, though, a recent redesign has given the storefront and its pricy DLC centre placement. Annoying, and also pointless, as the purchase buttons don't work.
So far I've been playing with aging off, and I've never really followed any of the stories in previous instalments. Is there any great benefit to playing with it on? It seems as the the neighbourhood would slowly depopulate over time unless a potentially infinite number of offspring are randomly generated in the surrounding families.
Overwatch....
...I know I'm late to the game, but I didn't care for it when it came out and don't care for competitive shooters in general. I've been itching for a low-stakes, multiplayer, quick-dose experience for some time and Overwatch is filling in that gap just fine for now.
I really shouldn't be getting into it as I have a huge backlog to tackle, but... it's fun, and imo time enjoyed is not time wasted.
I don’t know what people’s general opinion is about this game, but from what I can tell people are positive and really like it. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same. Persona 3 Fes has been one of the most disappointing games I have ever played. And after 90 hours I just never want to play this game ever again. To kick things off, let’s do some of the stuff I did like. Quick note about playthrough, after about 10 hours I ended up using a guide to help my playthrough it. Also, this is the first persona game I have ever played.
Positives
Story:
Yeah, this was a major positive of this game. The story starts off slow and builds up nicely over the course of the game. With a great final conclusion to wrap up the game. I will mention though that I didn’t play The Answer, for reasons I will mention later. Instead I ended up just watching the cutscenes on YouTube.
Characters:
This is the point that I feel the game really shines, beating out even the story by a longshot. Growing closer to your social link’s and the members of SEEs is a very convincing progress. This is one of those things that I think the game being so spread out over many days helps with. It just feels like you have been with these characters and seeing them grow forever. But it isn’t without flaws, some of the character growth feels really super sudden. And switching between social link story and SEEs story sometimes leads to really odd disconnects like you are actually dealing with two completely different people. The romance in this game is also extremely poor, you just talk to them for a dozen times or so till they get maxed out and move onto another romantic partner. It never did feel like I was romantically involved with them, and instead was just doing a normal social link.
Negatives
Choices:
Everything here is the stuff in general that you can choose between different options to give you different results. The issue I have is that many of the options are incredibly vague. Many times, I had no clue which option was the correct one and had to resort to the guide. While this isn’t as big as an issue with social link choices that I can generally figure it out. But the school lesson choices are completely random guesses without a guide. I don’t have a clue how anybody is supposed to figure out which choices to make because they are so obtuse or stupid.
Dialogue:
While I can praise parts of the dialogue without any trouble. Other parts though are just horrendous. You end up with five-minute sections of time when you have nothing to do but push the continue button. And none of that five-minute section contains any useful information at all, and it just random filler text. Normally I wouldn’t have an issue with it, after all this a long jrpg so lengthy bits of dialogue are to be expected. But normally lengthy bits of dialogue in jrpgs don’t put me to compete sleep or make me wonder if any of this is adding anything at all to my experience. If I didn’t read this dialogue, I wouldn’t have missed out on anything at all. On the positive side of things, when you have a conversation with a SEEs member or some social links you really care about what is being said. Important bits of information are revealed, and you want to read more of it. So overall it is a very mixed bag, half the time it is good, but the other half is just terrible.
Length:
It took me a tad under 90 hours to finish The Journey, and by the end I was just annoyed with the entire experience. You get tiny 2-hour patches full of story and cutscenes and impactful moments, but those stretches are surrounded by the worst grinding and going through the routines I’ve ever had. I would end up grinding in the Tartarus for 10 hours at times to be prepared to beat the floor bosses and full-moon bosses. Then spend another 2 hours just running through social links or literally doing nothing but going straight to bed to just get to the good story bits as quick as possible. It all just really awkward, and I think it actually harms the story. Because by the time you reach the story you are just kinda tired of dealing with the rest of the slog to get to this point. This becomes a massive issue by the very end of the game, because I wasn’t excited to see the final conclusion but instead was tired of everything, I had to deal with to get to this point.
Combat:
Oh man, oh man, oh man. This was such a terrible game to actually play. The combat wasn’t something I could possibly enjoy because I was constantly frustrated with the AI. I don’t think I could find AI as bad as it was in this game, they actively ignore my strategies and work against me to win fights. They will heal themselves instead of killing the enemy, and then die because they didn’t kill the enemy and the enemy AI exploited their weakness. Now for the non-AI related complaints. This game becomes a matter of just spamming the same move that exploits the enemy weakness over and over. But when the enemy doesn’t have a weakness, it just becomes an incredibly boring slog.
The moment I really felt this slog was the final boss battle. A 14-phase boss battle, with a final phase containing 6000 health and no weaknesses. To make things even worse he will randomly use moves that repel all attacks, but because your AI companions don’t listen to you, they attack regardless and periodically kill themselves. In the end it took nearly an hour and a half to finish the boss battle, and if I didn’t abuse the emulators save states, I would have to do the battle all over again because of an instant death attack.
Personas:
Man, I really hated the persona system. Or at least I hated the fusion portion of the system. It gives you no guidance at all, no comparison feature, no way to figure out what to combine to get a desired result at all. It becomes a complete guessing game if you add you combine personas you will get the correct moves that you are looking for. It is really the worst system of its kind I think I’ve ever used.
Exploration:
Both the Tartarus, and the overworld map are absolutely terrible. Large sections of the overworld map have just a tiny sliver of content, and you really only have to go to them on random occasion for 5 minutes and then you can safely forget it exists. Other sections have content but have content for just 2 social links and then you can ignore it once they are done. They also don’t have any minigames or collectables at all and the map largely stays the static until the very end, so I never had a reason to explore the map after the first time looking around.
Meanwhile in the Tartarus, you go through the exact same floors over and over again. With the only change between blocks being a difference in textures. But overall, the layout remains unchanged completely for 250 levels. And man after 250 levels, I am completely tired of seeing the same floors over and over. You quickly become good at skipping through the floor as fast as possible and noticing the way the floors get generated to just get up as fast as possible.
Emulation:
Now I just want to give a quick mention of how I played the game. I played Persona 3 Fes on the PCSX2 emulator with the resolution upscaled to 4k and the widescreen mod. And playing through the game upscaled that much is an absolutely amazing experience. Sure, the textures are still really low quality and unchanged, but the actual models look incredible. The models clean up really well and actually start looking like something a bit more modern. Meanwhile the widescreen mod is incredible, it works really well without any major issues. Some minor things are you notice characters moonwalking when they were meant to be off screen during in-game cutscenes. On occasion I also noticed some texture glitches here and there, where some texture would randomly flash for a second and then stop. It happened so infrequently and randomly I never even remembered to record it happening. Also, I noticed if I paused the game during an in-game cutscene, sometimes it would have trouble continuing and might glitch out a bit and try to break. But despite this, never once doing the 90 hours did it ever actually crash. The save state system worked perfectly, and I was able to maintain a perfect solid framerate for the entire game without trouble. Do wish I could do something about the terrible animated cutscenes via the emulator, but oh well.
Final Thoughts:
I wanted to love this game. I really wanted to love this game. I saw the big review numbers, saw people just falling in love with the game, and figured I would like it also. But by the end I just wanted to be done with it completely. I didn’t fall in love with this game, I grew to hate every extra hour I had to spend grinding levels in it. And now I never want to pick it up again, and start questioning if I want to play Persona 4 Golden. Will I just end up being burned by good reviews in a game I end up not liking?
I just finished Gone Home about half an hour ago, and I am feeling things. Amazing how well that game can tell a love story with a few pages, voice recordings, and a few punk tapes scattered around.
I also recently did the Titanfall 2 campaign because of the huge praise I’ve seen it get. Frankly, all the parts that really impressed me were mechanical, i.e. movement and gunplay. One standout mission let you flash back and forth in time, meaning you might have two fights at the SAME TIME. That was cool as hell.
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is great too. <3 Walking Sims.
And What Remains of Edith Finch!
And The Stanley Parable, which is honestly my fav of the bunch! Although it's a lot less serious than the rest. :P
LOL yeah that is a pretty apt description. It's a really brilliant game, and the thing that blows my mind about it is just how much the creator seemed to think of practically everything. E.g.
mild spoilers
At one point I thought I was super clever by noticing a bounding box issue that allowed me to semi-glitch my way on top of a desk and towards a window. When I finally reached the window, I was able to walk through it and fell outside it into a white room... and guess what? The f'n narrator said something like "Stanley thought he had broken the map, until he realized it was part of the game's design all along"!
And another was when I decided to sit in a closet for 30min to see if the game would notice. It did, and there was long series of funny narrations to go along with it, as well as a followup later. :P
I really liked Firewatch and its atmosphere, but it seemed to kind of fall apart right at the end (seems to be a common complaint). So far, most of the games I've played in this genre are appealing - The Stanley Parable, The Beginner's Guide, and a few others, but there's something about Gone Home and its characters that really hit home (haha) with me.
What Remains of Edith Finch is in my library, too, and I'm looking forward to playing that one soon.
I started playing Minecraft again. What the hell is this game? It's radically different from when I used to play. They've added crazy things like raiders, clamped difficulty (the difficulty of a chunk ramps up to a set point). I was never much of a survival player, but it's completely different than I remember it.
I quit playing around the time Microsoft bought Mojang, and played a little bit occasionally. Sticking with a save for a while, I'm really seeing the ramp in difficulty. It's interesting that even in the Java version they're trying to put an emphasis on adventure, moving around and the game rather than the building on its own. It feels radically different, but is a good amount of fun, even if it's frustrating to constantly die in caves.
I will say. The additions are good. But I like the stuff Notch added more. The couple really good recent things that have been added are the honeyblocks, the sea biomes, and the new village spawn mechanisms.
Notch had this thing where he was able to add something in, like creepers, which were good for the adventure players - killing those things, and the builder players - creeper farms.
The new updates are heavily skewed adventure in my opinion, but I like the way the biomes are being added for the nether and caves. My dream is that they get rid of bedrock and make the world bottomless once they get the 3D biome system fully in place.
I finally finished Control. It's a good game. Wouldn't call it great, but I enjoyed my time with it. Now onto the DLC
Blood Bowl 2: Turn based tactical football might seem like a good idea for a tabletop game, all I know is it makes for a terrible video game. Games Workshop's entire catalog of video and tabletop games has been a disappointment to me. The lore behind it can suck you in until you get deep enough and realize that it's so often contradictory that nearly everything you've read is useless. Their fans however are some of the greatest model artists I've ever seen. As a BattleTech nerd, it is a field that the BattleTech community is sorely lacking.
Satellite Reign: Turn off bloom. Not sure why every cyberpunk game thinks that a dystopian future is one where there's vaseline spread on the camera lens so everything glows blindingly, but they certainly took it to heart here. Controls are on the unweidly/unintuitive side. Pathfinding of your characters is terrible. You can have all of them grouped together, issue a command for all of them to go to a location, and they will split up. AI of your characters is awful because if they're being shot at, they won't shoot back. Of course all of that is pointless if you ever actually get into a fight. While not a stealth game in name, it certainly seems that is the way they want you to play it (even if you are allowed things like miniguns and rocket launchers in said "stealth" game) as if you try to get in a fight your FPS drops to nothing. When this happened I went searching only to find the game is built on Unity. Take a game engine that has laughable (read: non-existent) multi-threading, add in an unoptomized game, and you get something bound to a single core of your CPU that maxes out and drops you to 3 frames per second. Oh well, onto the next game.
Dungeon of the Endless: Figured the tower defense aspect would be minor or could be turned off. Figured wrong. I hate tower defense.
Airheart, Tales of Broken Wings: Cute dieselpunk airplane roguelike. Plane design gives me flashbacks to Crimson Skies which needs a reboot/sequel/remake more than any other game I can think of. The pseudo-punk music during the unskippabale credits was awful though.
Hard disagree there, as my nearly 400 hours in Blood Bowl 2 can attest to. :P I also used to moderate for a BB Twitch streamer, and even spent several months creating a Compendium + BB Team planner in google spreadsheets (before getting distracted with something else, as I inevitably always seem to do):
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SJJV5hBTeI6vYAKK9nO3jc82yAp3RA_AXodXWxi20Ws/edit#gid=736458847
IMO it's a great game, with an awesome (and still reasonably active) community.
I mean, it literally says "Dungeon of the Endless is a Rogue-Like Dungeon-Defense game" in the first paragraph of game description on Steam
I started up Fallout 4 again using the Horizon mod (which I've used before) and I had forgotten how much of a microcrafting slog the mod is. Doing the simplest of things like getting water and food is overly complicated.
For example you can find plants in the world but you can't just plant them in your settlements noooo you have to domesticate them first using bones and compost. Getting bones isn't too bad but you get compost by putting rotten meat into a compost. And the process of getting compost is slow and unintuitive. I ended up using the console to give myself a bunch of corn, razorgran, mutfruit and the like.
I did the first Brotherhood of Steel quest, the one where you go to ArcJet systems and the synths there were brutal! I somehow managed to survive although Danse got downed numerous times despite his power armour.
The needless complexity of Horizon and that one quest may make me stop playing Fallout 4 again. An element of grind is okay, especially in survival mode but not this extent.
I've been sampling random games from the massive itch.io Racial Justice Bundle, which I've posted about here.
Battle Chasers: Nightwar: I moved on from this, and I can't quite put my finger on why. All of the pieces were there and I liked what I played, but it also just seemed like what you see of the game in the first couple of hours is what you'll get for the rest of its lengthy playtime. It's been a while since I've played a JRPG so maybe that's just part of the genre, or maybe this one in particular isn't the strongest (as some of the reviews point out).
Aaero: I'm one of presumably very few people who actually played Rez back on the Dreamcast, going so far as to buy a sketchy copy of it off of eBay (since I'm in the US and it was never released here). I had to wait weeks for it to arrive, all the while hoping I hadn't spent all that money on a pirated copy (no fear -- it was real!). Upon getting it, Rez was one of my very favorite games. I've played through the campaign many a time, and I downloaded not just the official soundtracks for the game, but also recordings people made of the level audio while playing, because all of the added sound effects make the experience much richer.
Clearly a love letter to Rez, Aaero features very similar gameplay (and a couple of deliberate nods, including near-identical targeting sound effects and a "Fear is the mind killer" achievement). It mixes Rez's on-rails enemy targeting and movement with "ribbons" that you have to follow for sections of songs that match melodies or instrumental lines. It's not perfect, and it can be frustrating in places, but I thoroughly enjoyed my time with it. It actually gave me an itch to play Rez again, so I'll probably be picking up the remaster of it in the upcoming Steam sale.
Also, while I can't vouch for this experience personally, both Rez and Aaero seem to me to be tailor-made for people who enjoy mood-altering substances. Highly recommended (pun intended) for those of you who partake.
BallisticNG: Much as Aaero was a love-letter to Rez, BallisticNG is a love-letter to the Wipeout series. The game in fact looks like a remastered version of the game's 90s entries. It's high-fidelity, low-detail style makes the game look like what Wipeout XL felt like back in the day. Handling, as is the case with any futuristic racer, is tough but rewarding, though this one has a way lower skill floor than, say, Redout. The game is very well-made and looks very feature complete (tons of options in the options menu). I've only put an hour in so far, but I'm going to keep coming back to it. Very highly recommended if you like futuristic racers, or the Wipeout series in particular.
Moonlighter: Let's go for a hat-trick on retro comparisons: Moonlighter feels like an updated version of Recettear, though it is less a direct nod like the others I've mentioned and more of an "inspired by" or an "of the same idea" game. You adventure in dungeons to gather loot, and then you sell that loot at your shop to fund better gear, other shops in town, and improvements for your own store.
The game is surprisingly chill, which I greatly appreciate. On any given run, you really only risk the items you've collected, and even then you can save a handful of them if you die. You're not under the gun to pay off any loans or meet any deadlines, so the game moves at the pace you want it too. I thought it was going to be a huge grind, but the rewards scale up pretty quickly. I'm nearly 10 hours into the game so far and am maybe halfway through it, and I've been taking my sweet time. Someone better and more rushed than me could get through things far quicker.
It's a perfect background game for audiobooks, so I've been listening to those while playing along.
First, you should absolutely get Rez Infinite as soon as possible. It has full VR support, and playing Rez in VR is amazing (and the new area they added is excellent too). You should definitely also strongly consider Tetris Effect—it's a tetris game made by Tetsuya Mizuguchi (the creator of Rez), and is also an incredible VR (and non-VR) experience.
I also enjoyed Aaero quite a bit when I played it (in May 2017), but I think it's unfortunately fundamentally flawed in a few ways, which mostly show up on the higher difficulties. I wrote a fairly long criticism/review of it that I never ended up posting publicly because I felt bad about being so negative toward a game I liked. I'll just drop it in here, and maybe it will be interesting to you or someone else (note that all the numbers/stats will be way out of date now, though I'd be surprised if the percentages changed much):
My Aaero Review/Criticism
Aaero is a game that starts out excellent, but unfortunately the higher difficulty levels really expose the flaws in its mechanics and twist the overall experience more towards frustration than fun. I still recommend it because the initial playthrough is truly great, but after that point it gets progressively weaker due to a few issues.
Before getting into detail, I want to clarify that my complaints aren't due to being stuck or not understanding the game - I have 100% completed it, which includes 5 stars on every song on all difficulties. As of right now, there are only 25 other people on Steam that have even completed the hardest difficulty, so there are very few people that have put a similar effort into it. (The fact that so few people have completed such a short game says something on its own, but I'll get into that later)
To start with a general description, Aaero is basically a rhythm/music-based rail shooter. It has two primary mechanics: following "ribbons" with your ship (controlled by the left stick) and locking onto and shooting enemies/bullets (aiming with the right stick), with the shooting mechanic being very similar to Rez and Child of Eden.
The ribbon-following mechanic is the more rhythm-game-like of the two, with the ribbons being laid out to sync up with the music. Keeping your ship on the ribbon generally feels great and works very well with the game's excellent (licensed) soundtrack.
The initial difficulty level (Normal) focuses mostly on the ribbons, and while shooting is definitely necessary, none of it is very difficult or dangerous. Since mistakes on the ribbon only result in losing your multiplier and not taking damage (unless you also run into one of the rare obstacles), clearing the levels on Normal is mostly not difficult, though getting 5 stars on some may take a few attempts.
The game consists of 3 sets of 5 songs each (15 total), with the last level of each set being a boss level that plays slightly differently than the others. Overall, the levels all look and feel great and don't get repetitive, with most levels having something unique. The soundtrack is all high-quality music that works well with the game style.
My only disappointment with the initial playthrough on Normal was that the final boss feels anticlimactic. The song is one of the shortest in the game and ends suddenly, so the last level leaves off with a feeling closer to incompleteness than triumph. The first boss (sandworm) is a far better level overall, so it's a bit disappointing that the final boss isn't able to live up to the first one.
After killing the last boss on Normal, the second difficulty (Advanced) should be available. It only takes about 2 hours of playtime to reach this point, so my expectation was that things were only just getting started, and the higher difficulties would continue building on this foundation. However, as mentioned, this is actually where the cracks in the game start becoming more obvious.
In most rhythm games, the lower difficulties are kind of a simplified version of the "real" game present in the higher ones. This tends to mean that as you work your way up through the difficulties, the game feels like it's "filling out". The complexity increases, but the feel of the levels is usually even better than the easier versions, since the highest difficulty is the "true" version of the song, and easier ones have aspects simplified or removed.
In Aaero it feels more like the opposite approach was taken, where the Normal version of each song is the primary version, and the harder versions were created by mostly just adding extra things to shoot. I'm fairly sure that the ribbon tracks are exactly the same on all difficulties, and the enemy layout/behavior is the only difference. This wouldn't necessarily be a bad approach, but the game's shooting mechanic is fairly weak and has multiple issues, so the additional emphasis on it mostly just hurts the feeling of the game.
The transition from Advanced to the highest difficulty (Master) is even worse, with the only significant noticeable difference being that your ship can't take any damage instead of two. This requires near perfection on all shooting sections since missing a single bullet will cause you to fail the song. Effectively, this takes the most frustrating aspect of the game and cranks it to maximum, without adding any other additional complexity.
Before explaining more about the specific issues with the higher difficulties, I'd like to digress for a bit to point out some statistics (which are easily available due to the presence of leaderboards and granular achievements).
At the time of writing, there are 1659 scores on the leaderboard for the first song on Normal, so that gives a baseline for number of people that have started playing the game. There are 466 scores on the last song of Normal, so about 28% of the people that started the game ended up finishing Normal difficulty.
Past that, 292 people have finished the first song on Advanced. However, by the time you get to the last song of Advanced, there are only 44 scores on the leaderboard. This is only 15% of the people that started Advanced, and only 3% of the total players. I'm certainly not an expert, but it's my general experience that while it's totally normal to see a large percentage of people start a game but not finish it, it's very unusual to see a dropoff this extreme at a "deeper" stage. By simply starting the Advanced difficulty, the player is showing that they have an interest in getting deeper into the game, but 85% of those people lose that interest before even finishing the second difficulty (which should only take a few more hours).
As a (not very fair) comparison, 36 people have started the hardest difficulty (Master), with 26 people finishing it. Even with Master being more difficult than Advanced, it still only shows a dropoff rate of 28%, compared to Advanced's 85%. A dropoff rate that large should be seen as a glaring indicator that there are serious issues with Advanced that cause a lot of already more-invested players to give up.
Getting back to the game itself, I believe these issues are mostly centered around the shooting mechanic. It feels fine on Normal, but the introduction of more enemies and especially far more bullets (which you must shoot down or take damage) on Advanced makes its flaws apparent.
First, locking onto specific targets often doesn't feel reliable. This isn't important in most sections, but makes all the difference when you need to shoot down bullets quickly while there are also other targets in the same area. Combined with the fact that it's also difficult to tell whether you've locked onto a bullet or not, the moment of hesitation can cause you to take damage (and need to start over, in Master). An easy place to notice this issue is near the beginning of Ill Still, where one of the first rings of bullets will place one bullet very close to a secret in the background. Sweeping the right stick around the circle will often end up locking on to the secret instead of the bullet, and cause you to get hit.
Getting hit is also often especially painful because the timing tends to work out so that you "respawn" just in time to get hit by the next bullets, without enough time to shoot any down. So if you're unfortunate enough to get hit in a section with several successive bullets, you'll most likely end up taking two or three damage instead of just one. A small adjustment to the respawning timing/behavior could improve this, and significantly reduce how frustrating this feels.
On the higher difficulties it also becomes much more important to time your shots perfectly, which causes them to land instantly instead of having some in-flight time. This mechanic is never actually explained by the game, but it requires you to fire slightly before a beat in the song. I understand the reason the timing was implemented like this (they want the shots to hit on the beat, so can't wait until it's already that time to see if the player shoots or not), but the end result doesn't work very well. The result is a rhythm game where shooting on the beat is the absolute worst timing. This is extremely unintuitive and just doesn't feel right. I think this has a pretty negative impact on the feel of the game, but I'm honestly not sure how it could be addressed, it's a really tricky problem.
That's a really great rundown of Aaero, and it makes me really glad I didn't try the harder difficulties. I played through on normal and then stopped. Like you, I found the targeting mechanics to be a bit frustrating in places, so I imagine the harder difficulties would definitely kill my enjoyment of the game.
As for Rez Infinite, I'd love to play it in VR, but it looks like getting it running on the Quest is probably more trouble than its worth. Tetris Effect on the other hand is native, and I had no idea that Mizuguchi was behind that! I might pick that up soon, as I'm starting to get the itch to play something in VR besides Beat Saber.
Oh right, Quest. Is your PC powerful enough to use the Oculus Link system to be able to play non-Quest games?
Either way, absolutely recommend Tetris Effect. I played the "standard" VR version and haven't seen anything specifically about the Quest version of it, but I assume they managed to get it working pretty well.
It looks like the living room PC I got recently is powerful enough, but I'd need a really long cord to be able to have it reach my play area to the point that it's probably more trouble than it's worth. Rez Infinite is available natively on the Rift, so maybe a Quest port might be happening at some point in the future? Maybe? Hopefully?
That said, even if I can't play it in VR, I'm still going to pick it up. I'll still love a non-VR playthrough for the nostalgia factor alone.
I just started playing fallout 4 as I found it in my collection, must have got it free at some point. I really like if it’s a bit confusing for someone new to the series but I’m starting to get the hang of it
Destiny 2 - I'm back on my bullshit again.
Okay, I guess that's not all. I left off at some point mid season 8 and I'm back now in season 11. I'm doing the seasonal stuff. I'm cleaning up some Shadowkeep quests. But I usually hit a motivation wall once I get near the power level limits for a solo player. I've put another half dozen hours in here and I might be reaching the limit again. I'm not the person to run the same missions/strikes/bounties forever, and I'm running out of unique stuff to do. Might run some crucible and gambit because I've been itching for some low-commitment multiplayer. And of course I'm going to re-up for Beyond Light.
Jackbox Party Pack 6: Press the Button - I didn't necessarily play this so much as observe as I played host. For a second time, I ran a "virtual fun" event for my work team and hosted two rounds of Press the Button. The aliens won both games, but they almost got ejected in the second one. A failed vote saved them. This is the same formula as Mafia or Werewolf, except codified in minigames. The short amount of time to identify the aliens was a real pressure cooker. Scheduled another event for this Friday because the players had so much fun.
Right there with you for D2. Almost reaching the limit, left for awhile and back, and have mainly just been doing Crucible for that sweet mindless low-commitment multiplayer. I do have a tonne of missions, but just haven't had thay jolt to do then.
It's really incredible to me how much combined time I've spend in Destiny between the two games and three platforms (PS3 -> Xbox One -> PC) but Bungie knows how to make a fun shooter. It's like a comfort food game. If I haven't played it in six months, I can go back and play some more. It'll be slightly different but it's still Destiny.
That was precisely my reasoning as to why I love Destiny in this thread. Always changing, but always Destiny.
(i posted this elsewhere also) Champions of Regnum This is an old school RvR open pvp mmorpg in a crisp full 3D gfx style. It's a heavy constant war RvR game across a large map, and its not just a case of running around capping forts. It's a case of large scale battles at each fort. I like it because it is unpredictable because the content is all generated by players. It offers excellent endgame value, that i feel beats its peers such as GW2, DAOC and Return for Reckoning. I feel it is the best value in terms of time and money, RvR mmorpg in the market today. Also, the game has a really unique strong art-style, thematically drawn from latin America. This is really unique amongst mmos--- so I feel when I visit the game, that I am suddenly in a small part of South America.
TW Warhammer 2. I dont like it. I played WH1 for about 5 hours and disliked it. Didnt consider WH2 until recently when i went through a WH reading kick, mostly 40k but still warhammer and it gave me the itch to play and i was told WH2 was a massive upgrade from WH1. They are beautiful but boringly simple and i cant be fussed with micro-ing mages and other magic things. There is such weight given to general units that they make everything else secondary. The one battle i lost was due to my garrison units being able to kill a Pirate general. He was literally the only guy on the enemy to survive and 700 archers, spearmen and horsemen couldnt kill him so i lost a settlement. Sieges are terrible. Formations have been removed. The campaign is even more simplified, at least there is visual variety in battles. Building consists of picking things you can build up to tier 3 in minor settlements and picking things that go up to tier 5 in major settlements, nice big warnings so you dont double build or try building a 5 tier thing in a 3 tier settlement. Nothing visually upgrades Ive had no problems managing happiness or the different types of corruption. I confederated with an empire that was bigger than me by spending influence. Two turns later and i doubled the size of my empire. Meh all round.
It sounds like the Total War series in general won't appeal to you. The improvements of TWWH2 are basically found in the esotericism of the systems from that level, there aren't any major changes that overhaul the game entirely. Sieges are basically the big weakness of all TW games, and the campaign map and building function is exactly as you describe throughout the entire series.
I like the Total War series in general, but dislike the Warhammer ones largely due to the focus on super-soldiers in each army.
I prefer the regular Total War games where your "hero" units are only slightly better than regular units and mostly are good for the buffs to morale and battlefield effects, like faster march speed or replenishment rates. And the campaign level stuff in the Warhammer games has been pretty weak over the other stuff they mentioned as well.
I still maintain Shogun 2 is the best Total War game yet. I haven't played Rome 2, but heard it had some big issues.
Shogun 2 is the closest to a perfect TW game. Everything just "works", the art, sound, battles, etc. all combined to make a fantastic experience. Rome 2 is really fun. It was a mess at launch, they tried a lot of new things and promised the world (though i personally had no major problems) and so it took them a while to fix but now its great.
I think Attila is the most underrated game. It's similar to Shogun in the sense it has a theme, if you dont like the theme i can imagine hating the game but if you like the dystopic, the world ending feeling its great. My game as the western roman empire is one of my fondest gaming memories.
I enjoy the TW games and have experience with the going back to the early days. Warhammer feels like they have simplified everything other than unit variety which they kind of neutered by focusing on OP Generals and Heroes. It's a tired argument at this point but i so want to like the warhammer games, especially after reading books set in the Warhammer universe but after buying both i just don't, which is a shame
IMO, the Warhammer universe would work best with an XCom style game. That model has high stakes strategic decisions and leaves room for using cool abilities and OP command units.
The RTS attempt ended up being Warcraft/Starcraft, which are cool in their own right but evolved into feeling very different. And the Total War series is more about grand strategy and large armies rather than battlefield strategy the way the tabletop games are. They don’t leave room for the larger than life heroes that the Warhammer worlds revolve around.
The Total War series, to me, always worked best with a focus on the large scale geopolitics. If you’re playing it right the majority of your battles should have you hopelessly wrecking whoever you go up against, and the big battles you do have end up being dramatic and decisive. That’s where the drama and excitement come from, the tension of your grand plans may or may not work out based on a cavalry charge, or you skirmishes holding a line. It doesn’t work as well with super units like Warhammer focuses on.
I'm playing a decent bit of Day of Defeat Source these days. It's an oldie but a goodie, and the people who play are all pretty mature and willing to have fun with it. I laugh my ass off most of the time just fragging and shooting the shit with people I'll never meet in real life.