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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.
After playing Deltarune, I decided I want to play another RPG. After hearing about how great Earthbound is for years and knowing that it inspired some of my favorite games I decided to finally play Earthbound, to experience it for myself. I already played quite a bit in 3 days, and man it really does get weird.
When I started playing I was really surprised how difficult the combat is, I guess this is how RPGs used to be. The only "old" rpgs I played before were some of the Pokemon games and these definitely weren't hard, probably because they were mostly focused on being for children. But Earthbound is probably intended for not young children, especially considering the themes in the game. I can't believe Nintendo published a game that seems to reference drugs everywhere! After I got through the early game and figured out what is happening a bit it got a lot easier and where I am now I didn't have too much trouble with the combat.
I am enjoying it so far. The humor got some chuckles out of me. Some of the dungeons get really tedious. A few of the mechanics are really clever -- the instant wins for easy enemies, the rolling health counters. Not having to worry about money is kind of cool too. Grinding also isn't necessary at all which is good, maybe because I have to wander around quite a lot not knowing where to go, meaning I kill a lot of extra enemies. The part that I hated the most was a mine where I had to find 5 moles, which I had to go through like thrice to do it. I actually kind of wish I looked up a map on a wiki, even though I said to myself that I won't use any help unless I get really stuck, cause it was kind of annoying. I wish the enemies didn't respawn at all after getting killed a lot of times, or maybe the instant win worked on them afterwards or ran away, or something.
It is interesting how you don't really know what you are supposed to do at all at some parts. Most of the time I am able to figure it out and there is also the hint system. I think I got stuck somewhere anyways once, and looked at a walkthrough to figure out what to do next, though I no longer remember where.
Looking forward to finishing the game. It seems like it keeps getting better so far.
I finished Earthbound! It was a great time. (Some spoilers ahead for a 1995 game.) It took me embarrassingly long to figure out the Giygas fight. But when I got it it was very cool. On my first try everyone except the MC died, had no revives left and I just kept smacking the boss with the MC for a long time, wondering why the boss isn't dying haha. Some of the parts were especially memorable and interesting. The way you got the third party member (Jeff). Moonside. Pretty much everything after you get the fourth party member (Poo) was amazing, I was really excited to see where we'll go next. The big "screen" showing your thoughts. The sudden switch to the tiny sprites in underworld dinoland. Magicant. The game has some amazing atmosphere pretty much everywhere.
At the end of the game, when you are supposed to go back to the meteor site, I figured out that you can use teleport alpha to run around enemies or if not run around them ambush them. Using it like that was really fun, I kind of wish I figured that out earlier.
I do wish there was bit more of an elaborate story, for example, it would have been cool to learn more about the MC, besides the fact that he is a courageous boy. When I got to Magicant, I even thought that there would be some cool lore drop. I know the story is mostly meant to be a parody of the default RPG storylines. But I still feel it could have been more.
I am really happy to have played this, I am probably going to play Mother 3 after some time next.
Since the last one of these threads where I started with the Battlefield 2042 beta and rekindled my love of older Battlefield games, I've done even more extensive studies (along with crunching the numbers with my unpaid interns) and brought BF3 to the mix and I have to report:
Battlefield V: good, lots of fun, I like how the guns work and its nice and fun and fast and arcade-y, maps seem bad except for the Pacific Theatre ones which are pretty good. Probably wouldn't have as high of an opinion if I bought at launch, but I didn't so I don't have to.
Battlefield 1: great, lots of fun, great maps and amazing atmosphere. Started going through some of the service and weapon assignments (some of which seem like they will take quite a long time to do). I feel like I'm not in to the weapons as much as BFV or BF3, but they have their own charm. They did a great job capturing WW1 in all of its oddities (including attack planes that work by dropping grenades instead of actual bombs).
Battlefield 4: good, lots of fun, not as much of a fan of the maps (and I remember that from launch too), and don't like how conquest-oriented it is vs. rush. Weapons feel a little off compared to BF3 for some reason, but it's not bad. Still enjoyed it more than the BF2042 beta.
Battlefield 3: as soon as I started playing it I fell in love again. The weapons feel exactly how I want them to, the maps are what I want, everything is near perfect, and I can only say near perfect because I know if I was able to play BC2 again I'd say that's even better. The later games aren't bad but after playing for even like 10-20 minutes I knew I was way more in to this than the other ones. I'm really not sure how they peaked with BC2/BF3 and haven't been able to capture that magic since.
Bad Company 2: tried it on Origin's EA Pass thing, but it requires me to log in to my origin account in-game, and that just does not seem to want to work. It's a real shame since I miss it and really wanted to play it. Watching gameplay footage of it just makes me more confident that that was the best game and the franchise peaked with it.
The elephant in the room for me though is remembering how fun BC2 was and then realizing I was playing it back in the day on console, which had a 24 person player limit (PC had 32). I get the feeling they're not going to capture the magic of that game again for another reason -- they're determined to have big player counts and AFAICT would never go back to designing a game around 24 player rounds, which is a shame since I think it's the perfect size for the games to be (maybe I'll make an exception for 32).
Rush in BFV is still limited to 16v16, even though Conquest and Breakthrough are 32v32. They limited Rush probably because having just two objectives funnels players, so having more players would be too much of a cf.
I'm a long-time BF fan with BF4 being my personal favorite and 3 being next. I so wished Venice Unleashed would've been more successful and bring in more players. I'm out of a GPU right now but I hope my soon-to-be 980 can play BF2042, at least just to demo to see if I might like it. I'm not about to buy a relatively new GPU in this market.
World of Warcraft
Bought some game time recently and thought I'd make another push towards KSM.
I have grown increasingly sick of pug groups. Most of the ones I join are incapable of doing acceptable amounts of damage, incapable of understanding boss tactics and often misunderstand affixes. Doing runs with my guild is out of the question because they only do content in their own little clique, so I've been asking myself if I even want to stay in the guild. Ended up there in the first place following the merger of my last guild - come to think of it, the only person from my last guild who got accepted into the clique and is regularly being taken through M+ keys is now dating an officer...
Also made the mistake of ranting about my M+ woes on /r/wow... to which I got very hostile responses. Heck, someone who recognised me from when I used to play during WotLK proceeded to throw a flurry of personal attacks at me earlier today.
To add some additional context to why this made me angry... Assholes like that bullied me off of the first realm I played on... They did horrible shit like openly tell me to kill myself unprovoked in Trade chat, spam homophobic and racist insults towards me, falsely invite me into groups and use me for a free summon only to then kick me, accuse me of ninja looting, etc. It's shit like this that made me wish Blizzard didn't have rules against naming & shaming on their official forums, because I would have loved to expose the toxic behaviour of a few of these guilds back in the day. Would have damn-near destroyed the realm.
A different commenter did analyse some of my combat logs and noticed immediately that some of the DPS in my groups didn't even have legendaries, which was a nice clarification that I felt exonerated me.
Super Smash Bros Ultimate
Came back for Sora because he was my #1 requested character for Smash, then realised that I didn't really buy any of the Fighters Passes so I went on a spending spree.
Smash is a game where I actively avoid the multiplayer because of how many times it's burned me. Poor netcode, not being good at the game and inconsistent matchmaking which sometimes throws you into competitive matches or 4 player FFA party game shit-fests depending on the algorithm's mood is why I avoid it. So I went into World of Light and quickly realised why I got bored of the mode.
All I've really done is grind up spirits on the Spirit Board and do a few Classic Mode runs.
What region / faction are you? My guild still does tons of M+ and many of us are 2200-ish rated (which isn't particularly great, but it's good enough to get KSM). Pugging to get KSM seems like the absolute worst, except that you've also mentioned talking about it on r/wow, and that's actually the absolute worst. r/WoW is a silly place - it's best to avoid it, in my experience. There's just too many people there. Cutting r/wow out of my life completely has made it much better and greatly increased my enjoyment of the game.
EDIT: Wait, you quit the mod position?
Europe, Horde, around 1450 M+ rating.
Oh yeah, I quit a while ago. There was no way to actually make any of the issues better without just straight up banning a significant portion of the userbase, and even when we did that, then streamers like Asmongold would direct people there specifically to be toxic.
Sadly, not Horde or EU so I can't help you get the KSM, but I would suggest some of the discords for finding groups would be better than randomly pugging. The Wow discord which was originally just the r/wow discord, but changed at some point (and I'm no longer affiliated with it either) has some links to other pretty good communities for finding actual decent people. Though the best advice I can give is to find a better guild - not super intense, but with a core group of people that like to run M+s and are relatively serious about it.
Also r/CompetitiveWoW is pretty good for discussion, too.
If it's any consolation, I found a premade group and went from being rejected for even +12's to healing +18's with them.
Kinda read a bit more into what happened with you. From what I understood you were receiving death threats from Asmongold's fanbase because you went ahead and enforced your subreddit's rules? That really sucks. It's a shame because out of all the Blizzard-owned subs, /r/wow had always done pretty well with enforcing the rules. I've definitely had disagreements with some of the power mods who have modded other big Blizzard subs.
Asmongold is one of those YouTubers/streamers I actually like too, but I agree that some of his fanbase are toxic as fuck.
I used to think less of Reddit mods, until my brother became moderator of a major sub. Apparently the problems they have with trying to stamp out assholes and with how little the Reddit admins actually help individual mods is insane.
I'm glad you're getting through - finding a good group is the most important thing.
I think Asmongold puts on the persona of a decent fellow, but he's really astute, and must know that when he says something like "tell these mods you won't stand for this" to his fanbase, that there's going to be some unpleasantness about it. He divests himself of the responsibility for his fans. He also seems to think that what he is saying is some kind of absolute truth, but it's really not. His fanbase did send threats, but they weren't the first or the worst to do so; sadly I think that's just life for a the mods of any large-enough subreddit.
Reddit mods tend to just be people who want to help keep a community on track, but they get very few tools, and they deal with too many assholes. It wears thin, and then people tend to blend together. After you've banned a few hundred / few thousand people for being abusive, small infractions start to look like they're worth permanently banning people for. "If they do [x], they'll do [y], and [y] is terrible," and suddenly the ban list starts growing much faster. Then you listen to the community and you start fracturing content off to related subreddits, and removing some posts all together. And you start really caring about "The Fluff Principle" and how to deal with it, and you start valuing particular kinds of posts over other posts... it's easy to get in too deep, and be confused about what's important. Most moderators just want to make communities better, but it's easy to lose sight of what communities need.
There definitely are moderators that like to do moderation because it gives them some semblance of control and power, but I haven't actually met many, and I have met a lot of moderators over the years.
I tried out Back 4 Blood since I'm a fan of L4D and L4D2. Unfortunately I can't really recommend it. It feels like it has many of the ingredients of a horde shooter, but put together in a way that's just sort of frustrating.
Sort of like some execs studied horde shooters but never actually played them. And never bother to have people play test this one before release.
The pacing is hot garbage, there's very little visual distinction between special infected, multiplayer is broken in numerous ways, maps are poorly designed and gun choice and customization feels like an anti pattern.
Overall it's more frustrating than fun, but the annoyances weren't immediately obvious so I passed the refund window by quite a bit.
Same for me. After I started playing Deep Rock in March, I now have over 500 hours in the game. I can't get enough of it.
Same. Maybe we can try to get a group of 4 together here on Tildes?
I used to, but now I don't mind it too much. If you have a team where 2 of your players immediately go and get oil shale, scout going to get minerals, and 1 defending, it can get pretty easy. I definitely agree though that it's the most tedious mission type.
OSRS, nice, what are your current goals?
My last victory was getting 99 woodcutting, I went to fish for sharks afterwards, because I don't like the min/max troutfishing method, but that's were I left off.
If I ever pick it up again, I'll problably get firemaking or fishing to 99.
Just finished up Sunless Sea; needs some improvements (mission tracking is terrible), but overall enjoyable. Looking to play Sunless Skies next.
My GPU died lately so I've been partying like it's 2001. in other words, playing Wolfenstein: ET Legacy and ioQuake3, both open source remakes. What a terrible time for GPU failure. I paid $200 for my late & great 1070 two years ago and now it's worth at least twice that if it didn't die; the market is just insane right now. Five years ago the thing would maybe be worth a bit over $100 for its age and power. I think I'm going with a used 980 as that seems the best bang for buck right now that can still play all the games I play at a moderate framerate.
Fallout 4. Holy shit is this game hard, and I'm just playing on Normal (all my Fallout games are "normal" now except my first FNV character). I started FO3, FNV and FO4 for the first time without knowing anything about the series, so I rerolled my FO3/4 saves. I rolled into Lexington and caught a Fat Man, then laughed my ass off at the acheivement, but was also frustrated that the first major location in the game casually sends you into a situation where you'll aggro a dude in power armor, with a fat man. I'm learning that this game is all about going slow, taking a deep breath, and working people from a distance at the beginning. But I'm also completely lost on what to do, as I can't get to the next story location, much less do anything there, because Boston is so absolutely tough to get through (I've just gotten the quest to save Nick Valentine). I saw a radstorm which was pretty cool, but it went away when I stupidly followed somebody into a trap house and ran back outside.
Sproggiwood: It's the sort of roguelike I prefer: Shorter dungeons to throw yourself at repeatedly, instead of one long 12-hour crawl. It's available for mobile devices as well, and plays well on them. It's simple, four directions, but I feel also provides enough challenge to stay entertaining. It's a good game to chill out with. I meant to back off it for a couple days to be able to beat a level, and a few weeks later finally got it.
The default carry weight in Fallout 4 is insanely low and made any attempts at gathering mats for crafting a multi-hour experience as I was constantly schlepping stuff back and forth from the same places, so I eventually caved and used the console to remove the limit altogether. That single change made such a difference for me that I doubt I would've finished the game otherwise. That was the first time I've "cheated" in a game in a long time, too.
I've got a Strength of like 8 specifically to boost my carry, because it was a constant problem for my FNV character. Not having power armor, I've got that much extra carrying capacity, but it may also be making my run that much more difficult. However, without power for the power armor, I'd be in for a bad time.
I think in all of the Bethesda engine games (Elder Scrolls or Fallout*) I've wound up using small cheats here or there. Even in FO4 I'm thinking of getting a mod that makes Fusion Cores last forever.
Ahh, I never bothered with strength. I didn't even bother with the power armor unless it was required. Every time I got a new suit I'd just fasttravel back home and drop it off. I'd always fully finish a zone and make sure I was overgeared before moving on so that every encounter was easy or I'd stack stims if I knew it wouldn't be.
Been playing some low-key relaxation games more than anything else.
Mini Metro and Mini Motorways: same developer, similar concepts. In Mini Metro, you develop a subway system; in Mini Motorways, you develop a road system. In both, you're managing people's travel, and try to maximize the number of people your system can handle. They are both pretty relaxing.
Plague Inc: Evolved: less relaxing, since you're literally trying to end the human race with a deadly virus, which is a bit on the nose. It's a fun little concept, and relatively well executed. Gameplay is slow and steady, and there's a cure mode, which was also interesting.
Slay the Spire: is a single player deckbuilder that claims to be mixed with a roguelike. It's not really a roguelike, but it is fun. I'm at Ascension 17 or 18 and trying to get to 20 for the last achievement.
The Stanley Parable: it was a bit over 5 years since the last time I played, and I put in my calendar to play again when I could get the "don't play for 5 years" achievement. This is one of my favourite games; if you don't know about it, I recommend getting a copy and trying it out. I found out that they're potentially going to be releasing a remastered version with more endings at some point.
I just finished Cyberpunk 2077.
It's... fine? It feels like that 85% of the game was finished, but they released it anyways. Like, sure it looks impressive, but it's wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle. The story is ok, but imo some of the side quests (mainly Panam's quests, River's too) are more interesting than the main story itself.
Overall, it's ok. Wait for a sale.
I finished up Yakuza Kiwami after about 20 hours with the game, much shorter than Yakuza 0, which I finished last. Honestly, Kiwami almost feels like it could have been a large DLC for 0, as most of the heavy lifting in Kiwami’s story is done by knowledge of 0’s story. I’m kind of curious how the story held up by itself in the original PS2 game. I did love dealing with Majima’s shenaniganary though, and he’s quickly becoming one of my favorite characters in any media. Pocket Circuit Racing makes a reappearance too, so that’s nice. I do wish that more of the npcs you built friendships with in 0 remembered you in the same way pocket fighter does (the sushi chef for example). Not as strong an entry as 0 for sure, but it kept my attention long enough to be excited to start Kiwami 2.
From what I've read,
Changes in OG Yakuza, including the ending
Nishiki is naturally much less developed, making his change in personality much more striking in Kiwami.Prepare to get a visual feast for YK2; I find the dragon engine gorgeous, particularly during night-time. Be sure to stroll through Kamurocho in first person mode, and check out the absurd level of detail on display in the various kombini and/or Don Quijote !
So there is a very simple and very old strategy game that I have loved for a long time by the name of Lord Monarch. Thanks to a special relationship with Sega they produced a special version of the game specifically for the mega drive. And this game had recently received a fan translation!
This version of the game is significantly revised from the original. Instead of being a bunch of unrelated maps, this version has a story mode that links everything together and has a much larger number of maps. It’s got new gameplay mechanics and a fresh new art design and new music to match. It’s even got new gameplay mechanics including towns, treasures, and captives - increasing the number of things you will need to move your king to interact with.
Also seeing a recent fan translation was the game best known as EVO The Search for Eden. Fans may be aware that this game already had an official translation. It’s much better when you can actually understand what they are trying to say. I played this with an emulator that has a rewind function and man, this game is short when you don’t have to put up with how unfair the combat is on this game. Its got a soundtrack by The famous Koichi Sugiyama and might be worth revisiting just for that alone. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it was arranged by Motoaki Takeuchi but I am pretty sure that so am the only one who cares about that detail.
The third game I have been playing is Extracurricular Activities. The plot and writing is just terrible, and that’s bad for a visual novel. But the smut is great, and that’s all that anyone cares about. It’s still very unfinished but it looks like a pretty good amount of it is finished. Let’s just say that it’s 90% of morenatsu completion.
I have a lot of nostalgia for EVO The Search for Eden. I first found it in a collection of SNES ROMs I picked up in the early 2000's, and played it to death, picking different evolutionary paths. The flexibility to grow and change and adapt as you wanted to mix up how you played was revolutionary to me at the time, though becoming human was never as effective at beating the last boss as was being some sort of brontosaurus hybrid.
It's weird how engrossing the game is even though so much of it is just bad. It's probably the only game where you can press the button for the short-range attack and end up taking damage because you're too close. There are evolution choices that you can make that feel like they're just there as traps. If you're not cheating like I was, you'll need to stock up on evolution points so that you can evolve during the course of the boss fights because that's the only way to heal in most cases. Thankfully there are a few microseconds when you get hit and are at 0 HP that you can open the menu and evolve for a full HP restore.
The most frustrating thing, though, is that there are times when your evolution points get stolen from you, but it's extremely arbitrary.
I finished the game all the way to Eden as a cat-turned-rhino and I'm very tempted to try out some of the more outlandish endings.
In case you weren't already aware, EVO is actually a sequel to the 4.8 Billion Year Story: The Theory of Evolution, a PC-98 RPG which got a fan translation a little while back. You might want to give it a chance as well.
I didn't know it was a sequel! I'll have to check it out.
I've been diving into Metroid: Dread, there's a new demo out if you want to try before you buy. I really like the movement and the EMMIs are certainly scary.
https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/metroid-dread-switch/