What are you playing?

GasBandit

Staff member
Much like KF2, Space Beast Terror Fright is much more fun in a group, but I perform so much better alone.

 
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Been dicking around in Star Trek Online for the first time in many years. Man, still hate the ground stuff and love the space stuff.

They've really upgraded the story telling and voice work basically bringing in every living Star Trek actor to do voice work (even having Jeffrey Combs do an old Captain Shran in the Discovery content). It's fun fan fiction basically digging out very bit of fan wankery possible from every bit of Star Trek lore.

Captain Nog looked adorable sitting in the captain's chair.
 
As a big fan of the Rollcage series for PS1, I've been waiting 17 years for a game to come along and give me that same high adrenaline, ludicrously fast combat racing fix.

Grip: Combat Racing came out yesterday. It's been available in Beta on Steam for a few years but somehow I hadn't heard about it. Yesterday it was released on all platforms though. I preordered it for ps4 in October so I got my hands on it right away and played until 1am last night.

It is effectively Rollcage 3. A fan of the series sought out a sequel, as I've been doing, found one of the original programmers, and the two formed a new company to produce a spiritual successor. Even got the same composer from Rollcage stage II.


I played rollcage stage II from 2000- 2016, so I'll probably be playing this for a while.

And I love this graphic design. The logo flips upside down. Never seen a video game's box art so effectively incorporate a major element of the gameplay before.
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Been dicking around in Star Trek Online for the first time in many years. Man, still hate the ground stuff and love the space stuff.

They've really upgraded the story telling and voice work basically bringing in every living Star Trek actor to do voice work (even having Jeffrey Combs do an old Captain Shran in the Discovery content). It's fun fan fiction basically digging out very bit of fan wankery possible from every bit of Star Trek lore.

Captain Nog looked adorable sitting in the captain's chair.
Strictly speaking, it's not fan fiction except for things coming out of Discovery or future shows/movies that contradict it. It's just that the game relies more on the stuff in the BOOKS (except for that stupid one where the Borg et wiped out) than the show; any deviations from what is presented in STO are officially taking place in alternate timelines (like the Kelvin/2000's movieverse, though you do get to visit that timeline) or parallel universes.

CBS has been dumping a lot of money into STO since Discovery. We got a DS9 themed expansion last Summer, intro to the Discovery stuff in the fall, a Battle of Binary Stars STF soon, and we're getting a full season of Discovery related content starting in January and ending in May that is probably going to tie into the current season. I think they finally saw how much the game was making versus how much it cost to operate/expand.
 

Dave

Staff member
Played some PUBG last night with a couple guys named Shadows and TBro. TBro is a good dude but Shadows is...very high strung.

In this video I got 3 kills but got hit by the fourth person on their squad. Meanwhile Shadows got downed and went REEEEEEEEE. No, I'm serious. Like he freaked the fuck out. REEEEEEE doesn't begin to cover it.

But I got 3 kills.

 
God of War: I've learned everything in Kratos's skill tree, but according to the list of main story quests, I'm barely cresting halfway through the story. Are there going to be more skill trees or is Atreus's lvl 5 bow the last of it? Seems weird to have learned everything so early.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Pit People

Dei and I have been playing this for a couple nights co-op, and I'd played it a few days on my own before that. It's an engaging turn-based-strategy with RPG elements made by the same people who made Battleblock Theater, and it's right in the same vein.

It's good even solo, but playing co-op adds a level of challenge to it, because it quadruples the number of units on the field (the enemies also double in number when you play co-op), but all the battlefields stay the same size. So it's real easy to get in each other's way or get overwhelmed by a flanking maneuver.

I gotta admit, I don't think our communication has been the best, because it is seeming WAY harder to do story missions now that I'd already breezed through in solo.
 
Yakuza Kiwami

Picked this up from the PSN+ Free Deals this month. This is an updated version of Yakuza 1, with the combat system and graphics from the PS4 versions of the series and lots of new, fun stuff to do. So if you want that semi-serious story from the first game, but with better production and gameplay, this is a steal for FREE.

And if you like wacky bullshit? It's got tons of that too, like usual.


Yeah, I fucking love this game.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
MFW I find out, the hard way, that Permadeath mode in Pit People also applies to the Arena fights (in which it is nearly impossible NOT to have somebody on your team die, and quite often your entire team)... and thus I've fucked my own savegame irrevocably and get to start over.

 
So I finished The Last of Us.

Really? This generic zombie story won all the awards that year?

I mean, the gameplay is fine. The characters are interesting. But it was annoyingly repetitive and had all the usual cliche zombie tropes.

There's one part where you meet two people along the way. As soon as they're introduced, I thought, "Yeah, they're dying. I bet one gets infected, the other one shoots them, then shoots themself in grief."

And that's EXACTLY what happened beat for beat!

Like, it was a pretty game, no question. Some really gorgeous areas. But I can't for the life of me understand why this is so highly regarded.

I should add that the gameplay was more enjoyable once I threw stealth out the window. The game supplied me with enough ammo to get through most encounters.

Then again, I also set it in Easy mode just to plow through the so-called "great" story. Even the ending had me thinking, "Really? That's it? That's the great story and ending everyone got all hyped over?"
 
So I finished The Last of Us.

Really? This generic zombie story won all the awards that year?

I mean, the gameplay is fine. The characters are interesting. But it was annoyingly repetitive and had all the usual cliche zombie tropes.

There's one part where you meet two people along the way. As soon as they're introduced, I thought, "Yeah, they're dying. I bet one gets infected, the other one shoots them, then shoots themself in grief."

And that's EXACTLY what happened beat for beat!

Like, it was a pretty game, no question. Some really gorgeous areas. But I can't for the life of me understand why this is so highly regarded.

I should add that the gameplay was more enjoyable once I threw stealth out the window. The game supplied me with enough ammo to get through most encounters.

Then again, I also set it in Easy mode just to plow through the so-called "great" story. Even the ending had me thinking, "Really? That's it? That's the great story and ending everyone got all hyped over?"
On the one hand, I think your experience is going to be hampered from this game coming out nearly five and a half years ago.

On the other hand ... we got The Last of Us not long after it came out and both Julie and I were numb to it. My response to the story was less "that's it?" and more I was bummed I couldn't get into it. We later watched a Youtuber we like do a Let's Play, and in the final hospital gauntlet you could hear him getting choked up as he was hurrying to the final room, and I wish I could've been that invested, it probably felt really rewarding, but instead I didn't feel anything.

But now that you've finished it, you can watch the superior version of the finale :D

 

figmentPez

Staff member
I finished playing Figment, in short: beautiful art design, fun songs, disappointing gameplay. Most of the game is mediocre, and some of it is clunky enough to be outright bad. Nothing is really terrible, or broken; it's just slow and stilted. It's way too easy to get hung up on the environment when moving around corners (and there are so many edges to get stuck on). Oh, and the plot is as clumsy as the gameplay.
 
I've been trying to play MtG Arena, but holy Christ is the amount of interaction required to play Magic annoying to do online. At least in person you don't have to pause and stare at someone until they decide to pay attention between every little thing you do.
 
I've been trying to play MtG Arena, but holy Christ is the amount of interaction required to play Magic annoying to do online. At least in person you don't have to pause and stare at someone until they decide to pay attention between every little thing you do.
If you just need to click pass priority, space bar will do that.
 
So I've been binging pretty hard on Star Trek Online and watching episodes of the show at the same time.

Balance of Terror is still fucking awesome and I need to watch The Enemy Below.
 
Batman The Telltale Series, Season 1

This has been installed on my computer for ages. I meant to get it for the longest time and finally got it via a Telltale Humble Bundle. Always heard good things about it.

Now I see why. I've only completed the first episode so far, but I'm really digging it. I like the character designs and the style and world they've created for Gotham. I like that Batman uses drones; it feels like a natural kind of gadget he'd use in a modern age. I like how, in one part, you actually create a plan of attack on how to take out thugs once you bust in. It's limited to one or two options, but I like the idea. And I really liked linking evidence at a crime scene, which reminded me of the Blackwell adventure games.

One criticism so far is something that bugs me in more recent takes on Batman's origin: his parents either being corrupt or that their murder was actually an assassination. I always felt making it a random mugging as the driving force for Batman's creation much more interesting.
 
making it a random mugging as the driving force for Batman's creation much more interesting.
They have to still be high-class for the whole “night at the opera” and “millionaire playboy” things to work out, but I agree that the “could’ve happened to anybody” part needs to stay canon.

—Patrick
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Pit People

I lost my troll mom in permadeath >_< this has been a terrible day.
I managed to find and capture a new troll mom. But I had to lose a cupcake and a mascot in the process.

Permadeath mode sure is punishing. I spend 90% of my time trying to recruit new (specific) fighters instead of doing quests or fighting in the pit.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Underworld Ascendant

The controls are floaty, the combat is janky, the load times are looooong, the RAM useage is thirsty (definitely a 64 bit game here, @Eriol, it wanted every drop of my 16 gigs :p) the physics are inconsistent, and the fact that restoring a save ALWAYS takes you all the way back to the start of a given level is rather irritating when all my savegame restores so far have been due to the game locking up so I had to restart it.

I mean, it's beautifully atmospheric, is dripping in lore, and there's very little handholding (which I consider a plus) but man are there technical frustrations. I'm going to give it a while and see if they patch the problems.
 
So Star Trek Online people, why do the Iconians look like WoW villain rejects? Even their Herald spaceships look like Naru.

This Iconian stuff is really throwing me off the Star Trek aesthetic.

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My daughter's current favorite activity is sitting next to me and talking smack every time I fail at being Spider-Man. When I tell her she can play then, she just says "No Thanks, I'm terrible at these games." :deadpool:
 
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