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Re: Currently Playing

Posted: Tue Sep 15, 2020 3:59 pm
by Sly Boots
Completely forgot about this. Did anyone else buy it?

Might be good to find a night sometime we can all play a session (so far Mantis, Snowy, Raid and me). Is it something that's best played on comms a la our D&D sessions, or without?

Re: Currently Playing

Posted: Thu Sep 17, 2020 1:12 pm
by Alan
Played a bit of Spelunky 2. Its more of the first with a bit more bobbins. I never really understood the fervor over the first but if you liked that I'm sure this will be up your street.

Slay The Spire ios
Slew the spire on my 5th game. Once with each to unlock the keys, one that was a failure, then a defect run that slew it. Stupidly chuffed with that. Most farther runs have been abject failures right enough but I'll always have paris.

Eve Echoes
Still playing it on and off. Theres this artificial gating by tech levels which is fucking annoying! Around 30 days before I'm high enough "level" to train Battlecruisers for example. One of the best things about Eve was that level didnt mean anything and if you specialised your training you could get into most sub caps and fly them well fairly quickly. Which lead to....

Eve Online
Oh look, I activated my account again and wow theres so much changed but so much thats still the same. I dont know if I can get back into it but man this game is still amazing. Theres nothing else like it (other than Echoes if you can count that) and it deserved to be in the pantheon of greatest games ever made with zero hyperbole.

Warframe
This is just a great mindless... thing. Its really hard to pinpoint what Destiny stole from them and what they stole from Destiny but its certainly more fun than its more AAA kin.

Re: Currently Playing

Posted: Thu Sep 17, 2020 2:22 pm
by Drarok
Sly Boots wrote:
Tue Sep 15, 2020 3:59 pm
Completely forgot about [Among Us]. Did anyone else buy it?
I got it last night as one of my friends was playing it online, got a bit of a crash course, and crash is a particularly choice word since the UX is an absolute car crash. The controls are bad, the UI inscrutable (the voting phase is the worst example – there's seemingly two separate voting interfaces, but only one of them actually does anything), and when I first launched it, it refused to connect to any game until I restarted it. Utterly garbage as a first-time experience.

Still, the actual gameplay is fun and a lot quicker than I expected. Got a number of games done in what little time I was on last night.

Re: Currently Playing

Posted: Wed Sep 23, 2020 3:37 pm
by Raid
I've gone back to Enter the Gungeon, although as I've moved from Switch to XBox my progress has been reset. As it's a rogue-like, this doesn't really change very much, it's just that there's less variety in pickups. I must have played this for 50+ hours by now, and today is the first time I've ever made it to the final boss (well, the last gungeon boss, I've not even started on crafting the Bullet That Can Kill The Past). I almost beat him first time too, there was just one mis-timed roll right at the end of the bullet curtain phase that did me in. I had an amazing combo of the trident and bell that stops time, which meant that most kills created a ring of slowed time where the enemy died, allowing me to get out of the way of most shots.

I like to think that I'm getting pretty good at this now, and while the success of a run relies on a fair bit of luck in regards to which weapons you find, I can usually get to the fourth level. My downfall comes from not being able to get through most bosses without taking a hit (which if you manage awards you an extra heart container); I've done it on *most* of the bosses at least once, but the sodding Bullet King, one of the first bosses you can encounter, gets me every single time.

I really can't recommend the game enough, it's genuinely one of my favourites (it's where my avatar comes from). The gameplay is dead simple, but the variety of weapons on offer, almost every one of which is a either a pop-culture reference or based on a pun, changes your playstyle every run.

Re: Currently Playing

Posted: Wed Sep 30, 2020 9:11 am
by Sly Boots
Bought Spelunky 2.

Played 15 minutes of Spelunky 2.

Refunded Spelunky 2 -_-


I'm sure it's good and I enjoy watching people play it, but I don't think I any longer possess the requisite twitch reflexes to play with any degree of skill.

Re: Currently Playing

Posted: Wed Sep 30, 2020 10:07 am
by Raid
Yeah, I watched a video of it yesterday and there's just something very... unsatisfying looking with the gameplay that I can't quite put my finger on. Perhaps it's the speed, perhaps it's the constant threat of game-ruining surprises, perhaps it's the fact that it's all over so quickly. At least with Enter the Gungeon you feel like you've had a proper game if you only do one run (mine tend to last for about half an hour start to finish). It's entirely possible that it's down to my watching an absolute novice play it, but it's not something I'm willing to take a risk on when I have two other new Rogue-likes that I've been meaning to start (Dead Cells and Hades).

Re: Currently Playing

Posted: Thu Oct 01, 2020 7:51 am
by Rusty
Hades is doing me well at the moment. very satisfying.
Risk of Rain 2 is also doing a good turn. especially with some hand picked mods so I can play with my son and have a right laugh.

Re: Currently Playing

Posted: Thu Oct 01, 2020 9:46 am
by DjchunKfunK
I've been playing Spelunky 2 for a few weeks as I grabbed it on PS4 and I've been enjoying it, despite not really playing much of Spelunky HD. It is very punishing at the start but I'm slowly getting better and discovering more tricks to see me through and increase my chances of survival. I do still prefer the roguelikes that have some kind of persistent progression but there is room for the more traditional games as well.

I really enjoyed Hades, apart from the bosses, until it broke my hand. The combat is very satisfying but I do think the bosses are a large failing of the game, they are not really fun to fight and spoil the game a fair bit.

Re: Currently Playing

Posted: Fri Oct 02, 2020 7:25 am
by Snowy
I bought Spelunky on the back of the furore about it but it left me completely cold. Not going to make the same mistake twice :)

Been playing a bit of Rocket League since it became free on Epic, quite a fun little game and the only competitve online game I have even vaguely liked in years.

Re: Currently Playing

Posted: Fri Oct 02, 2020 4:40 pm
by elgaucho
I finally finished Rise of the Tomb Raider after a 6-8 month break - I still think these games are fantastic!

Not sure I want to rush into the third one without a break though.

After Hades hit v1 I went back again - i'm actually impressed at how much artwork they changed from the early access to final version - they really enriched and polished the environments.

And the gameplay remains absolutely top notch - very likely this is my game of the year. Endlessly, casually replayable and so so polished. I'm not surprised every comment is excellent on this game! :)

Re: Currently Playing

Posted: Sat Oct 03, 2020 5:41 pm
by Raid
I did it! I finally beat the first Final Boss of Enter the Gungeon, thanks to finding the enormously powerful Vulcan Cannon combined with the Ammo Drum that syncs with it to increase its fire rate. Not only did I kill the Dragun, I also killed the High Priest which was the only boss I'd fought that I hadn't actually managed to kill before. Not only that but I managed to kill the sodding Bullet King without taking any damage (before I found the Vulcan cannon I might add), which ends my embarrassing inability to kill a first level boss without trouble.

Re: Currently Playing

Posted: Mon Oct 05, 2020 12:49 pm
by Sly Boots
Heaven's Vault

Let me first start with the slightly downbeat disclaimer that I think this will only appeal to a very specific type of player - someone who doesn't mind something a bit slower-paced, enjoys linguistic puzzles and the feeling of being a detective, piecing together a mystery from the clues you discover.

Fortunately, I am exactly that type of person, and so I think it was brilliant :lol:

I bought this a while ago, played the first couple of minutes then put it down, probably because I was suffering from lazy-brain brought on by lockdown and wanted something a bit more visceral. I went back to it a couple of days ago, in a more open-minded state, and haven't put it down until I completed it just now.

So what is it? Broadly, and without spoilers, you're an archaeologist living in a system of tiny moons existing inside a nebula, joined by rivers of water and ice that follow gravitational lines, and upon which you sail in a boat-spaceship type thing. The university you work for tasks you with finding out what happened to one of their researchers, who hasn't been heard from in a while, and your only clue is a brooch they sent back with a strange ancient, hieroglyphic script.

Most of the rest of the game is travelling to different locations, finding clues, trying to decipher what this ancient text says and gradually unravel the mystery of not only what happened to the researcher, but the secret history of the nebula itself and prophesied doom.

The emphasis is really on decoding the language, which I found enjoyable. You're not punished for getting it wrong (beyond leading your own suppositions down potentially wrong paths), indeed it may be some time before you can confirm if your initial guess was right or not, through discovering other sources where that word is used. Luckily, eventually the game will tell you if it was right (in which case it gets added to your lexicon and will automatically populate into any puzzles later on where that words recurs) or wrong, in which case you have another stab at it.

So, how does the decoding work? At the start you're all at sea and just guessing from the context of what an object is and where it was found (which can take you quite far, in honesty), but gradually you start to recognise the symbols denoting a noun, verb, adjective etc, and subjects like light, plant, water, fire etc, and through the combination of such things can take an educated guess what a new word might be. For example, if you know 'I/me' and 'of', if you find a symbol that combines both, it's not a huge leap to say it means 'my' - ie literally 'of me'.

The world itself is very engaging, and the surrounding mystery of how things came to be as they are, and the various world-defining events that occurred to shape the current society kept me gripped until the end, which, when it came, was quite unexpected.

If you have played and enjoyed something like Obra Dinn, I think you'll love this also.

Re: Currently Playing

Posted: Wed Oct 14, 2020 8:33 am
by Sly Boots
No Man's Sky

My youngest is really into space stuff, so with the new update out I thought I'd re-install NMS and play it with her, thinking she'd get a kick out of it.

Ten minutes later she wanders off, claiming "it's boring".

On the one hand I was slightly annoyed, on the other I was impressed that she so quickly reached a conclusion that previously took me 20 hours of play to come to :lol:

Re: Currently Playing

Posted: Sat Oct 17, 2020 2:36 pm
by Raid
Halo 4 - I never did play far into Halo 4 when I bought it back in 2012, and it marked the end of my love of the franchise. I've decided to give it another go as part of the MCC, and I'm remembering why it didn't click with me. There's just something quite unsatisfying about it; the controls are skittish, the weapons feel weak and low ammo is an annoyance forcing you to constantly switch. I lost count of the number of times I died when I didn't even realise I was being shot at, usually from needler rounds which the sound design doesn't do a good enough job of informing you that you've being skewered by. In fact the sound design as a whole is pretty weak.

It *looks* great; I assume it got a texture upgrade as part of the MCC, but it certainly doesn't look like it was a 360 title. It's just a shame about, well, the rest of it.

Re: Currently Playing

Posted: Sat Oct 17, 2020 7:31 pm
by Rossell
Ghost of tsushima

Much more than assassins creed Japan. The combat is difficult to master at first but aside from some movement complaints very good. The story is really good with what I feel is great characters. Some of the complaints regard the open world not being as revolutionary as it could be but while true to an extent its not a game breaking problem.

Also, graphically it's one of the most beautiful looking games I have ever played. I can't overstate that at all. So far, recommended.