Original thread:
Last post - Dec 29, 2016:
MATATAT:I never finished vermintide. The last mission is absurdly difficult. Like they only wanted you to finish it if you had a perfectly coordinated team of 4.
Just finished Doom (2016) (hardest difficulty i.e. just under Nightmare which is locked).
Really a fun game that clearly understands what it is and doesn’t try to be anything but a 1 person against everything type game that the original allowed.
I did find the secret detector on the suit to be glitched, on initial upgrade it homed in on the secrets really well but in later stages, the sound tone only went off once rather than multiple times and often once I was standing right in front of the secret.
The game lets you play as you’d like but thankfully doesn’t have any hide and cover system like newer games tend to have. Either move or die.
When first going into the game I wasn’t too keen on the alternate fires for all the guns but they ended up being really enjoyable.
Weirdly I didn’t really enjoy using the rocket launcher much, my favourite weapons in order were the plasma rifle, super shotgun and gauss rifle. Super shotgun because it’s a no nonsense close range I will destroy anything that isn’t a boss in 4 shots. Plasma rifle because of the secondary fire which release heat in a limited range which can pretty much wipe a room. Gauss rifle because it can one shot nearly anything when you land headshots.
The glory kills were a bit weird at first because they took away my character’s control however became fine enough and entertaining after a bit plus a resource to survive on.
The game had some great graphics and played smoothly above 100hz. I ignored all the reading text for the background of the story as Doom is not about that trash written data logs.
Disappointed that the multiplayer didn’t work out for the devs that must have spent a bunch of time on.
Hmm, so basically when you strip it all away to only the stuff that works it is Doom remade for 2016. The troubling notion is that this 23 year old recipe is still able to garner all the game of the year and critical acclaim. Meaning no one was able to improve upon it noticeably in single player FPS.
Strongly recommend it for ~$20 however my favourite single player game from 2016 is still INSIDE.
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Been playing Dust, not sure why I didn’t finish this game years ago it’s lots of fun, though is slightly laggy when streaming to my laptop.
I’ve been playing puzzle games over the past few days.
WayOut - This is a pretty decent tile clicking game. The puzzles are long and complex enough that each feels satisfying, and there are enough of them that finishing the game feels like you actually finished a game. The way it lets you know when you haven’t finished a puzzle in the minimum number of moves made me go back and learn how the mechanics really work. My only complaint is that the twin tiles break the reversibility of certain tile presses.
Squarecells - A minimalist nonogram game. I finished it over two days, quite enjoyable.
klocki - More tile puzzles. Well worth the asking price of a dollar. It has its own mechanics unique from WayOut. However, it is comparatively short. There is no way to know if your solution was optimal or when you are going to run out of puzzles. I found out when the puzzles started looping.
Polarity- Portal clone, I almost didn’t want to include it because it really isn’t anywhere as good as Portal. Sometimes the jump key doesn’t work. In a first person platformer. Really just rubbish.
Dust is the type of game where I enjoy playing it hard for a weekend and then giving it up for a while.
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I bought a game over the sale called Human: Fall Flat. It’s like someone made a single/coop puzzle game based on Gang Beasts. Its pretty darn fun so far. I thought it looked like some early access type nonsense but it’s actually pretty well featured and the controls are tight for a game where the conceit is that your character is supposed to be difficult to control.
Twilight Struggle is absurdly good but not binge-able.
VA-11 Hall-A is everything I wanted it to be. I’m playing it slowly though, by playing one game day a day.
I just beat Owlboy. Don’t waste your money on it.
The pixel art isn’t the highest tier, but it’s up there. Sadly, it’s the games only redeeming quality.
The music is well made, but not memorable. I beat it just minutes ago and can’t hum a single tune from this game.
The story is mediocre. It’s a typical “we am play gods” storyline that never bothers to fully explain itself. At one point you fight a boss simply because they “don’t have time” and “don’t want to” explain themselves. After you beat them, they explain themselves, and of course you had no reason to fight in the first place.
The game itself is the worst. I think that on the usual 10 point scale that game reviewers use it would get a 5 or 6, but on a real 10 point scale where 1 is some truly unplayable garbage, this is a 3 or 4. There are so many extremely significant and fundamental flaws in this game that it often makes you want to throw your controller like the old days.
The screen scrolling is often severely fucked up. There are many situations where it scrolls to a new screen like in the old days before Mario invented smooth scrolling. Even if it does scroll smoothly, your character is often on the very edge, so you can’t actually see what is coming at you. It doesn’t move the camera appropriately so that you can see enemies or the next platform you have to jump to. On top of that, it gives you very small margins of error for actually dealing with those things. You have to play many sections repeatedly and memorize them to survive as a result. Imagine if the arrows in DDR appeared at the top of the screen instead of coming up from the bottom. That’s what this game does.
Also The controls aren’t unusable, but have a bunch of flaws that add up to a major annoyance. The worst is the web-grab hook shot thing. It will lock on to all sorts of unnecessary things. Also, it works no matter where you shoot it, even on just walls. They provide special points for it to hook to, but it hooks anywhere. Then they put you in situations where you need to use it very rapidly, and it doesn’t work.
The firing button is the right analog trigger. This is fine except holding it down doesn’t rapid fire at maximum. So you end up pushing the trigger up and down rapidly and hurting yourself. It’s not an analog control, so it should have been on a face button.
The shotgun reload is very very slow. Too slow. The shotgun has another mode where it just puts out a little bit of fire. If the reload is done, it will fire at full blast no matter what. If it is not reloaded, it will shoot the little fire no matter what. if it’s full there is no way to use the little fire. There are situations where you just want to use the little fire to burn something and keep the gun loaded. You can’t do that.
Many levels have major design flaws. There is no map. It’s not always clear where to go. Often you will be backtracking, with nowhere new to go, but you’re not sure if that’s right. There are many buttons you press without any clear function. It’s also not clear which buttons require a character too stay on them, and which are permanent.
The game constantly takes control away from the player to have characters talk with text for extended periods of time. It also will frequently put you into situations where you have limited or restricted movement, and is very very slow. Look at the best games of all time such as Super Metroid and Half-Life 2. The player is in full control of the character nearly 100% of the time. Even if you are trapped in a room while something happens, you can jump and shoot and run at full speed. There’s a reason for that. Owlboy gets this so so wrong.
And then, on more than one occasion, the game throws you into immediate action with no chance to ready yourself. The boss will finish introducing themselves and them immediately start shooting before you can even move yet. Notice how in Mega Man the boss does a little dance and their energy meter fills up? There’s a reason for that. Have the people who made Owlboy even played games, or did they spend their entire lives drawing pixel art?
The animations of getting hit are really bad. Some animations make you think you got hit or took damage, and it’s not clear if you actually did or not. So you’ll end up maybe not doing a move that is actually totally safe because it looks like you took damage the last time you did it.
When you do actually get hit, you often get slammed like a knockdown in Street Fighter. That is not appropriate for a platforming action game! This is not a fighting game. You lose all control for seconds at a time. Your character gets moved to who knows where. And then you stand up with bad guys still moving and doing shit to you. Results in a lot of one-hit kills despite having plenty of health remaining.
The core mechanic of the game is that you have to carry your friends around and they actually do stuff. You do the flying, they do the shooting. Changing friends is changing weapons. You have a magic teleporter to switch them as easily as you switch weapons in Doom. This core idea isn’t bad.
The implementation is bad. First off, the hitbox is only the owl. Your friend can get hit by anything, no problem. This isn’t always clear. There are many times where I dodged unnecessarily because it looks like I’m going to get hit. I actually ended up making myself get hit.
Also, the button for picking up or dropping a friend is the same button for picking something up off the ground. If you are carrying a friend and want to pull something out of the ground, what do you do? You drop them. Oh, you dropped them in front of the thing on the ground. Now you can’t get the thing on the ground because your friend is in the way. Now you have to pick up the friend and throw them somewhere else. There is no button to just make your friend disappear.
Owlboy is really really short. I beat it in 5 hours, many of which were spent repeating bullshit sections. It wasn’t worth even the Steam sale price, and not because I think time = game value. It’s because this kind of game needs to be longer to be good. The story suffers the most from the short length.
For example, early in the game a town is destroyed. This works in say, a Final Fantasy game. You walk around the town. You meet the people. You start to care about them. You learn the buildings. Then they destroy it. Owlboy you walk into the town and now it’s blown up. You never meet a single inhabitant. How can I care that it got blowed up then? I don’t care. I don’t care about anything in this stupid owl universe, and I really like owls.
TL;DR: Unless you want to pay a lot to look at fancy pixel art, save your money. Not even worth $5. Wait for $2.50. Current Steam price is $20. No good.
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Hmm… I was thinking of picking it up, but I was gonna wait for a deeper discount since I don’t really have that strong of a desire to play it. But maybe I’ll just pass it.
Doing a little bit of Destiny again. Still the same game as before but the SRL event that ran for the last few weeks was the fastest way to grind end game gear.
Been cheating on Overwatch with Titanfall this holiday week. It is the standard modern shooter. You run, you jump, you shoot, you die from a spec in the distance that spotted your head. Overall frustraring. Then you learn how to properly wall run. Suddenly you jump from your base and never touch the ground until you steal the opposing flag and grappling hook away. It’s all fun until you turn a wrong corner and giant robot fist meets fine red mist. The game slowly changes into an improv Spiderman.
Then Shinji gets in the fucking robot. The game changes. Now it is your turn to be feared…briefly, as you get flanked, robbed, and destroyed. Then the game changes again. Now you are learning how to quickly and efficiently build meter to call your big gun. Shooting dudes is okay, but you are rewarded more for stealing batteries and recharging allies. The pace of a game greatly speeds up once it starts raining robots.
There is a single player. There is a charming robot buddy. It is difficult to play through it because that means time spent not playing the addictive multiplayer.
Overall review:
https://youtu.be/4j2xEwEHbrE
Omnutia and I have been playing it pretty consistently since it went on sale a few months ago, though I’ve been playing a little less than him - holy shit, is it good. Admittedly, I had a slight advantage, being a reasonably dedicated Titanfall 1 player before that game all but died, but damned if it doesn’t take everything that’s good about TF1, and polishes it to a mirror shine. Fucking fast as hell, too - it made going from Titanfall to CSGO extremely jarring, on account of it making CSGO feel absolutely ponderous. It made DOOM feel like Doomguy was plodding around in hip-waders full of molasses.
I have played Overwatch (and Tracer specifically) so much that when I play CS:GO, I sometimes find myself hitting shift in an attempt to reach far-off ledges or escape a firefight.
Bought Dying Light yesterday and sunk some hours into it. It’s Far Cry with Zombies. Pretty enjoyable to me, but I’m also a sucker for games with heavy parkour elements. The combat is pretty tough. They made traveling at night pretty damn scary, and firing a gun actually feels like it needs to be a last resort. Co-op apparently has some fun parkour racing aspects to it. Pretty neat but I probably won’t ever play it again after beating it.
Yeah I tuned into a bit of the Owlboy stream when you discovered the rocks didn’t exist until they were drawn on screen (when getting into the pirate ship).
Didn’t seem to be fun.
Sounds great but I thought Titanfall 1 was pretty good till everyone stopped playing it, that’s why I’m cautious on this one.
[quote=“sK0pe, post:15, topic:127”]
Sounds great but I thought Titanfall 1 was pretty good till everyone stopped playing it, that’s why I’m cautious on this one.
[/quote]It was, but what killed Titanfall 1 was the garbage matchmaking and idiotic DLC policy - the Matchmaking would inevitably create high-level teams that always ended up against low-level players, which already put people off and made it hard to find a game. It was such a huge problem that they ended up adding a PVE mode just to try and get around the problem and regain players.
The DLC policy was that you could only play with people who owned exactly the same DLC as you did - so if you went to matchmake for a server, it would matchmake you to servers that only had maps you had - so, you couldn’t even match on basic maps with players who owned the DLC - which fractured the playerbase like mad, making it even harder to find a game.
Titanfall 2 matchmaking is much different, matches people up and balances teams in a much more sensible fashion, and they’ve already said that all non-cosmetic DLC (Maps, modes, guns, etc) will be free to all players.
Instead, Titanfall 2 has the opposite problem - they’re not losing players, Between what happened with Titanfall 1 and their release date basically being right along with 3 other far more popular FPS franchises, they’re struggling to gain players. It’s not dying, it’s slowly growing, but emphasis on the slowly, at least for now.
The Binding of Isaac got a new expansion called Afterbirth+. Unfortunately there is a lot of bullshit in this new expansion which just seems unfair. Portals that spawn unending enemies that flood the room meaning that you can’t get close to the portal to kill it, chests that damage you when you touch them but only reveal themselves as dangerous if you touch them, some completely impossible new bosses with unavoidable attacks or that teleport right on top of you, some stuff that just hits you randomly out of nowhere, etc. Hopefully they rebalance some of this crap soon.
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I’m playing Axiom Verge
It’s the most Metroid game I’ve played that isn’t actually Metroid.
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[quote=“chaosof99, post:17, topic:127”]
Portals that spawn unending enemies that flood the room meaning that you can’t get close to the portal to kill it, chests that damage you when you touch them but only reveal themselves as dangerous if you touch them, some completely impossible new bosses with unavoidable attacks or that teleport right on top of you, some stuff that just hits you randomly out of nowhere, etc.
[/quote]So, basically Dark souls, but without everybody calling it a masterpiece.
Told you, glad you are enjoying it.