What game are you playing?

[Ralyks]

Welp, PS5 is out for repair (basically, since I got the thing, it would crash when playing PS4 games. Yes, not PS5 games, but PS4 games). I thought maybe a system update would solve that, but nope. Tried every troubleshooting suggestion Sony fave, but nope. So it's probably a fried motherboard.

So, been playing the Xbox. Mainly Citizen Sleeper, which in still deciding if it's my kind of game or not. Also, TMNT Shredders Revenge is awesome.

 

[wankerness]

Mine's definitely been having issues for a few months now, too. It will unpredictably crash horribly if I suspend any game. If I always close out games before putting the system in rest mode, it never crashes. It's happened with multiple games so it doesn't seem specific. Not really sure what to do about it since it's probably a software problem.

 

[beerandbeards]

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge. Great nostalgic feeling side scroller beat ‘Em up. Played online with my brother and nephew and it was everything you’d want.

 

[TedEH]

Finished Tunic today;

Spoiler

It's late and I'm tired, so I'll try to be brief, but also maybe some actual spoilers.

This game has some great ideas that mostly center on the in-game manual, and how information is mostly hidden from you. There's a sort of "key item" that you chase for a good amount of time that turns out not to be an item at all, and I won't spoil that, but it leads to a really good "ooooooooooooooooooooooh THAT'S what's going on" moment.

By the time I got to the end of the game, I had some inventory items that did.... I have no idea what. I think I like that in this game though. The flip side is that you have that Outer Wilds style issue that once you know you know, and there's not much replay value.

The biggest downside to this one is the difficulty spikes when you reach bosses. Every time I encountered a boss, I had to take a break and come back to avoid wanting to just give up over repeated failures.

There's also some end-game fetch-questing type stuff you need to do to get the "good ending", and it's easy to accidentally miss important stuff, but I don't think it's enough to bring the experience down.

I'd put this in the "if you're on the fence, just try it" category.

 

[Carrion Rocket]

Almost snagged a PS5 this morning. Just so happened to check Target and the store a city over had 5 in stock, but by the time I had finished the checkout process they'd sold out. About threw my laptop through the wall.

I'm about to pop in Castlevania: Lords of Shadow for the first time. Heard alot of good things, so I'm ready to finally check it out.

 

[wankerness]

Almost snagged a PS5 this morning. Just so happened to check Target and the store a city over had 5 in stock, but by the time I had finished the checkout process they'd sold out. About threw my laptop through the wall.

I'm about to pop in Castlevania: Lords of Shadow for the first time. Heard alot of good things, so I'm ready to finally check it out.

What did you think? I played it for a couple hours and just didn't get into it. I think the camera being zoomed so much further in on the character combined with the wallowy movement and slow combat just made it feel too clunky for me.

In other Castlevania news, I just watched a long video about how good and ahead of its time Castlevania 64 was. One of their main theses was that it played more like a modern 3d actioner than people were able to handle at the time, so stuff like the deliberate platforming and just negotiating the combat with the camera was not something people were used to. They drew some interesting parallels between CV and Dark Souls that I never really noticed (how pre-SOTN Castlevania/CV64 is all about being deliberate and having to commit to attacks and being held back by attack animation speed and slow jumping abilities etc). I'm kind of curious to play through it again. I think I sold my cartridge way back in the 90s, but I still have Legacy of Darkness. Might have to check it out. I'd much rather Konami release something like they did with the other side-scrolling ones so I could replay it with a modern controller, but I don't really see that happening anytime soon.

 

[BlackMastodon]

I haven't played Lords of Shadow in like 10 years (...jesus christ...) but I enjoyed it at the time. Mind you, I love the Devil May Cry games it played way more like that or the original God of War trilogy than any other Castlevania game, so take that for what it's worth. Never did check out the sequel, though.

 

[TedEH]

I started up Golden Sun, since it's one of the handful of virtual console titles I scooped up on the Wii U before the store shuts down. First impression is that this is going to be good-for-it's-time, but nothing special by modern standards. By that I mean it feels really formulaic so far, the kind of thing you could throw together in RPG maker with a bit of added polish, and that makes me worry that it's legacy is mostly because of the cool combat swoosh thing it does. With any luck it gets good once it gets going.

 

[wankerness]

Played about 45 minutes of Ys IX, it was ok I guess, combat seemed dull and button-mashy. I’ll have to give it some more time.

Started up sekiro again on PC today. It is sure a lot harder on NG than it is on NG+ in the early game. I felt like a noob idiot dying repeatedly to Butterfly and Genichiro. Now I’m to the interior of the gun fort and should probably get to the ape on the next session. Having a shitty controller is really a liability - I have some generic pc controller the copies the Xbox controller design, but the L1/R1 buttons aren’t super reliable and the back paddles are terrible so I can’t depend on them! I appreciate my ps4 controller with button add on even more now.

 

[MFB]

Funny enough I was considering doing a new playthrough of Sekiro, and that might just confirm that I'm supposed to. I didn't finish my NG+ play which is fine since it's not tied to any trophies, and doing a 2nd/3rd will allow me to pick up the ones I didn't get the first time for a platinum maybe.

 

[wankerness]

Funny enough I was considering doing a new playthrough of Sekiro, and that might just confirm that I'm supposed to. I didn't finish my NG+ play which is fine since it's not tied to any trophies, and doing a 2nd/3rd will allow me to pick up the ones I didn't get the first time for a platinum maybe.

You actually do have to do NG+ since there’s a trophy that requires you to kill all bosses on the same “character” (aka you have to do the bad ending bosses on ng+ if you did sword saint on ng) and another that requires you to get all item upgrades (you can’t get enough lapis lazuli without getting to the fountainhead palace or w/e it’s called a second time). Unless you mean you did those and just have no reason to do the last bosses, which is true as long as you already got the all bosses achievement (iirc you never did owl father?).

NG is definitely a lot more fun since your character actually gets stronger through the course of the game and there’s motivation to kill all the mini bosses.

 

[mongey]

been playing a bunch of fall guys since it has just been revived .

its fun but ,as I found our when it first came out, the maps get repetitious pretty quick . already a bit over it

 

[MFB]

Ah shit, is the all bosses trophy on the same playthrough? I thought it was just collectively, not with a single one, if that's the case then yeah I guess I'll have to finish that playthrough. I got up to Guardian Ape completed, so I think it's once you hit Owl Shinobi that you have to make different choices to get the alternate endings.

I did forget that even though I got all the baseline skills, I need to complete the very last scroll, all of which are like 9 points each which is some real BS. So that'd also mean completing NG+ to achieve

 

[Bloody_Inferno]

Finished my first run on TMNT Shredder's Revenge story mode and unlocked Casey Jones. It's got the hallmarks of a great brawler, almost touching the arcade version of Alien Vs Predator but a few flaws linger the longer you play, especially considering the arcade brawler is a bygone genre.

The playable characters are the heart of every brawler, and the cast here have enough quirks for variety but still not unique enough for the to feel different. What made AvP so good was that all the playable characters were so different to each other that it gave a lot of replay value. As different as the characters are, they're still fundamentally the same movesets. Taking a deep dive into them does make you appreciate everyone (Raphael just happens to be the best character... again), but I suppose I just wished the developers leaned harder into the concept. The 4 turtles were more unique in Turtles In Time, and (while not the same genre) Turtles Tournament Fighters made each of them as unique as their personality implies. Streets Of Rage 4 suffers similarly, which is funny since Streets Of Rage Remake makes each character unique to each other it's a joy playing all of them. Perhaps future DLC can introduce other characters and extra tweaks on the current cast.

Another thing that makes brawlers problematic is that their primary gameplay loop is so simple (walk right and beat everything up) so the variety is a much needed spice. All the vehicle based stages still play like a normal stage with a few frills. Again some new mechanics (new unique skateboard moves etc) would be nice to break the monotony. Some of the bosses do spice things up (Chrome Dome, and the last 2 bosses) but most of them are interchangeable with each other, again another issue with the genre. Funny to say this, but TMNT could greatly benefit from their ripoff rivals Battletoads for some gameplay variety... or at least the old school games (SNES one especially), since the recent Battletoads game sucked tremendously.

I guess I'm being so harsh to a game driven by nostalgia, especially one pointing right at me who played the OG arcade, NES, and SNES TMNT games. But there's a lot to like and ultimately I had a lot of fun. I miss James Avery's voice but it's always nice hearing Rob Paulsen as Raphael again. And as a multiplayer, it's an absolute hoot and even better at parties. But gameplay I wished Shredder's revenge learned and improved from the past rather than wallow in it.

 

[Mathemagician]

Finished year one in stardew valley. I new see how these games are so addicting. No achievements/trophies. Just pure monopolistic farming/fishing with no outside competition. Nice.

 

[mongey]

Finished year one in stardew valley. I new see how these games are so addicting. No achievements/trophies. Just pure monopolistic farming/fishing with no outside competition. Nice.

I played the hell out of it for ages on on my Mac book. Can’t remember how many years i got through but it was allot.

Finished the main story and kind of fell off from there.

But it’s a great game, and I’m not huge on sim games generally.

 

[TheBlackBard]

Here I go again, yet ANOTHER playthrough of Disco Elysium.

 

[wankerness]

Ah shit, is the all bosses trophy on the same playthrough? I thought it was just collectively, not with a single one, if that's the case then yeah I guess I'll have to finish that playthrough. I got up to Guardian Ape completed, so I think it's once you hit Owl Shinobi that you have to make different choices to get the alternate endings.

I did forget that even though I got all the baseline skills, I need to complete the very last scroll, all of which are like 9 points each which is some real BS. So that'd also mean completing NG+ to achieve

The bosses you can't do on the same playthrough are siding with Owl

Spoiler

leading to you having to fight Emma and "easy" Isshin

vs not siding with Owl at about the 2/3 mark and thus eventually fighting the Genichiro/Sword Saint boss. Owl Father is just kind of in an optional area, he's not a binary choice that locks out anything else. But yes, I looked it up to verify, you have to do them on the same "character" so one has to be done in NG+.

Yeah, it's not hard to get the all abilities trophy and it technically could be done on NG, it would just be really tedious. I just farmed the first robe asshole in the late-game NG+ version of Ashina Castle's lowest level for HOURS. It's totally brainless so I got some good podcast listening in. It's like a 6 second farm loop just backstabbing that guy, running back to the idol, running right back to him and backstabbing, etc. I think I read that it takes getting through NG+4 or so if you want to get that all abilities trophy without any grinding.

Make absolutely sure you do the pot nobles quests on each playthrough (which requires getting almost all the treasure carp scales) or it would take more than two playthroughs to get enough Lapis Lazuli to unlock all the upgrades.

 

[MFB]

Restarted Sekiro tonight, I can already feel the headache while playing even when not fighting bosses. Why do I do this to myself?

 

[wankerness]

Restarted Sekiro tonight, I can already feel the headache while playing even when not fighting bosses. Why do I do this to myself?

Cause it has about the best combat system ever in a game, imho. It’s a game with some very serious flaws but the good is so good that it’s well worth the suffering. Well, unless you take more than about an hour on a boss, that just sucks.

I played for another hour or so today, killed the monkey mob and the giant serpent and then took a few tries on guardian ape. On first try, I got his second phase down to about 1% before dying, and then I kept dying repeatedly to first phase in about 20 seconds per attempt. Got really mad and went on the offense instead of playing defensively, and killed both forms only using two gourds

Then I died horribly to snake eyes sirahagi so one-sidedly a few times in a row I had to quit the game. Wtf is wrong with this mini boss and why did I never have trouble before?!