What are you playing right now?

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Ughubughughughughughghlug said:
Submarines are fucking useless
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Nobody asked but I found out this was very very wrong.
Boomers are extremely frightening. You have to use them thoughtfully, but their survivability is a huge advantage even in a game where MAD definitely happens because they ARE super exposed to a random destroyer or sub killing them but are effectively, if you shoot and scoot, immune to counterforce. With MIRVs you can just pepper a whole country with impunity. I've even had boomers (on my custom maps) take world voyages restocking and hitting stuff all along the way.

Regular subs are actually the sea apex predator, but so it basically comes down to a circle of cruisers being dedicated destroyer AND shore bombardment killers, destroyers being sort-of sub killers and air killers, and subs being destroyer and cruiser killers. I haven't tested it yet (it's not in Blitz mode), but I think cruise missile subs are probably optimal for the boomer version of reducing enemy defenses like SAM sites, stuff you can't afford to waste nukes on but that would otherwise ruin your own strike.



I've been playing a lot of Easy Red 2 and some Nebuchadnezzar.

Easy Red 2 is one solo dev (like Schedule I) making a WW2 campaign. It isn't anywhere near as polished as I thought it would be but it turns out it's still good. If you've played Enlisted you know the premise of commanding a whole squad with roles you can flip between. This isn't tightly designed like Enlisted, but the AI isn't AS stupid as Enlisted (it's still a little stupid). It's kind of like Enlisted with more jank to slow it down. You get long, sprawling historical campaigns from all kinds of theaters that will be introduced with no more fanfare than a canned Erika snippet and "The Germans counterattack" on some piece of shit hill that you know has been 100% accurately recreated but whose real world location or significance or any sort of narrative around what is happening won't be given to you.

It's the closest experience I've had in a veyr long time of playing classic COD, which is what I bought it for. So no real narrative beats - it's like playing Battlefield 1 operations - but for what it is, you have the same vibe of a WW2 game that takes itself seriously. I can't say as I've noticed mortars in it, which is gay. Artillery call-ins exist. Infantry roles are reasonably fun. Tanks are kind of interesting/fun. Unlike Enlisted my tanks don't die immediately, so you can actually have these duels where your tank gets treads knocked out, you shoot 50 times and never penetrate, you fight as combined arms. There's no reason to touch planes; they're included, but there's just nothing appealing about them at all when War Thunder exists.


Nebuchadnezzar is a Caesar/Pharaoh-like. I never played either of those, so for me it registers as Anno with obnoxious, autistic internal logistics instead of interisland trade. Central gimmick of it is this freeform monument construction but I haven't been deep enough into it yet to engage with it. I honestly don't find myself feeling creative; as a kid, I would have played for hours with that (like I did with Age of Empires scenario editors). Game is hard. Easy to go into death spirals, partially due to lack of quality of life mechanics like more granular control over warehouses. I just got to the part in the campaign where it mechanically unfolds with war mechanics. At first I was feeling peeved because I HAD fucked around in the tutorial of Tlatoani (which is free, but full game is for pay), and this is mechanically much simpler, but now I can't imagine dealing with Tlatoani's shit at the same time. Tlatoani's more thematically appealing to me and has gimmicks based around Aztec religious life (human sacrifices, the whole autistic calendar is represented, etc.). I'm sure it isn't included (stuff like this never is) but I'm hoping YHWH makes an appearance as a god in this game.
 
Been picking away at Dispatch the past few days and finished it today. If you're a fan of the old TellTale games and aren't bored to death of superheroes I recommend it, it's fairly decent.
 
Descent II. I played it a bunch when I was a kid, but never finished because I'd get really turned around in the later levels.

I still do thirty years later, lmao. It's a lot of fun, so I don't mind.
 
Fired up my old PS3 and started playing GTA 4 and it's DLC again. This game, in my opinion, has some of the best serious GTA moments throughout its main game and DLC. I have to agree with the consensus that TBOGT is the better of the DLCs though.
 
Flatline said:
What were your favorite moments?
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A personal favorite of mine is one I usually don't see. When you decide to kill Duane over Playboy X and you kill a single guy with a bat and he just gives up. He makes you feel like an asshole for being a backstabbing prick to a guy who was already shafted a million times.

The reveal that Karen is an FIB agent that has some decent setup if you pay attention.

The time when Niko opens up about what happened to Roman's mother.

Johnny's struggle with Ashley and her addiction tugs at the heart strings the first time, but it's hard to feel bad for him about that all game. Especially since it gets him killed in 5.
I do like a couple of the somber moments in TLAD. Notable ones are the small cutscene for executing Billy at the prison, and when they burn the clubhouse at the end while the main music sting plays in the background.

I'll be honest, even though it's a lot of silly shit mixed in with the serious stuff I think this DLC is probably the better one.
Luis may talk about racism a couple times but it's not enough to make me roll my eyes at it.
His conversation with his mother about how he knows good people and bad people but he knows the difference.
The bridge scene with the crazy chick he hooked up with, where it borders on comedy with how little he really cares.
The moment he almost betrays Tony, and when he kills Bulgarin on the plane and parachutes to safety after the plane gets blown in half.

Granted everyone is gonna have different preferences on stuff and a few of those might not even really be classified as "Serious" moments.
 
Gimmick Account said:
my computer broke so I'm playing shenmue
some of the the characters aren't chinese david lynch but it's okay so far
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Shenmue is an objectively terrible game that I still find incredibly charming and play through every few years. There's just something about the incredible detail (and at a time when the tools for making 3D assets weren't nearly as sophisticated) and leisurely pace of the whole thing that appeals to me.

Shenmue 2 tried harder to be a game rather than a mid-80s-Japanese-neighborhood-simulator and I didn't find it nearly as interesting.
 
ryo manouvres like an assault battlemech but I enjoy opening cupboards with him
 
heavily modded kerbal space program

aka poor man's warthunder

it's impressive that a third-party mod for a mexican rocket-crashing simulator from 2012 is more balanced than a high-budget AAA game
 
Mostly World of Warships here and there. I initially had a plan for the last weeks of this year, but can't be asked to start anything else.
 
The Halo series and, frankly, I'm about to give up on it.

My Halo experience was being a little kid that had an XBox, the provenance of which is unknown, that had exactly one game I can remember, and it was Halo. I stalled out at 343 Guilty Spark (I know this because it was scary and when I replayed it as an adult just now I didn't recognize any of hte stuff that came after). I went on to read a shit ton of Halopedia without ever even being aware that Nylund wrote novels or once thinking to myself "should I possibly try another Halo game." I did the same thing as a kid with Wookiepedia and other pedos.

So coming back to this as an adult, I had sky-high expectations. Then I play Halo: Combat Evolved and I think "that kind of sucked, this is probably a Portal 1-Portal 2 situation where I'll blast rope to Halo 2." And then Halo 2 has sucked ass the whole time (I'm up to Regret, VERY APT name for a mission).

So my take on Halo: Combat Evolved:
Halo CE is definitely a video game. An old video game. I had recently (like, over the past few years) played Black Mesa, my only exposure to Half Life as a franchise, and also the Doom reboot, so it's interested to see this retro or retraux games. And this one holds up far and away the worst, yet the same things I didn't like about it were what I missed when I started Halo 2. You've got a shoestring plot (it's amazing how much a small child can invest in a character like Sergeant Johnson or Keyes who shows up all of twice for a few minutes) delivered with "college kids giggling into a microphone like they're kids playing army men in a sandbox" voice acting. What you will proceed to do for the next several hours is walk down the same corridor repeated going through the same combat scenario with light variation and occasionally be treated to a very light combat sandbox. This shit was mind-blowing when it came out, but it's one of those things where the technical contribution of it to the medium doesn't mean it has any value today. The worldbuilding feels odd; Forerunner architecture is intentionally supposed to feel purposeless and confusing and mysterious, but it reinforces that this is a vidya game.

The remake graphics are godawful. I played on the old ones as soon as I figured that out. They butchered the art style.

As far as enjoyment goes, the best of it was Pillar of Autumn (still holds up as a tutorial mission with vibe), Truth and Reconciliation's infiltration sequence with the sniper rifle, 343 Guilty Spark if you DON'T know what's coming, and then everything from that point on. I actually genuienly liked the Library, yes it was the same shit over and over but that and Keyes were both the two points where the Flood has a recognizable, tense, miserable combat loop. Two Betrayals was peak and genuinely amazing. The warthog sequence at the end was retarded. All told, the second half of the game was actually fun, which was my experience with Doom: it was absolute piss until the last half, which is too late.

So when I get to Halo 2, what happens to piss me off more? Well, suddenly the game becomes way faster paced. No health bar. Shields both go down and regenerate fast like this is fucking Call of Duty Modern Warfare. You get real environments to fight in but everything blends together visually. Perhaps the best thing about retraux games is that they have crisp roles for each alien and weapon. I've started calling them 'alien shooters," not "arena shooters." But the roles, of alien and weapon alike, get watered down when all of the aliens die pretty fast.

But worst of all, the tone changes.

What always grabbed my imagination was that dimly remembered experience of sort of mystical cosmic awe that it's steeped in. Halo somehow manages to have (in hte video games, I'm not passing judgment on books I haven't read) this weird combination of the most low-effort video gamey presentation with absolutely mythic, Biblical-level, skin-tingling naming. At age 10 it burrows in to your psyche.
The Pillar of Autumn.
Truth and Reconciliation.
The Covenant.
High Charity.
Prophet of Regret.
Long Night of Solace.
Gravemind
Covenants and Floods
Master Chief as a way to play off of what calls back both unga bunga AND the most bland, logistical-sounding bureaucratized modern military hell in one figure
The story of a race (feels like djinn tales in Islam or the War in Heaven in Mormonism) destroying their Gods out of jealousy to steal the patrimony of another race, then being punished by the revenants of the elder gods coming back in vengeance against humanity, and humanity's own former partners unwittingly trying to repeat the cycle of Satan, or Cain and Abel

It's a match made in heaven: Black Hawk Dawn era oorah set against Bronze Age mythology in a world that feels like a Cenotaph.

But Halo 2 then went and somehow fucked it up. And I can see the glimmer of brilliance. The juxtaposition in the same cutscene of Arbiter being tortured and Master Chief being awarded at the same time is movie-level shit. But it didn't feel like it went anywhere with it. I figure I'm far enough in to at least finish Halo 2. Also, Cortana needs to shut the fuck up.



It is official.
This may well be THE MOST DISAPPOINTING thing I have ever played.
 
Ughubughughughughughghlug said:
This shit was mind-blowing when it came out
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That's not how I remember it, though I was a PC gamer kid foremost who already knew what an FPS was. A lot of people have high nostalgia for Halo, but it's not like it broke ground in the way that Goldeneye did. But it's the couch multiplayer Goldeneye for kids who didn't own a Nintendo, while also being in kind of a weird kid-friendly SERIOUS ARMY MAN zone right at the beginning of the serious army man era, so there was an embarrassingly persistent tendency to pretend it was cooler and more mature.

...Except it's actually goofy as fuck. All the weapons look and feel like nerf guns. The aliens are neon muppets and the main character is just Doom Guy if he had an imaginary girlfriend designed specifically for early 2000s video game magazine covers. Even as a kid I noticed the huge disconnect between the actual game and how people talked about it.

I mean, nerf guns actually make perfect sense for a party game--that's not even a criticism--but I wish fans would admit that's what they are. But you still see people comparing the weapons in new games to their memories of Halo as though they were actually high design and impactful. I think part of this is just that the particular segment of people who don't play that many games but like army man shooters overlaps a lot with those who grew up with an xbox.

Sometimes people now pretend it was about the draw distance or something, but kids don't notice that shit. Or vehicles, but Tribes and stuff did that years earlier.
 
Gimmick Account said:
That's not how I remember it, though I was a PC gamer kid foremost who already knew what an FPS was
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I remember the weird thing that stuck out to me when I was young was the really floaty physics of Halo. It took fucking heaps of getting used to the low gravity and really slow Master Chief after growing up on Doom and Quake. Coming back last year to play through all the games on MCC with my nephew (except Halo 4) I still feel the same way - if anything, it feels even more jarring after the years and years of every other mostly boomer shooter I've played. Jumping and hanging in the air for 3+ seconds will never  not make me feel extremely uncomfortable.

They're still good games, and I want to bully my nephew into playing through them all again co-op over the coming xmas holidays, but the sheer slowness feels like unresponsiveness and definitely damages my enjoyment of them now.

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Been playing the first Parasite Eve game to compare it after playing tons of PE2.
There's lots of things I  want to like about it, but so much of it is just bad.

Shit like how moving Left Stick in the same cardinal direction will send you off in slightly different angles on each screen, and it often doesnt line up with the perspectives of the pre-rendered backgrounds. Or how often new screens completely change the angle of action in a nonsense way (I know filmmaking has a "rule" like this, the 180 Degree rule or something?) which makes every location fucking confusing. This is made worse by a good number of screens overlapping each other - particularly noticeable in Central Park - and by a lot of screens being the kind of shitty low-res where you can't make out where screen transitions are. Key Item hunting is also a stitch-up, as many are hidden in pre-rendered background objects you'd have no way of knowing could be interacted with.

The funniest part to me though is the writing. Aside from how cheesy and tropy everything is, Parasite Eve 1 feels like it was written by a Karen a lot of the time. There's an officer/armorer at NYPD who lectures you about 'how bad guns are' and explicitly says criminals only use guns because cops use guns. There's pseudoscience stuff all through the game that does totally make sense to be there, in the sense that I remember hearing a lot of people in the 90s talk about things like Spontaneous Combustion and the 'we're all from Africa' genetic Eve stuff very seriously, but nowadays it's shit 40 year old women treat like their new religion because they saw a podcast clip on facebook.
There's lots of other smaller stuff I'm forgetting, but they make me laugh so fucking hard.

The cutscenes are generally pretty fucking cool though, watching the rat mutate in the first level was pretty gross, and the police dog Sheeva mutating into a giant Cerberus/Manticore hybrid felt just like watching the Kennel scene in The Thing, it was great.
 
Revisiting Ace combat 5, I have a side thing I do, and I wanna have it done by the thirty first. Don't expect me to post it here because that seems like a bad idea as compensation though I will share some knowledge.

All Ace Combat games from 2 onward have in engine HOTAS support, with hori even issuing a few for AC. As a result when emulating them you can rebind the controls to your own HOTAS and enjoy a classic title in a fresh way. I have done this with 4, 5, 0, and X.
 
Been on a real open world game kick recently so I've been switching between GTA Vice City, Mafia 3, and Saint's Row 3's remaster. I probably enjoy Mafia the most of all 3. The shooting feels nice and the takedowns are gory enough to seem satisfying. The documentary style story is pretty good and I hear the word Nigger enough it evokes some old COD lobby memories.
 
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