What are you playing right now?

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Right now, I'm between Crash Team Rumble and Modern Warfare Remastered. There's one more achievement I need from Crash that requires a long level grind.
 
Noob-diddling two Warhammer games, Inquisitor and Darktide. Kind of neat so far. Crusader in the former, Zealot in the latter.
 
I’m in a bit of a game slump at the moment after dedicating all of my free time and then some to a Pokémon FireRed romhack, Pokémon Unbound. But I did play a little bit of Against the Storm this evening for the first time in a while and that was fun.
 
Never finished VTMB despite several plays through my teen years, so the last few days I've been making another earnest attempt to do so. Last time I played Gangrel, so this time I'm playing Tremere and going hard on Thaumaturgy. I'm up to the museum and I've been doing every sidequest I can find along the way, so I already feel very Master Of All Trades even when I forget to use Bloodbuff. Playing with the version of the Unofficial Patch that just does fixes and stuff, no restored or added content.


VTMB is much worse than I remember, which is a bit of a twist given how often I've been pleasantly surprised in the last couple years. I find myself enjoying VTMB when I'm either exploring, or talking to NPCs who aren't established vampires. The quieter tracks are fantastic, and "less important" characters have more interesting things to say that flesh out the world.

The rest of the time, the lauded facial animation system is atrocious and uncanny, the environments feel empty because there's so little clutter/detail/interactibles, animations are janky, combat is janky, voiceover quality changes almost every line, and the world itself feels really small while also being a pain in the ass to walk around. Important characters all come across as having their heads up their own asses, and frankly I don't want to interact with basically any of these retards except maybe Max Strauss.

When I reached Downtown I had the attitude of "I kinda wanna see how bad this gets", but now as I'm doing the last Downtown quest and about to head to Hollywood that feeling has worn off. I really just want to be done with it so that I can say I have finished VTMB and I never need to touch it again.

It HAS made me curious to try find and pirate some OWoD books though, just to read more of the setting and early 90s artwork. I like the ideas of a lot of WoD tabletop stuff, but dear god this videogame is bad. Playing it alongside Postal 2 is doing VTMB a lot of damage.


EDIT: I've reached Hollywood, acquired the .44 magnum, and my mood has improved drastically. This gun absolutely fucks and doing the middle section of the Tzimisce questline has given me the XP to buy Ranged 4. I hope Mercurio actually does come through with a combat shotgun, because I feel like the Colt Anaconda and a SPAS are just gonna sweep the entire rest of the game.
 
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I just picked up Insider Trading, a rouge-like stock market simulation game, and its been an enjoyable time. I'm only 4 runs deep and I stumbled into the WSB mode and got the stock prices so low that I went 4.5 billion in profit. absolutely a fun time, and only like $12 on steam right now. If you played and enjoyed Balatro or Clover pit but want a much more minimalist UI, this game is for you.
 
Tekken 8: A couple of rounds here and there, still grinding ranked.
Let It Die: Fiddled around with the game in the past but never gave it enough time. With the offline announcement I thought it might be a good time to revisit it.

I have a bunch of other stuff I want to play, so I might jump into something like the newly released Banquet for Fools, FF X/XII/XIII, Outward, Daggerfall, Sacred 2 etc.
 
Lurkerish Kandor said:
EDIT: I've reached Hollywood, acquired the .44 magnum, and my mood has improved drastically. This gun absolutely fucks and doing the middle section of the Tzimisce questline has given me the XP to buy Ranged 4. I hope Mercurio actually does come through with a combat shotgun, because I feel like the Colt Anaconda and a SPAS are just gonna sweep the entire rest of the game.
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I did a Tremere playthrough a couple of months ago. Make sure you don't fuck Strauss over with the gargoyle thing and miss out on the chantry apt! The early game guns with low firearms are so bad that I threw my hands up and bloodstrikemaxxed until I got ahold of the .44 and only then did I throw a couple of points into firearms. By the end of the game, I realized I was playing a dollar store toreador and regretted almost entirely forgetting about thaumaturgy once I had a half decent gun and the skill to use it.
It had been a while since I last played and I thought the game held up super well.
 
Asian tech support said:
It had been a while since I last played and I thought the game held up super well
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Having actually got to Hollywood and done a few quests, I'll chalk it up to Downtown being a bit of a low point in the game. I think the only quest I enjoyed in Downtown was the Haunted Hospital stuff.

Also I kind of expect to be one of the few people to think VtMB doesn't hold up, its par for the course at this point. I have a lot of odd gaming opinions usually born from caring about autistic shit that normal people don't.
 
Lurkerish Kandor said:
I have a lot of odd gaming opinions usually born from caring about autistic shit that normal people don't.
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Me too. For example, I find it nearly impossible to play Prey (2016/2017, not the old one) because the left trigger doesn't aim/zoom/steady your bubblegum gun and you can't make it do that. Am I retarded? Yes.

Also, Civ V pissed me off for the longest time. You know when your citizens get angry? The game somehow managed to convey me the information that a specialist was one of the angry citizens. I searched for a way to make specialists happy, instead of just generally making general citizens happy. Such a feature didn't exist. Now that's fine, BUT WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU TELLING ME THAT A SPECIALIST SPECIFICALLY IS A PROBLEM IF I CAN'T DO ANYTHING ABOUT THAT SPECIALIST SPECIFICALLY? WHY GIVE ME SUCH INFORMATION AT ALL? Now am I retarded again? Perhaps, but there's at least one Civ V dev who is also retarded and perhaps too a homosexual.
 
Playing system shock 1, enhanced edition not the full remake, and really enjoy it. Its nice to play a game with just enough info to know what to do and actually respects your intelligence. Yeah yeah "graphing calculator controls" but once you get used to switching cursor functions with e and firing with right click its pretty intuitive, at least now that mouse look is native. I really love the two small windows with the swappable functions, stuff like changing the beam guns energy and some bomb timers is just the coolest shit to me even if not the most practical. I feel the restoration bays kinda fuck balance though since before you find one you slowly sneak around playing extremely cautiously but one you do find it you just start running out bashing everything with your pipe/lightsaber. Still amazing pioneer of a game that's sadly under played because of its clunky reputation
Also FUCK those invisible mutants in maintenance.
 
Playing Slay the Spire 2. It's impressive how different they've managed to make the game feel very different and I'm excited to learn everything. I'm a little concerned that I know StS so well that it's basically my comfort zone, and once the excitement of the new game wears off I'll start to resent a lot of the additions - I can imagine coming to the conclusion that the added mechanics just upset the balance of simple and complex.

Necrobinder is fun. I haven't made Regent work yet. Silent is still the best character. Defect feels strangely chunky to play, despite it still being a card game.
 
Animal Well. It's amazing.

It starts out like a creepy SNES era platformer, but eventually it turns into an enormous puzzle. Damn near every room has a secret lurking somewhere. The tools you get are so weird that it makes you feel like macgyver to solve the puzzles (bubble wand, frisbee, yo yo, slinky etc). The art is good and the ambiance is unsettling. I never thought an animal themed pixel game would be great, but its one of the best things I have played this year.
 
sperginity said:
Animal Well. It's amazing.

It starts out like a creepy SNES era platformer, but eventually it turns into an enormous puzzle. Damn near every room has a secret lurking somewhere. The tools you get are so weird that it makes you feel like macgyver to solve the puzzles (bubble wand, frisbee, yo yo, slinky etc). The art is good and the ambiance is unsettling. I never thought an animal themed pixel game would be great, but its one of the best things I have played this year.
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Just be careful, I heard it's haunted. When Maldavius Fagtree played it, a stack of paper flew down on its own!
 
KIngdom Come Deliverance on the Nintendo Switch, was on sale for £3.99 and I've always wanted to try it.
 
PlayStation has a sale on a lot of games going on so I decided to finally pick up Ghost of Tsushima. I already understood the premise going in and I was a fan of Sucker Punch already because of the InFamous games.

It's a very visually stunning game with some beautiful views to find at some of the shrines and other POIs. The combat can be a little overwhelming at times, and the multiple sword stances that specialize against certain enemy types sounds good in theory but it usually results in combat feeling stop-start when you have every stance at your disposal and you're just purpose swapping stances. The standoff mechanic is pretty fun, since it's essentially the quintessential samurai moment where you cut 1-3 people down mid attack with one slash apiece. Definitely worth checking out if you like melee combat open world games.
 
lichen said:
Playing Slay the Spire 2. It's impressive how different they've managed to make the game feel very different
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Okay. I just tried it out and after playing for a couple minutes had to double-check that I didn't accidentally download a torrent of the first game.
 
Rocket-fueled Wheelchair said:
I’ve been curious about this game, keep us posted with your review and if it’s worth getting!
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I'm going to be honest, I'm struggling to bring myself to say this because I really wanted it to be good, but it's been really meh so far. I'm 5-6 hours in and I'll give you another review when/if I finish the thing. And I'm still praying this actually turns out really good because I had an experience like this, I palyed like 10 hours of Prey, gave up on it and when I came back a year or so later it became one of my favorite games of all time.

You didn't ask for a comparative analysis, but that's what you're getting.

This game is a prime example of how trailers can make people excited but can't really tell you anything about what a game plays like or what it's even supposed to be. Give you an example, Death Stranding's trailer looked spectacular, because it was bizarre, but it also had fuck all to do with bokka, which is what the game was really about (post-dad game of being a bokka). Likewise, this thing shows you a parade of weird shit with a good song and makes you think "oh fuck yeah that looks so exciting and whimsical and surreal," but all that tells you is that they had some clever designs and strung them together fast and shot it sexy.

Game's gonna live or die on what it's about. And for me, I went in like most figuring this would be a contribution to the whole retrofuturistic dystopian genre with Bioshock, We Happy Few and Fallout. Some of those games have a great "point" and fucked up on gameplay (We Happy Few, which I love). Some have no point but made unique gameplay experiences (Fallout). Some did well at both (Bioshock). Problem I'm getting with this one is it's phoning it in on both.

So, the setting is supposed to be scientific socialist, Red Plenty Krushchev (not necessarily that time, I have no clue when this is set) USSR, which is already a great hook because the Soviet Union has very different flavors and "stories" depending on when you set it and we almost always get grim KGBland, or Stalinland, or Belarus on fire from the Wehrmacht. So in this one's world, magical atomic power/magical sea slugs/magical "polymers" (that's like saying your sci-fi runs on "chemistry") has allowed the Soviets to create their technological wonderland and become rich and peaceful and just generally a nice place to live. Robots are the big thing. They've gotten really really good at robots. And you can tell, no matter how off the culture feels in other ways, these guys ARE science spergs because there's references to dudes like Chelomey and Tsiolkovsky everywhere. And some dude has decided to ruin this research complex by making all the robots go haywire, and you've got to solve that.

The problem is that after all this time I still don't get what this is about. The aesthetic is genuienly fantastic, they blow their load upfront with the big intro sequence in Flying Akademgorodok, but where is this going, what themes does this have, why is this the Soviet Union. The robots are indeed quite nice and whimsical, there's weird shit going on, but when you play this you're not getting a tight one minute trailer, or even a tight two hour movie, you're moving from discrete setpiece to setpiece. Here's a robot. Here's another robot. Here's a biological experiment gone wrong. What's this ABOUT?

With those other games I could tell you. Bioshock is ABOUT Objectivism. The whole premise of Rapture being an undersea colony, and its name, is all an allusion to the motif of Atlantis in Atlas Shrugged, just made literal: what if Galt's Gulch actually was Atlantis, it actually is at the bottom of the sea. The art deco is striking, and it's spread throughout the whole world, you do feel like you're stepping into a moment and an ideological mindset that is recognizable and alien all at once, somewhere in the vagueness of early 20th Century America that didn't get reduced to Gotham or Mayberry. The central conflict is stupid and the analysis of Objectivism is dumb (lol do you want to kill the little girl to get rich y/n), but you can still charitably read it as being metaphorical about man stealing fire from the gods and burning himself, real problems where a state founded on "fuck you got mine" anti-altruism will inevitably compromise that position to protect itself, and if nothing else you still feel really smart at 16 listening to these guys talk about these ideas even if it's basic bitch stuff.

Similarly, We Happy Few isn't really about political philosophy but it is about psychology. It takes a real world story (the German occupation of the Channel Islands) and uses it as a launch pad to ask, how do individuals and societies process guilt and grief, what would happen if we could give ourselves grace without earning it, that sort of thing and its magic (the Joy pills) are actually plausible, it's like straight up contraceptive-laced dope that's just frying people's brains with all the consequences you would expect from it. The 1960s theming isn't just set dressing, the happy shagadelic vibe is infantilizing, it's papering over their trauma from the Blitz. It serves a purpose.

Fallout is the weakest because it's complete nonsense, just kitchen sink mush, but even that has sometihng going in that it took 1950s B-movie/comic book pulp bullshit, real-ish 1950s suburbia and then plays it either as dumb action-adventure pulp shlock (3) or totally straight poe-faced "I insist you take me seriously" (New Vegas), and in the process it winds up creating, like, the vidya version of Tolkien or Star Wars where it invents its own visual language that people can live forever in.

I can't tell you yet what Atomic Heart is trying to do. Is there going to be some critique of Soviet central planning at some point like Red Plenty did (the vision was beautiful, we tried our best, we came close at times but our Tower of Babel still fell), a satire of Lysenkoism and the whole premise of scientific socialism, what is it? If it's going anywhere it's taking its sweet time. And all the little cultural texture, I'm just not picking up. You get a Young Pioneer mascot like the Pip-Boy because Fallout had it. You get spaces that look accurate to mid-20th Century Russia but you don't have people living in them in a way that feels like 20th Century Russia. It's like they had a bunch of really creative kids making genuinely cool robot ideas, that also really liked Fallout, and they said "hey man what if we did like Fallout but it plays like Bioshock but in Russia." Cool. Whoop-de-fucking-do.

Gameplay-wise, it just hasn't done anything interesting yet, really. The liberating thing, and this is what keeps me going, is the robots allow it to do weird stuff. It doesn't have the variety (in armaments, in superpowers) of Bioshock, so you don't get the interesting mechanical problem solving old games like that had, but you do get more types of enemy than just "turret" and "tweaker with frying pan/gun" (most of the time, though, it's still going to be "angry robot trying to throw hands"). This plays a lot like my impression of old Metro games. Those too had that problem of not having a point, but they kind of made up for it with trying to feel extremely real and tactile and grounded (everything's animated, everything's slow). This is like that if it decided to be fast and silly instead.

I'm aggravated. Supposedly it gets a fair bit better but the slow burn is bad. I do find it entertaining when I play, but this is a mediocre showing.


Edit: We Happy Few would have, by this point, had me sexually pleasing nursing home patients, electrically torturing people as part of the state Simon Says championship, interpreting John Lennon, harvesting adrenochrome from people and fighting plague victims (zombies by another name) that speak in Anglo-Saxon.
 
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Still playing Warhammer games, Darktide and Inquisitor. Might as well elaborate.

I don't know shit about 40k, I don't know the names of people/legions, I don't know what's what, I don't paint dolls and I haven't played board games in ages. But motherfucker, these games are fun. Playing both on Xbox like a PLEB


Darktide is a co-op game that resembles Left4Dead by quite a margin. You mow down hordes+special enemies and advance in long-ish levels. Between missions you fuck around with about 10 systems of progress and color-coded loot. The game is still simple, even if most of the finer mechanics (brittleness? What the fuck is that) aren't explained in the game for whatever reason, it just assumes you know. You can still pick it up with a buddy and go, you don't have to pass a test.

I will say that some of the gunner-type enemies seem smart. You gotta keep your eye on them while you're whacking the melee hordes. They can be sneaky, change positions and keep their distance. Also, it's cool how enemies react to being shot, the animations can be great. All weapons seem kind of powerful somehow, feels good. A little jank here and there, but right now it's my co-op game of choice.


Inquisitor is an ARPG. You look at your character from above and turn everything into a retarded tornado of bloody explosions and numbers. Numbers go up enough and you lose the urge to kill yourself. The theme of all weapons feeling kind of powerful continues.

Still playing the single player story and a few randomly generated missions here and there, and the game keeps introducing new exciting stuff in a timely fashion. I suspect there is a hardcore endgame for the autists but I'm just enjoying the relaxing nature of it right now. I am surprised how fucking much I like it, especially since I never heard of this game. Apparently it wasn't even half-finished when it released, but now it's feature- and DLC complete.


Actually fun / 10 for both. Some strange controls here and there, some jank perhaps, but the fun is there in spades. I can see myself pretending to be some W40k hobbyist veteran in a few weeks in order to gain attention and approval from 60-year old men playing with small, retarded statues instead of their withered ballsacks
 
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