What Game Are You Currently Playing?

[thaddeus6th]

Ah, not my type of game but I have heard some mockery of games journalists who disliked it because they found it too hard (a bit like Cuphead).

Satisfying type of difficult, though, right?

 

[Bugg]

Oh definitely, yeah. It's not the game's fault I'm rubbish

 

[thaddeus6th]

Still playing Shadow Hearts: Covenant.

The gameplay mechanics remain innovative and very well put together even 16 years after initial release. The ring makes each battle something more engaging, and performing well (all perfect results, no/few enemy turns, no damage) gift extra rewards after a battle so there's an incentive to try even when battles are easy. Almost all characters can equip demonic crests for transferable magic skills, but if you place them in correct sections of Solomon's Key then additional powers are unlocked, so old crests don't just become useless as the game progresses. And if multiple crests on the same character confer the same skill, the MP cost of casting gets halved.

Pretty nifty stuff, by and large.

 

[Toby Frost]

I'm still on Fallout 4, and probably will be until I'm 60 or so. Yesterday's highlight was hiding from super mutants, as a woman in a blue vault suit: "Here, human human human... come out and die, stupid blue lady!"

 

[Deke]

Anyone play Horizon Zero Dawn? I loved the story and how they fed it to you piecemeal. I thought it would make a great movie, probably a better movie than a game but the game was still good if a bit repetitive.

But the story kept you wanting to push on, not the story in the games timeline for me but what happened before, though I did become emotionally invested in Aloy towards the end.

 

[Toby Frost]

Yes, I had it. I enjoyed it, but I never felt that I really got the hang of fighting the robots. I reached a point near the end where I seemed to need a better bow, and getting hold of it was very difficult, so I got no further.

 

[Deke]

There is a “story” difficulty. It drops the difficulty to a level you can just enjoy the game for the story telling.

 

[Toby Frost]

Maybe I ought to give it another go sometime. It was good fun.

 

[AlexH]

Metroid Dread

It's fantastic in just about every way but, unfortunately, my reactions are no longer as good as they were nearly 20 years ago when I was playing the Prime and GBA games

I wasn't a fan of Super Metroid on the SNES and as a result never really tried a Metroid game again. Maybe I should revisit. I bought a 3DS last year and had an eBay alert for the 3DS Metroid game for <£20. That never materialised, and since Dread was announced, prices more than doubled. So I wish I'd splashed out the £20+ to try the game. It would've been a good profit if I didn't like it!

I'd like to try the Prime games. Apparently they're best on the Wii, but the Prime Trilogy is expensive too. Maybe they'll remaster for Switch...

 

[Bugg]

I wasn't a fan of Super Metroid on the SNES and as a result never really tried a Metroid game again. Maybe I should revisit. I bought a 3DS last year and had an eBay alert for the 3DS Metroid game for <£20. That never materialised, and since Dread was announced, prices more than doubled. So I wish I'd splashed out the £20+ to try the game. It would've been a good profit if I didn't like it!

I'd like to try the Prime games. Apparently they're best on the Wii, but the Prime Trilogy is expensive too. Maybe they'll remaster for Switch...

There have been rumours of the Prime Trilogy coming to Switch for a while now. I think the latest expectation is that they'll release it in the run up to the release of Prime 4. Metroid Prime was my favourite game of all time until Witcher 3 came along. I still prefer it in many ways. It was worth having a Game Cube just for that game, even if my hands turned into claws by the time I finished playing it I did play it on Wii as well and they adapted the controls very well, and it's in 16:9 as well, as opposed to the original version being 4:3, so probably the best way to play it these days, short of the Dolphin emulator.

 

[thaddeus6th]

Still on Shadow Hearts: Covenant, now playing disc 2. I'd forgotten more of this than the first disc, but it's still nicely done. Shame the series stopped shortly thereafter (there was one more game but it wasn't as good).

 

[Toby Frost]

I thought I'd try Torment: Tides of Numenera again. It's like a very talky, combat-light version of Baldur's Gate. It's also utterly weird, to the extent that one of my party seems to be a translucent blob made out of my character's own sense of guilt or something. I appreciate the original setting, but the sheer oddity makes the game's logic hard to understand, and hence the puzzles are quite obscure. It's hard to know whether I'm doing anything wrong.

 

[BigBadBob141]

Yes folks I've gone back to the Stone-Age, I've put on my furry briefs ( synthetic not real fur ) and got my trusty club, now am looking for a nice girl to bash on the head and drag back to my cave by her hair, I always was a romantic!
What the hell am I twittering on about you may well ask, well as far as computer games go I really have gone back to the Stone-Age.
Am talking about the famous Infocom text based adventure games such as Zork.
They can be found to play free of charge on-line at enderandrew.com/if/games.html
They seem to have the full set of Infocom games plus a load of others, but sadly no Level Nine Games, I was so looking forward to replaying Snowball and Red Moon but never mind, there's lots of other stuff to have a go at.
What a text based adventure is, is just that, all text, no graphics or sound, this may sound very boring but it's not, some of the puzzles are rock hard to crack, you also need a large sheet of paper to draw a map on as you go, otherwise it can be easy to get lost or go around in circles, to be honest a lot of people who bought them never finished them as they can be so hard!
I'll be honest they can get frustrating and you need a fair bit of patience, but keep on trying out different things, if that doesn't work just give it a rest for a while and the answer might come to you.
There's lots of great games as well as the famous Zork series, there's one based on The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy made with the help of the late, great Douglas Adams.
There is also a very kinky one called The Leather Goddess Of Phobos, now that is worth a try just for a laugh!
It could be said that text adventures were the very first computer games, the first being Colossal Cave written by students on a university main frame before there was such a thing as personal computers, so go on give yourselves a treat and have a go at the granddaddy of them all!

 

[Toby Frost]

I was slaughtering a range of fascists in the old Call of Duty: World at War game. I don't think it's particularly good, and there are much better WW2 games, but it's the only one that's ever given me much of a feel of how utterly grim it must have been to take on hordes of crazed sadists with machine guns. The problem is that this (literal) stab at realism means a lot of just dying arbitrarily. It's a relief to finish the levels, but not actually all that enjoyable.

Anyhow, just before the end, the game randomly wiped all my saves, so it's been deleted. Well done, CoD.

 

[MemoryTale]

Anyone play Horizon Zero Dawn? I loved the story and how they fed it to you piecemeal. I thought it would make a great movie, probably a better movie than a game but the game was still good if a bit repetitive.

But the story kept you wanting to push on, not the story in the games timeline for me but what happened before, though I did become emotionally invested in Aloy towards the end.

That's next on my To Play list, after my current run through of Arkham City - all I've got left to do is pick up the last few Riddler trophies for the ultimate reward in all of gaming history - getting to punch Riddler in the face

 

[Toby Frost]

Prey (2017): this is by Bethesda Softworks, and should be a mixture of Dishonoured and Bioshock, as you try to survive in a ruined space station. Unfortunately, it's bogged down by endless busywork (put the objects in the machine to make goo, now put the goo into the other machine to make new objects etc), and continual backtracking, which makes progress very slow. Add to that very high difficulty and confusing directions, and it's a bit of a missed opportunity.

 

[alexvss]

Warsaw. A turn-based RPG about the Polish uprising during the Nazi invasion. You manage your resources and characters, then go out on expeditions to try and reclaim the city. The battle system is the same as in Darkest Dungeon, and I like it a lot. If the characters die, they stay dead, even the main ones. The story is pretty straight-forward and you know you're doomed from the start; but Poland has an amazing history of resistance on that era so I'm enjoying it a lot.

 

[.matthew.]

I was slaughtering a range of fascists in the old Call of Duty: World at War game. I don't think it's particularly good, and there are much better WW2 games

It's actually one of my favourite CoDs from my relative youth. I didn't play the ones after that because it got way too in your face achievements, multikills, ridiculous customisation and grind, etc. But, I do remember liking the multiplayer of World at War.

I've been playing a bit of Space Haven. It's an early access game I picked up from a Humble Bundle but it's not terrible. Gets repetitive and slow but the idea of a colony manager where your colony is a ship travelling from system to system in search of resources is pretty good.

 

[Toby Frost]

The multiplayer always struck me as a really jarring change of tone. You finish the last mission, and there's a solemn speech about death tolls and the evils of fascism, and then the game goes "Now, wanna shoot some zombies?!" I find it slightly uncomfortable to be playing a game - at least, a purportedly serious one, unlike Wolfenstein - set in the real world's atrocities, but at least it seems half-accurate and shows some stuff that has been conveniently forgotten and ought to be remembered.

More time-killing with Prey. It really has one enormous flaw: it's very unclear about what you're supposed to be doing to progress. It'll often say something like "Open the airlock" without explaining that you need to make a keycard to open the airlock, using the makeotron. Or maybe I'm just dopey and need more hand-holding. It's far more stressful than a horror game like Bioshock, because it's so irritating.

I also played a game where you have a theme park with dinosaurs (not Jurassic Park). It was very simple and pleasant.

 

[Vladd67]

I been having with the big train set that is Transport Fever 2.