So, what're you playing?

[Yegolev]

I am poking at GTAV but it's very bothersome without being able to BUY NEW CLOTHES OR GET A HAIRCUT.  Also Online is somehow meh.

Instead, I've resumed Dragon's Dogma after the free Dark Arisen from PSN.

Also, Path of Exile in small amounts as I find time.

[Kageru]

I appreciated the free RAGE weekend on steam... what an incredibly dull game. Too much boring between the shooting and even the shooting in unsatisfying. Some games just suck you in and this would be the polar opposite.

Found my Spellforce complete disks and remembered why I never finished any of them, mercilessly dragged out showing the northern European tolerance for tedium or a time when you had limited games to finish.

Also 5$ defiance, which is oddly more fun than RAGE but still not a good game at all.

[jakonovski]

BF4 keeps shitting the bed so I started Torchlight 2. It's better than Dieablo 3.  I also tried to continue Tomb Raider, but the terrible gameplay drove me away.

[Jeff Kelly]

I've finished Zelda Skyward Sword and I didn't enjoy it.

This game showcases the limitations and negative aspects of the Wii motion control scheme. It requires a Wii motion plus but even with that accessory the control scheme is prone to failures and doesn't register the correct inputs half of the time. If you know how those tiny MEMS sensors work and how accurate (or really how inaccurate) they are you can spot just how much behind the scenes work and trickery Nintendo had to employ just to keep them working most of the time and they usually are out of sync at exactly the wrong moment in your game.

This made made most of the game and especially the boss encounters an exercise in frustration and after maybe one third of the game I wished that the game would work with a traditional controller setup because that would have made it instantly 100% better. The lack of precision directly translates into the design of mobs and boss encounters that are more designed to the strengths and weaknesses of the input scheme and less to be challenging/interesting although the game has some decent and interesting encounters.

The amount of tutorilization and hand holding in this game is quite frankly insulting. I somehow suspect that Nintendo's development team thinks that all of their players are borderline retarded. Even an 8 year old would be frustrated by the amount of mindless repetition of quest and stat text and the excessive amount of graphical and text hints. Even worse you can't skip any of that. Most of the time the game even repeats stuff back at you that you've seen/read less than 30 seconds ago usually employing Fi, the virtual assistant residing in your master sword. Fi has a limitless capability to state the obvious and is annoying on the same level as Clippy, the MS Office mascot.

If you've hated Navi in Ocarina of Time and Clippy in Office 97 you will loathe Fi and you will vow to burn down Nintendo's headquarters to make an example of them.

Skyward Sword would be a good 30 hour Zelda experience, unfortunately it's 50+ hours long and it only reaches the 50 hours by padding it out with mindless filler and by forcing you to revisit the same three regions over and over again. The game even recycles whole boss fights to pad out the playtime. It's also the most linear Zelda game I've played. The game basically forces you to do all regions/dungeons in order and will only unlock further regions/dungeons when you reach a checkpoint in your game. The overworld is completely barren and only features a few islands in the sky, most of which don't even feature any sort of landmarks

Apart from that it's standard Zelda fare, you have the Water Dungeon, the Fire Dungeon, the Woodland dungeon etc and you get the standard Zelda items. Occasionally a little brilliance shines through, the Ancient Cistern is probably one of the best designed Zelda dungeons I know and I really like what they did with the Desert Region and the time shifting there. The soundtrack is great but also pretty repetitive.

It's the first Zelda where you can clearly feel that they ran out of time and that they had no original ideas left and instead were just going through the motions.

[schild]

I didn't know there were any new ideas after Link to the Past.

That's not a designation of quality of lack thereof on the following entries, just a lack of new ideas.

But whatever, Nintendo ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Yegolev]

Definitely nothing new since OoT.  I did like Wind Waker but it was mostly the same stuff.  I also liked Majora's Mask, and that was a bit different, but mostly I liked/hated the moon.  Super creepy.

Still Path of Exile and Dragon's Dogma: Dark Athena.

[Mrbloodworth]

Some "lol", some smite, Some payday 2, Mount and blade persistent world.

[Hawkbit]

WoW (actually found some fun lately, for some reason)
SMTIV
Minecraft server with the kid
D3 on PS3
AC4BF on PC, have yet to dig into yet though.  Tomorrow and friday.

[koro]

It's the first Zelda where you can clearly feel that they ran out of time and that they had no original ideas left and instead were just going through the motions.

I was under the impression that Wind Waker was heavily rushed, since the game lost at least two dungeons due to time constraints.

Meanwhile, A Link Between Worlds continues to be amazingly fun.

[Rendakor]

Picked up Ys: Memories of Celceta for the Vita; it's my first Ys game but I'm having fun so far. It plays a lot like a modern day Secret of Mana, and has about the perfect story:gameplay ratio for me (about 1:5).

Also Path of Exile, working on A2 Cruel with my ST Scion.

[Kail]

SMTIV deserves better than distracted plane-ride playing.

Stupid question:
I'm hearing a lot of good things about this game, but have never played and know nothing about the previous SMT games (I guess they're RPGs about high school kids and ghosts?  Or something?).  Can you just jump in to SMT4 and know what's going on, or do you have to play the previous games in the series?

[Rendakor]

You can just jump right in. The SMT series in general is about demons, not ghosts, and only the Persona sub-series focuses on high school kids.

[schild]

All the SMT Games other than Digital Devil Saga (which is one game split in two) are standalone. You don't need to play the former ones to enjoy any of them.

[schild]

Picked up SMTIV on sale.

This game has the hardest beginning of any SMT I've played. Jesus christ.

[Trippy]

Learn to dodge encounters n00b

[schild]

Naw, I've just plowed through, I'm fine now. I didn't expect a 3DS game to be harder than Nocturne though. I'm quite pleased.

[rk47]

I installed Dawnguard.
Guard said something about Dawnguard fort near Riften.
Traveled there, decided I wanted to fence some goods and train marksmanship.
Headed in town, combat theme played.
I wondered, wtf is happening...
Never mind, head down to sewers to guild hideout.
Everyone went into combat mode instantly.
I was perplexed, and was sorta hyped too.
Maybe there's a vampire spawn in town they wanted to kill?
Whatever, I followed them to the guild's exit through the cemetery.



The combat theme kept playing as I waited patiently for them to make their way out, I charged out into town, but no vampires were there... and I realized they made a beeline to the gates..
A vampire attack in broad daylight outside Riften!? Intriguing! Come Brothers! To Arms!
I reached the gate and witnessed the courage and valor of the thieves guild as they killed two wolves who made the mistake of chasing their leader before returning to the hideout.

[Bzalthek]

I picked up Dead Island on the steam sale several days ago.  I finally beat it.  Holy Fuck that's a long ass game.  Admittedly I do all the side quests but 31 hours is pretty decent.  And it's just satisfying beating the shit out of zombies that can fight back.

[bhodi]

Dead island wasn't my thing; I honestly found it a really boring and repetitive borderlands clone. State of decay, though? That was worth my $10. I played it through this weekend in two marathon sessions.

[Soulflame]

31 hours is a long game now?

I have 130 hours in Skyrim, and I never came close to finishing it.

[Margalis]

31 hours is long when the game only has like 5 kinds of enemies and they scale with your level. The 20th hour you play of Dead Island is pretty similar to the first.

[Bzalthek]

Skyrim is an outlier, honestly.

But yeah, 31 hours is pretty long.  Sure it's a bit repetitious, but crawling through a zombie infested city, with different arrangements of monsters, and different threat level areas (those fucking infested just keep coming) and every once and a while you run into a random big baddie, which complicates everything.  I really enjoyed the atmosphere and the stories of the people I'm helping fit the mood well.  I enjoyed it.

[Margalis]

Beat Ace Attorney, was going to DL Shin Megami but had to pick up a larger SD card first. Instead started playing Crimson Shroud.

[Jeff Kelly]

I'm usually a fan of the +50 hrs long-ass game franchises, but with the sheer amount of games and entertainment options I'm kind of glad that not everything approaches Skyrim or 90's RPG levels of time investment.

I have been playing Super Mario 3D World this weekend. It's everything the press and the fans have made it out to be and more. It's the closest a 3D Mario game has come to SMB 3 or SMW and I mean that in an entirely positive way. It won't be the system seller Nintendo fans hope it to be though. It should have come out at launch for any chance of that happening.

It's a great game, the galaxy team shows that it still has a lot of creative thoughts left. It's structurally similar to SM 3D Land on the 3DS in that you get a lot more levels of harder difficulty once the main game is over but the overall qzuality is much improved. There's also really no reason why this game should be on the Wii U. I've also encountered some things though that felt like they were 'copied' from the recent Rayman Legends but since both games were released roughly at the same time this is probably a coincidence.

I've been frequenting a few message boards over the weekend and even the die hard Nintendo zealots have become less rabid and seem to acknowledge that Nintendo is in a difficult position right now. If even some of the die hard fanboys say things like 'I want to play that game but I won't buy a Wii U for it' then Nintendo is in much more trouble and I've recently heard similar things about the 3DS and Zelda LBTW and the 3DS kind of has a decent selection of games now.

That game as multiplatform launched in conjunction with the PS4 and Xbone would have killed and sold millions. Yes I know that this won't ever happen but the Wii U is pretty much dead and even though Nintendo managed to turn around the 3DS it still can't shake the impression that the 3DS is a failed enterprise. It won't keep people like me from buying their systems probably but even Knack outsold the new Mario over the weekend and probably even Nintendo does know where to go from there.

[Paelos]

Is there a reason Nintendo won't go back to creating consoles that don't have weird gimmicks and controls? I loved my gamecube.

[Yegolev]

Gamecube gimmick was the handle.

[Paelos]

Yeah but it played games without my worrying about bizarre controllers or dancing in front of my TV like a crazy person.

[Soulflame]

Are you implying that you are not a crazy person?

[Miasma]

Nintendo invented shit like that and I blame them for our current predicament.



I think they had a hand in making those jeans too.

[Paelos]

Are you implying that you are not a crazy person?

I'm implying that I would not enjoy removing all doubt in front of my TV.

[jakonovski]

I always wanted the Panasonic version of Gamecube, but my ass was broke back then.

[Margalis]

Is there a reason Nintendo won't go back to creating consoles that don't have weird gimmicks and controls? I loved my gamecube.

They've convinced themselves that competing directly with Sony and MS is a bad idea. It seems to me if they came out with a system comparable to the competitors that got all the third party stuff and also had their own first-party titles they would do well...

In other news, I went to buy SMTIV today as it was on sale. I bought it (digitally), started downloading it, then realized I had bought SMT Overclocked instead and IV isn't on sale any more...then I bought IV. Oops.

[Rendakor]

Well, Overclocked is still a great game, particularly if you didn't play the original Devil Survivor.

[koro]

Is there a reason Nintendo won't go back to creating consoles that don't have weird gimmicks and controls? I loved my gamecube.

They've convinced themselves that competing directly with Sony and MS is a bad idea. It seems to me if they came out with a system comparable to the competitors that got all the third party stuff and also had their own first-party titles they would do well...

The Gamecube was more powerful than the PS2 (and I've heard the Xbox too?), had a better price point, had great third party support, and had no real gimmicks beyond the funky button placement on the controller. The mini-DVD format wasn't even much of an impediment to development. Despite that, it still got edged out of second place by the fucking original Xbox. That's less Nintendo convincing themselves and more the market convincing Nintendo.

Trying to compete on that level again with a system that strives for parity with the Sony/MS offerings would not only cost an obscene amount of money with no guarantee of success (and kill backwards compatibility dead), but would also be the first time Nintendo's moved from a PowerPC system architecture to x86, which would throw away at least a decade of development experience to start from scratch.

Of course, their current console trajectory isn't working and probably isn't going to work in the short term, so I don't even know what they could do that doesn't leave them in a "damned if they do, damned if they don't" situation.

[Paelos]

The market is no longer the same though. The XBOX and PS4 aren't really doing anything extraordinary anymore. Nintendo would just have to enter the market at a lower price point, have their already established exclusive titles, and encourage 3rd party support without all the nonsense.