So, what're you playing?

[schild]

Disgaea peaked with 2.

I don't think you need to play Shadow Hearts 1. Rasix is correct, there is no third one.

Digital Devil Saga is probably the best megaten.

For whatever reason, I literally am incapable of finishing a goddamn Persona - and likely never will. Every character from every game has just been so meeeeeeeeeeeeeehhhhhhh.

[Teleku]

I picked up Digital Devil Saga 1 a few years back because of the praise here.  I got about 2/3'rds way through it before I just sort of stopped playing.  It wasn't bad... it was just sort of meh.  Game world was kind of bland.  Gameplay itself just didn't really grab me for what ever reason.  I was interested to see what the 'twist' at the end would be (IE, explain wtf is going on with that world), but otherwise the story was sort of shallow and bland as well.  I don't know, I guess I got use to Final Fantasy for my JRPG's, with a thousand plot points and characters all over a varied colorful world.

Is the 2nd one much different in terms of story and gameplay?

[schild]

The second one is superior, imo. The first one did become kind of a trudge through wet concrete by the end because, well - graphics.

[Signe]

I very nearly almost never finish anything.  Not since the old Ultima games mostly.  That never stopped me from enjoying them, though.  I remember finishing an Ultima game and there was cheering and a parade and the next game I finished something not much of anything happened.  I was very disappointed.  Of course, the main reason is that playing rpgs takes so long for me that I get tired of the game before I can finish.  I am almost never compelled to go back unless there some big expansion or addon or DLC. 

[Yegolev]

For whatever reason, I literally am incapable of finishing a goddamn Persona - and likely never will. Every character from every game has just been so meeeeeeeeeeeeeehhhhhhh.

So far, you are correct when you stated YEARS AGO that I would never finish SMT Nocturne.

[Rasix]

Disgaea peaked with 2.

I don't think you need to play Shadow Hearts 1. Rasix is correct, there is no third one.

Digital Devil Saga is probably the best megaten.

For whatever reason, I literally am incapable of finishing a goddamn Persona - and likely never will. Every character from every game has just been so meeeeeeeeeeeeeehhhhhhh.

While Shadow Hearts 2 does retcon a lot of what happens in 1 (and picks the ending it wants to go with), you miss a lot of the impact of 2 without playing the first. But, the game is better in every aspect and probably aged a lot better graphically than 1.  1 did have some pretty interesting moments right from the start, and you get the entire backstory for Yuri and Alice. So, I'm torn, but yah, you could play 2 without playing 1 and be OK.

I thought the characters in Persona 3 were fine.  4 had some really grating personalities and voice work.

[Khaldun]

I liked Culdcept Saga. Was there ever another in that series?

[schild]

NO. AND IT'S A CONSTANT SOURCE OF ANGER FOR ME.

[schild]

And before anyone says shit, I'm aware they kept coming out on ass systems in Japan.

[Druzil]

Shadow Hearts Covenant is $90 on Amazon 

First one is $123, guess I should feel lucky.   

[Signe]

My sister has become totally obsessed with Creativerse.  She was up until 3 AM the other night, building a house.  The only other time she did that was with Wizard 101, the very night of the very first game she played.  Yes, it was me who started her on games.  Dammit.  She didn't even get this crazy with WoW.  Next thing you know she'll be here, on f13, fact checking me!   

[Yegolev]

Fallout 4.  Synths are creepy.

[Sky]

Fallout 4.  Synths are creepy.

They killed Van Halen!

[Yegolev]

Don't blame the hammer for a shitty house.

[Chimpy]

I decided to re-play both Portal and Portal 2 this weekend. Man those are some great games.

I then decided to go through some of the games I bought during the Steam Summer Sale of 2012 that I never installed/played.

Last night I installed Bioshock and played for about a half hour.

[Sky]

If you play Bioshock Infinite, very early in the game there's a set piece where a balloon full of barber shop singers floats up as a couple embraces, watching them. Just watch the couple, who continue to loop the same animations after they leave. Indeed, forever. The vast bulk of my hour or two in that game was that. I got a beer and just giggled.

It was better than the game, which annoyed me so completely I never really got through the interminable introductory parts.

Man, that was a wretched game. So bad I chuckle when people dog on No Man's Sky. I probably paid $5 for Bioshock Infinite and should've gotten a refund.

[Chimpy]

I don't own infinite, just the first two which I think I paid $7 for combined.

[Mandella]

I'm in the "first Bioshock was brilliant camp," and also in the "never finished or even got halfway through Bioshock Infinite."

I'm not even sure I can explain why I didn't like Infinite. The game certainly was beautiful to look at, but both game play and story were just bleh.

[Sky]

For me it was the utter lack of any verisimilitude while trying to shove it down your throat. The world was not cohesive or believable but they tried to sell it to you so hard that I spent half my time rolling my eyes and the other half of the time laughing at how bad it was. Then the way it wanted you to keep the Disney ride moving but didn't have any solution for if you stopped (the barber singer's fans). It all distracted me so much I could never get around to the, you know, game part.

I didn't like Bioshock much, either, though.

[HaemishM]

The game part of Infinite wasn't great. It wasn't bad but the parts that were new were really fucking annoying to me. The story swerving into pretentious head up ass bullshit just sealed the deal.

[Ard]

I wasn't a huge fan of Bioshock 1 or 2, I felt they both ran way too long.  I'd probably have been upset if I'd spent more than $5 since they felt really padded to me.  That said, it was worth it for the Minerva's Den DLC in 2.  That bit was brilliant in my opinion, and didn't overstay it's welcome.

[hal1]

I played 1 about a third of the way in. The second less than that and the third when I realized that I have to kill every cop in the game. I don't know where they are or if I'm gonna find a few. And I just had better things to do. To sport them the graphics are spot on, The feel is spot on, but the game play is meh.

[Sky]

Another Rush pack for Rocksmith? Fuck yeah.

Aaand now my right index and middle are blistered. But hey, I can still nail Tom Sawyer in Master Mode (it's an easy song, to be fair). Scored respectably on La Villa Strangiato, given I never really learned it the right way...

[Strazos]

Going through the entire enhanced editions of the Baldur's Gate games, as well as fooling with World of Tanks.

Certainly making good use of my obnoxious laptop. 

[Teleku]

Heh, when I had to leave my rig behind and live in Japan for a year with just my shitty old laptop, I too went back and played through both Baulder Gate games.   

[Strazos]

Well, I'll eventually get back to Farcry Primal and some other things. I may finally be able to play through ME3 and Dragon Age 3.

It's good to have a really nice laptop.

[Rasix]

I tried Undertale.  Yah.  Not a positive experience for the 20 whole minutes I lasted. I loved Earthbound, but this isn't striking a chord.

[Khaldun]

I stopped hard halfway through Infinite. I thought it was great art direction with zero narrative appeal and no gameplay worth my time.

[Rasix]

Finished Pillars.  It was OK. It could have been a lot more, but the plot didn't start getting interesting until the game was almost done. The big twist, introduced sooner, could have provided a lot more interesting possibilities. Combat was OK. Encounter design was bad to OK. Everything was just kind of bland. Like another entry in the Icewind Dale series but with less interesting encounter design. 

On to the next. 

[schild]

Finished Pillars.  It was OK. It could have been a lot more, but the plot didn't start getting interesting until the game was almost done. The big twist, introduced sooner, could have provided a lot more interesting possibilities. Combat was OK. Encounter design was bad to OK. Everything was just kind of bland. Like another entry in the Icewind Dale series but with less interesting encounter design. 

On to the next. 

I couldn't even get through 3 hours of it. All the gushing over what it was and I'm just like "I played this before and it wasn't very good the first time. Torment this ain't. Baldur's Gate this ain't."

[Rasix]

Apparently I got through 36 hours of it. At least it didn't annoy me in the ways that other recent nostalgia farming has.  It shares the low effort graphics, but at least it wasn't as bad as Wasteland 2.  Sad that Bryan Fargo's crew is less technically competent that Obsidian.

It's really odd that out of all of the kickstarted RPG nonsense, I enjoyed Divinity: OS before.  Guess that's the benefit of not having to resurrect a corpse and starting with a product that just needed additional funding.

[Jeff Kelly]

Played a few hours of Obduction - the new game by Cyan makers of Myst and Riven. If you liked Myst or Riven I'd very much recommend it because it's exactly in the same vein as those two games with a few nice twists to make the gameplay and presentation feel much more 'modern'.

Game performance is shit though at the moment (the recommended specs are Core i5 4550 w. 8 GB of RAM and a GTX 970) and it is still plagued by a lot of minor technical gremlins (AV desync, texture and Rendering bugs, stuttering) so pretty much par for the course for a Kickstarter project.

[apocrypha]

On a whim I decided to fire up South Park: The Stick of Truth, having got it in a sale for treefiddy ages ago. I'm slightly surprised by how much fun I'm having, but I do have the sense of humour of a 12 year old boy.

Also it turned out that Invisible Inc is actually a bit of a pain with a touchscreen, so I gave UFO: Enemy Within a go, but the Surface Pro 3 struggles a bit with it. I may have to accept that it's not really a gaming machine.

[Yegolev]

Surface.  Sorry, man, those suck.

I picked up Moon Borderlands again and am having brainless fun as well as nostalgia.  I really want to complete this one before I start replaying Borderlands 2.  Moon Borderlands isn't BAD but it is constantly surprising to me just how extensive it is.  I don't care for some of the more confusing maps, such as inside Helios where everything is blue and twisted and the 2D map is absolutely no help in preventing me from getting lost.

[Merusk]

I loved my Surface Notebook, but the tables are NOT gaming machines. The processors don't handle 3d well, which is why the laptops have the vidcard built-in to the keyboard.

The notebook was able to handle some large Architectural Model files like a champ. I was also able to get Fallout 4 to play on it very nicely, though admittedly not on as high of settings as my PC. The only downer was the screen resolution fucked with programs that were still designed around 1080 and desktop screen Ratio standards. Fallout 4 in particular needed some .INI hacking to get things to display properly.


As for what I'm playing: Overwatch Competitive and WoW's Legion expansion for a bit. At least until Civs comes out later this month. I'm 2040/ 5000 in Overwatch so I improved! Downside: I solo-cue so I've lost my last 3 games and dropped from the 2100+ rating I had. I think I'll wait out a few weeks and let the misranked folks fall down and see if I get teams that actually talk.