So, what're you playing?

[MisterNoisy]

Mostly playing Ghost Recon Wildlands with my brother.  More Skype with guns.

[Kail]

Planescape: Torment remake is out today, so I'm diving in to that.  I never beat the original, I started it like five times and always petered out part way through.  Not sure why, I love the world and the ambiance and it certainly has no shortage of cheerleaders, I just never made it all the way through without something else catching my attention.

Playing Far Cry: Primal, and really enjoying it.  As far as I've heard, the main complaint is that it's too similar to the previous Far Cry games, so for someone like me, who hasn't booted up any of the games after the first one, it's pretty great.

Also, poking at the new Shovel Knight DLC which adds Specter Knight's campaign.  I really like 2D platformers with a bunch of acrobatics and crazy gymnastics, and that seems to be what this version specializes in, so I'm really liking it so far.

[Fabricated]

The overwatch PVE thing is actually really fucking difficult at higher levels. It's great for farming EXP and kinda relaxing at lower levels after dealing with retards in Quick Play however.

[apocrypha]

The overwatch PVE thing is actually really fucking difficult at higher levels. It's great for farming EXP and kinda relaxing at lower levels after dealing with retards in Quick Play however.

Cool, I'll tool around with that a bit soon as my arm will let me then.

[Rendakor]

The overwatch PVE thing is actually really fucking difficult at higher levels. It's great for farming EXP and kinda relaxing at lower levels after dealing with retards in Quick Play however.

Is it solo or coop with retards only?

[apocrypha]

It's co-op. There's 2 modes, one with 4 fixed classes - Tjorborn, Reinhart, Tracer & Mercy, and another mode with any classes you like. I just managed to do it on the lowest difficulty as Mercy, even with my right hand being 35% scabbed blood clot. It was quite fun :)

[Rendakor]

Fixed classes doesn't sound like my cup of tea, since I suck as all 4 of those. A quick glance at the skins told me I don't really need to go hard on this, but I'll at least patch up and give it a shot.

[Kail]

It seems pretty fun so far.  Looks like they took some inspiration from Battleborn in the mission design, which works well.  I'm finding it a lot more fun than their Halloween PvE event.

Though the actual rewards have basically just reinforced my hatred for Overwatch's shit garbage trash fucking crap ass hell damned horrible loot system.  Five crates so far, ONE skin (not even one of the event ones) and EVERYTHING ELSE has been sprays, icons, victory poses, and a few voice lines.  Fucking let me buy the pack of skins for $15 or something and I will, but I'm not spending money on a crate when the drop rates are such utter shit.

[Soulflame]

The crate system is shit.  The players are shit.  The skins are meh.  The PvE event is okay.

[Yegolev]

I am playing Let It Die but I do not know why.

[Gimfain]

Started playing bayonetta that got a surprising release on pc.

[Rasix]

Persona 5 is going to take me a long, long time to beat. Just got through the first dungeon. There are just so many options in this game that I think I'll just have to settle for a less than optimal completion. I'm hoping there isn't some sort of "best" ending, where you have some do some really obscure shit like in Persona 4 and have unreasonably high levels in all social connections.

And my family still can't fish in Stardew Valley.

[Fabricated]

I've been told the True Ending for Persona 5 isn't difficult to get.

Basically, always be doing something to either 1) complete the current palace, 2) janitoring your confidants, or 3) janitoring your stats. Don't waste time slots. Be prepared for Morgana to blueball you all the fucking time because he's an asshole.

Good non-party Arcana to work on:
Temperance - will grant you the ability to do stuff AFTER hitting the Metaverse at max rank which is really good- but I think this is blocked by max-rank charm or guts. Can't recall.

Sun - When you get access to the Sun Confidant if you grind him up ASAP you can easily get personas and utter fuckloads of cash in palaces and Mementos by extorting shadows. You don't really need a Sun persona to easily do this either.

Moon - Like Sun you don't really need a Moon persona. Not as boss as Sun but not having to juggle party members if you want keep them properly leveled is nice.

Hierophant - Getting this leveled up early on lets you pop an evening time-slot to make curry or coffee that restores lots of SP to everyone in the party. Extremely fucking good.

Death - Level her if you want more and better stuff at her shop.

Random stuff:
Studying during rainy days at the school library gets you Guts and Knowledge
The underground mall at the subway station in Shibuya has a juice mart that sells special juice only on Sundays that will give you points towards a random stat.
The vending machines next to the bathhouse and in the atrium at the school sell very minor (but very cheap) SP restore items and get restocked every week.
Go buy bio nutrients from the flower shop and feed the plant in your room for a bunch of kindness points every chance you get.

[Ironwood]

Shadow of Mordor was quite good.  For a fiver, anyway.

[Khaldun]

Yeah, it's the quintessential, "Well, that was fun! [a year passes] Did I play that? I can't remember" game.

[Ironwood]

While I'm a big fan of the Nemesis system, everyone's raving on about Shadow of War and it'll be huge and groundbreaking and new and I'm watching the trailer and thinking 'This is just Doomdarks Revenge.'

Don't get me wrong, hugely looking forward to it, but it makes me think about old ideas we can drag out the cupboard and present as our new vision for the future.

 

[Jeff Kelly]

I was never a big fan of the Rocksteady Batman titles because I really, really dislike the combat mechanics (I'm not a big fighting games fan) so Shadow of Mordor never seemed that appealing to me.

I'm still a bit surprised though that nobody has integrated something similar to the nemesis system into another game. It seemed that people really liked that aspect of the game and it would make sense for a lot of action adventure/action RPG type games that adjust the levels of enemies to the character Level.

[Ironwood]

I just want an updated Doomdarks Revenge now. 

What I will say is that I loved the Batman games and found the fighting interesting, but playing SoM it was far, far, far more noticeable that the fights weren't as interactive as they seemed.  You can literally chain up to 100+ simply with the same two buttons every time.  Unlike Batman, it seemed to even manage the 'direction' for you.

I still loved it, mostly due to rolling heads, snapped arms and daggers through eyes though.

I also really, really liked the Branding aspect of it.  There's nothing more fun than lining up all the guys you've branded and pressing K to pop ALL THE HEADS.

Though I did do that stupid thing where I super trained one wee jerk to be the ultimate to get an ultimate epic rune, only to find out that he fucking killed me 5 times in a row once I tried to get it from him.  I basically gave up and sicced one of my other nutters on him.  That was fun.

[Mithas]

I'm playing Dark Souls for the first time. Yes, I know, I'm extremely late to the party. I've had it sitting in my backlog for years. Tried it a few times and gave up because it was hard. I've always thought that because of wife and young child obligations I just didn't have time for "hard" games. I wanted to get to the fun quick and not grind. Finally decided to buckle down and work on it. I am so impressed I am having a hard time describing my experience. The first thought that comes to me is that Dark Souls is 'fair'. If I die, it is generally my fault. I learn and I get better. I know that this is old news to almost everyone here but it is still great to experience it for the first time, only 5 years late.

[Ragnoros]

Hollow Knight is a great Metriod style game. Have we talked about it here? I would highly recommend, with the major caveat that the game just doesn't respect your time.

Probably half of my ~15 hours was spent backtracking and wandering from point a to b in hopes of finding the next collectible or story point. While I get that's partly the point of such games, I think they let the game's scope get too big, or at least needed to make the fast travel points more conveniently located, as they all seemed to be as far away from important areas as possible.

[Quinton]

I'm loving Hollow Knight.  Not finished yet at 35 hours (though I think I'm pretty close now), but I'm not rushing and also I'm *terrible* at boss fights.  Some of them take me quite a few tries to get sorted out.

I think the core Metroidvania formula involves revisiting old areas once you've gained new abilities and suddenly you can get at things you couldn't before (including into entirely new areas).  So the backtracking was something I expected.  And given how amazing the game looks and sounds it hasn't been bothering me too much.

The little things constantly make me smile... like the variety of the benches you rest on:

Also I love the foreground layer (in *front* of the layer your character is on) of parallax scrolling.

[Kail]

Hollow Knight is a great Metriod style game. Have we talked about it here?

I think I played the demo back before launch and quit about ten minutes in, there was some glitch where about a quarter of my controller inputs weren't registering.  Wasn't killing me, but after derp-walking off the side of the twentieth platform in five minutes I just said "screw this".  I assume if everyone likes the game that at some point this got fixed?  Or is this likely to be some *special* issue that only hits me?

[Ironwood]

Factorio released a new update. You can now go nuclear.

[Jeff Kelly]

I've watched quite a bit of Hollow Knight being played. I'll wait till it's out on the Switch. It looks quite hard and I also don't like the map system and how it is unlocked. Other than that it seems to b entirely up my alley

[apocrypha]

Factorio released a new update. You can now go nuclear.

You have to opt into the 'experimental beta' on Steam to get it currently. They've also started upgrading the textures to high resolution too, although the current half & half situation looks a bit odd.

[Ironwood]

Yup.  Easy enough to tick though.  I played about with it again last night and I liked the changes.

[Quinton]

I've watched quite a bit of Hollow Knight being played. I'll wait till it's out on the Switch. It looks quite hard and I also don't like the map system and how it is unlocked. Other than that it seems to b entirely up my alley

I actually enjoy the map system -- you seldom have to spend that much time in new areas before finding the map maker npc, and his trail of papers and the tune he hums provide visual and audio breadcrumbs.  The boss battles are pretty tough (at least for me), but generally you can find a rest/restore point near by, you can learn their patterns, and you can go explore other areas and get better gear, and it works out in the end.  There are some optional/extra/bonus bosses that I hear are just completely nuts.

Regarding controller glitch issues, in ~40 hours of gameplay I've had controls lock up twice (both times when I opened up the inventory screen immediately after getting a new item), and my player character glitch where he wasn't tracking the ground until I ran into an enemy twice.  Otherwise it's been rock solid.  I'm playing on Win7/Steam with an Xbox controller on the TV in my living room.  Wonderful experience.

[apocrypha]

Yup.  Easy enough to tick though.  I played about with it again last night and I liked the changes.

Yeah, I only said that because it took me a while before I found that out :)

I'll be giving it a whirl when I feel done with my current RimWorld game, which is the first really successful base I've managed on Cassandra/Rough difficulty.

[Ironwood]

Rimworld never worked for me.  Just for the life of me couldn't figure it out as a game.  At all.  Shame, but I ain't young anymore.

[Yegolev]

In Soviet Russia, games play you!  At least that's how I'm feeling right now.  Fortunately I'm having fun with Horizon.

I still do things in Let It Die.  My wife hates this game and doesn't tolerate it being on while she is in the room.  I still can't explain why I'm bothering with it.

OK, one thing I can say is that Let It Die is more fun than Fat Princess Adventures, but my friend is playing that and therefore so am I.  I hope he gets his stress under control so we can move upward in the complexity slider.  This will probably happen when we get the next 7 Days update.

I very nearly booted Persona 5 a couple days ago.  So close!

One day recently I was brain dead and played some No Man's Sky, which was pleasant.

I might be tiring of Skyrim.  I mentioned this to my wife and her face turned white.

While sitting around at a Smash Bros tournament (my son was eliminated as soon as mathematically possible), I played some Majora's Mask.  I'm going to finish this one before I die, I swear to pasta.  Then, naturally, I fucked around in Animal Crossing.

[Druzil]

I think in another year where there weren't so many games I would have played a decent amount of Let It Die.  I played a few hours and it seemed like it had a ton of systems and enough going on that it could be really interesting.  Also, Uncle Death is pretty awesome.  The combat did seem a little mediocre which was probably why I didn't go back even though I had planned to.

I'll be playing Persona 5 for at least a few more weeks.  Every night I plan on just playing through a couple of days and I end up just totally immersed in it and it's hard to put down.  I think at this point I have to find a way to play 3 & 4.

[apocrypha]

Rimworld never worked for me.  Just for the life of me couldn't figure it out as a game.  At all.  Shame, but I ain't young anymore.

Funny, it grabbed me immediately. I think something in me just embraced the chaos, suffering and death. I played something like 10 games that didn't make it past a year without everyone dying horribly. l've modded it to crap now of course. 

[Sky]

This will probably happen when we get the next 7 Days update.

Still minecrafting a bit. Saw what it would take to max out my draconic armor and kinda balked. Not that it's all that difficult, just the chore of reincarnating the ender dragon that many times is blah. Maybe I'll build a bedrockium gen and check out the deep dark, I've only seen that once, briefly as a pack that's played there.

Of course Rocksmith. Love the new sorting options, I'll often just pick a year and start playing though stuff. Works for the fiancee, too, if I pick the 70s.

Tried to get into Dishonored again. Controls seem wonky (made for controller, I guess?) and the story/characters just bothered me a lot more than usual. It was just so over the top mustache twirly and silly I couldn't even. And the stealth wasn't as good as Thief goddamned 2. C'mon, man. Didn't make it out of the prison, but I was pretty close to the part where you get out, I think. So I should probably get at least out into the city to give it a fair shake?

[Rasix]

Tried to get into Dishonored again. Controls seem wonky (made for controller, I guess?) and the story/characters just bothered me a lot more than usual. It was just so over the top mustache twirly and silly I couldn't even. And the stealth wasn't as good as Thief goddamned 2. C'mon, man. Didn't make it out of the prison, but I was pretty close to the part where you get out, I think. So I should probably get at least out into the city to give it a fair shake?

The prison is probably the weakest part of the game. The following missions are a lot less linear and allow for better stealth options. I could be wrong; it's been a while since I played Dishonored, but I do remember being a little frustrated at the start.

However, I'm not sure anything will get past your Thief 2 fetish barrier.

Back from "vacation" (kid's state chess tourney), so it's back to Persona 5. Mona needs to really let me do what I want with my damn evenings.

[Ironwood]

I loved dishonoured, but at some point I just stopped playing and never went back.  Odd.  Too many games I guess.

Also, it's the spell check that's doing that, not me.