whatchu playing now

I have finally, sadly, accepted that I don't have the time to learn how to play strategy/builder games like Surviving Mars - as great as it looks. It might just go on my list of "games I watch other people play on Twitch"

otm, i love board games in that genre but 4x video games are an order of magnitude more involved to learn and play

Yeah - but what I've watched of Surviving Mars seems oddly joyless. But maybe it's great if you get engaged.

finished Tales of Berseria last night, really good JRPG overall. some of the best & most fun character writing I've seen in the genre, and the combat system was enjoyable the whole way through. it doesn't have the visual or environmental wow factor of some of its peers e.g. xenoblade but it does everything else well.

next up in my JRPG queue is the first Trails in the Sky game, i think

xp in my experience every mars themed game, both videogame and tabletop, comes out joyless, i call this the Curse of Mars

lol

https://i.imgur.com/5vxrKexl.jpg

i just got to the 2nd map in Metal Gear Survive and am still am having fun. bow & arrow/battle axe is my current go-to loadout. this game may reuse a lot of MGSV assets but so far the world maps are entirely new. looking forward to see what they do with the jungle, not being tied to having the larger bases/outputs formula.

mission 14 was pretty incredible! one of the few legit reuses of an old map and it's for such a cool sequence. there are a bunch of cutscenes from this mission and the final one is a doozy.

xp in my experience every mars themed game, both videogame and tabletop, comes out joyless, i call this the Curse of Mars

― ciderpress, Friday, March 9, 2018 10:08 AM (five days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Not true! Red Faction: Guerrilla is a delight! But that's almost entirely due to destructible environments. Few game mechanics can compare to smashing buildings apart with a sledgehammer.

trails in the sky is charming but v slow paced, i'm 12 hours in and not much has happened yet. love the corny jazzy battle music, it's so far off of the final fantasy template that 90% of these games use.

Wasn't Doom set on Mars? I won't stand by and let you slander Doom!

i meant strategy / survival games set on mars, doom is fine

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/af/Ultima_Worlds_of_Adventure_2_cover.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima:_Worlds_of_Adventure_2:_Martian_Dreams

never played but this always looked sick

whoa ciderpress you're playing trails in the sky? i am trying to play it too! less than an hour in and i almost always immediately fall asleep as soon as i try to play tho.

yeah i just started it last weekend it's very cozy

i'm a bit more excited about trails of cold steel tbh but i want to do things proper and play the older series first. it honestly hasn't aged that badly compared to other early 00s RPGs thanks to using sprites instead of 3d models for the characters

well i blasted through trails in the sky 1 thanks to liberal use of the turbo button - really glad they added that feature in the steam version, there's a ton of lengthy magic animations in combat that you don't need to watch 1000 times, and cutscenes of airships slowly taking off and landing in a game that's already really slow paced. combat was reasonably fun, it's got a pretty basic but enjoyable turn-based system that was engaging enough to have me constantly tinkering with my characters' builds. it ends on quite the cliffhanger and having started the 2nd game now it's become clear that 1 was really just something of a long introduction to the world and characters, whereas 2 is much meatier from the start since that stuff is all out of the way.

d00dz my students are obsessed with fortnite and won’t shut up about it

is it any good??

it's okay, it's the best of the trendy battle royale games so far just by virtue of running smoothly. unclear how long the trend will last

I tried pubg last night and Holy holy does trying to find a tiny enemy on a tiny screen suck

Just sneak to the final circle, hide, and lob grenades liberally when down to 2. It's how I won my only chicken dinner, whilst being a lousy shot. I love(d) the aesthetic of PUBG, and hate that of Fortnite.

I've played Subnautica to death. Dozens of hours past the end of the game to collect seeds and plant decorative undersea gardens. Probably going to buy Surviving Mars next.

would be interested to hear how surviving mars is. i watched a stream and wasn't totally convinced.

i think i just can't stomach Gun Games unless they're stylized rather than going for realism re: fortnite vs pubg

the last big fad was overwatch

battle royale is a fad of greater magnitude than overwatch, by a fair amount

i thought the same of mobas, but they stuck around

and actually overwatch has generally stuck around too. not sure they're fads so much as just new genres

moba and battle royale more new genre-y than overwatch, which is more of a refinement

yeah blizzard is in full-on pc genre refinement business, cf hearthstone, herostorm and overwatch.

yeah i don't necessarily mean flash in the pan, MMOs and MOBAs both went through fad periods where there were tons being made and then eventually people gave up on competing with the successful ones. we haven't gotten that bandwagon wave of battle royale games yet but you can be sure as hell they're coming

i just meant in terms of what my students - obv a very small subset - were into

hearthstone is interesting because it's not an original game concept but blizzard were the first big studio to gamble on there being an audience for it among video gamers and not just tabletop gamers. i wouldn't call it a refinement of anything, it was the first major game in its space. MTG online was just never designed for accessibility or new players so it doesn't even count here imo

I thought a decent chunk of gamers have been into online "CCG" deck-building games for ages?

do people still play DayZ? that was the hotness at one point. did it even make out of early access yet?

Played I Am Setsuna over the last week as it was half price on the eshop. Its got a bad rep and I can see why most might not like it (linear, downbeat etc.) but I really enjoyed my time with it. Harkens back to FF4 and Chrono Trigger and other 16 bit JRPGs, but streamlines a lot of stuff. Only major complaint is the soundtrack which is all solo piano, which conceptually I think is good to fit with the wintery theme of the game, but the composer sadly just isn’t up to the task. I switched it off after a couple of hours :/

yeah i was thinking about picking that up on sale

wasn't the guy who made DayZ the one who made PUBG? or one of them

Playerunknown made a BR mod for DayZ, then participated in some way in H1Z1, before working with the Koreans.

ni no kuni 2 is out tomorrow, planning to play it once i get confirmation that the PC version is functional

You’re a machine, I’m still not done with Xenoblade Chronicles 2

i spend a lot of time playing games...also i'm not a completionist, i tend to just do the main story + a small sampling of side content in RPGs

Quake 3 isn't really related to the previous games in any meaningful way, but I'm surprised by how much I'm enjoying it. It's like a proto-Alien: Isolation, super stressful and unnerving. I can only handle random gibbering from the shadows and waiting for a thing to jump at me from a hole in the roof for, like, half an hour at a time before I get all noped out.

Oh goddammit, I meant Doom 3, not Quake 3. Look, it's been a long day.

started ni no kuni 2, so far my party consists of a catboy and the president of the united states

That’s a big get

Northgard is pretty great

https://i.imgur.com/49LuAeYh.jpg

Yeah. I don't know why I have such an issue with the latter. That whole 'dialogue over a static image' thing feels so lazy to me. Y'all remember this is a game, right?

I just finished playing Hungry Hearts Diner ON IOS & it was a very nice Japanese food game / visual novel where you play a grandmother tending a provincial japanese food shop & customers come in & tell their stories more and more as you develop the dishes they crave, like salisbury steak and curry. it's simply and quick but the stories were surprisingly touching.

is it like diner dash mechanics?

I don’t know diner dash but it’s not really a speed game, ludically it’s very simple but the stories were very nice, I’m glad to have played

pax east is really weird this year - a lot of the big single-player game developers are conspicuously absent, and the vacuum has been filled entirely by:
-computer hardware/peripherals companies with big booths showing off how well their products run playerunknown's battlegrounds and fortnite
-twitch (amazon), facebook gaming, and microsoft with huge booths trying to draw people to their streaming platforms to stream/watch playerunknown's battlegrounds and fortnite
those two games accounted for a good 50% of the expo floor it felt like

this was an unsettling experience beyond just the fact of major tech companies taking over the space, it really felt like an emperor's new clothes moment where through sheer conformity they accidentally revealed the exposed machinery of the tech-authoritarian future vision of Gaming