whatchu playing now

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

on the bright side though, the Gal*Gun publisher had a booth so i got to play the meta-game of 'see what kind of people are brave enough to play Gal*Gun in public'

I am playing divinity: original sin, and my children are playing fortnite. my wife wants to watch masterchef. UK 2018.

whoa Spy Party is finally officially being released next week - it's a v cool little online multiplayer 1v1 game thats been in development for like a decade by one guy iirc. premise is pretty simple - one player is a spy at a cocktail party in a house full of npcs and has to act like an npc and blend in while accomplishing a checklist of subtle little missions like swapping a statue with a decoy, putting a bug on a politician etc, the other player is a sniper watching the party through the windows with a single bullet

officially being released meaning steam early access with online play, theyve run in-house games of it at gaming cons for years

Oh I thought I saw that on RPS’s games of the year previously - more than once now I think about it.

yeah it's been around for a long time but always as a beta version

That sounds awesome

it does sound interesting

Demon's Souls (PS3) - finally got past that cliff with the skeletons and manta rays and defeated the Old Hero and Storm King. the Storm King is such a cool fight, and when you win it becomes the best spot to quickly farm souls.

last night i beat the Valley of Defilement, all the way to the awesome ending, killing Maiden Astraea, which is a really fucked up situation, running into this massive cavern to hear some dark metal choir and see a bunch of acolytes worshipping above a pit of blood with bubbling zombie babies and a Renaissance statue beaming in glowy light.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPJUQg_U5HY

sounds kind of like John Carpenter or Goblin

my brain is still mush from spending 2 full days at pax looking at dozens of indie pixel art sidescrollers and isometric/top-down brawlers. there were a few cool things but mostly people just won't stop making the same games

Ppl should take a hiatus from pixel art platformers unless they’re like pretty sure they are making a better game than Celeste; anything less is superfluous imo

INSIDE on ipad. what a great game. though the controls can be frustrating. man the underwater "child siren" and shockwave areas were harrowing. poor kid.

currently working on the alternate ending. yes i'm looking up where those orbs are.

i think what's stuck with the most is the slapping sound of those work-zombies' bare feet on concrete. eugh.

some things that did catch my attention:

code vein - one billion people have already called this 'anime dark souls' in jest, though anime bloodborne is probably more accurate. its not gonna be the most original thing but it looked pretty good in an expo hall where none of the other big publishers showed up with new single player games

omensight - indie action-adventure game with character action combat and the 'use time travel to solve murder mystery' narrative setup. i wasn't clear how these pieces fit together but it looked very stylish in action.

rite of ilk - 2-player coop adventure/puzzle game where the main gimmick is that the players are bound together by a rope

yoku's island express - i think i've already posted about this one on here in the past but i got to play it finally and it played pretty well - it's a 'pinball adventure' game, basically a sidescroller where the entire game world is one massive pinball table. should be a fun chillout game even if it doesn't have much depth to it.

there were a few other promising things but i've forgotten them already so maybe not

Did you play Black Future 88? It looks lovely, but not sure whether it’ll be fun (it looks like it should be). Perhaps falls into the pixel art aesthetic, though it’s a bit richer an environment than most pixel art games

i saw it but didn't play it as it didn't stand out over everything else. there were half a dozen games with that synthwave aesthetic. looked it up now and its gameplay hook is something that obviously doesn't come through visually on an expo floor.

ni no kuni 2 is good but it's not a game that really gets its hooks in you, i keep finding myself drifting away from it for days at a time. it's gorgeous of course, and the combat remains fun (iirc this was the pain point of the first one?) but the kingdom building and military minigame aren't sticking for me and the story is far too light to be a motivator.

you can also kinda see the seams where theres a gap between the game's vision and it's budget - some cutscenes are very short/abrupt, and voice acting is very sparse and sometimes doesn't even cover the whole scene but just a few lines.

kinda worried now that playing nier:automata, xenoblade 2, and tales of berseria all back to back has made me numb to jrpg stories that don't get super fucked up

I need to get back to XC2 soon, when I last played my wife unlocked her ultimate form

the true power of tsundere

sold

Final Fantasy XV (steam) is going to take a while. it's really fun to do combat and all and the story missions are not bad (enemy design is always great, basically an HD version of the classic ghouls skeletons and slimes) but every now and then i find myself in a city and i look at the minimap and there are all these question marks and missions and i want to play something else. lol the open world curse

Demon's Souls (PS3) replaying this and working through the Tower of Latria at the moment. really one of the greatest vg dungeons of all time. i love the color scheme, the eerie green, the golden hallways, it really feels like a 3D version of something out of Castlevania. that giant spear shooting machine where you have to time your jumps _just_ right feels like an especially NES-era touch.