whatchu playing now

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.

"tsundere" is japanese for "borderline personality disorder", right?

currently playing minestorm on the vectrex, the spouse got me one for my bday

it's the anime/manga character trope where a character (usually a girl) starts out rude and hostile but opens up over time

holy shit, a for real vectrex? are you playing vector video games on a CRT? if so that is the coolest

ooh jealous, always wanted to play a Vectrex, love those clean lines in arcade games like Asteroids & Tempest.

played through Blossom Tales and enjoyed it, although parts of it made me wonder about when inspiration and homage turn into outright plagiarism and where the dividing line is (Link to the Past in this case)

Gah why have I started playing Fortnite/why can't I stop playing Fortnite?

yeah, a for-real vectrex with an oscilloscope - there's this super amazing vintage game store right down the street from me. it's pretty cool, it's the sort of thing emulation can't really do justice to. hope it doesn't break down too quickly, we're talking about 35 year old hardware here! let's just say i wouldn't bother with it if i had any kids.

i wonder if you can program homebrew. that would be a crazy project!

wow vectrex multicart! http://vectrex.wikia.com/wiki/72_Game_Multicart

only £39.99, includes a vectrex drum machine! http://vectrex.playntradeonline.com/

sounds dope

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1skO9QXkVw

I only became aware of tsundere through this Subnautica time capsule (findable loot/images/text left by other players upon completing the game).

lol

playing Transistor as a bit of a palette cleanser before i dive back into the 3 JRPGs i have in progress. this has been sitting in my steam library for a few years untouched, must have gotten it in a bundle. so far finding the bombs to be particularly fun with the time stop mechanic

xxp so much lol at that Subnautica thing

playing atelier while watching the nba playoffs for the maximum possible aesthetic dissonance

Beat Kirby Star Allies with my allies tonight and my god I will be surprised if Xenoblade Chronicles 2 manages to have a weird ending

How’s Atelier, what’s it like

atelier's a long running series of girly jrpgs built around elaborate crafting/alchemy systems. the newest one (lydie & suelle) is a pretty good one though the switch port is kind of janky.

Won my first Fortnite round!

I've played fifteen rounds of Fallout now. Zero kills. Think It's time to acknowledge I can't play that sort of game.

which fallout?

or maybe you meant fortnite? i'm with you, if that's the case. i downloaded and played for about 30 minutes but i'm just awful. i've finally come around to the idea that i just don't like first person shooters that much

I’m also terrible at it. Have made it to the final few a couple of times, mostly by avoiding everyone.

Have had fun playing with friends, not so much solo.

I hate its aesthetic. Low rent Blizzard. And that stupid dance makes me cringe.

My friend said he was officially over it after he played with some kid who did a Peter Griffin impression on voice chat the entire match.

I did mean Fortnite! Ugh one of those days.

I'm terrible at the shooting but it's a game where you can get pretty far with a bit of luck and a bit of stealth, and I enjoy the map a lot more than I'd have expected to. Only killed 2 people in the one game I won, and I killed them both in the last 2 seconds when they found me behind a tree, tried to hit me with a rocket, missed, and I somehow panic whacked them both with a crappy assault rifle. It felt GREAT.

I'm fine with the look and feel of it, always happier playing cartoony shooters than po-faced military ones. I haven't ever turned voice chat on though, and don't know why anyone would.

The fort part of Fortnite is extremely cool and weird. Has sort of a Inception / Doctor Strange-esque feel where the architecture of the environment is constantly changing.

Seems like there's a fairly huge advantage in using extreme controller/mouse sensitivity settings so you can build quickly.

Red Dead Redemption (PS3)

yeah this game is incredible. just the design of it all, it is very well done. combat is not amazing but pretty smooth. compared to doing a drive-by in GTA:VC it is infinitely easier to pop off shots as you ride your horse in circles around bandits. the slow motion superpower is cool and the ideal thing for this game. last night it helped me shoot a rope, freeing a hanging victim. yeah it's pretty much a spaghetti western come to life!

i really love it at nighttime. not sure whether it is the low resolution and/or by design but the stars have this great shimmery quality to them.

Ah, I loved that game. Zen cowboy GTA

i did some horse-and-carriage racing earlier and kept rolling over. then i did a mission where me and an NPC went down into a mine as cool as any Skyrim dungeon but with a surprise exit, let's just say it was way cool.

i tried fortnite again. i played 4 matches, each of which ended with me sneaking around in loneliness before suddenly dying, often before i even fired a shot back. somehow placed in the top ten for 3 of the 4? i don't know. i want to be better at the shooting part of it but i've only had about 15 seconds total of shooting across an hour of playing? maybe i should try that other mode (zombie survival or whatever) to get more experience with the actual combat

I've been playing a little Fortnite lately, too. I'm definitely not a shooter kind of person, but I've only been playing it when a couple of friends are online too, so we're in a 2 or 3 man squad. We can easily go for 3 or 4 games without any of us getting a single kill. Other games it all just clicks where there's good loot drops, enough time to prepare, and some blind luck getting the jump on people equally as rubbish as us, and we'll get 8-10 kills between us (still no victory royale though). I definitely notice when I come up against people who are actually competent, because even when I get the jump on them and pump a full clip at them they manage to kill me. Like you say, though, the actual shooty bits are so sporadic I don't know if I'll ever actually get good at that bit. Then you watch guys like Ninja on Twitch, and it's just ridiculous.

RDR is getting better and better.

really astounding level of detail here. lots of seamless immersion. the interplay of systems working together to make emergent stories is nice. i was headed out to a contact when i passed by someone who had just had their horse stolen and they were yelling for help. i turned around and went after the thief and caught the horse and brought it back to the owner, who thanked me. later i was walking with a contact and listening to the story when we passed by some prostitutes standing on the corner. they made come ons and my character said "I'm not that kind of man anymore", which is some random character building, then some town drunk passed in front of us on our way out of town. as we left i could hear him talking with the other NPCs in concert.

its a real, living world (or at least a real, living Pirates of the Carribean-style playable ride). the animation throughout is so impressive. so many incredible stunt deaths, people falling off roofs, people falling off horses, varieties of the most spectacular tumbling from horse deaths, etc. imo the GTA games always had lame deaths, the screen goes bw as you ragdoll. here it is stylized, much like stunts from those old cowboy films. i was making an escape and coming up on a bridge that had a lone horseman positioned to shoot at me. i got them with my revolver and the horse reared up, the force of the shot hitting the bandit sending him flying back due to realish physics. pretty incredible animations here!