whatchu playing now

the game awards had a ton of ads for pubg and fortnite. that must be where the money is being made now.

i'm playing System's Syzygy, https://mdsteele.games/syzygy/ -- a tribute to system's twilight and cliff johnson's games.

only things that excited me from TGA reveals were the obsidian not-fallout game and persona 5 in smash bros

kinda psyched for MK11 and Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3

The obsidian game just showed up on my fb feed and it looks v cool

Very cool and very legal, even.

been playing Battlefield V , I always need to have a FPS in rotation for some reason

Outer Worlds trailer looks like a skinned Fallout and I guess that’s ok

Actually, it looks like a taunt aimed at Bethesda.

...with a bit of anti-corporatism/anti-branding tossed in. I'm imagining it will play like interactive Idiocracy.

its pretty good timing for them to have a not-fallout game ready to show right at the moment, though i know its been in the works for a while as a new vegas spiritual successor

Loving Rise To Ruins on Steam, a sweet DOS style looking game of city building with enough extra stuff to keep it interesting.

got the yogscast humble bundle which reveals games through December, advent style. Games that I found interesting; Unit 4, Westerado, Tower 57, Slime-san, Lakeview Cabin Collection, Freaky Awesome

Also like the look of Dusters, a kind of space ship exploration game with drones but looks gorgeously complex.

Company of heroes 2 is free today on steam. Apparently it’s one of the best RTS games of all time. The RTS genre stresses me out to the point that I don’t have fun but it’s supposed to be really good.

I played the first CoH and it was fun enough, though I only felt like i had about 50% control over my troops

Huh, I had no idea that AC: Origins was well-received.

https://www.polygon.com/2018/12/10/18130965/best-games-2018-assassins-creed-odyssey-games-of-the-year

ok Dragon Quest Builders rules

my unwieldy backlog going into the holidays:

jrpgs:
persona 4
final fantasy xv
ys origin
atelier arland trilogy
tokyo xanadu ex

indies:
crosscode
timespinner
gris
the missing
iconoclasts

that's a lot

most of them are pretty short games other than persona which I'm already 50 hours into

Let us know how Gris is so I know how hard I should pray that it gets ported to PS4.

PS to anyone who played Assassin's Creed Odyssey -- what were your thoughts? I've heard it's super grindy for the bulk of the story with so-so side quests.

I'm about 15hrs in, it feels like around a quarter. There is a little grind, but the side missions aren't any less fun than the rest of the game tbh. It's not like jrpg grind.

I compare to the other AAA game I played this year (FC5) and I'm getting bored on much the same way. After I meet the stock characters, the gameplay feels fairly samey. I very much doubt I'm going to finish the game let alone beat it, but ninja-ing around an area silently murdering everyone is still pretty good fun.

As with FC5 most of my enjoyment seems to come from gawping at puddles and light beams and vistas.

MK8 deluxe
enter the gungeon
hollow knight

EtG is perfect switch fare

I've been playing smash like constantly for 10 days now

solo, local mp or online?

yes

been playing smash single player, still need to get online with the switch.
beat World of Light, will probably very slowly clear out all the nodes

i played Everybody's Tennis for about three hours straight last night

Finished 'The Return of Obra Dinn', which was excellent. Putting it down for a week or so was a mistake, though - I totally lost my train of thought.

wow @ gris

that has to be the prettiest platformer ive ever played

Continuing my "hey i'm back on ILX and i spent my year off with lots of media; here's my best of gaming list for 2018... nothing earthshattering but hey.
I have a PS4, Switch, iPad and Steam for Mac with gaming platforms being used in roughly that order.

Best
Spider-Man (PS4)
Dragon Quest 11 (PS4)
Celeste (PS4)
Hollow Knight (Switch)
NES Switch Online (Switch)
Captain Toad Treasure Tracker (Switch)
Florence (iOS)
Donut Country (iOS)

Have and need to Play More... or, uh, at all...
Subnautica (Mac)
Iconoclasts (Switch)
Into the Breach (Steam)
Yoku’s Island Express (PS4)

Based on My Interests (and the Internet), I Apparently Will Play These in 2019 (with 2018 non-sale pricing) - Would welcome suggestions to add!
Dragon Ball FighterZ (PS4) - $60
Ni No Kuni 2 (PS4) - $60
No Man’s Sky Redux (PS4) - $60
Monster Hunter World (PS4) - $50
Tetris Effect (PS4) - $40
God of War (PS4) - $40
Monster Boy and The Cursed Kingdom (PS4) - $40
A Way Out (PS4) - $30
Dead Cells (Switch or PS4) - $25

Octopath Traveler (Switch) - $60
Valkyria Chronicles 4 (Switch) - $60
Super Smash Brothers Ultimate (Switch) - $60
Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze (Switch) - $60
SNK 40th Anniversary Collection (Switch) - $40
Katamari Damacy Reroll (Switch) - $30
The Messenger (Switch) - $20
Chasm (Switch) - $20
The Gardens Between (Switch) - $20
Gris (Switch) - $17
Minit (Switch) - $10

Two Point Hospital (Steam) - $35
Return of the Obra Dinn (Steam) - $20
One Hour One Life (Steam) - $20
Paratopic (Steam) - $6

No and I Bought It but I Actually Mean No
Red Dead Redemption II (PS4)

Dragon Ball FighterZ (PS4) - $60
Ni No Kuni 2 (PS4) - $60

figured as much, but thanks for that... maybe something I play on PS+ in 2020 instead.
God of War is like $15 on Gamefly right now and I'm still not really into it. Too much backlog!
Just started Iconoclasts and it's a good time. Very light Metroidvainia.

i didn't play that many games in 2018, but i'd rank them like this

the game i spent the most time playing this year, by far, was CINCO PAUS (iOS), a michael brough joint. it came out on christmas day, 2017, i believe. it's the one where all the text is in portuguese for no reason (brough doesn't even know it well himself), which put off a lot of people. i made the mistake of introducing it to my partner, who plays very few games in general but gets incredibly addicted to them when she does. she has put an incredible number of hours into it this year. i didn't even like it at first, but there's a weird learning curve/hump and then the replayability goes through the roof and doesn't stop for a very long time. i feel like i'm trying to sell crack to all of you, it makes me feel bad.

i believe i officially and publicly crapped my pants out loud in my praise for CELESTE (ps4) on the ilg thread. the only reason i stopped playing was because i suffered a right-thumb injury from playing it to much. the controls are so perfect and exact, but they require intense d-pad mashing. i was working my way through the b-sides (and had yet to even tackle a c-side) when the thumb pain got to be too much. i had to go on the 30-day DL, and as i gave my thumb my rest i got hooked on another game, a mouse-clicking kind of simulation if i remember correctly. i understand people complaining about the difficulty, but here's the thing. the vast majority of players will not be able to 100% this game. i could barely get through some of the b-sides, and i think i literally could be completely stumped on some of the c-sides, if i could even get to them. celeste it really isn't about "beating" the game so much as the satisfaction of mastering certain segments of it, and this is cheesy, but also the joy of the responsiveness of the controls and level designs. the reason super mario bros 3 often gets brought up w/ celeste is that there are levels in both where the combination of muscle memory + perfect level design temporarily allows the player to transcend and get totally ~zoned in~, zooming through the level, careening off enemies, changing directions mid-air twice in the same jump, stringing together 8 or 9 sick little movements in a row. when you watch a really good speedrunner do smb3, it's amazing how you can see that the levels are designed for the perfect player - if you go full speed and bounce off things in just the right way, so many enemies and platforms and timed objects are perfectly synched together. smb and celeste are designed with these perfect routes in mind, and both have such perfect controls that most anyone who spends time with it ends up landing on them on occasion. very very satisfying to play. jfc i just crapped my pants out loud again, sorry

i've only played an hour or so of RETURN OF THE OBRA DINN (steam) but i can already tell it's going to wind up around here. very, very cool. each of the "memories" you can find have the exact moment of death, frozen in time, and you just walk through them looking at what happened from various angles, seeing who was involved. the memories are found in an order that isn't chronological, as you peep in on fatal moments of all these people on a boat that was sailing toward the tip of Africa. innocent bystanders in one memory will be key actors in another, and as you watch a bunch of them you start to form a general construction of what happened how various storylines connect. looking forward to playing this more but i need to finish cowboy game.

if HOLLOW KNIGHT counts (it's a 2017 game), then definitely that. i didn't play it until this year, on the switch. for some reason i quit playing after about 10 hours, then picked it up months later and got really into it.

i am playing RED DEAD REVOLVER 2 (ps4) right now, nearing the very end. rockstar games are rarely my very favorite, but they're always solid and i generally play them to the end. but i'm getting kind of sick of just hitting the lock-on button and pressing the trigger, over and over. i know i should turn auto-aim off but i can't stand the feeling of manually aiming with the analog stick on the PS4. it makes me physically feel unwell. it's not the same as fingernails on the chalkboard, but it's in the same general category of personally sensed physical discomfort. so instead i just auto-aim and fire. not sure what to do about this, but i'm about ready beat it and move on.

i played and beat GOD OF WAR (ps4). it's a good AAA game. my eyesight sucks and my tv sucks, and for probably not unrelated reasons i just don't care that much about cool looking graphics. god of war has more going for it than graphics, but that's a big part of the experience. i think i would have enjoyed the axe-throwing aspect more if i didn't suffer from the analog-stick repulsion syndrome that i mentioned above re: rdr2.

i wanted to like INTO THE BREACH (steam) more than i did. i didn't unlock even half of the possible unit factions, and i imagine there's a replayability there which might rival FTL. but i started getting bored with the lack of variety in the mission scenarios and especially in the maps. there are volcano, desert, and ice planets, and they all present environmental obstacles, usually in the form of certain tiles disappearing or changing in some way. but in practice, it seems like most battles play out in pretty much the same way, regardless of scenario. the maps are randomly generated (i think?) but there's just not enough variety.

i played A WAY OUT (ps4) with my partner, which is the 2-player game where everything is in split screen and you have to cooperate in order to break out of prison and then do a bunch of dumb shit that i forgot. we called the two characters sean bean and sean penn, which made the experience way better than it would have been otherwise imo. i read a rave kotaku review about how fun it was, but i found it to be a straight up bad video game. it's bizarrely constructed, too. the first 4/5th of the game is this really long and unimaginative set of co-op exercises (cut scene, sean bean must press X in order to let sean penn tap square repeatedly which lets them meet up at a different object and hold triangle together, cut scene) paired with the dumbest story of all time and dialogue/performances that teeters on the edge of funny-bad and bad-bad. i never did figure out which side it was on. then about 8 hours in, near the end, it suddenly turns into uncharted 3 and you get a gun and suddenly have to murder dozens of enemy agents who are flanking you and killing your partner irl over and over again. after 8 hours of pressing face buttons and slowly walking from one obvious task to another with no time limit, it assumes that you're suddenly ready to snap into a fucking 3rd person cover-based shooter game. we struggled to the end and i think both of us wished we would have spent the time playing cinco paus instead

excellent breakdown zs!
i'm with you on Into the Breach so far. I think i'm just tired of the roguelike philosophy.
you always enjoy difficult games more than i did and i liked celeste a lot but i hit a controller throwing point and never went back. great game tho!

Yoku's Island is A LOT of fun... how long does this game go on for? ten hours? twenty?

that reminds, i had this in clipboard earlier but was waiting to paste it until after the mountain of text so it would get buried:

glad you're back, ulysses!

a lot of your lists mirror mine, which makes sense because i enjoy your taste in games and we have most of the same systems (i don't have a working iPad, though)

entire words and phrases are now just disappearing from my sentences, sorry

heh, i thought you were engaging in my easygoing, folksy writing style!

hahaha

that reminds...*old man accidental whistling noise through the teeth*

xp yoku's isn't that long, it's like 5-6 hours to complete, maybe 10 hours to get 100% of the collectibles

Ah, then i may be closer to beating it already than i thought!

iirc there's 3 main "bosses" you can do in any order and getting to and beating those is most of the game and then theres a finale

hollow knight is a 2018 game

fuck playing a PC

damn, i'm impressed you actually took a whole year off from this place... must've been weird!

xps you know when people say a game is 6 hours long? I always have to double that. value for money I suppose... but my poor ego...

i'm the opposite, i always finish games in like 20% less than the advertised playtime. i think it's just because i read really fast and play a lot of dialogue heavy games

i usually take longer than average, but i also like to spend a lot of time doing really dumb things in games whenever possible

lol looking at my purchase history everything that I played after getting back into gaming was this year!

TLOU - GOAT

Mass Effect Trilogy - The second one was good and my favorite of the three. I enjoyed the third too (the nerds who raged out over the ending are morans), especially the individual character moments.

Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice - Enh. Maybe I needed to play this with headphones on, but I didn't get much juice out of the story.

Uncharteds - MEH. The story for 4 was the only thing that kept me going, and I hope TLOU2 doesn't play like it.

Witcher 3 - Slightly better MEH. I put decent hours into it, but mostly with the expectation that it would finally click for me at some point. I got as far as Act 2 when I decided it wouldn't.

God of War - Fun game, but the much vaunted story didn't touch me. I beat it but still have things I could do, but I'm pretty sure I'm done with the game for the foreseeable future. Also per KM's writeup, I have a good tv (though I played on a Slim) and the visuals did not transport me (I'm not a graphics nut to begin with).

Persona 5 - YAYYY. Love the characters so much, I started my NG+ pretty soon after finishing my first playthrough.

Bloodborne - too creepy (rules out playing on the evenings) and too hard (rules out casual sessions).

What Remains of Edith Finch - Couldn't finish this because my motion sickness kicked in.

Hollow Knight - My first dip into its world was astoundingly magical: art design, music, it all created a beautiful and unadulterated experience. The characters are great, and if/when I try to revisit the game it'll be because of them.

Horizon Zero Dawn - My love for this is mostly carried by the story, the scale of which is ambitious and deeply moving. The combat is really good, too, even though I barely scratched the surface of it.

Nier: Automata - Still playing, I'm finding it to be incredibly uneven. On normal difficulty, I was able to get by pretty much mashing the light attack button (i.e. boring), and the deeper combat tactics have largely eluded me. But on the B path, I'm enjoying the hacking minigames (and I don't think it's because of any misplaced '80s nostalgia). Storywise, the stuff on the periphery has the most pathos. Such a weird game so far.

subnautica is v fun

i only have time for one completely immersive open world game rn and i've been considering horizon zero dawn over RDRII