whatchu playing now

planescape: torment but also it's m john harrison

Disco Elysium could be my xmas present from myself

Ughhh Slay the Spire is too addictive

if you live in an area with redbox, they're shutting down video game rentals and are selling the games from the boxes for cheap. i saw you can get death stranding for $25. i assume just the disc with no cover etc.

huh, I thought they only sold their secondhand ones online but apparently you can buy them at the box

hmm!

there's some glitch where it's giving a "Card not approved for games" message when I try to check out online

I'll hit up the actual box over lunch and see what gives

didn't have any problem buying, haven't picked up yet though. pumped to play death stranding!

disco elysium is 20% off in the winter sale and i'm not even mad about it

gonna start either that or saga scarlet grace tomorrow. flip a coin i guess

i'll move over to the death stranding thread once i make some real progress into the game but for now it's crazy playing a big-budget PS4 game after having pretty much played switch games for the last year+. i forgot what modern game graphics are.

disco elysium looks gret

i'm going in heavy on path of exile right now.

i leave on christmas day to see family, and I don't know what I'm supposed to do about my POE fix.

Disco Elysium: Early thoughts... Inherent Vice as told by the creators of Baldur's Gate, basically? I love the art and the writing. I get a little bored in a point-and-click scenario so I'll see how far the writing carries me.

Made it to Monarch in Outer Worlds. The combat feels a little creaky so far? Love everything else about it.

just bought Yoku's Island Adventure on sale which was great but far too short. on the plus side it was my first platinum trophy on the PS4 which I was uncharacteristically giddy about.

Playing the hell out of Baba Is You. It can be fiendishly difficult but not so much that you can't progress. The music in the Fall level is also haunting drone goodness.

Sadly, it’s so difficult I can’t progress.

What level are you on? This seems like a decent guide that doesn't give away the solutions: https://www.keyofw.com/baba-is-hint/deep-forest

I don’t know, it’s been a while. I just got a few puzzles that stumped me, and looking up solutions just made me pessimistic about my ability to progress. I do think it’s a wonderful game! Just for people smarter than me.

Hell, I've been finishing up Link's Awakening - there are puzzles in that I never would've solved on my own (or without an extra dozen hours of time to randomly search everything)

I had the same problem Dowd

i'm sure you've imagined it happening, but i am saying it happened to me, this week: i've played a few hours of the outer worlds, waiting for the groundhog day thing i had heard about to start happening, only to realize to my chagrin that that's outer wilds and i've been playing the wrong fucking game. happy holidays!

lol! I’m so sorry! That must have happened to thousands of people. Luckily they’re both fun(?) I’ve only played Wilds

i got control and rdr2 for xmas, but i just started death stranding and don't really have the capacity to play multiple huge open-world games at the same time so i'll probably save them for when i get bored with death stranding

I have finished Disco Elysium! Went to the one unavoidable combat without acquiring a weapon and got murked. Played through the endgame afterwards with great clarity and purpose. I can see why a lot of people dislike the ending but I was 100% on board with it.

Also, only when the titles came up at the end did I get the pun, because I am an idiot.

after three false tries, i finally cracked Nioh. It's really good!

Am liking the Remote play thingy on Steam. I can play Shell Shock with my mates and they don't have to fork out 3 quid (the misers)

Have also jumped back into Hunter Call of the Wild, and got the snowy map + the ATV bike (which imo is pretty essential and should have been part of the main game and not a dlc)

One of the first missions I had to do was shoot an injured reindeer. Merry Xmas everyone!

Will anyone rep for RIVER CITY GIRLS?

any relation to RC Rampage?

Same universe, apparently.

its wayforward making a new game in the river city ransom series, dunno what rampage is

i still havent started it so can't help you with impressions

lol, meant ransom and typed rampage
interest piqued; is a top 20 all time

It only supports local co-op, unfortunately. :(

did anyone play that rcr lift last year. the friends of .. i forget

ringo ishikawa? nope but it's on my list, as is RCG

found it pretty dull

ringo ishikawa gets by on vibe but it's a great vibe

thinking about lonely mountains downhill on the strength of the eurogamer end-of-year review

I got Slay the Spire, and it was so good that it had to join the ranks of games that I played constantly and compulsively for 72 hours and then uninstalled forever in order to prevent myself from dumping any more time into it

Which character do you like?

i'm making a end of year list for games i played this year rather than games released this year to feed my year-end tabulation impulses without unhealthily rushing through the dozen good games i didn't get to

good plan

yeah. i've given up trying to make it through that jan-march catch up rush
also i think i played less than five 2019 games anyway

polyphonic--the huntress character ("silent", I guess)! But I used essentially the same strategy with all 3 characters (and beat the game with each one): load up on cards that allow you to draw additional cards and cards that give you additional action points (or whatever they're called), then just prolong each turn as long as possible.

That tactic might be difficult on the time snail thing.

ape out on the steam sale. what a lovely well executed action game.

happy new year gamers, here's my top 10 games i played in 2019 and felt like putting into a list:

10) Baba is You (2019) - this is the best type of pure puzzle game, where the solutions feel like moments of epiphany rather than the result of several steps of incremental logic. i'm far too stupid to ever finish it though.

9) Judgment (2019) - it's not as sublime as yakuza 0, though that's one of the best games of the decade so no big deal, this one still pulls its weight as a member of the yakuza family of games. my only complaint is that i could do with fewer of the tailing missions, which are no less dull in this than in any video game that has them, and more of the missions where you chase a wig that's being blown around the city by freak gusts of wind

8) Eastshade (2019) - eastshade dumps you into a modestly sized, vaguely elder-scrolls-like world as a traveling painter. you wander around, look at the scenery, talk to people, find and paint things for them. there's no main story, no combat, no conflict to speak of. this is basically all i want out of my open-world games. i only spent a few hours in eastshade because it ran like shit on my PC at release, but i'd like to go back assuming they've patched up the performance a bit by now.

7) SaGa Scarlet Grace: Ambitions (2019) - it's a JRPG without levels or resource management, which i dig. it also has no field or town or dungeon environments, just an overworld map and combat, so the fact that i, a hardcore Environmental Design Liker, got hooked by this is a testament to how good the combat system is. i'm only like 10 hours into my first playthrough, as Urpina, but i'm curious to find out exactly how different an experience the other characters' campaigns are since it feels like there's enough room within the systems for it to be a substantially different game. also the text is even smaller than fire emblem somehow, so we're well on our way to the first JRPG you have to play with a magnifying glass, pretty cool.

6) Under Night In-Birth Exe:Late[st] (2017) - i got really into fighting games for a bit earlier in the year, tried a bunch of stuff but settled on UNIST as my game of preference, as i really like its pace and character variety and visual clarity. spent a few dozen hours in training mode learning Nanase combos, went online, got destroyed, got destroyed again, made some adjustments, got destroyed again, won like 3 of my first 100 matches, got frustrated, logged off, quit video games entirely and just watched anime for a couple months. pretty much the standard fighting game experience, i think. the new version of this comes out soon and i'm excited to do it all over again.

5) Tales of the Abyss (2006) - it took the Tales devs more than a decade to figure out that beat-em-up combat is more fun with a stamina bar than a mana bar so that you aren't constantly disincentivized to use your cool moves as if it's a strategy game. and then half the fanbase complained and acted like the series had lost its way, once again proving that JRPG fans hate change more than they like fun. of the old-style Tales games though, this is the best one i've played since it doesn't gate the fun too hard and has one of the best JRPG stories.

4) Anodyne 2: Return to Dust (2019) - i can't put my finger on which gross-looking PSX or N64 game this game's overworld reminds me of, but it really captures all the unknowability and red herring empty space of the best 3D hub worlds of that era. and then the actual levels are bite-sized 2D zelda dungeons. beyond that i don't really know how to talk about this at all without spoiling the experience, it unfolds in surprising ways.

3) 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors (2009) - i played the whole Zero Escape trilogy in 2019 and enjoyed all of them to various extents, but this first one does it the best and most memorably. again, i can't really say much without spoilers but the way in which it gradually primes you for its big payoffs is masterful. the escape rooms are pretty good too.

2) Zero no Kiseki/"Trails from Zero" (2010) - this is the first of the two PSP games after Trails in the Sky and before Trails of Cold Steel that never got an english release. i started this kinda halfheartedly to learn about the characters before they showed up in Cold Steel 3, but was blindsided by how much tighter it was than all the other Trails games, even through the haze of a rough fan translation. it's clearly the product of more experience than Trails in the Sky but without the overreach in narrative and cast size of Cold Steel. there's a higher quality fan translation that's almost complete, and Falcom just announced a PS4 rerelease so it'll get another chance at an official english version too. so if you're one of the 1 or 2 other people on this board who have played Trails in the Sky already, keep an eye out i guess.

1) Hypnospace Outlaw (2019) - this is great not because it parodies the Y2K-era internet but because it does it with the comedic voice of corny 00's pre-social-media internet humor like homestar runner et al. much like obra dinn last year, it's a game that made me not want to leave my desk other than to eat and piss until i'd finished it.

thanks for the write-ups! Under Night In-Birth Exe:Late[st] is the most videogame title of all time (or it would be if there was a 3 at the end)