Joined: 19 May 2017 Gender: Male Posts: 126 Location: Wakefield, UK
23 Feb 2020, 10:44 am
The Binding of Isaac has been my go to game recently. It's a very very messed up rogue-like, but a lot of fun and surprisingly deep when it comes to emergent gameplay and evolving strategies.
_________________ Diagnosed with Autism on 1st August 2018, at the age of 47 (almost 48).
Joined: 4 Nov 2005 Age: 38 Gender: Male Posts: 2,555
25 Feb 2020, 10:11 pm
I have been playing Maiden and Spell, a new game that I've been eyeing for a bit. It seemed like a neat concept, and the art and music drew me. It's a shoot em up with a single player boss rush campaign, with additional extra bosses rewarded for completion of the main campaign. But it's also a multiplayer PVP game, with multiple characters, each with a unique loadout. I don't know much about the developer, but the rollback netcode in it is very good, unusually so for a Japanese developed game. I'm playing with people with 300ms ping or so and lag is imperceptible. Both the single player campaign and multiplayer duels feel great. I played through the single player sections on normal and now I'm just having a blast duelling people online.
Joined: 5 Dec 2019 Gender: Male Posts: 44 Location: NW England
03 Mar 2020, 12:41 am
As a kid I played through Wild Arms 1 & 3, and they're both pretty great, so I've been meaning to play through the rest of the series some time.
I heard Wild Arms 4 was the bad one, and the theme song is good, so I had to play it.
This game is wild. It's stupid in such a way as to perfectly appeal to me. It has that typical JRPG thing where they're trying to deal with themes that are way above the capability of the writers, so you get these incredible conversations about moral relativity and how a "war criminal" and a "hero" aren't necessarily any different, except filtered through a fairly incompetent translation and poor voice acting and (I imagine) a bad original script. There are scenes where a bunch of ridiculously aged men in suits of armour talk at each other about how representative democracy doesn't work. There are villains who have special powers that are immediately undone and do not make sense. I'm trying to avoid real spoilers here and there are a lot of stupid things I specifically avoided mentioning. This game is a hidden treasure of stupidity for anyone who enjoys bad media.
Joined: 7 Dec 2008 Age: 46 Gender: Female Posts: 27,019
11 Mar 2020, 12:10 am
^ good to hear that I'm not the only one still playing 3DS!
I have been playing Devious Dungeon lately. It was on sale and I liked the demo. It's fun.
_________________ BOLTZ 17/3 2012 - 12/11 2020 Beautiful, sweet, gentle, playful, loyal simply the best and one of a kind love you and miss you, dear boy
Joined: 4 Nov 2005 Age: 38 Gender: Male Posts: 2,555
11 Mar 2020, 5:48 am
I've been playing Ori and the Will of the Wisps. I've played the first few hours and so far it's a large improvement over the first game. I loved the first game, with its incredibly tight platforming, controls and fluid animation. It had a great sense of flow with how you traversed the game's levels. But the combat was garbage, and even if it made up a minor element of the game over its playtime, it was still a weak point of the game.
The new game has much improved combat mechanics, heavily borrowing from Hollow Knight, with less button mashing spam and more focus on melee combat and avoiding attacks. It's still not one of the game's strong points, with little visual feedback on impacts; most enemies don't get knocked back by hits and your player character inches forwards with combos, so if you're not careful you can combo straight into taking contact damage. It also uses a similar system to Hollow Knight's charms.
But like the first game, so far the combat seems to be a pretty small part of the game. It's much more heavily focused on its platforming, which I'm glad for. The first game was unique for being a Metroidvania style game that was mostly a platformer, and it'd lose some identity by leaving that behind. There's other games like this that do the combat better, so it should stick to what it does best.
Like the first game, it's incredible to look at. If Pixar used their resources to animate a film on behalf of Ghibli, I imagine it'd look like this game.
Joined: 4 Nov 2005 Age: 38 Gender: Male Posts: 2,555
05 Apr 2020, 12:15 am
I've been playing Half Life Alyx over the past week and finished it today. It's a brilliant game, and really feels like it's heralding the beginning of a new era of gaming, in the same way Super Mario 64 did for the first 3D games. It blends frenetic action, nail biting horror, exploration, puzzle solving and environmental storytelling, with the familiar structure of the Half Life games. It's a new Half Life game and shares its DNA, but it draws influence from other games, like Boneworks and Amnesia: The Dark Descent. The end product is polished and feels thoroughly playtested, with the mix of different gameplay styles never threatening to fatigue the player, like many other VR games before it.
The gravity gloves are an ingenious gameplay mechanic, one I expect to be copied in other games. Not only does it solve the problem of the need for complex movements in VR games where space constraints may be an issue, but the mechanic is used as the basis for many of the game's puzzles, traversal and loot acquisition, and leads to many dynamic action sequences. Use the gloves to retrieve a nearby live grenade and lob it back at your enemies, grab distant ammo in a firefight when you've used your last magazine, or nearby objects to shield yourself from pouncing headcrabs.
The guns are all fun to play with, and the game's system of upgrading them with items found in the environment works well in tandem with the gravity gloves and the abundance of physics objects.
There's some small issues, like the lack of melee feeling like a missed opportunity, and the game's difficulty overall is low even on the hardest setting, with an overabundance of healing items. Enemy AI is nothing special, with the game's most memorable encounters being heavily scripted and the game's difficulty scaling being primarily based on enemy hitpoints.
Overall, it's one of the best games I've ever played, and feels like a worthy Half Life sequel.
23 Feb 2020, 10:44 am
