What Are You Playing?

[Potato]

Finally got a little into Endless Ocean. What's with all these story missions where I get to swim for about 3 seconds and then have to endure crappy dialogue and AI voice and then the mission ends?

[Nintex]

Started playing Uncharted 4 on PC.
It looks fucking incredible on my RTX 4070 Ti and runs at 170(?) or so FPS. It can almost pass as a current gen title. 

But the game itself is 'fine' I suppose? I'm a big fan of the Square Enix Tomb Raider Trilogy and I don't see how Uncharted 4 is 'superior' to those games or a 10/10 at all.
I'm in chapter 5 or so and there has been very little gameplay in between the cut scenes. Some mechanics like the fighting and steering the boat at the beginning are kind of janky too. Also, who at Sony thought that it is fun to have a 30 minute scene bickering with your virtual house wife eating pasta on the couch. I read that it has 22 chapters, so unless the chapters greatly vary in length I've already completed about 20% - 25% of the game. 

It's a nice distraction from all the RPGs I've played lately but I'm not really impressed with the slow start so far outside of the visuals.

[Nintex]

Played some more and chapter 8/9 is what I think this game is supposed to be and when that happens it is fun to play.
Especially things like shooting enemies while swinging from ropes, the climbing and overall decent gun play. 

But so far I still think Rise of the Tomb Raider is better.  

I think the big difference is that Uncharted 4 is entirely linear. There aren't any hidden Tombs(?) to find and what is hidden is often just a small branching path. You don't even have or need a map. Puzzles in Uncharted 4 are so far just 'figure this 1 thing out' while in Tomb Raider it is often multi-layered. Especially in Rise as the Russian base is basically designed as just one giant Tomb to comb through.

The 'ultimate' version of this type of game would be:
- Max Payne 3 gun play
- Tomb Raider Rise level / open-zone design
- Uncharted level set pieces / production values

[Potato]

Uncharted is just another Soyny style over substance game that the FIFA and CoD crowd latched onto. Janky shit.

[chronovore]

Tried XDefiant, curious about Watch_Dogs' DedSec presence as a faction in it. The tutorial playlist has all kinds of peeps seal-clubbing in there, basically turning it less a tactical experience and more of a meatgrinder for newbs. 

Started The Pathless, immediately felt it was on-brand for AnnaPurna: indie-darling style low detail art, lovely soundtrack, and absolutely midling gameplay. There were a few things they could have done to keep the world feeling immersive, but it's basically a plethora of unexplained boost-points littered around a low-poly-ish landscape, with puzzles where your falcon familiar carries a weight that looks like a birthday cake around for you to activate pressure plates. It reminded me of that older game, Malice, which was also super hyped during development but turned out to have remarkably uninspired gameplay. 

Still playing Fortnite, though I skipped the last battlepass for the first time in 2 years. Though I enjoy the Festival/Rockband mode, it's not enough to get me to fire it up on its own. Lego/Minecraft I haven't touched since its first 3 weeks, and rocket/racing is alright but I keep forgetting it's there. 

Which is a long way to say the last two chapters of Battle Royale have been overly focused on the sniper meta, with a three-shot mag rifle readily available that blows through zero-build-shield, full-shields, and entire health in one headshot. It's absolutely zero fun being third-party plonked at extreme distance after finally getting a nice loadout together. Snipers were everything. 

This new season is themed around Fallout and postapocalypse Mad Max/Road Warrior style vehicles, which looks more my speed.

[Nintex]

Finished up the last few levels of the main story of Shantae 1/2 Genie Hero I still had on my backlog.

Fun game and the HD pixel art is great but the 3DS one is better. Seems a bit too streamlined with the level select and no connected map and you're kind of overpowered in this game.
It has many bonus modes so I'll probably revisit it some time later.

[chronovore]

Uncharted is just another Soyny style over substance game that the FIFA and CoD crowd latched onto. Janky shit.

I really wondered what I was missing that UNCHARTED feels so uncompelling to me. Happy to hear someone else say it.

[Potato]

Uncharted is just another Soyny style over substance game that the FIFA and CoD crowd latched onto. Janky shit.

I really wondered what I was missing that UNCHARTED feels so uncompelling to me. Happy to hear someone else say it.

A desire to play a thinly disguised male Indiana Jones power fantasy + a large advertising budget + desperate Sony fans clinging to any sort of success in the PS3 era.

[Puffy Fucking Baby]

I liked uncharted games until about half way thru 3 and now I'm a bonafide hater of them. I finished 4 out of spite.

The new tomb raider games are even worse.

[Nintex]

Played it some more and it is just very inconsistent.

Driving around the map with a truck to find 3 or 4 points of interest and bandit camps was boring.
Climbing a clocktower and solving some puzzles with the notebook was neat.

[Nintex]

At chapter 15 or so and it surely picked up the pace with set pieces.
Some really good shit like a well designed car chase, which are not easy to pull off in video games.
The Pirate island is stunning.

The 'action' gameplay is still very basic though, hasn't really changed since the first encounter (I think they literally added only 1 enemy type in 15 chapters).

[Nintex]

Finished it.

What can I say, it's a decent game but no 10/10 of any kind. If I was still reviewing games I'd probably land on a 8/10 at most.
They did some cool things with using your vehicle as a tool to progress but overall the vehicle gameplay is pretty bad.

The running and gunning is fine but you die pretty easily, so its best not to do the dangling from rope heroics and instead just sit in cover and shoot.
The stealth gameplay is very janky, especially if you are teamed up with Sam or another character.

The 'bro' storyline is decent, the settling down with your wife and retirement stuff is just awkward, Sony really loves their Soy I guess.
Some folks might enjoy this more grounded tone but it doesn't make any sense for a videogame character that has gunned down a couple thousand people with his gang of treasure hunters.

[Nintex]

Started Shantae and the Seven Sirens.

It's even more Metroidvania-esque than the 3DS game, with a large connected map instead of 'levels' or 'zones'. They upped the production values too with cutscenes and stuff.
So far so good.

[HardcoreRetro]

Apparently it's pretty easy to get Need For Speed Underground 2 to run on modern hardware. The no-cd crack works when you put a txt file renamed FOOBAR in the installation map.



Just got the stock Toyota Carola out of the garage.



Nostalgia hitting me right in the feels.

[Nintex]

There is also a bunch of graphics mods you can check out.



I guess EA didn't remaster these because they are too good and their new products pale in comparison? 

PS2/360 era games got the core gameplay loop and difficulty level so right without any of the tacked on bullshit or EvErYoNe NeEdS tO wIn nonsense.

In Forza Horizon 5 winning just feels meaningless because you get 50 cars as a reward anyway and you can rewind the whole thing.
In NFSU2 you feel like a king when you beat a much faster car after perfectly mastering your Mitsubishi Evo. 
 

Anyway there is various 'repacks' of this game with both EU/US cars added, controller mapping fixes and general patches.

Such as:
https://www.magipack.games/2020/06/nfs-underground-2-full-game.html

You can download the vanilla .iso files from the InternetArchive
https://archive.org/details/nfsu2-2004-pcgame

[Nintex]

Played some more Shantae and the Seven Sirens.

This is a fun Metroidvania-lite even the soundtrack is very Metroid like from time to time.
It's also fun how they blend in the 'Zelda dungeons' with the overall gameplay loop.
It does take a while to really get going and open up though as it drip feeds your abilities. 




====

Also started Tales of Symphonia Remaster

And its... actually good. Whatever technical issues it had are now seemingly fixed. It's still the 30fps version but that doesn't really matter much for a game like this. 
I had forgotten about how this game can be both funny and dark at the same time, things like kids hanging around at a concentration camp (overall quite a popular thing in JRPGs).
 
It plays every bit as great as it did on the GameCube, perhaps even better at this high resolution. What I like about these older JRPGs is that you aren't overwhelmed with sidequests that keep you stuck in a single area for 10+ hours. Instead you can progress pretty quickly as the distances are short and the game rapidly evolves and changes scenery.

Also more games need Anime Openings like this   

[Nintex]

Played some Need for Speed Unbound

The patches have certainly improved the handling, not seeing much 'Underground' stuff in the single player though, must be only in the Live Service.
Beat the 2nd qualifier and got an achievement that said only 6% of players have done so. Looking at the tiers (B(tutorial), A, A+, S, S+) the game likely has only 4 qualifiers.
So only 6% of players played up until the halfway point.
I'm seeing this a lot on Xbox these days, only single digit percentages for achievements past the half way point.


Played some more Tales of Symphonia too. I don't remember any of it, so its fun to revisit.
Beat the fire temple in the desert and the grind is mild so far. It is kind of funny what they got away with in terms of UI in those days.
All these menus have a sense of "it works, that's good enough" 

And the explanations for fairly simple mechanics are word salads 

[Nintex]

15 or so hours into Tales of Symphonia

It crashed on me one or two times and I'm not sure why it needs loading screens but other than that it is still a very fun RPG overall.
I think I'm working my way towards the half way point now. Nearly broke all the seals.

The writers always go hard with the evil in these type of games though. 
Concentration camps, people starving, dead children replaced by decoys, innocent grannies turning into monsters you have to put down. Bosses giving you the entire "subhuman" Hitler speeches and the usual "don't blame your parents for what they did in the war". They must have some issues. 

[Nintex]

Made it to the half way point I think. Never gotten this far in TOS on the GameCube.
I never knew the game had two worlds.

[HardcoreRetro]

I love my affinity for World of Warcraft. Bought a month of gametime.

*plays for 90 minutes*

Wow, this fucking sucks. Literal Stockholm syndrome.

[Nintex]

Beat Tales of Symphonia Remastered. Which is actually the first time I beat the game because I never finished it on the GameCube.

TOS has its ups and downs though, some mid dungeons and weak segments but it holds up well in 2024. It takes a lot of cues from the early Final Fantasy / Mana games both in map design and story but it mixes it with some decent character development and I would say higher stakes overall. The battle system is very fun also.

It starts out easy, then gets harder but near the end the difficulty takes a nosedive once Raine has her best healing spells and items/skills that replenish her TP automatically you basically never die and can power through anything and with 4 character slots there is basically always room for her in the party. 

Graphics wise this "remaster" is just an upres and I think some visual effects from the NGC are missing like the cel shaded outlines and it's 30fps instead of 60fps. The music is great but the sound quality is a bit eh. It crashed on me 2 or 3 times but overall it is completely playable from start to finish.

There was always the debate if TOS is actually good or just overrated because it was one of the few GameCube RPGs.
I would say parts of it are underrated because very few people made it to the second world where the game really gets going.


Started to play Sonic Super Stars next.  Generic 2.5D Sonic game. Level design is fine but I can see why Mario Wonder totally burried this. 

Switched over to Tactics Ogre: Reborn. Cool how you tag along with some much better characters early on in the game who explain how everything works.
Much better than a lengthy tutorial. I've never played the original but it looks to be remastered beautifully.

[DavidCroquet]

I just beat Anodyne 2: Return to Dust. great game. The art direction and music are incredible, it's just a great game to exist in. Don't tell the other posters on the Bire, but it's very trans-friendly.  

Now I'm back to Returnal for some reason...but I'm not mad about it.

[Nintex]

Tactics Ogre: Reborn
The game has opened up more. I do enjoy it even if the UI is a bit convoluted at times. However the gameplay tweaks to modernize it are somewhat strange. I never played the original but I do remember people thought it was grindy. In Reborn they added a level cap per battle and Random buff cards that you or enemy units can pick up to boost stats like attack or refill MP. Apparently they greatly reduced the number of skill slots as well.

The story and the fact that your decisions alter the story must've been ground breaking back in the day. The story is still good in terms of complexity and presents an interesting tale about warring factions, rebellion, politics and the characters but it is not as mind blowing today as it would've been in 1995.

Overall though it plays nothing like Fire Emblem, where you simply move your chess pieces across the map to take out the enemy in one or two 'rock, paper, scissors' skirmishes. It's more about blocking the path of enemy units and slowly grinding away at health bars and using various skills to counter their buffs and advantages.

It does make the battles feel epic but some take a long time to conclude.

[Nintex]

Dragon Quest XIS
Played this a couple hours sometime last year(?).
This weekend I gave it another go. Very fun overall, runs and looks great on the Switch although the overworld can get a bit blurry with the dynamic resolution.
The orchestral soundtrack also packs a punch. 

So far a bit on the easy side but already some good plot building and story progression early on in the game.
If you like classic JRPGs with good vibes, towns, dungeons etc. this is probably the best one of the 'recent' releases to play.

[chronovore]

Played the opening missions of the Starship Troopers RTS that came out a few years ago. The writing is pretty great, as it spot-on mimics the tone of the Fed Net newsreel format. So far no resource gathering, so that's fun; haven't been focused exclusively on unit movement since Bungie's Myth.

Started Klonoa on Steam, it starts in some suboptimal resolution, but it's an upscaled PS1 game, so I should count my lucky stars. At some point they added 2P functionality? That wasn't in the original game. Man, it's such a fun game, with a wildly active camera whipping around the 2.5D landscape… what an inspiration this game is. 

Still smashing fools in Fortnite. However much people hate the cars, that's how much I hated last season's sniper meta. I'll tell them the same thing I was told: git gud. 

[benji]

[chronovore]

God damn! Remind me not to be on the opposing team!

[MMaRsu]

You wanna play together sometime its been awhile since I fired up TF2

[benji]

That's only like the second time I've cracked 20 kills in a match.

There's some max level dudes still playing, along with some guys who get accused of cheating but I think may just be super good. There's one guy who gets like 30 kills always, I mentally give up when I see his username at the start of matches. There was this guy who may have been cheating who got 55 kills in a match the other night, he was ignoring the objectives completely just to slaughter everyone.

There's this one guy who is like (Prestige) G76 or something who only plays hardpoint and bounty hunt, he completely dominates those modes especially bounty hunt but I've started liking winding up on the opposing team because he's so dominant. He knows the drop spots and order on every map, I only know them on like half of them. I've noticed that we're pretty much the only people still playing who actually seem to know there's an order and it's always the same. We're generally the only guys who get to the next spot before the game shows where it's going to be. He gets a sentry and titan so fucking fast, there's only like two maps where I can do that. Love when our team beats his, if we're both on a team we practically never lose. In hardpoint/bounty hunt I can almost always get in top three, I've done it less lately when opposing him because I've started targeting him just to make it more difficult for him to rack up points.

There's a Bore group I created back when the game first came out, I think there's only like one other person in it, search for Yum Brands. I use it because I can control when the Happy Hour for the 2XP bonus is. 

There's like 2500 people playing on weekends, 1800 during the week. Whenever there's a Steam sale it boosts a little to like 3000 and 2000. I don't know how it is in Europe but connecting through the East Coast stuff it rarely takes very long to find a match. Every so often it's clear everyone else is taken because it will briefly say "7 minutes" when it's searching, matches are 15 minutes long max. On occasion there will be a dude who is moving around as if he's 500 ping.

I just use the regular client still, I don't know anything about the Northstar client other than people who spam chat are using it. Nobody really uses chat otherwise, like once a week I'll have a match where people spend half of it arguing over who is cheating. One last week descended into these two guys throwing slurs at each other in Spanish.

[benji]

Player boost because of current sale for $2 (EA app) and $3 (Steam) up past 4000 players.

This is what can happen in Bounty Hunt:


To go back to what I mentioned earlier, this 13 kills was the most I had of the four games I played tonight. And I got a completely unfair grenade that killed three people in this one that I didn't even know were there.