Level four of Thunder Force V reached, managed to get to the boss on my last life & continue and got myself killed after the tranformation sequence (I've gotten used to dying a lot in this game, even on the easiest difficulty level). I've now managed to complete the first level on a single life a few times, level three was also pretty easy once I figured out how to quickly kill the mid-level boss (and the end-boss of that level is pretty easy). Level two's boss is a pain in the behind though, as it's very aggressive if you don't kill it fast enough and also the last part of its body can't be destroyed with all weapons (it's called "Iron Maiden" and is a insectoid biological weapon monster thing that melts into a puddle when you kill it). However, I think I've finally figured out which weapon to use at that point...

The keys to actually do well at this game is to known when to use what weapon, memorize the dangerous parts of the levels, and master switching between weapons and using the overweapon system.

Doom 4, totally radical singleplayer.

Life [is] Strange.

Someone else played this game, right?

There's a thing everyone I'm sure everyone does when it comes to text-tree games; you save, and then back track after your first choice to see what where an alternate choice takes you. This game manages to turns that impulse into a mechanic by allowing the protagonist to rewind time in short jumps.

Through this, you can find out information by asking different questions, change the conversation's outcome by invoking information you learned in the last go-round, and even change how interaction with in-world objects play out, e.g. first by blowing a door down to get into a room, then rewinding time so that you were always standing in it, and can now unlock the door from the other side.

Other wise, it's a point & click mystery, and not a half bad one.

I'm currently playing Doom, as others have mentioned really cool Single Player, highly enjoyable, fast-paced and just a lot of fun. Going to start playing around with the SnapMap stuff soon, see what I can do with that.

I've also started playing Bully on the XB360. It along with The Warriors are some of the only games by R* that I haven't actually played properly. I've always heard good things about it so I'm excited to give it a go.

Played about an hour of Touhou Scarlet Weather Rhapsody, after suffering through four hours of Windows XP to get it installed properly. This is the second Touhou fighting game (not the hard as nails shoot 'em ups). After setting the difficulty to Easy and reconfiguring the keyboard to my tastes, I first tried practice mode, and when that bored me, the versus computer mode. I started off with playing Reimu vs. Marisa, but quickly switched to Reisen Udongein Inaba, the resident little bunny only good for her sex appeal (and suckerpunching enemies into submission with her bare hands, if the game is anything to go by). Wearing a school uniform with a short skirt, very long hair, and a pair of entirely natural rabbit ears, she of course got her ass handed to her in the first round against Marisa, who stole her victory with ease. But as I learned to control her better, I started winning, even though I didn't have any spell cards. So after kicking Marisa's behind in two matches, I went to take on that annoying photographer who likes taking pictures of the ladies in compromising situations. There, I was hit by my first spellcard, but still managed to beat the enemy, despite not having any spellcards of my own, in both matches I did. Next up was Suika, the drunken Loli, who almost did me in, as she's pretty much impervious to physical attacks. On the other hand, it froced me to learn to use my ranged attacks better, and by the end of the second match I even managed to connect some physical hits. Finally, I assaulted Patchouli, who must have some kind of motion problem, as she mostly stood swaying around while moving as little as possible, except when mishandling the book in her hands, which she violently connected with Reisen's head several times. But she couldn't stand my punches and quickly went down once I had learned how to avoid her attacks. Reisen is fun to watch fighting, as when she jumps around and somersaults she turns into a little ball of spiraling fur/hair, and her suppositorie...er...bullets fly around and can be machine-gunned at enemies.

Control with the keyboard is not easy, and since I am using a PS/2 keyboard instead of a USB keyboard some key combinations are hard to pull off (the keyboard controller doesn't like it when I press certain combinations and reacts slowly). I will probably install the drivers for the USB gamepad I have laying around for a better playing experience.

Last weekend I finally finished Borderlands 2, which was a decent enough game. A little overboard on some of the fights, but I generally liked it.

Next, I plugged in The Witcher 3 to start that, only to have my Xbox tell me I needed to download a fucking 18gb update. So, I played Rise of the Tomb Raider while it was downloading, which is OK, but exactly the same as the previous game. By the time the Witcher update was done, I played through the tutorial, and then went to bed.

Why do they need to make these updates so massive, anyway?

Shamsiel-kun wrote:Control with the keyboard is not easy, and since I am using a PS/2 keyboard instead of a USB keyboard some key combinations are hard to pull off (the keyboard controller doesn't like it when I press certain combinations and reacts slowly). I will probably install the drivers for the USB gamepad I have laying around for a better playing experience.

Gamepad tested and discarded. Although it is much easier to pull off certain moves and combos with the gamepad, the lag is worse. I blame the gamepad though (Logitech Dual Action), as despite having been used only a little bit more now the direction pad has noticeably more play, and I have to mash the buttons down really hard for it to react sometimes (crappy quality...). Also, I get painful hands from using it due to the bad ergonomy. So I will need to find a better gamepad. Anyone know whether the Hori PS3 USB gamepads that work on Windows 7 also work on Windows XP?

Sega Saturn games played lately:

The Game Paradise. This game is both awesome and a royal pain in the behind at once. It is awesome because it has great graphics, good music, and quite good controls. The graphics bit needs a little elaboration: you fight against enemies that look like game characters, arcade machines, and consoles. The levels themselves are a mix of weaponized arcades and levels from Jaleco's earlier games. Several bosses are cute girls, whose antics cause items to attack you (e.g. one throws up toys that fall down on you, another sings and the words attack you. Regarding the ships, you can choose between a classic ship, an airplane, a mecha, a pig, and a girl (whose bombs are extremely fanservicy ). The game has an arcade mode and a Saturn mode, which are quite different, plus single and 2-player mode. In the options menu there is an option to listen to Jaleco's game making history (in Japanese). The only problem? Even on "very easy" the game is a brutal bullet hell shooter. Often there's so many bullets on screen you simply can't avoid them. And they are not all in nice patterns: many shots are targeted at your ship, and although some of them can be destroyed, it's pretty much impossible to not die. Also, the earlier bosses are rather hard, and come in boss rushes. It took me at least twenty continues to reach the end of Saturn mode on "very easy", and arcade is pretty much impossible because lives lost count against your score (and the score can go below zero ).

Layer Section II. Fun but hard. I think the 3D action looks quite good, but sometimes it's hard to see enemy shots. Now to figure out how to beat the stage two boss without running out of lives and continues.

Been playing through a lot of Gundam Breaker 3, I'm on my second playthrough and getting a decent amount of Master Grade parts. I have a few different mobile suits but my main one is based on Den from Battle Angel Alita. It's funny because if you make his weapon Martial Arts hands he'll actually do crazy G Gundam style flying kicks and Kung Fu moves with his horse legs.

Steam sales are back, woo! More stuff I don't actually have time to play... but it's so cheap I just can't resist. My haul, assuming nothing else tempts me:

Aquaria
Dust: An Elyssian Tail
Half-Life 1 Source
Steam World Dig
System Shock 1&2 remastered
The Swapper
Valkyria Chronicles
Wasteland
X-com Enemy Unkown (and dlc)
Xeodrifter

I got Elder Scrolls Online and Environmental Station Alpha off the Steam sale.

ESO:
The reviews for this game range from great to horrific so I went into this with low expectations. It's surprisingly quite good. I wouldn't call it my favourite Elder Scrolls game, but it's a pretty good MMORPG and I'm having a lot of fun with it. I am saddened that I can't be quite as much of an amoral cheese wheel-stealing walking god as I was in Skyrim, but it does scratch my itch for questing through dungeons in the Elder Scrolls universe with other players. There's also something vaguely amusing about watching other new players agro-ing guards in the starting area and getting the asses handed to them.

Environmental Station Alpha:
I got this because I've been in the mood for some 2D Metroidvania lately, and the game is exceptionally cheap but has been extremely well-received amongst fans. It's very old-school; it hearkens back more to the original NES Metroid more than Super Metroid in that you can't aim diagonally, the graphics are very, very pixelly (in the opening a ship moving towards a space station is literally represented by a single blue pixel moving across the screen) but it all fits together very well. The starting boss is an extraordinarily easy warm-up that doesn't even leave a traditional power-up, but that soon turned out to be non-indicative of the game's difficulty as shortly thereafter I wandered into a deep water pool and got trapped, forcing me to restart from a save point. The game seems fairly simple at first but has a fair amount of difficulty and a deep story hidden under the surface, and unlike Metroid it won't stop you from going into areas without the requisite power-up or getting trapped.

I beat Nier.
For several reasons I wont go into I really think this game is VASTLY inferior to Drakengard 1 and 3, still better than Drakengard 2 though (not that being better than DoD2 is hard)

Here's hoping I like Nier Automata a lot more.

God, I can't stop playing Witcher 3, this Blood and Wine DLC is fucking beautiful. And I mean that in every way possible. I wish everything in the game looked as good as Toussaint.

I'm always gonna pick Triss, I can't imagine anyone picking anyone but her. I want to invite everyone to live in the estate in the game.

Dat Yen tho

Chuckman wrote:Dat Yen tho

I'm always going to pick the redhead, I don't know why, but I'm always going to. Though I wish ciri was an option, even though that's wrong.

I'd also pick the duchess and Shani... Syssa too.

The first few hours of Zero Time Dilemma took some getting used to.
The novel segments are a lot more cinematic and animated this time around, there’s no set stock of aghast reactions played over and over again like in Virtue’s Last Reward. I take this as both a good and bad thing- it’s a step up in presentation, but a part of me misses the “do more with less” or “just make do” approach VLR took.
I’m playing with English audio, though we are thankfully given the option of switching to Japanese. Pity you can’t set individual voices however; Europe never got a dub for VLR, so it’s odd for me hearing Phi speak English.
The escape segments are a little easier compared to VLR, although a couple did have me running to gamefaq… and there are currently no guides. Ha!

There’s no single Junpei or Sigma type main character this time, and the story is fragmented beyond belief. It’s been difficult keeping track of events and really feeling swept up in the narrative so far. Still- looking forward to seeing how everything comes together at the end.

On my second play-through of Fire Emblem Fates: Conquest. Casual normal difficulty is such a relaxing pleasure after the horror of classic hard mode.
Yes, Awakening is better, but Fates is still good.
I’d type a longer post on it, but I’m waiting for someone to bump the Fire Emblem thread first.

Furi has to be the biggest surprise of the year for me.

It's basically Afro samurai (Creators are the same) combined with cyberpunk, hack and slash, shoot'em Up, boss rush and Dark souls - like challenging, but fair difficulty.

I've defeated first two bosses, but I'm stuck at the third at the moment.

Let's talk casual: Slither.io is just as addictive as you might have heard, and it's also designed by the Devil. I find myself spending way too much time gobbling up balls and chasing one-eyed snakes when I should be doing something productive.

If you see a snake named "Instrumentality" feel free to offer yourself in tribute.

That is one weird-ass game. Crazy addictive, though.

Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak

This game is good. Not great, but good.

The choice to "go to ground" was inspired, I like that they mixed up the unit composition more for each side, and just as with its predecessors, Desert of Kharak has great atmosphere. Neither the music with its beating drums and its tribal-esce chants, nor the characters grimly setting the stage for their battle, nor the (signature) stylized animatronic cut-scenes let you forget that this is a harsh desert world, with people in a pitched battle for survival.

... Unfortunately, it also has the same flaw as its direct predecessor. It doesn't have a particularly compelling story, or characters. Everything on the personal level is presented in a pretty monotone, sanitized manner.

On the story front; the background is... stupid. I can buy not knowing that you're descended from a space-faring race-- that's a sci-fi staple. What I cannot is people having 22nd century technology, and satellites, yet never having discovered a wreck the size of a small metropolis on your planet sitting right there on the surface. Or the biggass ancient satellite and its death ray.

How the ships got to the planet was a nice touch though.


With characters, we of course have to talk about units. Homeworld 2 lacked personality in its unit voices; I was sad to discover that the Vagyr forces shared the same generic voices as the Higarrens. Only the Vaygr leader really had any personality about him.

There's a little more variety in the voices time around, and they even hand out names(!) to units who earn combat experience + promotions. But I still didn't connect well with them... partly because I had 4-5 of the same units with the same names. (Are you Viktor 1 or Viktor 5? Meh, meet Viktor 6. he'll be replacing Viktor 3.)


I certainly didn't connect well with "Rachel", the "protagonist" if there is one. The girl sounds bored in every scene she's in. She couldn't even carry the death of her brother with more than restrained disappointment.

We're introduced at the start to several members of the Kapisi crew, each representing a different function for the ship: Command, Engineering, Science, Intelligence. I thought then that this was to be an ensemble thing, but your barely hear from anyone else besides Rachel and the Intelligence officer.

I do sort of adore the latter, but that's due to a bug. Even during Rachel's ending-game monologue, even during the end credits, he couldn't help but chime in "Gaalsien aircraft approaching!". Which they always are.

Just to say, if there's any voice performance I was sold on, it was the Gaalsien Warlord; especially as he tried to evangelize my "northerners" amidst his death throes.

Speaking of bugs, there's a game-breaking one; Mission 4 won't continue if you destroyed a production cruiser while they're not moving. Reason being, the unfinished unit they were building will survive, and be invulnerable. I had to restart; and let the cruisers live, until it went on the run again.

There's also an annoying bug; Strike fighters take forever landing back on the Kapisi (Carrier/mothership). By selecting them, and ordering them to land, you can force it, but they're hard to select. Not doing so leaves them vulnerable to approach anti-air units. Aircraft, particularly the strike fighters, were a must for me. They were scouts, a probing force, and life savers (for my unprotected units) all in one. No units got more kills, nor died in higher numbers than they did.

Mechanics;

*Aircraft again were a nice feature, mostly responsive. I only wish you could set patrol à la Supreme Commander to counter enemy air incursions.

*Repair is taken away from the collectors, and given to "support" cruisers. This meant putting 2-3 of them at the front of my force to attract attention, while letting my range units snipe at the enemy from the rear.

* The Coalition (the player's faction) don't get sub-production cruisers; only the Kapisi can produce more. The Gaalsien however do.
What the Coalition do get is the Base Runner, which can build turrets.

* There is still a ship capture feature, but it's now a special ability from the science vessel (Rachel in campaign).

* There are two resource types. Resource units are rarer, and are now blue. Construction units are more common, and are rendered yellow.
Additionally, certain resource are held in warehouses which can be broken up, sometimes spawning a "relic" which can improve the performance of your units or the carrier.

* The carrier's power can be re-allocated à la Star Trek Bridge Commander or Starfleet Command III. I didn't experiment very widely with this, but you can on the fly switch the carrier from offensive or defensive posture, long range, or close quarters, simply by reallocating power to the sectors you think are needed. You can also over-allocate power to a sector, with the con being that the carrier will damage itself over time.