What are you playing right now?
I thought the slice of life elements at the start of the first three chapters were misguided and not well done. Really kills the pacing when you go from the end of one chapter to the start of the next where nothing really happens. Plus the characters aren't fleshed out enough to maintain interest in them, at least not until their specific dramatic arc.
From what I've read the author Ryukishi07 was inspired by Jun Maeda's style with juxtaposing light hearted first acts before delving into the drama, but he doesn't pull it off as well and it stands out as more dissonant than in Maeda's writing.
The fourth and fifth chapters have skipped all the fluff at the start though, so it's definitely better paced. I'm two thirds of the way through chapter five and I've just thought of a theory that explains a lot of the stuff.
Yeah I can understand that though I do see why the author did that as well. Everything that doesn't look connected actually is after all but they could have done a better job at hinting at that. Umineko did do things slightly better though.
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Diagnosed ASD 4/22/16
All magic comes with a price! - Rumplestiltskin
Dusk, a first person shooter set in rural America where demonic cults have taken over. If you love Quake, you'll love this.
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I am sick, and in so being I am the healthy one.
If my darkness or eccentricness offends you, I don't really care.
I will not apologize for being me.
Factorio.
Holy porkbutts. This isnt a mere game. No sir. This is a full-on addiction waiting to happen. I havent encountered something on this level since Minecraft first released. Dwarf Fortress also counts.
If you havent seen/played this, the goal of the game is to escape this planet by building a rocket and launching a satellite to call for help. But a rocket isnt something you can just craft. Factorio is about automation, building entire factories and production lines. BIG factories. The one in the screenshot is "small". Early-game stuff here. Yet it's already a hideous tangle of assemblers, conveyor belts, smelters, mining arrays... and so on. In this playthrough, I've recently researched the stuff necessary to create trains and related things (well, SOME related things). The map is utterly enormous, and it's not exactly practical to line up ridiculously long conveyors that could develop screwy problems. Dont have time to be fixing up a mile-long conveyor every time something breaks a tiny section of it. I've also hit the point finally where angry alien creatures are starting their assaults. Weak things now but eventually they'll be huge and extremely numerous. I have turrets, and got mass ammo production started, but I havent set up automatic refilling of that ammo for the turrets. And they're only the most basic turrets anyway. My next goal is to get an oil refinery going, which is quite the process. Have to do that in an area far south of the main factory. Time to branch out, should get interesting.
Really though... what a game. It's the 2nd highest rated game on Steam, with only Portal 2 outclassing it. That is one hell of an incredible achievement. After alot of time with it I can see why it got there.
DQ11 is one of those games that, in retrospect, I can barely remember playing and I can't for the life of me figure out the appeal of this series. I'm not going to get into the mechanics much, but the main problems imo are:
- the game is easy until the very last optional content
- the battle system isn't complex enough
- battles are way too slow (this is a problem with most JRPGs that aren't Shin Megami Tensei)
- there's no interesting tension or dynamic between the characters at any point in the game and the characters are extremely bland to begin with (except Sylv whose shtick is not bland but simply intolerable)
That last one is the worst in my opinion. I felt like characters were, outside of a few scenes, simply not interacting at all but rather delivering overlapping monologues. I couldn't care less about them or anything that happens in the (also bad) story. The game felt like a quest to tick all the boxes and do all of the things and I'm tired of that! I played Ni no Kuni 2 earlier last year and honestly they both left the same taste in my mouth. The only good JRPG last year was Valkyria Chronicles 4 and that barely counts as one.
Anyway, I've been playing Resident Evil 2 (2019) and it's great. In particular I love the police station layout and how much the game feels like classic Resi. After 7 - honest to god the worst numbered game in the series in my opinion - I couldn't have had lower hopes but this game feels like a successful sequel to the first remake game, it learned all the right lessons and did pretty much everything as well as possible wrt implementing that gameplay style in the new camera/control scheme. In fact if this whole game was consistent in quality with the police station it would be an instant classic but it suffers from the same drop-off in level design as the original, which is a shame because they completely redesigned the later areas and could well have opted for a more open design. Also there are some awful boss fights in the latter half and the sections where you play as Ada/Sherry aren't great.
I've played Leon A/Claire B and I've just started the inverse on hardcore mode. They weren't kidding with this difficulty. I'm not sure this will be fun.
Factorio.
Holy porkbutts. This isnt a mere game. No sir. This is a full-on addiction waiting to happen. I havent encountered something on this level since Minecraft first released. Dwarf Fortress also counts.
If you havent seen/played this, the goal of the game is to escape this planet by building a rocket and launching a satellite to call for help. But a rocket isnt something you can just craft. Factorio is about automation, building entire factories and production lines. BIG factories. The one in the screenshot is "small". Early-game stuff here. Yet it's already a hideous tangle of assemblers, conveyor belts, smelters, mining arrays... and so on. In this playthrough, I've recently researched the stuff necessary to create trains and related things (well, SOME related things). The map is utterly enormous, and it's not exactly practical to line up ridiculously long conveyors that could develop screwy problems. Dont have time to be fixing up a mile-long conveyor every time something breaks a tiny section of it. I've also hit the point finally where angry alien creatures are starting their assaults. Weak things now but eventually they'll be huge and extremely numerous. I have turrets, and got mass ammo production started, but I havent set up automatic refilling of that ammo for the turrets. And they're only the most basic turrets anyway. My next goal is to get an oil refinery going, which is quite the process. Have to do that in an area far south of the main factory. Time to branch out, should get interesting.
Really though... what a game. It's the 2nd highest rated game on Steam, with only Portal 2 outclassing it. That is one hell of an incredible achievement. After alot of time with it I can see why it got there.
Yeah Factorio is a micro manager's wet dream come true. There's so much from a logistical perspective to deal with and the game gives you all of the tools you need to meet those extreme demands. It also has multiplayer which makes the game even more fun.
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Diagnosed ASD 4/22/16
All magic comes with a price! - Rumplestiltskin
I am playing Asphalt 8 Air Borne and This is my favourite game.
Currently alternating between Bomberman Tournament and AC New Leaf, just started up a new town.
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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
Stop the wolf kills! https://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeact ... 3091429765
RetroGamer87
Veteran
Joined: 30 Jul 2013
Age: 36
Gender: Male
Posts: 11,043
Location: Adelaide, Australia
Ichinin
Veteran
Joined: 3 Apr 2009
Gender: Male
Posts: 3,653
Location: A cold place with lots of blondes.
Spent lots of time last night doing SRV mining in Elite Dangerous. Found a planet with lots of high grade metals and i have finally been able to drive in full speed between the ore nodes, despite controls being crap when using keys instead of an analogue controller (flightstick).
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"It is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring" (Carl Sagan)
Aye, so I've heard.
I cant imagine doing multiplayer myself though. Here's everyone else being all organized, and then here's me just doing whatever and making a horrible tangled mess that only makes sense to me and nobody else...
Unless of course it's a group where EVERYONE is disorganized, and then that must get outright hilarious.
RetroGamer87
Veteran
Joined: 30 Jul 2013
Age: 36
Gender: Male
Posts: 11,043
Location: Adelaide, Australia
The World Ends With You.
Maybe I'll actually make some progress. If only the pin evolution system wasn't so terribly complicated. >.<
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I am playing Wargroove, a game I'd been looking forward to for some time. It is exactly what I wanted. It's similar to Intelligent System's tactical games from the Wars and Fire Emblem series, balanced and fun, with the ability to support short or long form matches. It doesn't just take what made their good, but makes them better by implementing the sort of features that the community has been using in unofficial versions of their games for years.
It bears the hallmark of a Western PC developer, by being not terrible on PC - as much as I love Japanese developed games, they're goddamn awful at PC games. That, and it contains tons of modern additions. That means things like arbitrary resolution support and aspect ratios without acting like supporting more than one resolution in 2019 is some big deal, online and local hotseat multiplayer, competitive and cooperative play, custom map editors, custom campaign editors community uploaded content browsable within game, asynchronous multiplayer with Steam integration to allow notifications. And since it's on Nintendo Switch and Xbox One too, crossplay with those platforms, where I assume it has the same robust features.
I was disappointed when Intelligent Systems stopped making Wars games in favor of Fire Emblem, and then they started making the series really weird with anime waifu petting sequences and extraneous RPG elements like making all your soldiers marry each other. I wanted Tiny Metal to be good when that came out last year purporting to be the sort of game this turned out to be, but that was a train wreck. I'm just glad that this turned out to not only be good, but that it is surpassing my expectations right out of the gate.
It bears the hallmark of a Western PC developer, by being not terrible on PC - as much as I love Japanese developed games, they're goddamn awful at PC games. That, and it contains tons of modern additions. That means things like arbitrary resolution support and aspect ratios without acting like supporting more than one resolution in 2019 is some big deal, online and local hotseat multiplayer, competitive and cooperative play, custom map editors, custom campaign editors community uploaded content browsable within game, asynchronous multiplayer with Steam integration to allow notifications. And since it's on Nintendo Switch and Xbox One too, crossplay with those platforms, where I assume it has the same robust features.
I was disappointed when Intelligent Systems stopped making Wars games in favor of Fire Emblem, and then they started making the series really weird with anime waifu petting sequences and extraneous RPG elements like making all your soldiers marry each other. I wanted Tiny Metal to be good when that came out last year purporting to be the sort of game this turned out to be, but that was a train wreck. I'm just glad that this turned out to not only be good, but that it is surpassing my expectations right out of the gate.
Ugh, yes, I remember when the Wars games were swapped out for Fire Emblem. I loved the Wars games. I loathed Fire Emblem. Still do, always will. Bleh.
I'd considered getting Wargroove myself, but after so much exposure to the indie scene, my tastes in strategy games has changed dramatically. Heck, even as nice as the Wars games were, I probably wouldnt go back to them now.
But they still left quite the legacy and it's nice to see someone continuing it even if I'm not going to bother with it.