What game are you playing?

wild card option: Wasteland 2

 

How did you know I also had that?! I bought it on console though (while back) so idk how it runs, but good to know it’s well received.

 

I don't know if the console version is any good but I love the pc version. Really scratches that fallout itch but manages to do its own thing too.

Which reminds me, I need to start up Wasteland 3 lol

 

The skill wheel is a little clumsy on console in wasteland 2 but apart from that it runs fine.

 

AC Valhalla is way too big. Weird criticism, but Jesus Christ. Odyssey made a bit more sense being so huge since it was a ton of islands and wide-open ocean. This has cramped little rivers but mostly just tons of land that you have to run around on the hundreds of yards between interest points. I think this is probably going to be a good hundred+ hours to try and get all the stuff on it.

The mythical questlines are really frickin tedious, too. I hated Jotunheim, especially, with the shapeshifting enemies that become unhittable when they're transforming and the areas that only become visible if you stand in the right place and walk from the right angle. Ugh.

Overall, so far, I'd definitely put this game well under Odyssey and probably about on par with Origins. The gameplay itself is similarly fun to Odyssey, but the hard limits on numbers of arrows and the inability to just craft more of them constantly removes that as a really valid gameplay option, and the melee combat is taken down several notches by your character constantly going into these lengthy unskippable execution animations. The story is WAY too frickin long, and while the characters are possibly better than Odyssey (not saying a lot), the lead is nowhere near as interesting as Bayek was.

I also hate some of the minigames. Especially the weird platforming sections where you change into bitchy future lady that no one cares about from the last couple games, and the card game which is OK mechanically but takes FOREVER.

 

I know a lot of peoples who are having the same issue with game that are too big. Especially games with a huge map with nothing on it (Ever played FUEL?).
Just got done playing Sleeping Dogs main game, going thru the DLCs at the moment. Was expecting something different then i realized it was just like Watching Dog without the Hacking. But with better driving.

 

X Plane 11 or MS Flight Sim 2020?

 

So I finished Arkham Knight and while it's well made and the design of Scarecrow is the stuff of nightmares it's way too light on the stealth & detective elements and felt quite dumbed down so it never really hooked me in the way the first game did.

I've now moved onto Journey to the savage planet which is a refreshing change as it's very similar to Metroid Prime (one of my all time favourites) plus it's got this oddball humour to it that's like a mashup of Hitchhiker's guide/Red Dwarf and the corporate satire of Total Recall/Robocop that actually makes me laugh.

 

I started playing System Shock 2 this weekend - and I never realized how much this game shares with other Looking Glass stuff. It feels like playing Deus Ex, minus the "every conspiracy theory is true" plus the janky animation and combat of Thief. Not sure how I missed this one before, all this stuff is very much my jam.

 

Wow, i actually envy you playing it for the first time. Yeh it's pretty much a Looking Glass game. Even uses the Thief game engine. I replay it every couple years or so.

The atmosphere amazing, helped by what i think is the best and spookiest sound design ever in a game.

A remake of SS1 is being made at the moment by the way, which i'm very much looking forward to. That game is awesome too, but the original has aged badly.

 

Has anyone played donkey Kong tropical freeze on switch? I’m pretty decent at Platformer‘s but some reviews say this game can be quite frustrating. What’s the level of difficulty on this?

 

I was able to get into SS1 for a while, but it definitely didn't age well. It's insanely clunky. Part of me worries though that the remake might modernize it a bit toooooo much. I think I tried the demo and I can't remember what my thoughts on it were.

 

After 4 months of trying, today was the day I finally got a blue rose in Animal Crossing.

Miyamoto says that when he'd start designing the first level of a new Mario Bros game it always ended up being a 3-3 difficulty level, so he'd have to work back to get 1-1.

Tropical Freeze is like the opposite of that without any of cheap stuff platformer designers put in to make them hard. It's tough, but it's also one of the best platformers ever.

 

Harder than most Mario levels from the get-go. But it’s exceptionally polished and feels tough by design and not “cheap”.

 

How does it compare to the SNES Donkey Kong Country series? I normally hate platformers and am terrible at them but have gotten 101-103% on those three games multiple times each At some point I discovered some people say they're hard by platformer standards (I don't think I believe it since I die nonstop in frickin 2d Mario games).

 

As good as or better than the original DKCs. It's the Metroid Prime of 2d platformers.

 

I meant difficulty-wise! I know it's a modern classic.

Still dumping hours and hours into AC Valhalla with no end in sight. I'm at 85 hours, and based on hidden achievement position/level requirements for missions, I'm probably only halfway through the fricking main quest which is an incredibly slow go thanks to tons of sub-missions every time you make any progress. Like, there are 12 or so regions of England that all have a lengthy questline through them, and there are still like 5 of them left for me and all of them are WAY below my level (I'm at 360, the zones cap out at 340, most of these quests are 160), and I haven't even gone back to Norway yet. This game is WAY TOO BIG. I think I regret buying the season pass. I might end up taking a break instead of grinding through the rest of it since I think it will be a minimum of 40 more hours. The more I play it, the less I like it compared to AC: Odyssey. The location is just so uninteresting compared to ancient greece, the boat feels like a huge waste of time since you're mostly stuck running around on huge landmasses separated by tiny rivers, the combat is fine but the abilities are useless and thus it's mostly just a lot of mashing of parry/dodge/light attack, there are wonky bugs galore (though I think getting stuck standing on barrels/crates and unable to hit the guy standing on the ground whacking away at you 2 inches from you is now sort of an AC feature at this point), and worst of all, the stealth is garbage compared to all previous AC games. Like, you can't even do double-assassinations in a way that makes sense in this game (you have to assassinate one guy and then can hit another guy that's somewhat far away with a ranged attack to insta-kill them but it only works sometimes with no apparent rhyme or reason), so it's impossible to not break stealth on most areas in short order. Like, if there are two guys standing there next to each other with their backs to you, you can only assassinate one of them. It's really annoying. I just gave up even trying to stealth anywhere after getting that achievement for assassinating ten guys in a row. There's no real punishment for breaking stealth, it just would be more fun if it was a viable option.

Plus, in addition to the absolutely horrible aforementioned sidemissions (I HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE the "anomaly" puzzle-platforming sections), I encountered a new one that's even more infuriating - STONE STACKING. You literally make a pile of rocks, and have to get it to a certain height. For a while I didn't care, I just did them in 10 seconds without thinking about it, but then you start getting to the high-level ones where you have to stack a bunch of them vertically to hit the limit and the awful physics make the rocks fall down and knock your pile over and have to start all the way over from the beginning with the tediously slow rotation/tilt controls over and over, sometimes with the rocks bugging out and being shorter than they're supposed to be. Like, you can follow video guides, stack things up the same way as them, and randomly have it not be tall enough, only to restart the puzzle, do THE EXACT SAME THING, and have it count the second time. I spent over an hour on one of these things. It is clearly designed to be like the haiku sections in Ghost of Tsushima and be chill or something, but it is anything but. It is one of the worst things I've ever played. Why do I keep subjecting myself to this game?!?!??!

Thinking about getting Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity. I've seen reviews that are all over the map. Like, the Kotaku review says basically it's a game for no one, and that you probably won't like it if you loved Hyrule Warriors but also won't like if you want something like Zelda: BOTW, while many other outlets say it's a lot better than Hyrule Warriors (but seem to be operating from the position that Hyrule Warriors wasn't that good, which is wrong). Also, Kotaku makes a ton of specific, detailed complaints that really sound awful (like Zelda's entire playstyle and the maps and endless sidequests) that no one else seems to even mention. I am thinking maybe most of the good reviews are not to be trusted. I'll probably buy it anyway! Unfortunately, it being something with the Zelda name on it, it will be 60 dollars forever.

Other things I want right now but shouldn't spend money on:

Dark Souls Remastered - PS4 - I still haven't played more than about 8 hours of this game and EVERYONE says it's a classic and must be played by any serious fan of action/adventure games but my motivation for playing it either on PC or digging out my xbox 360 are almost nonexistent. Should I spend yet another 20 bucks and maybe never end up playing it?! All reasonable people suggest no! However, I recently paid 40 for Skyrim (it pricedropped to 15 the other day, of course) and played all the way through it so I'm definitely not a reasonable person.

Judgment - PS4 - The lack of Kiryu as the protagonist and hearing about some annoying sidemissions put me off getting this, but then I've mostly only heard positive stuff about it for months now from people who finally got it. I will definitely get it someday, but not sure when I'd get around to playing it. I've also been waiting for it to get cheap - now it hit 20 bucks, so that's probably about my breakpoint. BUT...

Yakuza: Like a Dragon - this sounds great, but it's 60 bucks just for the baseline version and I dunno if I'd have time to play it before it gets cheaper anyway! However, I want to play it more than I want to play Judgment.

Overcooked 2 - I've been playing the first with my ladyfriend and it's a lot of fun but is getting very annoyingly difficult in the ice area and the way each level is locked behind ever-increasing stars that makes you have to keep going back and redoing levels you didn't get 3 stars on is not fun to me. Sounds like 2 has more levels and is quite a bit easier so it might be a good alternative to inevitably hitting a wall with this one! Unfortunately, it's an extravagant 45 dollars for the "complete" version and was recently on sale on both platforms I'd consider so I doubt it will be cheap again anytime soon.

 

Oh, my bad. Definitely noticeably harder.