What games are you playing and why?

If you mushed King's Bounty and Heroes together, and got an art team with an ounce of *censored* taste, then maybe we could have the perfect game.

 

I can only say that I agree with that.

And not to derail it completely, the game I am playing now (or was playing until a moment ago) is Jamestown.

 

BTW, one of the devs gave a link to a demo of the 1.0 version of "Bionic Dues": steam://openurl/http://arcengeneral.s3.amazonaws.com/BionicDues1000WinLinuxOSXDemo.zip
I don't know how it differs from the live version.

 

Been playing some Agarest... it's pretty good, but can also be aggravating, tedious and grindy. I am semi-regretting not activating the DLCs(at least some of them).

 

Got Borderlands 2 on sale. That means it's time for "stuff that bugs me!"

*Start game from Steam. Click Play. Sit through 3 logos that are louder than anything in the actual game, or spam Escape to speed it up. Press any key. NOW go refill drink because the "searching for DLC" takes longer than any of the previous 5 things I waited through.

*First person Mario sequences still suck.

*Game seems built for consoles first, pc's second, because trying to use the mouse to scroll through backpacks seems to have a 20-30% chance of getting the cursor stuck in an infinite loop that requires closing and re-opening inventory; using controller (or cursor keys) never has this issue.

*Max upgraded backpack is about half the size of Borderlands 1, and there's a 5th element to carry, and there's an achievement (that gives stat boosts) based on how many white/green/blue/purple/orange items you've picked up. Sooo, any time a new item drops, you're encouraged to drop something from your inventory, then pick up the new one for the achievement, then figure out which one you want to drag to the vendor, which if it was the old one involves the risk of glitching the backpack with the mouse or setting your mouse down to pick up your slower-but-less-glitchy xbox controller. Or just leave stuff on the ground *twitch twitch spasm*

*Dollars and ammo auto-pickup if they dropped from an enemy or debris pile. If it came from a box, bucket, locker, chest, fridge, washing machine, mailbox, or suitcase, OR is Eridium, you must press E a second time to pick it up. Ammo I could understand leaving behind strategically, but if I'm under the max for either currency, why would I want to leave it there?

*Can pick up dollars and ammo while in vehicles, but not Eridium, guns, shields, grenade mods, relics, skins, some quest items, or ammo you are full of. Many of these items look exactly like ammo when covered in debris and you are unable to zoom the camera from the driver seat. Jump out, hover cursor, jump back in, curse and spam change seat because the game decided you were closer to the gunner seat than the driver seat that you were just freaking in and didn't move at all, resume driving.

*Vehicle ramming does less damage than a punch, unless you're an enemy vehicle, in which case ramming does infinite damage. So does an enemy vehicle ramming a friendly vehicle that you're standing next to in order to see if that item was a paintjob or a bullet. And "ramming" only requires 1 pixel of distance to reach fatal velocity.

*Scaling quest items return from BL1. Accidentally accept a quest before you're max level? Grats, you just permanently lowered that item's stats. Hope you have an alt or a save editor.

*Not sure why they needed to make Rockets into Grenades 2.0 by excluding them from ammo regen (and for that matter, Roland could regen grenades in BL1...). I'm happy they got their damage boosted, but they've kinda slid from "a fun spec for Brick" to "too cool to use" territory, like those bolts/wands/potions that stay in your bag until Dredmor.


Cool things!


*Max backpack now requires grinding rather than save-scumming. (No Claptrap #18, I do not want that random $324 piece of vendor trash, I would rather have the cant-get-anywhere-else backpack upgrade that you have a % chance to give. WHY IS THAT PERCENT LESS THAN 100!!?!??!)

*Gun XP no longer exists! You are no longer penalized for having the Badass die while you were in a vehicle or Berserking.

*Goliaths are a neat idea. A little annoying to see one get soloed by a random non-badass enemy, but the risk/reward of weaving through a camp with one of these screaming berserkers on your tail, softening up his former friends for him, then popping his pinata before he pops your head... is quite exhilarating.

*Badass ranks are a cool little trickle of Skinner Box rewards that do encourage you to go a little out of your way and switch equipment/tactics up a bit. Some are more frustrating than fun but it's a decent system as a whole.

*SHARED STASH. When I saw the game was ten bucks, the first thing I did was Google if this had been added. It had. Add to cart.

*Doctor Zed is alive! Would have been very disappointed if they said Ned was really him.


Verdict so far: Despite the irritations, I've gotten less than half of my available Firstwins for LoL and Cardhunters this week since this is my current free-time activity of choice.

 

Then again, they could have also made it into something which you can only accumulate a little of that has no passive effects and which would be spent to raise the stats (and the level requirement) of the guns you have. Sure, it would require changing their "guns made from parts" system, but at the very least it would make the level-scaling rewards from quests neater—if you accept the quest earlier then you simply have to use the gun for a bit in order to raise its stats to what they would be otherwise, and in the meantime you'd still have a neat gun.

And there's also the quest for unlocking the shared stash. The most epic quest in the whole game...

 

I rather liked BL2. It is quite a bit of fun if you have a sense of humor. But it seems to me that it is quite a bit harder than BL1.

Note that if you are picking up stuff in mailboxes/boxes/whatever, just hold down the "E" key and it will grab all in range of your character. That greatly simplifies the torture of the loot-spam system. (Only hold it until it grabs stuff, then you have to release and press it again if you want to continue looting.)

 

I regret buying Borderlands 2. It's not a bad game at all, I just really can't get into it.
I liked Borderlands 1, 2 just seems so... generic and boring

 

Yeah the last 20,000 rocks were the hardest, as there was no longer room to walk in Sanctuary and the surrounding terrain had dropped below sea level!

Yep remembered that trick from BL1; it also has the "used this on purpose like twice ever" feature of the same keypress replacing your currently equipped gun/shield/evs with the piece of equippable vendor trash under your cursor that's surrounded by ammo. >_<

 

I've got to get my grumping in before Canadia has a holiday tomorrow.

So yeah, BL2. It's one of those games that - mostly due to the frequent DLC and sales - keeps cropping up on my radar, and yes, I would rather like to play as Gaige, but - Yes, there's a but here - I have one problem. It's Gearbox. I just don't know if I can support them after everything they've done, and things about BL2 turn me off. Not so much the art style, but more the Oh Boobs design ethics, I didn't really get into BL1 (though this was mostly due to the MASSIVE HEADACHES IT GAVE ME), and... yeah. It's one of those games that looks like it might be good to play but I probably wouldn't enjoy it, or if I did, then I almost certainly wouldn't complete it.

 

Not something I'm playing (yet), but Talisman Digital Edition is being released tomorrow for Steam Early Access. This is the reported state of the game:

 

I am still playing Fallout New Vegas. Steam however is annoying me. Does using "pcb" erase that amount of playtime from Steam's record? I show 191 hours playtime when I know for a fact that I have played an average of six hours daily for at least a few months by now. (Not contiguous. Usually a few weeks at a time and then a few months off before I am back to try new mods.)

"pcb" is short for PurgeCellBuffer and clears some memory to make things more stable. I do it often for that reason.

 

I got a chance to try out Talisman. It has a couple of bugs and one or two usability issues (like no pause button), but it is playable. I'm sure it will get better.

 

In a nutshell, as a tactical combat RPG it's great, but as a game, it's quite grindy, it's very unforgiving at times, and it's clunky in many respects. The expected single-playthrough time is about 150-200 hours, a lot of time will be wasted grinding in dungeons(because that doesn't advance the "turn" clock), trying to unlock "titles" at the adventurer's guild(like achievements, but gives nice rewards), gathering crafting components, and capturing monsters.

 

With some implied "buyyy ittttt" from Mooms and an urge to splash some cash, I bought Dust: An Elysian Tail from this week's Steam midweek.

Oh my girly gosh, this is rather good.

 

I really like it. Not seeing any flaws. I am 22 hours in but restarted because at first I had all DLC enabled (I didn't know what it would mean). I am now playing without any DLC enabled (well, the extra dungeons ^^) on hard and it's a much better experience: not as broken as before.
It's just fun and cute and interesting.

Oh and by the way I heard about capturing monsters: how can I get the capture skill? Anyone knows?