What games are you playing and why?

Love Risk of Rain

 

Sacrifice (the enemy chest one) is one of the 3 I'm missing. I've beaten the game 4 times now, only seen Magma Barracks once and it didn't spawn :/ I've also yet to see more than 2 Keycards in a run (apparently there's always exactly 4 but sometimes they drop from enemies instead of the gold lockers...and killing enemies for 20 minutes wasn't enough. Someone on the forums said they had one drop from the final boss one time lol).

 

Finished Valiant Hearts: The Great War this evening, and it was really, really good. Except for some sections. But otherwise really, really good.

 

Yeah, Magma Barracks is annoyingly rare, keep at it!

Been playing Plague Inc lately, it's not terrible, but it's also pretty much Pandemic 2.

 

Lol, it's shown up 3 times in a row now. Had the buttons each time, still no Miner, and I still haven't gone for a "stand in lava" build yet. And got the Huntress Wisp achievement after killing it unhurt 6 times (and hurt maybe 5 times). Yay!

The Sacrifice artifact was...underwhelming so far. Like, finish stage 1 with 3 whites and a green, and 760 gold that *could* have bought 15 items...? Tried it three times in a row and averaged less than one item per minute, turned it off and started getting loot again.

About the only things left to do are stand in lava, untouched Commando (which I hope gets detected better than the Huntress), Monsoon Merc, Lightning Dodging I mean Sniper Reload, get the friggin Miner and his stuff, and the 11th artifact. Been a pretty good 3 bucks I think

Edit: Miner showed up on the 12th Magma barracks

 

See? You should listen to me sometimes.

 

Kerbal Space Program. So very many dead Kerbals. Science can not move forward without heaps...of dead Kerbals.

 

Fallout: New Vegas + all the expansions + a mod that speeds up the wait and sleep actions

 

Picked up Shattered Planet, because it looked fun, and I clearly need more roguelikes. MOAR.

*Ehem* Your characters are a series of clones. You: explore a randomly generated portion of the planet; catalog flora, fauna, geologic formations, equipment, and who knows what else (you are part of a research expedition!); gather items and two currencies; and die. Enter clone #2, who can spend the resources your previous self gathered, either on equipment that will be consumed by the run or on genetic upgrades that will benefit all future clones. Each takes a different currency.

There is also something about monsters you can tame and cloned pets, but I'm not that far in. I gather the idea is that you are trying to solve what is happening to the planet. Combat is turn based, and I have no idea if there are ranged weapons present. Clones yes, gunpowder and lasers iffy.

 

Yes, there are ranged weapons -- I know thrown weapons for sure (grenades and potions). Be careful though using them as the grenades have a (fortunately small) blast radius and can start fires. I've managed to kill myself using one. I'm not sure about lasers, but there was a gun for sale that I couldn't afford, but I'm not sure if it was usable as a weapon (I think it's supposed to make a hole through impassable terrain). In a Let's Play, I saw someone who had found a teleport gun but he couldn't figure out how to make it work.

There are a couple of things about it that I don't quite get yet:
Why are all of my clones called 'Clone 001'? I thought it would increment after each death.
Is there any way to get back to the ship short of dying?
/edit Also when are the daily challenges good for? Is it until one person beats it or what?

 

I think I figured this one out -- you can only try them once. I must have clicked on it the other day and not realized it. I tried today's daily challenge and could only attempt it once.

As far as ranged weapons are concerned, I found a few more. They do exist but you don't wield them, you 'use' them. They also seem to have limited charges and are fairly rare.

BTW, the DNA extractor does insignificant damage, so I could only see it as being useful if you can manage to get an enemy down to a tiny sliver of health without actually killing it. I assume that the Blight gun is only of use if you have a pet, but not ever getting more than an egg (and then dying with it on me) I've yet to unlock a pet (though a blighted pet could be cool, if that's in fact how it works). I'm curious if that Allergen gun would have been any good, but 100 credits(?) was a bit too rich for my wallet.

 

I've played SP a bit more. Then my game got locked up due to a bad daily challenge seed. Essentially, I can't play until the next patch, OR I could reinstall the game and wipe everything.

I'm waiting, as I had a bit unlocked already. If possible, avoid the Daily Challenges until at least the next patch, as if you get a bad map seed you can't play the game at all. This is per the devs by the way, who to their credit have been very communicative and already released at least two undocumented patches.

Also, unless a rebalance patch changes thing, the Emissary is the best clone by far. His starting bonus of +10 fate never expires, which makes it ridiculously superior to the other clones buffs that vanish after 200ish turns.

 

What am I playing and why?

Why.. I thought you'd never ask!

Let's start with the why bit: Because I bought it in the steam sale and wanted to try it out and now got the time for it.

What bit: Paper Sorcerer.

How is it bit (extra extra ^^):
It's great, I like it a lot! It's visual style is nice and easy on the eyes.. relaxing, and so evocative of the nice older dungeon art. For example I think the doors in the game are the best looking doors ever (the wooden ones with the metal on it anyway). It leaves quite a lot to the imagination I guess but that's actually very cool too.
The combat is nice, their system works well and after a few levels and learning the abilities and synergies between characters (I think you can have uo to 6, 4 of which active at the same time (but luckily the inactive ones do level up as well!!)) becomes really enjoyable.

My party started with Sorcerer (me), then Goblin, then Vampire for healing, then Witch for more healing since the Vampire seemed like a bad choice as only healer, then Minotaur do deal a lot of damage and also deal damage to all enemies, then the Ghost/Dirge to get some really nice buffs and enemy debuffs (paralyze all was one of the examples you get later on).

As I found more and better items I have the last few levels working with a party of Sorcerer, Vampire, Goblin and Minotaur, as the better items helped an incredible lot and the levels made everyone a bit tougher so the Vampire now has enough time to heal etc.
The other two are easily swappable and useful too so if I do a longer run I can just substitute my damaged chars. Also happy with the fact healers can heal outside of combat as well, so the witch is still really useful.

Story is cool, makes me want to continue. Just a really good and fun game overall, in the style of a classic dungeon crawler.

 

Remember Me - With French voices. Made more progress on my PS3 version. It can be a little ugly sometimes and the combat is still frustrating and the controls sometimes seem to decide to not work but oh gosh i love this

 

Paper Sorc looked interesting when it came out.... I can't quite recall why I didn't snag it. Maybe a fear the art would drive my eyes bonkers over large sessions.

I've moved on from Shattered Planet for a bit. While the Devs are super nice (more Canadians, perhaps a trend), the game just doesn't have enough mechanics or strategy to give it legs. Combat is almost always a melee slug fest, you lack abilities to stun/relocate enemies reliably, and the clone options are all bad save one. There isn't anyway to really build a strategy and execute it, aside from grind grind grind. (The events were fun, enough to make me start a partial list on the steam forums). The Devs have said they would like to do a significant content update if sales make it possible, which could easily suck me back it. Give the clones inherent abilities on cooldown, or something.

Art remains great.

I finished up Shadowrun Returns: Dragonfall last night. Much better than the original campaign that accompanied the release. Overall, good story and conversation options in the vein of Knights of the Old Republic or a "lite" version of Fallout 2. I wanted to finish the story and learn more about the various character's backstories, even past the time sane people were sleeping. The Ending was reactive to some of your major decisions, to the point where you couldn't just save n' load to see them all.

However, the combat realllllly became drawn out in large fights, which began to grate the last few missions. Other people liked the system, so YMMV. I played on Normal, and don't think I'd bother with a higher difficulty- the story was why I was playing, not the combat.

 

I agree with everything you said. The discovery mechanic is odd as well, and the fact that your data persists is not always helpful, since you get gems from discovering new stuff.

 

I got Dragonfall on release and I have maybe played about two minutes of it. But I also only played Shadowrun Returns proper for about 30mins - maybe an hour. I need to rectify this at some point.

 

I would be interested to hear what you thought of the combat system in Shadowrun during late-game fights. Maybe it was because I spec'd into pistols with my decker, idk. But I seriously considered dropping the difficulty level just to get the fights over faster.