What games are you playing and why?

Still playing Risk of Rain, and a little Super Puzzle Platformer Deluxe on the side. Yesterday was happy to win normal with the engineer. Unlocked me the Huntress too, finally. Going to try her out tonight, seems interesting. Now only the Mercenary left for unlocking..

 

Dustforce - Okay, I've played the tutorial. Love the art-style but it feels like a SMB platformer but criminally sluggish. Navigating the menu is like running in water. Will try it with the controller, though.

Escape Goat - WHY DID NO-ONE TELL ME TO PLAY THIS BEFORE?! It's a rather good puzzle platformer *that I can actually do*. So far I really like it, plus the OST's great. And you play a goat.

Dust: An Elysian Tail - Got maybe 10% further again. Really, really need to sit down and play this, though.

The Binding of Isaac (w/ Wrath of the Lamb) - Really enjoying it still, even if I struggle to get past the third floor.

Spelunky - Why is this so hard? But it's really, really fun.

Also tried the free version of Desktop Dungeons and I'm not sure if I'm going to get it, and Daynab told me about Dungeon Crawl which is... yeah, kinda good but not sure it's something I want. I've got Tales of Maj'Eyal for that kind of Procedural Death Labyrinth (much cooler term than roguelike/roguelikelike but to be honest I prefer Procedural Frustration Generation Game With A Predeliction For Unfairness, or PFGGWAPFU for short - which is also conveniently the noise you make when you have a frustrating death in a game like Spelunky).

 

Yeah but you never explicitly told me to play it.

 

Time for another rant!

Prime World Defenders

Single Player Collectable Card Game Tower Defense.

The basics:

There's a forgettable storyline. Along the way you earn cards. You choose a limited number of these cards each mission to determine what towers and spells are available. Cards may be Evolved (combined with each other to increase stats) or Fused (combined with each other to increase stats but in a more differenter way). Missions, Achievements, and selling cards gives Silver (wow, a game that doesn't use Gold!). Missions and Achievements give Stars, which are much rarer and in most locations are non-repeatable. Silver can buy Common cards or upgrade materials. Stars can buy random Rares, random Uniques, and random chests that might have Commons, Rares, Uniques, Silver, or Stars inside. Um.

The Good:

*Some levels have that "aha!" moment of figuring out how to maze around that corner so your Lightning tower can get an extra couple shots off, killing that monster half a second before it takes a life!

*Spells are pretty satisfying, offering a mix of damage, crowd control, stealth reveal etc. Sometimes you're mashing that key praying for the cooldown!

*Only mentioning this because Borderlands 2 was so atrocious at this, but there are NO intro screens to skip past. Just launch from Steam, 5 seconds later you're at the title screen where you can Play, view Achievements, etc.

The Bad:

*CCG randomness. There's still a few cards I don't own, despite having 10+ copies of "equally rare" cards. Weakens the puzzle-solving nature of Tower Defenses when some tools are unavailable.

*Grind. It can take over a hundred trash cards to fully upgrade a Unique tower or spell. So even if you DO luck out and get that aoe-anti-air tower or whatever, it will take several hours before it's any better than that crappy single-target version that you've already upgraded. Again, weakens the puzzle solving of "Hmm, because of that gap in the middle of the stage, maybe I should try Snakes and Lightning instead of Mortars and Slingshots" when you can't actually use the "real" Snakes until you've grinded earlier stages for a few hours.

*While the title screen is nice and fast, entering a mission has some teeth-grinding unnecessary steps.
-Click Mission
-See that there are invis/flying/whatever enemies that require a special tower
-EXIT MISSION
-Click Collection
-Drag new tower over old tower. (If you try to do it the other way around, you have to click again to close the THIS IS WHAT THIS CARD DOES popup, then do it the right way.)
-Close Collection
-Re-click Mission
-Start Mission
-Wait a few seconds
-PAUSE
-Now you can place towers! Oh and you literally can't start the mission until you place a tower, which means some strategies require you to place a almost-free Blocker then immediately sell it, then wait for the trickle income to unlock your expensive tower or something.

*You can press Tab to Send Next Wave early, getting bonus money based on how early you do. Several TDs have this feature; however, here the window to click send sometimes is disabled for around 10 seconds (so you sit there mashing Tab while there the corpses of the previous wave decay), sometimes it is disabled for around 0.001 seconds (causing you to summon 2 extra waves from your mashing), and sometimes the window is literally less than a second long (meaning you get between 1 and 15 currency depending on which millisecond your finger happened to be in midair). Holding Tab does nothing, you must press and release. Oh and EVERY Hard Mode and Survival stage has at least 3 waves where the game gives you a reward, and there is NO REASON TO EVER NOT press Tab at that point.

*Starting at the first boss, every mission spawns 3 repeatable randomly-generated farming missions. Beating the story mission itself will PERMANENTLY DELETE ALL 3, but open the next story mission with 3 new farms. Yes the rewards get higher as you move on (see "The Ugly"), but if you ever want to go back to those happy days before Flying/Invis/Ghosts existed...better start a new save file!

*Typos. "You" instead of "Your", entire paragraphs in lowercase, misspelled story names in cutscenes, "To" instead of "By"...I get the impression this game was ported from another language. Although there's also an enemy that "regenerates 30 life per second", but that thirty life is somehow faster than the SEVEN THOUSAND DAMAGE tower shooting at him, so I don't know what language would use different numbers like that. Mayan? Politician? Calvinball?

The Ugly

*Despite having about 30 different towers, most of the non-uniques are completely worthless. The game seems to expect you to actually delete these common towers, because a fully-upgraded inventory doesn't have enough room for one of each card + mission rewards by the end of the game...which can cause the game to crash, and according to the Steam forums, even bork your savefile. Oh, but some achievements require you to use specific towers, so you may need to undelete (read: re-buy and re-grind) them at some point.

*Six or so of the towers are secretly extra-super-unique; they can't appear in the Unique booster pack (which if you remember costs Stars, some of which can only be earned once) until you beat Story Mission 13 or so. You get a helpful popup at that point. First, WHY hide them, secondly, WHY is that not mentioned at the shop? It feels like a Free To Play gotcha, like LoL's tier 2 runes, except this is single player with no microtransactions so why the HECK would there be a feature in the game designed to delete half of your mission rewards?!?

*And finally the thing that prompted this post. The card upgrades work as follows:
-Evolve requires a card + itself, or card + Mirror. A card can be evolved twice.
-Fuse requires a card + pretty much anything. A card can be Fused until it's max level, which for why-are-you-wasting-cards-on-this Commons means level 5 and this-is-probably-better-than-a-maxed-common-even-while-level-1 Uniques means level 25, which can take hundreds of cards.
-The stinger? If you Evolve a card ONCE, then Evolve a second copy of that card ONCE, then Evolve them together...You get a permanent stat bonus. If you Evolved a card twice, then sunk a week's worth of grind time into Fusing that card, then read on the forums that it is now IMPOSSIBLE to get that double-evolve bonus...you ragequit and write this post.

WHAT.
THE.
F.

Again, this feels like it was supposed to have microtransactions. "Lol, you fell for our "actually do what the tutorial told you" trap? Better give us a couple bucks unless you want to spend another few weeks re-earning those stars! (assuming you even find 4 copies of that card again)."

Conclusion

Do not play this game until you research all of the ways in which it tries to delete hours of your life for no reason. If you do that research and still wish to play, try searching Kongregate for a bunch of FREE and just-as-good-but-not-3d TDs. If you run out of those and still want to play, buy Defender's Quest or Defense Grid or Plants vs Zombies instead. Still want to play? Um, have fun I guess.

 

Thanks for warning, it was sort of somewhere on my radar to check out, I guess I won't now ^^.

Been playing Primordia. Horrible resolution but all the rest is awesome! Loving it so far! One of the most engaging and entertaining point and click adventures I played so far! Story really matters to me. Comedy relief is the right tone, characters are very interesting,...
Get it

 

Well, the engine is like a billion years old.

 

Picked up Dust: An Elysian Tail since I'd seen it mentioned by several people. On sale it was cheaper than PWD and has been excellent so far!

The Good:

Artwork. This game is GORGEOUS, and apparently all of the art *and development* was done by one guy in 4 years; other people did the music and voicework, but DANG!

Sound. Great music. Voicework is average to good; I've heard that since it was mostly indie actors they weren't able to record in the same studio and some of them have different acoustics and whatnot, but overall it works. And Chi-Chi from DBZ Abridged is Fidget!

Story. Nothing too new, but what's there is solid. The Reed's Box sidestory was quite a roller coaster.

UI. The same developer/artist dude was in charge of porting it from Xbox, and he put a LOT of effort into adding mouse support and a good options screen. You can reposition and resize your healthbar, colorblind mode, crank the graphics higher than the Xbox version, etc. Inventory and quest menus are decent; the "see new thing" hotkey is a handy feature.

Key Minigame. You've probably seen how a lot of games have those "Press XYBBAXB in 4 seconds" sequences. You might have also noticed that the Super Nintendo controller and Xbox controller have the same buttons but mirrored diagonally. Anyone else happen to have the SNES order burned into their brain by age 9? >_< Anyway, THIS game doesn't just ask for the buttons, each button that lights up IS ALSO displayed in the proper top/left/bot/right position onscreen, so you can ignore the letters entirely. A LOT of games should learn from this!!! (I'm looking at you, Gladius. 5 Hit combos my arse...)

Gameplay. Oh yeah this is a game! Minor quibble with some of the platform hitboxes not matching the art, but most of the jumping feels good, flying sword juggle combos are awesome, parries, magic, lewt, skillz etc.

Artwork. Seriously, this game looks amazing.

The Bad:

Healing. There's a "close call" feature in the hit point system, where as long as your healthbar isn't flashing red (meaning it's above 20% or so), you can't die from one hit; you drop to 1 hp instead. If you were flashing red, you can die. While it's a cool system as far as being exciting...it's a flawed system when you consider the fact that you pretty much always want to be at 21%. Why bother spending money on potions for the other 79% when a lot of monsters will two-shot you either way? And since potions are flat values rather than percent, if your max health is 80 you can reach green for 80 gold; if your max health is 550, reaching green costs 480 gold. So...raising your max health basically just reduces your income. And you can't raise your attack stats from skillpoints without also raising your health. :/ Raising your health does mean that easy monsters won't force you to potion as often, so if you're half-asleep and grinding early areas for crafting materials then it's fine, but if you're in high level areas it's a bit counter intuitive.

That's the only real problem I've found so far, and while it's a questionable design decision it's honestly not a big deal.

Super highly recommend it, and so does TotalBiscuit (which is where I learned about the "one guy does develop/art/port" thing)

 

Obsessively into XCOM: Enemy Within.

Also modded it to allow second wave options, and running with skill roulette(the skill trees are randomized). Some of my soldiers have ended up pretty crap, and some have ended up pretty amazing. But on the whole it feels like it's more of a hindrance than help. You rarely get a balanced set of skills. On the other hand you can end up with soldiers that have run&gun, bullet storm, rapid fire, sentinel, close combat and field medic.

 

I've been highly stressed lately and XCom is not a great game to play when you are stressed (at least not for me). But I will return to it eventually (I hope) when I'm feeling a bit less ovewhelmed. But I'm also playing with a bunch of second wave options as well. I find that it can be useful to have a lot of extra soldiers, especially since there's so many ways that your soldiers can become unavailable for missions when you need them (Infiltration, Psi testing, mech and bio modifications, and of course injuries). And a lot of the new special missions can be really cool (I had a blast with the base invasion -- I didn't care that it was a generic base layout really).

 

It's also going to be nice when a compatible version of toolboks(mod) comes out for it.

http://www.nexusmods.com/xcom/mods/79/?

 

Was playing some Minceraft last night. Inspired by the two recent handbooks, I decided to play around with some rails in Creative mode, 'cos I haven't got the patience to do it in Survival.


Yessssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss

 

I am not really sure what thread to put this in, but Tales of Maj'Eyal is now available on Steam.
http://te4.org/news

 

I got into the hearthstone beta so yay! So far my arena record is 3/3, 6/3, 6/3, *sigh* built good decks, just no luck and some opponents just had the nuts. I also didn't get any sleep, off to work I go!

 

Beyond: Two Souls - A rather pretty game (ignoring some texture pop-in, clipping, etc.) with... quite an odd story and so on. But I'm enjoying it. Problem is that it's essentially quick-time events and cutscenes, and it sometimes isn't always clear about what it wants you to do. I had a lot of fun getting Jodie to dance correctly, though.

Spyro the Dragon - Yeah. Got a PS3, got a stack of games, spent half my time playing Spyro 1 from the PSN Store. But what can I say? It's a classic.

 

1225 altogether, with plans for more.
http://steamcommunity.com/app/25968...5214792454/?insideModal=1#c630799905215008879
Far more than any other Steam game. If you like these, grab a copy and play until your head implodes.
http://astats.astats.nl/astats/Steam_Games.php?DisplayType=Achievements

 

Hahaha effin epic

I think I'll get TOME soon.

Right now I've been playing Aarklash, I'm 15 hours in now and it's fun. A light tactical group based RTwP (Real Time with Pause) combat game. With skills and leveling.

 

Managed to redeem my copy of ToME4 on Steam. Yay.

 

Not sure this warrents a good things/bad things list, so this is just kinda going to be a rambling summary of my time with ToME4.

I tried the website months ago after seeing people recommend it here. I made an account (only online game I've ever seen require a nonalphanumeric character in your password), the installer kept erroring, and I never bothered trying to get it to work since I had other games filling enough time already. Grabbed it on Steam, now I can't connect online because my email is already being used by that, so I need to connect the accounts somehow...but after playing a bit I'm not sure I'm going to bother. ANYWAY.

First character was tutorial, blah blah. Skill system looks interesting.

First real character was a Berserker. Yeah, this skill system seems to offer a nice variety of deep and wide builds. Oh wow, and an escort quest (with a gender-swapped future me...) seems to have given me a cross-class skill. Sweet! The actual gameplay is a bit tame though, rank-and-file enemies offer no threat at all, but there's a few bosses that hit hard enough I have to retreat and wait for cooldowns. Then at one point I go down some stairs, immediately get pulled TO a boss and his 4 minions, stunned, silenced, and poisoned before my first turn. Sooo...not sure how to avoid that. Areas are not repeatable so I can't grind, I never got any invisibility potions (if those even exist?) to drink before every staircase, etc. The game basically decided that I would open 3 Evil Chests at once, with no decision on my part. Hmm.

Well I got far enough to open the Arena, lets try that. Start an Archer (which apparently is terrible in arena according to forum posts I read later haha). Game starts with the shop screen open; well, I don't know what the starting equipment for the Archer is, so I'll close the shop to look at my inventory...oh, you can't reopen the shop. Until it auto-opens wave 15. And you apparently can't sell anything you have equipped, so the strategy is to:
1. Memorize the starting equipment for each character.
2. Before killing the final monster on wave 15, unequip everything that you think you might want to sell/upgrade. Unequipping takes a turn, so good luck tanking a monster in progressively increasing degrees of nakedness for 10 turns.
Bleh. Die on wave 18 or so; not sure what I could have done differently, there was just too much ranged damage and too many 400 hp melee monsters coming from all sides. Probably needed to be a non-archer and/or get luckier with the loot drops.

Also during that run, I learned that you can unlearn your most recent skillpoints by returning to the levelup screen, BUT you can only return to the levelup screen if you have unspent points. So seems like if you're experimenting as opposed to cookie-cutting, you should always have one less Con than available. Bleh. And experimenting/cookie cutting is definitely needed, because SOME archer skills cost ammo, some don't, and some of those wiki pages are blank.

Second campaign character was an Alchemist. Oh hey, this character apparently can actually use all those +stat gems my other two characters were carrying waiting for an enchanter shop! Guess they should have sold them all instead. [although according to the wiki one of the Escort quests can give you the Gem skill tree] Anyway the golem with customizable equipment and AI is super cool! And turning items into gems into bombs is cool! Iron Pickaxes not being made of Iron is a little weird, but 'evs. Sweet, got another cross-class skill, this one spits poison! Oh but it costs "equilibrium..." which isn't regenning... *alt-tabs to wiki* ...Equilibrium is restored by walking on the world map or by casting spells like Meditate (which is not on the Alchemist list...nor the Berserker, Guardian, Rogue, Brawler, Archmage etc etc basically 28 out of 30 classes or so don't get it). So...either I can only use it a couple times per map, or I have to walk back to the entrance between every fight. Yuck. Anyway, I pretty much two-shot everything without needing the poison spit, never really dropping below half health, oh, I found a miniboss with 900 hp that can one-shot both me and my golem.

Third campaign, Arcane Blade. THESE SKILLS ARE SO COOL! Little annoying that I've got so many ways to regen Stamina but all of my stamina skills have enormous cooldowns, so 100% of my bottleneck is Mana (which can't be regenned until level 8). If they gave a melee Steady Shot equivelant this would have been super cool, as-is it feels a little unpolished. Anyway. Oh, and there's another escort quest that offers a cross-class skill. This time I'll check the wiki...YEP, that's another resource system that only regens if you're that class! I'll take the Strength this time instead of the two uncastable spells, thank you. Mwuahaha I avoided your trap! By this point I've kinda accepted the fact that 98% of the game is just pressing Z, casting one spell, then autoattacking. Bosses continue to be either "you will win at 30% health if you spend all your cooldowns" or "you will get oneshotted". Aaand there he is. It's been a different one all 3 times; not sure if that's a good thing (VARIETY!) or bad (YOU'RE THREE TIMES AS LIKELY TO ROCKS-FALL-EVERYBODY-DIES THAN IF IT WAS JUST ONE (avoidable?) BOSS!)

At least that guy got far enough to unlock THE SUMMONER! Which tends to be my favorite archtype in any rpg I play, be it real-time, turn-based or tabletop. And according to the forums this one is pretty overpowered. Well maybe he can kill those level 23 minibosses that show up in level 8 zones! Derpaderp Z 1 click Z 1 click Z 3 click...another escort, oh I remember this guy, he has a non-trap spell reward! Oh, but he's HITTING ME WITH FRIENDLY FIRE WUT. Jerk, well I'll just have to rest after this fight then since you did more damage to me than the monsters did AAAAND you run off and die during the 30-turns-compressed-into-0.5-seconds of Rest animation. WHY. THE. HECK. Does Resting stop if you take poison damage, or if a Bunny shows up OFFSCREEN, but NOT when your freaking escort walks 20 squares away and dies? Ok I'm not even waiting to get one-shotted this time, exit to desktop.

So um...I realize it's roguelike tradition to have you get one-shotted or accidentally poison yourself, but usually you *learn* something for future playthroughs, like "stand diagonal from the Evil Chest and be ready to kite like heck" or "don't drink any acid not for potatoes" or "don't stand under the drawbridge when you open it" or "dark rooms have Grues". Here I'm not sure what I'm supposed to learn except "be a summoner since they're apparently overpowered" and "hope you don't get ambushed by a monster that's 14 levels higher than you since they can appear anywhere at any time" and "alt-tab to the wiki every time you levelup or do a quest or pick up an item or find a shop and hope that that page isn't blank". Maybe I've just been super unlucky and the game is fun for the average non-cursed person, but thus far I'm not pleased with my purchase.

In happier news, I beat Dust: an Elysian Tail a second time to get the last few achievements, and my opinion of it has only improved since my last gushing post. The only new nitpicks I have is that there's no "restart Trial" button; if you're 10 seconds in and hit a trap that would prevent you from getting a 4star rating, you either have to grind your teeth and complete the trial knowing you'll fail, or grind your teeth and walk back to the entrance and jump to another screen, then come back. And the Lightning spell seemed pretty glitchy, and some of the later voicework was jarring (one guy sounded like an Australian trying to do a Scottish accent or something? and a few unfortunate Narms...)

But, those are very minor complaints and the game is still super amazing and you should buy it now. The story got much stronger, the art never disappointed, and the combat remained fun the entire time. I beat it twice AND am watching a Lets Play of it on Youtube, lol.