What Are You Playing Right Now?
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The thread title should say it all.
Currently playing:
Kingdom Hearts III - Polishing off a 2nd play through on Proud Mode by actually collecting all the lucky emblems, crafting the Ultima Keyblade, and defeating the game's superboss. Taking my time with the post game cleanup, but having a great time.
Resident Evil 2 Remake - Still in the middle of Claire's 2nd run mode, but I finished Leon's first run right before KH3 dropped. In love with this game, but taking my time with it so I can continually be caught off guard by it each time I boot it back up and get the crap scared out of me.
Wargroove - Haven't put a ton of time into this one yet, but I'm working my way through the tutorial missions and having a real fun time with it. Having never played an Advanced Wars game, but being a fan of Fire Emblem, it's been a treat learning the differences this game has to offer. Also look forward to diving into the user created content down the line, I'm blown away with how robust the map/campaign creation system looks.
Hollow Knight - Played through the base game right after it originally launched on PC and really liked it. The announcement trailer for Silksong got me incredibly pumped, so I went out and bought the game a 2nd time for Switch, knowing it also had all those content updates included that I never went back to try out, and boy, I'm loving it even more the 2nd time through. The HD rumble feature makes this game feel so much more engrossing, and I think this might be my favorite Metroidvania style game ever upon a second inspection of it. Can't wait to keep playing and discover the new content along with the old that I simply forgot about.
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I had to spend $10 to get past the first boss of the last chapter of Bravely Default. This game would be a lot more fun without these stupid difficulty spikes (and also the tedium of the second half), but at least I'm almost done with it
Started Devil May Cry 4 Special Edition yesterday, and hoping to get it done before V drops. I'm enjoying Nero more than I thought I would, especially with his Exceed and Devil Bringer abilities. Hopefully I'll also get the chance to try out the other characters they added to this version (Vergil, Lady, and Trish are all dudes I got my eyeballs on)
Also been slowly working through Final Fantasy VIII and nearing the end of Disc 2. Since Bravely Default has now turned me off to the idea of MP in games, I actually really appreciate VIII's magic drawing system and find it a much cooler alternative to using MP (it also helps that it's stupid easy to break with the right GF abilities). Characters and story are a little hit or miss, but I'm enjoying Squall more than I thought I would, and I'm glad this game knows how to have humorous writing from time to time
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I got three hours into KH3 and got irrationally angry with how little I understood from only playing the main games and Chain of Memories, so I just went through Birth By Sleep - easily the best entry in the series I've played yet. Doing Dream Drop Distance next before getting back to KH3.
CoM and BBS are my favorites out of the four I've played by a long shot. I realize that the main series games have depth to their combat somewhere, but I sink my teeth into the spinoff combat systems so much more, I've had a lot more fun with them. Looking forward to Dream Drop Distance.
Also FF8 is best FF, gj Alf
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I do not envy anyone who tries to play KH3 without having played the other games haha Skipping Recoded and the mobile game is acceptable in my opinion, but anything else and you're missing huge chunks of what this game is trying to wrap up. Glad you're enjoying Birth By Sleep though! It's not the most fluid game mechanically but it brings a lot of new ideas to the series and the three playable characters are actually quite fun to play through.
Dream Drop Distance is great too, but boy is it a trip. Get ready for a narrative can of worms to be opened up towards the tail end of that game haha
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Never got to play Bravely Default, but I've heard good things! Sorry to hear you reached a sour spot in your play through though, that's never a good time. FF8 is a good time, it certainly gets more flack than it deserves (why no Switch port, Square Enix?), and I only ever played a small chunk of DMC4 when it first launched back in the day, but Nero was pretty cool. I remember the gauntlet grabbing moves were really fun to combo with.
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I'm currently playing Skyrim again. My last 'proper' playthrough was 6 years ago, so it's nice to go through everything again. I'm currently 100 hours into my new playthrough and it's not ending anytime soon.
I'm also playing Civilization 6 from time to time. It got a new DLC released last week, and it's honest to god incredible.
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Besides the typical multiplayer stuff with friends (TF2, Killing Floor 2), I've been playing mostly three games: Hollow Knight, Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart and Terraria.
Hollow Knight is an amazing experience. It's probably one of my favorite atmospheres in game, with areas with such diversity of feelings, from the calming and serene Greenpath to the melancholy of City of Tears, to the scary as hell Deepnest, they all give such sensations due to the combination of sound design, ambience and especially level design. Each are, while all following the typical structure of a Metroidvania game (corridors and rooms connected via places that you can pass with different skills earned later in the game), unique in the sense of thematic structure. Deepnest, a place that scar me and still is haunting me in my dreams, is only as scary as it is because of a combination of long and thin corridors, maze-like structure and worms crawling in every place. The Kingdom's Edge feels like surpassing a difficult mountain (even more than the real mountain area of the game), rewarding the player that conquers the mountain with a coliseum worthy of his or her might. Crystal Peak, my favorite area of the game, is an amazing vertical experience filled with conveyor belts and lasers everywhere. It caught me on such a grip that made me exited for the new game Silksong, even if I didn't finished it yet.
Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart is a passionate project from a group of fans. It's surprising how the game was able to be made with so much detail and finesse on fucking Doom Engine. The driving is well done, with the drifting being weird, but quickly adaptable. The level design is really well done, filled with curves that let you choose between drifting and risking hitting a wall due to the next turn or taking it more slowly. The sprite work also surprised me, taking the direction of Mario Kart Super Circuit of making 2D characters on a 2D with 3D details environment. But what makes me love this game is how many mods the guys made. You can play as Sonic, SMBSS Mario, TAoStH Robotnik, Hornet driving Hornet, Vinny from Vinesauce and Majora's Mask Link on Epona ALL AT THE SAME TRACK. It's such an experience.
Terraria is weird for me. It's more of a background game for me to talk with my friends instead of an actual game to focus. Which is odd, because the core gameplay is rather interesting, especially if you crank the difficulty and go Expert Mode. The core cycle of mine-farm-beat boss is enjoyable on itself, and the Hardmode stuff is enjoyable when it's not bullshitting you. But the main problem of the game is that it sometimes forces you to be on the defensive without the tools to do it. It presumes you to dodge some bullet hell situations with very little vertical mobility and mediocre horizontal one. Bosses like The Destroyer and Plantera, while easy to cheese with the right amount of spells and preparation, take too much damage to be consider a challenge, being more an endurance test. Lastly, there is fewer options if you want to go ranged compared to magic or melee. If you go melee, there are several weapons that you can take, from swords to yo-yos and throwing knifes. If you are a magic user, you can do A LOT of stuff, due to the distinct nature of each spell. For ranger, not only you need to choose between guns, explosive weapons and bows, three category of weapons that don't gain the same benefits from a certain set and all require a different helmet to equip, but most of the weapons on each tier overlap each other in terms of utility, meaning that, most of times, you are not creating versatile sets, but rather upgrading what you have and going on. The gunner has this problem the least, but you still go with around 3 guns at the late game (Sniper Rifle, Tactical Shotgun and maybe an Uzi or a Megashark), while both the archer and the bomber usually goes with around two weapons (the most recent bow/repeater and the Tsunami for the archer and the RPG-7 and the Mine Launcher for the bomber). The ammo variety sort of remedies that, but the impact of most of the bullets is not distinct enough to enforce the player to bring a variety of bullets to a combat, since most of them are just "damage + something at the bullet" (homing, explosive or high velocity).
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Ignoring the massive backlog I currently have (2017 in particular did me a real number and I have several titles from that year I still need to finish, 2018 just piled stuff on top of that)...
Stuff I am actively playing right now:
Kingdom Hearts III (awesome Valentine's gift from my girlfriend after I had to cancel my preorder last month)
Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate
The Binding of Isaac: Afterbirth + (to be fair, this game is kind of in permanent rotation on my Switch, easily my most played game in many years)
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@FourString said in What Are You Playing Right Now?:
Skipping Recoded and the mobile game is acceptable in my opinion, but anything else and you're missing huge chunks of what this game is trying to wrap up.
@FourString So is it worth the ~4 hours of my time to watch the remastered cutscenes from 358/2 Days? It seemed skippable, but if it's pertinent... I'm already in this far, so why not
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@Zam I love Terraria for some reason, I know literally nothing about it and have done barely anything in it but I've spent over 300 hours messing around in it with friends
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Dark Souls 2, again. There's a yearly player event coming up where a lot of people pick up the game again with a focus on multiplayer. So I've made a new character to go through with Co-Op and been working on optimizing a different character for PvP. Whenever I get super frustrated from the PvP I'll play Reus for an hour or two. It's a neat little world managing game where you create the world and resources via acting through 4 deity-like Giants. It's made for timed play to see how well you can do in a set time limit but I prefer just relaxing and experimenting in the endless mode.
Also been playing Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth 2 as usual. I still like doing big free for all battles against the easy a.i. It's really satisfying specifically because it's so easy.
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@SrTNick said in What Are You Playing Right Now?:
Also been playing Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth 2 as usual. I still like doing big free for all battles against the easy a.i. It's really satisfying specifically because it's so easy.
Do you know any place to get the game? It's one of my childhood favourites, but the disc's lost and I really want to play it again.
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smash bros smash bros smash bros
And Civilization 5 with the Community Balance Patch (Vox Populi? Whatever it's called).
I'm always very reticent and sweaty-palmed about online play in Smash but I'm getting over it and tossing myself into matches more. I rotate between quite a few characters and I have an ongoing rivalry with my friend group, so I find myself tweaking my playstyle little by little to better match up with them. It's a fun way to connect, we all live in different cities now.
Civ 5 with CBP is just incredible. They keep updating it. I have a few more mods as well to make the single-player experience more dynamic and challenging and I've reached a point where I'm fanatically stumped. On a regular game, no mods, I can beat the game on Immortal pretty regularly (depending on the roll of the dice). With mods, I can't even scrape by on King. It's really a step up and I have to play completely different. But golly gosh golly it is fucking fun.
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@Vulgar-Chocobo I would actually watch them. The game has emotional weight that feels worthwhile and pertains to characters and events that are important in KH3 later on.
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@NGW said in What Are You Playing Right Now?:
Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes
What do you think of this game? I was a huge fan of NMH 1 & 2, but I was skeptical to say the least after watching the trailers for this one. If anything I was just disappointed that it wasn't a true mainline sequel, but I'm still curious if it's worth picking up as a fan of the series.
Recently beat Kingdom Hearts III, so now I'm just passively collecting all the lucky emblems, assembling the Ultima Weapon, and all of those typical postgame shenanigans.
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Watched the cutscenes for 358/2 Days last night, glad I did! It was honestly quite a bit more enjoyable than I'd anticipated. I'm not sure how the original game is, but the story for 358/2 Days actually works pretty well, especially when supplemented with the journals and secret reports. Now I feel like I need to replay, or at least watch the cinematics for, KH2 before going back to 3. I replayed the first one a year ago, then did CoM before abandoning KH2 after ten hours. The second game suddenly seems really blurry now that I kind of know what's going on in Kingdom Hearts
This journey catching up on KH is turning into a pretty ridiculous ordeal, but I'm enjoying it. The games strike the right balance of kitschyness and genuine sentiment that I'm still able to get invested in them, in spite of not being 10 anymore. I feel pretty accomplished actually piecing this whole narrative together, too.
I've got The Nonary Games, the first Red Dead Redemption (loved the second), Yakuza 0, and Nier Automata all sitting on the shelf, but I guess I have to go kill Pete first, or whatever - I'm assuming that's what the whole KH story is building towards.
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I just recently beat Terraria on PC for the first time. I'm not all that impressed with the game's building mechanics. The building just wasn't as engaging as something like Minecraft where you can build in a 3D space. Still, its combat is really quite entertaining. Sure, you can bum rush some things with brute force. Other fights take genuine strategy, though. The best part of the game for my money was definitely mining and exploration. It's a magical experience to wander through abandoned mines, ancient ruins, and zany mushroom caverns. The different biomes serve the game well. I think the game began to feel empty when the emphasis on exploration and mining was taken away, though. Everything after the Jungle Temple felt bland and uninteresting.
I also beat Fallout 1, Fallout 2, and Fallout 3 recently. It gave me some perspective on Bethesda's game design vs. someone like Interplay or Obsidian. I came away from it feeling like Bethesda really dropped the ball on their acquisition of the Fallout series. The ending to Fallout 3's main story was simply abysmal for anyone who wanted to play the game as a "good" character. Satisfying if you're evil, though! Fallout 1 and 2 both provided engaging narratives and interesting outcomes dependent on what the player chose to do with the inhabitants of post-nuclear California. I felt like I had much less control over the fate of the citizens of the Capital Wasteland. Not that I hated Fallout 3 -- indeed, I had a blast tearing through the remains of DC. But on the tail of Fallout 2, a game so sublime it had me coming back for seconds immediately, it just felt... Boring. The gunplay was bad (the game is unplayable without VATS) and the story was linear. There weren't very many characters I felt bad about maiming. That's about all there is to that.
I'm also playing through Dark Souls 1 on the Nintendo Switch. That's an evil game. Not a bad game. But not a fun game. That's a game I play when I say to myself, "Ben, you're gonna be angry today." It's a game I play when I want to be spitting fire at the dude that just invaded me as I was about to challenge the boss I know I can beat after God knows how many tries. It's a game I play to feel good about myself when I finally make a breakthrough. But also, the Kapra Demon can go to hell. That was a dumb fight. Not sure how much more I have left in the game, as I just reached Blighttown and I know that's going to take me weeks to figure out. Hoping that I'm close to the light at the end of the tunnel, though. We'll see.
Currently on my livestream, I'm replaying Fallout: New Vegas and also the Morrowind: Tribunal expansion. Those are some quality narratives right there. New Vegas has tighter gunplay than Fallout 3 did, and leaves the fate of the Mojave almost entirely up to the player. Tribunal really brings to a head the fate of the Nerevarine, and helps finish their destiny, which is to "devour the sin of the false gods," so to speak. I'm enjoying playing them with people watching because it gives me an avenue to discuss lore, how the history of the games work/don't work, how to stories are woven well together or are poorly woven together, and so on and so forth. It lets me utilize my college education for more than just writing papers, which is nice, haha.
Thinking about replaying the Mario Series and the Zelda series soon. Pokemon too. I've got a hankering for Nintendo that needs to be satisfied.
