Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

[François]

Rita, I agree with your politics and your heart's in the right place, but I'm a professional photographer and my net worth is flee-the-country dollars. If you want me to take a picture for you, you gotta pay.

(It's charitable to say SWERY's career output has been uneven, but so far it looks like The Good Life is closer the The Missing than to Deadly Premonition 2. Here's to hoping it holds out.)

[Silversong]

The Wild at Heart has been super fun so far. It's a pikmin-y game, you get forest sprites and you throw them at obstacles / enemies. The art style is pretty and charming, the mechanics work well, and I love the gameplay. It's mostly exploration, at least several hours in. Exploration and puzzle solving that is required to do more exploration. Few enemies. And the world feels huge.

I think I could make it more stressful for myself if I weren't diligent about not leaving camp at night (The Dark is Bad), but as it is it's a great unwind game at the end of the day.

[Mongrel]

I don't know if it's a typo or intentional (it's not impossible for Wargaming to sink that low), but the Tanks annual loyalty reward came with "20,00,000" credits.

[Grath]

I don't know if it's a typo or intentional (it's not impossible for Wargaming to sink that low), but the Tanks annual loyalty reward came with "20,00,000" credits.

It could be Indian numbering system separators, although Wargaming is Belarusian.

[Mongrel]

I don't know if it's a typo or intentional (it's not impossible for Wargaming to sink that low), but the Tanks annual loyalty reward came with "20,00,000" credits.

It could be Indian numbering system separators, although Wargaming is Belarusian.

Yeah, a bunch of people on the server are already joking that clearly WG is giving us 20 lakhs. xD

[Thad]

Finished Yakuza: Like a Dragon (maybe more thoughts on that later) and started Dragon Quest 11.

I'm playing the Definitive Edition and I thought the idea of being able to swap between 3D and pixel art was a neat hook, but boy is the execution clunky. I was picturing something like Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap and being able to toggle graphical modes at the touch of a button, maybe swap into 2D when I get into town so it doesn't take so much time to walk around, but nope; you can only switch modes at a church, and you have to start over at the beginning of the current chapter.

That's not even fun as a novelty. Seems like it'd be exploitable AF if I wanted to farm items (seems like you can swap back and forth between 2D and 3D and replay the same section over and over indefinitely, and keep your inventory but have all the treasure chests reset so you can get them again), but on the whole it really feels like it could have used more time in the oven.

I can understand, from an implementation, why they'd do it like this -- my guess is this isn't actually one game, it's two games (the PS4 version and the 3DS version) put together, and when you swap modes, you save your game data and then it actually reloads a completely different game from the same data -- but even allowing for that, it seems like it would work a lot better if it reloaded from the church where you saved instead of the beginning of the chapter.

As it is, I've played through the opening section of the game 3 times (in 3D, then 2D, then 3D again) and I really don't see why I'd ever want to switch back to 2D again. Unless I finish the game and (assuming this DQ game is like other DQ games) decide I want to play the ridiculously difficult post-game section, in which case I can see why swapping versions to farm items would help with the grind.

[pacobird]

Finished Yakuza: Like a Dragon (maybe more thoughts on that later) and started Dragon Quest 11.

I'm playing the Definitive Edition and I thought the idea of being able to swap between 3D and pixel art was a neat hook, but boy is the execution clunky. I was picturing something like Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap and being able to toggle graphical modes at the touch of a button, maybe swap into 2D when I get into town so it doesn't take so much time to walk around, but nope; you can only switch modes at a church, and you have to start over at the beginning of the current chapter.

That's not even fun as a novelty. Seems like it'd be exploitable AF if I wanted to farm items (seems like you can swap back and forth between 2D and 3D and replay the same section over and over indefinitely, and keep your inventory but have all the treasure chests reset so you can get them again), but on the whole it really feels like it could have used more time in the oven.

I can understand, from an implementation, why they'd do it like this -- my guess is this isn't actually one game, it's two games (the PS4 version and the 3DS version) put together, and when you swap modes, you save your game data and then it actually reloads a completely different game from the same data -- but even allowing for that, it seems like it would work a lot better if it reloaded from the church where you saved instead of the beginning of the chapter.

As it is, I've played through the opening section of the game 3 times (in 3D, then 2D, then 3D again) and I really don't see why I'd ever want to switch back to 2D again. Unless I finish the game and (assuming this DQ game is like other DQ games) decide I want to play the ridiculously difficult post-game section, in which case I can see why swapping versions to farm items would help with the grind.

The post-game is by-and-large based in content that was exclusive to the 3DS version so you're stuck with 2D for that.

[Thad]

Picked up Death Stranding. Spent 90 minutes figuring out how to get the damn thing to run, which turned out to be a couple of trivial fixes (set it to run with Proton Experimental, install protontricks, set winecfg to use Windows 10 compatibility instead of 7).

I'm hoping this kind of fiddling will become less common once the Steam Deck comes out and Valve devs start asking questions like, say, "Why are we still using Windows 7 compatibility as our default?"

[Mongrel]

Some asshole nazi made a fucking nazi fleet pack for Avorion, and I just couldn't resist making fun of them.

Maybe I wouldn't care so much but there's a crazy shortage of actual fleet packs to make the in-game factions more interesting (working on some myself and drumming up interest in other folks), so something like this will get more mileage than it otherwise might. Also it's not super obvious at a glance but as soon as you look closely it's like, LMAO THIS IS A FUCKING NAZI FLEET.

[Thad]

Saw a lot of recommendations for Guardians of the Galaxy that were along the lines of "The gameplay is just okay, but the writing more than makes up for it" and that's about right. The gameplay is serviceable, not great but decent, but I think it may have the best dialogue I've ever seen in a game. There are definitely some rough edges -- quicktime events that don't bother explaining how they work and give you about three seconds to respond, followed by a fucking two-minute reload after the Game Over you get because you don't understand what you're supposed to do -- but the script is good enough that that kind of bullshit just feels like a bit of a speed bump. This is a franchise that lives or dies on its character relationships, and the game fucking nails them. The banter is engaging and I've been really impressed by just how much there is of it and how little it repeats. It's well-written and well-acted and it may not be up there with Tomb Raider in terms of gameplay but it's up there in terms of the quality of the writing.

[nosimpleway]

Okay I'm gonna play Cyberpunk 2077 again and see if I can get the Secret Ending

and then I did and now I'm gonna talk about it

Okay so your Last Job is to blast off into space and do something to someone on that geosynchronous casino the game's been establishing is a thing that exists for a while. It's either a last-ditch effort to save your life, or one last big job so that your name will live Even More In Infamy after your raid on Arasaka Tower. Maybe you're off to find someone who's genetically compatible enough to download your mind into their body and live out their lifespan. Game doesn't say.

The very last scene of the game is your PC, drifting toward the satellite that is their mission objective, gun clutched in one hand, teeth clenched in an expression that's either intentionally hard to read or just bafflingly rendered.

..........PC has a gun.

I played through most of the game clubbing people to death in melee. I was kind of wondering where all my iconic weapons were and why I was relying on this random piece of junk, when it occurred to me that my guy wouldn't be using a gun in the first place, where's the giant pink dildo I used as a bludgeon for most of the game? which in turn reminded me
It is canon in the Cyberpunk universe that people who expect to resort to violence in space use melee weapons. It's in the sourcebooks! It's an intuitive reason, too: if you miss your target, or even blow through your target, you've made an eensy little hole in the hull of the spacecraft you're on. The eensy little hole immediately becomes a very large hole, and explosive decompression kills everyone on board, including you.

So as far as I can tell that clenched-teeth expression is "My last mission is a suicide mission, for which I am going to kill every boujie motherfucker on this casino, because fuck 'em, that's why." Which... is a weird objective to have even for a guy who's been running around doing whatever odd job crops up for the last couple months of his life.

Anyway the core message the game seems to be sending, given the various ways the story can wrap up depending on the ending, is that you can't make the world a better place, not even the tiniest dent, and in trying to do so you'll only destroy yourself. In fact, there's no saving yourself, either, the best you can hope for is dying and being remembered rather than bleeding out anonymously in some gutter somewhere. Sheesh, post-Cyberpunk developed as a genre specifically because shit like this is too bleak to care about any of the setting or the characters.

[beatbandito]

I could have sworn I already made a post about Vampire Survivor on steam. It's a little bullet hell roguelite that I'm pretty sure is entirely stolen castlevania assets, and which is definitely more fun than the $3 price tag.

[Thad]

Looking through the Nova Corps's criminal database: "Zak-Del, alias Wraith, is a member of the Nameless..."

Is his crime going around calling himself Nameless even though he clearly has at least two names?

[Thad]

TFW you pick up a game you haven't touched in years and discover you were 15 minutes away from finishing it.

But not right away. You fight a couple tough bosses, save, quit for the night, come back to it the next night, and discover that was the last boss and all that's left is cutscenes.

[Mongrel]

Due to the military operation in Ukraine, game chats were disabled in World of Tanks.

Today, from ~16:05 (UTC), the ability to write to the game chat in battle, Private Messages, has disappeared, and the General Chat has been completely disabled on all servers.

This was done in order to remove insults, hatred, enmity, and hard trolling in chats. All this can be seen in the game chats in large numbers since the aggravation of the conflict in Donbass.

The measure is temporary, but how long it will last is unknown. Made technically in the form of issuing an endless chat ban on the account.

Between being an EU-registered company owned and operated mainly in Belarus but with offices in Kyiv, and the largest proportion of its playerbase in Russia, and the fact that the Asian server is potentially about to be moved, since Hong Kong is shortly going to be put behind the Great Firewall, I'm pretty amazed at just how many political live wires a dumb video game company can touch at the same time.

[Brentai]

You say "dumb video game", I say "online electronic playset for grognard submodern war fetishists". We're not talking about Fall Guys here.

[Mongrel]

Eh, it's always been more arcade game than war simulator.

I play it for the same reason I have for the past ten years - it's extremely warty, but it's still the only FPS out there where everything is slowed down for us olds.

[beatbandito]

I am (sadly) about 120 hours in to Elden Ring already, and am ready for it to end. I've been pushing myself to finish for a while because I'm eager to start a totally new game and build with what I've gathered and learned. Definitely haven't been to every little side dungeon or map point, but I think I've been to every area and just have the last optional area boss and final boss or two in the final area. Also trying to finish around level 120, which feels like a good spot to stay at for NG+ multiplayer, but I could easily go to 130-140 with the resources of the final optional area.

It's good, it's a fun and nearly perfect action/adventure experience as you explore the world. I recommend it.

[Upthorn]

I'm also about 100 hours into Elden Ring so far, and I keep meaning to progress the plot, but getting distracted by the idea that I might be able to do something more in the hellswamp area.

The fact that I'm always right is poor comfort for the fact that I have mentally imprisoned myself in the hellswamp.

[nosimpleway]

Video games are just flagrant appeals to male fantasy. For example, the idea that we might one day escape the hellswamp.