Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

[Mongrel]

Finally got around to Helltaker which was a quick bit of fun. I'm petty bad with puzzles but I did figure them all out.

The fact that it HAHA SURPRISE switches to the Crypt of the Necrodancer which turns out to be the only "real" part of the game just made me kind of sad though; I don't have the reflexes for that sort of stuff, no matter if I memorize the patterns. There was no way I was ever beating that.

Like what, you let people skip every single one of the puzzle parts of the game if they're too stupid to figure them out, but not if they're too slow to bullet hell? That's a fucking gamer-made game alright.

[mharr]

Speaking of Minecraft ocean worlds, there's a well hidden work in progress community mod that adds a Subnautica style deep ocean dimension here: https://github.com/BlueDuckYT/deepwaters

[mharr]

... and apparently I'm back in Minecraft for a while because some madlads spent the last few years making 3 gigs of MMO adventure world map and chucked it on Mediafire for free. https://www.planetminecraft.com/project ... enture-map



Edit: When I say adventure mode, note that it's very sparingly used. Specific puzzles and ancient sites have pickaxe protection but in most of the world you're free to mine, build and homestead as usual before venturing into the Content Zones. It's a great combination.

[Thad]

Ring Fit Adventure is a perfectly decent tool for gamifying a workout routine. I find myself alternating between it and the elliptical machine.

I also got Rimworld on (modest) sale. It's still really early days and I'm learning basic things the hard way (didn't know I needed a hospital bed until I needed it; I didn't realize it wasn't enough to grow food, I actually have to harvest and cook it until I started getting warnings about my food stores running low). Expect my first game to end in failure any time now; tutorial's over but I suspect failure is the real tutorial.

[Yoji]

Has anyone played Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime? Because we're playing this at the next Brontocon SW. Also, this might be the game that teaches Kiddo 01 his left from right. "We need the left gun up! Left is for Life Bar!"

[Thad]

Yeah, I've played it with my nephew a little and enjoyed it. It kinda reminds me of Down the Tubes on Earthworm Jim in terms of its physics, but unlike Down the Tubes it's actually enjoyable to play.

[Friday]

Down the Tubes on Earthworm Jim

I fully expect, if and when I die and go to hell, that this will be the only available video game.

[Yoji]

Further on this topic, I need to figure out if there's any way to share digital Switch games. Alexis just got a Lite version and it'd kind of stink if she had to rely on the old one to play our digital-only games.

[Lottel]

I think if you are on a family account you can share the games but it only allows one console to play the game at a time.

[Mongrel]

Originally the current league in Path of Exile was supposed to end today, but about six weeks ago, they announced that they would be pushing the league end back a month.

Only, not one person at GGG remembered to turn off the original timer.

Watching chat go atomic after the message "The League is ending in 5 minutes." message appeared out of nowhere, and then thermonuclear after every player in the game was frozen for a couple minutes (in what would normally be prep for a serverwide shutdown) was the most fun I've had all league.

[Niku]

Hollow Knight was on PlayStation Plus last month and I hadn’t touched it since getting 107% or whatever was the original maxed out percent when it came out on Switch so I was like “well since I can just download it I’ll run around and do the first couple of bosses again or something” and whoops I got 112% and the platinum trophy (admission: i cheesed the final final final trophy and challenge, since it’s basically just an attrition battle of “now do literally every boss in the game in a single one-life sitting and also some of them have new gimmicks to trick you and make you start all over again if you’re not ready for them” and even for someone who loves the Path of Pain ain’t nobody got time for that). That game is such a goddamn masterpiece. Probably in my top five games of all time if I wanted to really sit and think about it. Silksong has reeeeally big shoes to fill but “even more dynamic movement” is a really good start.

[Niku]

Like it is legitimately ridiculous how good the map design is — most Metroidvania games are actually very linear lock -> key -> lock -> key design unless you’re sequence breaking, and Hollow Knight is the same for the first .. three locks or so. But once you get the third key you can have a legitimately completely different play through than anyone else just depending on which areas catch your interest and where you feel like going. And if you do want to sequence break then you’ve got the tools to do so almost right from the start of the game. The double jump is one of the mid to last “natural” upgrades on the usual path and I’m pretty sure speed runners just never get it.

My route through the game the second time was ridiculously different than the first and it just completely deepened my love for the design of the whole package. I forgot I could even upgrade my weapon at the point in the game where I was and probably went another four or five hours before doing so but even not touching the game for two years it’s so much a “your learned skills are more important than your earned skills” experience that it was much less frustrating in the hardest parts than my first play through.

I think starting Blasphemous on Switch helped my appreciation too; I love that game’s art and it’s definitely another Dark Souls inspired Metroidvania but I bounced off it after a couple of play sessions and am not sure if I’ll ever go back at this point. The movement and map design just did not click in the same way.

[Niku]

min min and steve seemed too weird playstyle wise for me to really care about getting challenger pack two but sephiroth is actually pretty real fun

[pacobird]

13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim is one of the most brilliantly designed games I've ever played, and a 100% perfect example of what I'm talking about when I say art is the use of a medium to tell a theme or story in a way that wouldn't work in any other medium.

When you have a bunch of kids getting in power armor to fight evil robots, the actual fighting of the evil robots with the power armor is the least interesting part of the narrative; all the interesting stuff happens in following them in the process of getting there. 13 Sentinels understands this completely. If it were a 26-episode TV show, the actual giant robot fights would only be the last two. But that would be a weird way to pace a TV show, and the game elides this completely by having the first 24 episodes be a branching, multiple-PoV visual novel and the last two an RTS game, and lets you flip back and forth between them independently. I just cannot see it working in any other medium. Even trying to do it in an action movie ends up with Melissa McCarthy punching ghosts!

[Niku]

speaking of bloodborne. five and a half years later:



finally buckled down and finished the chalice dungeons when I realized I only had three left, and then a jaunt from Amelia to the endgame in NG+ to get the two non-umbilical endings. And now I just want to play more Bloodborne, so maybe I'll get a couple other skill weapons up to +9 or +10 and run through NG++. Or start a STR/ARC character and do a crazy suicide Old Hunters run to get the buzzsaw as early as possible.

[Niku]

i started a str/arc character and did a crazy suicide old hunters run to get the buzzsaw as early as possible

i've got a level ten pizza cutter and only the dlc and nightmare of mensis left to go

i got the platinum already why am i already planning my ng+ for this character someone please help me stop

[nosimpleway]

nightmare of mensis

Gonna refer to my daughter going through puberty as this now thanks

[MarsDragon]

13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim is one of the most brilliantly designed games I've ever played, and a 100% perfect example of what I'm talking about when I say art is the use of a medium to tell a theme or story in a way that wouldn't work in any other medium.

When you have a bunch of kids getting in power armor to fight evil robots, the actual fighting of the evil robots with the power armor is the least interesting part of the narrative; all the interesting stuff happens in following them in the process of getting there. 13 Sentinels understands this completely. If it were a 26-episode TV show, the actual giant robot fights would only be the last two. But that would be a weird way to pace a TV show, and the game elides this completely by having the first 24 episodes be a branching, multiple-PoV visual novel and the last two an RTS game, and lets you flip back and forth between them independently. I just cannot see it working in any other medium. Even trying to do it in an action movie ends up with Melissa McCarthy punching ghosts!

Man, if it wasn't for all my robot-loving friends telling me that 13 Sentinels is actually really really good, this would've convinced me to scratch it off the list.

[Büge]

13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim is Homestuck

According to my wife

[mharr]

Okay so, this has taken an inexcusable amount of time but we've Indiana Jones slid under the global pandemic into permanent housing in a functioning social democracy and I've fully reanimated my zombie Shield portable into an ersatz smart TV for the nest. R/W network drive access, Steam Link, the usual emulators, a couple of good controller support Android games like Oddmar and Forager...

Plus there's this project stupidly named 'JoiPlay' which is basically ScummVM for RPG Maker and guess what:



Not far enough in yet to guess where this might be going but the logic puzzle guards skit was exactly what I needed last night :D

Question: Am I okay to share the game with individual friends and family with the nerd cred to appreciate it?

Bonus katzen: