Games You Played Today ver.1.22474487139...

ticky · January 18, 2022, 6:09pm

tried out Dirt Rally 2.0 with my VR headset and wheel and it was a surprisingly transformative experience - I find myself not very good at that game due to the rather more demanding handling model than I’m used to, but suddenly with the broader field of view I was nailing the corners because I more or less instantly got an intuitive feel for the car’s extents and momentum which just doesn’t really translate on a TV

that being said, my inner ears were clearly very angry at the whole thing, and I couldn’t handle more than a handful of stages at once before having to lie down

Victor · January 18, 2022, 7:20pm

i’ve typed this out before, but the first thing i did when i got psvr was strap it on and go for a ride in the very not ready for primetime dirt rally 1.0 base ps4 release. great way to ruin your day.

Coincidentally I’ve been re-tinkering with Assetto Corsa + Windows MR to try and divine out the perfect mix of weather/render/post settings to eke out a solid 45fps for 90fps interpolation after discovering the universal upscaling dll linked above. It works, sometimes. Daddy needs a new graphics card.

I wonder if anybody’s like cooked up a workable VR kludge for Richard Burns Rally.

boojiboy7 · January 18, 2022, 8:24pm

The past few nights, as a basic cooldown before heading to bed, I have started doing a tiny ritual of early STG games. This started thanks to Rudie birthday-gifting me the M2 Tiger-Heli release (the first part of their Toaplan Garage subseries of the ShotTriGgers series, why not) and me being somewhat perplexed by the two games there (Tiger-Heli and Kyuukyoku Tiger (which was sorta localized/bastardized as Twin Cobra* in the US)). Like, every one of the M2 STG series I have played has had a lot to think about, but these just seemed slow and brutal and and everything I did made me suck at them. Bullet dodging seemed impossible. I couldn’t even clear the first stage of either game.

So knowing Xevious is a thing for Japanese arcades, I went to get that, because I never really got Xevious. I bought the Hamster Arcade Archives version, because I realized I had only ever really played the NES version, and it turns out, that makes a big difference. I feel like now I get Xevious a bit more, even if I am still not good at Xevious. But I am doing that thing of feeding a few credits in a day, and I figure it out a little more each time. I have figured out some of the rank management, for example, but also that rank never seems to go down that much, which makes the game feel like a slowly escalating crisis that I am just trying to keep from getting too bad. It rules.

After playing Xevious for a while, Tiger-Heli and its sequel make a whole lot more sense. You think you are slow in Tiger-Heli? Xevious is musch slower to move, but the field is so much bigger. Suddenly Tiger-Heli felt a little fast, but zoomed in. Tighter space, more demand for focus on early dodging. Xevious’s first waves introduce the idea of just drifting back and forth, L-to-R, to take out the enemies. Eventually it becomes a smooth flow, only broken up by either a new large enemy or that part where the plates start falling at you and you just dodge them. Turns out, a variant of this LR drift works in Tiger-Heli too. It’s not perfect, but it’s there.

There are differences, specifically in how much you learn to outsmart enemies. You don’t outsmart shit in Xevious; ground enemies are either stationary or moving on set paths, air enemies are fast and stupid. You manage the game, not the individual enemies. Tiger-Heli (and its sequel) do have some of this management, but what has helped me get better in both of those is learning to read the enemies as having simple thought processes. Tanks in Tiger-Heli fire at a set rate, and you can tell they are going to fire when their turret turns. They also do not give a shit about how close you are to them. With this, the general slow sweeps work really well, though if someone is shooting from your side, you gotta switch to vertical movement. Ineterestingly, Kyuukyoku Tiger enemies do give a shit about how close you are to them, and you can use that to your advantage to keep them from shooting at you. The sequel also starts out with a really neat pattern of helicopters that teach you the movement speed of your chopper just like the ships and the beginning of Xevious teach you to sweep. It’s great.

So anyhow, back to my ritual, I spend about a half hour, just drop a couple credits into Xevious, then to Tiger-Heli, then Kyuukyoku Tiger. It’s great. I slowly improve at each, and my mind just focuses in on that. I quit before any frustration gets in. Last night I cleared the first stage of Tiger-Heli without dying. I cleared the first stage of Kyuukyoku Tiger for the first time. It feels like progress. It also just relaxes me so much, which I wouldn’t think such futile efforts would, but whatever.

*: It's hilarious the obvious contempt that M2 has for Twin Cobra.The arcade version is included in the collection, but without any of the bells and whistles. It's just there. Also, it sucks. It changes up the respawning system, which in TH and KT is set up to force you into specfic situations when you die. When replaced with just an instant respawn, the game gets way less balanced and you are somehow even more punished for death. Huh.

Cerium · January 18, 2022, 9:46pm

Final boss of Drakengard 3 made me like video games again.

Sakurina · January 18, 2022, 11:28pm

@slime has been playing Destiny 2 and I decided to accompany her on some strikes this afternoon. As you may know I’ve been playing D2 on Stadia because I don’t like this game enough to dedicate any disc space to it anymore, and it runs smoother on Stadia than it does on base PS4 at this point.

First issue: despite being freshly logged in on my iPad, the Stadia web app wouldn’t authenticate my game license or whatever and froze when I tried to boot the game. Tried a bunch of shit (disabling secure DNS, disabling ad blockers, reconnecting to Wi-Fi, rebooting the device, killing Safari between each change) and no change.

Got fed up, went to my PC, logged into a bare install of Chrome (no extensions, no browsing data) and got the same issue, but it eventually spawned a pop up to reset my account token that fixed that issue. But then the PC wouldn’t let me pair my controller. The controller would make the successful pairing vibration, while the PC wouldn’t see it, and the controller would shut itself off a few seconds later. I ended up playing the required mission on mouse and keyboard because I got fed up, then reloaded the Stadia web app after beating it, and it would finally pair.

Love to bring the fragility of Web applications to my gaming experience. 10/10

tacotaskforce · January 19, 2022, 3:32am

I’m beginning to think my old MH playing habits:

look up monster I need to hunt for item I want
look up what gear I’d want to build to hunt that monster
look up what monsters I’d have to hunt for that
take pictures of palicos

was entirely due to MHW’s load times. With the instantaneous load times in Rise on PC I’m way more willing to just jump into anything and roll with it.

Tegiminis · January 19, 2022, 6:26am

i have the brain sickness that craves colony sims. i desire to see little ants scurrying around doing their ant tasks while i lay out the foundations of society. it’s fun for me to see a town develop from nothing into something. i especially like colony sims that lay some sort of pressure on the player, ideally in nuanced ways that are about foresight and planning.

so i played a lot of oxygen not included

(my farming, cistern, and industrial areas)

i really like ONI. it’s certainly my favorite klei game, precisely because all their other efforts are perfectly-engineered puzzles while this is basically taming chaos. decisions you made an hour ago force new engineering, you’re constantly racing against dwindling resources to set up something that is truly sustainable. heat management is particularly important, as all the resources that are technically infinite come out too hot or too cold for easy use, encouraging you to think about how to sequester heat and utilize it for power.

i had a bunch of failed colonies and each time i failed one i learned more and i gradually get better at it, which is the best feeling for a colony game to me. also despite having a creative mode, survival imparts so many strange restrictions or challenges on you that it requires sloppy solutions that you have to refine over time, which is the sweet spot for games like this for me.

(a super-screenshot of my whole settlement)

songs of syx goes in kind of an interesting route for a game like this too. as your city grows and you finally get the manpower necessary sustain an army (one of the few games that really respects the 10-to-1 civilian-to-soldier ratio) you’re put into awkward resource shortages that require redesigning and relocation.

it’s a much grimmer game than ONI though, aiming for a sort of conan-esque fantasy city-state barbarism. for example, the justice line of builds requires you build a dungeon, court, GALLOWS, AND ENSLAVER in order to function correctly. granted, the only crime in this game is murder; your citizens don’t thieve or assault each other, they merely have a % chance to do a spontaneous killing. the dev just added “entertainment” line of buildings which includes a gladiator arena. you know, evil low fantasy stuff.

it does mean the steam community for the game is full of scumsuckers though.

i also played more rise to ruins. still very good. i posted about it… about a year ago! i just tend to play colony sims around the same time every year, huh.

idiot · January 19, 2022, 12:01pm

played some of the god of war pc port and while this thing has some graphics and i enjoy the combat, the incessant aaa tooltip prompts for experience gains and lore entries give me a migraine

preparing to challenge the final boss of saga scarlet grace, very exciting stuff

Rudie · January 19, 2022, 2:44pm

The Good Life blooowwwwwssssss

Rudie · January 19, 2022, 2:46pm

Rudie why are you playing?

I don’t know. I had a long day, I listened to falcom soundtracks while running across a boring world to find bullshit for bad NPCs I hated. It was chill at least.

Also the drinKING minigame sucks.

I’ll probably finish it. It fits an exact hole in my brain for right now.

jsnlv · January 19, 2022, 4:14pm

Yeah, it’s definitely not a good game but it fit perfectly in the environment of the SB meetup for me. It’s not a coincidence that I’ve basically made no progress since coming home.

spacetown · January 19, 2022, 4:42pm

i’ve been meaning to get back into this! i couldn’t quite wrap my head around everything because of how complex it is (to me) so i’d like to give it another shot

need to finish this factorio save i have though - it’s the farthest i’ve ever been in factorio! i have flying robots that carry things to different places! i love how each new “level” of research opens up different kinds of automation that you think will completely solve all your problems but will in fact make them more complicated as you struggle to fit them in with your existing systems and i think the alien attacks actually add a really nice challenge where in an ideal world you’d just clean up all your systems every once in a while but the biters make it so that you never really have time to do that to your liking

cigarette · January 19, 2022, 9:25pm

finally got back to the zodiac age. i was having problems with the pc version and have been for awhile now so i’m using my underused switch. just escaped nalbina and it was way easier than i remember it being. balthier is an absolute beast as a bushi / samurai. the multi-hits just keep coming. was in the estersand for a bit but didn’t explore much like i normally do and just headed for rabanastre.

i love this game so much. battles flow so nicely and my license boards are coming along well. already got vaan his first quickening and i wasn’t really trying. can’t wait to see what everyone is like at endgame when they’re already so beastly. gonna play more right now i think.

isfet · January 20, 2022, 3:47am

yeah i loved this remaster; made me enjoy the game in a way i hadn’t previously. such a cool game.

anyway, lately i’m playing a variety of stuff.

making my way through the end of Final Fantasy XIII, about to get to Chapter 12. this game isn’t that long but it is sort of exhausting to play for extended periods of time because of how intense the battle system is. i love it.

also playing Disco Elysium for the first time; i’m impressed that i feel like i am making progress in a dozen different directions but none that feel like they are close to the right direction, yet. no idea if i’m playing the game correctly, but it seems pretty loose. trying to play in a way that sticks to my own morality (vaguely) is making certain missions tougher.

Halo Infinite - it’s cool. it’s both very impressive and also kind of underwhelming. i think i’m sort of over this genre of open world game? go from dot to dot on the map; do the thing; repeat. that said, it’s Halo combat, so at least the “thing” in question is fun. the grappling hook makes the game feel like you’re playing in debug mode. love it.

Flight Simulator. shit, fuck. this is hard. i think i need a keyboard. fun.

Forza 5. the Bang energy drink of car simulators. makes me want to do irrational things, like spend money i don’t have on fancy racing wheel controllers.

Quake Remaster - what can i say. all people involved firing on all cylinders make a sick-ass videogame. looks a lot different than what i remember on my old PC.

boojiboy7 · January 20, 2022, 4:52am

New personal bests in Xevious (finally top of the local leader board, over the stock High Score) and Tiger-Heli (I am #123 in the world; I made it to halfway through stage 3 on 1 credit).

Not so much in Kyuukyoku Tiger, but hey, 2/3 ain’t bad, per Meat Loaf.

bunny · January 21, 2022, 5:44am

i’ve been too busy working on this comic and my degree to focus in on anything not digestible in 20 minutes so i’ve been playing a shitload of Warhammer: Alberta Rat War 2 the last few weeks.

Underneath The Loot Stuff it’s a pretty fun stamina melee helms deep simulator ig. mostly the draw for me is that the guys you play as are funny cartoon sketches of fantasy guys that have a lot of caustic exuberance in their dynamic and it’s funny to have them all scream fantasy insults at each other while doing rat slapstick.

i keep waking up and turning to my gf while still half asleep and making up shit to say in the sneering squidward pilgrim guy’s voice like “excuse me, you who mans this gamestop. i would wish to exchange my duke nukem forever collector’s edition for your so called ‘store credit’, as i will suffer it’s presence no longer.”

skelephone · January 21, 2022, 7:02am

I’ve had to play a bunch of stuff recently that I wouldn’t normally play. For example I had to play a bunch of Fortnite… every time I touch that game, I’m reminded both that it’s a) actually very, very good and b) a weird hallucination out of the mind of an actual child. Playing it feels like descending into a world ruled by the logic of 10-year-olds. It’s all domestic environments, school buses, blockbuster movie IPs, knock-off McDonalds structures, and fantasies of what beaches and farms etc should look like. I dunno. Weird stuff. Playing it always makes my head spin re: what childhood must be like these days. Very glad I am not a child right now!! I also dipped into Apex Legends–lasted less long in that one. Battle Royales are interesting but they tire me out!

I had more fun playing a ton of Disco Elysium, and I, too, was very pleased by the feeling that I was making a lot of progress in anything but “the right direction.” I played a lot of this game at launch and bounced off a bit because of this precisely, but now I’m able to enjoy it. I think I may have learned how to enjoy myself more thanks to my failure the first time around, however. For example, I’ve learned not to grub for pennies to make my $100 back and pay the hotel. There are so many interesting paths to follow at the start of that game, but there’s a couple things they urge you to do which are either impossible or very boring, and I’m learning now to just not pursue those threads, haha.

Shahczyk · January 21, 2022, 7:52am

I’ve been playing Renowned Explorers International Society, a watch makerly mess of systems I’ve had the pleasure of disassembling for the last few years in few week bursts. I redownloaded it as a cleanser after trying out that new 4x Humankind and playing some Monster train again, both of which are fun to click buttons in but not that fun to think about.

Renowned Explorers is an adventure novel Indiana jones grab as many artifacts as you can game. You can do this in a lot of ways, either by mugging the world for all it’s worth, or by being friendly and asking nicely enough, or by being devious and taking everyone’s valuables a la illiterate farmer signing away the homestead. Normally it’s a mix of all three.

It really doesn’t look or read like much, but it feels rewarding to play and to come back to again and again since there’s so much room to develop your strategy. A run takes about 40 minutes to an hour and a half, jump out and jump back in whenever, making it a nice play while you chew game.

After you learn how to just survive until the end taking the easiest path, you need to learn how to get a score of 2500 to actually win a run, which can seem ridiculously high at first. People who are ‘good’ at the game can pump out numbers like 25,000 no problem, and it’s not through big jumps abusing certain things either, there’s a gradual curve up to the big scores.

I really love number machine games like that. While I’ve never had the patience to grind all the way up in Disgaea after beating the main story, knowing that the part I played is like the singe player campaign in a fighter is somewhat soothing. It’s nice to know I don’t need to know the rainbow of roman cancels to get through the part I want to play, but they’re there if I want to go further, or even just for when I get bored.

I haven’t been feeling that much recently in strategy games, since a lot of the ones I’ve been playing feel either easy to break, not that deep or too similar to others in their respective sub-genre. I might have to give myself some time to forget a little, maybe fool around with some Xcom mods again or something, or mostly play action-y games this year.

GherkinForce · January 21, 2022, 11:30am

I was on the final floor of a dungeon in Shiren, my health was low and the exit was dead ahead, only a bunch of enemies were in the way. By chance the unidentified grass I ate turned out to be heal grass and filled my health right up.
Then I threw a talisman at the enemies that put shadow bound on them (preventing movement) and tried to go around, but the effect wore off after a few steps.
I then threw another unidentified talisman which put berserk status on everyone including myself, and so one monster killed another, levelling into a stronger monster and then killed me.
I miraculously revived to full health thanks to another unidentified grass, only because it was gut grass apparently my stomach was now more active.
Then I immediately dropped dead from food poisoning, three steps from the exit

Rudie · January 21, 2022, 4:03pm

I found out Swery has a piss smell fetish. Thanks multiple quests in The Good Life.

This game continues to have no value what so ever! Need to be clear absolutely nothing. I’ll finish it because why not. listening to pop punk and playing this game is maybe a sign I’m depressed.