What Video Game Are You Currently Playing?

Playing GTA VICE CITY. Original, but in russian language.

It should be Deus Ex w/ Deus Exe & Kentie's D3D 10 renderer, Wolfenstein: The New Order on Xbox Series S, Carmageddon: Max Damage w/ STShotgun's C:MD Overhaul (HIGHLY recommended over the vanilla game), Doom 3 w/ dhewm3 source port, and Quake on Xbox Series S and Switch, but ever since going back and finishing Fallout: New Vegas for the first time (as well as it being my first Fallout game) on Xbox Series S w/ all DLCs after a little over 200 hours I'm sucked right back in with an immediate second playthrough where I toggled hardcore mode and going for a pro-Legion run after sympathizing with NCR before going for an independent Vegas previously. This seriously may be in my top ten favorite video games of all time now.

Been playing Deathloop over the week or so. Thoroughly enjoying it. Great art direction and level design from Arkane as usual. It runs surprisingly well on my rig in spite of what's going on with the PC port. Hopefully they'll be able to iron it out soon. Would be a shame to see it not get the recognition it deserves.

^{(also FYI: turn off the objective markers for an ideal experience)}

Double dipped and Just picked up BG1&2EE for the switch. (good sale on at moment) Currently trying to decide on which class to carry through. 

juggling between destiny 2 and quake(spasm) custom maps

The new DLC of Outer Wilds :D

Been playing a metric-fuck-ton of yakuza 0 recently. It's fun going through the game again on legend NG+.

I'm currently playing Quake Enhanced and Team Fortress 2

Virtua Racing

The port on the Switch is seriously the best way of playing it nowadays.

I started playing Shadow Warrior, it's very good

5 hours ago, CrystalHawk_Doom said:

Been playing a metric-fuck-ton of yakuza 0 recently. It's fun going through the game again on legend NG+.

I really need to get back to that. I bought it months ago when it was on sale. Actually due to recommendations from here. Never played a Yakuza game before, but it was highly recommended as a good starting place. I think I've got about 20 minutes in it so far, but it looked enjoyable.

The problem was, Trials of Mana was on sale at around the same time, and I vowed I would finish that game before starting another. Well, I still haven't finished it.

Amazing game, beautiful graphics, enjoyable story, great dialog and characters. I fell in love with it early on, but time constraints and general exhaustion have kept me from finishing it. Over 20 hours in, and I'm doing the final dungeons, but when I get home at 10:30 or 11:00 at night, eh. It'll wait.

I really need to buckle down and start finishing a game before I buy a new one. But the issue becomes "I'm loving this game, I'm going to finish it! Oh... that's on sale right now, that's a good price. I've wanted to play that, I'll get it." And then I start playing the new game instead of the one I'm currently playing.

Consumerism at it's finest.

Baldur's Gate 2 again, taking my first crack at running it with a duo party, of an elven mage/thief and a half orc fighter/cleric. I finished the first game a while ago using an elven fighter/mage and half orc cleric/thief, and had one of the best fights with Sarevok I ever had in which the cleric/thief beat him in melee combat when the fighter/mage got paralysed. That shouldn't have happened, even if she was buffed to shit (pot of frost giant strength stacking with Draw Upon Holy Might). So far that mage battles in the Planar sphere to get the stronghold were total bullshit and I had to polymorph into a mustard jelly to cheese my way past a lot of that, but I'm at Brynnlaw now. I need that bag of holding. 

I'm also doing Quake: Epochs of Emnity and waiting for the 2.1.0 update to play Hedon's Bloodrite episode. 

I recently started playing Castlevania: Lords of Shadow for the first time, it is pretty much my first Castlevania game now even though it's nothing like the 2D sidescrollers from what I know, it has its tough moments but I have found the game not very hard overall, I am quite enjoying it so far.

Started playing Psychonauts 2 and it's great; all of the charm, wit and challenges of the first game are still there.   Doublefine really outdid themselves here.

Good ol' Battle of Britain...

Astalon: Tears of the Earth. It's a classic style 2D Metroidvania which I think demonstrates the best of 8 bit visuals and sensibilities. It's been fun and just the right side of frustrating. 

My daughter is playing with Studio Code.

I just got Nier Replicant, Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of war on the current Steam sale. Starting off with Nier and i like it the first couple of hours in.

Currently playing FFVII on my Switch and also got Serious Sam on it just yesterday, been playing through First Encounter HD.

Just got into the Touhou series because of those Fumo videos I see in Youtube and started with Perfect Cherry Blossom because I saw a video of it saying it's a good starting point, tried Marisa B at first but after dying in Stage 4 I chose someone else and Sakuya A. She seems way easier to play since her attacks track if you go to Focus mode, allowing me to dodge bullets easier because I don't have to worry if my shots are hitting or not. Stopped at Stage 5 once I reached the Prismriver Sisters, gonna have to practice that I guess.

Doing my yearly-ish run of Doom 64 with GZDoom mods. This time around I'm using Doom64 CE, with Embers of Armageddon Eternal and an appropriate monster mod. I've plopped D4D onto wad playthroughs before (love that one), but this is my first time giving classic Doom the Eternal treatment instead. A bit glitchy on the sprites, and some level props have been replaced with shotgun guys, but works well for the most part. Also uh, yeah, apparently the mods thought I wanted less Eternal and more an Ancient Gods Part 1 kind of experience, because holy heck does it get nuts with the enemies. Started off with a Cyber Mancubus in the first hallway of level 1 and only got crazier from there. There must have been at least 10 Marauders in Dark Citadel, and those suckers travel in packs. It's getting to the point that in The Spiral I just fired the BFG to clear a path and noped right on over to the exit; me not taking the time to kill everything I encounter in a level is never a good sign. Only a few levels left though, so might as well see it through. And then maybe try some different mods for Lost Levels.

Currently making the effort to finally sit down and beat the Super Star Wars trilogy. I'm coming up to the end of Jedi and I have some thoughts.

OH MY GOD THESE ARE SOME OF THE MOST BULLSHIT GAMES I HAVE EVER PLAYED!

New Hope was tough but manageable. Empire upped the bullshit by a considerable margin with such fantastic design decisions as enemies constantly respawning on single-character-wide platforms that you have to stand on as you wait for the next platform to move into a reachable position, thus pushing you off and forcing you to do the whole sequence again. Rinse and repeat. The Vader fight was soul-crushing - landing hits on him without taking damage is next to impossible (more on that later). Recharging your Force with the junk he flings at you is also basically impossible to avoid taking damage from. I couldn't find the Heal power, so I basically used Vanish to wail on him for a few seconds at a time for around an hour. Oh yeah, and the boss health bars are like something out of a JRPG. Passwords are useless, because this being a LucasArts game they are short and easy to input, but start you on the level with NO ITEMS. Good luck beating Vader with no Force powers. Jedi remedies this by giving Luke a pool of Force powers from the start, and RESETTING EVERYONE ELSE'S POWERUPS ON EVERY STAGE. Thing is, despite his Force powers, Luke is pretty much useless in any level that allows you to choose from multiple heroes (except one that can be cheesed). He might get you through the level, but like I said, he can't deal damage without taking it, and this time around the boss health bars are EVEN BIGGER with no means of restoring health or Force during the fights. Not to mention that health pickups are reduced SEVERELY across the board, with literally ONE enemy type per stage coughing up any hearts whatsoever, usually the least frequent one. In fact, Slave Leia turned out to be the best character in terms of melee-only, with her Spin move making short work of even Jabba. Add to this things like mandatory leaps of faith, enemies that throw you around the screen like a defenceless ragdoll, fixed enemies blocking your route that respawn the moment they leave the screen and INSANE platforming segments, and the whole experience is just infuriating. If there was any real finesse to the controls, I wouldn't be ranting as much, but coming off the back of games like Super Turrican and Contra III it feels really stiff.

Honestly, aside from the awesome Mode7 ship stages, the entire trilogy is a showpiece for the absolute worst excesses of "Nintendo Hard" this side of an LJN game. Dark Souls gets invoked a lot these days, but Dark Souls in NOT Nintendo Hard. There's a difference between brutal challenge that makes you question your approach and a game that just vomits enemies at you constantly without giving you the means to deal with them. I've beaten games like Cuphead and Contra Hard Corps - games that properly test your reflexes and ability to memorise patterns and telegraphs. SSW has none of that, and the rush to get these games out on a yearly schedule shows with just how unbalanced the second and third games are especially. They are just unnecessarily brutal and several occasions had me throw my hands in the air like, "what the hell am I supposed to do in this situation?"

Still, looking forward to finishing the last couple of stages, but there's no getting away from the fact that these games have issues. The Force is with them, but they are not Jedi yet.

@scalliano tfw Super Empire was my very first video game. I'm surprised I didn't give up on the hobby shortly thereafter, and I only beat them on easy, the only difference in difficulties seems to be the starting health bar size. But yeah not being able to restore things like upgrades is really freakin' bad. I was trying to play Empire again but on the default difficulty and it made the level after the mode 7 snowspeeder stage impossible to beat the beginning, all because my health bar isn't as long. I liked Return much more, but my impatient kid ass was not having fun with the first level being mode 7 and kinda fkn difficult for the first level to boot. Nothing prepared me for the final mode 7 sequence however with escaping the death star.

I tried to beat the original Super Star Wars and was flabbergasted that it had no password system, causing me to fail the game at the very end because I ran out of lives. The level design was also significantly worse with next to no verticality.

Redoing Penumbra, started out of order, did Black Plague first, now doing Overture. Not sure if I'll bother with Requiem.

Just got my new rig, (i9, RTX3080, 1TB SSD, 16GB RAM).

Playing Wreckfest and Thief Simulator right now. I plan on finally playing Doom 2016 tomorrow.

13 hours ago, Lila Feuer said:

@scalliano tfw Super Empire was my very first video game. I'm surprised I didn't give up on the hobby shortly thereafter, and I only beat them on easy, the only difference in difficulties seems to be the starting health bar size. But yeah not being able to restore things like upgrades is really freakin' bad. I was trying to play Empire again but on the default difficulty and it made the level after the mode 7 snowspeeder stage impossible to beat the beginning, all because my health bar isn't as long. I liked Return much more, but my impatient kid ass was not having fun with the first level being mode 7 and kinda fkn difficult for the first level to boot. Nothing prepared me for the final mode 7 sequence however with escaping the death star.

I tried to beat the original Super Star Wars and was flabbergasted that it had no password system, causing me to fail the game at the very end because I ran out of lives. The level design was also significantly worse with next to no verticality.

Just finished Jedi - the fight against Palpatine took a few tries, but learning to ration the Force pickups dotted around the arena made him much easier than Vader in Empire. The Falcon tunnel run was actually really good fun, although I can see how that perspective could give some people motion sickness after a while. The controls in that section are EXTREMELY floaty, forcing me into my Colin McRae Rally headspace of "small corrections, small corrections, AGH, SMALLER CORRECTIONS!" and that final escape was incredibly tense. Took a few restarts, but in the end that whole section almost felt like a sequence from Rebel Assault (no bad thin IMO.

Regarding New Hope's level design, there were a couple of vertical segments (the Sandcrawler exterior and one inside the Death Star) but for me they were ruined by that game's insistence on arbitrary time limits (thankfully nixed in the other two games) meaning that if you screwed up and fell all the way back down, you were more or less screwed for that run. But yeah, Empire and Jedi's maps are much more exploratory and fun overall.

All in all, I stick by what I said - the vehicle sections across all three games are the highlight for me and I'd love for someone to do a romhack that amalgamates and expands them (probably not feasible, but a dream's a dream). The platforming that makes up the bulk of the games just needed a bit more time in the oven to balance out the experience and make it less crushing. That said, I still think they are among the best of the movie tie-in games out there, and it's just a shame that only the first one has had a modern port outside the now defunct Wii Shop.

Still holding out hope for Super Phantom Menace. I want my Mode7 pod race, dammit!

I just finished Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition, a great game in my opinion, one of my favourite Xbox shooters. Next up for me is Overwatch.