What Video Game Are You Currently Playing?

[Lila Feuer]

SiN took itself seriously?

[[McD] James]

24 minutes ago, Lila Feuer said:

SiN took itself seriously?

 

Relative to its tone and subject material, yes. It kind of reminds me of a trashy sci-fi/action series you'd see on MTV in the mid-late nineties, and I really don't mean that in a good way. 

[Doom_Dude]

I enjoyed SiN way back when. I may have to do a replay sometime. i remember liking some of the levels like the geothermal plant. I forget much of the mission pack other than those spider things coming out of some zombie looking guys.

 

Meanwhile I'm currently playing through Daikatana of all things. Got it runnin with the 1.3 community patch. Finally made it to the 2nd episode with the Greek levels, which I remember being my favourite areas in the game.

[Avoozl]

I was playing some UT2004 with 30+ custom characters in Last Man Standing mode with 10+ lives and the insta-gib mutator, good times.

[Master O]

23 hours ago, Ajora said:

I'm playing SiN. Bloody hell, this game's humor has aged horribly (Monica Lewinski jokes in the year 2037). I know people like to rag on Shadow Warrior and Duke 3D for having antiquated humor, but at least those games didn't take themselves half as seriously as SiN does. SiN feels like it was written by an edgy fourteen-year-old whose personal hero is Fred Durst from Limp Bizkit. Furthermore, the protagonist is an obnoxious psychopath that isn't any better than the goons that he gleefully mows down. 

 

Gameplay is fine. The environments do some neat things with the Quake 2 engine, and the guns are generally well-designed. Seeing as how this game came out the same time as Half-Life did, it's no mystery why nobody bought the thing. This isn't the underrated gem that some people make it out to be, but it is fun. 

 

Hahahaha, Limp Bizkit.  What a shitty band.  

 

Anyway, I'm currently playing Hexen: Deathkings of the Dark Citadel.  I've completed 2 of the 3 hubs in that expansion. 

[[McD] James]

You can't go wrong with a classic. I forgot how much I love Alfredo for the NES. I've had a lot of fun tonight revisiting this game with a bit o' rum and beer to go with it. 

 

 

[Vermil]

I'm playing Serious Sam the first encounter, for the first time in ages.

[seed]

Still busy with Arkham Origins, but at the same time done with the base game, all I have left is Deathstroke stuff. Completionism at its finest, it only took me a few dozens of hours :v . DLC is not happening anytime soon.

 

So, my opinion on the game definitely remains, I still think it's terribly underrated, but mechanics wise, it might actually be the second weakest title in the series, after Asylum. NOT to say Asylum is anywhere near bad, but compared how much everything was expanded like crazy in City... yeah, it laid the foundation, but in retrospective, it's sort of... primitive maybe? And we can all agree that the controls on PC are not intuitive compared to future installments (really, controlling Remote Batarangs with keyboard KEYS? Whoever designed this must have been drunk, and that's just the tip of the iceberg), and the combat is really basic in comparison as well. It's a brilliant game, but there are some things that make going back to it rather difficult. By the way, I like the fourth wall break in it though (Oracle asking Batman if "someone patched the game last night" before the short sequence where you play as Joker begins). I think Enigma also accuses Batman of looking up the solutions to the riddles on the internet. I don't remember any fourth wall breaks in neither City nor Origins.

 

Anyway, back to Origins. So, during the combat, one of the most obvious problems is that you don't get the grace period after performing an attack, and attacks such as Ultra Stuns don't stop the attacks of the surrounding enemies. This can be irritating sometimes when fighting the TN-1 folks or tall dudes. Nothing more irritating than getting a high combo, performing an US on an enemy only to have a petty thug cut you with a knife or punch you in the last moment. It has its fair share of issues:

 

It is indeed buggier than all the other games. From my experience, there are: 

- texture popping issues

- thugs sometimes get up after being taken down and become invincible in the process, but vanish after reloading the area

- sometimes there is no sound playing during the fast travel cutscenes (I've been reading that the sound always goes out of sync on the consoles, so it's probably inherited from them)

- Enigma thugs cannot be interrogated after finishing the main story, unless you just quit and restart the game, so not a huge problem.

- Crime in Progress thugs or Enigma informants are sometimes not highlighted in red/green (visual bug only).

- Thugs sometimes fall through the map or props (or spawn incorrectly).

- Supposedly, Bird's Most Wanted is glitched. If you don't do his mission right after it becomes available, Bird and his thugs will no longer spawn in My Alibi, rendering the quest impossible to finish. I did not experience this however, as I went after all assassins before finishing the main story, but I can imagine how stupid this could be. A major glitch left unpatched.

- Batman's gliding animation glitches sometimes (visual bug only).

 

All in all, I very much enjoy Origins, but it lacks a bit of polish given the kinds of bugs that remain in the game. Other things such as the extensive reuse of assets is more subjective than objective from my POV. As long as it still delivers I'm honestly okay with this, but I do agree that it does reuse a shitload of content (the skeleton of the map, dialogue lines, animations, sound effects, enemies such as the ninjas, and so on). I've seen some people don't really like the Remove Claw, but I do, it's super efficient in Predator rooms, and seriously, in City some challenge maps could be a real bitch on Extreme difficulty, so I can definitely see why they added such a powerful tool in this game. Yes, it makes everything easier, and so what of it? What happened with having fun these days people? Not everything has to be "skill based".

 

My only problems would be what they did with the upgrades, the Dark Knight system is a pain in the ass, not to mention how frustrating or irritating at the very least can some of the Worst Nightmare challenges be. If you don't know a good, consistent way of taking down 3 thugs with a propane tank for instance, you're screwed. All upgrades should have been left to points just like in the other games, locking them behind stupid challenges is a bad design decision, especially since if you don't unlock them during NG+, you will NOT be able to complete the game 100% (some challenge maps require the Sonic Shock Batarang upgrade, which you can only get by completing the required task in the Dark Knight system). I think the idea in itself was good, but the execution was horrendous, not to mention that rooms do not respawn, so if you miss completing something on your first or second run, it's over. I Am the Night is a hardcore mode, and if you die there, it restarts from the beginning of the story.

 

NG+ also doesn't preserve all your gadgets apparently, unlike City and probably Knight too, it only keeps your challenges, progression in the DK system, extortion files, and so on. But not the gadgets.

 

Slade doesn't feel as much as his own thing in the game either. To me, he's somewhere between City's Robin and Nightwing, more agile than Robit, but not as great as Nightwing, or as effective, since he has very few gadgets and none of them are really as useful as the ones the other 2 had in the previous game. Mechanically wise, as a player controlled character even if only during the challenges, they could put more effort into him, I must say that they got lazy here. He even reuses some of Robin's animations lol (the stance where he's looking downwards with both hands on the stick, come on WB Montreal... ).

 

But it gets many other things right, such as the boss fights. They're easily the best in the series, although Mr. Freeze's battle in City has to rank up very high on my list, that one was really good. Loved how you had to use most of your arsenal and tactics to take him down.

 

Continuity wise, I think we have a small problem. Rocksteady acknowledges Origins as canon in the series, but Batman has some things that are not seen in Asylum and City, such as various gadgets and the expanded Detective Vision, allowing a reconstruction of the events. The way I see it, is that we probably shouldn't concern ourselves with this. We should acknowledge the events that took place, but not necessarily other elements, such as Batman's arsenal.

 

Spoiler

 

Bane thugs: "I will not run from you cabron!"

Slade:

 

 

 

Edited March 19, 2019 by seed

[loveless]

I might get back into duel with Quake Champions.  I started playing duel in Quake3 in 2005, kept moving with the games and the comp scene in general until last year.  

  

Really hard to just drop something after 14 years even if it isn't representative of duel.

[[McD] James]

My goodness, the controls for the underwater and vehicle sections in SiN are horrendous. 

[MrDeAD1313]

Got Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and I'm in love with it! A nice fresh take on the FromSoftware mechanics while managing to maintain the feel of their signature combat somehow. Much more fast-paced but still requires skill, patience and technique. And the game is absolutely stunning in 4k HDR too :)

[wolfmcbeard]

Quake, I never played og Quake until today, been playing GLQuake specifically since I'm having issues with non-gl.
My first death was from a piston trap on map 3.

[Avoozl]

I decided to give the Marathon games another chance starting with the first game.

Edited March 25, 2019 by Avoozl

[Grimosaur]

Holy crap Papers Please is good.

I thought the whole game was just checking passports and that's it but I didn't know about all of the moral choices you have to make and how in-depth it gets later on.

Definitely one of my favourite games.

[[McD] James]

26 minutes ago, 𝕲𝖗𝖎𝖒𝖔𝖘𝖆𝖚𝖗 said:

Holy crap Papers Please is good.

I thought the whole game was just checking passports and that's it but I didn't know about all of the moral choices you have to make and how in-depth it gets later on.

Definitely one of my favourite games.

 

It's pretty damn funny as well. By far one of my favorite games of this decade. I've gotten all of the achievements except for the class-5 apartment one. 

[MrDeAD1313]

Papers, please is amazing :D

[Jello]

I started replaying Brutal Legend last night, and I'm still enjoying it. I'll admit it wasn't everything that I thought it would be; I thought it would be more of a 3D platformer like Psychonauts, instead of the weird RTS hybrid it turned out to be. But it's still a fun game with a ton of personality. It's the single piece of media that made me stop hating Jack Black; now I just tolerate him. And it got me into Motorhead, so it has that going for it. But it is a beautifully designed game, the environments are great, and it oozes metal. I just wish Doublefine would've made it into an adventure game instead of an adventure game/RTS hybrid. As a 3D platformer/adventure/open world game it would've been fantastic. I just get sick of the RTS segments. Especially since you have to do them from an on-the-ground, third person perspective.

 

Still, good game if you haven't played it. And if you like metal. And Tim Curry. And Brian Posehn. Rob Halford. Ozzy Osbourne. Lita Ford. And I can't forget, Lemmy Kilmister, may he raise hell in hell.

 

It really makes me sad that Schafer made some bad decisions with the game, because it really could've been an absolute classic. A videogame monument to heavy metal. Instead it faded into obscurity.

[wolfmcbeard]

I got Brutal Legend a few months back, it looks awesome as hell and I want to play it, but it's either got hella pc requirements or is badly optimized.

[Doom_Dude]

I was replaying Daikatana and made it to the Catacombs. But my interest fizzled out with that.

 

So I grabbed the Skyrim TC, Enderal: Forgotten Stories on Steam and played it a bunch over the weekend. It's set in it's own worldspace and has an overhauled skill system, newfangled story and stuff. The beginning was a bit weird but it got much more interesting afterwards. I'm impressed the voice acting is as good as it is. I wish they would have done more to overhaul the monsters as there's still skeletons, spiders, rats, trolls, bears, wolves... But hey, it's well designed, free and a bit of Skyrim style fun.

[Jello]

19 hours ago, wolfmcbeard said:

I got Brutal Legend a few months back, it looks awesome as hell and I want to play it, but it's either got hella pc requirements or is badly optimized.

It really shouldn't be, it was released on the 360. The updated version on PC was slightly upgraded, but it shouldn't take much to run it. Windows 7, Core2 duo at 2.5ghz, 2gb RAM, and a Geforce 650 are recommended specs for the game.

Edited March 26, 2019 by Jello

[wolfmcbeard]

Core i5 660 ,8gb ram, AMD hd6570, Windows 10, frame rate between 3 fps to 15ish fps, no clue why.

[Jello]

Yeah that really doesn't make sense to me. It might have something to do with the game not playing nice with the AMD card, but it's still a 1GB card; same as the 650.

I'm running it on Windows 10, 64bit, 16GB RAM, GTX760 4GB, Core I7 4770 @3.4 GHZ, and it's a constant 60 FPS. Because it's limited to 60FPS, I'm sure I could run it at a higher FPS. But yeah, with your setup I really can't see a game this old running at 3 to 15 FPS. I wish I had more advice to give you, but, I don't see a reason why your computer shouldn't be running it just fine. Unless it's a compatibility issue with the video card.

[wolfmcbeard]

Maybe that's the problem, isn't AMD cards that have finicky compatibility with games? I swear I've heard that from somewhere.
I figured Brutal Legend would run far better than something like Fallout 4, I get an easy 30-40fps in that.

[KVELLER]

14 hours ago, wolfmcbeard said:

Maybe that's the problem, isn't AMD cards that have finicky compatibility with games? I swear I've heard that from somewhere.

 

ATI/AMD's drivers have always been shit. I used an R7 250 a while ago and I had frame drops on fucking Terraria, while Intel's integrated graphics ran the game flawlessly. A specific version of the drivers also prevented GZDoom from rendering sprites.

[wolfmcbeard]

28 minutes ago, KVELLER said:

 

ATI/AMD's drivers have always been shit. I used an R7 250 a while ago and I had frame drops on fucking Terraria, while Intel's integrated graphics ran the game flawlessly. A specific version of the drivers also prevented GZDoom from rendering sprites.

Thats why I'm buying an Nvidia card for my next pc, nothing spectacular, probably a gt1030 or something, but I can't put up with the weird AMD compatibility for much longer.
The fact that it couldn't render 2D sprites at one point is both funny and sad.
If it wasn't for my igpu being shit on it's own, I would've just trashed the card by now.

[Chezza]

I'm stopping my current 7 days to die game, satisfied with my progress and getting over dead be daylight so in the meantime I installed Mad Max again. Pretty decent game but I'm remembering how repetitive and tiring it can be.

Edited March 27, 2019 by Chezza

[Black Star]

Currently fluctuating between Doom, Bloodborne and Diablo 3.  Three wildly different styles but hey.

[[McD] James]

Soul Reaver 2. 

[loveless]

Getting back into Quake duel.  So far my SR is mid-1500's in Quake Champions, a far cry from the 1900's I worked to in Quake Live.  

  

Gonna see how it goes.

[wolfmcbeard]

39 minutes ago, Ajora said:

Soul Reaver 2. 

I think Legacy of Kain is one of those series that gets overlooked way too much, good to see people still enjoy it. 
Curently forcing my Dell-O-Tater to run Skyrim SE.