What are you playing now?

    Unreal 1 and Unreal Tournament. But not for nostalgia. I've just found out that maps that I made a logn time ago had some positive comments in a UT community, which lead me to downloading them and going back to mapping for UT and U1 just to test out some theories that I've came up with during my incursion in id tech 3 realm.

    So like, i was playing Silent Storm for the first time (saw what you did there) And well, that's a pretty awesome tactical game ! I would put it right next to Jagged Alliance 2.


    Everything was going so well, WW2 stuff, documents and shit, how naïve i was. Until that mission :


    Panzerkleins.


    God that was absolutely traumatic. The ones who've been there surely have it in their eyes.


    Those game designers were completely nuts if not sadistic. It took me an entire evening and a lot of ragequits; but man, that was like my most epic battle in a tactical game ever.

    "Depths of Fear : Knossos", after seeing it referenced on Rock Paper Shotgun. It's a roguelike dungeon crawler first person horror RPG type thing. You're Thesseus, son of Poisodon, entering the Labyrinth of Minos to slay the Minotaur, to prevent anyone else from being sacrificed to it. There's a bunch of other Grecian monsters down there, and you must enter their special areas off the Labyrinth hub map in order and kill them before you can tackle the Minotaur.


    So far it's fun. You have a torch that, thankfully, does not run out or get extinguished, but it does draw attention to you if it's lit. You can light and extinguish your torch at will, but the Labyrinth is super fuckin dark without it. There's gold and 'knowledge' (books) around, and with them you can buy things from Daedalus (with gold, accessible between levels) or favors from the gods (as far as I can tell single cast spells, bought with knowledge points at altars hidden randomly in the levels). It kinda reminds me of Arx Fatalis, atmosphere-wise. Technically it's not great: It's got a limited list of resolutions supported, none 16:10 (my monitor ratio), and it freezes unrecoverably if you alt/tab or minimize it. I'd recommend it though, if you want something "different" from most of what's coming out lately. It's only $6, too.

    God of War: Ascension.


    I've played all God of War games, even the PSP ones. I've beaten them all on hard and some parts were frustrating as hell. But this last one, has a little something called "The Trial of Archimedes" which is just impossible. Wave after wave of enemies without saving or the possibilities of resupplying health while fighting a long side traps in a narrow corridor. Seriously considering letting this one go.

    Quote from SpronyvanJohnson

    God of War: Ascension.


    I've played all God of War games, even the PSP ones. I've beaten them all on hard and some parts were frustrating as hell. But this last one, has a little something called "The Trial of Archimedes" which is just impossible. Wave after wave of enemies without saving or the possibilities of resupplying health while fighting a long side traps in a narrow corridor. Seriously considering letting this one go.


    After, what feels like a quadrillion tries, I got this. But damn, that was some tough shit!

    Beat Depths of Fear: Knossos. At the end, the Minotaur was disappointingly easy to beat after a fairly difficult game to get to him, since smacking him with the magic macguffin sword (Just the gladius retextured ) stuns him.

    Playing Guacamelee. At first it's fun... a lot of fun. The abilities and the open world castlevania style level design works. But then we get to the shitty, obnoxious puzzles. Some of which require miliseconds of precision to execute properly. The game has puzzles in a sequence, and the first 2-3 puzzles are fine, slowly increasing in difficulty. Then you get to 4th part of the puzzle sequence, and it's like running into a brick wall of difficulty. It doesn't help that failing this step will send you right back to the beginning of the sequence. Every. Fucking. Time.


    What's worse is that the game relies so heavily on a proper control scheme with a controller (I'm playing with one), but fails to understand just how important the reception of control data is from the player's perspective. In order to do a specific special move, you can press a directional button/flick analog stick plus one of various action buttons. However, the game only allows strict input for execution, which is directional input FOLLOWED by the action button (so directional up + A), and not the other way around (A + directional up). This conjures up some situations in the puzzles that become halfway unsolvable until mastered to a point of muscle memory. They should have taken some inspiration from the likes of Street Fighter, where the control scheme is tight and fluid enough for the game to recognize a plethora of different input combinations to execute the same action.


    It doesn't help that the special moves are spread out on all buttons, instead of just a single button with different directional input. If something goes wrong in a puzzle, I usually get panicky and end up pressing one too many buttons, resulting in a loss of control due to the special move galore that follows.


    Special moves aren't cancelable either, meaning that once you've begun the execution of one, you CANNOT get out of it until the animation is completed. In various situations, especially due to combat enemies, this can have butterfly effect-esque consequences as a special send a player flying towards an enemy, but ends up being interrupted by an enemy attack, knocking the player off the platform back to a previous area. This happened to me on multiple occasions.


    Let me just be clear here that this is NOT good design. It makes the game feel like it's designed by the designers for the designers, rather than for the players. It's a real shame too, because the game offers an otherwise great world with a lot of explorable content, along with a kickass soundtrack.


    So in summary: Good art, some good level design, but bad, bad puzzle design and controls, A+ soundtrack. I can't recommend the game really, but go listen to the soundtrack on youtube, it's pretty awesome.


    I saw some pics of this and it looks too indie for my liking, thanks

    Quote from ChopperDave

    Anyone playing Shovel Knight? It's supposed to be amazing.


    Bought it for 3ds, haven't started yet but I've had my eyes on that one for a looong time. Really looking forward to it!

    Playing Silent Storm : sentinels, I am at this mission, and this is perfectely my feeling. What the fuck the level designers were thinking ???


    Why do i still play that game ??????


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    3ds fire emblem. Not sure if I like it yet. I love the perma death even though I'm a coward and reload too many times but I'm a little weary the CPU might be too cheap. Some enemies are guaranteed to oneshot half your party and then you have one or two characters who are super powerful.


    Quote from Minos

    I saw some pics of this and it looks too indie for my liking, thanks


    Too indie? Is that like an art style thing?


    For the record I havent bothered to play it because it's too on the nose with the metroid references (that freakin statue being an exact copy is a little much).


    Same deal with retro city rampage. After about 20 mins I realized this game is more about packing as many oldschool references into the game rather than focusing on the gameplay. Definitely have some cognitive dissonance for paying full price.

    I never played metroid, so maybe that's why that didn't bother me -- but damn they really do some cheap attempts at internet humor too. There's so many references to internet memes all over the place, and it's not really funny or providing any sort of merit for the game. There are of course genuine attempts at humor that are funny, but those a few and far inbetween.

    Finished Transistor.


    It's interesting in terms of gameplay. It feels like they hit the nail on the spot with regards to the design of skills and how they work with each other. It's amazing to just sit and try to find out what the best combination of skills is. Towards the end it does get a bit too easy, being that you can unlock way too much goodness. I rarely died or lost anything, and so the challenge level isn't really there. Unless you try the challenge rooms themselves, which are pretty damn good too. It's like playing a puzzle game with multiple solutions to each puzzle.


    On the other hand, the narrative suffers immensely. There's a talking sword that accompanies you throughout the game, and about 10% in I just had to mute it simply because it becomes too annoying. I don't need to get told every little thing about what color the walls are or being reminded verbally that I am transitioning between level segments when I am, indeed, transitioning between level segments. It's like having a kid running around you constantly asking, "HEY! WHATCHA DOING? OH YOU DOING THAT? COOL CAN I JOIN?" It absolutely ruins the mood of the game, which is a huge shame because the environmental storytelling of a collapsing city is beautiful and inspiring.


    The dialogue in general also suffers from trying to hard to convey something in a different tone than usual. I assume it's an attempt to make the characters more believable, but it's like everyone in future talks like a hipster would talk if they were in a game. This ties into the narrative as well, and it quickly brings the game down from its lofty game design heights.


    On the other hand, the soundtrack is excellent. Not as good as the Guacamelee one I'd say, but still very fitting dark ambient electronica mixed with some pop here and there. It definitely helps level the mood just a little bit.


    In summary: Game is awesome, art is awesome, but feel free to play it with muted voices as they will bring down the atmosphere. You lose some of the story/narrative, but from I glanced it really isn't that important. Most of the good stuff is conveyed well enough through environmental storytelling. Soundtrack is good too.


    Initially I really liked how they incentivize mixing the different skills together and using them all as attacks/upgrades/passives to get more backstory, but at one point it just started feeling a bit too messy for me when there were too many to choose from and I feel it made the combat less fun in the last 1/3 of the game. At least I think I would've enjoyed a lot more if I'd been less of a completionist and just stuck to the combos that I liked, rather than experimenting as much as I did. Also I kinda lost interest in the story as the game progressed.


    But yeah, I agree that their narrative style fell somewhat flat for me as well. Somewhat reminiscent of Bastion, but they delivered much better with Bastion's style of narration.


    Anyway, was okay, no way near as good as Bastion (not that you can really compare the two), tho they get big props for creating a pretty fresh style of turn-based/real time combat and with a really unique presentation.

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