What are you playing now?

[AlexM]

Trying to get back into Skullgirls now Squigly and Big Band have been funded by their indiegogo crowd-funding thingamajig. I actually haven’t been playing it since the patch which makes me a terrible person. From what I can gather Big Band is like Nrvnqsr Chaos only instead of opening up his flashers coat for shadow animals and tentacles it’s trombones and cornets. I approve of this.

If you think this was mainly about linking the indiegogo campaign rather than saying what I've been playing... you'd be right. Also, Heart of the Swarm, League of Legends, and Vergil's campaign in DmC.

How does skuilgirls play? Liking it?

[Sentura]

skullgirls plays very well last time i tried it, it's a simplified form of street fighter and i guess on par with MVC3. i personally like it because it is more accessible than SF on average. I don't know how the online meta is at the moment - i've been away from the fighting scene for a while, but it's definitely an interesting game.

[Taylor]

I really like Skullgirls. It’s definitely the deepest fighting game out on consoles this generation and the best fighting game out of a western developer by far. How’s that for an opening gambit?

The gameplay system was made by MikeZ who is a tournament-level Marvel vs. Capcom 2 and Guilty Gear player. I believe his stated goal was to make an MvC2 where everyone played like a top tier character (for the uninitiated

but only a small portion of its cast is viable).

It brings a few new features to the table like the infinite protection system, variable team sizes and custom assists. I could write for ages on how these are super awesome, but I’ll refrain unless someone actually cares. Although there are only eight characters (up to ten with the funding) they have pretty extensive skillsets reminding me more of a Guilty Gear character than one you would see in Marvel. It also makes no competitive concessions to modern conventions, so there throw windows are short and there is no comeback mechanics.

Some of its problems are what you’d expect from a low budget game using all its money on animation, the cast is small and the non-canon “story mode” is the extent of the single player content. Other problems are a large burden of knowledge due to the reset heavy gameplay, but that's something you just need to embrace.

Edited March 15, 2013 by Taylor

[AlexM]

Looks like I'll have to get it when I get back to Canada. Unless it comes out on the Vita before then.

[Taylor]

I don't know of a Vita release. I can't imagine it being too nice to play on a handheld as it uses six buttons and double inputs for throws, assists, tags, supers and snaps D:

There will be a PC release, though.

[Skacky]

So after I finished Call of Pripyat I went to finish Shadow of Chernobyl once again. Have I ever told you how amazing this game is? No? This game is amazing.

It has to be one of the most atmospheric games ever released, only beaten by the likes of Thief and Arx Fatalis in my eyes, but not very far from them either. One of the best parts of the game has to be the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and the following sarcophagus, the very place you've been after the whole game. The atmosphere there is completely nuts and hopeless, you are stuck in a dead, radioactive concrete sepulcher struggling for survival while fighting both the deadly radiations and the equally deadly soldiers defending what may or may not lie in the infamous Reactor #4.

And that deep voice, man. That deep voice. It pounds your brain over and over again. These are the only Russian sentences I can approximately speak.

Off to Clear Sky now.

Edited March 16, 2013 by Skacky

[AlexM]

I don't know of a Vita release. I can't imagine it being too nice to play on a handheld as it uses six buttons and double inputs for throws, assists, tags, supers and snaps D:

There will be a PC release, though.

Ah yeah. My rule is that I only play 4 button fighters on the Vita. My lord though, the Vita is just perfect for 4 button fighters. I REALLY hope they bring KOFXIII to Vita. It's a match made in heaven.

Well if Skullgirls comes to PC I'll be all over it.

[Jetsetlemming]

I bought Castle Doctrine (a game about robbing other players' houses, and building your own into a deathtrap to prevent robbery) yesterday and played it for a few hours, before quitting it. It was terrible. Here's a more detailed review I wrote on another forum.

It's a bad game deliberately hampered by the creator's "message" for it. The threat of being robbed makes people design levels that are completely unfair, aided by numerous bugs that result in inescapable and unforeseeable deathtraps, and dying deletes your house, which takes a long time using a cumbersome interface to set up to carefully safeguard your vault and moneysack wife. This also includes dying while testing your house, which is easy to do by accident due to poor visual pointers (Tiles slightly overlap and different related things like "open pits" and "closed pits" look similar enough to mistake for one another), fog of war, and the screen not scrolling until you run into the outer edge and step into an unseen tile.

This could be something like a roguelike Little Big Planet, where you design fun levels and share them automatically with other players and have a fun communal building and playing experience. Instead, the design actively encourages griefing, and just not playing the game period for fear of the consequences of loss. Maybe that would be worth the moral lesson in a free indie game, but this is $8, required due to the server infrastructure that runs it.

[Algor]

I finished Far Cry 3 last night after some 27 hours. I completed the story, got all the pouches and took out all the camps but couldn't be arsed with much else. Overall I think it was a good experience except they stick their foot in their mouth a number of times with the open world thing.

Tried to boat down to the farthest southern island early on only to get the lovely "leaving the Battlefield" message. Then my boat is reset outside the battlefield where I am constantly being reset and unable to get back to the playable area. Later, I couldn't get access to The Compound so I found a nearby hill and tried to wing suit my way in only to find The Compound is filled with industrial strength fans to push me out of. To add insult to injury that seemed to create a bug where my wing suit was broken in the same manner until I quit and reloaded the game.

I'm still not sold on first person driving and I got sick of the physical interactions with everything pretty early on. Might have been a good skill to unlock where you don't have to pat down every body for loot. There were also a number of checkpoints placed right before a long first person cinematic which got pretty annoying. There were also a lot of missions that ended standing next to an NPC, the player turns away and resumes control of their character, only to turn back and the NPC is gone. This wouldn't be so bad if my next story objective wasn't to talk to that guy who was standing right next to me and is now halfway across the god damn world. Early on I felt like they took the cheap route and hid all the skills and equipment upgrades behind their side missions just so you'd be forced to play them. As I found many of those happened naturally I didn't mind it so much. I also had a strange thing happen where the first half of the game my wallet was always capped out, and towards the second half I never had more than $500. While I didn't use the pistols very much past the first couple minutes, most of the weapons felt pretty satisfying and diverse to use... maybe with the exception of the sniper rifles. lol @ this game has a cover system? Never even knew about it. Lastly,

that helicopter mission was a disaster. "Hang on while I do donuts around the airbase while every soldier fires rockets at us." I had to drop the difficulty to easy after failing the mission five times, and even then I barely scraped by.

Tonight I started up Bulletstorm and I am finding it surprisingly awesome. While the story is very convoluted for the type of game (how many times did the story shift time periods in the first hour?), the gameplay feels very tight and satisfying. We'll see how it holds up after a while.

Edited March 22, 2013 by Algor

[Kedhrin]

so glad i have 3 monitors at home now for once, a game i can actually REALLY use eyefinity with.. i love eyefinity... just you know, games have to be made with it in mind.

[e-freak]

how did you get your hands on age of empires II yet? or is that the old build with some hacks?

[⌐■_■]

hah, that looks like the HD version. looks great, except for the cliffs D:

[Taylor Swift]

started playing john romeros daikatana yesterday, the story blew me away.

[Kedhrin]

i just pulled the screenshot from here http://www.ageofempires.com/age2.html

[Thrik]

So, Dishonored. SHIEEEEET that was a good game! I really got into the story and characters of that, excellent writing and the climax was downright cinematic — despite never taking control away from you. Shows how great games can be when the developers don't wrestle control away from the player during the coolest moments. And the art... o my gad, the art.

This trailer is now much cooler after having finished the game: