What game are you playing now?

[cucubits]

On 3/13/2022 at 2:46 PM, cucubits said:

As a side note, especially having played it already, I don't mind cheesing it quite a lot this time. I took advantage of a design oversight in Dying Light 1 where during the prologue mission when they send you to turn on some traps, you can actually go explore the whole map and time does not advance. It's hilarious that during the prologue I got a bunch of levels up, already found the 500 dmg Korek machette and cleared the big bridge of all zombies... a few times, lol.

 

I promise I'll start the main story on the next session. Maybe :))

 

Nope, couldn't do it.

 

Fired it up last night and really honestly had the intention to finish the prologue just to properly start the game... but whacking zombies is so much fun in Dying Light 1.

 

Also discovered that if using the Korek Machette, even after its durability reaches 0, it can still chop off heads in 2 hits at this stage. With that said, back to the big bridge. I keep going back to that big bridge because it's always packed full of zombies and there's also loads of goodies on the cut-off section, you just need to very carefully climb on the big cables.

 

There's a cool bottleneck section with spikes on the ground. I'd go there, crouch and whack off zombies feet to watch them fall and get impaled. It was glorious.

 

My next mission is to go back to this cut-off bridge section today and try to reach the end on nightmare difficulty. There are about 5 police vans and I read that on nightmare there's a small change to get legendary weapons.

 

Maybe we'll start the game after this 🙂

[Sandy Bridge]

Spring, 1552.  Tens of thousands of horsemen leave the Timurid border, heading to the Chagatai capital of Urumqi.  The old Khan, Abdul-Karim, had died of a hunting accident after more than half a century of rule.  As had been custom for centuries, the horsemen returned to their base for the succession.  In one last parting gift, Abdul-Kareem had made his intentions clear in that regard, avoiding the succession crises that had so often plagued the hordes.

 

In Herat, there was a collective sigh of relief from the Timurid nobles.  They knew the signs of a horde "seeking more grazing land" for their horses, having once been a horde themselves, and they knew they were the likely next target.  Why else would the Chagatai Horde have betrayed their alliance ten years ago, or failed to effectively help defend Timurid lands against invaders ten years before that?

 

A year ago, the Timurids had thought there time was up when Chagatai horsemen massed on their border, but they took the last southern lands of the Uzbek Horde instead.  When they massed again in the winter of 1551-1552, the Timurids had thought sure they would be finished.

 

Link to map (surely there's an image hotlink option somewhere, right?)

 

And yet, this was a topic of debate among the Chagatai elite.  Abdul-Karim had indeed intended to divide the Timurid lands between himself and the Black Sheep Turkomen - the Silk Road for Chagatai, Persia for the Turkomen.  But his overtures to the Turkomen had been unsuccessful - instead they allied with the Ottoman Empire, and made clear their intention to rule the entire Caspian Sea some day.  As a result, the Horde had made an alliance with the Mamluk Sultanate.  Both needed a counterweight against the threat of an Ottoman-Turkoman invasion, which neither could counter by themselves.

 

With that diplomatic failure in Persia, there was thus talk of perhaps reviving the Timurid alliance.

[Hertzian56]

Deadspace remake early 2023, not clear if it's just the first one or the other two. Kind of ominous tbh with remake track records and of course EA being what it is.

 

https://www.dsogaming.com/news/dead-space-remake-will-now-officially-release-in-early-2023/

 

 

[ryan]

 

[cucubits]

On 3/16/2022 at 3:45 PM, cucubits said:

My next mission is to go back to this cut-off bridge section today and try to reach the end on nightmare difficulty. There are about 5 police vans and I read that on nightmare there's a small change to get legendary weapons.

 

Maybe we'll start the game after this 🙂

 

So to keep this discussion going with myself 🙂

 

After grinding a few more levels I finally decided to start the game properly and finished the prologue. Now time flows normally, nights come, I have missions and a whole bunch of DLC stuff is available. I also switched back to normal difficulty with the idea to have fun rather then keep dying. Either way, I was feeling way too overpowered with all the extra levels and weapons I had found.

 

Since I have the prison heist DLC which was new to me, I decided surely it must be a good idea to go check it out right at the start of the game. I do have power level at 10 so I wasn't worried. This was a mistake, lol

 

As soon as I started it, I got my behind handed to me big time. After wasting all the ammo I had gathered during my prologue shenanigans, I got the the room with the volatiles and now I'm properly stuck there. There's no way I'm killing all these with my current loadout so no way to unlock the door at the end... I'll just have to sheepishly back out and re-visit this later.

[Hertzian56]

Still mainly on Elden Ring but looks to be entering final area, just trying to find and do as much of the side stuff as possible, finally figured out how to bring down the walking mausoleums.

 

I was also dabbling in Anno Mutationem which has a pretty cool 2d/3d hybrid mechanics and pixel graphics cyberpunk meets anime thing. I'm not very far into it but seems pretty cool, hoping it's a short and sweet dazzle and not an overstay and ruin it with stuff type of thing.

[toastofman]

Been back playing No Man's Sky.  Played on and off since launch, the launch was an absolute crap-festival of broken promises and missing content.  But it has grown into the world-class game many of us hoped it would, and the latest update spices it up a bit more too.

 

Of course splitting my time between NMS and ARK.  Love me some ARK.

[cucubits]

That's actually not a bad idea. Started looking for something more relaxing to play these days. I don't feel like starting Elden Ring and neither CP2077. Kinda out of ideas and I have been a huge No Mans Sky fan. I also used to be extremely angry at them for that mess of a launch with all the lies.

 

Considering the "scale" of the game, I didn't play it that much, Steam says I have a little over 100 hours in. Back when I used to play it I wasn't in it for the story too much, I sort of made up my thing. Favorite pass-time was finding cheesy ways to make loads of money and searching for exotic ships. Then after one update I got mad at them again when they introduced that stupid converter which essentially is just an artificial way to force players to grind...

[ryan]

poolians....if your semi curious check it out its alot of fun talking crap to people after you win....all in good fun

[toastofman]

On 3/22/2022 at 1:09 PM, cucubits said:

That's actually not a bad idea. Started looking for something more relaxing to play these days. I don't feel like starting Elden Ring and neither CP2077. Kinda out of ideas and I have been a huge No Mans Sky fan. I also used to be extremely angry at them for that mess of a launch with all the lies.

 

Considering the "scale" of the game, I didn't play it that much, Steam says I have a little over 100 hours in. Back when I used to play it I wasn't in it for the story too much, I sort of made up my thing. Favorite pass-time was finding cheesy ways to make loads of money and searching for exotic ships. Then after one update I got mad at them again when they introduced that stupid converter which essentially is just an artificial way to force players to grind...

 

Yeah, exotics are awesome.  I recently did the questline for the Living Ship, and it is now my go-to ship.  You have to be comfortable with "exploit-ey" stuff to fill its inventory slots up (they come 22/21 storage/tech), but they are great ships.  They have good damage and hyperdrive, but are still outclassed by fighters and explorers (same way with exotics compared to fighters and explorers).  I will say though: In pirate encounters, even elite pirates, I have never had an issue grinding them into the dirt with my Living Ship despite not hitting the 250 base damage that fighters can hit.

[cucubits]

1 hour ago, toastofman said:

You have to be comfortable with "exploit-ey" stuff

 

I am. This is the only game I ended up using some mods. I only chose the ones that sort of made sense and took a bit of pain and grind away. Had one for inventory stacking increased limits, for take-off fuel requirement, one to allow ships to fly closer to the ground and I think something for the converter to work faster.

 

Wondering if any of these would still work in the present release...

[toastofman]

23 hours ago, cucubits said:

 

I am. This is the only game I ended up using some mods. I only chose the ones that sort of made sense and took a bit of pain and grind away. Had one for inventory stacking increased limits, for take-off fuel requirement, one to allow ships to fly closer to the ground and I think something for the converter to work faster.

 

Wondering if any of these would still work in the present release...

 

RIGHT!  Well good news then.  Living Ships initial seemingly pathetic offering of 22/21 can be increased to 48/48 (thats right, 48 "tech" slots).  You can't fill all the tech slots because you still overload it all, but seeing 48/48 is very lovely.

 

They are also weird fleshy orb-things.  I dunno.  I'm enjoying goofing off with them and trying to min/max them.

 

I didn't even know people played NMS with mods.  I'll have to look into that!

[hfm]

Oh man, NMS is definitely WAY BETTER than it was at launch, and I haven't played it in maybe a year or so. I'm sure it's progressed even further now.

 

I'm still playing AC:Valhalla, probably will be on that a while. Tried out Lacuna (yeah the adventure game) for a quick change of pace. I liked what I saw in the demo and grabbed it since it's on sale. I'll probably revisit Elden Ring after I finish that and RDR2. Man I still have Hitman 3, and by consequence 1+2 in that engine since I never played those reboots. Plenty to do while From is continuing work on Elden Ring.. hah..

[Hertzian56]

Was just playing a skirmish map in Company of Heroes 1 last night, easy on the equipment and fan noise while watching something on the external screen. Still one of my all time favs. Tons of free skirmish maps.

 

Anno Mutationem is getting stale and overstaying it's welcome at this point. Still it does have that cool 2d/3d and pixel graphics, feels like Nier Automata a lot of the time but budget also definitely got a lot from cp77, needed to be more metroidvania imo with more straight up gameplay and larger levels, at least you can skip through the dialogue and some cutscenes. They just needed a bit more western game expertise overall imo. Terrible map. etc But I plan on powering through it since I've invested the time.

 

A bit of GTAV, it's been almost 2 years since I fired it up.

[Katja]

Been trying to not burn myself out on anything, so I tried 2042 again, and was disappointed YET AGAIN.

 

Also, I gotta do the last part of PSO2NGS' spring event, so that's something.

[ryan]

might buy death stranding...kinda on the fence

[hfm]

Still playing AC: Valhalla... I should probably just put this on auto-post for the next month or two lol. Game is huge.

[cucubits]

33 minutes ago, ryan said:

might buy death stranding...kinda on the fence

 

I haven't read any reviews of Death Stranding but I'm sure you remember how highly I spoke of it when it came out. Graphics was amazing and the gameplay/story/music is like no other game out there.

 

If I were to guess what's going to happen, I'd say you're either going to love it as soon as you take control of the character or you're going to hate it. I don't know why, I just feel it's a very polarizing game.

 

I want to pick it up again really bad but so far I've been distracted with other stuff. I played it, I'd estimate, about half - 3/4 of the story. I was really into it and to be honest I don't know why I suddenly stopped playing. Most likely some other game came out. Oh yeah, I do remember I was slightly mad that one of the NPCs I liked died. Won't spoil details.

 

I did read about the director's cut which is out now but if I resume playing, I'll just continue the original one. I'm not sure I want to pay $10 for what's essentially a patch with some minor gameplay improvements.

[Hertzian56]

Yeah I was one of those who hated Death Stranding almost from the get go, pretentious annoying cutscenes almost non stop, shrill ad placement in game, story too bizarre for my taste, hands on gameplay was not satisfying at least the hour or two I actually got it. Watched a full replay of MGS4 and it looks like that was similar amount of over curation, MGSV was great but half a game sadly I actually like the short prequel MGZ better so much cool sneaking and a well populated smaller game world.

 

Trying to force myself to continue Anno Mutationem, another section where you have to race some blob over the landscape and I've yet to master it through trial and error. Was looking at Weird West, seems like a cool ISO western themed game I might try. Still kind of went back to Company of Heroes 1 skirmishes but that eats up a lot of time per session which I'm short on right now.

[ryan]

is anyone interested in playing pool? its free and alot of fun.

 

and lastly whats the best snes emulator

[cucubits]

3 minutes ago, ryan said:

and lastly whats the best snes emulator

 

I've played with SNES9X a lot but this was some years ago. Not sure about the current situation.

 

I might look into this again. Loved the Donkey Kong series.

[ryan]

for me it's mainly super mario world...miss when games were actually fun and a fun challenge....simple pleasures

[Hertzian56]

Mesen is pretty easy to use for snes and nes and more.

[cucubits]

20 minutes ago, ryan said:

for me it's mainly super mario world...miss when games were actually fun and a fun challenge....simple pleasures

 

Oh yeah, I loved Super Mario World too. So many cool secret places and paths...

[Aaron44126]

1 hour ago, ryan said:

and lastly whats the best snes emulator

 

RetroArch with the Snes9x core.

 

RetroArch is nice because it basically separates out the front-end and back-end configuration for emulators.  You can set up your display config and audio config and so forth once, and then use that with any number of emulators (NES, SNES, Genesis, PSX, N64, handhelds, ...).  I do a fair amount of gaming via emulation, and I'm rather picky about smooth video (vsync, no frame drops, no tearing) and smooth audio (in sync with no pops) and RetroArch not only handles these things quite well, it removes the need to "figure it out all over again" when I want to add another platform to the mix.  It's got a small learning curve to get into how custom configs work, but it works pretty well "out of the box".

 

It also has a ton of "shaders" (visual filters) so you can pick if you'd like you games to look basic/pixely or if you'd like to try out a CRT filter to sort of bring it more in line with what things used to look like.  https://www.retroarch.com/index.php?page=shaders

 

It also integrates with RetroAchievements if you'd like to try classic games with achievements.

 

(For SNES, bsnes has also been ported as a RetroArch core if you want a 100% accurate emulator.  It has a higher performance cost and does not support RetroAchievements.)