What are you playing right now?

[Lexx]

So you people made me install Mad Max again. Played a bit yesterday, finished off some outposts. First I was confused because I couldn't collect any vehicle scap anymore... till I've noticed one of the upgrades I have collects them automatically. Nice.

 

Now I just have to figure out how to switch to the mine sniffing dog... It is probably an obvious and stupidly easy function, but I just can't figure it out and the tutorial / tooltips don't mention any of this. Oh well.

[Fenixp]

Now I just have to figure out how to switch to the mine sniffing dog... It is probably an obvious and stupidly easy function, but I just can't figure it out and the tutorial / tooltips don't mention any of this. Oh well.

You enter the any of the fortresses and press whatever button you press to select from unlocked vehicles - you're looking for the buggy

[Malcador]

Ugh. XCOM 2 crashed three times on the final "mission". Luckily all three times, the autosave had saved pretty much right at the point of the crash. Otherwise I would have had to re-play some tediously long fights just to get back to where I was.

Nice to see nothing changed from the first one.

[Hawke64]

Reached the credits in Consortium. Seems to be a first-person adventure game. Not sure.

[GhostofAnakin]

Finished XCOM 2.  Hated it when I started, but enjoyed it about halfway through.  The difficulty learning curve was ridiculous and almost made me rage quit early on.  In contrast, about halfway through I kept getting "flawless" on missions and the final battle was relatively simple (I did lose a soldier, but it was more due to a lucky shot than because of any sort of difficulty).

[Keyrock]

Still playing Shin Megami Tensei Liberation Dx2 on my phone.  It's telling how much I like this game now that I'm home and I have options to play games on my PS4 or PC and I'm still mostly playing a game on my phone.  I finished chapter 3 and am mostly concentrating on doing the Aura Gate (1st person dungeon crawl) and grinding my character level up to 30 (I'm at 28) so that I can fuse high tier demons.  I've reached the point in a MegaTen game where you can't really brute force your way through battles any more and you need to really think about the composition of your demon teams and use careful strategy in battles.  This is also where buffs and debuffs come into play, whereas they're mostly a waste of time early on.  I continue to be impressed by this game.  There are personal quests for every character who joins your team and these are multi-stage fully voice acted quest lines with their own story.  I'm just not used to seeing this level of quality and effort in a phone game and I still haven't hit anything resembling a paywall after some 15 to 20 hours of play time.  At this point, I'm almost certainly going to buy some stuff with real money in-game, not because I need to, but to support the developers.  I've played and had a ton of fun for zero dollars for a good long time now, even if there is a paywall somewhere down the line, I've gotten a ton of enjoyment out of the game for free and I think that deserves rewarding.  I'm just really surprised that they made a legit MegaTen game for phones and not a shoddy slapdash cash in exploiting the MegaTen name.  It's telling of the state of the mobile gaming market overall where a good game that doesn't try to rip you off popping up on the app store in a shock.

[Malcador]

BFA launch went well for me, zones sure are pretty. Everything has that new shine and all, at least I don't have to ditch my legendaries as of yet

[GhostofAnakin]

Damn, looks like I only killed 457 enemies.  I think I needed 500 for the trophy.

[Katphood]

The Surge got added to Origin Access, so I'm giving that a proper shot. It's a very decent sci-fi take on Dark Souls.

On Xbox, there is EA Access. I checked and they haven't added The Surge, but they have added Dante's Inferno!

 

Goddammit...I just started playing GoW: Chains of Olympus!!!

 

 

Have you guys/gals tried playing two rpgs, two hack n slash games or two fps games at the same time?!

 

Edit: you know, one controler in each hand.

Edited August 14, 2018 by Katphood

[Keyrock]

I scooped up Phantom Doctrine on PS4.  I watched a couple first impressions videos and I liked Hard West enough to give this a shot.  I'm not taking my PS4 onto my semi, or lorry, as the British folk call them, yet (I will once I go solo), so I only have a couple of days to play it before I get back on the road, hence I'll be going ham on the game over the next 2 days.  It's downloading now.  I'll put up some impressions as soon as I can.

[GhostofAnakin]

Mafia III is free to download on PSN this month.  How is it?  I know it's free, but I don't want to waste time downloading and playing it if it's not good.

[Keyrock]

Started Phantom Doctrine.  Early going, but I'm having a blast so far.  It's very much Firaxis XCOM, but in a cold war setting.  There's less RNG, or different RNG.  There is no RNG in chance to hit, the RNG is in how much damage is dealt.  There is also a stat called Awareness, which works sort of like stamina.  Awareness is used for certain actions and for things like dodging attacks (which makes them deal minimum damage).  It's a stat which can be depleted and replenished (either through time or abilities).  Like XCOM 2 and Hard West, there in an infiltration phase where enemies are not aware of you and combat has not yet initiated.  In XCOM 2 and Hard West you can use this phase to position your team before combat begins.  In Phantom Doctrine, if you're really careful, you can go through an entire mission in the infiltration phase and never enter combat.  Like in XCOM you have a base where you can research, send agents out to gather intel, heal up injured agents, etc.  My favorite part of the base is the information analysis where you go through dossiers full of recovered intel, find keywords, and use a corkboard to connect pieces of intel with string to form connections and reveal information. 

 

Fun fact: One of the available female portraits (there are like 100 for each gender) is the actress who plays Nina Struthers (her name is Mahria Zook), Devolver Digital's Chief Synergy Officer in Devolver's amazing E3 presentations.

Edited August 14, 2018 by Keyrock

[Hawke64]

Tried Joe Dever's Lone Wolf. Failed all QTE, I think.

 

Tried Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition. Couldn't bind Quick Save to F5. BG1EE had decent GUI and controls. Why BGIIEE does not puzzles me. Also the size of the starting city is intimidating.

[Keyrock]

More on Phantom Doctrine.  Like in XCOM you have a world map where you can send your agents on missions.  These missions generally start out as recon and may or may not lead to other things.  While you are doing this the enemy is working against you, so you need to send your agents to suspicious locations to find out if anything is going on there or not.  What I really like is that when you do discover enemy agents in a location working against you that doesn't have to mean going into an isometric turn-based encounter.  You can, if you chose to, go directly into that (it's called Assault), but that tends to be a last resort.  You generally have other options for diffusing the situation, ranging from sabotaging the operation, to tailing the enemy agents, and so on.  All these things have time limits, though, and it takes time to fly your agents to the location if you don't happen to have any close by (that's why it's good to spread your agents out over the map a bit).  If you take too long then assault may be your only option to stop the enemy.  Alternatively, you can do nothing and allow the enemy to finish their mission, but that comes with consequences, such as the danger level of your HQ rising as the enemy gets closer to discovering and infiltrating your HQ.  You can always move your HQ to a different location, resetting the danger meter, provided you have discovered a suitable location, but that costs a lot of money.  Like in XCOM, you simply don't have the resources and manpower to do everything and you have to strategically let some things go.  Also, you can get ambushed on the way to locations which immediately forces you into turn-based combat where you try to fight or escape the ambush, or you can let those agents get captured.This game has a good bit of depth to it and there's a good bit of tension, which is obviously critical for any good spy thriller.

[Lexx]

Oh damn. I've just learned that Mad Max has a first person driving mode. Nice.

 

 

Driving and stuff is cool, but I just loath all the grindy elements. It is so annoying, running through an outpost, trying to find the stupid scrap to get a 100% complete. Most of the time I'm missing exactly 1 and then have to start running through the whole area again. Just a pointless waste of time. I'd rather have a deeper story mode and side mission than any of this...

 

Imagine a game like Interstate 76 being made today: Just drive around and collect items from outposts all over the place. Every once in a while you get a short cutscene to advance the pseudo story. Ugh, horrible.

Edited August 15, 2018 by Lexx

[mkreku]

Mafia III is free to download on PSN this month.  How is it?  I know it's free, but I don't want to waste time downloading and playing it if it's not good.

 

It¨s rough but I loved it. Just.. don't do everything the game offers or it will be a grind. Just concentrate on the fun parts.

[mkreku]

So.. I recently helped a friend who is kind of new to PC gaming to install Fallout 3 Steam Edition on his Windows 10 machine (not entirely straight-forward because the game demands Windows Live or something and that doesn't exist anymore). After getting it to run I got a weird urge to play it myself so I bought the Fallout 3 GOTY package from GoG and it just worked out of the box. Yay GoG.

 

Anyhow.. to my amazement Fallout 3 is a much better game than I remembered! Sure, the start as a baby, Three Dog, the subways and the Intelligence dialogue options still grate, but.. since I already know about those flaws it is much easier to look past them and enjoy the actual game. And it's good. I'm having a blast. I've also forgotten a surprising amount of stuff. I usually remember games for the rest of my life which makes replayability crap. But Fallout 3 has somehow been wiped from memory. I still think New Vegas is the better game, but now I feel that Fallout 3 has gotten an undeservedly bad reputation.

 

30 hours in and still only level 14. Deathclaws still kick my butt.

[Katphood]

I am replaying Fallout 3 as well, but on the Xbox One X because the Steam version sucks.

 

Thanks for stealing my money from me, GabeN! You should quit the gaming industry and start shoplifting.

Edited August 15, 2018 by Katphood

[Keyrock]

I did a big, 6 person mission in Phantom Doctrine.  I did some recon before the mission allowing me some tactical advantages, namely a spotter and the ability to disguise one of my agents.  I used my disguised agent to move inside the compound and collect extra intel, items, and get strategic information.  I still had to be careful because the place was crawling with enemy agents and while disguises fool civilians and regular guards, enemy agents see right through them unless you have a perk that makes them foolproof (which I didn't at the time, but I do have that perk on one of my agents now).  I collected all the intel, disabled cameras, and looted all manner of safes and cabinets with Indigo, my disguised agent, all while I spread the other 5 agents out to surround the main building while still staying far enough away to stay in the unrestricted zone.  After collecting everything, I had Indigo begin to silently eliminate enemy agents with takedowns.  It helped that, at the time, Indigo was my highest HP agent and the way takedowns work in the game is that you have to have higher HP than the victim for a takedown to work.  I eliminated about half the agents, but then I got a bit sloppy and a civilian noticed me taking out an agent, blowing my cover and initiating combat.  At this point, though, I had the building surrounded with agents in great tactical locations and I burst in and just gunned fools down left and right making this a fairly easy battle.  I escaped with no casualties and only minor wounds on 2 agents.  It was great to see all the recon work I put in earlier and proper strategic preparation pay off.

 

Good times.

[Malcador]

Game is getting rough reviews, hm.

[Chilloutman]

watching TI8

[Keyrock]

watching TI8

Trying to watch it, anyway. 

[Keyrock]

I finished chapter 1 in Phantom Doctrine.  So far so good.  In chapter 1, all my operations were in the Soviet Union, but I'm pretty sure I'm about to go global.

[melkathi]

Yeah, all the shooting through walls reviews have me wary of the game.

[Labadal]

I completed Hot Tin Roof: The Cat That Wore A Fedora and Inquisitor. Two wildly different games in different genres and different time commitment demands.