What are you Playing Now? - the man sez Video games are bad for you - fight the man!

[Hawke64]

Finished Signalis. A very pretty game with a lot of irritating design choices. 

The game successfully replicates everything I dislike about older console games - the unrebindable controls, the limited inventory, the severely restricted saving, and obscure ending requirements. Additionally, the most labyrinthine section misses the map. The combat system, with the combination of reviving foes (because zombies), limited ammunition, and the damage dealt depending on the time spent aiming (i.e. the longer you aim at a particular opponent, the higher the damage), is unpleasant, but this is expected and the least irritating of the design choices.

If one can tolerate it and does not care about the outcome, it might be an interesting survival horror in a sci-fi setting, with a strong critique of communism in general and the Soviets/PRC in particular. The puzzles and bosses are easy enough (on the default difficulty) to keep the pacing consistent. Arguably, for the right-handed players with the QWERTY keyboard layout, the control scheme should be comfortable enough.

The system requirements are adequate, the art and sound design are gorgeous (excluding the foes' screams upon noticing the protagonist, which get old fast), and 5-button mice are supported (the 4th and the 5th buttons are used for reloading and using the equipped item). Finally, the game is mostly VA-free (there are some spoken lines in German, but they are in the background).

[Lexx]

Finished Metal Gear Solid Delta. It feels pretty much exactly like the original game, which is good. They improved on the worst elements of the game, which was the way the moving and shooting worked. This now behaves more like in MGSV. I remember that years back, people kept saying that changing this would change the whole feeling of the game, but I disagreed... and now we have proof that it doesn't harm the rest of the game at all. 

Kinda wish they would have went a little further, because hiding in cover and the climbing / dropping down mechanics still feel super clunky (just like in the original). But eh, not the worst. 

Performance really is ass, though. Since I'm not at home right now, I have played it on medium settings on my laptop. Getting constant 30 FPS at least, which is fine. But in comparison, MGSV runs on ultra settings at 60 FPS... and Delta doesn't look *that* much better in the end. So while it's impressive that this technique works (emulating the original game and rendering via Unreal Engine), it does feel terribly bad on the performance side. 

Oh, one more thing... I know David Hayter is iconic, but his line delivery is so cringe in most scenes. Granted, the writing is cringe as well in most scenes, so it's not all on him and his acting chops. But still.. replaying MGS3 like that made me understand why Kojima picked someone else for MGSV.

Edited Sunday at 04:19 PM by Lexx

[Wormerine]

SILKSONG! Less than £17. Noice. 

[majestic]

43 minutes ago, Wormerine said:

SILKSONG! Less than £17. Noice. 

+1

Good thing GOG has manual downloads. The Galaxy service is completely borked. As is Steam it would, uhm, seem. Anyway, see you guys in December.  

[Lexx]

Silking the song since 12 minutes after it officially released. Need to get used to the new attack pattern still. First few bosses took me more attempts than I like to admit.

Music is amazing again. Visually very good looking. Will see how the quest.. I mean.. the wish system ends up later. Hopefully it won't be fetch-quest filler. We'll see, I guess.

/Edit: So my first impression after a couple hours is that the game is a lot harder than the first one. There wasn't a single boss fight yet that I could do in first attempt. Lace also looked a hell of a lot easier in the E3/ gamescom videos. She's mopping the floor with me. I'm at attempt 10 or whatever already and about to give up for today.

Edited 39 minutes ago by Lexx

[marelooke]

On 8/19/2025 at 7:36 PM, Theonlygarby said:

Well for one I'm not a dune fan so I think some of it is lost on me.  However I did have fun with it at first so I don't think thats the main reason.

 

I think it just has the same problems every survival building type game has, which is seemingly endless incremental upgrades, repetitive exploration and no real end goal aside from getting those little upgrades.

 

I could see having more fun if I had gaming friends I could play with.  I did have some fun with it, and it's probably something I will return to.  It just felt like it was going nowhere.

It's why Conan Exiles is still my favourite "survival" game. There's an actual story, though Funcom, probably in preparation of Dune's launch, kinda pushed it aside for some "modern" checklist bollocks, but it's still all there. What I enjoy is that you have to go out and *find* the story and slowly puzzle together what happened.

And the game has a goal that you can complete, if you so choose: getting out of the situation you find yourself in after the intro. I'd imagine the gameplay is similar to Dune, at least my impression of Dune is that it's just Conan Exiles in the Dune universe without the option to host your own server (but I haven't played it, just to be clear)

 

Personally I haven't really stopped bouncing around half-finished games. Went back to the original DOOM reboot and apparently I'd left that off at the last boss, so I killed that and freed up some disk space.

I also made a little bit of progress in Mass Effect: Andromeda, but the game just hasn't been able to hold my attention after first contact. I'll probably finish it, eventually.

Mostly I've been having a lot of fun in Stellaris, tried getting through a game with Knights of the Toxic God a few times (using the predefined species) and got absolutely stomped in the early game multiple times, so I increased galaxy size with less of us in it to give me some more breathing room at the start. Also added another 300years to the "game end" condition as my last game where I wasn't sniffed out early ended when stuff started getting real.

After beating the endgame crisis the awakened fallen empire decided to go after me for war mongering (I mean, I was sitting on massive fleets and I just cleansed the universe of two crisis, which I guess makes me the bad guy) and everyone else decided to close borders, blocking some of my fleets from getting out of the Contingency system, so they were stuck until I could buy a Gate to teleport out (I expected this, so I came prepared).

They had a bunch of fleets with 2 to 3 times my fleet's power but decided to attack me in a heavily fortified system (3 maxed out Citadels set up to deal with them specifically). Lost like half of the ships I was able to actually field but managed to murderify both of their strongest fleets (somewhere around 4million fleet power together). Little while later that Gate got finished, freeing up two fleets in prime fighting condition, and now I'm just happily stomping down Awakened Empire systems. Hope I can take them down entirely before the war ends, if not I may just declare them a galactic crisis and have everyone beat down on them (I have so much political influence due to my fleets that anything I want done in the Galactic Community, goes, it's hilarious, maybe I should run for Emperor next...)

Edited 39 minutes ago by marelooke