Hello everyone. Hope everyone has had a good week. I've had a busy week (3 job interviews) but still found time to play a lot of Binding of Isaac since a muscle injury has kept me out of the gym. Hope everyone has a good upcoming week.

  • DefinitelyNotAPhone [he/him]
    ·
    5 days ago

    Marvel Rivals is, surprisingly, quite good. They're leaning heavily on the comics style for the characters rather than another half-assed attempt at an MCU adaptation. The game is entirely FTP, with only cosmetics being something you have to buy as far as I can tell, and you start with all characters unlocked with no bullshit. If capeshit (or, perhaps more appropriately, the source material that was turned into capeshit) is of any interest and you can stomach multiplayer PVP, I'd recommend giving it a try.

  • Moss [they/them]
    ·
    5 days ago

    Over the past week I have played and finished Disco Elysium for the first time. Masterpiece. I'll never play anything like it again.

      • Babs [she/her]
        ·
        5 days ago

        https://gofile.io/d/XR6BKy link to A Sacred and Terrible Air by Robert Kurvitz

  • joaomarrom [he/him, comrade/them]
    ·
    4 days ago

    Technically not what I'm playing right now, but I recently played Nobody Wants to Die and while I didn't think it was a particularly good game, I was absolutely blown the fuck away by how unbelievably good that game looks. It's one of the few games I've played that made me literally go holy fucking shit out loud just looking at it. My jaw hit the floor about five minutes in when you get the full reveal of the game's futuristic cyberpunk noir setting. Just check this shit out at around 8:15, when the character opens the door of his car hovering over Times Square.

    The aesthetic is like LA Noire meets Bioshock meets Cyberpunk 2077 and it's absolutely impeccable. It's a brand of art deco noir 30's retrofuturism that I don't remember ever having seen anywhere else, and it fucking rocks. A visual masterpiece that's sadly wasted on a game that's the definition of meh.

    Overall it's a very mediocre game, the plot is pretty confusing and derivative, just a more noir version of Altered Carbon with a hundred different indistinct characters that I mostly did not care about or even remember who they were as your character does the murder investigation. You investigate by putting together a kind of puzzle visually connecting characters and events, but I have to admit that most of my progress was by trying random shit because I had no idea who anybody was and didn't care. The gameplay loop is repetitive and kind of annoying, but holy shit is it an absolute visual feast. Soundtrack's pretty solid too.

  • joaomarrom [he/him, comrade/them]
    ·
    4 days ago

    Finally got myself a new GPU a month ago and decided to give Cyberpunk 2077 another shot and... damn, it's actually a pretty solid game nowadays. There's a bunch of bugs here and there, it doesn't feel extremely polished, but I'm really into it now. It was absolute ass at release, but now that the major bugs have been squashed I'm having tons of fun with it.

    The combat system really gives you that badass power fantasy. I went for a high risk high reward melee build with throwing knives and a katana and it's a blast to activate Sandevistan, throw a knife into an enemy's face then leap to the next one, swinging my katana.

    Also, I think the writing is way better than I thought it would be. Not Disco Elysium levels, sure, but I like the worldbuilding and character development. Johnny Silverhand is a really fun character and Keanu's performance actually elevates him.

  • HelluvaBottomCarter [comrade/them]
    ·
    5 days ago

    I started Farcry 5, having never played a far cry game before. They combine a lot of shit into Eden's Gate which I don't really like. The political commentary is just an aesthetic skin on the world, it doesn't really have any substance. Though, if you take it literally, you're a fed doing a color revolution against a revolutionary regime while pretending you're a smol bean resistance fighter. That kind of accidentally gives you some insight into how little the creators understand the right wing militia movement. It just comes off as if someone listened to some post-2016 podcasts and decided it would make a fresh setting.

    • UmbraVivi [he/him, she/her]
      ·
      5 days ago

      I enjoyed it but you really can't think too hard about it. In my opinion, Far Cry 5 actively suffers from being an open world game.

      • buckykat [none/use name]
        ·
        5 days ago

        The way the main story directly rips you out of the open world is extremely annoying

        • barrbaric [he/him]
          ·
          5 days ago

          Lol yeah it's pretty rough. Around the third or fourth time I got hit with a tranq dart while flying an airplane I kinda lost all interest.

    • buckykat [none/use name]
      ·
      5 days ago

      Try Far Cry 3, the best one. The politics are still bad (it's basically "quirked up white boy with a little bit of swag busts it down sexual style.. is he goated with the sauce?" played completely unironically) but it works somehow and it's fun as hell.

      • joaomarrom [he/him, comrade/them]
        ·
        4 days ago

        Michael Mando as Vaas really took that game up a notch IMO. If being in this game is what gave him the opportunity to play Nacho in Better Call Saul then I say Far Cry 3 was worth it.

      • barrbaric [he/him]
        ·
        5 days ago

        Smh can't believe this slander against Blood Dragon, the best FarCry with the best politics.

          • barrbaric [he/him]
            ·
            5 days ago

            Was going to say you can play it without owning FC3 but forgot that it's literally called FarCry 3: Blood Dragon lol.

    • SpiderFarmer [he/him]
      ·
      5 days ago

      I love that game for the music alone. But yeah, I can't defend it too hard. It's pretty easy to accidentally rush through, making it way better than the standard Ubisoft grindfest every game after that turned into. The fishing minigame is also pretty fun.

  • graymess [none/use name]
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    edit-2
    5 days ago

    Citizen Sleeper. Very engaging story so far. It does seem like everyone you meet immediately likes you and wants to be your friend, which is fine for most games. But in a RP heavy time management sim, I feel like you want to see those characters grow to trust you over time depending on who you choose to help, especially since you're an illegal sentient being in a stolen synthetic body who literally just showed up on their space station.

    • glimmer_twin [he/him]
      ·
      5 days ago

      I was doing the Netflix paralysis thing last night, going through game pass and adding stuff to “play later” rather than actually playing anything, and came across this. Haven’t heard of it but it looks cool.

  • buckykat [none/use name]
    ·
    5 days ago

    I am yet again playing some shit I wouldn't have bothered pirating but egs gave me for free so why not.

    I haven't played a Lego game since Lego Island (1997) but I've heard the Lego (insert franchise here) games are good and they're giving away 9 movies worth of Lego Star Wars so I decided to give it a try and first impression is holy shit this game is huge. I got a few of the glowing blue rpg elements upgrade token bricks and the game tells me there's 1200 of the goddamn things? So far the plot is literally just the movie scene for scene but with constant Lego based slapstick. Luke finding his family murdered hits weird when he's a little Lego guy.

      • buckykat [none/use name]
        ·
        5 days ago

        All of them? One for each main series movie. It calls itself "Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga"

        • MaoTheLawn [any, any]
          ·
          edit-2
          5 days ago

          Ahhh the new one

          yeah it's huge but to be honest it doesn't have as much of the 'lego games' identity about it as previous titles

          obviously I have a lot of nostalgia but for me Lego games peaked when they still had unvoiced characters - or at least they were voiced but only spoke in gesticulations and hmms and ahhs

          also the new one doesn't have character creation which is bollocks

          I suppose it's not really surprising that Disney Lego Games are more commercial - that era of Star Wars games in particular when video games were still a bit of a wild west were amazing. LucasFilm licensed Star Wars out to anyone that had a fun idea, and let them go nuts. Some of it was totally shit but it was all smaller studios, it was fresh and attempting to innovate.

          • buckykat [none/use name]
            ·
            5 days ago

            Like I said, I haven't played a Lego game since 1997, so those things flew right over my head. I have no expectations of a current century Lego game, I am in full blob-no-thoughts mode over here.

  • glimmer_twin [he/him]
    ·
    5 days ago

    God damn trying to beat the time trials in crash bandicoot remaster is addictive. It’s just like being me back in ‘97 when my mum bought the ps1 to distract us kids from the divorce fr fr

  • Owl [he/him]
    ·
    5 days ago

    Believe it or not, still UFO 50

  • RION [she/her]
    ·
    5 days ago

    I'm gonna try out Marvel Rivals later today, I like me a hero shooter now and then

    Also not exactly playing but watching Northernlion play a ton of The Bazaar and it looks swag as hell. Hope it comes out of beta soon because you will not catch my ass paying $30 for early access

    On that note I downloaded Hearthstone for the first time in like 5 years because I remember hearing about some PvE content they had that was pretty fun, which I thought might scratch the Bazaar itch. But all these solo adventures released in 2019 are still $20????? So I played a couple normal hearthstone games and it was... fine

  • Comp4 [she/her]
    ·
    edit-2
    5 days ago

    Im finally about to put some time into Caves of Qud. I picked it up years ago in early access but never got around to checking it out. I always heard great things about it, so Im planning to play for at least 2-3 hours (maybe more) to see how I feel about it.

    Live and drink.

      • Comp4 [she/her]
        ·
        edit-2
        5 days ago

        Version 1.0 is already out for Caves of Qud. It Released on the 5th December (After 15 years of development) Which is why I decided to finally give it a proper look.

  • Packet [none/use name]
    ·
    5 days ago

    Gmod sandbox rocks to this day. Got me off boredom after I had a timberborn overdose

  • grouchy [she/her]
    ·
    5 days ago

    Surprised no one's brought up Infinity Nikki, a lot of peeps here would love it (ignore the gacha, the free outfits are plentiful and cuuuuute)

    Game's gorgeous even on lowest settings on my cheap non-gaming laptop, and I have NEVER seen another game put so much love and care toward fabric/hair textures and physics. Cute and relaxing way to spend time, though I've heard Nikki lore apparently gets unexpectedly dark, lol. I've been spending way more time playing since launch than I expected to.

    • buckykat [none/use name]
      ·
      1 day ago

      Yesterday I saw another player's in world snapshot that was them pointing out a hidden whimstar. This is a Strand type game.

    • buckykat [none/use name]
      ·
      edit-2
      5 days ago

      Giving it a try on this recommendation, so far it's comfy cute fun

      Edit: not only can you pet cute critters, it's such a central gameplay mechanic that it's bound to right click

  • peppersky [he/him, any]
    ·
    5 days ago

    I'm probably two-thirds through the new Indiana Jones and I've kinda gone a bit more cold on it. It's still pretty good, but it does feel kinda limited in its design and with the locations never quite feeling as ambitious and unique as the first one, it kinda runs out of steam somewhat predictably. It is very well designed with a minimal amount of distractions or friction, but that also makes it feel pretty limited once you get over its surface level qualities, like the incredible production values, it falls quite short from its promise. Like if the game was a little bit more ambitious with its puzzles, had more in-depth item management and dialogue trees, this would actually be pretty close to a real first-person version of the old style of point-and-click adventure games, which would have been really amazing.

    spoiler for an area halfway through the game

    biggest disappointment so far must have been this: there is a part where you suddenly wake up in shanghai and it isjust absolutely gorgeously realized, with tons of details, many different districts and landmarks and different types of architecture, but your entire stay there only consists of a ten minute scripted setpiece of the city being bombed by the japanese, with lots of explosions and ridiculous action setpieces, but which is also weirdly bloodless and tame otherwise. like the entire point of the sequence seems to just be to brag about how many assets they crammed into there and how willing they are to waste them by just blowing them up in highly detailed explosions. for how much detail they put into the first vatican section in the game this just feels pretty iffy.

    Show another screenshot from the game indiana jones and the great circle showing a scripted sequence involving the player shooting down a japanese fighter plane from another plane in a very highly detailed version of 1936 shanghai