VIDEO What are you currently playing?

Making my way through the God of War trilogy in preparation for the new one releasing in a couple months. Few hours into II now. These games have aged surprisingly well, most of the time. I'm enjoying them more now than I did over a decade ago.

 

Warframe & Monster Hunter World. There are things about the latter that annoy me but, well, I bought the damn thing so I might as well try to go through it.

 

Thanks to Fortnite, which I am totally addicted to, I haven’t been playing any other games. I’m looking forward to the new God of War though.

 

Well, I would be playing the eagerly awaited demo of Yakuza 6: Song of Life, except they are taking the mick.

The problem? It's a 36.5GB download!

Now granted, it's a demo that allows you to save and transfer your progress to the main game.

Even so - 36.5GB!?

 

Running through Dead Rising series again, then like I do a load of the times, Mod KOTOR and have some fun with star wars games.. I want more games like KOTOR to appear soon.

 

Maybe the file is just the whole game with stuff gated off.

 

Could be, but probably not given the near-total lack of restraint on game data size on PS4.

 

Not that I was necessarily interested in that game; but I heard SEGA apparently pulled the Demo off the PS Store because some people found a way to access the full game.

http://www.playstationlifestyle.net/2018/02/27/yakuza-6-demo-removed-from-playstation-store/

 

Lol, called it.

 

Yeah, I've just caught up on that. Played the demo tonight, it's a lot of fun but I didn't get to unlock the full game.

 

Did anyone else today(3/1) exp issues on Xbox and PS online services? I couldn’t sign in on Xbox to play Monster Hunter around 5pm central and couldn’t even load the page they said to go to to find out what the issue was.

I got back on about 45 minutes ago.

 

Fallout 2

 

CounterSpy. It's a stylised cartoonish side-scrolling stealth shooter set during the cold war, where you sabotage both the USA and the USSR from completing their race to launch a nuclear strike on the moon (yes, that's right) to display their power to the other side. The two sides are not referred to by name here, instead given the monikers "the communists" and "the imperialists". Levels are randomly generated, and each time you die or fail a mission, that bloc's DEFCON level is decreased, in turn raising the stakes and difficulty for you. You have to alternate between sabotaging either bloc before DEFCON reaches zero for either side, in which case the nukes are launched and it's game over for everyone. The gameplay is quite fun and addictive on its own, but it's the game's black comedy take on the cold war that gives it its charm, as well as its stylised cartoonish presentation. Highly recommended.

 

Back over in Divinity: Original Sin…

Pay the toll, human.
**** you troll.
Oh, that’s how it’s gonna be?

… A few minutes later.

Urghhh…
Did we have to kill all his dogs too?

So, killed trolls, a load of Goblins, evil flowers and have been experimenting with summons, which can be fun. Sending an immune-to-poison undead soldier up against poison-spewing flowers was very funny, then I had Scarlett shoot all the poison with a Fire bow! It was, er, explosive and very, very fatal.

Yakuza 6: Song of Life: Prologue (demo)

While the heart of the series is the Kiryu-Haruka relationship, for anyone who started with the first PS3 western release of Yakuza 3, as I did, the kids at Sunshine Orphanage are also a major part. So, there’s an emotional hit to Kiryu’s reunion with them here, some years later. How the situation is set up with Haruka is sadly plausible, in the wake of how Yakuza 5 concluded.

The other half of the demo is minigames and the inflicting of incredible amounts of violence on very deserving targets. While it has much in common with its predecessors, there’s a few changes to the combat system. First is no load screen - which is true of restaurants and bars, you just walk in. Second, the AI is far more aggressive, with your enemies being able to coordinate attacks, grab or throw objects and weapons are far more frequent. Despite that, the golden rule of the series remains: The best defence is offence. Graphically, it initially appears to be a step back on the fighting, but do a few and you notice those graphics are far more expressive than before. This is particularly true of the heat moves. Third, heat moves have changed, but they have, hard as it be to believe, become more brutal. For instance, before you might have grabbed a guy by a lamp-post or pole, done the heat move where you throw him, back first, horizontal into it - in this game? You pick the guy up, hold him overhead and drive him into the pole - balls first!

As ever, while the themes may be of brotherly honour, loyalty and responsibility taken very, very seriously, sometimes ludicrously so, the execution is superb. It draws you in and you want to see what happens, plus seeing Kiryu catch up with other characters some years on always works.

It’s interesting to note too, with your average gamer now being 35, that there’s been a few games in the last few years that deal with either growing up and settling down or being a parent. In this respect, this game is no different.

Final Fantasy XV: A King’s Tale

A free download, this is something of an unexpected gem for anyone who grew up playing the golden age beat 'em ups from Sega and Capcom. It has Regis and companions, in a 2D side-scrolling slash 'em up, but with a surprising amount of complexity and latitude. Unlike its predecessors of yore, you’re limited to a screen, but can move around far more than you might expect. This in turn allows greater strategy and tactics. At the same time the game gives you quick and strong, shield and magic attacks and a dodge move. The attacks can all be combo’d and combined, while the magic is a nuke move, moving through the initial then to -ara and -aga spells, if you charge it long enough.

The enemy onslaught builds up to being quite frantic, with multiple enemy types all requiring difference attacks being thrown at you.

The only weak bit is the final boss, but that’s true of the other levels final sequences too. It’ll only last you a couple of hours, but completing that story opens up a set of 25 special condition battles I haven’t tried.

Definitely grab this, it’s a fun little title.

 

The Division.

 

Well, that was a crappy experience - tried tweaking the gear for exploring Hiberheim and it made sweet feck all difference.

Oh and the game sticks Jahan a millimeter behind a gate but treats that as if it's a massive sodding wall. Still eventually managed to kill that bunch of Immaculates despite the crap the game pulled - frozen status applied at the drop of a hat, oh and an armour/weapon remove attack that makes no damn sense.

And then I got ambushed by a Snow Shaman and 7 fecking wolves, all with super-attack points and all my characters doing next to nothing because the game froze them instantly several times over while screwing with the attack points. Eventually killed the wolves and what happens? Turns out the ****er can leg it faster than anyone, healing himself the whole time - the whole fight felt broken. The only kind of bastard who'd design something like this is a masochistic git who has root canal work done for fun.

Kind of inclined to let the Void Dragon eat Cyseal - Feck 'em all.

 

I still have a lot of games from 2017 clogging the backlog so naturally I started a fresh play through of Stardew Valley.

 

Well hopefully it grows on you. As I said in Destiny thread I’m enjoying the hell out of it now but I really struggled with it the 1st 2 days. It’s super addictive!

 

BattleFront 1. Going way back.

 

So, this time I tried using a few new things and had a far better couple of fights including taking out a Guardian oak-ogre thing.

It was quite, quite evil to start the earlier fight with a fireball spell that took the big enemy down by 2/3! But hey, they wanted to fight so they fought.... And died.

Having no slip boots helps a lot in Hiberheim.

 

Update: I'm deep in the grind of trying to get a house expansion, steel tools, and access to the desert, and benefitting immensely from this not being my first time at this game's rodeo (literally and figuratively). Shipping blueberries en masse, exploiting the hill farm's abundant copper access to transmute iron bars to sell at a profit, looking at a two hour window before I have to sleep and saying "time to fish," yet spending every day with only hundreds of gold in my wallet because the expenses are sky-high.


Also debating whether I just want to get hitched or get all of the bachelors and bachelorettes up to ten hearts first just to get my sick kicks achievements.

 

I understood little of that without context, but it was an entertaining read.

 

It is slowly growing on me. Destiny is dead and I can only play Warframe so much before I start dozing off in front of the TV. I'm slowly making my way into larger prey, but I'll admit I need to take a deep dive into the UI, the crafting systems and grind some more before taking on something like an Anjanath successfully.

 

Update the Second: Went with the second option.



Also, as I have now completed the "necessary" purchases, I am richer than God and hope to someday put all of my money into a pile so I can climb to the top of it and laugh in his face for being so poor.

This is a novel experience for me because I very rarely replay Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons/Rune Factory titles despite being a huge fan, and I'm starting to realize why I never bother. This is fun in a completely wrecking the game sort of way, I suppose.

 

Stopped playing Nier Automata so I could revisit Max and Chloe one last time...