What are you playing?

[rabidtictac]

Ninja Gaiden Sigma Male. I've made it up to Awakened Alma now. The Sigma Male version is still mostly fine compared to Black. It does remove a few puzzles from Black, and it allows you to shoot your bow while jumping. Those are positive changes. The Rachel chapters are absolute dogshit, but I'm finally done with those.

I'm not looking forward to playing Sigma 2 and seeing how Hayashi butchered Nigga Gaiden 2.

[Kugelfisch]

Still Snowrunner.
I went to Amur. Because I have time and apparently hate myself. Amur is the hardest region by far. In real life it's in the Far East region of Russia, bordering on China.

Absolutely everything about the region is difficult. Super deep mud with ice shards, super snow that offers so little grip that anything with under 50 inch tires will get stuck, steep iced roads that require chains and lots of tippy places, rocks and inconvenient fallen trees.

Just repairing the first two bridges is a pain. I've been going at it for hours and I'm still not done.

[Kugelfisch]

I've mostly gotten the upgrades and the truck I wanted from Amur and retreated back to Taimyr.
I'm thinking about heading to Kola, though. I could need some money, am in a good position to deal with the snow and ice and could use the vehicles there for other maps.

Kola was a big leap in difficulty back then but the later released Amur makes it look mediocre at best and the pain department.
At least Kola allows for very large trailers.

[Complicity]

Playing this:



Roguelike in which you are the evil reincarnated god who has to kill everything to become stronger, and then kill the pantheon of the new gods.
All the races and classes are "evil" themed, so you can create stuff like vampire warlock, lich necromancer, goblin poacher, rotting abomination berserker and so on.
All sentient creatures which are not critters and farm animals seem to want you dead, to the point that once i stumbled upon a farm raided by orcs, and the farmers and raiders stopped fighting each other to gang up on me.
Lots of crafting, which is mandatory because equipment's durability wears down very fast and you have to eat, drink and sleep to stay alive (what you drink and eat depends on your race).
Supposedly there are also diseases, but so far i've only tried races like like the Gnoll (it's obvious that the devs played wow) who can eat raw and rotten food with no penalties, so it hasn't happened to me yet.
I don't know if the world is randomly generated or if it's always the same; usually when i create a new character the starting zone is different, but once i started in the same cave outside the same Gnome village as in a previous game.
It's hard, but much easier to get into than games like CDDA.
So far it's way better than Caves Of Troon.

[Complicity]

Making progress in Soulash as a goblin poacher.
For what i'm able to see, the basic structure of the world is the same in every playthrough, but the content inside of it changes.
The same farm can be occupied by human guards, raided by orcs, burned down and abandoned, replaced by a marsh full of ghouls and so on.
There are bosses in the form of wandering champions and creatures like dragons, and after some leveling the new gods will start appearing one by one to fight you.
Once they are dead, part of the world will die with them, making the survival aspect of the game harder.
So far i've killed the Murloc-like River God, and now all the rivers in the game have been replaced by patches of dirt, meaning no more fishing, less drinking water and no more murlocs, who were a convenient source of exp and meat.
I've seen the altar of a God of Farming, which means i will eventually no longer be able to make bread and forced to subsist on a diet of dwarf meat -humans drop only bones when you butcher them, and elven ears are less filling than mushrooms.
And there's the altar of a God of Rain, meaning that eventually either the amount of water in wells and ponds will become finite, or there won't be water at all.
I've started converting all the copper and leather i can find into jugs and goatskins and to fill them, but i don't know if it will be enough.
I will probably die way before that and restart as a genie warlock anyway.
If you like CDDA and Unreal World, play this one too.

[Complicity]

Not Doom/Quake with fancier graphics is out:



Good looks and music, but the level design is the usual corridor-small arena-corridor-small arena, even though the game tries somehow to hide it.
Slow paced, which is good for me because these games give me motion sickness otherwise, but not good for lovers of the genre.
No enemy respawn at all, meaning that if you reach a checkpoint, you kill 10 enemies after the checkpoint and then you die, you will restart at the checkpoint but the 10 enemies will stay dead.
In other words, death is completely inconsequential in this game.
The difference between "normal" and "ultra hard" is the number of hits you can take before dying, which is extremely lazy.
The automap looks like the one in Daggerfall, useless and confusing.
After beating the first level, a world map opened itself to me, allowing me to select stages and to replay the first one for the secrets.
Maybe i will be able to spend ore in order to upgrade the weapons? I don't know.

This one may be better, but it's in early access so i won't play it:



This corridor-arena cancer is now the norm when it comes to every FPS, from Doom Eternal to indie stuff like this Lovecraftian shooter:

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

FPS games are as prone as any genre to succumb to the template of [most popular gimmick atm].

[Kugelfisch]

It's not even a gimmick. It's just lazy and a shame.

[rabidtictac]

No enemy respawn at all, meaning that if you reach a checkpoint, you kill 10 enemies after the checkpoint and then you die, you will restart at the checkpoint but the 10 enemies will stay dead.
In other words, death is completely inconsequential in this game.
The difference between "normal" and "ultra hard" is the number of hits you can take before dying, which is extremely lazy.

That's absolutely unacceptable horseshit. There's a reason most FPS games in this subgenre (now cancerously called "boomer shooters) use save states. If you die, enemies should come back when you respawn. However many enemies you killed before saving is how many enemies should stay dead. Save states work perfectly for this kind of game too, since spamming the save state button over and over will cause you to quicksave in unrecoverable spots. Which forces a mission restart and punishes scrubs like DSP.

I will admit to being mildly interested in Prodeus, but not if it's slow as fuck, full of arenas (serious sam is not the same thing as doom!) and has such seriously flawed design.

I've been playing some arcade racers. Super Hang-On, Outrun and a nu-ripoff called Horizon Chase Turbo.

[wulfenlord]

So it's just the Bioshlock Vita-chamber all over again.

I recently played Generation Zero, which is bretti gud. Nonsensical story about killer robots let loose on one tiny swedish island in the 80s. You start the game as either a Hippie, Metalhead or Punk, but there are tons of cosmetics lying around in either the Not-Volvo or Not-Saab (which is very immersive from the get-go, because no other car brands exists in Sweden).

Game has a campaign somewhat reminiscent of the start of Dead Island, but absolutely HAS to be played co-op, else the evil rogue robutts will swarm you.

The game has good tense moments when you are out in the swedish woods and have to fend for your life, with adequate stealth-mechanics, so crouching/lying flat and laying an ambush instead of Spoony-walking to the next quest marker is of vital importance.

When you are inside a village or an outpost, the stealth survival is sometimes replaced with taking potshots out of a house for 5 minutes, then loot the mountain of bodies right at the front door, because the machines at least have the manners not to break into houses.
2beefairy, the opposite scenario, where you try and storm a nazi bunker or castle ruins infested by robads is buttclenching, because the AI tries to seek routes to outflank and supress you from multiple sides.

It's not very good at it, because apparently the prime directive of a murderous AI is to seek and destroy JVC Ghettoblasters you lay out as traps, so you can take them out by shooting at their WEAK SPOT for MASSIVE DAMAGE.

Game has some glitches like enemies spawning under the map / in objects (which is especially annoying with little tracker/scanner drones that make sounds/alert other robutts.) and your characters getting stuck in objects (especially when crouching). The negative reviews I found where from people playing on a potato experiencing crashes or expecting a Cawadoody. When discounted to 5 Eurobucks it's fine.