[Mentalist]

Got up to the last mission in Charlemagne, and felt a bit burned out. It was a pretty straight-forward B&D against 2.5 really large and strong enemy towns (basically trying to conquer Barcelona from the Moors). Starting position is kinda weak and open, and the enemies have a leg up in teching up and have an easier time swamping me with powerful units.

So i put that on the backburner, and instead I started the York "Battle of the Forgotten", which has a huge Viking army taking on the British Isles in 865.

Having made my way to the Isle of Man with my starting recon troops, I set up my base there (doing so gives me a free Castle). Teched up, and then the main army arrived (a fuckton of elite longboats.... who out-range most towers and castles).

Been having a ton of fun since, clearing a beachhead, landing some citizens to put up a castle and then pumping out FU berserkers. Viking unique tech gives them a boost against cavalry, PLUS I got the "infantry does extra damage to buildings" upgrade PLUS berserkers regenerate HP. Basically, there's an unstoppable wave of them now. Of the 7 enemies I've already forced 3 to resign (Strathclyde that represented Scotland + the 2 Irish kingdoms). There's 4 ways to win the scen- collect 15 out of the 23 relics; wipe out 5 out of the 7 enemies; amass 50k in gold tribute from pillaging (not sure where I'm at with that one), OR destroy the Palace (Wonder) in York and put up your own Wonder in its place. I'm basically going for the last one, but I intend to wipe out Mercia first, because they are actually being an active irritant, sending trebuchets, knights and assorted siege against me.

While the actual campaigns in the Forgotten expansion are often buggy, these "Battles of the Forgotten" single-scenario campaigns are a ton of fun. I hope they make more of them down the line.

[worry]

I finally played Gears of War 3. It was the same level of dumb and fun as the first couple. Only worth mentioning because in the credits I noticed someone named Woody Ent. Now that's hilarious!

[Maark Abbott]

I'm maybe 2/3 of the way through Valkyria Chronicles now, and I'm certainly getting the hang of it. All my units are at least level 13, some with royal weapons. I gave Marina a mark 3 royal sniper rifle and hot damn, she's plinking bitches off from literally the entire map away.

[Traveller]

Oceanhorn is pretty fun.

I didn't think there'd be enough there besides being a obvious zelda clone, but it's surprisingly enjoyable.

[amphibian]

Apt, on 28 December 2016 - 07:58 AM, said:

amphibian, on 27 December 2016 - 10:26 PM, said:

I'll play Virginia and see what happens. This should be unusual because I'm deaf and rely heavily upon body language and lip reading.

Will be interesting to hear what you think. The game is like a silent film in that there is no talking, however it also has a quite powerful orchestral score that follows the beat of the story. It tries to tell you when things are tense or hopeful or shifting with orchestra.

I played it. Kinda David Lynch like, but really doesn't give the player any reason to connect to the protagonist or really any person in it. The "on rails" experience needs an amazing story to justify that experience and it didn't live up to that at all.

That's also not a trip that's gonna happen on one tab of acid being carried around in the wallet of a switch blade carrying punk hanging out at a crime scene next to an air Force Base.

These fuckers don't even know how acid works or how promotion within a bureaucracy works. It's a broken story that whoever was the actual game mechanic builder couldn't rescue.

The ending was pretty clear: either this is all the cancer hallucinations of a proud but dying father of an FBI agent or the two agents are in jail cells for multiple procedural violations and one of them is acid tripping the fuck out, which is a very bad move at that precarious time.

Interesting experience, not worth telling everyone to spend ten dollars on.

This post has been edited by amphibian: 18 January 2017 - 03:45 AM

[Mentalist]

My Viking raids ended with a very anti-climactic finish. Turns out before my last save I was already very close to completing the ":total amount of gold collected as plunder" goal. A few razed Monasteries later, it was game over with me the winner,

Might go back and replay that scen eventually.

Moving on, I was playing another custom scen, "Tristan and Iseult", about a Cornish knight and an Irish woman who is to be wedded to his liege lord.

Very creative scenario, but also annoying, because a lot of originality comes out of settign up what are in essence quick-time-events. In an RTS. YMMV on this.

Have not had a chance to finish this, because life is hectic, and my lack of patience means I die a lot, losing progress.

[Traveller]

Goddamn it but I've hit a glitch in Oceanhorn - a chest containing a vital key has dropped but not hit the floor, so I can't open it. I'm in a sea temple, I've reloaded, restarted the island, and tried using things to climb up to it but I think my game is wasted as there's no way to reset and only one save.

I was enjoying that, too.

Super game breaking glitches aside, it's actually really good to play as it highlights what makes the Zelda games so good. Oceanhorn has taken the key structure; island a ) unlocks item that unlocks b ), which unlocks c) but also gives access to stuff back on a)... but tbe main character is fairly non-descript, and on the occasion that the npcs speak they do so in a terrible American accent which seems totally at odds with the whole Japanese/Zelda-esque theme.

Now I have to decide whether to start again.. and take the risk of another glitch at 10 hours instead of only 5.

This post has been edited by Traveller: 20 January 2017 - 07:56 AM

[Tiste Simeon]

Started playing Battlefield 1. Stunning game, and I'm not a fan of FPS, as a general rule...

[Mentalist]

Solid progress in the AoK HD meta-game.

Wrapped up "Tristan and Iseult", which is nice, bittersweet scen marred by the pseudo-QTE events. Very creative though.

Then did 2 Battles of the Forgotten back to back- "Honfoglalas" as the Magyars (aka, "How the Magyar tribes found their home in Hungary after the Pechenegs repeatedly kicked the living crap out of them". Its a VERY long, and quite difficult campaign-length scenario, where it takes several doomed last stands and scripted relocations to live out the Hungarian history. Problem is, you can't age up, as progress is gated by scenario progress, so you're often facing troops that are more advanced. This was especially true once I survived the second set of Pecheneg waves and was asked to make an amphibious landing over the Danube and defeat Imperial-age Bulgars (Huns), with my Castle-Age Magyar troops. What followed was a protracted battle where I built 3 barracks and kept churning out Pikemen to die under his cavalry, why my suicidal villagers kept building Castles, pushing from the shore all the way to Bulgar base (about 8 castles ion total, slowly grinding them down with attrition- my own kick-ass cavalry was useless, b/c they kept sendign Halberdiers who have insane anti-cav attack bonus.

Then once the Bulgars sued fro peace, Pechenegs attacked me again. I'm not sure if I was supposed to lose at this point, but I ended up bringing my massive army home on boats, then also bringing a bunch of rams right up a river into thir camp. while they were trying to flank my base, I wreaked merry havok in their camp, and ended up wiping them out, which then triggered the last part- the conquest of Greater Moravia. Given this was Imperial age, that part was ridiculously easy.

Then as the Chinese played the Battle of Langshan Jiang. Fun scenario where I got to clear a mostly naval map from enemy ships and towers to allow shipments of materials for a Great Temple to arrive safely, while fending off enemy attacks. There were some cool secondary objectives as well. One of the best scens so far.

Up next there's the semi-official Forgotten Battle of Kaesong and the unification of Korea. This is actually a workshop item, but the Forgotten Realms team acknowledges that this was supposed to be the last "Battle of the Forgotten", but they couldn't get it to work right. It appears to be fiendishly difficult "defend for a long time before reclaiming the country"- type scen. it should be interesting.

[Aptorian]

amphibian, on 18 January 2017 - 03:42 AM, said:

The ending was pretty clear: either this is all the cancer hallucinations of a proud but dying father of an FBI agent or the two agents are in jail cells for multiple procedural violations and one of them is acid tripping the fuck out, which is a very bad move at that precarious time.

Interesting experience, not worth telling everyone to spend ten dollars on.

Awhh, I think it's excellent.

However I thought there was nothing clear about the ending. Maybe everything we see is just a trip, like how everything that happens in The Devil's Advocate takes place in the blink of an eye, but I got the impression that there was more too it than that.

What was the deal with the relationship/animosity between Senior field agent lady and the Director? What was she trying to uncover about him? Why does he appear in the hallucination about the buffallo and the parents? What is the closure on the missing kid? Is there some kind of buffalo cult or is it all just a mundane case of missing persons?

Traveller, on 19 January 2017 - 11:14 PM, said:

Goddamn it but I've hit a glitch in Oceanhorn - a chest containing a vital key has dropped but not hit the floor, so I can't open it. I'm in a sea temple, I've reloaded, restarted the island, and tried using things to climb up to it but I think my game is wasted as there's no way to reset and only one save.

I was enjoying that, too.

Super game breaking glitches aside, it's actually really good to play as it highlights what makes the Zelda games so good. Oceanhorn has taken the key structure; island a ) unlocks item that unlocks b ), which unlocks c) but also gives access to stuff back on a)... but tbe main character is fairly non-descript, and on the occasion that the npcs speak they do so in a terrible American accent which seems totally at odds with the whole Japanese/Zelda-esque theme.

Now I have to decide whether to start again.. and take the risk of another glitch at 10 hours instead of only 5.

Did you google a video showing the island you got stuck on? Maybe it's not a glitch and you're just missing a clue? That happened to me a bunch.

I finished Oceanhorn earlier today. Liked the game but I think the criticsm I read before playing it rings true. It's a some what shallow gaming experience, in the sense that the game relatively quickly reveals its tricks and never really strays far from them. In comparison to Zelda there is a lack of wonder to this world, a lacking sense of adventure. I think it's mainly related to the 3D nature of the game and the art style making the world seem plastic-y and more like a 3D model than a 3D environment.

Tiste Simeon, on 21 January 2017 - 12:36 AM, said:

Started playing Battlefield 1. Stunning game, and I'm not a fan of FPS, as a general rule...

Really enjoyed the segmented nature of the story missions.

My favorite ones were the vehicle based tank and plane missions. It took me a while to get used to them but once you master the controls it was really fun. Especially the plane story made me wonder why nobody has made an open world-like game about some fighting ace flying around fighting and exploring.

I wanted to play more by the time I was done.

I've been playing a bunch of stuff since Christmas.

I started up Stories: Path of Destinies and was surprised by how enthralled I became with this game. It's a third person action-adventure game in the style of something like Diablo 3. The actual gameplay is rudimentary and somewhat mediocre. However what makes this game truly exceptional and fun is the premise.

The game starts out with you saving a book from some evil crow soldiers and it turns out this book is telling the story of your destiny or destinies. The game has a 4-5 act structure where at the end of each chapter (and some times during the chapter) you make a choice that will take you down a branching narrative. This means that there are around 40 or so possible stories to experience, with all of them playing into 4 story threads that ultimately leads to a final confrontation with X person/event.

It doesn't take more than an hour or two to play through the story but you'll have to play through the game at least 4 times to connect the story threads and combine your knowledge to figure out how to win/survive.

If ound myself really enjoying the story and was surprised by the games consequences/choices at every turn. The game is fun, clever and dumb, and best of all surprisingly fresh.

I hope they make another one.

One unfortunate thing about the game though is that it has a ton of bugs. I found myself getting stuck in the geometry more than once.

Also played some Axiom Verge. This is an interesting game. It's one of those retro platformers that are a dime a dozen on Steam but rightfully it got a lot of attention and praise when it was released in 2015. It's a game that is reminiscent of Metroid, turrican and similar gameboy era platform shooters where you explore and collect upgrades. It's really well designed, has an amazing sound track and plays really tightly.

Unfortunately I found that, while I appreciated the nostalgic gaming experience, this kind of game just isn't for me any longer. Maybe I'll come back to it some day but I just couldn't get into it.

Played some Dangerous Golf and this game just straight up sucks. The premise is cool. You're placed in random rooms filled with physics objects and your objective is to destroy as much of the room as possible with a flaming golfball bouncing around the room. Unfortunately controlling the ball is not fun and for every 10 seconds of fun there's 30-60 seconds of navigating menus. Interesting game ruined by tedium.

Played a couple hours of Turok: Dinosaur Hunter on easy. I never played any of the Turok games since I never knew anyone who owned a N64 when I was a kid. This game was sort of fun to play on easy with a mouse. I can certainly tell why this game would have been popular back in the day but by modern standards this game plays like arse. Fun to try it but I don't need to play more of it.

Played a bunch of Enter the Gungeon. This is a really fun pizelated dungeon crawler based around shooting elements. This is a game that is wonderfully thought out and well designed, however the fun is completely spoiled for me by the rogue-like perma death aspect when you fail and a difficulty aspect that means you will die and die again. I ended up just downloading a trainer, gave myself infinite life and ammo and plowed through the game. It was really fucking cool, I loved the enemies and the bosses, loved the levels and the guns. I really wish it was a more forgiving game.

This post has been edited by Apt: 22 January 2017 - 07:49 PM

[Tiste Simeon]

Quote

Really enjoyed the segmented nature of the story missions.

My favorite ones were the vehicle based tank and plane missions. It took me a while to get used to them but once you master the controls it was really fun. Especially the plane story made me wonder why nobody has made an open world-like game about some fighting ace flying around fighting and exploring.

I wanted to play more by the time I was done.

Yes! I have been running through the desert in the Lawrence of Arabia missions! Crazy hard but so much fun!

This post has been edited by Tiste Simeon: 22 January 2017 - 09:47 PM

[Mentalist]

Battle of Kaesong is a struggle.

After several dozen tries, I've worked out a way to go forward between enemy waves, and establish a strong position in central Korea, freeing the northern villages that nominally belonged to my kingdom, (now they pay me tribute as "taxes") and getting a town in the centre that belonged to one of my 2 rivals to defect to my side. I was able to set up a decent defense before going up to Imperial age (the mission is set up so that my enemies basically follow me teching up, so I tried to delay that,because in early Imperial they have a major economy advantage and so they tend to kinda crush me). I was able to set up a formidable defense in the town, making the fields in front of it a killing filed for my onagers to wreak havoc in. One of my opponents managed to build a Wonder ( starting while still in Castle age - filthy cheat!) but I arranged for a suicide beachhead landing of 5 fully upgraded trebuchets, and I demolished not just the Wonder, but also his Castle on that peninsula. Which seemed to really piss him off, somewhat, because his attacks got more serious.

I also had set up trade with a Chinese outpost, and even hired some mercenary Chu Ko Nus from them. These really helped in bolstering my defenses early on.

Basically, I was ready to make a big push. I demolished the enemy castle overlooking the killing field from the south (I've been moving from the very north of the map down), and I was gearing up to start wiping out enemy towns. Then the scenario got even harder.

See, the backstory is, China was in a civil war at the time. The Tang dynasty was real helpful to me, but they lost, and the Jin who took over are jerks.

I suddenly found myself facing a third enemy, who would use his navy to harass me, and would occasionally land small parties of troops on the mainland to make my life difficult. I did destroy one of Silla's 2 town centres, but that didn't seem to phase them much, and I had to roll back to my outpost, to rebuild my siege and my many cavaliers.

I may go back to right when I crushed the Wonder and re-think my strategy a bit, keeping in mind this unpleasant eventuality. In order to stop the Chinese I need to destroy their 4 docks, and it has to be done swiftly, before they get time to set up a proper navy. I may need to set up a strong naval force around them, and then replay my push on Silla to trigger the Jin takeover and wipe them out before they get in gear.
I think that once I beat this scen I'm gonna take a break from AoK HD.

This post has been edited by Mentalist: 25 January 2017 - 06:42 AM

[Aptorian]

Other games I've been playing.

The Room 2 for PC. I love these games. The puzzles are just the right mix of logic and intuition for me to be good at them. They're sometimes a bit too dependent upon the bad mobile game camera movement but I get by. I love the mystic, slightly Lovecraftion/Hellraiser like premise of the story. I hope they port the third one to PC before 2018.

I finished Transformers: Devastation yesterday. That was a hell of a game. Not just a good Transformers game but a surprisingly good game through and through. I knew from the reviews that it was well received but I wasn't expecting to love the retro-homage to the 80s cartoons this much. Much more than High Moon's (Also great) Transformers games, Devastation feels like playing an extended transformers episode. Cool story, funny writing, great boss fights.

It's interesting to me that this is a Platinum game. It certainly plays like one, but now a days you never know if you're getting Good Platinum or Bad Platinum when you play their games. I hope they make a sequel.

Also currently playing Resident Evil 6 what with the Resident Evil 7 being in the news. I tried playing through RE6 with a friend back in 2012 but the game was so tedious that we just never bothered to play more than a few sessions. I decided to give it a new try, playing on easy and I'm making progress.

RE6 is a strange game. You can tell that this is a really big production from Capcom. Multiple campaigns, lots of cutscnes, big cinematic scripted scenes and yet the game plays like ass, the textures look terrible and it's so long winded. Just playing the game on easy makes it a fun but repetitive action third person shooter.

I'm mostly just playing it because I want to see where the hell the story is going after RE5. But also because I had an idea I'd want to play Resident Evil 7. But after seeing the reviews and watching some gameplay, I realize I'll never play RE7. It looks way, way too creepy and horrible. Which I think is great. I love that they've gone back to the drawing board and created something new that brings back the survival horror but with a high production value.

Unfortunately that also means I am too much of a coward to play the game.

This post has been edited by Apt: 25 January 2017 - 07:06 AM

[Itwæs Nom]

Dark Souls 2.

I've just spent around half an hour trying to make my way through the first fucking location, I nearly broke three swords and was forced to fight with a broken sword I picked somewhere, I got killed by a two-handed sword wielding motherfucker at a roof platformin 2 hits. All the progress through the window. FUCK.
And what am I spposed to fight with when both the 2 decents swords and 1 half-decent swords can't make it to the next bonfire? Am I fighting that wrong or wtf?

Also it would have been nice if they had made someone check the key bindings for PC, I refuse to believe they were not just assigned by random number generator and anyone looked at them and was satisfied. Plus the double-click disabling option didn't even work for me, but I got that sorted out with AHK.

I haven't played the previous titles obviously, btw.

[Mentalist]

Beat Kaesong. That took almost forever. Trying to set up a force that could immediately jump in on the Jin once China turns hostile proved to be tricky. In the end, I compromised by sending in a decent-sized force to keep them busy (but ultimately die) while I finished destroying my Korean rivals. Once I forced them to resign, I built up a force of about 30 Cavaliers, 15 trebuchets, and some arbalests and Villagers, and just steamrolled the Jin.

Now gonna take a break from AoK HD (more patches are on the way anyways), and gonna dip my toe into Bioshock Infinite. tried benchmarking it on my new graphics card, On average, on Very High settings I still get above 100 FPS. and its mighty pretty.

[Traveller]

Itwæs Nom, on 28 January 2017 - 07:18 PM, said:

Dark Souls 2.

I've just spent around half an hour trying to make my way through the first fucking location, I nearly broke three swords and was forced to fight with a broken sword I picked somewhere, I got killed by a two-handed sword wielding motherfucker at a roof platformin 2 hits. All the progress through the window. FUCK.
And what am I spposed to fight with when both the 2 decents swords and 1 half-decent swords can't make it to the next bonfire? Am I fighting that wrong or wtf?

Also it would have been nice if they had made someone check the key bindings for PC, I refuse to believe they were not just assigned by random number generator and anyone looked at them and was satisfied. Plus the double-click disabling option didn't even work for me, but I got that sorted out with AHK.

I haven't played the previous titles obviously, btw.

How have you managed to break swords? I think that only happened to me when something spewed acid on me!

You can buy repair powder, but I thought weapon durability reset at bonfires.

Don't forget that you don't have to fight everything, especially once you've gone through an area several times - just run, roll, run some more, hide up a ladder or whatever, just dodge and run past.

This post has been edited by Traveller: 30 January 2017 - 12:16 AM

[CowboyYojimbo]

I finally checked out Final Fantasy XIII, and holy it's worse than I feared!
I really hope Mistwalker gets back on their feet...

[Itwæs Nom]

Traveller, on 30 January 2017 - 12:16 AM, said:

Itwæs Nom, on 28 January 2017 - 07:18 PM, said:

Dark Souls 2.

I've just spent around half an hour trying to make my way through the first fucking location, I nearly broke three swords and was forced to fight with a broken sword I picked somewhere, I got killed by a two-handed sword wielding motherfucker at a roof platformin 2 hits. All the progress through the window. FUCK.
And what am I spposed to fight with when both the 2 decents swords and 1 half-decent swords can't make it to the next bonfire? Am I fighting that wrong or wtf?

Also it would have been nice if they had made someone check the key bindings for PC, I refuse to believe they were not just assigned by random number generator and anyone looked at them and was satisfied. Plus the double-click disabling option didn't even work for me, but I got that sorted out with AHK.

I haven't played the previous titles obviously, btw.

How have you managed to break swords? I think that only happened to me when something spewed acid on me!

You can buy repair powder, but I thought weapon durability reset at bonfires.

Don't forget that you don't have to fight everything, especially once you've gone through an area several times - just run, roll, run some more, hide up a ladder or whatever, just dodge and run past.

I hadn't let them actually break, I'd stopped using them just when they were about to run out of durability. They do reset at bonfires but I was unable to get there before running out of durability on all of my decent weapons.

Anyway dumped the knight I had initially created and got a swordsman instead and adapted "kill them before they can manage to even hit me" managed to get to the bonfire, did some research and got a rapier(and a backup one too), I haven't gotten much further but I've went through some of the places around and broke a wall leading to the bonfire that allows me to rest there and then go on to a more advance position and got some useful items along the way. I don't expect my tactics to work half-effectively for very long but I'm hoping I'll learn dodging better by that time.

Based on my encounter with some nasty pigs in Majula I thought the enemies won't leave me alone unless I go rest at a bonfire or get to some place that they can't reach, yeah I guess the bigger ones can't climb the ladders. Thanks.

By now I've also used over half(yeah really, I think it's around ten now) of the lifegems I had by pressing e neraly everytime I want to access the inventory, I'm an idiot.

And I'm terrible at the game but it can be fun.

Also my dad got xbone for Christmas and I got Dishobored2 but save for short periods of time playing FIFA or NHL high I've never played with a controller and the way I was forced to play with the controller is rather boring compared to the fast-paced action way I'd play on computer at sone places, and the combat effectiveness specifically... And I was learning waay too slow with the controller so put that off for some time and when an opportunity occurs I'll get Witcher 3 to play on xbone.

[amphibian]

You might want to use a controller for Dark Souls. And see if there's a patch/update available. The weapon durability thing is a mechanic that ended up being bugged, so a patch was released in 2015 or early 2016.

If no patch is available, play the first game (very cheap) and see how you like that. I like them all, but DS2 is the least amazing to me.

[amphibian]

In Dark Souls 2, most of the enemies disappear after being killed a certain amount of times (10x I think). It's an anti "stalling" mechanic that sorta works.