General Gaming Megathread: What are you playing?

I don't remove them I installed mods that improves dragon combat, altho with the rather bad combat system there is not much you can do to make the fights be anything other than whailing on a flying hit sponge. Still skyrim is for like short sessions every 3 months, I think I made a mistake by installing Skre and the apocalypse spells mod because I sometimes get one shot out of nowhere by random magic despite being covered in heavy armor with a bunch of perks.
 
Speaking of which, I'm currently wandering Skyrim on the PlayStation 3 with a Khajiit warrior as my main character. It's a great game.

 
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And you are playing on ps3, I think you are inmune to torture or blind if not even the worse version of the game seems bad to you.
 
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TorontRayne said:
SnapSlav said:
Call it what you want, be it correction or clarification (which is why I used quotation marks to denote it as a title), it was still a prudent note. I think it's of vital importance that no matter how good mods can be, we ought to be diligent in snuffing out even the smallest opportunity of misrepresenting that a game that's shit is anything else but shit just because we love its mods. After all, who here actually LIKES the Arma series, itself? DayZ is the shit, but that doesn't mean the game it mods it any good. XD

It wasn't meant to be an insult, so please stop taking my comments as one. Prudence, nothing more.
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It wouldn't be an issue if you hadn't told me the very same thing before on a different occasion where I said something similar. Then it just seems like "correcting" for the sake of "correcting" yet again. Seems like one of those preaching to the choir situations around here anyway. I took no great offense by your comment, but I feel like this conversation has happened before, hence my rather coarse tone so to speak.... :)

Mods are pretty much the saving grace of the Elder Scrolls and now Fallout series. If not for the mods the games wouldn't do as well. That is all I mean by my comments. You take around 60% of the problems that many have with some of these games and you can mod that shit out of it. Don't feel like the Civil War in Skyrim had enough troops to be considered a Civil War? There is a mod that fixes that and not only does that, but adds numerous conflicts all around Skyrim. Don't like how the Dragons are portrayed? Well you have dozens of mods changing everything about the damn things. Not hardcore enough? There is a mod for it. They dumbed down the RPG aspects of the game? Mod for it. Think it's stupid that you can run around naked and not freeze to death? Mod for it. Didn't like how the Vampires were portrayed? You get the point...

With Bethesda games it has gotten to the point where if you have a complaint about the game, someone probably made a mod to fix it. Yes, I hear you, they shouldn't have to let modders do their work. I don't think anyone thinks otherwise besides the developers, who will sell the game like hotcakes, even if one hit from a giant in Skyrim will catapult your character into the stratosphere. The fans eat that shit up!

"Hahaha the bugs are half the fun they say!"

Prudent indeed but the ones who need to hear this info don't give two shits about it. They are the same ones who accept bugged, half ass, hiking simulators and call them the best RPG ever. The ones who do care are the ones actually modding the game to make it better. Fixing the shit that drags the game down. Few can argue that Skyrim holds some value in many respects. Bethesda does have talent. They just aren't very good at telling stories and they release buggier games than Obsidian does. Granted I say all of this and I can't really stand to play Skyrim even with mods, but that has more to do with the setting than anything else. With the right mods it is a decent RPG...barely.
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Well you hit the nail on the head (in the bolded section) that the target audience for my comments were those who wouldn't care to begin with... i.e. not you. Which is one of the communication errors I'm well aware of, after the fact, though I missed when I was typing it. It's a prudent note citing a comment you made, not directed at you, which I failed to specify.

But human beings are creature of habit, so it's important to note what habits specific individuals tend to indulge. Even if history as a guide tells us that certain behaviors are futile, we're still destined to indulge in them if they are in our habits to do so. I am compelled to scrutinize every tiny little detail, regardless of being covered previously or not, if the present information invites the possibility of misunderstanding to an unwitting stranger to the topic. I will invariably indulge in the habit of slapping on a disclaimer that the frequenters of such discussions are more than aware of on behalf of those who might be oblivious. It's just in my nature.

As for those types that couldn't care less either way, and not only that but DELIGHT in a game's shittiness... I've met those types before, and they confound me to this day. We tried to conduct many discussions on WHY they liked certain things, unironically, because of their badness, and we simply never understood each other. I never came to understand why they loved their certain shitty things because they were shit, and they never came to understand why I couldn't enjoy shit the same way they did. I suppose I just hold out hope that, were I to come across someone who seems to be that type, that they weren't that type and would be open to discovering something better.

In other news...
SnapSlav said:
On the plus side, I did some calculations and I should easily net a spot in the top 20 players worldwide on my current Very Hard run on NGS! =D That beats my #60 on Hard by leaps and bounds, and I am extremely thrilled about that. Just gotta get past 2 particularly painfully tedious (and patience-killing) sections and I'm more or less home free! =D
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Well, I made it past the first of the 2 "painfully tedious" sections a few days ago, and now I'm facing the second, and final one. This is NOT the end of the game, so once I FINALLY beat it, it's all downhill and smooth sailing from here! But WOW is it a killer of a brutally nasty, irritatingly joy-killing, meticulous, finicky bastard of a section! I find it weird that Hard and Very Hard have some of THE toughest aspects of the game, and the top difficulty is arguably easier in those specific regards. Harder overall, but more forgiving in those particulars... Well anyway, I've been slaving away at this final frustrating section for the past day, with very little progress to speak of... I will be fucking overjoyed when I surpass it! ~_~

EDIT: YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Oh, I finally passed that section, with under a minute on the clock to spare. Ran out of all my healing items with more than 30% of the trouble left to go, so it was a really tense moment. Now it's finally over, and I can look forward to the rest of the game being much less frustrating! ^_^ It'll still take me several more days to beat this run with satisfactory results, but NOTHING will push me as much as this last battle I had to tackle. That was a helluva thing. It was hours ago and I still feel so happy and relaxed now that it's over... So happy right now.
 
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Currently going through The Evil Within for the 3rd time after small break of playing. Not because I got tired of the game, mostly because I've just been busy. Really hoping for a patch that fixes some of the performance issues sometime soon, and maybe giving the player some i-frames when throwing matches, but otherwise been loving this game.

The lack of i-frames aren't that much of a problem on Survivor (Normal) but on AKUMU it's a nightmare where I have to be extra careful when using matches while a group of enemies are nearby. I wish that they had developed AKUMU mode a little bit better because certain sections don't seem to have been well thought out with the idea of one-hit kills in mind. I've only made it to chapter 7, but ch 6 easily has to be one of the worse areas to do on AKUMU. Waves of enemies in an enclosed space waiting for your partner to open the door? Fucking brutal. I've heard that was the worst section to do in the whole game, and I sure hope so. Next couple of sections weren't as bad, but as a whole ch 6 was brutal.
 
If there was a game out of staring at that avatar, I would be playing it right now... Seriously, I can't get enough out of that giggle loop! SO MOE!!!!! ^^
 
Wasteland 2 and Planescape Torment. I only have time to play on the weekends so I go slowly, I'm still in Arizona in Wasteland 2. I plan to play NWN 2 Mask of the Betrayer, and I also plan to someday finish both Baldur's Gate 2 and Throne of Bhaal (never managed to finish ToB). I bought Deus Ex on GoG yesterday, but that's way down on my list.
 
Make certain that you play through Baldur's Gate first, and import your party ~else you miss the best Fallout easter egg ever devised.

*It requires that your party import with an item from the Friendly Arm Inn.

** BG2 is outstanding.
 
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Gizmojunk said:
Make certain that you play through Baldur's Gate first, and import your party ~else you miss the best Fallout easter egg ever devised.

*It requires that your party import with an item from the Friendly Arm Inn.

** BG2 is outstanding.
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I would rather have someone spoil me than fully play those two games...:look:
 
Zelda hype.




In other news Bayonetta 2 rocked. A whole new level of badass. Devil May Cry eat your heart out. If you own a Wii U you must buy it. So all two of you go and pick a copy up.
 
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Speaking of B2, ANOTHER friends asked me if I'd gotten it "yet" purely because I was celebrating my #10 in the world placement on the NGS leaderboards... XD
If NOTHING else, having the outspoken resolution to never ever buy a Wii U should tip these people off.... it ain't happening!

I did enjoy Yahtzee's review of the game, though. His biggest criticism is that including the original with the game underlined too prominently that "it's more Bayonetta". Jim Sterling applauded how deliberately bad it was, because it didn't care, and he loved it for its self-aware absurdity, and if I remember correctly his biggest qualm was the voice acting. Everyone's got different takes on the game, different likes, different nitpicks, which I find interesting.
 
Bayonetta's appeal comes from everything else besides the story. The gameplay is top notch imo. I'll stick by that assessment. They really nailed the combat in this series.
 
It's all part of the same great blob of peripherals, to me. Just like "graphics" can be easy to dismiss in importance, as long as the core game is good, when in fact GOOD graphics stand only to make a good game better, I like it when a game that has great gameplay and graphics also has a great story. Not necessarily riveting, but enjoyable. Doom's story really was just an excuse to explain what that mess of a thing was ("mess" in the good, thrillingly hectic sense) and why you should care, assuming you needed a reason. It was simple, it wasn't great, but it worked, and its simplicity made it fairly air-tight to the ages. There wasn't much room to make lofty criticism of ludonarrative dissonance or schizophrenic plot beats or plot contradictions, because the story was just premise, and nothing else. The rest was the game you played. In some ways, it's the same with Portal and its story, though as with much of Valve's works, "story" was embedded throughout the game in Easter Egg type fashion, so that the game could have been played for its gameplay, or it could have been explored for user-driven exposition and optional storytelling. Demon's Souls and Dark Souls did the same, with the game being driven by story in a sense, but largely left to the devices of the player to enjoy at their leisure. If one were to pursue the lore behind the scenes, one would find a wealth of color to the world of your exploration, and I adored it for that.

In stark contrast, David Cage's work is often lambasted for fixating STRICTLY on story, and tangling it within a game that has ergonomically-challenged button layouts and mind-numbingly repetitive and inconsistent QTEs to make up the mainstay of a game that otherwise lacks traditional "gameplay" in any typical sense. Somewhere between these two extremes is where I enjoy games the most!

I like that Ninja Gaiden has a solid story. It's nothing special. It's not particularly amazing. The twist at the end isn't much of a revelation. The game stands on its gameplay, and the graphics were superb for the time in which each iteration was crafted. The story was just kinda "there", but it worked, and that's what I liked about it. It was better than Doom's, not quite as complex nor remotely mind-fucking as Portal's. But I can't say the same for its sequels. Each subsequent title just added more bullshit and contradictions to the story. The nits you could pick with NG2 or NGS2 rivals that of FO3's nitpicking potential, and that's saying a lot! Gameplay wise, the first sequel added improvements but, depending on taste, took out some things you'd like, as well. It's the sum total of things that's why I prefer the first game over its sequel. It's just "better" overall.

Similarly (and again, predictably, given it's Valve we're talking about) Dota2's story is there, but largely hidden unless you decide to go looking for it. Each playable hero has a backstory, and even NPCs (which you won't even notice, unless you pay close attention) have a tale behind the scenes! It's all there, and it can be found in a variety of ways. You can learn about the relationship between Kunkka and Leviathan based on their dialog when they encounter each other in the game, both as enemies and as allies. You can learn secrets about the Arsenal Magus, the Invoker, if you successfully trigger a rare line of dialog. You can learn things about Leshrac's past and his traumas by repeatedly clicking him and learning his insights. There's such an absurd abundance of rich story in Dota2, but you wouldn't know it from simply playing the game. The game is meant to stand on a firm foundation of superb gameplay and night-flawless balancing. But Valve went the extra mile and made sure not to overlook that little extra flare in the game's story.

I don't know of any games that I've played (much less enjoyed) that were on the level of "nothing but story, fuck all the rest" like what Heavy Rain and its spiritual successors/predecessors were criticized for. Although I WAS interested in picking up HR, and simply never got around to it on account of losing my job around the time it came out, and avoiding its purchase for the sake of having something to eat. But now that I've got steady income once more, I ponder about getting it, years later. (I've managed to keep myself unspoiled, all this time! XD) But I do wonder how it will feel, if I were to find all those criticisms of the game turn out quite true. If it feels truly boring or if some of the scenes just feel like a drag or if its focus on story was wasted. If I pick it up, I suppose time shall tell.

I find it appropriate when they say these things are "only icing", because it's true! If all you eat is icing, you'll make yourself sick. But if you savor a delicious cake, good icing will only enhance the experience! By all accounts, Bayonetta's gameplay should be no different than ANY other game: it should be the foundation of that cake, the deliciousness that you savor. If the gameplay wasn't fantastic, it would deserve little in the way of praise. But icing shouldn't just be dismissed as totally optional. It should make the experience better. According to Jim Sterling, its story is delightfully ridiculous, and so assured of itself that he's totally along for the ride. It accomplished immersion in its own way, for him, in a very convincing fashion, and it was through the world and the character of the game, not just the gameplay. According to Yahtzee, he was just too distracted by Bayonetta's impossible and horrifying proportions (which I don't see, quite frankly; she looks good to me) to notice anything other than the gameplay, and he couldn't decide if it was his experiences with Dark Souls having refined his abilities or if B2 was simply toned down in difficulty from the prequel because he scored so much more consistently better in the game than the previous. According to others- I forget who, exactly -it's a thrill of a ride and it's not about the story. Sounds good. Just sounds like a cake that goes easy on the icing. =)
 
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