Discussion What are you currently playing? (Week 30 of 2024)

[Cacher]

New week, new thread! What are you playing?

I finished One Piece Odyssey last week. Going to take a short break from gaming for a while so I am leaving the thread to fellow Councilors! Have fun.

 

[Lashley]

Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous

First time too!

 

[curi0usBystander]

Crash 4: finished the main story I'll try to 100% 106% really the game but I don't think i will the time relics seem insanely hard.

 

[Stevey]

Picked up Diablo 4 again after not playing since the start of the season.

 

[Li Kao]

Nothing. Still in my post game depression after finishing Star Ocean First Departure R.
I'm throwing random shit at the wall hoping something sticks.

Like, I kinda wanted to play FF13 for the first time. But it will more probably be Star Ocean Second Story R.

 

[Parsnip]

Started playing Souldiers. Digging it so far.

 

[Nabs]

I'm playing Neon White and The Big Catch: Tacklebox.

Neon White is incredible. Well, the gameplay is incredible. I can't stand anything else. But man, the gameplay. The game is super fluid and fun.

The Big Catch is also incredible. The main issue with this game is it's really hard. It's going to force a lot of people to drop it early on, but if you stick with it you'll be rewarded with one of the best platformers of the year. Maybe the best. It's also free, which makes no sense to me, but I'll take it. I just hope they can make wall running a little less finicky. I'm getting the hang of it now, but it took a lot of falling.

 

[Li Kao]

Ok, so I started Final Fantasy 1 Pixel Remaster in the optic of replaying more or less every FF.
OCD thing. Annoying thing too, as I played 1-2 several times already.

The good news is that the weak shading on the sprites is a non story, at least on the Deck. It's a very nice looking retro JRPG.

The bad news is that Square being Square, their remaster is half assed. Shocking.
There is an insufferable amount of random encounters, and instead of actually giving us real QOL features like a fast forward during combat (nope) there is just a button to turn off encounters altogether. Weak.
In the same Square way, there is an auto battle button, which... doesn't really auto-battle, at least in my view. It's a repeat the last moves buttons. There is a difference to me, who several times pushed the button to expedite a fight and saw my characters either flee or use magic like morons.
You also can't run on the world map and the mini map is only 'over' sizable on said world map, not in dungeons. Which, on Deck, is not ideal.

But hey, it's FF1. It's shiny enough. You know what you get if yo have played it already. I just could have done with a little more love given to the remaster.

 

[Alexandros]

Jedi Fallen Order. It is a cool game (and much closer to the spirit of Star Wars than most of the recent films and shows) and it mostly runs well but Unreal Engine's traversal stutter is pretty brutal and it spoils the overall impression a bit. I hear that Jedi Survivor is way worse so I'm not going to buy that game even though I would be interested in it. Maybe in the far future once I can brute force my way to smoother gameplay.

 

[Mivey]

Still the same as last week, Trails Through Daybreak. Now in Chapter 3. Seems my rate of progress is pretty much one chapter a week. Still having fun, the party roster is slowly growing and we get to explore new areas of Calvard. I really dig the slow build up that first games in a new Trails arc have and Daybreak is pulling it of pretty well so far.

Also playing a bit A Plague Tale Requiem. I kinda gave up on trying to play the action combat sequences that this game introduces. They just aren't fun and the game refused to implement action the way you want expect in an action game. Luckily there's an option to enable invincibility to skip these terrible sequences. I appreciate when developers understand their limitations and don't force me to keep replaying the same nonsense. I will say I will probably reduce my view of this sequel pretty harshly based on these sequences. They just don't fit well with what the game is going for. It's one thing for these to happen in a couple dramatic story moments, but it's just way too often and at that point you need to design the game around making combat fun, and it isn't, it's hard to control, slow and just incompetent. I'm sure in their minds it's all to increase "immersion", but it's hardly immersive when I'm fighting the game instead of playing it. Really dumb-ass move. Well, at least the story itself continues to be interesting. I kinda hope the little brother turns full super hero/ super monster, by the end of this one and gets full control of his rat powers. That probably won't happen, but it's what keeping me going.

 

[Arc]

I finished the third stage of Kunitsu-Gami. I don't have much to say except the centipede boss kicked my butt several times and I'm enjoying what I've seen so far.

I've also been playing a bit of Team Fortress 2 due to the summer update and Valve getting rid of cheater bots (for now).

 

[spiel]

Started on Black Book

Narrative deck builder sounds like a weird combination, but I'm digging the mechanics and the dark tones. I'm playing in the original dubs with English subtitles which makes it 1000% better.

 

[didamangi]

Really enjoying Okami HD now. After turning the voice volume down, it's becoming a pretty cozy and fun Wolf Zelda adventure. With Issun getting a lot less annoying and I can hear more of the fantastic music as well.

While the port is bad in terms of locked 30 fps, at least the game runs at a stable frametime without stuttering or crashes. With the patches to remove ghosting and grain effect plus Lossless Scaling, I'm having a lot of fun. Valve has just fixed the celestial brush and fishing minigame not working in Steam beta as well.

 

[Durante]

I'm still playing Troubleshooter: Abandoned Children. There's a lot of game here, and despite the mediocre translation and writing, the character focus makes it much easier for me to stay invested than X-COM likes with less of a story/character focus. Also, the systems are really coming together now that I understand more about how masteries work and can be combined (that one of the main UIs for it is one of the worst examples of localization doesn't help!).