What are you currently playing?

[Thorgi Duke of Frisbee]

Mark of the Ninja. Awesome, awesome game.

[deanb]

Last Remnant. Again. I'm now where I last was, but I've obviously skipped some of the side-quests or forgotten bits because I carry on hitting points where I think I'm caught up then something else happens and I'm like "wait no I did this part before too". It's good and I'm intrigued to follow along with the story(though it occasionally jumps n lurches about n takes a while to follow what's going on again), but there's a ton of technical niggles with it (Which thankfully a few will go as n when I can fully man my squads, as it stands I'm still at the stages of hitting new parts of the game and getting access to being able to use like 3 more soldiers at a time). I'd say my main issues that won't ever go away is you have no access to an area map until you've found the map of the area, so even places you've walked along and explored don't count; you can only open the map once you've got the whole thing. Made this one area, subtitled "forest of illusions" and PITA to navigate as it was kind of structured a bit fractally.

[P4: Gritty Reboot]

Still slowly working through Black Mesa. The part where you reach the surface and the military starts shelling you... man. So good. I am also playing through Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam, a great Wii game and one of the best of the Tony Hawk series. Nailing a 1.5 million point combo is bizarre fun. I really only started playing it again because my sons are obsessed with skateboards and always want me to play the "Skay-bee-board game".

[FredEffinChopin]

God, I'm halfway through something like 6-8 games right now. Sanctum, Black Mesa, Civ5 (though there is no real halfway there), Dungeon Defenders (this time on PC)... The past week though, has been all about NHL 12 and Dishonored.

 

Re: NHL 12

I don't know how anyone can go back to playing a team vs. team sport game after playing the solo career modes that most of them seem to include now. Maybe it's because I'm far more of a gamer than I am a sports guy (the stat growth/management is a decent part of the appeal), but it seems like THE way to play. Also, aside from the just straight up cool dynamic of being a single member that needs to play the role in his/her team effectively, I think that the mode is a great outlet for all those deep/complex control schemes that sports games have been lugging around for a while now. Being on the offense (in NHL) is a whole control scheme worth mastering in itself, rewarding for one who can get really good at pulling out all the moves reflexively. I'm barely learning the intricacies of it just playing "be a pro" mode; I imagine if I were playing team vs. team that I'd be trying so hard to learn the details for the controls in all the contexts that I'd never come close to mastering any. Anyway, I loved this mode in MLB The Show, and I think I like it even more here. It's close, though I think The Show is the slightly better game in a few ways.

 

Re: Dishonored

I just don't get it. It's good, I'm having a decent time with it, but I'm not being especially moved by it; not the the extent that its reception would indicate I should. Maybe I'm just too early in. I'm finding myself caring less and less about the story as I go on though, and while the gameplay is sort of fresh and refreshing, I'm not sure it's going to be enough to carry the experience for me for too long. We'll see. I'm not crazy about the character-design style either, nor the washed out colors (no matter what I do with the brightness it seems like there is a sheet of white on everything) of the game, though I dig the visual style otherwise. It's got stuff going on. I don't know...

[TheMightyEthan]

I think a large part of Dishonored's appeal is that it's something new in a sea of sequels, reboots and copycats.

[toxicitizen]

I'm currently playing through Dishonored as well and I am loving the hell out of it. The opening level didn't make much of an impression, but as soon as I started the first proper mission and started exploring, man I got really excited. This is a game I've been waiting a really long time to play. This is basically Thief in all but name.

 

Combat is a much more viable option in Dishonored, obviously. And some of those kill animations are just glorious. But the satisfaction that comes from sneaking around on rootfops, pickpocketing people's keys and coin, breaking into people's houses and emptying their safes, no kill will ever be more satisfying than that to me.

 

Earlier tonight, I was eavesdropping on two dudes. Then their conversation ended and they went their separate ways. I slowed down time, blinked behind one of them, snatched his house key and blinked right back to my hiding spot without being caught. How fucking awesome is that?!!?!

 

Also, on the first mission I was kind of stuck trying to find the combination to some guy's safe. I figured it would be like most games and the game would just tell me once I got it. Turns out I already had it from reading through the guy's notes, the game just didn't point it out to me. There are strong hints in your mission clues journal but you actually have to do some investigating for yourself. I fucking love it.

 

If it wasn't for XCOM having managed to suck around 80 hours out of me in less than three weeks, I'd already be calling Dishonored my favorite game of 2012.

[TheMightyEthan]

[fuchikoma]

I'm putting in crazy time to Forza Horizon lately. Sure, it has a lot of things that rub me the wrong way (like traffic, heh) but I can't deny that it has a firm hold on me. An unexpected perk of the open roads is that a lot of them have really twisty, hilly sections that undulate sharply, adding the challenge of being tossed into the air at higher speeds, or trying to corner but having your apparent weight reduced (it's fun landing an aerial drift on the road and nailing it without losing control...) Much different from the typical well-planned race track, even Laguna Seca or the Nurburgring. While it's a little annoying to have opponents use shortcuts, it's not really abused, and it's a nice change from the mainstream Forza series, where in many places if you run a little bit off-track, your car is stopped by the Catcher's Mitt Of God, bleeding off 100km/h in 5 feet.

 

The music is... IMO... terrible, but like others in the series, there's no problem with using your own. You can even skip both company logos at the start of the game, where on Turn10's Forzas, you must see and hear their logo every time it starts up.

Edited November 8, 2012 by fuchikoma

[Saturnine Tenshi]

I'm on the final boss in Mugen Souls, but I think I may just give up. There's this asinine game mechanic that keeps killing me in one hit. My own ability.

[Mal]

Beginning pains... killing people so slow. Then again, in Dynasty Warriors, everybody is the same as well. Then late game they'll tear through everything.

Also, they made Rei look so badass, which he is. His legend will never die! Edited November 9, 2012 by MaliciousH

[Saturnine Tenshi]

Cherry Tree High Comedy Club for review (also fun).

[Hot Heart]

Did the first couple of levels of Halo 4. Getting a real nice Halo 1 and 2 vibe so far.

[TheMightyEthan]

AC3 since it's FINALLY OUT ON THE GODDAMNED PC!

 

Also New Super Mario Bros. U and Nintendoland. Really digging both of them. The Pikmin game in Nintendoland is especially fantastic. If there was a full-length version of just that game I would buy it without hesitation.

[toxicitizen]

AC3 since it's FINALLY OUT ON THE GODDAMNED PC!

 

Have you been experiencing any kind of graphical glitches? I just gave it a shot as well and right at the beginning I'm getting these weird colors in the characters' hair, like the light reflecting on them isn't rendering properly or something. So Desmond ends up with red and purple patches in his hair. It's kind of annoying.

 

I'm downloading the beta driver, hopefully that'll fix it. But I did some quick googling and can't seem to find anything about it, so I was curious.

[TheMightyEthan]

I'm not having anything in this game, but I've seen exactly what you're describing in other games before and sometimes turning down/off the anti-aliasing will help it.

[toxicitizen]

No such luck. Neither the beta driver or tweaking the settings fixed it.

[deanb]

I've being playing Puzzle Quest 2 on my phone again. It's good, I played a crap ton of the first on my PSP, and it's a game well suited to the touch controls over having buttons. There's nothing too deep to the story but there is one. Main gameplay is in the battle system, and there's a fair few unique battle types (I hate looting though, you end up with the advancing wall eating sooo many treasure chests :/)

 

And in the similar vein started on Runespell the other week which plays out pretty similar to the original Puzzle Quest, but you're using cards and aligning poker sets instead of gems. Which also means the gameplay is much more simplistic. Unlike Puzzle quest where your special attacks requirei certain amountso f gems, with Runespell you build up MP(or whatever) by completing card sets, and then your special powers just have a certain amount of MP to use, nothing like "double Daggers: Requires Two Pair" "Dragons Breath: Full House" or something like that.

[fuchikoma]

Rocksmith! I got the guitar bundle, but the guitar was badly defective - it slipped out of tune every 3 minutes or so, and man it hurt my fingers using the frets, but that's normal for newbies, right? All the fret exercises were trial and error since it never accepted the one I was holding down. So I read up on it and did some troubleshooting - tune the intonation! ...can't really do that on this guitar... not per string anyway. Adjust the action - the strings should be about 5/64" over the 12th fret... mine are... 31/64"! Oh hey, what's this... the neck is leaning forward from the body and the screw holes that should hold it on are all slack! That's no good...

 

So after letting my numb index finger heal for a couple days, I went and returned it, kept the software and got an Epiphone SG Special. Much better! Nice tone. More features. Significantly lighter too. It set me back about $210 (CAD), where the Rocksmith bundle was $200 - $80 for the software, leaving about $120 of that for the Epiphone Les Paul Jr that it came with. Still, it was the cheapest electric with humbucker pickups I could find, and really about as little as you could spend on an electric guitar with a straight face it seems. Reviews I've found roundly praise it as an entry-level unit and I'm certainly not advanced enough to take issue with it! The only advice I'd add for someone taking the same route is to get a leather, not nylon strap, since whenever I reach for my PS3 controller to navigate menus and skip prompts, my guitar twists down and the nylon strap rubs on my neck because it's so low friction.

 

The game? Great so far! It doesn't allow a lot of room for fiddling with the basics (though you can specifically tell it to give you basic drills again and again, it prefers to run you through a bunch of simple versions of songs and ratchet up the difficulty as soon as you get the hang of it.) The difficulty creep is a good confidence builder at times and would be good to keep perfectionists from getting complacent with easy drills. My only problem so far is that I've received some really crappy scores for not doing things that it hasn't explained anywhere yet. I just played a song with 96% accuracy and got about 6000 points out of 100,000, probably because I didn't line-with-an-X-though-it enough. No promises, but when I get more proficient I might even try penning a more in depth review for the site.

 

For some background, I figured investing in this wouldn't be a bad idea since I love rhythm games. I got into Pop'n Music 3 around 1999 and soon after, the early Beatmania (or technically, "beatmania") games, which I kinda hated until I found Beatmania: Best Hits. I played those pretty regularly up through about Beatmania IIDX: 14th style. I love Pentavision's DJ Max PSP games and have all 5 Korean releases (I once pulled off a 15,000 note combo across several songs...) I haven't totally beat, but have made it far in Gitaroo Man, and Hatsune Miku: Project Diva. Most other games like Space Channel 5 1&2, Bust A Move 1&2, Parappa the Rapper, Puyo Puyo DA! etc are all fun, but pretty easy with that background. More recently, I beat the great multi-DDR dungeon indie game "Sequence" in about a week on normal mode. So in other words, I'm a music game nut and not too likely to drop Rocksmith unless I master it - and if I do? Mission accomplished! (For now though, I'm quite the guitar noob... but still surprised how quickly I've progressed just trying what Rocksmith throws at me!)

[jayc4life]

I'm a guitar noob too, and Rocksmith piqued my interest as a sorta "learning tool+" investment. I learned how to read tabs and stuff long before I ever got a guitar, so kinda taught myself how to go from there to actually playing the music. I'm not terrible, but I'm still below average, I'd guess. Might pick it up next year if there's a lull window for quality games coming out (unlikely with the phenomenal Q1 coming up next year).

 

EDIT: I just finished Pokémon Conquest on the DS. It's gone from rank outsider to damn-near-if-not GOTY for me. I shit you not, it's awesome. Only finished the main story, but there's a megaton of New Game+ content to keep me going for a long time yet.

Edited November 22, 2012 by jayc4life

[fuchikoma]

Cool. Well, I hope you can get your money's worth out of it at least! I love the idea of RS, I'm just surprised it appears to work as well as they'd hoped (and really surprised they have the original sound tracks for their licensed songs, where even Guitar Hero didn't!)

 

I never learned to read tabs (though I flipped my in-game string display to prepare to learn them,) but sorta fiddled with my mom's acoustic guitar as a kid and learned a really simple song or two from a book, then put it away... but over the years, I've found when it comes to games that involve a concise challenge, mastering a technique with lots of depth to it, I can sink endless hours into it. When I had Raptr on here, some may have noticed I sink a sick number of hours into the Forza games - for that same reason - clear objective, but endless room to improve. So I figure dropping a console's worth of cash on guitar stuff should not go to waste, at least for me. I've always wanted to master an instrument, but have merely been a beginner in a handful of them so far.

[Mercurial]

Started playing DOTA 2 I RUN LIKE A CLOCK

[Cyber Rat]

Mark of the Ninja. Might get flack for comparing the two, but I think it's a better stealth game than Dishonored.

[Hot Heart]

Speaking of stealth games, I've been playing some Assassin's Creed III (LOL!).

 

Seriously, though, I just punished myself by doing a mission over and over to get full sync. But I did it and it felt so good...to go back to the mission area afterwards and kill every single one of those bastards.

[TCP]

At one point I just had to say "fuck it" to the AC3 full sync. However, Liberation, so far, has had really easy full syncs... most of the time I'd get it without even trying. Except for the one where you have to tilt the Vita to nudge the ball throw a maze and into a hole. That was singlehandedly my worst gaming experience of 2012. A tip to developers NO ONE, wants to do those types of minigames. No one wants to hold their system up to a bright light to solve a puzzle. I've had to do that in two separate games, and guess what, BOTH times there was no bright light near me. Using the touch screen to access menus, or gently moving the system to tweak aiming (like in Uncharted Golden Abyss) is fine. But shoe horning game mechanics that have no place in the game is BULLSHIT. FUCK!!! I need to go cool down.

[Hot Heart]

Yeah, I ignored one about avoiding damage from a firing line because that one seemed ridiculous when it came to being able to grab a guy to use as a shield. Combat was a complete clusterfuck with everyone in redcoats anyway...