2017 VIDEO GAME CATCH-ALL THREAD

[JonnyLaw]

I just unlocked NXT era Dean Ambrose and his finisher, the "Moxcutter."

This game has potential for that sort of stuff alone.  

[RIPPA]

I spent the time of poking into those limited time battles

Was not ready for that

[JonnyLaw]

I've done a couple of those.  I've decided I'll keep playing this at least until I unlock the eventual Handsome Rusev.

[RIPPA]

If it keeps making me fight Dolph Ziggler as Seth Rollins - I'm uninstalling it

[J.T.]

Finished the campaign mode of Gears of War 4.  Now that I am done angsting over collectables, I can play through it again and pay attention to the minor story details.

The kaiju big battel at the end was pretty awesome.  I like overwhelming firepower when it is on my side.

The ending left me a little misty and it took a while for the reveal to sink in.

Spoiler

Myrrah, the deceased queen of the Locust is Kait's grandmother.  I am going to end up blowing Kait's brains out later on, right?

I'm playing a little Horde mode to prep me for ME: Andromeda co-op.  My run and gun is pretty rusty.

[Chaos]

The complaint I've heard about Gears 4 is that the ending felt a little Halo 2ish in that it didn't have the feeling of an installment ending.

[Michael Sweetser]

Seriously, how great is the SHAREFactory GIF maker?

[odessasteps]

Pinball Arcade just released a nuWho table to go along with the Classic Who one from a few months ago. 

 

[J.T.]

13 hours ago, Chaos said:

The complaint I've heard about Gears 4 is that the ending felt a little Halo 2ish in that it didn't have the feeling of an installment ending.

Yeah, the game ends on a cliffhanger and I hate that.

I unlocked the Rare Achievement for surviving 30 waves in Horde mode on any difficulty. No wonder so few players get it.

I have come to the conclusion that I was spoiled by Mass Effect 3 co-op.  There are far more people doing dumb things in GoW4 multiplayer than you could ever imagine and the early quit rate is infuriating.

[Michael Sweetser]

I'm surprised there hasn't been any kind of informal study into certain FPS games to try to correlate game type, age brackets, skill levels, etc.  Then again, it sounds like far too big an undertaking and I'm sure they'd just get insulted the whole time.

"Subject was inundated with hundreds, if not thousands, of insults regarding Subject's mother's promiscuity."

[Cliff Hanger]

16 hours ago, odessasteps said:

Pinball Arcade just released a nuWho table to go along with the Classic Who one from a few months ago. 

 

I thought that came out last month; iirc it's all the same target placements etc as the original, just with new art and sounds. Been meaning to snag it but $10 for one table is hard to justify now, even as I know why it's that much.

[odessasteps]

I had played it in a while but i just got the new newsletter hyping it, so it must be somewhat new.

[J.T.]

Still playing GoW4 Horde mode..  It is pretty fun when you get players that aren't screwing around.

I am pleased to report that I no longer suck with the Dropshot.  Matter of fact, I unlocked the Rare Achievement for getting 3 headshots with the Dropshot.

Figured out that it works on the same principle as the EMBAR (ie. it works like a "charged" weapon, so you hold and release RT instead of rapid fire like a normal gun) so I had to just figure out the timing on when to let go of RT and drop the bomb on fools.

I'm not brave enough to play Versus mode yet as the skill cards for my classes are shit and none of them are above Rank 5 let alone Rank 10, so I don't have the extra card slots for additional special abilities like higher ranked players.

[Cliff Hanger]

Double Dragon II part 2: The Budget Release

 

Man, less than a year after River City Tokyo Rumble, this is really disappointing.  How the fuck does a game built on NES sprites have screen tearing? Why are there no throw/hairpull moves? Why are the two Yakuza women who run the Renegades' Japan operations and talk about never having been to the US named Casey and Shannon? Why does Burnov disappear when you've beaten him, but never done his "oh shit" disappear-and-reappear gimmick?

[Ryan]

Because the people making it may not speak English and the people that do don't give a shit and didn't use any quality assurance. AKA, a lot of apps.

[J.T.]

Okay, so this Horde bullshit really does sorta work like ME3 co-op.  I earn "credits" in co-op after successful completions of waves.

I can use those credits to "buy" cards that I can use to upgrade my class skills or customize my toons.  I also get a chance to get bounty cards that give me extra XP or extra credits if I beat certain challenges like survive 20 waves while playing a certain class and other bullshit.

My Scout is Level 5 now, so I have three card slots I can use to augment my abilities.  Since my role is battlefield scavenger (ie. the object of Horde is to kill enemies to get "power" that you can convert into barriers and other items that give you better control of the map).

Since the Scout class favors run and gun tactics, I opt for skill cards that boost my max health, shotgun damage, and add a bonus to the power icons I collect.

I have already gotten friend requests from players for simply not leaving them in the lurch in the middle of a firefight.  GoW4 has put penalties in place to punish early quitters in Versus mode, but there is nothing to stop players from stranding their teams in Horde mode right now.

[Michael Sweetser]

Man.  Sleeping Dogs was well worth the five bucks I spent on it.  Trying the Year of the Snake now because I love the cop stuff.

Been thinking of trying Yakuza 0, since I've been meaning to get into the Yakuza series.

[Tromatagon]

Yakuza 0 is great and you'll like it

[Chaos]

1 hour ago, Tromatagon said:

Yakuza 0 is great and you'll like it

Is that a good starting point? I played one of the PS2 era ones back when I worked at Movie Gallery, but I honestly don't remember much about it.

I was listening to a podcast praise it earlier as well.

[Tromatagon]

It's a prequel to the first game, which is getting a HD remake later this year, so it's a good starting point - it's where I'm starting with the series.

[J.T.]

Ran into my first team killer while playing GoW4 Horde mode.  The dipshit kept pointing our defense turrets away from enemies in the middle of a wave and shifting our barriers around so that they wouldn't slow any advances.  I sent a pretty scalding PM to him after the team wiped on Wave 45 and the 2 remaining players rage quitted. 

The dummy was stupid enough to return my PM of "WTF were you messing with the defenses. dumbass?" with "lol i wuz bored!" and I promptly reported him..

I am more tolerant of quitters than I am of assholes that deliberately sabotage the game.

After four iterations of this game, I have FINALLY figured out how to plant grenade traps and how to properly perform Retro Lancer bayonet charges.  I am now that douchebag that grenade traps spawn areas for cheap kills.

I think my GoW4 career will come to an end after I reach Player Rank 50 and Scout Level 10.

[RIPPA]

Quitters became high on my report list when I started playing Overwatch since they actively hurt your competitive score/rank (since they don't get replaced mid-game)

[J.T.]

43 minutes ago, RIPPA said:

Quitters became high on my report list when I started playing Overwatch since they actively hurt your competitive score/rank (since they don't get replaced mid-game)

Horde Mode also does not replace quitters, but if you've got one or two players that are committed to the win you will usually make it past the 50 waves.  I'd rather players just quit and go away rather than sabotage the game for the people who want to survive the waves.

My first full 50 wave completion was done with three out of five players, but we had an amazing Engineer who constantly upgraded and built / repaired defenses during the intermissions and allowed me to do my Scout job of gathering the power ups for the fabricator.

The assholes that deliberately get themselves killed and AFK XP Spongers who die repeatedly don't really bother me because I can earn ribbons and extra XP by going on revive runs or full fledged corpse when you have to retrieve their CoG Tags and use the fabricator to bring them back to life.

If the active players get fed up with the sketchy player's bullshit and quit, I bail out too and leave the jerk to his own devices. 

I've gotten a couple of PMs from one or two AFK XP Spongers that suddenly want help with Horde mode (probably because they have a Survive 50 Waves bounty they want to complete) after they found out they were been abandoned.  I have yet to respond to those PMs.

[J.T.]

I unlocked the achievement for getting a Player Rank of 50 in GoW4 multiplayer yesterday.  My Scout is up to Rank 6.  There is an achievement for getting a class up to Rank 10 and another for getting at least five classes up to Rank 10.

I do not know if I have the patience to work my way towards the latter achievement, especially with ME Andromeda release day closing in.

My three open Scout class skill slots have maxed out green skills (+50% Fabricator Power Bonus, +100% Heatlh Bonus, and +100% Shotgun Damage) so I am pretty beast in a fight on Casual mode and Normal mode..

I am really tired of players quitting out because I am catching up to them in the point total. The point of Horde mode is to work as a team and survive.  It is not a fucking competition. 

I really don't care who has how many points so long as I get my bounty done and we ace the Challenge rounds and get the extra supply drops.

Speaking of Challenge rounds, I'm also tired of me being the only one trying to get executions, headshots, or bayonet / chanisaw kills during Challenge rounds.

I'm doubly tired of being the only player that cares about building and repairing defenses when the party does not have an Engineer..  No one wants to build, upgrade, repair / reload, or replace a fucking turret, but everyone wants to man it after it is up and running.

No one decides to build a sentry gun until they figure out that sentry kills go towards your kill count and the there are sentry guns all over the place and they end up getting blown to shit because the player that crafted it does not go back to repair it.

[Lamp, broken circa 1988]

I AM NOT GOING TO BEAT LA-MULANA - I did try it again, but put shortly, there was a speedrun of it on Awesome Games Done Quick that condensed a 60 hour game into a 1 hour 30 minute run. Having now had a whiff of what those 60 hours would include, I'm okay. I'll pass.

I SHOULD NOT HAVE REPLAYED FRACT OSC - FRACT was like the herald of the "LET'S DO RAD SHIT WITH THE MYST FORMULA" that the last few years have been full of  and better for. FRACT, for being early, has flaws that got ironed out by successive games, and I'm having a bad time with it as a result. But, I had to know, so now I know.

LARA CROFT GO [4] - This was almost a 3. The last large-scale world gets kind of unfun, but the rest of the game is just so clever and neat that, for the dollar i paid for it (shout out to unexpected sales) I had an overall great time with it. 

FAIRUNE 2 [3] - A better version of the same paper-thin dungeon crawler. It's a pretty neat idea of just like taking the Zelda formula and just making it as simple as is physically possible to focus as much on the weird caves and exploration parts of it. Kind of like an Inverse Dark Souls. Anyways, the best thing I can say about it is that the developer is moving to PC and PS4 for their next game and I'm likely going to be there day one.

QUADRILATERAL COWBOY [4] - I could talk about this game for a week straight. It's so good. It's so, so, so good. It's a heist puzzle game involving command prompts, with an entirely female cast and HEAVY cyberpunk weirdness. No one speaks a word and they establish bonds between characters stronger than any AAA game I've seen. Everything about it is just outstanding. It's also COMPLETELY impenetrable if every time you've ever seen a DOS prompt, you asked for help. Like the way that the game works (at the start) is that you're literally using telnet to manipulate physical objects around the world (doors, windows, laser grids) all in service of moving vaults. Then after each job they introduce new tech, and it gets more complicated. And then they triple up on tech, and it gets absurdly complicated, but never overwhelming and always thought-provoking. Fuck. This game is so goddamn good. This was probably the best game that came out last year. It's made me want to go back and play everything the developers have ever put out, so, that's probably going to happen.

just installed Fire Emblem Phonezies, and I also bought Monster Hunter Generations on sale from Amazon. So those, the next Hitman mission (this is my Saturday plan), and Dragon Quest 2 will probably be what come up next for me. Oh, and I'm getting in on For Honor to pay back a convoluted series of debts to a friend.