2018 VIDEO GAME CATCH-ALL THREAD

[Death From Above]

4 hours ago, Lamp, broken circa 1988 said:

just wait for the market to crash, craigslist will fill with video cards

I hear this but at the same time, your guess is as good as mine as to when that will be. A year? Two years? Nobody knows.

[Zimbra]

4 hours ago, Lamp, broken circa 1988 said:

just wait for the market to crash, craigslist will fill with video cards

Looks like lightly toasted GPUs are already showing up:

[Death From Above]

If you are paying $400 US for a used 1060 you are clearly irresponsible enough with money to justify buying one new.

[JLSigman]

20 hours ago, John E. Dynamite said:

PIcked up some used OG Xbox stuff - both Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliences for post-dinner co-op with the SO, the slept-on Crazy Taxi 3, and the disc to Shenmue II (I've had the case/manual/bonus DVD for ages, somehow).

Dark Alliances are really fun little hack and slash games. They're fairly short and linear, but it does what it says on the box which is all you need.

[Death From Above]

Kingdom Come: Deliverance launches with a day one, 23 GB patch.

 

lmao say what you will about games labelled Early Access on steam but at least they are honest about launching as beta state games. Why QA test your game at all when you can get a hundred thousand people to pay you $60-80 to test it themselves? There is increasingly no point in buying a major title on day one unless (1) you are streaming it as a source of income (2) the only appeal to you is the multiplayer and you want the biggest community possible.

[Andrew POE!]

2 hours ago, Death From Above said:

Kingdom Come: Deliverance launches with a day one, 23 GB patch.

 

lmao say what you will about games labelled Early Access on steam but at least they are honest about launching as beta state games. Why QA test your game at all when you can get a hundred thousand people to pay you $60-80 to test it themselves? There is increasingly no point in buying a major title on day one unless (1) you are streaming it as a source of income (2) the only appeal to you is the multiplayer and you want the biggest community possible.

Or you're a trophy hunting idiot. Even this game looks like garbage to me.

[Lamp, broken circa 1988]

also it's directed by a pro-gamergate sort so there's that

[Death From Above]

5 minutes ago, Lamp, broken circa 1988 said:

also it's directed by a pro-gamergate sort so there's that

I don't keep up with all that but that's good to know.

[SirSmUgly]

Some other games!

South Park: The Stick of Truth: I got this as a free download along with The Fractured But Whole, which was like 24 dollars with Best Buy's Gamers' Club Unlocked, so what the hell. It's a decent game, but it's a real bummer that Obsidian, a company that has made all-time great games like Fallout: New Vegas and KotoR II and Pillars of Eternity and made the best janky game of all time in Alpha Protocol, ended up making a solid, but really rudimentary-feeling RPG. It doesn't help that the game is filled with South Park-style "humor," which is, of course, sub-Seth MacFarlane garbage where Both Sides Are Bad and aborting fetuses is funny because it's sooooo edgy and such. But I mean, I played through the whole thing anyway because even Obsidian's subpar games are still fun to play. Still, Obsidian can do and often does much better work than this. I don't know if I'm going to make it through TFBW anytime soon. I'm on shitty humor overload. 

NBA 2K18: I got back into this because I could create the expansion Sonics. I thought about moving OKC back to its rightful city and name, but then I would have had to spend virtual time in Oklahoma, which, while not quite as dreadful a prospect as spending actual time there, still didn't seem fun to me. Anyway, the graphical downgrade is whatever on the Switch, but the gameplay is sooooooooo good and such. The stuff they did to give you options in the post or with your back to the basket alone blows my mind. The presentation is insanely elaborate, too. I have already dumped too many hours into this, especially because it's easy to play two quarters and put it down and then finish your game later. I was about to finish Celeste, but then I got sidetracked by this. 

I fired up Injustice 2 for the first time in a few weeks and enjoyed playing as Enchantress for awhile, but then I found out that the TMNT don't come out until this week, and I was sad, but now it's this week and not last week, so I'm excited again!

[Victator]

I got a Switch for Christmas along with Breath Of The Wild and Mario Odyssey. 

I love it so much. But recently I have been having issues with my left joy con staying at low battery. Anybody have an idea what the problem might be? 

I went ahead and bought a wired controller but am use to using the joy cons. Holding them at my sides feels so natural. 

[Lamp, broken circa 1988]

CELESTE [4] - At chapter 4, I found myself switching away from using a controller and to using my mechanical keyboard, because I didn't want to get accidental diagonal inputs on my 360 controller.

Celeste is that precise. I will have to review my own memory bank before I commit fully to this but to my mind at this moment, Celeste is the best platformer I have played since Cave Story. You might know how strongly I feel about Cave Story. If you do not, here's how I feel: Very Strongly. Celeste's controls are a triumph. Celeste's character work is fantastic. I love this damn game.

It also has a thing called Assist Mode instead of any kind of Easy setting. So if you don't want to fling yourself into the kind of platformer that would make you want a mechanical keyboard and instead just want to hang out in a cool place and hear a ghost story, you can turn all sorts of different options like invulnerability, infinite climbing, and more. Plus, turning that stuff on in no way disables you from seeing the story. In fact, they make an express point to say that the main collectable in the game only exists to show off to your friends. It is a feature I want in every game I have ever played, retroactively, starting now. It is the right answer to the difficulty question. Celeste is now the right answer to a lot of questions in general. For example, "what should I be playing right now?"

[Craig H]

I did the dive into Celeste on the Switch this past weekend, but only completed the first level. I died...82 times. Holy shit is this game brutal, but also very satisfying.

[Death From Above]

So Super Meat Boy and Cave Story had a baby?

I mean, I don't love Cave Story nearly as much as Lamp, but you still have my attention.

[Lamp, broken circa 1988]

Sorry, i think I phrased that confusingly. It has very little in common with Cave Story other than "it feels so good to play that it makes me emotional." It's definitely way more Meat Boy than Cave Story. I just don't think highly of Meat Boy so I invoked the last amazing platformer I remember playing, which is Cave Story.

[SirSmUgly]

7 hours ago, Death From Above said:

So Super Meat Boy and Cave Story had a baby?

I mean, I don't love Cave Story nearly as much as Lamp, but you still have my attention.

I think it's more of a Super Meat Boy + Fez mashup, and I might have actually made that argument somewhere in this thread. 

It's Super Meat Boy in terms of forcing you to be pixel perfect, giving smaller optional platforming challenges within each larger platforming challenge, and expecting you to die often (except that Celeste is nice and encouraging about it and re-starts you even quicker than Meat Boy does after your death).

It's Fez in that there is more to the game than one might think both in terms of story and in terms of secrets hidden throughout the place. Fez is much more of an inscrutable puzzle game than Celeste, but Celeste does ape Fez in a significant way. 

I'm meh on Meat Boy, but I think Fez is mind-blowingly brilliant, so Celeste ended up being a great game for me. 

[Death From Above]

I have played a ton of retro platformers and Meat Boy might be the only one of them that actually has good platforming.

Fez is one of those games that had a developer when you pointed out bugs in his game he encouraged the steam community to troll you about it, so fuck him and fuck Fez too.

[SirSmUgly]

1 hour ago, Death From Above said:

I have played a ton of retro platformers and Meat Boy might be the only one of them that actually has good platforming.

Fez is one of those games that had a developer when you pointed out bugs in his game he encouraged the steam community to troll you about it, so fuck him and fuck Fez too.

I mean, yeah, Phil Fish is a quite unpleasant dick, but his game is one of the best games of the decade. 

I spend so much time dodging devs who are overt racists, sexists, homophobes, and the lot when picking games that an old-fashioned shithead whose shitheadedness is evenly administered isn't as offensive to me.

But I totally get that he's a habitual line-stepper who overstepped your personal lines and deserves your "fuck you"s. 

[Black Angel]

On 1/27/2018 at 3:09 PM, Tromatagon said:

Dragon Ball FighterZ is fun as fuck.

Yes. Yes it is.

[Death From Above]

This doesn't relate to anything in particular, but I find it incredibly dumb that Steam will still age verify check you on going to a game's page/forum for games YOU ALREADY BOUGHT, yet it doesn't actually age check you during giving them money. This seems really ass backwards.

[Jiji]

1 hour ago, Black Angel said:

Yes. Yes it is.

Just got it today after marathoning some of Kai. So much fun! I suck at fighting games but I picked up a Mayflash stick to play SFV and eventually FighterZ, so it's helped a bit. Aside from the most difficult combos for each fighter, FighterZ is actually pretty easy and fun (so far). SFV I'm struggling with because it's way more difficult. 

[Andrew POE!]

8 hours ago, L_W_P said:

So they have remastered Secret of Mana on PS4. How early can I buy myself a Christmas gift?

It's likely to go on sale before the end of the year, but it's freakin' Secret of Mana. Go for it.

[The Man Known as Dan]

For those fellow Obsidian junkies, Tyrany is on sale for about 15 bucks down from 45 on Steam.

[John E. Dynamite]

8 hours ago, Andrew POE! said:

It's likely to go on sale before the end of the year, but it's freakin' Secret of Mana. Go for it.

There's already a Steam sale. The reviews have me shook. 

[Cliff Hanger]

Yeah, between his review for Polygon and his column on Retronauts, Jeremy Parish pretty thoroughly turned me off buying it while I have an SNES Classic.

[odessasteps]

It's been so long since I turned my Xbox on, I just had to install the fall update.