Get your game on!

Culture
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Speaking as one who also backed the heck out of the kickstarter and played the heck out tabletop version back in the day, I’m thrilled that you’re enjoying the game.

The best confrontations involve watching the enemy lance(s) crash against the indomitable defense of your own well-constructed force.

The very best confrontations involve rushing the enemy headlong to engage in a terrifying exchange of fire before crashing headlong into a brutal melee just as everything begins overheating and hopefully surviving to tell the tale. The sheer joy of that moment when you unexpectedly destroy the cockpit of an enemy assault mech with a desperate punch and turn the tide of battle is not to be underestimated.

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@MissyPants got me playing FO4 on Survival.

I die so much. Everything matters. Bloody dogs are a one-hit-kill (killing me. It takes significantly more to take down them). It’s not just higher difficulty. Complete strategies change. “Useless” perks suddenly become very, very important (Before: who needs “Leadbelly”? Between stimpaks and purified water, I can just sell food. Now: OMG. Need Leadbelly before I die of radiation poisoning just trying to eat. Foood, food, gimme food).

Frustrating, but rewarding. Thanks, @MissyPants.

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I made a return appearance on a podcast:

It’s over 3 hours again. You’ve been warned.

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PixelJunk has a second edition of Monsters out. It’s fun, but I don’t think the 3D and topography add anything. They might even make the game worse and more confusing. But I can pause the game whenever, and that’s the key feature I need in any game.

My daughter and I had our first gaming experience. I was watching the trailer for the new Spyro the Dragon remaster. They were my favorite games growing up. She walked by, looked, and said “Oh, I like that.” Very excited to play with her in September. 3 seems a little young, but I see other kids who have their own iPads and stuff, so it’s probably fine?

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Hero!

Fire Emblem Heroes
Once again, FEH has received a stellar update that has added even more depth to everyone’s favorite RPS/Chess smash-up.

The core premise is that you take a squad of four onto a grid-based battlefield. At its core, FEH is a game of decisions: do you choose melee units or ranged? A high defense Armor, an anti-mage Flier, a speedy Rider, or the classic Infantry? Green, Red, Blue, or Null?

Units can inherit new skills at the cost of other units. With some restrictions. You can’t build a high-defense healer, for example. You get new units by completing story chapters, side quests, or by spending gold orbs (that you get for completing quests) to Summon. And FEH is very, very generous.

Pretty much any unit can be viable at this point. Using the resources that FEH throws at you, you can invest in any unit to turn them into a walking tank. Some units start out better than others, but any unit can be top tier. Even Raigh, the worst unit at launch. Even Wrys. Especially Wrys.

Anywho. Fantastic game, highly recommend. You’ll get three quite powerful units completely free, who can solo some of the most difficult content. Go play!

pictured: a decision

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Zero!

Spirit Lords
This dungeon crawler is dead. Servers were shut down. Rest in peace.

Legacy Quest
Dead. Socialspiel - the developers - were shuttered last year. All characters, rankings, and progress is lost. All that’s left of Legacy Quest is memories.

Valiant Force
If anything epitomizes the fundamental boring, broken combat of 90s JRPGs, this is it. Pay actual money to summon useful units, then sacrifice your meagre stamina bar to complete quests. Spend your earned in-game currency to summon feeder units, rinse, repeat. There is very little to no effort required to play. Mostly, you’re waiting for the timers to refill. Even PETS LIVE had more depth.

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I finally have a computer good enough to run modern games, and grabbed Battletech last week. Much of fun; I’m surprised by how closely it mimics the old tabletop game.

Are you still playing?

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I’m kind of on pause with it at the moment. I’ve gone through the campaign up to the final bit, and suddenly the game warns me I need to be able to field “multiple fully capable lances” and that kind of took the wind out of my sails. I have four pilots with all 10s, a lance of four assault mechs that works together really well, and have been scrapping almost everything else for cash. I’m pretty annoyed that the game changed right at the end.

For the moment, I started a new seasonal character in Diablo 3.

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Have you tried multiplayer? I just had my first shot at that, and it was rather fun.

I think that they’re still working on expanding the game, BTW.

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Nope. I’ve mostly avoided multiplayer games for a while now because it’s easier to keep my cool that way :slight_smile:

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In terms of cool-keeping: there is a chat option in MP, but it’s hidden by default and there’s no need to look at it during play. So, if you want, the experience is entirely asocial except with much smarter and more creative opposition.

OTOH, you will run into a lot of sneaky tactics like Firestarter swarms or massed indirect fire. There’s no one unbeatable tactic, but there are a lot that will trash you if you don’t know how to counter them.

—

I just finished the campaign game myself; that unlocks some options for further play, but I’m planning on doing a restart with all the difficulty options maxed out instead.

You might appreciate my last non-campaign mission:

I was running the SLDF Highlander, an Orion converted into a jumping twin-PPC sniper, a jumping Jaegermech-A carrying forty LRM tubes and a Griffin. While strolling down a canyon, we were ambushed at close range by a Victor, two Highlanders and a King Crab.

I’ll spare you the blow-by-blow, but we got out of it with nothing more than armour damage, and enough salvage to build a Victor and a King Crab. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Started playing Overwatch.

I like playing first person shooters, and I’ve been looking for a game I can pick up for a few rounds and then get back to doing other things. I tried CS:GO but you really have to put in a lot of effort to have fun in that game and I quickly noped out of that one. For a while I was having a lot of fun playing Ghost in the shell: First assault, and it was a good game, pretty well balanced, there weren’t a lot of maps but they were well designed and balanced, unfortunately that game shut down last year. For this reason I avoided battlefront and battlefield, even though they’re fun, I don’t trust they’ll still be available a couple of years from now.

I was a little hesitant to try out Overwatch because it’s a team based game and I was hoping to find something that didn’t have a large learning curve, but it’s pretty well balanced actually and team matches are actually pretty rewarding, and being able to play different roles depending on the situation gives the game a lot of variety. I’m probably never going to be proficient with all the characters but you don’t really have to be to have fun.

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I supposedly can play it on my machine but not the kids which is better specced according to CanYouRunIt.
You should give TF2 a try if you like overwatch. A nice learning curve with some classes much harder than others to get good at and it is dead stupid fun.

In my current obsessions thanks to being employed I was able to splurge and get the packs for Season 1 and 2 of Pinball Arcade before they lost the license to sell the Bally/Williams tables. That should keep me occupied for some time.

Also I got West Of Loathing which is all you would want and more if you ever played Kingdom of Loathing.

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Nintendo Switch owners, how are you liking it? I realized the other day that I kind of miss gaming away from the computer. I’m mostly into racing games, puzzles, Diablo-likes but am up for other stuff. (Not shooters and probably not the more difficult platformers.)

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My son digs it. I might like it more if the Joy-con controllers weren’t so wee. He’s got another controller that’s more to the scale of the Xbox controller, but I haven’t given it enough of a chance, in large part due to the buttons being labeled “wrong” (i.e. A & B being swapped with X & Y). Ergonomically, I prefer all the various WiiU controllers.

But still, the Switch has so many great and revolutionary things about it. I dig the Labo stuff, too.

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image

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This sort of thing drove me up a wall switching from NES to SNES, due to how I mentally associated the button positions… and then n64 made the mental dissonance even worse.

I have an SNES controller that I’ve converted to USB (with a built-in flash drive for emulator +roms), and to this day I always have to re-learn my hand positioning on it any time I play any of the Mario games with it no matter what system they’re for.

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Switching between my PS4 controller and Xbox controller always has an “oh shit” adjustment period whenever it comes time to press the Ｘ button.

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It drives me crazy that PlayStation has never sorted out a system-wide button for “confirm”.

The rule seems to be that Western developers use X and Asian developers use circle. That’s… Suboptimal but OK. What’s more annoying is that they sometimes “localise” the options for Asia, so that cancel and confirm are swapped.

Sometimes they don’t and sometimes (I’m looking at you, Far Cry), they swap the buttons but don’t localise the on screen prompts, so the game tells you to press X to confirm but doing so cancels your choice and exits out of whatever menu you happen to be in. I have actually sworn out loud at my controller because of this.

Why is it every other console that has ever existed has had uniform buttons for confirm and cancel but somehow Sony has never thought it was worth implementing?

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The Sony that put root kits on their audio CDs? The Sony that has a EULA for their wireless headphone software saying they will collect data about the sound files you listen to with the headphones and report copyright infractions?

I’m not sure they have end users’ interests high on their priority list.

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Somewhat strangely, I’ve never had an issue switching between the buttons on a Playstation and any other platform. Maybe I internalize that since all of the other buttons are shapes instead of letters, that X is just another shape. I genuinely have trouble with Nintendo’s button layout vs. Microsoft’s. Any time I change between them results in multiple missed buttons until I re-calibrate.

Apropos of nothing, but one of the coolest low-key features of the switch is that the console knows which color of controller you’re holding. I honestly don’t know why no other console has ever implemented this (as far as I know).

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