WHAT VIDEOGAMES ARE YOU PLAYING RIGHT NOW?

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Friend basically forced me to take a gift copy of Transistor*, so I've been playing that. Great music, stylish graphics, really entertaining gameplay and perhaps best of all: The constant narration isn't annoying. I played the demo of Bastion and just couldn't stand how the narrator seemed to talk about every miniscule thing, like he was afraid to shut up for five seconds.

But the gameplay in Transistor, it bears elaborating: I love being able to play around abilities, so being able to use every power as its own power, as an upgrade or as a passive (and later add two upgrades onto a single power) was great. Unlocking bits of character biography for using a power in different ways was also great incentive to experiment. (I spent about 80% of the game constantly swapping my loadout and found some very fun options because of it.)

Wound up slightly cheesing combat, though. Basic melee move briefly stuns an enemy. Combined it with an upgrade that lets me spam it and another (depending on loadout) that either had it chain to nearby enemies or attack even faster. Could stun lock any single enemy. (Fortunately, it takes actual effort to exploit it.)

Losing powers (temporarily) every time I took a beating also made combat way more frantic and engaging than having full combat effectiveness through a fight. The first boss had me reeling, trying to rapidly figure out how to win without my go-to move.

I do have a complaint though, and that's that the world doesn't get explored much. I've filled out every character biography and monster notes and I still don't know how the setting works. At all. I have theories, but very, very little in the way of facts. Currently going through my first Recursion (Their term for a New Game+) to see if I learn anything new.

I also found the final boss frustrating, as you have to use entirely different tactics against him than other enemies. A LOT of your abilities are worthless during the fight. I won't spoil why, but suffice to say that I abandoned my usual set of load-outs in favor of maximizing survivability and unleashing the hounds. Excellent results.

And this proves that, despite what anyone may think, I can enjoy things.

* I feel incredibly guilty over receiving gifts.
Definitely going to check out Transistor.

As soon as I fucking finish Dark Souls. I'm still playing this, and I seem unable to fully devote my attention to other games until I beat it. I love the game well enough, but damn, it demands a lot of you.
Sonic Generations

About time I played it, game is incredible holy shit
Started playing the original Wild ARMs a little while ago. Oh my god, I forgot how good classic RPGs can be. I can already feel my enthusiasm for the genre rushing back.

The music has blown me away the most so far. I'm gonna need a copy of this soundtrack ASAP.
Wild ARMs is great! Agreed that it has a good ost. I haven't played it for at least over five years, but I still listen to the soundtrack every now and then. I love the setting of that game.

author=Pizza
Started playing the original Wild ARMs a little while ago. Oh my god, I forgot how good classic RPGs can be. I can already feel my enthusiasm for the genre rushing back.

The music has blown me away the most so far. I'm gonna need a copy of this soundtrack ASAP.


Yesssss, the music for Wild ARMs is just lovely. And that opening movie music... not ashamed to admit that I usually have that on my 'inspiration' playlist when game making. It's just so nice. I've even got some remixes of Rosetta Town on my ipod.
I am replaying Suikoden for the first time since it's initial release, in preparation to replay Suikoden 2 on my Vita during my trip to New Zealand when it drops on EU PSN next month. It's held up remarkably well for a 19 year old game! Menus are pretty clunky, but it still feels good to play and looks excellent to boot. I've noticed that the writing is pretty goofy, now that I'm 30 and not 11, but still. Great game.
The original Wild Arms is great. (Is there an echo in here?) I've actually been thinking of replaying Wild Arms 2, since I haven't played it in so long that I've forgotten most of it. And a friend keeps telling me to try Wild Arms 3.

I spent a good portion of yesterday playing Recettear. Endless mode, since I stopped playing right after beating it last time. It's mostly for inspiration, since I'm trying to write dialog for more innocent / naive / carefree characters than my norm.
Wild Arms 3 has decent gameplay, but suffers from having a party of characters that all hate each other. By the 20th hour you're questioning why they bother staying together. Still, they're less annoying than the idealistic child protagonists of 4 and 5.
Ratty524
The 524 is for 524 Stone Crabs
12986
Started playing Diablo 3 on a friend of mine's PS3.

I heard some mixed feelings about this game, but even though I haven't played the other two, nor have I gotten that far into it, all I can think about while playing this game is "meh."

I didn't like how the character I was playing as spoke for me, or maybe games like Skyrim have spoiled me a little, but oh lord I didn't know female monks had deep french accents and spewed out the most generic "I'm the hero" dialogue, otherwise I would have picked a different character. The combat felt like a watered down version of The Gauntlet; I got to a point where I was just holding one button to kill an entire horde of enemies and I took so little damage in return. This and the fact that I'm seeing dungeons with copy+paste layouts makes for a pretty repetitive and overall uninspiring game. I still want to continue it, though, just to see what's ahead, but so far, it's turning out to be one of those games that I neither like nor dislike, kind of like Spore Hero. I just feel like there are too many missed opportunities with this game.
author=nurvuss
I am replaying Suikoden for the first time since it's initial release, in preparation to replay Suikoden 2 on my Vita during my trip to New Zealand when it drops on EU PSN next month. It's held up remarkably well for a 19 year old game! Menus are pretty clunky, but it still feels good to play and looks excellent to boot. I've noticed that the writing is pretty goofy, now that I'm 30 and not 11, but still. Great game.

Did you know... that the punctuation in Suikoden II translation was like that in the Japanese version too? That little nugget threw me for a loop. Here I was thinking the translators were idiots when it came to English punctuation use, but nope. They were being true to the original!!!!!!..........!!!!!

That said, I'm gonna break out my PSX (yes, I have a PSX, not a PS1 :D ) on release day and plaaaaaay II again. In fact, fuck it. I'm gonna clock it in one sitting and aim for the special scene with Clive.



That said, I've been playing the Blackwell series. They're pretty good! And cheap, too - the first four (of five) are currently on sale for $6! That is, all four of them for that price. You should buy it if you like point/click adventure and mystery/supernatural genre games. Even if you don't, they're well presented and the characters are interesting, too.

The series revolves around the women of the Blackwell family and a certain ability they have - it doesn't end well for the first two, and the third is the main character of the series. It's a point/click adventure and the characterisation is pretty well done.

I'm enjoying it a lot more than I thought I would. I bought the first game by accident and decided to give it a try, then bought the rest of the series when I enjoyed it.
author=Liberty
Did you know... that the punctuation in Suikoden II translation was like that in the Japanese version too? That little nugget threw me for a loop. Here I was thinking the translators were idiots when it came to English punctuation use, but nope. They were being true to the original!!!!!!..........!!!!!

That said, I'm gonna break out my PSX (yes, I have a PSX, not a PS1 :D ) on release day and plaaaaaay II again. In fact, fuck it. I'm gonna clock it in one sitting and aim for the special scene with Clive.

I did not know that at all! How bizarre, thanks for that!

I was reading an interesting inteview with the translators of Suikoden 2 in the Untold History of Japanese Game Developers (not good, probably don't buy this). Here's some excerpts from that that you may enjoy:

author=Jeremy Blaustein
So, 108 characters, right? What you want to do, obviously, is you'd like each character to have a unique voice. What most people don't understand is that Japanese offers you the opportunity to have an extremely wide range of voices in written material ... In Japanese, you can make a lot of things clear in the way you write dialogue. The reader can read it and say 'This is an 80 year old person from the north-eastern region of Japan, who has a lower class education, a bad sense of humor, and watches a lot of cop dramas.' ... Now in English, you don't have that. So now you've got 108 characters and you've got two months to translate something.

author=Nick des Barres
We were delivered the script among code, with no indication as to who was speaking. Text was bunched together based on location. The solution? Play the game multiple times, searching as we did so for strings to gather context. We did our best. We were actually provided with Murayama-san's personal encyclopaedia and log of Suikoden's wold. It rivalled Game of Thrones and beyond in complexity.

author=Casey Loe
I'm not tech savvy enough to know if the files we were working on were source code o what, but I recall it as strings of English text in files full of gibberish, probably the instructions regarding the text and chaacter portrait display. I believe we were eventually able to figure out which chaacter was speaking by matching hexadecimal strings or something.

author=Casey Loe
Writing the same line in English usually takes at least twice as many characters, so if the original Japanese line filled up all four lines of the text box, then the English text would need to be cut to the bone to make it fit. That meant going over every line dozens of times, replacing every word with its shortest possible synonym, cutting every bit of flaor and information that wasn't absolutely essential, deleting any idiom that wasn't more space-efficient than what it represented, and so on, until lines I had once been proud of were reduced to elementary-school primer text. And then since the final game did end up having a thinner font that often didn't fill up the text boxes, it often ended up looking like we made those cuts for no reason at all.
Isrieri
"My father told me this would happen."
6155
I'm playing LISA on steam.

Its making me feel terrible. Which makes me feel wonderful.



EDIT: EXCEPT FOR THE ENDING OH PLEASE GOD LET THERE BE A BETTER ENDING *sob*
Max McGee
with sorrow down past the fence
9159
I have never played Suikoden, still gotta remedy that. Sometime around when I get through all those Final Fantasies I've never finished...like all of them....

@Shinan: Which space sim is that? I've been looking for a new one lately. I'm kind of a fan of the X series but that's kind of a love-hate relationship for obvious reasons (if you're familiar with that series). They have a lot of baggage.

Elite: Dangerous looks pretty baller but I'm hesitant to buy a full price game when there are so many for less than full price. I was thinking about picking up Space Engineers or Kinetic Void on steam.

Anyway, for Christmas I got Far Cry 4 and Civilization: Beyond Earth, and I won Claire and I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream from the RMN Plays event.

Yet in spite of all of those and a HOST of other unplayed videogames I did not even mention, I find myself virtually unable to play anything but the new build of Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead. Which is eating up so many hours of every day (and turning them into amazing stories of survival, or more often...not survival, in the face of impossible odds).

Truly the deepest and broadest open-world survival/horror post-apocalyptic zombie quasi-roguelike ever made (it's going to be hard going back to something as limited as Fallout and those open-world FPS crafty shooters like DayZ seem to pale in comparison), and unbelievably addictive once you get into it (because of, not in spite of its punishing difficulty and permadeath). It is free and has no real graphics or music/sounds yet it's beating the shit out of brand new AAA games (among others) in holding a vice grip on my attention and not letting go, ever. Every day I load it I wish I could throw my entire wallet at its creator.

TOO MANY VIDYAGAMES. How's a guy ever s'posed to work on RPG Maker. Self control? What's that.
Craze
why would i heal when i could equip a morningstar
15150
i fiddled around in RM* before playing suikoden 2, but think suiko2 really cemented my love of rpgs and what kind of experiences they could provide. it has a solid place in my top 5 videogames.

i was gonna get civ:BE but... i got endless legend instead. i've played enough civ v and BE doesn't seem to be what i wanted (re: alpha centauri: alien crossfire 2.0).

right now i'm playing risk of rain... again. i had unlocked over half of it before, but i lost all progress when i bought this new laptop over the summer. it's also probably in my top five favorite videogames, so this isn't really a problem for me (YES IT IS THAT FUCKING COMMANDO SURVIVAL ACHIEVEMENT)

i've also been playing dynasty warriors 8, which is decent fun but it's not risk of rain. i still need to finish transistor.
slash
APATHY IS FOR COWARDS
4158
Risk of Rain is real good. My friends and I finally got to the point where we could beat Insane mode... but I have never found the miner ;_;

I just started playing FTL (only three years late) and it's real fantastic. I finally beat it the other day by building a ship that only cloaked and used beams to set fire to the enemy oxygen system and slowly kill them >_> I actually felt real bad...

I also started playing Fire Emblem: Awakening (two years late) and the combat is pretty cool, but honestly I'm just having way too much fun making everyone in my army flirt with each other.
Right now, I'm giving Super Smash Bros. Wii U a try.

Holy SHIT this is such a massive improvement from Brawl. It has Melee's breakneck pace (or at least something VERY close to it) and so much content I just aaafggh;jhl

It helps that I got a Fighter Pad from Gamestop, which feels just like the Gamecube Controller, so now I have no trouble playing; the one thing is that I have to remember to use a controller config (an in-game feature allows you to map buttons to whatever function you want, which is very helpful) that switches my shoulder buttons (so ZL/ZR guard/roll while the normal L/R grabs) every time I start a match, since my memory is more-or-less so adapted to the GC controller then I end up pressing the wrong button really often without my config. Otherwise, no complaints!
I finally got my hands on Rune Factory 4 (it's for sale in the eShop for PAL now) so I've been sinking a lot of time in to it.

I love it.

It is a little clunky in some areas - the old Harvest Moon games know how to switch between items easily but RF still has to learn that little thing. Instead of just pressing a button and switching, instead you need to constantly go into a mini menu and scroll through all the items in your pack before equipping the weapon/tool you want. It gets a bit tedious when you're constantly scrolling between weapon/hammer/axe/watering can/etc.

That said, it's cute as fuck and I love all the bachelors and bachelorettes to bits. Currently going for Dylas (though I'm considering Leon as a possible second) though Arthur and Vishnal both love me to bits by just talking to them.

It's a pretty good game. Best thing they ever did was take the farming elements of Harvest Moon and combine them with RPG elements and a story~<3
Bought Sims 3 Seasons the other day, and it is great. Didn't realize rain and pretty snow would transform my town so dramatically into a cosy little world XD