What VIDEO GAME(s) have you been playing?

Booth, here was my favourite Whatcha Playin Ash before seeing the one you posted:



it starts off slow, the big payoff is at the end. The sequence at 0:31 is freaky cuz she looks exactly like Dom there. 1:19 is my favourite part and is why it was my favourite for so long.

Went to friend's house for a night of couch co-op games.

We started off with Divekick. We ended up pretty even on wins. I played this online a decent amount when it came out, but it doesn't really hold up as a good competitive couch game.

Followed that up with Foiled . A free little two-player game that I never get to play. We played this for a while and loved it. It's highly competitive, frantic, and simple.

We played Ultra Street Fighter 4 for a bit but he hadn't played for several years, and my hiatus was a few years less than him, so I ended up dominating and we gave up on it.

Then I broke out Sportsfriends. Barabariball is a little like Smash Bros, but the attacks are deliberate, so you have to time them right and I wasn't doing so hot. The highlight for me was Super Pole Riders . Done by the guy who did QWOP , it took a little playtime to get the hang of the controls, but once you do, it's pretty great. A lot of back and forth and tense moments.
We didn't play JS Joust or Hokra because they require more players.

We finished out the night with a few hours of Rocket League. We played split screen on the same team against people online. He had never played before, so it took him a while to get the hang of it. We actually managed to win on our very last game of the night. Splitscreen is definitely a different experience since you see much less of the field. We weren't doing too bad with it though. He liked it a lot so hopefully he'll pick it up and then we can play individually with another friend for a complete 3-player team.

Not a bad way to spend 7 hours on a Friday night.

Been plowing through the Last of Us. Was enjoying it pretty well (a solid 7.5 or whatever) until the 3rd act ("Winter"). What a shitshow. You know how I criticized Barnes for saying it was B movie SyFy material? The first two acts are pretty good, much better than that but Act 3 is a disaster in line with what Barnes said. The whole act is predicated around some band of other survivors who are cannibals but the things they do have no logic to them whatsoever and the villain is 100% transparent the second you meet him and has no reason to do anything he does besides twirling his (pedophile) mustache senselessly. What a piece of shit. But again, the 3rd act was beautiful and had some of the best images of the game, e.g. the snowstorm, the warm inviting wooden tavernish town, etc.

Doom 3!!! Still fun, even when the graphics don't look as nice as it used to be.

I started The Last of Us but haven't gotten far into it and haven't much been able to get myself to continue. So far it's not a game, just a cartoon where they tell me to push a button every now and then. I really don't give a fuck about zombie shit and don't care about anyone on the screen, so the fact that supposedly after the point I'm at now (he just got the little girl he needs to escort or whatever) it actually turns into a game isn't really getting me excited. And hearing about how hard it is also doesn't excite me. I'm an old fucker and I don't need a videogame to hand me my ass anymore to have a good time. I'm not going to spend hours figuring exactly how to take down this one boss; I don't give that much of a shit anymore. It's like nerds slathering hot sauce on everything, turning the concept on "flavor" into "whatever punishes my mouth the most".

I've also been playing Diablo 3 on the console with my wife, but largely out of inertia. It's really a shit game, and I loved Diablo 2. There's just nothing to Diablo 3. There is nothing to care about in it. Not caring about the plot is a given -- nobody who isn't on Blizzard's payroll ever cared about Diablo plots -- but there's nothing to care about in the gameplay either. There isn't any reason to ever do anything other than brute force and armor, few of the enemies distinguish themselves from each other at all, and there's no "horizon"; there's never anything beyond where you are right now except more of where you are right now. I guess maybe I'm misremembering D2 as having more substance to it, because I'm hard pressed to name what that might have been, but D3 is just boring sameness. Any given twenty minutes of it is utterly indistinguishable from any other twenty minutes.

I guess right now I'm running out the clock on Fallout 4. I've been playing that dumb Fallout Shelter game on iOS and been making my own fun by naming dwellers things like "Donald Trump" and "Ayn Rand" and "Jenny McCarthy" and sending them out in the wasteland with no weapons, outfits, or medicine to die. I could resurrect Ayn Rand for 153 caps, but I only have 260,000 and I rightfully earned them and it would be an insult to her to give her that kind of charity if she can't afford to resurrect herself. And I guess Jenny McCarthy didn't know as much about medicine as she thought.

I played on Hard, Legomancer. I'm guessing on Normal it's no big deal---you probably don't really technically even have to use stealth much with more ammo.

Legomancer wrote: I've also been playing Diablo 3 on the console with my wife, but largely out of inertia. It's really a shit game, and I loved Diablo 2. There's just nothing to Diablo 3. There is nothing to care about in it. Not caring about the plot is a given -- nobody who isn't on Blizzard's payroll ever cared about Diablo plots -- but there's nothing to care about in the gameplay either. There isn't any reason to ever do anything other than brute force and armor, few of the enemies distinguish themselves from each other at all, and there's no "horizon"; there's never anything beyond where you are right now except more of where you are right now. I guess maybe I'm misremembering D2 as having more substance to it, because I'm hard pressed to name what that might have been, but D3 is just boring sameness. Any given twenty minutes of it is utterly indistinguishable from any other twenty minutes.

The story is less-than-awesome. I do love that cutscene when Diablo gets to the High Heavens though. I watch that one every time (four times now, I think?) I think you might be misremembering DIABLO 2, because it's a LOT like DIABLO 3 in my head. We might be getting different vibes from them, but DIABLO is all about loot optimization for me. If it's not fun, I would recommend dialing up the difficulty and/or playing HC. When you get really overleveled, you can just mow through stuff and that's not always a good time. Playing HC, I had to learn patience and how to draw enemies away from crowds and better health blob management. If you don't have good evasion (say, as a Barb), you need to be really careful with those chained bastards in corridors. I had some really tense moments this way. My Barb died on Hard Belial when he went all crazy with the Poison. It's just... over. Now I feel like I have to beat the game this way, so I am right back in it.

If you beat the game, you can switch to Adventure mode, which is much more bite-sized. You do little quests, find keys, maybe make a Hellfire ring, &c. Rifts are a whole layer of entertainment you can fire up and get through in 30 min or so.

I could have posted in this in the Chill out thread -

I was burnt out yesterday and wanted something thoughtless - so I fired up my Marvel Ultimate Alliance Gold Edition and started a new playthrough with my max level characters on hard mode. Yay button mashing!

Funny thing though......beginning of Act 2 you get sent to Murderworld and have to do this Pitfall simulation. Almost rage quit right there.

Magic Duels Origins comes out on steam and Xbox One this week, can't wait

Black Barney wrote: Magic Duels Origins comes out on steam and Xbox One this week, can't wait

I've played a little of this on iPad over the last couple of weeks. It's so hard to get into since I've been playing Hearthstone. Everything seems so slow. I'd probably be more into it if I had always been a Magic player but I think Hearthstone has ruined me, at least for playing digitally. I like Magic better in person and just playing casually.