What VIDEO GAME(s) have you been playing?

oh man, that's the last thing I need to hear right now. GTA V for the One is my most wanted game at the moment. I really feel like replaying it and want to dig into the Online portion more this time around. I just have so many other games to play now, it's nuts.

I hit the daily gold cap at Magic Duels: Origins last night at 10pm which means it's not really worth playing anymore that day (this rarely happens to me). So I was all, "i got an hour until bed, what else could I play?" I've been downloading free games for months on the Xbox One and never really took stock about what I had.

So I made a spreadsheet of all my games to try and come to some idea of what order to play them in. Made two columns, one with the amount of hours I think it'll take to finish, the other with a scale of 1 to 10 on how hard I think it'll be. This also allowed me to quickly see which games I'll probably never play so I can delete them (Killer Instinct, Ghosts, Smite, etc)

So I came up with a three way tie for first place:

PNEUMA - some really pretty looking puzzle game like MYST. It's 10 gig too so I should really just get through it and get rid of it.
BATTLE ISLANDS - looks like a fun and grindy little wargame. I'm not sure what it is but it interests me
GEMS OF WAR - a puzzle quest free-to-play knock off that looks super addictive and fun

...and now that I've finished all the Halo V MP achievements, I should really do all the fun single player stuff (campaign on legendary, intel, skulls, etc)/ Since that's a 60 gig game, I need to do that too.

So now the analysis paralysis takes over and I can't decide which of these games to do next so I eventually run out of time and go to bed.

first world problems

More on SW Battlefront...I love it, but it is definitely nowhere near the game that Destiny is. It's a big, dumb toybox of a game. That ad they did for it that showed the kids growing up playing with SW toys pretty much nailed what this game is all about. It is not a "great" shooter in any way. But it is a great SW video game full of awesome stuff to play with. It is not deep, it is not ruthlessly competitive and it is not finely tuned and balanced. The game modes are really kind of boring without the SW livery applied to them, and your choice of blaster has more to do with which one you think is the coolest than which one is the most effective- although the DL44 (Han's Space Mauser) is really damn good. For example, if I'm playing a Stormtrooper, I'm taking the standard issue E11 rifle. Snowtrooper, I take the longer heavy blaster. It's just how it is supposed to be.

There's been some really awesome moments. Like teaming up with some folks to take down an AT-ST...and then a Snowspeeder comes flying over like five feet overhead and smashes into it. Blowing up the Emperor with a proximity mine. Totally absurd. But fun!

Most of the time, it's total chaos. But as is usually the case in Battlefield/Battlefront games, you can usually find where a "front" is and if you stay there, there's more organization and you wind up in somewhat more realistic exchanges of fire. Sometimes, these happen in interior spaces and it looks and feels just like the shootouts onboard the Tantive or in the Hoth tunnels.

The solo options are pretty terrible. There are tutorial missions that are also kind of the single player campaign, such as it is, but they aren't linked by storyline or anything. But you do get stars, so they are also kind of challenge levels. Same with the missions, which are all just "get the token" modes with bots. You can play those as regular soldiers or as heroes. There is also a survival mode, which is really a horde thing. I dunno, I've played all of them and they are kind of fun but in kind of a dull way. Except Star Wars.

The DLC for this is unfortunately going to be mandatory, I think. It's going to add new planets, vehicles, characters, etc. and that's the stuff that ultimately really matters more than the mechanics or mode selection.

Odd thing, I actually like playing it in the third person mode better than first.

I think I can safely pass on SW: Battlefront based on your description, since I was mostly hoping for some good single player modes. *PHEW* I want to get through a good chunk of my backlog before picking up anything new, but that was damn tempting.

I'll pick up STAR WARS BATTLEFRONT when it's garbage juice in a year. All the inks will be worked out, there will be some DLC thrown in on some GOTY edition, &c. This is how things are for me. I would like to run around and shoot some AT-ATs, but not for 60 bucks.

Been playing DESTINY. Got my Warlock to 290 light, getting my Titan there (fights about 275). Worked on my Hunter yesterday, using the little crystal or whatever to get it to Level 25 right away. Leveling the skill trees is such a pain in the ass though, jeez. I just love this game. I usually just queue into some randos on the Level 18 Strikes and we all romp our way through. Some folks are rush rush and I can do that. Some folks just poke along and kill the Taken and join global events--that's what I prefer. We're all having a good time. The spontaneous teamwork of the game is such a cool feeling. And of course, the danceoff at the end. Ideally to the disco ball effect of an Arc Grenade.

Still digging ROCKET LEAGUE. I feel bad for my teammates the first two games I play in though, as I miss everything until I warm up. Whooooeee, it's bad. Then I get it together and start making some good saves and shots. You know, contributing.

Got MAGICKA 2 from PS+. I really like HELLDIVERS, so I assumed I would be into this. The writing is solid, perhaps a little tryhard. The game seems really comlpicated though. I think there are eight elements and maybe four ways to cast a spell built on them? It seems like you can do anything. I think I have Bethesda syndrome. The Open World here is too open and I don't feel like I can do anything.

I had the same reactino to Magicka 2. It just made we want to play Helldivers.

I was in Gamestop over the weekend and got to try some demos.

I have been tempted by Rocket League forever mainly due to jeb talking it up Holy cow do the streamers make it look easy. It is so hard to actually hit the ball at all much less at the right angle to send it anywhere useful. Still, when I eventually get a ps4...

I had also been tempted by a WiiU but I finally realized I only am actually interested in a couple games and otherwise it's only iterations on Wii games I am perfectly happy with. Sure, Mario Kart 8 looks cool...but I already have Mario Kart Wii edition. Same for Super Mario. The Nintendo games I'm interested in are coming out for the 3ds, not the WiiU.

And then I went home and finally fired up Dragon's Crown for the ps3. Wow is this fun. I picked the super muscly barbarian woman. Not sure why I bounced off this before, it's great bite sized beat-em-up RPG-lite gameplay.

So besides playing Mario Maker almost non-stop (my four year old makes some pretty horrible levels, but he loves it) I've also been playing Sin and Punishment. The virtual console version from the N64 days.

Some time ago Jeb was awesome enough to send me some games I really didn't deserve and one of them was Sin and Punishment: Star Successor which I absolutely adored so when I saw the original for ten bucks on the Nintendo e-shop I picked it up with the little bit of money I had left on my account.

I love it. Great game. Then again I loved Space Harrier as a kid (I'm the only person I know who actually finished all 18 levels in high school - on the Sega Master System not in the arcade) and Sin and Punishment is very much a relative of the Space Harrier games.

I also picked up Castle Storm for a more casual play which is a fun tower defense game for Wii U (Kingdom Rush is probably my most played iPad game) and it's a pretty good time.

I bought Wolfenstein - The Old Blood on bundlestars since it is mega cheap right now. < $7

I'm about a week into Fallout 4 and I have OPINIONS. This entry in the series has new and fun elements but the new elements aren't fun and the fun elements aren't new. I'm a Fallout fanboy, so "more of the same" isn't a drag to me, since I really like the same. The newer stuff, though, included to differentiate it from FO3 and FNV, is annoying and intrusive. The settlement building is clunky, thematically off-putting (really? clean water is THAT easy to get now?), and convoluted. There's a mission near the beginning which requires it, but it's easy to complete and as far as I can tell, you're free to ignore it afterwards.

The crafting and gun/armor/power armor mod system is just obnoxious, however. I don't know anyone who played FO3 and felt that what was missing was a million different little bullshits you can add to weapons to tweak them in microscopic ways. Or the ability to have one arm be heavily armored but your left leg not so much. Why? Only a few minutes into this mess with the armor and the power suits I was tired of having to care, and not opting out means also you have to cart around a bunch of junk so you can use pieces of it when you finally get to a workbench. It also doesn't make any sense, as if I find a weapon with a modded, say, stock, I can't just remove the stock, I have to "create" the standard stock. Then it will allow me to remove the modded stock and put it on a different weapon. I'd like to ignore this part as well, but since every weapon and armor bit has to be deciphered to figure out what the hell it is and how it compares to what you already have, it's a constant intrusion.

There are other decisions that have been made as well which seem odd, but I need to get further into it before I can comment on those.

Still, I am enjoying exploring the wasteland, and Jenny Biscuits even found a perfectly-preserved pie she'll feast on when I complete the main game.

That just knocked the wind out of my sails.


ANYHOW...I'm playing Titanfall. A lot. Anyone wanting to play, XBOX360 GamerTag is SuperflyPete.

Titanfall is an amazing game.

Then let's go blow some shit up together!

long form version of my Fallout 4 take, but it's pretty much just what I said before:

Fallout 4: Bomb Craters and Massholes

I've been playing Fallout 4 for a week now. Jenny Biscuits crawled out of Vault 111 in search of her kidnapped child and last night made it to Diamond City. If you haven't played the game, let me assure you, that isn't very far. She's had a lot of distractions along the way.

My current impression of the game is that it's got a lot of new and fun things but the new things aren't fun and the fun things aren't new. That sounds harsh, but please bear with me.

I'm a Fallout fanboy, so "More of the Same" wasn't going to be much of a criticism for me, since I loved the Same and would happily play More of it. Taking Fallout 3 exactly as-is and giving me a whole new area with different inhabitants, stories, quests, landmarks, and secrets is not anything I'm going to complain about, and Fallout 4 delivers. Unlike some people I'm too far west to go see how my house fared in the apocalypse, but I'm enjoying roaming around the Boston area. I'm glad the map has a little more color to it, and the little hints of the big story I've gotten so far are interesting. Everything I want in a Fallout game is here, and I'm into it. Plus there's more!

It's the "more" that's kind of bugging me.

There are two major additions to the game. The first is settlement building. You can actually edit places to remove bombed out houses and debris and erect new crappy looking structures instead. You can also add defenses, food production, shops, and all kinds of other stuff to help turn the settlement into a thriving community. This is something I'm not super interested in doing even outside of a Fallout game, much less within one. And even if I were, the interface for doing it is just not very good. Last night I built Jenny Biscuits a house and just making this thing:

took a long time, and it's garbage. I mean, yeah, it's a ramshackle hovel in a ruined wasteland, but also its corners don't match up and I can't place a rug because I guess I had to do that first and it's just a mess. I wanted to put an item in it that I don't currently have the materials to build and instead of showing me an outline of the item so I could at least save some space for it, it just does nothing.

The settlement thing also does some real theme-breaking. One of the first, easiest things you can build for your settlement are pumps providing clean, fresh water, making the entire main plot of Fallout 3 even more dumb than it was before. And it doesn't take long to ask why these settlers can't throw lumber in a pile and call it a house and need you to do it.

Fortunately, apart from an early and easy-to-complete mission, you can ignore the settlement building if you want to. The game doesn't seem to rely on it. The same can't be said about the other new major element, weapon and armor mods.

In Fallout 4, there are hundreds of new weapons because there are weapons that each have dozens of different modifications to them. You can take a 10mm pistol, say, and trick it out however you want. On the surface, that seems like not a bad idea, but in play it's not so great.

My first problem with it is that it requires me to spend far more time diddling around with different weapons than I ever want to. even in Borderlands, which boasts its absurd amount of guns, I can easily compare two guns and ditch one easily. In Fallout 4, every new gun has to be analyzed and deciphered to see if it in any way can be used to improve my overall firepower, and the system for doing so is not easy.

For example, suppose you find a pipe rifle with a modified stock. You already have a pipe rifle with a site you like, and you want to add this stock to it. Instead of just removing the stock from the new gun and pitching the rest, you have to "construct" a standard stock on it, which will then put the modified one into your inventory to use.

Armor works similarly. It's divided into different parts and you assemble it however you want. So if you want your left arm to be really heavily armored but your right leg to be free as a bird, you can do so, but nobody wants that. And once again, if you pick up a piece of lightweight armor and you want your current piece to also be lightweight, you have to make the new one not-lightweight and then attach the lightweight to your old one, assuming you have the materials needed.

It's a ridiculously convoluted system and for me it's not worth it. I really don't care about the possible incremental changes in fire rate or energy absorption. I just want a gun and some armor and to get out and shoot things. I don't want to play with my inventory when I could instead be actually out and about in this world.

So yeah, the two big innovations in the game are a bust for me. Maybe on a future replay or later in this one they'll win me over but for now I'm trying to avoid them as much as possible.

But back to things I do like:

* You can't kill Dogmeat AND you can have him wear bandannas and things, which is fantastic. Also, he (or she, as xe seems to have no gender characteristics of any kind) can carry tons of items in some kind of pocket dimension.

* Travis, the DJ of Diamond City Radio, is a great answer to Three Dog, though he needs to give "Anything Goes" a rest.

* I've already come to the aid of one same-sex, biracial couple.

* There are still these calling to me:

but now there's the third big new innovation: pens.

I have been playing Final Fight on my commute for the last two weeks or so and I still can't get very far on it. It's a difficult game and somewhat rough around the edges so progress has been slow. Still, I'm really enjoying it and the complaints I had about it become less relevant once you get a nice hold of the strategy.

It seems to me that the game is balanced under the assumption that you are already good at it, so early challenges remain fresh even when you can reach the latter stages. The problem is that this makes for a very steep difficulty curve and Final Fight is so simple at its core that I think the developers overcompensated when it comes to damage and boss design. Sodom is a great example, he's so untreatening when he has both of his katanas that they were forced to make him hit for 60% of your lifebar in that state.

So far I can make it to the middle of the 3rd stage, with the Adoré cage fight taking most of my lives. If I learn how to deal with them, I don't think the corrup cop is going to pose much of a challenge because you can deal a lot of damage to him very fast and his movement is very predictable.

More Titanfall. Killing shit in a giant, bipedal tank never gets old. Sadly, the weapons kits suck so it's basically the rifle and shield wall for me.

Also, Metro 2033. Masterpiece, IMHO. Existential dread the entire time. Halfway through.