So, what games are you playing now?

[Eraser]

Control is free in the Epic Games Store the next 24hrs or so

[Don Carlos]

Forza Horizon 5

Beautiful on the series X - a lot of fun as always with these games. Done most of the stuff I am interested in now; just a few cars left to buy that I want to try and I will be done with it. Then back to Miles Morales before Horizon Forbidden West arrives

[Eraser]

Mario Party Superstars and Super Mario Odyssey.

Yep, I got meself a Nintendo Switch as Xmas gift from work.

[Mat Linnett]

Odyssey's fab, full of really inventive ideas
Myself, I'm playing a janky RPG, Greedfall, which has actually got a pretty good story going on about colonialism.
The RPG itself is a bit basic, as is the gameplay, but the story's enough to keep me coming back for more.
It's like a budget Bioware game crossed with a Piranha Bytes game (Gothic / Risen etc.)

Apparently the makers, Spiders, are somewhat known for making janky but ambitious RPGs.

[MKJ]

Odyssee is great. Theres no endgame tho ehich is a shame.

[Pext]

Dead Cells - 9/10

Incredibly flow-inducing gameplay.

[Eraser]

I'm enjoying Odyssey, it's a fun game. But there's a few bits in there which feel a bit out of place in a Mario game. The whole New Donk City level is just weird. I mean, it looks good and it plays good and it all works and the level itself looks decently cohesive, but it's just so weird to have Mario walk in this real world setting with "normal" people walking around. It's not bad, just a bit odd.

I had the same feeling with the dinosaur in the very first Tricera-tops level. The whole level has this cartoony look to it, but the dinosaur is suddenly this realistically rendered, real life looking dinosaur that just looks so incredibly out of place. I wonder why they went for these contrasting styles.

[vesp]

Yes I noticed that feeling too - it's like they normalised the whole style crossover thing with Smash Bros and are just going with it now.

[Don Carlos]

God of War is out on PC now...just saying *cough* Eraser *cough*

[Doombrain]

Still just PUBG and Halo

[Eraser]

God of War is out on PC now...just saying *cough* Eraser *cough*

Gotcha

[Lieutenant Dan]

Fell into playing GTA5 Online with a few friends. Since they make it easy to create private lobbies with just the people you're playing with, it's actually pretty damn enjoyable.

[Hannibal]

Broforce: what am I doing with my life/10. Haven't laughed this hard in a long fucking time.

[Whiskey 7]

Hannibal, been a while

I looked up this BROFORCE and selected video in Google.
I love the Alien link in this YT @ 28 secs, especially the Sigourney Weaver moment and the others through the Launch Trailer below

[youtube]_loRDrWCv10[/youtube]

[Don Carlos]

Miles Morales on PS5

I can't get a stupid 100 hit combo so I can't plat the game. It's doing my tits in. Other than that, good little game, worth the playthrough.

[saturn]

Only Wordfeud and Wordle these days. And maybe racing on Zwift if cycling in a virtual world counts.

[Pext]

I've been plaing this recently:

[youtube]XFuKSIuNSG4[/youtube]

It's ~3$ on steam. Stupid game but a LOT of fun for 1-2 evenings turning into nights.

You move around, dodging enemies. Your weapons fire automatically. And there's some roguelite mechanics (you get gold from runs and can spend it on upgrades).

Highly recommended.

[Eraser]

Been playing a couple of different things. Got Big Brain Academy and WarioWare on the Switch, which are fun little games to play with my kids.

I've also been playing a bit of Little Nightmares. My brother recommended this to me and it's a charming little game. It's a platformer/puzzle game kind of like Limbo. It's set in a typical horror setting but it's not actually scary. It's more of a Tim Burton style of horror.

Another game I've been dabbling around with since yesterday is Rocket League. Never played it before because I thought it looked like 6 retards scrambling for a ball, but my brother has been playing this with his kid a lot. I was browsing the Switch store and saw it so I thought let's give it a go.
The game does feel like 6 retards flailing around to try and run into a ball, but it's actually kind of funny. I'm terrible at this game, but apparently so are a lot of other people, so I'm matched into games that I can actually win with my team. I find myself struggling to do something useful in a match, but somehow, I do manage to make saves, assists and even goals with a high enough frequency that it stays fun. I guess that if I give this a bit more playtime, my skill will increase and it'll get even better.
The only downside of Rocket League on the Switch is that it's clearly developed for PC. Fonts are way too small to properly read, UI is aimed at mouse use. I also don't understand how the whole system of gaining cosmetic items with blueprints and loot boxes and trading and whatnot works, but that's completely uninteresting to me anyway, so eh.


I finished Control, did most of the side missions as well but got bored of some of the difficulty spikes for the remaining missions. I moved on to Prey (the 2017 one by Arcane).

I can tell it's an expertly crafted game. Arcane are a studio I hold in high regard. Their work on the Dishonored games is excellent. The world building they did in those games really drew me in.
Oddly enough, it's exactly that what seems to be missing from Prey. I'm having a hard time actually caring about the world the game places you in, or the character that you play. It's interesting to see how a game like Control immediately had me hooked, but Prey just feels a bit bland and uninteresting. It's too much generic sci-fi. And that might be an odd thing to say after praising Control, as that game just stacks all of the x-files cliches on top of each other, but there's this intangible difference between the two.

The whole gameplay mechanic of grabbing items and putting them in your inventory and recycling junk you pick up into resources that can be used to craft new, useful items is something I'm not a fan of either. I want to shoot aliens in the face, not micromanage my inventory like some kind of book keeper.

The game is supposed to set itself apart by offering multiple distinct ways of achieving your goals. Hack the door? Find the keycard? Find an alternate route via the airducts? It's nice to have options, but the options all feel a bit obvious most of the time. A bit forced, at times, even.

Combat is a bit weird in this game as well. As enemies get stronger, fighting them head on isn't always a good idea anymore. Not that you can't handle the enemy, it's just that you'll run out of ammo too soon. The game doesn't offer any solid stealth mechanics either, so that's not an option most of the time either. I'm struggling a bit in my mind about whether I should be afraid and avoid an enemy, or if I should just go in guns blazing and kill him, with the risk of finding myself out of ammo 15 minutes later.

So is this a bad game then? No, not at all. It's just that it doesn't deliver on it's ambitious promises (yet, I have played only a relatively small portion of the game). It just feels like I've played this game before. Not literally this game, but the various gameplay mechanics. It's like a mashup between games like Bioshock/System Shock, Deus Ex and a hint of Dead Space.

I'll give it a few more play sessions to see if my appreciation for it grows, but so far, it's not a game that leaves me wanting for more when I turn off my PC.

[Mat Linnett]

I hope you manage to stick with Prey Eraser. I loved it to bits, but then it's my kind of game.

Myself, I'm playing Sifu.
It's a kung-fu vengeance story with a twist; every time you would die, you instead get older. It starts off with you getting a year older, but every death also increases the death counter. So say you're 23 and you death counter is 2, next time you die, you'll resurrect at 25. Get to 70 and above, and the next death is permanent.

The youngest age you get to the next level becomes the starter age for that level. You can go back and try to complete it at a younger age, which will set a new starter age.
So with that in mind, you really want to get to the next level without dying.

And that's really fecking hard. This game doesn't pull its punches, pardon the pun, and if you manage to set a low level start age, it's because you've got better, not your character.
Although you can unlock new moves, but they just add options rather than making the game easier.

And the combat is some of the best out there. Kinda like Arkham Asylum, but I reckon it feels better overall. Enemies are much more likely to attack you while you're fighting someone else than they were in the Batman games, and a wild swing can even hit their buddies.
It also feels like it really relies on player skill, where Batman occasionally felt like it was on autopilot.

Highly, highly recommended.

And it treats you every so often to recreations of famous fightscenes from modern martial arts classics

If you were interested in Absolver, but wanted a single-player version, this is it. It's made by the same company.

[MKJ]

That sounds extremely interesting.
Not available on xbox

[Eraser]

So what does it actually mean if you get older? Is it just a glorified lives counter or does getting older influence the gameplay as well somehow?

[Eraser]

Oh, I got a high enough level to play competitive (ranked) Rocket League mode. Yeeeaaahhh, that sucked the fun right out.
The matchmaking is whack. I found myself playing against groups of people who belong to the same clan (or whatever they call it) and they do all these wild acrobatics in the air and just fly all over the playing field. There's no fun in that.

[Mat Linnett]

So what does it actually mean if you get older? Is it just a glorified lives counter or does getting older influence the gameplay as well somehow?

Well apart from any death after 70 being permanent, each 10 year marker (30, 40, 50, etc.), your health goes down, but your damage goes up.

[raw]

Just started playing Lost Ark with my son.

[Eraser]

I'm playing through Quake 4 because I never finished the game. Playing through it I understand why I never finished it. It's garbage. I will soldier through, though, just so I can say I finished Quake 4.