Support NeoGAF

[stn]

Gonna beat Banjo Kazooie tonight, then continue Deathloop, which I barely started. Both on the Series X.

 

[brettski2024]

Gonna beat Banjo Kazooie tonight, then continue Deathloop, which I barely started. Both on the Series X.

Sweet. I just finished a playthrough of BK last night and started the stop n swap cheats for fun. One if my all time favs.

Also playing DQ11 and Final Fantasy 6 T Edition off and on.

 

[marcincz]

Replaying God of War before Ragnarok.
Still great game.

 

[TintoConCasera]

Gonna beat Banjo Kazooie tonight, then continue Deathloop, which I barely started. Both on the Series X.

Have fun bro, great game but the last segment was amazing to me. Probably because I have lots of nostalgia tho, but still, lots of fun.

Replayed it some months ago, and the final boss was harder than I was expecting too. Good luck!

 

[SmokedMeat]

Just wrapped up Industria last night. Actually wound up liking it more than I thought. Combat could’ve been better, but it’s serviceable.
I liked the quietness of the world with there being no humans around. For a small indie team, it was impressive.

Now I’m debating what to focus on next?

Thinking of returning to Nier Automata. Maybe get back to Cyberpunk.

 

[Danjin44]

I decided to finally play Cyberpunk 2077 basically my real first time playing any WRPG (I dont count Horizon and GOW as RPG).

I'm still at the beginning, the atmosphere is great and enjoy seeing different people with different cybernetic implants, they really capture that cyberpunk aesthetics.


My current issue is and it might not be game's fault because I mostly used to playing JRPGs, but menus and UI in this game are suuuuuuuuuper confusing and overwhelming.
I played games like Xenoblade that also heavy on UI but it’s no where near as confusing as this game.

When people said this game is made for PCs I thought they were mostly talking about graphics but when looking its menus and which even has mouse cursor, it feels like this game made with PC in mind.


Also one early quests was that this random guy was having issue with dick implant and try to bring him to a fixer but he got out of the car then suddenly his lower half exploded and died......I guess I failed that quest somehow? This game is really confusing the crap out of me for some reason.

 

[TheGecko]

Having a blast on OG Doom 3. PC.

 

[Davesky]

Replaying Final Fantasy IX for the first time in over 20 years. I have memories of enjoying the game but no nostalgia to it and always looked at it less favourably to its PS1 predecessors. Slowly realising my experience and memories have been affected with my parents divorce and going off to a shitty high school around the same time, not to mention PS2 and FFX just around the corner. Currently loving it, a much better game than FFVIII and around the same level as VII.

 

[CYRU5_DA_GR34T]

Just Tried out Destiny, not bad but I think I'll go back to Remnant and Warframe, 3rd person is just much more me.

 

[Captain Toad]

I'm playing Final Fantasy IX Moguri Mod on Steam Deck. Beautiful.

 

[Heimdall_Xtreme]

I finished
Livestream: Escape from Hotel Izanami.

The video game is not worth it for less than 15 dollars


By far one or even the worst "Survival Horror" I've played in my life.


I did an review , on the thread of Halloween games.

 

[Shifty1897]

Got back to Metal Gear Rising. I need to feel the music again

RULES OF NATURE!

As for me, I fired up my old hacked Wii and started up Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance for the GameCube. Currently on Chapter 21 of 29. Not sure why I never beat this game in college, there's some difficulty spikes here and there but nothing that bad.
Also I bought Ikaruga for Switch on a whim and hooked it up to a spare computer monitor that rotates for the true arcade mode feel. Game is brutally difficult, I thought I had shmup cred because I could get to the final boss of Einhander but this is on a whole other level.

 

[TintoConCasera]

Finished Yakuza 6. Great game, loved the story on this one, plus the baseball and fishing minigames were also great. Clan Creator was meh, too easy to be any kind of fun tbh.

Missed a few side stories, not having them displayed on the map was a bit mean. Still did a lot of them, loved the ones about Ono Michio and also the Pocket Circuit Fighter one. Going back to having them all voiced felt like a luxury coming from 5.

Sad thing is, with this one I've finished all of the Yakuza games. Man, am I gonna miss Kamurocho and all those characters. Overall I'd say it has become one of my favorite sagas of videogames, one with a lot of care and love put into each one of it's entries, with devs going beyond what's expected just to add a bunch of crazy but also well done stuff.

 

[Joho79]

Playing Solasta, crown of the magister.
I’m having an absolute blast.

 

[SmokedMeat]

Just started Chivalry 2. I think I’m ready to get back into online gaming.

 

[ssringo]

Very enjoyable action RPG at a great price (~$35). It's tagged as "Souls-like" but it's more a mix of Kingdoms of Amalur and Tomb Raider with a couple of Souls elements ("bonfire" respawning enemies and stamina bar for running/attacking). It's not difficult (on default setting) and the enemy AI is rather lacking at times but it's still fun navigating areas and stomping enemies. Really scratches that feeling of exploring with only the map in your own head though the rewards are, unfortunately, usually mundane (upgrade mats and such). You can definitely tell it's budget title but it's so charming and well crafted that I can easily look past the flaws. Currently my second favorite game released this year.

 

[Nitty_Grimes]

Metroid Dread.

 

[Mr Hyde]

Have a couple in rotation. Been quite distracted recently so haven't been able to focus on one game as I normally do. I'm about halfway into Forbidden West. It's very good so far. The only downside are the lame puzzles with moving boxes and fetch quests. That shit needs to die. Everything else is great.

Then I started a new playthrough on Blood Omen Legacy of Kain. Love this game. Played it on PC not long ago up until meeting Vorador, but switched over to Playstation. PS version has annoying load times but it looks and plays way better than the PC version. Also couch.

And then on Switch, I'm currently pretty deep into both Dying Light and Legend of Mana. They are great too, no complaints there.

Hopefully I manage to finish at least two of them very soon. Playing this many games at once is really not my thing.

 

[tommib]

I’ve been trying to finish Death Stranding since forever. Eventually I got the Director’s Cut on PS5 and transferred my save. Every time I play that game it grips me for 4 hours straight and I love it.

But I can’t for the life of me go back to it. Today I realised I’m only on chapter 6 which is not even half-way! I play it like every 3 months. Weirdest thing.

 

[Feel Like I'm On 42]

I’ve been trying to finish Death Stranding since forever. Eventually I got the Director’s Cut on PS5 and transferred my save. Every time I play that game it grips me for 4 hours straight and I love it.

But I can’t for the life of me go back to it. Today I realised I’m only on chapter 6 which is not even half-way! I play it like every 3 months. Weirdest thing.

I pretty much am the exact same way with DS. It's a tough game to come back to due to all that inventory/delivery management and fairly complex systems

 

[Labadal]

Playing Solasta, crown of the magister.
I’m having an absolute blast.

It's a cool game. I'm currently rolling with a party of Fighter, Cleric, Ranger, and Wizard. The light/darkness system, plus exploring vertical dungeons is lots of fun.

 

[Captain Toad]

I finished Final Fantasy 1 through 9. I'm FF'd out. Unfortunately, nothing else sounds like something I feel like playing.

Currently, spending my time staring at PSN, Switch, Xbox and Steam stores for about 20 minutes each on hopes a game I want magically spawns.

 

[TintoConCasera]

I finished Final Fantasy 1 through 9. I'm FF'd out. Unfortunately, nothing else sounds like something I feel like playing.

Currently, spending my time staring at PSN, Switch, Xbox and Steam stores for about 20 minutes each on hopes a game I want magically spawns.

How about Crystal Project?

It's basically more FF, but way less linear.

 

[PrefectAboro]

I’ve been trying to finish Death Stranding since forever. Eventually I got the Director’s Cut on PS5 and transferred my save. Every time I play that game it grips me for 4 hours straight and I love it.

But I can’t for the life of me go back to it. Today I realised I’m only on chapter 6 which is not even half-way! I play it like every 3 months. Weirdest thing.

Just finished Death Stranding last night. Keep going....the rest of the chapters all the way up to 13 go by fast. More boss fights to experience too! Play one chapter a day until you beat it!

 

[Rippa]

Got platinum on my sweet $70 Last of Us Part I PS5 copy.

Followed that up by replaying and getting platinum on Last of Us Part II.

Now I’m replaying God of War and getting platinum in anticipation for Ragnarok.

 

[GametimeUK]

Just finished GTA4. I absolutely hated GTA4 in 2008. I finished it and never thought about it again. I was utterly disappointed with this game after San Andreas. San Andreas let me fly jets, cistomise my cars, fly a jetpack, get fat, learn different fighting styles etc etc...

Now I'm a lot older all the stuff I loved about San Andreas are the things I can't be arsed bothering with in games since they feel like a waste of time. I enjoy GTA4 being a bit closer to reality. The game just gripped me start to finish and now I'm wondering if its actually my favourite GTA game and one of the greatest games I've ever played.

I didn't know my opinion could change this much.

 

[Danjin44]

I just finished rescue mission with Panam in Cyberpunk aaaaaand…….I don’t want to talk about it.

 

[fart town usa]

Still chipping away at DQ7 but it's on hold for October, playing through REmake 2 cause of the season.

God damn this game is good, of course I got it at launch but haven't played it in a while. About to finish Leon's 2nd scenario and then will probably jump into Claire's 2nd scenario.

 

[dorkimoe]

got an invite to beta test an upcoming coop game that should be out soon i think

 

[Shifty1897]

Just finished Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance, back in college I never beat it because I refused to let anyone die. Made it through this time with only 2 deaths, and I didn't care about either. The game itself was fine, there's really nothing about this game that hasn't been done better in future entries.

I just bought Star Ocean 5 on PSN for 12 bucks because I apparently hate myself. I've beaten all the other ones and I figured it would be cool to have beaten every mainline game in a JRPG franchise. And Star Ocean isn't hard to do there's only 5 games currently and because all of them except The Second Story (WHY) are available to buy on PS4/5.

 

[anthony2690]

Finished Deathloop, loved it, I was pretty close to dropping it, I carried on and then it gripped me and I could not put it down.

Picked up shadow warrior 3 on sale for £16 and blasted through it, only took me 4 hours 55 minutes to beat it, I quite enjoyed it.

Street fighter 6 beta, I really miss it

& Now I'm playing Diofield Chronicles, I'm about 7 hours into it and really enjoying the game so far

 

[amigastar]

Finished Deathloop, loved it, I was pretty close to dropping it, I carried on and then it gripped me and I could not put it down.

Picked up shadow warrior 3 on sale for £16 and blasted through it, only took me 4 hours 55 minutes to beat it, I quite enjoyed it.

Street fighter 6 beta, I really miss it

& Now I'm playing Diofield Chronicles, I'm about 7 hours into it and really enjoying the game so far

Hmm, i've installed Deathloop on Game Pass but haven't tried it for long. Maybe i give it another chance.
Anyways playing Curse of Monkey Island after Return to Monkey Island.
And Outer Worlds is also on my currently played list.

 

[64bitmodels]

I have been playing almost nothing but Geometry Dash for the past 2 weeks. It's addicting

 

[k_trout]

scorn, I'm really liking it so far

 

[OZ9000]

Metro 2033 Redux

Awesome FPS. Everyone should play it. For such an old game, it also looks very good. I can't believe these are 2010 visuals.

 

[RAIDEN1]

Coffee talk via Gamepass, good setting and set-up but I would be sooo interested if they took that formula and put it in a sci-fi setting, say a Mass Effect spin-off where you would get all sorts of species/aliens coming to your coffee bar, etc....somewhere set in the future instead of September 2020....definitley a welcome break from the usual smashing and bashing of games like God of War 2018...which as much as I am somewhat interested to see I'm not desperate to get it completed...and trying to get back into Forza Horizon 5 seems to be a challenge because whenever I look to go back to it, it needs some update or the other which prevents you from picking up from where you left off..

 

[marcincz]

Halo Reach for the first time.
Only Halo I've never beaten.

 

[reektann]

Ive never really played a Fire Emblem game so I’ve been playing Fire Emblem the blazing blade on GBA. Proper brutal how characters are permadeath bt default but I’m enjoying it quite a lot. It did a good job of teaching for the first half or so which I appreciated but I feel I’m getting the hang of not being too aggressive etc.

I forgot how advanced the GBA visuals are for its time - the animation is really great and I would even say the visual style is quite charming.

Recently played through Cloudpunk on steam deck too and it was really great. I played fully in first person mode and I feel it made the vibe so much better - I didn’t like the standard view at all - driving around with the rain beating down on the cab window in first person was a great feeling. I would actually say Cloudpunk is more cyberpunk than Cyberpunk?

 

[names are for friends]

Scorn

After playing for a couple hours or so, this is very difficult for me to continue.

My number one problem with this game isn't the awful combat. I can tolerate that. It's the failure of the game to sell the world it takes place in as anything more than a backdrop... it's a painting that you wonder through. Despite the environment being a series of somewhat active biomechanical facilities with machinery and gore everywhere there is no motion, no rotting flesh or moving parts.

Oh, but there are moving parts; the game features a few different types of fleshy Levers and Switches. Wooooo. Spooky. But nothing moves without the interaction of the player character. The puzzles in the game are of the type where you operate a machine and the machine has an entirely self-contained puzzle inside of it. It's very videogamey in that regard and makes the world feel like a series of videogame levels rather than something that exists as a whole in some kind of believable logic... it's not a horrible world where organic human life has been twisted into something unthinkable & evil, it's a rollercoaster through some HR Giger fanart.

At the very least, environmental puzzles based off of operating the machinery of the setting and trying to make sense of the purpose of everything would allow for some environmental storytelling and ground the world in that way... it would make exploration meaningful especially if there was some overarching idea or story behind the environments to be discovered by a curious player... what's worse is that they KNOW this, because the opening area of the game includes a puzzle kind of like this. It sucks, it's a very puerile & pathetic attempt, but it's kind of the right idea.

The monsters are awful too. They're just... completely antithetical to the setting. When you think of monsters and Giger, you either think of Alien, or you think of some sort of twisted biomechanical humanoid, or something like that. Instead we have these little alien creatures that sort of lethargically wander towards you and spit goop at you. I can't fathom why they went with this design. They're sort of rounded and soft in design; if anything, the player feels like the predator and they like the prey.

If we want a direct comparison of a game with a similar style, consider Darkseed. That game uses its Giger world as a contrast to the real world, a corrupted version of it with strange machinery and biomechanical humans that parallel and satirise the real world locations. It's an easy way to work the typical Giger themes and it's reasonably successful, and works much better as a horror game despite the fact that it's a 90s adventure game.

By contrast, Scorn feels like Giger as an aesthetic and nothing more. There's no underlying meaning or interpretation to draw from events or from the environment, for the most part.

edit: One thing I will say in the game's favour is that, other than some stutter, it performs well on lower-end hardware. My laptop, with a GTX 1650 Max-Q, is able to run the game at 2880x1800 using max settings and FSR 2's performance mode (ie. 1440x900 render upscaled) while maintaining at least 30fps in every scene I tried. It does look beautiful like this, and I'm especially impressed by the IQ when upscaling from such a low-resolution image... but that's on AMD, not the game. If you have some sort of mental sickness and want to show off the graphical performance of your low-end system then this is the game, I guess?

edit 2: played a little more. Good god this is awful. At what I imagine is the halfway point it devolves from being a 5/10 curiosity with an interesting art style to being a series of red-and-grey generic corridors full of enemies that you kill through the worst combat I've ever seen in an FPS. It's a real pile of shit. Just now I played through a roughly hour long section involving several challenging puzzles, a lot of slow animations and about fifty enemies to kill that had no checkpoints; I know it didn't because I kept having to check the loading screen because I wanted to turn it off. Even for £15 do not buy this, please.

Azure Striker Gunvolt 3 (PC)

I played the Switch version for 25 hours prior to writing this review.

I'm not really a fan of Gunvolt, I only like this game and Luminous Avenger iX. Gunvolt (the character) is really dull to play and I hate him. Thankfully Inti agrees so, after being cucked out of two-and-a-half games by Copen, he's been captured by Sumeragi, put into a machine and used to power the electrical grid for thirty years before— completely inexplicably— getting turned into a talking dog. Now he's your little pet and while you can swap with him at will so long as you have enough meter, you won't want to (unless you just want to push over the bosses) because he can't score as much. Instead, you're playing as Kirin, who is a ninja and a... a... g-g-girl?! *heart starts pounding out of chest like old cartoon*

The gameplay this time is that you tag enemies using talismans and you press a button to teleport to the enemies you tagged in sequential order, either killing or damaging them depending on enemy HP and number of tags placed per enemy, before ending up on either side of the final enemy you tagged. Each time you use this teleport attack you regain one aerial jump. The objective is to stay in the air as much as possible to maintain a score multiplier, while taking as little damage as possible and finishing within the par time for the maximum time bonus (although this is less important than previous games, it's pretty lax).

Bosses take a more traditional approach with attack patterns that you need to learn and more of an emphasis on your standard sword attacks, but they do force you to use your ability to teleport across to the screen to evade attacks. The biggest difficulty is your lack of a basic ranged attack which, in combination with the heavy score penalty for taking hits when you have a lot of score built up, makes for some violent incidents of gamer rage as any boss movement can suddenly screw you if you don't anticipate it. (Also, at the higher end, boss difficulty in this game is crazy. I'll beat merciless mode this time, I swear...)

Overall this is a fast-paced game that relies on reflexes first and then memorisation as you replay levels for rank, and there aren't any really obtuse or weird mechanics that you need to read up online; as such, it's about as fun on a first playthrough as it is on subsequent plays and, although you could accuse the game of lacking depth, it piles on just about enough gimmicks to work. It helps that the levels are short. It's very easy to get put into a "one more go" mentality and then you find yourself trying to S++ a level for like an hour.

Anyway, this game is nice and you should play it. Also Luminous Avenger iX (the first one). I hope they make a Luminous Avenger iX 3 and that it doesn't suck ass this time.

edit: Having played for longer, this game is my favourite game this year.

 

[MidGenRefresh]

Cyberpunk 2077 at max settings, psycho RT and DLSS set to Quality. It runs amazing on 4090 and is genuinely giving me goose bumps. Amazing graphics.

 

[names are for friends]

Cyberpunk 2077 at max settings, psycho RT and DLSS set to Quality. It runs amazing on 4090 and is genuinely giving me goose bumps. Amazing graphics.

Huh. Must be incredible to own an RTX 4090 graphics card. *wishes I had a trust fund/daddy money available*

 

[GymWolf]

Amalur remaster.

The very hard mode is what was missing from this game, vanilla was stupidly easy.

People talk about dogma having good melee for an action rpg open world but amalur combat was very good aswell.

 

[MOTM]

Sniper Elite 5. Played 2h and feel like the game won’t get any deeper or more varied than this .. could be wrong but I don’t see myself sticking with it.

 

[AV]

I'm playing Final Fantasy IX Moguri Mod on Steam Deck. Beautiful.

Sick, wanted to play that soon and was wondering if the mod would work on the deck. This little device is so neat.

 

[kubricks]

Nier Automata again, this time on the Switch. Such amazing port.

Unfortunately, I dropped Tales of vesperia after 45hrs. I think I am on the 3rd story arc... the combat alone is not good enough to carry the game. Yuri is the only one I cared within the whole team.

 

[SmokedMeat]

Chivalry 2: A high point for me was noticing both of my arms were cut off, but I was still able to run around head butting enemies.

Great game and a fun change of pace from the normal shooting games.

 

[Södy]

Finished Witcher 2. Next up: Breath of the Wild before I jump into Witcher 3.

 

[Flyingpanther]

The medium (ps5) and deathloop (ps5)

 

[Captain Toad]

Sick, wanted to play that soon and was wondering if the mod would work on the deck. This little device is so neat.

It worked perfectly up until the literally end. I guess the ending CG length causes the game to crash.

Apparently, you can delete some file or something to fix it, but I didn't bother. I've finished FFIX enough times, I didn't feel the need to bother to watch the last part of the ending.

 

[Sinkao87]

Elden ring.
What a game, but i'm more fan of sekiro though.