Last Game You Played

[ShiraNoMai]

Phogs!

100% this game with Moony today. Very cute and fun experience, despite the jank and the few incoherent puzzle design choices. Definitely something to pick up if you have a partner or friend around locally to play. Can't say I'd recommend playing via online, not necessarily for the connection, but the communication absolutely required to play would make this near impossible to complete any task. Y'all know Nickelodeon's CatDog, right? Imagine one person controlling Cat, and the other controlling Dog. Can't really do that without verbal communication lol

[Dragon Lord]

Would you say it's worth getting Demon's Souls at full price @Dragon Lord or is it best to wait for it to go on sale?

As someone who absolutely loves Demon's Souls, and ranks it as their third favorite in the Soulsborne series, I can say with absolute honesty that the Remake is not remotely worth a $70 price tag. As much as I love Demon's Souls, this remake brings nothing except for prettier graphics and a couple of new armor sets. Otherwise the game still feels like you're playing a PS3 game from 2009. The only other thing that this game brings over the original, is online play, since the servers for the PS3 version were shut down a while ago, but if you don't care about online play, then meh. I never really co-op'd in Demon's Souls because the game is relatively easy, and I never invaded because the PvP is wonky as hell (still is, thanks Bluepoint for not doing any actual work on remaking this game!). So for me, if I wanted to play Demon's Souls as it was originally, I would just boot up my PS3 and play it.

They had a great opportunity to refresh Demon's Souls completely and make the combat and mechanics feel as nice as Bloodborne/Dark Souls III, but instead they just chose to completely botch it. Again, I love Demon's Souls to death, but the game had a lot of issues with the mechanics, and they needed to and should have been fixed in the remake.

Saddest thing is? They were so lazy on this remake that a lot of the major bugs and glitches are still present in the remake. You can still do a skip in 4-1 where you get yourself over a ledge you shouldn't be able to and that lets you skip the entire level and go straight to the boss. There's a glitch with a talisman called 'Talisman of Beasts', which lets you cast spells without having the required stats to actually use the Talisman. Not only that, but it lets you bypass the HP drain on a weapon buff called "Curse Weapon", which is supposed to give you a 50% attack boost in exchange for 1% of your MAX HP per second. Instead, casting it with the Talisman of Beasts will give you that 50% Attack buff in exchange for 1 HP per second. Think they could have taken a bit of time to fix a bug that severe, but nope. I mean, good for the players, I guess. That's a massive advantage for us. Just sad that they really couldn't take time to fix many things abourt this game. I think the only major bug that really got fixed was the item duplication bug. Though there is a new duplication trick where you back-up your save online, go into the game, summon a friend, drop all of your items you want to duplicate for them to pick up, then download your save from online storage, and then load back up and you have all of the items back due to restoring a previous save, and your friend still has all of them too. Takes a bit more work than the original trick, but can still be abused.

Anyways, long rant over. In the end I enjoyed playing it, but it just felt like the same game I played back in 2013 originally. Aside from looking prettier, there was absolutely nothing new for me to experience otherwise. Even the PvP is still the same wonky-ass laggy experience it was from the original.

[Maniakkid25]

Lost Odyssey (360):

It's happening! Last disc, final Point of No Return because it's the last level of the game! Just got a bit of sidequesting to wrap up, and I'll be done grabbing footage of the game, and can finish part 2 of the rant. I'm surprised with myself for being able to just BURN my way through the last two discs in two weeks. Goes to show just how much more time and energy I have now that school is over.

[Moonface]

Lost Odyssey (360):

It's happening! Last disc, final Point of No Return because it's the last level of the game! Just got a bit of sidequesting to wrap up, and I'll be done grabbing footage of the game, and can finish part 2 of the rant. I'm surprised with myself for being able to just BURN my way through the last two discs in two weeks. Goes to show just how much more time and energy I have now that school is over.

Last two?! How many discs does the game have?

[Kyng]

I think it would be Crypt of the NecroDancer, which I played on Thursday? (I was away from home all weekend, and I haven't been in much of a gaming mood anyway!)

My run wasn't very successful, though... I died at the first boss fight .

[ShiraNoMai]

I got my gaming kick started up again. Finally played a game I bought on a Steam Sale!

Halo: Combat Evolved (Anniversary)
So, I've never actually played through the Halo games! Not owning an Xbox growing up contributed a major part to that, haha. So, thought I'd fix that and get me into some fun KB+M FPS single-player action I've been strangely craving lately. Feels good to play, and the anniversary edition is stunning. There are some downsides to it, however; the 'transparent' parts of the levels, where glass is involved on the floor panels, is highly non-contrasting to the rest of the environment, which, in the heat of action, can be easily confused as normal ground when in fact it's a giant abyss to death instead. Have died a few times to that.
Also feel that the level design isn't always clear in where you should be always going? I could just be thick and not figuring it out, but sometimes I find myself lost through the many identical corridors that appear in some of the levels and the game isn't clear on where exactly you should be going to progress.

[Moonface]

Would you say it's worth getting Demon's Souls at full price @Dragon Lord or is it best to wait for it to go on sale?

As someone who absolutely loves Demon's Souls, and ranks it as their third favorite in the Soulsborne series, I can say with absolute honesty that the Remake is not remotely worth a $70 price tag. As much as I love Demon's Souls, this remake brings nothing except for prettier graphics and a couple of new armor sets. Otherwise the game still feels like you're playing a PS3 game from 2009. The only other thing that this game brings over the original, is online play, since the servers for the PS3 version were shut down a while ago, but if you don't care about online play, then meh. I never really co-op'd in Demon's Souls because the game is relatively easy, and I never invaded because the PvP is wonky as hell (still is, thanks Bluepoint for not doing any actual work on remaking this game!). So for me, if I wanted to play Demon's Souls as it was originally, I would just boot up my PS3 and play it.

They had a great opportunity to refresh Demon's Souls completely and make the combat and mechanics feel as nice as Bloodborne/Dark Souls III, but instead they just chose to completely botch it. Again, I love Demon's Souls to death, but the game had a lot of issues with the mechanics, and they needed to and should have been fixed in the remake.

Saddest thing is? They were so lazy on this remake that a lot of the major bugs and glitches are still present in the remake. You can still do a skip in 4-1 where you get yourself over a ledge you shouldn't be able to and that lets you skip the entire level and go straight to the boss. There's a glitch with a talisman called 'Talisman of Beasts', which lets you cast spells without having the required stats to actually use the Talisman. Not only that, but it lets you bypass the HP drain on a weapon buff called "Curse Weapon", which is supposed to give you a 50% attack boost in exchange for 1% of your MAX HP per second. Instead, casting it with the Talisman of Beasts will give you that 50% Attack buff in exchange for 1 HP per second. Think they could have taken a bit of time to fix a bug that severe, but nope. I mean, good for the players, I guess. That's a massive advantage for us. Just sad that they really couldn't take time to fix many things abourt this game. I think the only major bug that really got fixed was the item duplication bug. Though there is a new duplication trick where you back-up your save online, go into the game, summon a friend, drop all of your items you want to duplicate for them to pick up, then download your save from online storage, and then load back up and you have all of the items back due to restoring a previous save, and your friend still has all of them too. Takes a bit more work than the original trick, but can still be abused.

Anyways, long rant over. In the end I enjoyed playing it, but it just felt like the same game I played back in 2013 originally. Aside from looking prettier, there was absolutely nothing new for me to experience otherwise. Even the PvP is still the same wonky-ass laggy experience it was from the original.

I completely missed this post. It's a shame that it sounds like the equivalent of a HD mod when you boil it down to basically what was done for the remake, rather than something that tries to improve the game where possible without getting away from what Demon's Souls felt like (if it feels more like Dark Souls then at that point is it really a Demon's Souls remake or just playing Dark Souls in a custom map?). I've never played it before but I think what would turn me off paying $70 is the idea that I can get more for my money and better From Soft experiences for either cheaper, or the same price when Elden Ring comes out.

I got my gaming kick started up again. Finally played a game I bought on a Steam Sale!

Halo: Combat Evolved (Anniversary)
So, I've never actually played through the Halo games! Not owning an Xbox growing up contributed a major part to that, haha. So, thought I'd fix that and get me into some fun KB+M FPS single-player action I've been strangely craving lately. Feels good to play, and the anniversary edition is stunning. There are some downsides to it, however; the 'transparent' parts of the levels, where glass is involved on the floor panels, is highly non-contrasting to the rest of the environment, which, in the heat of action, can be easily confused as normal ground when in fact it's a giant abyss to death instead. Have died a few times to that.
Also feel that the level design isn't always clear in where you should be always going? I could just be thick and not figuring it out, but sometimes I find myself lost through the many identical corridors that appear in some of the levels and the game isn't clear on where exactly you should be going to progress.

Yeah, the one bridge you showed me last night was really rough, but only in the remastered graphics. Switching it to the original graphics made the bridge easily visible, and for me is a very easy way to highlight how remastered graphics in games can lose the atmosphere and readability of a level and that more isn't always better if it causes that. I'm trying to remember if any levels in the Crash and Spyro remakes suffered from that...

Dead by Daylight (PC)
Been playing this quite a bit since buying it, mostly because it's a very good pick up and put down game since matches don't take very long and so far I've not had to grind for upgrade points for characters. Mostly been playing it with @Karo but I did play it yesterday with both them and @Maniakkid25.

Minecraft (PC)
Just working on designing stuff for the forum server. I need to take some screenshots to share what I've been doing. XD

The Binding of Isaac: Repentance (PC)
Just been doing the daily run every day for this lately. I started an actual run about a week ago and haven't bothered to go back to it yet.

[Maniakkid25]

Lost Odyssey (360):

It's happening! Last disc, final Point of No Return because it's the last level of the game! Just got a bit of sidequesting to wrap up, and I'll be done grabbing footage of the game, and can finish part 2 of the rant. I'm surprised with myself for being able to just BURN my way through the last two discs in two weeks. Goes to show just how much more time and energy I have now that school is over.

Last two?! How many discs does the game have?

If you watch the rant, you will note I say I'll "save discs 3 and 4 for a later date". So, there are 4 discs. On Xbox 360. Yeah, the game is BIG!

Donkey Kong 64 (N64)

*grabs hair, pulls* AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

So, this game is about to make me throw myself out of a window. In the game, you collect Golden Bananas, and some of them are locked behind minigames. And two of them are locked behind the hard difficulty of the WORST DESIGNED MINIGAME IN THE ENTIRE GAME: BEAVER BOTHER! I cannot intimate enough how much of a nightmare this game is, and the game expects you to drop 15 of the bastards into a hole in 60 seconds! Yeah, in a game with poor hit detection, terrible mechanics, and bulls*** AI (THEY WALK INTO THE HOLE WITHOUT FALLING IN! WHY DO THEY DO THAT?!)! I just -- I can't. I CAN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE!

[Kyng]

Banished

I got this in the Steam Summer Sale, to play once I finished Medieval Lords: Build, Defend, Expand (which has a very similar premise: it's also a city-builder in a Middle Ages setting ). And, now that I've beaten that game, I've started on Banished.

So far, I've just got the basics set up: a few houses, some farms, a few resource collection buildings, and a barn for storage. It's not exactly a shining city on the hill, but one day it will be:

Spoiler

[Dragon Lord]

@Moonface - Yeah, a lot of dropped potential with the game. If they would have went back to and let Fromsoft do the remake, I'm convinced it would have ended up 1000% better. They would have actually taken the time to fix things in the game, refresh the game, and make it feel new while maintaining that Demon's Souls feel of the original. The combat could have definitely used a touch-up, and having it be more like Dark Souls III combat would have been great. I don't know if I mentioned it during any of my rant posts about the game, but they did add a couple of new armor sets to the game, which are really cool. Especially since one is the armor set of one of the fan-favorite bosses in the game. However, due to how the weight system works in the game (both equip weight and the carry weight), you can't even use them. They're so heavy that you'd have to pump up the stats that increase both weight limits pretty high, and that would mean sacrificing stats that matter even more (damage increasing stats like Strength and Dexterity). So it's just really sad that they couldn't change that up to make using heavier armor sets more viable in the game.

Genshin Impact (PS5)

Been exploring the crap out of Inazuma and farming up all the materials I need to max out Ayaka. Been taking forever, but it'll be worth it in the end. Absolutely loving Ayaka and her playstyle. I've been waiting for a one-handed sword character I actually liked using other than Keqing in the game, and I finally got that with Ayaka. Unfortunately Keqing does suffer from having an element that doesn't really have anything good about it, while Ayaka benefits from having one of the two highest damage elements in the game (Pryo and Cryo, Ayaka being Cryo). So while I like using Keqing, it's nice to use a one-handed sword character that's also able to pump out a hell of a lot more damage.

Hopefully I can get some better Artifacts for Ayaka so that I can really make use of her insanely high Crit DMG potential, and the fact you can get her to 100% Crit Rate. Also right now I have to keep switching my artifacts between Ganyu and Ayaka, and that's annoying. Plus it means I can't use both of them in the Abyss at the same time, without one of them being majorly gimped.

Azur Lane (Android)

Currently having our IDOLM@STER x Azur Lane collab. I've gotten... four of the six girls so far, I think. Sadly no Hibiki in this collab (maybe in a second wave if another collab with IM@S happens). Other than that, I am still just working on leveling up more ships to level 120 and working on finishing off more PR ships. They added a system to where you can now pay coins in place of using blueprints to enhance PR1 ships, which is really nice. Been able to get Roon to Dev Level 30 thanks to this. Gonna have the third anniversary coming up this month, so I'm super hyped to see what kind of event we get for that, plus what new shipgirls we get too. Hoping for some really hype news + merchandise.

Arknights (Android)

Have our next event going on here too, which introduced a couple of new 6*s that are pretty hype as well. I managed to pull both of them in 91 pulls (a bit high compared to my usual luck, but I did end up getting two or three of banner sixes, so that caused me to have to pull a couple of extra times). Got both of them to Elite 2 Level 90 (max) right away. Been having fun playing around with both of them. One of them is a very interesting Vanguard that can't actually kill any enemies. She can reduce them down to 1 HP, in which they enter a "wounded" state and are slowed down. After a certain amount of time, they'll die from the wounded status, so you have to properly position her in a spot the enemies won't be able to reach the base before they die. Or you can have another operator behind her to finish off the enemies she can't kill. Either way, it's a very interesting mechanic to her and makes her really unique. She's a 2 block Vanguard, so that makes her valuable, and she regenerates a lot of DP while having high damage, so even though she can't kill anything, she's still worth using in certain situations. The other character is an AoE caster who is currently the strongest of her type so far. Though AoE Casters are kind of weak compared to single target casters in general. However her skills add a lot of unique strategic options to using her, so it's been really fun just messing around with what she's capable of. While neither character is rated as "super OP Meta" characters, they have been fun to use so far. I'm liking both of them a lot.

[Moonface]

Dead by Daylight (PC)
As I mentioned in the thread yesterday, I played a game as the killer again and for the first time managed to kill every single survivor. I don't know if it was multiple people or just one person, but someone was constantly screwing up the generator skill checks which made it very easy for me to keep finding people. The stupidest thing they did though was the last two players led me straight to the hatch during a chase, and when I caught and hooked one of them, the other thought it would be smart to camp the hatch for when it would open when the hooked player died, but ran away when they saw me thinking I would chase them and leave the hatch alone. Instead, I closed the hatch the second it opened and at that point the last survivor had no chance of getting away because the hatch was in a corner of the map, and they couldn't attempt to flee without me seeing them do it.

@Maniakkid25: Is that the largest game on Xbox 360 with that many discs, or are there others with the same amount or somehow more? XD

@Dragon Lord: As someone who isn't familiar with all the intricacies and differences between Demon's and Dark, what would keep the remake feeling like the original if it had been made to feel more like Dark Souls III?

[Nightingale]

Baseball 9.

It is excellent for a mobile game, although it doesn't quite escape the "pay-to-win" factor.

[Maniakkid25]

@Maniakkid25: Is that the largest game on Xbox 360 with that many discs, or are there others with the same amount or somehow more? XD

As far as I know, it's the largest game sold on physical discs on the 360. Both Final Fantasy 13 and Blue Dragon were only 3 discs on 360 (FFXIII was 3 discs because of the limited storage of HD DVD compared to Blu-ray). Then again, Consoles were well known for shite compression of their games, so it's entirely possible that, had the game come out on PC, it could have fit on one disc. Plus, installed on the hard drive, the game "only" takes up 24 Gigs. Plus, even if you 100% the game, its only about 70 hours. Dark Chronicle is longer than that on 1 disc on the PS2!

[Nightingale]

Command & Conquer 64.

It is almost SHOCKING how well that plays.

[Monocle]

Axiom Verge 2.

Excellent Excellent Excellent metroidvania. I was engrossed. already finished the game with 80% item collection completion