Currently Playing in 2021

Just started Metal Gear Solid V for the first time. Only a couple of hours in, but so far I'm really enjoying. I was a huge, HUGE fan of Metal Gear Solid 1 to 3 and I've probably played through them more than any other games, yet I was pretty disappointed with MGS4. It almost felt like it was made by people trying to create a MGS vibe, rather than the same people behind the first three games. So between that feeling, and knowing there was never going to be more MGS, I'd been putting this off for a very long time, but so far it definitely feels like what MGS is to me.

I highly recommend Warhammer 40K Inquisition - Martyr for anyone wanting a Diablo fix. Feels a bit janky at first but the gunplay is fun, there's a good variety of classes (3 classes, 3 sub-clasess and 1 DLC class) and the maps are decent. Gameplay variety is lacking, but there's lots of MP options. The stick up the protag's arse also loosens a bit once you get further into the game.

PostRe: Currently Playing in 2021 by **Zilnad** » Fri Apr 02, 2021 10:27 pm

DBD

By attacking a wall I managed to wordlessly communicate to a survivor that I needed to "interrupt" them while they worked on the nearby generator.

I love this game when random strangers help each other to compete the challenges :lol:

Warhammer 40K: Inquisitor - Martyr

FFFFFUUUUUUU! Main story continues in paid for DLC :fp:

PostRe: Currently Playing in 2021 by **Tafdolphin** » Sun Apr 04, 2021 1:24 pm

Finished Dead Space 1. What a cracking game, I'd forgotten how good it actually is.

Strangely enough, it really reminded me of Alien Isolation. The run down, industrial-future setting, the long periods of quiet broken only by amazing environmental sound design, the escalating sense of panic and hopelessness...

And it's absolutely not too long. Polished it off on Medium in less than 10 hours.

Already 3 hours into Dead Space 2 and, while it's a natural progression and there are some amazing setpieces, it's nowhere near as creepy and definitely feels more like an action game than a horror one. I remember actually preferring this to 1, but that's not been the case on this playthrough.

Just missed out on getting gold in the Meltdown tournament (with Elite AI) in Wipeout HD as a bastard
missile hit me (it strawberry floating would hit me in mid air wouldn’t it :roll:

) in Ubermall, ultimately losing me a few places & points.

Made progress in the final race on Sol 2, if I’d of not got hit in Ubermall, I would of won by a point or two.

strawberry floating missile. What a dick. :roll:

PostRe: Currently Playing in 2021 by **Tafdolphin** » Tue Apr 06, 2021 11:30 am

Went from Dead Space 2 to Dead Space 3, and whoof something went very wrong here.

A terrible start, followed by a section that was genuinely excellent (the lost flotilla) followed by another incredibly tedious section which I assume will last the rest of the game. The characters are all awful gooseberry fools, including Isaac who's become a whiney man-child, the focus has gone from horror to, I'm not kidding, romantic drama and the structure of the ice planet section is so incredibly dull I'm losing interest quickly. And how does it look worse than Dead Space 2?! Seriously, the textures are muddy as strawberry float, the character models are atrocious and the direction is messy and often incomprehensible. The first two games still look great, this thing looks like a AA budget game rather than a tentpole blockbuster.

God, I'd love to know what went on behind the scenes here. I know there was a shitload of executive interference regarding micro-transactions, a feature that seems just utterly absurd in hindsight, but I wonder how much they influenced the content as well as the form? There are straight up cover shooter sections, which the game is obviously designed towards meaning the encounters with the necromorphs now feel incredibly bland. It also feels like I'm missing half the game as I'm playing solo.

When I finished DS1 I was sad as I knew the series has effectively been dead since 2013. But after playing this...yeah. I can see why.

Started Oddworld Strangers Wrath on the Switch and dam it's an awesome game. It's a clever mix of platforming and shooting, there's certainly nothing else quite like it on the market. Love the designs of the characters, the story and humour.

Also got Munch's Odyssey as well and tried a bit of that and so far it's a pretty decent early 00's 3D platformer.

PostRe: Currently Playing in 2021 by **Seven** » Wed Apr 07, 2021 2:03 am

I've been streaming/playing Twilight Princess (Wii) and Little King's Story (Wii) past few days - Twilight Princess I'm going through it on Wii this time as I finished it ages ago on Gamecube version and it was easier to stream, doing 3-hearts challenge. Most of my deaths are due to me being dumbass clumsy-ness, but so far it's been quite easy. Still great game though and I've just got past fourth dungeon.

Little King Story I actually started today, it's so cute game but damn I'm bad at it. My guards keeps getting killed :slol:

Will play it off and on over the week.

I'm also thinking about starting/streaming Sin & Punishment 2 too, and on non-streaming side I'm playing through SM3D Land since I didn't give it proper chance at release. Enjoying it loads more this time.

Picked up Gears Tactics again after playing a few hours around launch. Found it nice and easy to get back in to. Wish there wasn't so much twiddling around required in the barracks menu though, it would be nice if there was some sort of auto select feature which just equipped the most suitable armour and weapon mods to the team you manually select.

PostRe: Currently Playing in 2021 by **Bertie** » Wed Apr 07, 2021 7:49 am

Just reading through the comments, dead space 1 is amazing, and 2 is more of the same, but is less of a surprise and ‘wow this is good’ moment. 3 is absolute garbage.

Gears tactics I liked. Xcom and gears combined. Tactics just has a bit too much filler and misses the base management elements/doom clock/development choices.

I’m currently playing Iron Harvest on PC. I love RTS (it’s why I got back into PC gaming). With game pass, I’ve just been sidetracked. But this is good, just not amazing. It’s company of heroes but with mechs.

PostRe: Currently Playing in 2021 by **Tafdolphin** » Wed Apr 07, 2021 8:46 am

Finished Dead Space 3 and it's "DLC" (which is actually one reused level that lasted less than an hour oh god I wonder how much they charged for it...)

What a mess that was. One good section (where you're free to explore a number of abandoned ships) and one interesting but fucked-by-overdoing-everything section (the Alien City) does not a good game make. The rest was absolute trash.

The worst part by far was the writing. The overarching story is...actually good. The tale of a lost expedition, the reveal of the Necromorphs' final goal, all this is great. But its execution is horrific. Large sections cut away from the cosmic horror to deal with one of the worst love triangles ever put in a game. Everyone is an arsehole: Isaac is a whiny fedora-wearing misogynist, Roberts an abusive dick, Ellie a cardboard cutout of a damsel-in-distress (particularly galling given her excellent character in DS2). The dialogue is straight out of a trashy chicklit novel, there's zero tension and Ellie comes across as nothing but a shallow floozy given the fact she shacks up with the guy who killed her boyfriend after what's supposed to only a few hours in-game.

They also ruined the gunplay. The crafting system means you can easily break the game by creating a single unstoppable weapon and the fact the developers lost control over the resources the player might have at any time meant the combat had to be generic by design. You can't create an encounter that relies on you having a certain weapon if there's a chance the player doesn't. The co-op also contributes to this: with a possible two players in every encounter, said encounters cannot be as fine tuned as previous titles given the devs can't direct the players' attention without a cutscene (of which there are many, all of which are bad).

It also manages to look worse than it's prequel. DS1 and 2 hold up wonderfully, but 3 looks like a muddy car crash. The character models are atrocious (once again Ellie bears the brunt of this not only gaining a downgrade in character modelling but a massive pair of tits too, because of MAINSTREAM APPEAL I imagine), the direction of cutscenes catastrophic and some of the textures look pulled from the PS2 era.

I've been doing some reading and although it really does look like EA stepped in and changed a bunch of stuff, the Creative Director of the first two games was no longer there, replaced by DS1 and 2's production designer who always wanted co-op in the game. His ideas, as discussed below, do sound more interesting than what we got but it seems the crafting system was already there when EA arrived.

The DLC is much, much better and genuinely feels like it was written by a different team entirely. The hallucinations (locked behind co-op in the main game for some unfathomable reason) are back and are just as effective, if not moreso, than in 1 and 2. But it's an hour long level that does too little too late.

The series does get a worthy ending through happenstance, although before they were dissolved, Visceral tried to undo said ending claiming it was just a hallucination because of course they had to strawberry float the one decent thing to come out of this whole mess.

When I finished DS1 this time round I was sad the series was dead. After finishing DS3 I genuinely don't care.

PostRe: Currently Playing in 2021 by **Jenuall** » Wed Apr 07, 2021 9:24 am

Dead Space for me always felt like a series that grew worse as the developers source of inspiration became more desperate. When you start out being inspired by System Shock then that's solid ground but by the end the influences were more Gears/Uncharted and ugh, that's just a well that was already dry 10 years ago,

PostRe: Currently Playing in 2021 by **Tafdolphin** » Wed Apr 07, 2021 9:28 am

Yup. DS1 still holds up incredibly well, reminding me an awful lot of Alien Isolation which remains one of my favourite games ever. I didn't dislike 2, in fact I enjoyed it, but it was clear where the series was headed from that point onwards. I think DS3 was almost an inevitability, a logical end to an idea eating itself alive when paired with aggressively hostile business practices and the creative ideal of "bettering" yourself each new iteration.

This is an excellent teardown of the three games if you have an hour and a half to spare! The DS3 section starts at 58.12

Noah's whole channel is strawberry floating great.

PostRe: Currently Playing in 2021 by **Jenuall** » Wed Apr 07, 2021 9:59 am

Oh nice, I'll add that to my watch later list

PostRe: Currently Playing in 2021 by **Squinty** » Wed Apr 07, 2021 1:37 pm

I honestly liked 3 better than 2.

I mean to replay 3 again to see if I feel the same way about it. I replayed through DS1 and DS2 a while back and always intended to go through 3, but never got around to it.

DS1 is still the best one in my view. I found the end of 2 really obnoxious.

PostRe: Currently Playing in 2021 by **Tafdolphin** » Wed Apr 07, 2021 4:16 pm

Squinty wrote:I honestly liked 3 better than 2.

I've seen this opinion around quite a bit and...I genuinely can't comprehend it. At all. DS3 fails at everything it attempts to do, and while DS2 may not have the horror chops of 1 it succeeds in evolving the lore and expanding the narrative. I'm going through 2 again now, directly after 3, and if I didn't know I'd say 2 was the more recent game. It does everything better, from the horror to the gameplay to the graphics to the lore. The Church level is one of the standout levels of the entire series for example. Add in the fact that 3 doesn't even do it's weird actionised combat well and that it looks like arse and...

I'm not even a fanboy of the series. I just don't understand people liking things that are bad.

I found the end of 2 really obnoxious.

I am curious to know what you're referring to here, actually. DS2 is many things but obnoxious is not one of them. If it's joke at the end then...I dunno man. Even if it didn't hit for you obnoxious is not the right word to use there.

PostRe: Currently Playing in 2021 by **OrangeRKN** » Wed Apr 07, 2021 4:53 pm

Tafdolphin wrote:I just don't understand people liking things that are bad.

Sig worthy quote here :lol:

PostRe: Currently Playing in 2021 by **Tafdolphin** » Wed Apr 07, 2021 5:13 pm

OrangeRKN wrote:
Tafdolphin wrote:I just don't understand people liking things that are bad.

Sig worthy quote here

Everything I like is ace so I really don't understand the mindset at all.

PostRe: Currently Playing in 2021 by **Bertie** » Wed Apr 07, 2021 5:27 pm

Taf smashing the forum up and making everyone play disco Elysiam too.

I am intrigued by disco Elysiam, it just doesn’t seem like my kind of thing.

I’ve been playing forza 4 fortune island this afternoon. DLC is cheap. Looks amazing!

Currently Playing in 2021

Who is online

Affiliates