Topic: What (Non-PS4) game are you playing??

I am playing Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines on PC. It's one of my girlfriend's favourite games ever and she's been planning to get me to play it forever. So I'm mouse and keyboarding and it's so annoying. The game is good though. Well, the game is a mess, but it's a fun mess. It's like a Bethesda mess. The world and lore and everything is fun enough that I'm okay with the glitches and the general silliness.

@RogerRoger Considering that I kept buying Mega Drive games without any means to play them for a good long while…. quite a large backlog 😂

@johncalmc Bloodlines is also one of my favourite games. It really is a mess but the fan patches iron out the messy bugs and such. It’s somehow a great game despite all that though.

@nessisonett I'm playing it with the fan patch, yeah. It's still not pretty. I can only really play it in short sorta couple of hour bursts because playing mouse and keyboard is so upsetting for me, but I've made some progress and I like the game a lot more than I thought I would. I also appreciate the Lacuna Coil poster and the Goldfrapp song that plays in the haunted hotel - some excellent mid-2000s tunes going on.

Man, the Mega Drive’s sound chip sounds so satisfying. It’s like ZEOWOWOW

@RogerRoger So basically you’re playing the first Killzone then 😛

@RogerRoger Just the little gameplay I looked up there makes it look like one of the jankiest games I’ve ever seen 😂

Very glad I picked up the Geofront patch for Trails to Azure before it was bumped to 2023!

@RogerRoger Oh man, that’s a true classic. Sometimes bust out my Cube copy when I feel the mood!

I started playing Monster Hunter Stories since it’s on Apple Arcade now and it’s been alright so far. Glad they’re adding proper games to it now, Layton’s Mystery Journey’s being added next! Also Zookeeper’s being brought back from the grave too.

Currently playing Resident Evil 3 (PS1) on Vita. I've been going through the PS1 trilogy on my Vita this year and now I'm playing through the third game on hard difficulty. I'm at the Clock Tower area of the game and I just beat Nemesis for the second time. Dear lord this battle was difficult, it took me an hour until I finally beat him! I definitely feel like the mandatory Nemesis fights in this game are difficulty spikes since he has so much health, moves around very quickly and can grab you if you're too close. He can also grab you a second time when you're on the ground after the first grab, and at that point you're pretty much dead. Granted, when I finally realised his pattern on the second fight, then it became much easier. But the amount of health he has in the second fight is still absolutely ridiculous.

I think this is the only gripe I have with the game so far, otherwise it's another excellent RE experience.

@RogerRoger I played ace combat 7 as it was leaving game pass a couple of months ago. Not sure which website I posted my thoughts on. I thought it was decent and worth sticking out. I loved the style of the cut scenes with its like realistic anime aesthetic along with a kind of out-in-the-sticks western aesthetic. I quite likef the alternate history it proposed too. Very interesting stuff even if the gameolay itself didn't live up to the other parts. Not sure how similar it is to 5 though!

@RogerRoger just shaking my head at all my spelling errors in that previous post. I think I was pretty tired when I wrote that last night.

I was really surprised by the anime stuff tbh. Not at all what I was expecting from what I've heard about it which is mainly related to the gameplay.

I checked a guide for a few tough missions instead of bumping down the difficulty. The game itself was holding my interest just enough for me to check a guide but I think if it was any harder then I would have canned it.

@RogerRoger oi, are you taking the miss?! 😃😂

I think it was 17 missions total, or 21. Not sure lol. I do remember there being one particularly tough one actually and it wasn't so bad after that, perhaps because I'd learned some skill from it. I think it was an escort mission possibly! Maybe I just looked up what to shoot on the map.

Started randomly playing Tales of Vesperia on the Switch yesterday. I've actually not been in a JRPG mood for a very long time now for some reason, perhaps because I've been wanting to finish a lot of games from my backlog and long JRPGs would hinder that. It doesn't help either that I've had Trails of Cold Steel IV and Persona 5 Royal in my backlog since last year, both of which are 100+ hour JRPGs, and so I didn't want to start up any new ones. Thankfully, I finished Trails IV in June and P5R earlier this month, so now I feel like the time is right to finally start up a new JRPG and I thought Tales of Vesperia would be a good one. I still haven't played through any Tales of games and I actually started playing this game for a couple of hours last year. So I thought it would only make sense to continue playing it and finish it up.

It's been rough trying to relearn everything since this game has so many different mechanics and I have no prior experience of the Tales of series. However, I've been absolutely loving the classic JRPG vibes this game has been given off. You walk around in an overworld map sort of like in Final Fantasy, the setting is pretty standard for a typical JRPG and it just feels overall very much like a classic JRPG. And I've missed those JRPGs considering I've been playing two very modern ones recently, i.e. Trails and Persona.

It's also nice to be playing a JRPG on a portable system. I personally prefer to play JRPGs on handhelds and that's another reason why this game has been a breath of fresh air compared to Trails and Persona, both of which I played on PS4. Not to mention that I have so many JRPGs in my Switch backlog and I've barely completed any of them. I think it's finally time to go through them now.

Recently got a gaming laptop and have played through Dogfight 1942 (of which I have written a piece on the "Impressions" thread awhile ago) & Ys Seven (just finished this up last night & was my first proper JRPG since completing Xenoblade: DE back in January).

Spent the rest of last night waiting on Microsoft Flight Sim to download, and while I really didn't get much of a chance to try it out before going to bed, the game recommended that my laptop was good enough to play on high settings, so I'm pretty excited to try it out tonight (I did one brief impromptu flight before shutting it down last night & it did look gorgeous. Crashed, the plane, almost immediately though, lol).

Been playing a lot of Tales of Vesperia on the Switch the past week and I'm currently 15 hours into the game. In all honesty, I'm not finding it to be as compelling as in the beginning. The story seems to be all over the place and I feel like we've not been introduced to many events that explain why we're doing all of this. It still feels like I'm in the beginning of the game despite having played it for so long. Furthermore, the combat feels incredibly repetitive, stiff and not as intuitive as I thought. The sense of progression is still nice though, except for the fact that I'm buying equipment for my characters literally every 1-2 hours because you travel so much in this game. Which actually brings me to one of the few things that I like about it, which is that it at least keeps a good pacing. You're never in one area for too long, not even in dungeons, and that's a really good thing since older JRPGs tend to do that. Another thing I'm liking is the amount of characters, but sadly they're never fully realised due to the poor writing of the game and typical tropes you find in JRPGs. I'm just not that interested in learning more about them.

I know I still haven't finished the game, but I'm honestly underwhelmed by it considering this is one of the best games in the series according to the fans. If this is the best the series has to offer, then I shudder at the thought of how the other games I have in my collection are like, such as Xillia, Symphonia and Zesteria.

I've also started up Saints Row 1 on 360 and I'm not particularly impressed by this game either. The whole gangster theme just feels like a product of its time, it's just so bland and uninteresting today. It also doesn't help that I've already experienced Saints Row 3 and 4 and those games make the first one feel incredibly outdated because they reuse the formula in each game. There are activities to do around the city but they don't feel as fun or varied as in SR3. For example, the Mayhem activity had you ride in a tank in SR3 but here you're just running around and throwing grenades or shooting people. It's not as crazy as in the later games, which is why I should've played this series in order so that I could've fully appreciated the first game. But now it just feels like an unnecessary obstacle in order to unlock story missions that simply feel like copy and paste activities.

Also, I found out that the gangster leader you're working for in Saints Row 1 is voiced by the same actor who voiced Captain Anderson in the Mass Effect trilogy. I genuinely can't imagine him voicing a gangster considering how civilised his character is in the ME games. Hearing Captain Anderson say "mother******" just doesn't sit right with me, lol.

@RogerRoger Yeah I mean, the best actors are the ones who are able to switch up their personalities on the fly like that. But it still felt very wrong to hear Captain Anderson talk like that, lol. The funny thing is that even though he swore and all, he still sounded incredibly sophisticated when he talked. Like he just couldn't let go of that formal tone of his, even though he's a gangster.

On a side note, I don't know if you have certain expectations about actors taking on certain roles, but when I heard that Norman Reedus and Mads Mikkelsen would be in Death Stranding, I expected them to act just like they did in their shows, i.e. The Walking Dead and Hannibal respectively. Norman's character there is the strong silent type while Mads is more the mysterious and clever individual. I think Norman's character in Death Stranding acted just like his character in The Walking Dead and Mads was more or less like Hannibal Lecter in that he was mysterious. The point I'm trying to make is that certain actors are simply known to behave in a certain way across all the media they appear in. Imagine if you take an actor who's known to be a good guy and then cast him as the worst villain imaginable. Even though it's a separate show/movie/game, it still wouldn't feel right to see that, you know?

@RogerRoger @LtSarge I won’t get too off the rails here on this thread but just chiming in to say I experienced this phenomenon recently with Idris Elba, who incidentally does a lot of video game voice acting too, but my sole experience with him is as the ultra-straight-arrow, epitome-of-integrity-and-loyalty Heimdall in the MCU and then to see him as Bloodsport in Suicide Squad was a little off-putting at first. I know he has a wide resume of other acting roles over the years but to me he will always be Heimdall.

@Th3solution I take it you’ve never watched The Wire (if you haven’t, watch it!)… as he will always be Stringer Bell.

@colonelkilgore @RogerRoger @Th3solution I'm afraid Idris Elba is Luther and no-one else.