The Gaming Postwhoring Thread

[vlinorman]

I finished a replay of the entire Phantasy Star saga recently. I still think they're better than any of the classic Final Fantasies.

[THUNDERDUCK]

Phantasy Star 2 was awesome, when I was a kid.  I got the Big Hero 6 Bot Battle game for my phone.  Plays just like Puzzle and Dragons

[coachie]

Fantasy Star 3 was the first RPG I ever played, I only bought it, because the box art looked cool, I had no idea what rpgs are LOL
It helped me to learn english, but I never beat the final Boss.

[Tuffty]

I got the PS4 on Monday! Pretty impressed by it thus far. I'm glad that I thought ahead and selected PS4 games I wanted out of PS Plus as I have a few games to add to Driveclub and Bloodborne. Here's my short review of each thus far:

Bloodborne - ASKLDJFSDKFNSKFN. So good. Not much else to say other than I'm getting the same vibes as playing Dark Souls for the first time.
Driveclub - The updates make it a very different game from launch apparently and I have to say I'm very impressed. On a pure technical level it might be one of the best looking games I've seen. I hadn't got such feelings on a new console release since Gran Turismo 1 on the PS1. Seriously. Just look at videos of driving at night in the rain, it's incredible. The handling feels nice, the tracks are nice and long and there's loads of events to get stuck into. Will be playing this for a long time.
Transistor - Looks very nice, the story is just as obtuse from the beginning like Bastion was and right away the most appealing thing about it is the combat. Already it's shown just enough complexity to really create a deep combat system which is open for experimentation and create different builds just to see what works. It might be easy to get through the game, but to get through it in style is another thing.
Valiant Hearts - Very charming adventure game centered around WW1. It's pulling on my heart strings already thanks to some nice animation and interestingly, collectibles which provide facts from WW1. That's a really neat way to do collectibles I think, much more rewarding than just doing it for a trophy. It actively makes me want to seek them out, even if some does make for tough reading. What a tragedy WW1 was.
Apotheon - An interesting 2D side scroller where you're a lowly Greek soldier trying to work your way up Mount Olympus to seek favor from the gods. The combat is Dark Souls-esque but I find the combat to be just ok. If there's more than one enemy then things get too hectic and I can't get a feel of where enemies are or what damage I'm doing. However, it is worth playing alone for the visual style. It looks like it's all playing out on an ancient Greek urn. Take a look at the game to see what I mean. Whatever flaws I think the game has, is overlooked by the fact that I want to continue playing to see how differenct areas or enemies look.
Olli Olli 2 - Hard as fuck 2D skateboarding game where the aim is to get the highest score as possible on these different levels. It feels like a 2D Tony Hawks game. You have to learn some game mechanics quick and while in my head I know what to do, the execution is different! Because the game moves fast, it's tough to keep a good flow going and so I make mistakes and press X too late or not at all which means I mess up the landing etc. Very tough, but it just makes me want to restart and go for the score again, in the same way that Trials does.
Strider -  It's the one I've played the least but it seems like a decent Metroidvania thus far.

[vlinorman]

Everytime I read Valiant Hearts I confuse it with Vandal Hearts. 

[Amplifier]

I just found out about Amiibo today. What an evil & awesome idea. I'm glad I don't have the money for all this fun stuff.. 

[Soike]

Really want to get bloodborne but just cant justify the price atm. 

[Tuffty]

The evolution of a gaming Youtube personality:

2013 -

2014 -

Remember kids, if you want those Youtube dollars just be as obnoxious as possible like Jacksepticeye, Pewdiepie, KSI etc

[shirenuファクトリー]

What the hell lol... What is his target audience, 12-year-olds? lol

[Tuffty]

^ You're probably not wrong about that. May be for a different audience but even so I'd like to think that even my 12 year old self would find the above as obnoxious, loud and not funny. And very apparently done for the sake of attracting a bigger audience too if you look at the tone of the earlier example compared to now.

I defeated the first boss in Bloodborne! Even uploaded footage of it to my Facebook like a true nerd. I was happy with the victory as what the video doesn't show is the 5 attempts I made on it beforehand and failed each time. As in any good Souls game, I eventually made it when I learned the patterns a bit. But what was magical about this particular instance was that by chance I found out if you hit it's head at the right time (which I did after changing the weapon to a whip mid fight) you can stagger it just as it's about to attack which can stagger it and use a move that does really big damage to it. That happened twice so it made the fight easier. Love the small detail of the both of us being covered in blood as the fight goes on. It was awesome and I'm so excited to see what other bosses come up.

Bloodborne - Cleric Beast

[thatonezombie]

I'm gonna rectify one of my blind spots. I'm gonna play Link to the Past. Will I finish it? Maybe, but I will at least play some of it 

[scorn]

And the worst MMOG for the past 2 years go to....En Masse's Tera NA!

Broken launcher, broken patching even if left to patch overnight, can't even start/launch the program up; so completely uninstalled.

[Tuffty]

Me (finally) defeating Father Gascoigne in Bloodborne. It's such a good boss battle.

[Soike]

I've never had a problem with Tera and I've been playing for over a year..?

[vlinorman]

Really fun doujin 

[THUNDERDUCK]

Downloaded the Forza Horizon Fast & Furious Game

[Tuffty]

Borrowing a copy of Shadows of Mordor to play with. It's well made and I really like working with the Nemesis system. It exposed a flaw pretty early on in the game though which lost some of it's magic for me. I had killed one of the captains with an execution move where I quite literally decapitated him. He was dead for sure. Then, later on, I find him out in the world again, head intact, threatening to kill me. Spoils the immersion a little bit seeing that!

Mortal Combat X has released to a slew of issues like locked characters, install issues etc but this is the worst I've read a patch which turned the rate of in game gold down dramatically, in order to push Day One DLC. All the more shady when you consider that this wouldn't be mentioned in any of the reviews about the game.

[maruda]

Since my last post in this thread, I've finished:
Dark Void
Just Cause 2
Spec Ops: The Line
Ghost Recon Future Soldier
The Bureau: XCOM Declassified
Army of TWO: The Devil's Cartel
Brothers
Back to the Future: Episodes 1-5
Tales of Symphonia
Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen
Resident Evil: Code Veronica X
Resident Evil 4
Resident Evil Revelations
Resident Evil HD Remaster
The Last of Us GOTY
Jak and Daxter Trilogy
Uncharted Trilogy
Killzone Trilogy
Resistance Trilogy
Homefront
Deus Ex: Human Revolution
Borderlands GOTY
Bioshock
Diablo III UEE

I also replayed and finished Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2, Darksiders II, Bayonetta and Vanquish on their highest difficulties.

About to start Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments and Bioshock 2.

[Tuffty]

I did have a laugh at this, a right wing gaming site came out with an article on how to spot a game created by social justice warriors. "A checklist of attributes all SJW video games have so you can tell if a game will try to entertain or lecture you." Let's go through these four steps together and see what they say.

1. Simplistic Gaming Mechanics - Game mechanics are supposed to be simple.  It's what makes them intuitive. You do not get depth by making the mechanics complex, it just makes the game confusing and painful. Successful games get depth by combining and playing relatively simple mechanics off against each other. Also a bit rich coming from a site that labels Call of Duty as one of the best shooters ever. You literally can't get more simplistic where all the game asks is that you move, point and shoot along to these linear corridors and tightly scripted pathing. By his definition, SNES games are simplistic purely on the grounds of the controller having fewer buttons. Try giving them Ninja Gaiden and see what they say then.

2. An obsession with visuals- Seriously? Indie games have a problem with this? Again, it's funny that Call of Duty is lauded over games which focus on graphics to the detriment of gameplay. What are they complaining about here exactly, the art styles? Because I guarantee it's done out of unconstrained creativity and relatively low budgets rather than hiding SJW propaganda. I don't even make sense of this and how it applies to big budget games.

3. No failure states - Come on now, AAA games may have failure states i.e. You Died screens, but this is not a problem with modern games considering that they constantly checkpoint and auto save for you. The punishment for death is so little that at most you're being inconvenienced for a few minutes of your time at most before reattempting your mistakes over and over until you succeed. Failure is meaningless.

4. Shoehorned-in social topics - This literally cries out as "My brain can't process opinions, politics or nuance in my storytelling, so I don't want it in my vidya games". I think they misspelled 'addresses' with 'shoehorned-in' personally. So any games like The Witcher, Mass Effect, Skyrim, Deus Ex, Spec Ops, Metal Gear....

This list practically sums up Bioshock as the quintessential SJW game. Simplistic FPS mechanics, an art style that permeates through every bit of the game, no failure states as you can revive at the nearest chamber and continue the fight without load times and it is rife with social topics. In fact, the topics mentioned above are so broad, I can't think of any game that doesn't match every category.

GamerGate is so stupid.

[Asmodai]

1. Game mechanics should be as simple as they need to be. That's going to vary by game and genre. Call of Duty and Mario are both pretty simple in execution. A realistic flight sim is naturally going to be pretty complicated because that's what leads to immersion. The controls should still be as logical and consistent as possible, but there's a lot more going on.

2. The obsession with visuals is industry-wide, and the games with relatively simple visuals (e.g. Papers Please, Five Nights at Freddies) tend to be indies. The complaint seems backwards. (In terms of AAA games, Borderlands famously adopted it's unique art style to cover up for issues with its engine and gained a unique voice from it.)

3. The only games that currently have meaningful failure states I can think of off the top of my head are the Dark Souls / Bloodborne series and MMOs. Arguably Civilization type games might fall in this mode since it's possible to get into a situation where perfect play can't save your bacon. The games with the harshest failure states traditionally have been point and click adventures.

4. Games are a part of culture, of course they're going to reflect ongoing concerns in that culture. This is a good thing. Now that games can do better stories than the simplistic and unexamined rescue the princess from the Ape/Fire Turtle narrative, many artists are going to want to take advantage of that. It leads to better games. I'd rather play The Last of Us than Corpse Killer any day. If someone really doesn't want to be challenged, there are still hundreds of titles a year catering to that, so I'm not sure where the complaint lies. There's nothing wrong with a shooting gallery game, but there's no reason why that should be all that games can be.