What games are you currently playing?

[Firewind]

Both strategies are viable, I just dislike it when people are "I always use the most powerful strategy vs the AI all the time and found out it makes this easier so this game sucks" without even bothering to play around and experiment.

[Malacite]

It's more the game doesn't punish you for brute forcing your way through more than anything else.

In Skyrim, sure you can just sneak past mobs and pick them off but it's always less effort to just charge in with your huge sword. In Mass Effect you can fight your way through hordes of Husks and Geth or you can just set the difficulty to casual and save the effort. Reviewers that call stuff like that a minus points are just morons really.

And the story isn't bad. It does nothing new but it's far from horrible. I've just been avoiding posting spoilers on here for the safe of the American users on the forum who didn't import.

FTFY. The "nuke launcher" doesn't work so well on Hardcore and Insanity. The final boss was surprisingly easy on Insanity as an Engineer though, only had 1 very brief close call where he damn near killed me because Sabotage was about a second too late recharging. That fight is a total joke though so long as you have at least 1 character who can spam lift.

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Since I'm trying to be a good, financially responsible gamer now, I need to fill out my GameFly queue

I have KH3D on its way now and I hope to finish that quickly so I can nab Sleeping Dogs right after. Aside from those two I've really just been dumping old SMT PS3 RPGs onto my queue. Probably need more 360 stuff, but PS3, 360, DS and 3DS suggestions are welcome, I suppose.

[DakAttack]

Both strategies are viable, I just dislike it when people are "I always use the most powerful strategy vs the AI all the time and found out it makes this easier so this game sucks" without even bothering to play around and experiment.

If I have to do more than turn the difficulty all the way up just to get a challenge, that's minus dee kay pee for the designers.

[Kailea]

Game Fly has helped me a lot as a Retro collector, I can focus on getting the old stuff, while using GameFly to play the new stuff, and games that I will guy later, but dont want to pay full prices for (like FF XIII-2)

I just got Metro 2033 in the mail and will be starting that shortly, Last Story needs to hurry it's little butt.... and Tekkit mod for Minecraft is.... addicting ;p

[snewt]

Waiting for TL2.

Messing around with FO:NV & Bioshock currently.

[Malacite]

Game Fly has helped me a lot as a Retro collector, I can focus on getting the old stuff, while using GameFly to play the new stuff, and games that I will guy later, but dont want to pay full prices for (like FF XIII-2)

I just got Metro 2033 in the mail and will be starting that shortly, Last Story needs to hurry it's little butt.... and Tekkit mod for Minecraft is.... addicting ;p

You could have just bought it for $10 during that EB sale

It's a pretty solid game though, glad I bought it. Looking forward to the sequel, Last Light, later this year. I downloaded the demo for The Walking Dead last night on XBL, holy crap the game is awesome. It's a traditional point & click game with multiple choice answers that change how the story plays out. Currently only 2/5 episodes are available for purchase however, each priced at about $5. I'm going to force myself to wait however, until all 5 are out in the hopes of a bundle deal though it's killing me because even though the demo was extremely short, I enjoyed every bit of it thoroughly.

[Raydeus]

I got Dawnguard last night and downloaded it.

And in about hour and a half I will start playing Skyrim again. So... if you don't hear from me in a while it's because I'm either having too much fun or I'm already dead in some gods forsaken dungeon.

[DakAttack]

You could have just bought it for $10 during that EB sale

It's a pretty solid game though, glad I bought it. Looking forward to the sequel, Last Light, later this year. I downloaded the demo for The Walking Dead last night on XBL, holy crap the game is awesome. It's a traditional point & click game with multiple choice answers that change how the story plays out. Currently only 2/5 episodes are available for purchase however, each priced at about $5. I'm going to force myself to wait however, until all 5 are out in the hopes of a bundle deal though it's killing me because even though the demo was extremely short, I enjoyed every bit of it thoroughly.

You can't spare $10 for something you really enjoyed?

[Kailea]

I will buy it later, Game Fly is just going to help me get the games out of the way, play wise, then I will buy them later for dollars for my collection.

There are very few games I am willing to throw $60 at, because I have been burned a few to many times as of late with modern games.

[Malacite]

You can't spare $10 for something you really enjoyed?

That's not what I said - I said I want to wait until all 5 episodes are out so I can do them all in at once in sequence, instead of playing 2 and then maybe forgetting about it or what have you. I want the complete experience up front, I'm not a big fan of episodic content.

[Raydeus]

After the Ys talk I decided to start playing Origin to try and curb my Skyrim excesses (I really go overboard every time I play Skyrim, up until 4 or 5am and only getting 3 hours of sleep ) And I'm glad to report I also died there, but nowhere near as much as I did on Oath or the original games.

Still, Ys is probably the only game where I actually make it a point to destroy some bosses. My first playthrough is with Hugo Fact, so I had some fun slaughtering <spoiler> on my second try (I only took 1 dmg), but then again he is nowhere near as good as Chester was in Oath.

[Icemage]

Picked up Persona 4 Arena and Sound Shapes yesterday and spent a little time with both.

P4A is a lot more amusing than I was expecting. Story mode actually has a story, with extended cutscenes and lots of dialogue (which you could skip if you like). Fighting mechanics are... interesting. Every character can summon their Persona to deal extra damage, but the Persona can be hit while it's onscreen. Four hits on a Persona "breaks" it for a while, which means you can't use a lot of your defensive evasions and power hits until your Persona recovers. A lot of Personas stay on-screen for a while to deliver delayed attacks, which you can combine with regular attacks if you chain them in, but that also leaves the Persona open to attack.

Each character seems to play differently and the combat mechanics are (mostly) approachable. The game even teaches you how to use each character in Challenge mode, where you're tasked with increasingly difficult chains of attacks.

Overall, it strikes a very good balance between the heavy exposition of Persona 4 and the typical hype-train furious action of an Arc System Works brawler, and there is a metric ton of fanservice on display here (and a LOT of attention to avoid continuity problems).

---

Sound Shapes is a game on the polar opposite end of the genre spectrum, but it's another amazing little gem. It plays a bit like Super Meat Boy crossed with a bit of LittleBigPlanet on a KORG synthesizer. The basic premise is that it's a platformer with some very easy and basic rules. As you finish levels, you earn components which you can then take into the game creation editor to create not only your own platforming levels, but your own musical track to go with it.

The whole song and level creation process is very organic and simple, and done easily whether you're on PS3 or on PSVita (you get both versions when you purchase it).


Icemage

[Malacite]

So I have a new hatred in ME2, in the form of roflscanning...

I'm not sure which is more annoying, the old roflcart or damned planet scanning. Not a big fan of how much they gimped biotics either.

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Yeah, P4A probably has the best explanation for a tournament I've ever seen in a fighter, it just dovetails right into the style of TV world investigations but this time with more than one story path. I finished Yu's (1st?) story arch and now I'm doing Chie's. Yu gets a little more text heavy and its feels a little odd because in P4 he was a silent protagonist and in the anime he went from that to a rather... understated protagonist.

I mean, literally, half the time he really was speaking out his text dialog options.

So to hear him have an English voice and all these inner thoughts now is kind of jarring. Watching the anime eased me into that idea a little, but this guy's got some serious expository narrative the other characters really don't. Maybe its just because I know how to perceive Kanji or Chie's feelings better.

I'm pleasantly surprised by Labrys. I don't know why the student council president of a Japanese high school would have a Brooklyn accent, but its cute.