What VIDEO GAME(s) have you been playing?

airmarkus wrote: So what is the deal with Diablo 3? I know it gets a lot of love here and based on that I picked up the special PS3 edition last year, but it didn't stick for some reason. I only tried playing the single player campaign which may have been a bad choice. I got bored after a few days and moved on.

I played on the hardest difficulty and it was still too easy.

I played on the hardest difficulty and it was still too easy.

Difficulty isn't the issue for me lately with games. It's more about keeping my interest. I think when I was a younger guy, I had all the time in the world, not to mention a good back and neck, so sitting through a longer game that was OK but not super interesting wasn't that big of a deal. These days I'm much pickier so I don't give games much of a chance past a day or two, which really only amounts to a couple of hours total. If I don't find myself thinking about a game when I'm not playing, which for me is the hallmark of a good video or board game, I toss it pretty quickly. I really miss the feeling of being totally infatuated with a game like I did in the old days like Gunship or F-19 Stealth Fighter, the gold-box D&D games, or X-Wing.

Oh shit, maybe I've just become a jaded middle-aged dude.

Gary Sax wrote: I downloaded card hunter again, now on Steam. It has been like... a year or two since I played it. It's gotten way better! They've smoothed out the difficulty and added more interesting twists. I'm still not convinced on adding so many slots to characters as you level up... I get that it's adding strategy (equipment mix) but I have never really enjoyed tuning decks for size/making sure the mix was right. As you move up in levels it's pretty clear that if you were good you would be thinking about the percentage composition of your forty or fifty card deck re: equipment.

Besides that, it's free to play but a very generous free to play model. No need to spend.

Cardhunter's on Steam huh? I might have to check it out. I wonder if I'd have to start all over? Actually that might be fun anyway. That game is up there with XCOM Enemy Unknown when it comes to turn based strategy games from a couple years ago.

You don't, you login with the login you used to use.

Playing Civ V again. I lost the last game I finished, four turns from the Space victory. I evidently suck at that game.

airmarkus wrote

So what is the deal with Diablo 3? I know it gets a lot of love here and based on that I picked up the special PS3 edition last year, but it didn't stick for some reason. I only tried playing the single player campaign which may have been a bad choice. I got bored after a few days and moved on.

A couple of friends have told me the same thing - that the first level playthrough is basically a giant tutorial for the game. I think I died _once_ in the whole level, because by that point I had stopped paying any attention at all to the heath and mana bubbles.

D1 and D2 I loved, and played the crap out of both of them. D3, I finished just to check it off the list. I didn't see anything in the game that was bad, but it was all a big 'meh'. Maybe my subconscious realizes that hundreds of hours of Diablo x is enough.

Diablo III rides on how much you fall for the progression system. It's not about story, environment, characters or anything like that. It's about incremental improvement across a TON of vectors over the course of the game. Fundamentally, it isn't really any different than those "clicker" games that are popular right now where the whole point is that you improve the outcome or rate of your clicking.

The genius of the game is in the loot, leveling and builds. You'll find yourself in situations where the "fun" is in modifying your skills to do something specific, like take out elites more efficiently or deal with crowds more effectively. Or you might be getting just completely owned by elemental damage so you'll spend some time tinkering around with crafting to come up with something better to deal with it. And weighing out whether item A or item B is better creates some fun decision-making, given that one has some buffs you really want but the other has a higher DPS.

Clicking the monsters until they dispense money or items is almost secondary, truth be told, to all of the above. But with that said, I actually think the game is considerably superior on PS4 than PC. The controls make it feel more like a proper action RPG, and the addition of an evasion move increases the importance of tactical positioning and timing. It feels much less like a clickathon and more like the old D&D Dark Alliance style games.

The difficulty has been tweaked and twerked since the first release. At first, it was WAY too easy on the earliest hard levels available. Now it seems about right. But it is very much true that a first playthrough is basically just the beginning and the "real" game begins afterwards. The difficulty is hugely customizable so you can make it as brutally hard as you want...after that first playthrough. And it is definitely more rewarding both in terms of challenge and reward if you play on the extended difficulties.

I would say that the Reaper of Souls edition is the only other PS4 game aside from Bloodborne that is worthy of my permanent collection. Prior to Bloodborne, my PS4 was more or less strictly a Diablo III player.

Yeah, if DIABLO 3 isn't clicking for you, I would just move on. It's not everyone's cup of tea. But if you like minmaxing loot and skills, there is nothing finer. My Monk will eventually have a crowd-control skill set and a boss-fight skill set, for example. I usually don't go all the way to having two sets of gear, but I have thought about it.

By all means, though, ramp up the difficulty until the Elite "mobs" are challenging. If you are one-shotting those glowing-chained-together guys you need to pump up that difficulty. You'll be rewarded with better loot, more experience and gold.

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Dabbling with my daughter's FINAL FANTASY THEATRHYTHM CURTAIN CALL on 3DS. That's a fun little game! And the nostalgia, my gawwwd.

Jeb, what is the secret to beating fucking Belial on harder difficulties? The poison blobs near the end just cream us. We always get frustrated and have to turn the difficulty down a notch to win. We tried poison resist gear but it didn't seem to help. Torment III w/ lvl 70's.

Another night, more card hunter. Really like the game, I suck at it. I spent some money, bought their basic edition for 20 bucks. More of a thank you to the devs for such a solid, coherent game with very little free to play grossness than anything else. I certainly didn't need to.

My issue with Diablo 3 is that there's nothing really there. You can play with loot and sets and nephalim rifts and shit, but always for simply more of the same. There's stuff beyond the single-player campaign, but it isn't any functionally different from the single-player campaign. Mobs, elites, the occasional boss. We finally got the keys we needed to craft an Infernal Machine and activated it: it takes you to another boss to kill who gives you shit that isn't any different from the stuff you've already been getting. Big fucking deal. I don't know what we were expecting, but we couldn't believe that was all there was to that. You don't even go to new places, just repaints of everywhere you went in the original campaign.

Basically, what comes later in the game are new and novel ways to get you to exactly the same shit you've been doing all along.

I'd have been done with it long ago, but my wife enjoys it. Still, I'm going to have to revolt soon. I feel my life draining away for nothing, and this is coming from someone who is still "playing" Fallout Shelter.

Card hunter is now availble on iOS as well under the name Loot & Legends. Unfortunately the accounts don't link up. I find it a bit easier overall. A good port. The only downsides are you have to have always on web connection, which matters to some folks, and the completely unnecessary IAP is pretty bogus in the way it's implemented. But it's unnecessary, so it doesn't especially matter.

Hex Sinister wrote: Jeb, what is the secret to beating fucking Belial on harder difficulties? The poison blobs near the end just cream us. We always get frustrated and have to turn the difficulty down a notch to win. We tried poison resist gear but it didn't seem to help. Torment III w/ lvl 70's.

Well, it's not poison, for one. It's lightning damage that's killing you. What you need to avoid that (other than Lightning resist) is higher DPS--damage per second. You need to kill him fast so his rage timer doesn't go off--or goes off close enough to winning that it doesn't matter. You have three minutes and then he just keeps hitting the meteor attack. He drops a lot of health globes--pick them up only when needed. The whole inner railing counts as his target zone, you don't need to hit his hands or face or whatever. All your attacks that impact status (Freeze, Stun, Blind) don't matter, so switch to skills that boost damage. Burning still works, so does Poison. As long as you can move fast you can avoid most of the lightning zones until he gets crazy after that rage time expires. Good luck!

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@Legomancer: The game is DIABLO 3, and yeah, even after beating it, it's still that. I like the quests, and you get a new extrinsic motivator for the seasons by trying to get deeper into a Grift. But it's still kill stuff, loot minmax, repeat.

It's lightning? Shit. After we went through all the trouble to convert and acquire poison resist... hehe. Looked like bloody poison or acid to me! We've been focusing on dots and automated attack type shit so we can still do damage when we're running around. Didn't know it was timed. Thank you, sir.

I thought it was acid or something as well. It is in a pool shape. Lightning? Bullshit is what it is.

Thanks jeb.

Markus, I totally agree. I really miss that feeling I had at games like Wing Commander where I'd think and daydream about it constantly. Games like that almost set off the same intense endorphins that falling in love sets off. I think GTAIV was the last game that came close to that, but not really.