What VIDEO GAME(s) have you been playing?

jeb wrote: If killing people becomes trivial, you end up with some seriously broken people.

You do not.

That's a great soundbite though.

Ohhhh God.

I'm playing TIS-100 right now and I CAN'T STOP, HELP ME SOMEONE. When I stopped yesterday it was 430am, HELPPPPP!!!

Then, I booted up SpaceChem, because I'm a glutton for punishment, and now I'M HOOKED ON BOTH OF THEM.

Ohhhh Godddddd

I agree with both Sax and Barnes on a few The Last of Us points. The storytelling and character beats are great, and the stealth action would be fun if it wasn't overused or I had more options. It seemed like the only option besides stealth kills were guns, and when I used a gun it was underwhelming to say the least. If the game by design wants me to avoid direct conflict or make my decision to use a gun have consequences then so be it, but resorting to a gun had no weight to it. It took at minimum 3 shots to drop anything when I would have much preferred 1 hit kills, especially with head shots or when firing on ordinary folks. It just wasn't for me. Throw on that the fact that I have no decisions to make in dialog or story direction and I didn't see the need to play out 8-12 hours of an utterly on the rails zombie game.

At least you have decisions to make in the Walking Dead series from Telltale games, and it never resorted to shooting in the face, rinse and repeat. True, those decisions may have been only deciding which NPCs got to stick around longer than others but at least it gave me some control over the story.

Borderlands TPS

Wife is out of town for the weekend and I have 3 toons to shoot and loot up level 70. I hate FPSs in general.... Can't stand COD:Anything or Halo or MoH, etc But for some reason I can't get enough of Borderlands.

MoH?!? What decade is this?

You probably just like that little gearbox robot guy, whatever his name is.

Black Barney wrote: MoH?!? What decade is this?

You probably just like that little gearbox robot guy, whatever his name is.

\

$10.00 says Ken has at least one MoH title still in the shrink wrap in his Unplayed Video Game Oubliette of Despair. Did he ever end up unwrapping RE4?

But for some reason I can't get enough of Borderlands.

Same here. I got DESTINY for free from a friend and have no desire to fire that up. But I would play BORDERLANDS right now, no problem. For me, it's a combination of loot--God I love loot optimization--and the art direction--that cel-shaded look is amazing. The writing is also pretty good, and actually funny here and there. This might be the case in CoD and the others, too, I wouldn't know.

Yeah - the loot thing is a big part of it - I really dig the character skill tree optimization as well. I really did like Anthony Burch's writing on BL2 - Handsome jack is probably the most entertaining video game villain ever. The first BL was cool with it's Old West Space Mad Max feel, but BL2 was teh funnay and better gameplay.






/Burch.....Now I'm in the mood to go binge watch some "Hey Ash, Wacha Playin"
//my fav :

My favourite Wacha Playing Ash was the one where they recreate the scene from Iron man where bridges minion fails to make an arc reactor. "...with a bag of scraps !!!" and the brother can't keep a straight face.

But yours is my new favorite one. They've become really good at the comic timing and the brother is amazing now.

And no, Ken has not cracked Re4 yet. If he had, he would obviously have apologized by now.

Jeb, the CoD games don't have humour at all, in fact quite the opposite. Gears of War has some great humour and it helps the experience a bunch. The redone first one is coming out soon with number four next year, holiday season.

Barnes---
Crazy shit is that I think we agree in a lot of respects. But I think you're way more on point with uncharted than last of us---your critique hits home better with that game. Last of us knows that its protagonist is complete psychopath and respects it. There's a wonderful moment, when the woman he's with is out the door, where she looks him in the eye and says "we are shitty people." Later there's a great beat where they defeat a roadblock by murdering ten people brutally and Ellie says "how did you know what would happen" and he's just like "I've been on both sides of that one" and she makes a comment about his chilling immorality.

And I still think the gameplay is better than you guys think, but I'm not like up to sing its praises or anything.

Booth, here was my favourite Whatcha Playin Ash before seeing the one you posted:



it starts off slow, the big payoff is at the end. The sequence at 0:31 is freaky cuz she looks exactly like Dom there. 1:19 is my favourite part and is why it was my favourite for so long.

Went to friend's house for a night of couch co-op games.

We started off with Divekick. We ended up pretty even on wins. I played this online a decent amount when it came out, but it doesn't really hold up as a good competitive couch game.

Followed that up with Foiled . A free little two-player game that I never get to play. We played this for a while and loved it. It's highly competitive, frantic, and simple.

We played Ultra Street Fighter 4 for a bit but he hadn't played for several years, and my hiatus was a few years less than him, so I ended up dominating and we gave up on it.

Then I broke out Sportsfriends. Barabariball is a little like Smash Bros, but the attacks are deliberate, so you have to time them right and I wasn't doing so hot. The highlight for me was Super Pole Riders . Done by the guy who did QWOP , it took a little playtime to get the hang of the controls, but once you do, it's pretty great. A lot of back and forth and tense moments.
We didn't play JS Joust or Hokra because they require more players.

We finished out the night with a few hours of Rocket League. We played split screen on the same team against people online. He had never played before, so it took him a while to get the hang of it. We actually managed to win on our very last game of the night. Splitscreen is definitely a different experience since you see much less of the field. We weren't doing too bad with it though. He liked it a lot so hopefully he'll pick it up and then we can play individually with another friend for a complete 3-player team.

Not a bad way to spend 7 hours on a Friday night.

Been plowing through the Last of Us. Was enjoying it pretty well (a solid 7.5 or whatever) until the 3rd act ("Winter"). What a shitshow. You know how I criticized Barnes for saying it was B movie SyFy material? The first two acts are pretty good, much better than that but Act 3 is a disaster in line with what Barnes said. The whole act is predicated around some band of other survivors who are cannibals but the things they do have no logic to them whatsoever and the villain is 100% transparent the second you meet him and has no reason to do anything he does besides twirling his (pedophile) mustache senselessly. What a piece of shit. But again, the 3rd act was beautiful and had some of the best images of the game, e.g. the snowstorm, the warm inviting wooden tavernish town, etc.

Doom 3!!! Still fun, even when the graphics don't look as nice as it used to be.

I started The Last of Us but haven't gotten far into it and haven't much been able to get myself to continue. So far it's not a game, just a cartoon where they tell me to push a button every now and then. I really don't give a fuck about zombie shit and don't care about anyone on the screen, so the fact that supposedly after the point I'm at now (he just got the little girl he needs to escort or whatever) it actually turns into a game isn't really getting me excited. And hearing about how hard it is also doesn't excite me. I'm an old fucker and I don't need a videogame to hand me my ass anymore to have a good time. I'm not going to spend hours figuring exactly how to take down this one boss; I don't give that much of a shit anymore. It's like nerds slathering hot sauce on everything, turning the concept on "flavor" into "whatever punishes my mouth the most".

I've also been playing Diablo 3 on the console with my wife, but largely out of inertia. It's really a shit game, and I loved Diablo 2. There's just nothing to Diablo 3. There is nothing to care about in it. Not caring about the plot is a given -- nobody who isn't on Blizzard's payroll ever cared about Diablo plots -- but there's nothing to care about in the gameplay either. There isn't any reason to ever do anything other than brute force and armor, few of the enemies distinguish themselves from each other at all, and there's no "horizon"; there's never anything beyond where you are right now except more of where you are right now. I guess maybe I'm misremembering D2 as having more substance to it, because I'm hard pressed to name what that might have been, but D3 is just boring sameness. Any given twenty minutes of it is utterly indistinguishable from any other twenty minutes.

I guess right now I'm running out the clock on Fallout 4. I've been playing that dumb Fallout Shelter game on iOS and been making my own fun by naming dwellers things like "Donald Trump" and "Ayn Rand" and "Jenny McCarthy" and sending them out in the wasteland with no weapons, outfits, or medicine to die. I could resurrect Ayn Rand for 153 caps, but I only have 260,000 and I rightfully earned them and it would be an insult to her to give her that kind of charity if she can't afford to resurrect herself. And I guess Jenny McCarthy didn't know as much about medicine as she thought.