What Games are you playing 2015?

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

SMT4 - After how damned scary Minotaur was, Medusa was hilariously wimpy in comparison. Bind's just not as scary as getting your face caved in every round, apparently. I actually went quite a bit forward, managing to finish the Counter-Demon base quest and all. Right now, I'm making pretty good use of Lullaby and Spirit Drain, the latter being just an amazing resource extension at this point in the game. Getting the L2s also helps quite a bit (Mabufula +1 on a 60 Mag Flynn in particular busts faces pretty hard).

[Shale]

3D World: Beat the main game, unlocked Rosalina in the aftergame. She's just the slightest bit ridiculous; a Mario character having an attack/doublejump in unpowered form is kind of bonkers. World Bowser went pretty quick aside from the stupid lava river level, which I hate and should die. Bowser himself was quite neat and really showed off the game's visuals.

[Sierra]

Last time I played o got that achievement.  Tried pick pocketing a bunch and gave up.  Shooting it out of his hands and going for a flurry to pick it up was way easier.

Thomas didn't solo the boss because is as dumb and was overly aggressive and died.  Just killed her solo after that.

I've never seen Thomas die even after eating thousands of poison damage. I dunno, man.

FONV: Tried again with Benny and got it after a couple tries. Shoot him in the head with his own gun while invisible and his bodyguards all run away because their boss got assassinated by spooky ghosts. Go upstairs to loot stuff and meet Yes Man, come back downstairs and all the bodyguards are conscientiously guarding the naked corpse of their boss. Then leave and SECRET AGENT FOX gives me his pitch within hearing of an NCR trooper. I love this game.

I hadn't actually talked to Yes Man since the first time I played the game. Yes Man is fantastic.

[Grefter]

Phone typing screwed things up.  I was overly aggressive and died, not Thomas.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

There a PS2 emulator that doesn't run like shit? I pulled a bunch of games cleaning out my storage unit and want to replay some of them.

[Fenrir]

Dreeps the Alarm Playing Game:

I tried to use it as an alarm
Heard the alarm for 3 seconds and these were like the worst 3 seconds of my life
Fucking Dreeps

[The Duck]

PCSX2 is pretty good but requires a lot of messing around with plugins. It does have controller support and can run games in 60 fps (and beyond with frameskipping) depending on your computer's specs. Some specific games need different plugin setups, which can be a bit of a pain but the emulator can also run things more smoothly and in better resolution than the actual PS2. Game compatibility is also good although again, it may take some messing around with plugins.

[Fenrir]

I should mention the real game I'm playing:

Citizens of Earth Hard Mode:
Is still really bland. Avoid.

I think I talked about it but I'll detail "Hard mode".
The only way to change the game's difficulty is to use the school mascot's talent. You can adjust difficulty on a pretty large scale, and raising the difficulty gives several exp/gold rewards while lowering the difficulty gives maluses.

I think it's pretty clear that you are not supposed to treat this as a conventional difficulty system, and that you're actually supposed to game this system: Raise the difficulty while grinding on weak monsters to get more rewards, maybe lower the difficulty on tough bosses.

The game's not designed to just set the difficulty to max and play through all of it that way AT ALL, because monster stats get jacked up to insane amounts. It's also the reason why I'm enjoying it, desperately trying anything to get through this insanely difficult bland C- Saturday Morning Cartoon.

I'm going mostly with a Teacher / Baker / Conspiracy Theory guy team, it is pretty balanced but I switch people around a lot whenever I want to hit a weakness / not get hit by a weakness.
- Brother: Tank type, can protect himself and provoke enemies. He also has cheap MT damage. The overall lack of damage is a problem, though.
- Mother: Early healer, outclassed by Baker I feel, but I didn't give her much of a chance.
- Teacher: Somehow this guy has the best regular physical attack. He also gets a lot of status and utility, plus some huge MT fire attack. My MVP. Yu have to pass a Tales like quiz about the game to recruit him and I totally cheated.
- Baker: Levelling him up is essential because you get more donuts. In battle he's a pretty tanky healer so I'm using him most of the time
- Conspiracy Theory guy: The "elemental mage" with the best overall damage. His personal item is useless.
- Mascot: I don't understand what's going on with this guy, but I treat him as the "Auto battle" guy. He has the best healing if you only use regular physical attacks on your two other characters.
- Coffee girl: Looks like shit

Cash flow is a huge thing, so it's good that I'm getting way too much from random enemies. I can either buy healing food or use the teacher to get Krazy XP on my guys, and I prefer to do the latter.
Difficulty is 3X right now, it could be 4X (lol) but I need to level up the mascot a lot first.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Final Fantasy 7 - The chocobo breeding process is really stupidly dumb/long, even when you know what to do. It's amazing the type of things I put up with as a teenager which just kinda grate now. I've probably invested close to four hours in it already (between catching 'em, stealing the breeding items, racing a bunch, and soft-resetting to get the right genders, it'll probably need another before I'm done). When I first beat Ruby Weapon I did it without Knights of the Round and spent an hour or so grinding it down with Pandora's Box, but now I'm convinced that is by far the best way to get a gold chocobo, at least without outright RNG rigging (which apparently makes it possible to get a gold chocobo in minutes; I should have just done that clearly). Chocobo racing is also a really stupid mini-game. At least FFX's, aggravating though it is, has a strong component of player skill. FF7's is just "wait two to three minutes to figure out if your stats are high enough to win". Fortunately it doesn't need that much investment if you know what you're doing, since you never actually need to race past B rank (which requires relatively little financial investment to get good enough stats to crush).

(If anyone's curious, I'm just doing all this mostly for the science of re-examining the whole process as an adult. I am intending to defeat both superbosses, so the investment isn't pointless, either.)


Super Mario 3D World - Started this, beat three of the worlds. Not much to say, the game seems generally quite terrific. First two worlds are a bit too easy but I'm used to the Mario difficulty curve, and it's already clearly started to tick upwards, so that's nice.


Kid Icarus: Uprising - Holy hell bosses on Intensity 9 are evil. Not that I've actually gotten to many. I'm trying to get through the flying sections with no deaths, then the rest of the level with at most one. I've gotten to a few bosses at 9, but have yet to beat one.

[The Duck]

I should mention the real game I'm playing:

Citizens of Earth Hard Mode:
Is still really bland. Avoid.

The only reason why I'd play it is for the humor, but I saw a few videos on it and it looked cringeworthy. Whoever was doing one video said that the humor in the game was... "attempted."

[Grefter]

Mass Effect 2 - Garrus Loyalty mission the first one of the non-DLC characters.  Forgot that would kick me straight into Collector ship.  Kind of intended to do Grunt's and get Fortification before then, but oh well (because Armor Piercing rounds isn't great for me, Inferno Grenade while I good power is redundant with Incendiary ammo and Flashbang Grenade is amazing at crowd control is also kind of overkill for Normal).

The Garrus Bone Zone is super awkward.  Shep just all "Hey we should bang." and Garrus being all "k we are friends so i guess that makes sense if you can work out how".

[Meeplelard]

The only reason why I'd play it is for the humor, but I saw a few videos on it and it looked cringeworthy. Whoever was doing one video said that the humor in the game was... "attempted."

Was probably Jim Sterling, since he opened his video with that.  I remember there were a number of moments where the game seems like it's trying for humor, and clearly has a set up but no real punch line.  Others are just bad attempts at humor.

Probably the most cringeworthy one in that video was this:

"I'm about to get my Penultimate Merit Badge!"
"Penultimate? What's that? Is it mightier than Swordultimate?"

I had a slight interest in the game, then I watched that video and saw just how dull combat looks, and how unfunny it was and went "yeah, pass."  It also seems to think that humor through enemies works based on SUPER OVER THE TOP WEIRD CONCEPTS, not recognizing that Weird and Funny are not one and the same at all.



Crisis Core Hard Mode: Finished the main game, had to twink Zack up so Darkness would do 9999 just so I can take out all of the support quickly at once AND get some hits on himself.  Otherwise I'm focused too heavily on the support and make no progress.

I have mixed feelings about Hard Mode.  On one hand, yeah, it's legitimately harder and Crisis Core was a relatively easy game, at least the main story, as is.  On the other-hand, one thing that was annoying about was how the HP boost in Hard Mode seems too drastic.  There are times I felt like I was wailing on certain enemies forever and they would never die.  Certain randoms have over 50k HP which for a game like Crisis Core is a bit TOO much even for a hard mode; the offensive push alone makes enemies much harder, the durability push just makes them dull.  I'm not saying they shouldn't be more durable, make no mistake, just saying the HP multiplier or whatever was too high.

[Luther Lansfeld]

The Garrus Bone Zone is super awkward.  Shep just all "Hey we should bang." and Garrus being all "k we are friends so i guess that makes sense if you can work out how".

Garrus is super awkward, but it's kind of cute at the same time.

[Cotigo]

"I'm about to get my Penultimate Merit Badge!"
"Penultimate? What's that? Is it mightier than Swordultimate?"

Hahaha what are you talking about this is great

[AndrewRogue]

Saints Row 3: Beaten. It was enjoyable. Provides enough variety and enough fun characters to never really get dull. Some missions are an utter pain in the ass though. Game's pacing is wacky as hell, but then you chainsaw a bunch of luchadores to death, so it balances.

[Fenrir]

"I'm about to get my Penultimate Merit Badge!"
"Penultimate? What's that? Is it mightier than Swordultimate?"

Yes honestly I haven't seen this yet but it would have been the only decent joke in the game.

For now it has just thrown unoriginal wacky stuff at me, thinking that the wackiness would be enough to make up for the total lack of jokes.

Think Simpsons, except there aren't any jokes (just wacky characters existing), there are no animations (just text), and there's one "funny"ish thing every 5 minutes instead of every X seconds.
A laugh riot.

[DjinnAndTonic]

So the Rondo of Swords LP finally went up on the archive... And thus I am playing Rondo of Swords again. Going to go Cold Emperor path again and try out some alternate builds instead of nuking everything with Super-Archers and Laser Popes. Maybe I'll use Rukia and see if I can't make her do something useful?

Also if you are in anyway curious about RoS, give that LP a read, even if you're not much of an LP person, it is basically the RPG most suited for LP in the history of LP.

[Meeplelard]

Paper Mario: Just beat the flaming Pirahna Plant of doom.  That was a legitimate boss fight, due to damage combination and how he is multi part (even if two of the parts only get an action once every other turn in effect), and I had to blow all my resources to get past him.  There were some mistakes granted, like a few messed timed hits that probably would have alleviated the fight, but still, felt like a significant step up from everything else in the game.

Punch Out Wii: Beat Career Mode, then started Title Defense Mode.  I actually lost a fight to Glass Joe...words I never thought I'd say!  The helmet makes him strong!  Mind you, second attempt I actually beat him because I mostly got a little cocky but I digress.

Von Kaiser was mostly a case of getting use to dodging the right way on his hooks, and remembering he WILL dodge a Star Punch if you throw it blindly.  Disco Kid...well, soon as I learned that you can literally duck EVERY SINGLE ONE OF HIS PUNCHES, the entire fight just sort of fell apart.

[Luther Lansfeld]

Bayonetta - I'm in the middle of Chapter 2 right now. I am enjoying the game pretty well, although I find the chapters a little overly long so far. I preferred DMC1's bite sized chapters.

[Sierra]

FONV: I forgot that Regis can teleport. Also Sergeant Contreras is somehow perfectly willing and able to do business from behind bars, not even acknowledging that you're the one who put him there. I'm pretty sure they just didn't bother to give him new dialogue because they thought he was too far back in the cell to speak to.

Not enough NPCs actually have things to steal! Makes the pickpocketing trophy kind of a pain (also the odds of success are routinely not great).

[Fudozukushi]

You pretty much have to stick to low-value targets to get anywhere with pickpocketing, and even then, that's only for the achievement.  It took me a while to gear up Bitter Springs trying to reverse-pickpocket power armor unto people.

[Luther Lansfeld]

DDR II - I successfully completed a Basic 6 song and a Difficult 5 song. Still working on Basic 7 and Difficult 6 though.

[Niu]

Devil Survior 2 Break Record- The Spring Triangle did not impress. These new enemies are not half as gimmicky as the Septentrion. They only have some unimpressive map weapon and some defensive tricks, which are not very threatening.

On the other hand, the plot was written in a way as if it is out to pander the Niu. Which is good, it is helping me to forget the pain that horrible anime had done to me.

[NotMiki]

DDR II - I successfully completed a Basic 6 song and a Difficult 5 song. Still working on Basic 7 and Difficult 6 though.

[Sierra]

You pretty much have to stick to low-value targets to get anywhere with pickpocketing, and even then, that's only for the achievement.  It took me a while to gear up Bitter Springs trying to reverse-pickpocket power armor unto people.

Why would you even do that? ...Oh wait, pacifist run.

Anyway I got through pickpocketing mostly by exploiting the fact that NCR troopers keep a very poor watch on their dogtags (which I may possibly have subsequently cashed in at Forlorn Hope as retrieved from dead troopers). Admittedly a few thefts were somewhat more elaborate: http://cloud-4.steamusercontent.com/ugc/530632767061723230/503B42C37A2C5A04B914301BE362EC202C54FF1B/

I can only swear I didn't make that happen on purpose.

Also YCS 186 how did I never know you existed before? Oneshotting deathclaws from a mile away, pretty great. Not oneshotting the legendary deathclaw from thirty feet away, substantially less great. Somehow the most useless perk in my collection comes to the rescue! I took Miss Fortune early in the game because hey, this is luck mode, but it hasn't factored in much because I almost never use VATS (it's usually sneak 'n' snipe this time). In panic as the most dangerous creature in the game rushes at me I mash V and manage one ineffectual shot. Then ally appears and unloads a barrel full of nonlethal ammo on him. He falls to the ground and sits there while I shoot him repeatedly in the head. Feels a little less like a wasted perk now!