What Games are you playing 2016?

[Grefter]

Fallen London - Zenny we need to play more Chess.  University is too hard and we need to play more chess.

Otherwise my romances are slowly on the way.

[Cotigo]

Fallen London - Zenny we need to play more Chess.  University is too hard and we need to play more chess.

fuckin on it

[Hunter Sopko]

Atelier Sophie:

So... apparently quality-of-life everything got reset back to 2001. The inability to adjust your Display Area leads to the frame being cut off on most TVs. You know, the part of most Ateliers where they put stuff like the date and time? Yeah. Really dumb. It's also missing some really fucking simple things like a gameplay timer. But that's less important.

Battles are not Full CTE anymore. Sort of CTE-Lite. They're turn-based but you can tell the order of the coming turn on a CTE type bar as you enter actions, so it could still be good.

Withholding judgment on the synthing, since early game.

But seriously, not looking forward to potentially playing a game where the whole thing is cropped like a bad letterbox.

But it looks pretty. Lots of empty space, but whats there is pretty.

[Cmdr_King]

Oof.  I gather there's a vita version.  Maybe that's the prime version this time?

[Grefter]

Fallen London - 2 ranks through Fascination before threesomeination.

El Cid, sorry if I ever send you invites to play chess that are full of swears about how the only way I would put my jizz in you is if you were literally a dumpster that was on fire that could only be out with human semen rather than just because you are a cum dumpster.

Those are meant for Zenny.

You are the top of the scroll window that might get scrolled to when I try to close it and hit Send Invite.

Edit - eat my shit zenny.

[Cotigo]

Is this what an abusive relationship is like?

Because if so I like it. Accept my anus faster.

[Grefter]

Dark Souls 3 - Didn't actually play any, just traded stuff off to another toon for my brother.  He finished a Luck/bleed run where he used Washing Pole.  He isn't sure if he coasted on Washing Pole or what, but he is pretty good at these games it seems.

Anyway I was dumping literally all the gear off the Wizard I decided I hated everything about because fuck this game fuck its shitty magic and fuck getting invaded as a mage in this game.

5 minutes after joining, invaded by someone who has Carthus Flame Arc used on a thrusting sword (Estoc I assume).  Carthus Milkring.  So at least has made it to Catacombs.  Weapon swaps to a Lucerne mid fight.

Try harding against fucking level 1 toons.

I got great joy out of backstabbing him with my naked wizard's bare hands.

Fuck Dark Souls 3 PVP and fuck the people that do it like this.  Trash gameplay for trash people.

My brother juked around him for 10 minutes after I died.

[Cotigo]

literally all the tears

[Meeplelard]

FF14: Beat the 3.3 MSQ. 

I have to say, I really liked the Dragonsong War stuff.  Ayemeric is probably my favorite of the City State Leaders (and I totally called that he'd become basically PRESIDENT FOR LIFE), because on top of being well developed, he's just a really cool guy.  I appreciate how Hraesvelgr required arguments from all 3 characters involved to convince him, since yeah, an 1000 year old stance isn't going to be easy to sway, and they all took different angles, and didn't sound whiny or preachy.  I think the nicest touch was Midgarsormr getting into the discussion.   As an aside, if this was where FF14 fully ended I'd say Alphinaud had a pretty strong character arc too, showing a huge contrast to the "Know it all spoiled arrogant brat" you first met early on.  The Dragonsong War centering around those two primarily is probably why I feel the arc is good.

It also reminded me of how redundant having Krile AND Y'shtola in a single scene is, seeing as both basically have the exact same purpose of "Magical Equivalent of Technobabble" to explain things.  To be fair, I kind of forgot Krile was even a thing in the game, but being only there since 3.1 and not doing a whole lot doesn't do her favors.

[Sierra]

I haven't touched MSQ yet because Weeping City. Step up over largely easy Void Ark. My alliance abandoned after an hour because team B kept eating it midway through Ozma. The superball is rude. (Very stylish fight, though.)

Grefter: for what it's worth, my impression of sorcery in DS3 is that it might actually be better than pyro. Apparently it sucked at launch, but I tried it post-patch and had no complaints. Fully twinked out for magic power, I was getting 800-1,000 damage out of Great Heavy Soul Arrow by the end (which is so cheap as to be almost infinitely spammable endgame, compared to Great Chaos Fire Orb which just got a rate hike). Also you owe it to yourself to try Soul Stream. It's as impractical as it is cool, but it is so so cool. Magic remains ass for PVP though, you will never ever hit another player with this shit unless you've got a really competent ally distracting them.

Fenrir: it was a spider this time. I don't know why I keep opening anything anyone sends me. (Captain K's gift box was saboteur rats.) EDIT EDIT: this actually dropped Persuasive. Wow.

[Laggy]

Weeping City on patch launch provided my most satisfying moment in FF14 pub history when I saw the second boss start casting Mega Death, dove into the zombie goo aoe, and watched 23 out of 24 members of my alliance die. (This was literally a half hour after the servers came back up, so everyone was running completely blind.)

The boss took its sweet time killing me afterwards over their corpses.

Weeping City is GREAT though. Void Ark was a total snoozefest and I'm glad to see mechanical difficulty return. The fights are stylish to boot. Doesn't quite top Labyrinth for sheer difficulty on release, but it reminded me a lot of World of Darkness launch which was also good times.

[Grefter]

Fen.  You know that storyline you talked about with the eating?  It was disabled.  It just got restored today.

You can do it.  You can be the big man.  Destroy yourself and everything you have done.

[Fenrir]

Fallen London:

"The candles whicker and roar like horses of fire. The blaze drives the shop-keeper back. Embrace it! It hurts, of course, but it is better than dark water, twice better, three times better, seven times. The crisping smell of flesh transgressed rises. Is it toothsome? Will you devour yourself? The pain roils; a blackness rises. You will remember what you have learnt.
What are you doing? Stop before you are ruined.

Time, the Healer, will take Marsh-Mired from you when she passes.
You now have 1 - Flirting with Disaster x Seeking Mr Eaten's Name
Wounds has increased to 7 - Agony and Desperation!
Suspicion has increased to 7 - A Desperate Fugitive!"

IKUZO
I actually just found it on my own!

[Grefter]

I will help you down the path you have chosen.

[Cotigo]

Aaaaand I'm done with Fallen London. It's a very well written game and I love the setting, but egh it is such a grind, and as satisfying as watching bars go up is, not being able to consistently do content for the second tier in any of my offstats ends up making anything but playing chess feel like a complete waste of time, and... nah.

Neat little game though. Maybe I'll come back to it later and just blow out my nightmares/scandal/suspicion and explore more, but for now I already have one don't-let-bars-fill-up game ruling my life. 

[Grefter]

Clothes is really the trick to get you over that transition between areas bump.

That said, maybe you should do the thing Fenrir is doing.  It is highly destructive and shouts at you explicitly out of character to not do it.

[Cotigo]

Maybe! If I do, it will be after a break to let my desire to do nothing but mindlessly grind fade away.

[Grefter]

Like some kind of cock zombie.

[Grefter]

Did that help you find your way Fen?

[Fenrir]

Aaaaand I'm done with Fallen London. It's a very well written game and I love the setting, but egh it is such a grind, and as satisfying as watching bars go up is, not being able to consistently do content for the second tier in any of my offstats ends up making anything but playing chess feel like a complete waste of time, and... nah.

Neat little game though. Maybe I'll come back to it later and just blow out my nightmares/scandal/suspicion and explore more, but for now I already have one don't-let-bars-fill-up game ruling my life.

Grind Is Coming but so far I haven't actually had to do real grind, except for threesomes
My point is:
U're playing wrong
Git gud scrub

I spent
Did that help you find your way Fen?

I spent more time procrastinating in bed than I had anticipated so this is a win

[SnowFire]

FE Fates, Birthright: Finished.  More thoughts later.

Fallen London: Do Sudden Insights max out at 20?  I seem to be stuck on that despite playing lots of chess...  is there anything I should turn them into if not using them for rerolls?

The Royal Trap: This is currently on sale on Steam this week (Celestian Tales is also on sale), but I've had it forever but not played it anyway.  It's another Hanako Games production, aka the people who did Long Live the Queen.  Finished one runthrough of it.

Anyway, it's recommended.  It's a straight-up branching decision tree game, there's no moods to manage or activities or investigations or anything.  (Which is in some ways too bad, a little more interactivity in parts would be nice.)  But...  the writing is good, which is what matters!  Basically you are Madeline, the...  uh...  companion?  tutor?  of a prince, and are a completely unimportant penniless noble who thus can actually hang out with princes, but are nice & controllable.  You are also totally in love with him, and him with you, but this can never be because Big Political Problems or something, basically his parents want him to marry up to some foreign princess.  (Similar to LLTQ, this is a somewhat inverted world where royal descent comes via the *female* line, not the male line, and thus princes are shipped around to be married and don't usually inherit.  For all that actual rulership seems to have the couple - if the princess marries - be fairly equal, in the one instance we see of it.)  Okay, so we got some kind of relationship-drama-by-proxy thing, where we're gonna manage affection meters and try and hook him up with the best princess we can find?  ...and maybe see if Madeline can dare sneak him for herself with some proper excuse?   Or settle for some hot prince instead, maybe?

No.

This is a good thing, as I'd be less interested in the above game!  Instead shit gets set on fire fairly quickly.  And did I mention that you are also the prince's bodyguard?  And the art design actually has a non-ridiculous getup that looks properly courtly-yet-dangerous?  Okay sure it's combat-via-text, but still.  Obviously can't go into this too deeply, but there's adventure, assassination, plots, & intrigue.  Interesting reading.  Similar to LLTQ, the author realizes that things just plain go wrong, people get lucky & unlucky, and rulers make mistakes based on bad information or assumptions.  It also takes a shot across the bow at one particular plot point that gets used in approximately a billion other stories, but is used a little differently here.  (the princess is totally an imposter!  Clearly a lowly peasant girl must be the real princess!) 

Anyway, there apparently ARE a variety of alternate hot princes to romance if that's your thing, but perhaps in other playthroughs.  I stood by my man for my first playthrough and managed to marry him, but will be interesting seeing some of the other possibilities.

[Grefter]

When you go Home you can spend them to gain a big boost to Watchfullness (that's what Zenny and I had been doing).  5 per boost, but it's a lot of points at once, especially for early on.

[Twilkitri]

Dragon Quest - played through

So... onscreen movement controls are definitely suboptimal, but they generally worked well enough. It's entirely possible that they'd fare worse with a more complicated game. Sometimes they didn't respond properly, but often the game didn't respond properly to text advancement requests either so I'm assuming it has some sort of deeper problem there. Also sometimes tricky to move single spaces at once, which could be annoying.

Due to the structure of the game I was loath to properly reset on game overs and ended up racking up 5 non-resets before I discovered that it had an autosave going on in the background, and if I killed the application on gameovering I could load that up.

Three of the non-resets were in Galen's tomb, which I had been thinking was more difficult than it ought to have been and I later found a place which was much easier (the cave with the Warrior's Ring - which I don't actually recall anyone ever mentioning) so I assume that I went through that earlier than I was expected to.

Don't really care much for the dungeons - that sort of dungeon style really needs you to have some way of instantly exiting, which you don't get here until late (unless I missed something). If I end up playing 2 or 3 and they have the same sort of dungeons I'll have to get out some graph paper and do things properly. The torch mechanic mainly seems to be a way to hide how small the dungeon floors actually are, hopefully that isn't carried forward even if the dungeon style is.

I thought that locating the mark was supposed to be a fairly nonstandard exercise in orienteering, given that you couldn't directly go in the directions indicated, but in the post-Dragonlord section of the game I found that the Princess's Pledge would give you coordinate information that I guess is the 'expected' solution (it wasn't doing that for me during the regular game, but I rescued Gwaelin after finding the mark so maybe it gets disabled in that scenario?). Presumably the original version didn't put an exclamation mark over your head when you're standing on the appropriate location either. Don't strictly follow how finding this thing, that theoretically anyone (able to survive the marshes) could have found, legitimizes you.

So Dragonlord. When I first fought the second form, I had around 100 HP, its generic attack did around 40 damage, and its biggest fire attack did around 50 damage, and I wasn't guaranteed to move first. This ultimately leads to the scenario where it makes one of the two moves and knocks me into the kill range of the other, then makes the other move and kills me before I can heal, and because it can do this from my having 80 HP or so it's an exercise in futility to try to stay two hits away from death. I started going up a level between re-attempts, but the damage numbers never significantly changed, and I'm going to put my eventual success down to luck of it failing to perform that sequence of actions. (Presumably it was at least becoming less likely for Dragonlord to outspeed me as I went up levels.) Ultimately, not really a fan of that fight, and if I had had to go back through the castle dungeon each time I would have been even less so.

[dunie]

Xenoblade:

Been playing this before I sold my TV for my big move; I'm about 110 hours in and am literally just sidequesting. My favorite team's have been Shulk, Rikki & Melia or Sharla, Melia & Reyn. I tend to play more as the second group because I'm finding myself more interested in playing as a long-range character, plus Melia tends to die ever so easily if Reyn's not there for some decent damage backup. I'm doing a Makna Forest monster quest with SRM.

You know, I've convinced myself that the voice acting is better because it's "British" (?); American voice-acting has depressed me because I really think we suck at intonation. Anyway. I had hit a rock in this game prior to picking it up again last week because I can't seem to move away from the questing. Like, is this telling me that I'm disliking the storyline, that I took too long of a break from progressing, or that quests have just been easier with my real life?

I'm trying to get through KHDDD by the end of July, otherwise I'll be tempted to take the DS with me to Deutschland.

[Grefter]

Fallen London - I convinced the Beauty and the Wit to do the threeway in the throneroom.  I dumped my scandal to 0 before it.  Scandal goes to rank 7 and a tiny bit over and auto sent to Tomb colonies.