What games are you currently playing?

[Master]

I've been playing Stardew Valley, it's pretty good. It's a bit tricky to play with a keyboard and mouse, however. This is a game I'm wanting to try out with the DualShock 4.

[Pirez]

For the past two days I've been playing The Binding Of Isaac Afterbirth +. One of the few games that got me hyped for 2017 (the others being Shovel Knight Plague of Shadows, Mass Effect Andromeda, Zelda Breath of the Wild and Kingdom Hearts 2.8 )

Yeah, it's still fun and all, but I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that the new new new end boss is not only difficult (in fact the whole game has been buffed in difficulty), it's also unfair, and that got me cooled back down to earth. Kinda disappointed on this one. In the next few days I will try the modding tools.

[Itooh]

I've found 2016 to be an amazing year for games!

My favorite one is certainly The Witness. But I also really enjoyed Firewatch, Rythm Paradise Megamix, Stepehn's Sausage Roll, Oxenfree and Hyper Light Drifter. Oh, and little mention for AM2R. :3
And there are aslo thos I haven't been able to play yet: Abzu, Owl Boy, Quadrilateral Cowboy, Event[0], Diaries of a Space Janitor, Inside, Superhot…
Mostly indie games, but what do you want, they are great games!

And 2017 has already some very interesting titles coming. But for now, I'm enjoying Botolo, and will soon pick two from the list above.

[Fifo]

Not playing anything right now, but I’m thinking about getting FFXV.

[Harpic fraîcheur]

I'm currently playing Oddworld New 'n' Tasty. It's really good!

I'm going to start playing Psychonauts now.

[Droolie]

I'm playing the fan translated Dragon Quest II for SNES. I'm near the end and I didn't have as much fun as I did with the first one. But judging from the music and sprite work in DQIII for SNES, I'll probably like that one again. Just need to go through a few more dungeons to finish II.

I also managed to repair my PS2, so I might jump into Suikoden III soon. Or a Persona game, but I'll probably just start with Persona 5.

Not playing anything right now, but I’m thinking about getting FFXV.

But when will you get FFIX? It's so much better.
(Also, Suikoden I and II.)

[Rayfist]

Yesterday, I finally finished Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne for the Playstation 2 (though I was emulating it.) This is honestly my favorite Shin Megami Tensei game by far. The atmosphere, the characters, all were really interesting. Even the story, while very simple, also manages to feel incredibly intellectual/mature in a sense. The conception (end of the world) occurs at the beginning of the game, but the conception is in place for the creation of a new world. Reasonably, this creation would cause many people with varying beliefs to fight over what they want the outcome of the new world to be. In SMT Nocturne, progression is not shown through loads of cutscenes, rather, through exploring the world, talking to the NPCs (lost souls and demons) in each town. You can choose to side with a belief resulting in an ending, but you can also choose to reject said beliefs for a different ending(s). These beliefs are called 'Reasons', and each human who survived the conception essentially has their own reason. You start to see the heavy toll that the conception took on people, and how such a dire moment can really deeply affect people. Two of your best friends at the beginning of the game are so heavily affected by the conception, that when they start to form their own reasons they start to turn on their best friend (you) if he does not favor their Reason. It's a game with this real creeping feel of isolation.

You feel like you can't trust anyone in this new universe. It's not your usual Law/Neutral/Chaos alignments, Nocturne with it's 'Reasons' allow for many endings (six to seven I believe.) The world you explore, the music, it's all incredibly eerie, uncomfortable and creepy, but I loved it. My recommended ending would be True Demon ending. Why? Not gonna spoil but it's worth getting because it's not only the hardest ending to get (adding an additional 30-40 hours in the game), but it's also the canon ending for Nocturne. For any hardcore RPG fans, find a way to play this game on PS2. And I mean that when I say hardcore, this is by far the hardest SMT game I've played. Unlike SMT IV, you can no longer save wherever you want, so it's one of those RPGs where it's super easy to lose a bunch of progress.

[Frostbite]

bad r ats

[Fifo]

Not playing anything right now, but I’m thinking about getting FFXV.

But when will you get FFIX? It's so much better.

I already have FFIX on my Vita. But I will try getting a disc copy someday.

[Bzzit]

Yeah, you should definitely check out FF IX; it's like the swansong for the classic era of Final Fantasy games.

[Rayfist]

FF9 looks interesting, have it in my backlog but never touched or really thought much about it. Regardless what caught my eye was the design of the characters, they seem more like classic era Final Fantasy compared to what was in 7 and 8.

Ohhh this reminds me, I finished the story in Final Fantasy XV a week or so ago. It was pretty good! I love the open world, and I honestly never get bored of traveling from one location to another. Hell, I haven't even scraped the surface yet of what the game has to offer with its side quests, but I'm super stoked to come back to that.

I enjoyed the story in this game in the sense that it was probably the most simple plot in a Final Fantasy game in a long time. Perhaps that's its weakest point though. You have two ruling nations, one protects the great crystal, the other wants possession of said crystal, war ensues. It's your typical sort of one nation vs the other story, but Final Fantasy XV shines far more in its characters, you can tell how desperately Square wants you to love these characters, and yeah I love them. I can tell it isn't really the simplistic plot that makes it so great, but more so the burden it carries on the characters. How being the upcoming king truly affects an ordinary person like Noctis. If you watch the Brotherhood anime (which you should if you're gonna play this game), you see how Noctis sort of has an ordinary, and lazy life, it kind of shows how having to uphold the Lucian family really took a toll on him, and how when his father King Regis passes, how important and crucial it is for him to uphold that title of King. And what I like is how sort of well... realistically Noctis feels about this all in the beginning, stubborn. Isn't that how we would all act in such a situation? So of course, that allows for some good character development. The group of four were all lovable and memorable, especially after watching Brotherhood... perhaps that's why I'm all the more pissed off at not seeing any of the other characters have more screentime. We know Luna is this very important character who can communicate with the gods, but I feel like the game didn't do her justice at all. Yes, she helped Noctis a lot in his quest, but we never got to see any truly badass moments from her. It was especially depressing seeing the Hydraean astral just absolutely fuck her shit up, and see her slowly die, as Ardyn delivers the final blow. I was also really upset at what little screentime the members of Nifelheim got. We saw Aldercapt die but this was not at all shown in the form of a cutscene. Ardyn is a great villain, but I feel like these type of 'psychological mind fuck' type villains are being incredibly overdone in videogames lately. Though one thing about Ardyn did stand out that made him an interesting villain that's revealed towards the end of the game, how he's part of the Lucian family, branded as a traitor for something he did long ago (that wasn't even bad) by the Lucian family, so he seeked revenge on them.

Now yeah.... I should talk about the end game. Chapters 1 through 9 were absolutely solid. I was legitimately just stunned when I first saw Altissia, I can't begin to describe how many hours I spent just exploring the city, night and day, it was breathtaking. I know that sounds like a bit like an overexaggeration but god damn I was just incredibly impressed when I first saw it. When I think of almost all the chapters from 10-15, I can't help but think they were incredibly rushed. Don't even get me started on chapter 13, I dreaded every minute of it. I get what they were trying to do, show from Noctis's perspective how it felt being isolated from his buddies at an attempt to make a horror-like game, but that just didn't do much for me. I'm very upset that they ditched open world in terms of a linear-like Final Fantasy 13 type game.

The gameplay is great, and I like the combat, but I gotta be honest I feel like combat just wore out on me after some time, it sort of became too easy. Constantly point warping and doing some Devil May Cry sort of tricks and combos, it all felt all satisfying and fun, but I feel like the combat doesn't have so much depth to it. I feel this was an intentional choice by Square to make the game way more open to a broader audience.

I enjoyed Final Fantasy XV, it's not hard to call it my game of the year when 2016 was pretty damn stale in terms of games, but it is far, FAR from perfect. I hope for the future Final Fantasy games we see, they improve upon the combat. I would love to see more experimenting with open world and combat. I love the turn based gameplay, but after getting 10 titles with it, it's nice to see something new and fresh for once (looking at you, Pokemon.)

[Droolie]

FF9 looks interesting, have it in my backlog but never touched or really thought much about it. Regardless what caught my eye was the design of the characters, they seem more like classic era Final Fantasy compared to what was in 7 and 8.

FF9 really isn't much, it's just the best out of all the FFs. I think the character design is actually quite charming and a nice change of pace from Nomura's designs (FF7,8,10,13,15). I can see why the "medieval fantasy" aesthetic might turn people who are used to the "industrial" aesthetic from FF7 or the "sci-fi" one from FF8 off from playing it, but FF9's world can feel like all of those at different times. And yet, it is perhaps the most coherent world of them all.
... Just play it already

I enjoyed the story in this game in the sense that it was probably the most simple plot in a Final Fantasy game in a long time. Perhaps that's its weakest point though.

I think the story was good and simple, but it would have been so much better if everything didn't happen off-screen. Most things with Luna happened off-screen, then Ignis being blinded, the emperor turning into a run-of-the-mill daemon, Jared's death (lol), the Insomnia invasion (it being in a movie is fine, but it should be shown better in-game too)... Another problem with the story was that it just didn't have any urgency. Noctis only acts upset about Regis's death in one little cutscene, and any anger or sadness they may want you to build up is completely broken up by the gang trotting around on their Chocobos, going out collecting frogs and having conversations full of puns. Basically, the story is good and would have been better if it wasn't rushed, but the execution is terrible.

Also, Ardyn's motivations weren't explained well enough: he was the first Lucian king (he's on the cover of the Cosmogony book and even references that event when he meets Gentiana) and, like Luna, saves people from the Starscourge by absorbing it into his own body. He succeeds and is admired far and wide, but his body is now also impure, making him unfit to be the Crystal's champion. One guy called Izunia (not from the Lucian family) gets jealous of all that praise and manages to get chosen by the Crystal instead. He tells the people he's the real Lucian king who healed the people, and Ardyn is an imposter. The people believe him because Izunia now has the king's powers. After centuries, Ardyn takes Izunia's name and goes around doing evil things to smear that name and to make the life of the real Izunia's descendants (who now call themselves "Lucis Caelum") as hard as possible.

I hope for the future Final Fantasy games we see, they improve upon the combat. I would love to see more experimenting with open world and combat. I love the turn based gameplay, but after getting 10 titles with it, it's nice to see something new and fresh for once (looking at you, Pokemon.)

Personally, I hope they go back to smaller zones (ie. something in between corridors or immense open spaces) in favor of a better story. It's clear that it's hard for them to create tension in the story in open-world segments, but I really didn't think that open world was necessary at all. It was cool to explore, but you can explore zones too. I liked the action-based combat but if they stick with it, they should probably tone down how chaotic it was: add more attack telegraphing, less player knockback, more enemy knockback, less button prompts, etc. Basically, more like Kingdom Hearts.
Also, graphics are cool but I hope they stop using the entire budget on them. There could have been more towns and cutscenes if not for that obsession of theirs.

[Roma10]

Lately found train games and playing almost every day with my little cousin.

[Cairnie]

So my partner now has a Megadrive Everdrive and things ensued. Like I'm SO close to beating Ys III which is like a side scrolling RPG that never came out in Europe, but man that final boss is diamond levels of tough.

[Master]

I'm running through Rayman 2 on the PC again, since Ad's released RayTwol. Even though it's been available for a while now, I do really appreciate being able to play Rayman 2 at 1080p 60FPS. It seems only like yesterday that trying to mess about with the resolution just stretched the game, and the frame rate would love to alternate between 60 and 30.

[Adsolution]

And don't forget 32-bit colour as well. ;D Get that banding outta there!

[Greeness]

I'm playing the new binding of Isaac rebirth dlc, but to be honest as much as I like the core game and afterbirth, this dlc is very lazy in terms of presentation in some departments the new "final area" is just a combination of all the other already existing floors and it reuses all thier assets some new enemies are just made out of already existing sprites and sometimes are just 2 enemies were just moshed together to look like they're brand new, other then that though it is enjoyable, mod support is going to be great, the challanges the dlc offers are still very entertaining and fun and the new character is incredibly unique, but other then that Antibirth which is a fan-made expansion had more effort put into it.

[Haruka]

I'm currently playing Ratchet and Clank 2, and to be quite frank, I think people put this franchise on too high of a pedestal. As a platformer I can agree that the worlds are colorful and imaginative, but I really don't get why the tools need to be equipped to the wheel; it makes more sense for things like the grappling hook to have their own button so that you don't consistently have to pull yourself out of the action, and for the puzzle solving items to have a context sensitive button. Things like that just make your game a lot smoother.

The storyline in the first game is fairly predictable and comedy unfunny in opinion, Captain Quark in particular being the most unbearable pile of dreck I've seen in awhile. The second so far is a little bit better at comedy at least, I got a good chuckle from the biker gang world.

Interestingly enough I've been playing the trilogy for PS2 in this latest month (for the first time I am playing R&C games in depth) and while the 2 is definitely superior to the first game, the third title fixes even more issues. Thank goodness they added proper strafing and a "key" gadget for everything (like Swingshot and Dynamo). I would recommend you to try out the third game.

[Master]

I haven't played much of the PS2 R&C titles, but I'm fairly certain they had ironed out those issues by the PS3 era.

[Rayfist]

Before my winter break ends: I've been playing Dangan Ronpa on PC, and man it is intense. I'm not so into the visual novel genre but I'm totally hooked on this game. I love the setting and the characters, will explain more in depth if I manage to beat it anytime soon.

On the other side, I've been doing FFXV side quests. Fun, but... slow, real slow. A lot of fetch quests and just unfun stuff. I've been making barely any progress with leveling up, and still haven't snagged the flying regalia just yet. The only thing I've really enjoyed a lot was stumbling into a huge dungeon where a royal tomb awaits at the end. But otherwise many of the casual side quests have just felt very back and fourth. I have enjoyed some of the hunts though.