What VIDEO GAME(s) have you been playing?

Been playing Payday 2 a lot, with the main goal to unlock achievements. Some of the ones I was putting off turned out to be ridiculously easy once I figured out how. Some others, I curse like a man with Tourette's. Overall, this is my favorite FPS of all time. That may change when Payday 3 comes out.

Last weekend, had one of the biggest adrenaline highs playing the Black Cat heist with others. Typing while shooting isn't conducive to staying alive, so I use my headset with the push to talk feature, and I only talk when necessary. It's uncommon to have more than one person use a mic (due to the fact that the game and other factors sometimes make them useless). So, I was actually happy to heist with another mic person. And man, his reactions to the heist had me going. He'd never done the Black Cat heist before so his responses were in awe of the heist and his OH SHIT! responses when he got in trouble from the po-po.

We got the vault open and then it was a mad dash to bag the loot and toss it overboard. We then had to signal the chopper on the front bow by writing PAYDAY on the deck with fuel and setting it on fire. Waiting for the chopper got hairy, but we pulled it off. The dude had a blast and I was bouncing to my coffee machine afterwards because how much fun I had with them.

Man, it's so rough that most online gaming is just so nasty and toxic. When it hits, it HITS, sometimes even with randos. I used to play Gears of War 2 regularly with a crew and it was such a good experience when every else wasn't being so shitty.

Yea playing something online with a full squad is really incredibly fun. Let me tell you the ways I leave everyone outside my party on mute though

GTFO is now in full release, on sale, and has bot support to fill out teams. The bots are not geniuses, but they are better than nothing. If you want an INTENSE cooperative shooter, this is it. Would love to play some time with people.

jason10mm wrote: I think ultimately GP will lead to the same general diminishment of quality of games that streaming services have done to media. I.e. the "just good enough to not unsubscribe" mentality versus "so good I'll spend money now to see it". Plus it heavily encourages DLC type purchases off of a "free" base game.

I dunno. They BOUGHT Bethesda, Mojang, and quite a few other major studios. That stuff will stay in the catalog indefinitely. And you are right it is magic for the indie games.

Picked up Cyberpunk 2077 in the after Thanksgiving sale off Steam. The story is there and engaging. I turned down combat difficulty and used a memory editor to give more cash than I'll ever use. I don't wanna run around picking up every deck of cards and earring I see to sell to a pawn shop vending machine. I don't want to disassemble every gun to get components. I'll just buy all the components in a huge block so I can get back to jacking into people's heads and making them explode. Load times are a bit much. Problem these days is I rarely have huge blocks of time to play. Driving SUCKS in the game. I'd much rather run everywhere. Other annoyance is when you cross streets outside of the crosswalks when the light stop the traffic you get hit, take damage and have to wait to get up. Love the story and setting.

mtagge wrote: The story is there and engaging. I turned down combat difficulty and used a memory editor to give more cash than I'll ever use. I don't wanna run around picking up every deck of cards and earring I see to sell to a pawn shop vending machine. I don't want to disassemble every gun to get components.

This speaks to something I've been thinking about as I approach making my own (very simplistic) video games. I understand that there are some settings where you want the player to feel as though they're always desperate, so you withhold things from them at the beginning. Most commonly this is money. I understand thematically why you might want a player to start out dirt poor and work their way up.

But this is a game and that work needs to be fun. Finding someone to sell garbage to isn't fun. Loading up with as many apples as you can find because they weigh .3 less than books but are worth 1gp more isn't fun. Being poor isn't fun...that's why people try to avoid it.

I don't know how to make being poor fun, but what I do know is that every game that ever put me through this eventually got to a point, sometimes sooner sometimes later, where I had more money than God and nothing worthwhile to spend it on. I know I'm supposed to look back and think, "wow, remember when I learned there were different types of tin cans and one pays more?" but it's mostly just irritating. It's also not much fun to find an item worth 500 gold or whatever and ignore it because who cares? Both of those tell me that either (a) money needs to be reexamined in this game or more likely (b) this game doesn't need money.

For me there's a similar issue with crafting and upgrades. I don't want to carry around a bunch of old shoes because they have leather I need to make some armor. I am the goddamn Champion of the Lands and making armor is not my fucking job. There are already people who make armor, let them worry about it. Maybe have one of them give me a quest to find a supply or whatever, sure, but I'm not the fucking apprentice armorer, I have shit to do. I don't want a making armor skill. I don't want to become King of Making Armor. That is okay for someone else to do! (Also if I want to learn magic that's cool, make there be a way for me to learn magic but Jesus I don't need to then become the President of Magic. It's fucking fine if there's someone else who does something better than me!)

And have you ever gone to buy a PC or car and you're looking at models and this one warfles at 30.2hz and that one at 28hz but that one also has 1.67 zimps as opposed to only 1.62 on this one. That's super fucking fun and you sure wish you could do that for every goddamn thing you own, right? Wrong. What you want is, you have a PS2 and you see a PS3 and you know that a PS3 is better because it's one more so you switch up. And the PS3 is better and you ignore all the PS2 shit you find or better yet you don't find any more because what you already have is better.

Somewhere along the way game companies decided what we all REALLY want to do is this little piecemeal incremental bullshit and can't envision a game without it. But the shit isn't fun. It's grindy and tedious and often makes no goddamn sense. I AM TRYING TO SAVE YOUR STUPID TOWN FROM DRAGONS, DON'T MAKE ME SELL WHEAT TO YOU SO I CAN BUY THE MAGIC ARMOR.

I love the Ultima games to death but in Ultima Underworld I you get to the end and discover you have to do a thing in the dream world to save the universe or whatever. The way you get into the dream world is, you eat a plant and then go to sleep. The game also makes you eat food and drink water. So I get my plant and I'm ready to go into the dream world and be a champ. I go to eat the plant and the fucking game tells me "you aren't hungry right now". The fucking food system is overriding the plot. I literally had to just run in circles until I got hungry enough to save the world.

I'm sick of this stuff and avoiding it now when I can. It's annoying, it's lazy, it's antiquated, and it's not fun.

Well said! I think a lot of this nonsense shows up to pad game length. I would much rather play a dense, curated 35 hour game than a 75 hour game loaded with nonsense.

I realize this is largely a product of not having all the time in the world and not being hard pressed to afford a game, as I was in my youth.

I totally agree that it's not fun, it's a time sink, and it often obliterates any sense of narrative flow. However, I think there are gamers out there who really get into that min/maxing stuff. It bores the crap out of me, but to each their own, I guess.

I have started the campaign of Halo Infinite on PC. I have game pass so it's "free"... and this game is cool! It starts out fairly standard, but once you clear a couple of missions, you get to the open world part, and I've only done a few things but look forward to exploring a lot more. I've mostly been indifferent to Halo (I did enjoy 3 quite a lot) but I think this one will entertain me for a while. Probably not the multiplayer, I have other games for that.

mtagge wrote:

jason10mm wrote: I think ultimately GP will lead to the same general diminishment of quality of games that streaming services have done to media. I.e. the "just good enough to not unsubscribe" mentality versus "so good I'll spend money now to see it". Plus it heavily encourages DLC type purchases off of a "free" base game.

I dunno. They BOUGHT Bethesda, Mojang, and quite a few other major studios. That stuff will stay in the catalog indefinitely. And you are right it is magic for the indie games.

Picked up Cyberpunk 2077 in the after Thanksgiving sale off Steam. The story is there and engaging. I turned down combat difficulty and used a memory editor to give more cash than I'll ever use. I don't wanna run around picking up every deck of cards and earring I see to sell to a pawn shop vending machine. I don't want to disassemble every gun to get components. I'll just buy all the components in a huge block so I can get back to jacking into people's heads and making them explode. Load times are a bit much. Problem these days is I rarely have huge blocks of time to play. Driving SUCKS in the game. I'd much rather run everywhere. Other annoyance is when you cross streets outside of the crosswalks when the light stop the traffic you get hit, take damage and have to wait to get up. Love the story and setting.

It sounds like you haven't gone out there to see the Aldecaldos yet. That's a lot of running to do out in the sticks, especially if you do all the side quests. But yes, the driving sucks.

It also sounds like I should have hunted up the mod you're using. I resorted to that scheme where you buy all the soft drinks from vending machines that you can find, then disassemble them and sell the parts for profit.

I started Halo Infinite as well. Not got to the ring yet but wow, does it play smooth on a XSX. Like some of the new? weapons. I feel like I missed a game in there somewhere, I don't recall who the Banished are and why there is a big hole in the ring. A little recap would have been nice. Now I gotta go back and see what I have played, all of them are probably available on gamepass.

Gregarius wrote: I totally agree that it's not fun, it's a time sink, and it often obliterates any sense of narrative flow. However, I think there are gamers out there who really get into that min/maxing stuff. It bores the crap out of me, but to each their own, I guess.

(Raises hand)

Maybe we need a Minmaxers Anonymous. Hi, I'm RobertB, and I'm a Minmaxer.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the CP2077 pop machine trick.

Legomancer wrote: But this is a game and that work needs to be fun. Finding someone to sell garbage to isn't fun. Loading up with as many apples as you can find because they weigh .3 less than books but are worth 1gp more isn't fun. Being poor isn't fun...that's why people try to avoid it.

I don't know how to make being poor fun, but what I do know is that every game that ever put me through this eventually got to a point, sometimes sooner sometimes later, where I had more money than God and nothing worthwhile to spend it on. I know I'm supposed to look back and think, "wow, remember when I learned there were different types of tin cans and one pays more?" but it's mostly just irritating. It's also not much fun to find an item worth 500 gold or whatever and ignore it because who cares? Both of those tell me that either (a) money needs to be reexamined in this game or more likely (b) this game doesn't need money.

For me there's a similar issue with crafting and upgrades. I don't want to carry around a bunch of old shoes because they have leather I need to make some armor. I am the goddamn Champion of the Lands and making armor is not my fucking job. There are already people who make armor, let them worry about it. Maybe have one of them give me a quest to find a supply or whatever, sure, but I'm not the fucking apprentice armorer, I have shit to do. I don't want a making armor skill. I don't want to become King of Making Armor. That is okay for someone else to do! (Also if I want to learn magic that's cool, make there be a way for me to learn magic but Jesus I don't need to then become the President of Magic. It's fucking fine if there's someone else who does something better than me!)

My all-time favorite PC game, D&D Temple of Elemental Evil, was annoying with the money stuff, but at least the crafting was painless. I never reached a point where money was plentiful, because resurrections were so expensive and buying or crafting great magic items and weapons was also expensive. At the low levels, money was tight enough that I got in the habit of stealing clothes and shoes from dead opponents so I could sell them for a bit of silver. At the higher levels, I ran into a different problem. The game would keep track of all the stuff that I sold to NPCs, and eventually all of their inventory slots would be full of stuff and they couldn't buy from me anymore. When I reached that point, I finally realized it was worth buying back all those old shoes and clothes, even with retail markup, then dump them on the ground, in order to free up inventory slots for my buyer and also to avoid filling my own inventory slots. As I said, the crafting was at least painless. No faffing around with components, just make sure that your spellcaster had the relevant spells and crafting feat and then spend a chunk of money.

Temple of Elemental Evil is now playable with cheats that allow you to manipulate all sorts of things, so you can actually play the game instead of fighting it. However, even with cheats this game is HARD.

As for Cyberpunk, I played through the whole game back when it came out, and completely ignored all of this vending machine nonsense. I crafted pretty much nothing, just took the gear that was given to me at various plot points, and had a good time. There is no need to engage with subsystems that are convoluted and not fun. Life is too precious.

hotseatgames wrote: I have started the campaign of Halo Infinite on PC. I have game pass so it's "free"... and this game is cool! It starts out fairly standard, but once you clear a couple of missions, you get to the open world part, and I've only done a few things but look forward to exploring a lot more. I've mostly been indifferent to Halo (I did enjoy 3 quite a lot) but I think this one will entertain me for a while. Probably not the multiplayer, I have other games for that.

Twitter was alive with memes this weekend. Two things were prevalent.

1) The Grunt Murders
2) Halo Infinite is the best Spider Man game.