What Are You Playing (Fall 2012)

[Yoshi]

Damn this year is moving quickly.

Borderlands (PS3) - My wife and I finished the main campaign in co-op and have moved on to Dr. Ned. I'm reaching my saturation point with it, but the Mrs. is still very excited for Borderlands 2. Thankfully, I think she wants to play single player first again. I have to admit that the game is much, much better co-op, though I am not a fan of that scenario.

Gradius (FC) - This game needs a 30 life code. Like Life Force, it's not that it's not able to be 1cc'd with three lives; it's just that you learn the levels so much faster when you have more lives. We need a new Gradius so badly. I'd even take it on the Vita at this point.

Zen Pinball (PSV) - I hate AgentX. I am by no means good at pinball, so when his scores pop on on PSN, I might as well be a gorilla staring at the moon. I ain't getting there. I did sneak in a high friends high score on the Wolverine table though. I can only conclude that no one likes that one. Also, I <3 Cross Buy.

That's really all I've been playing. I need to get on some other stuff, but, well, it's football season.

[GohanX]

My playing has been very random, mostly sticking with arcade style games in the precious few moments I have.

Outrun Coast 2 Coast (Xbox) - I really like the 1 player mode in this, it has real racing. Otherwise, not a big departure from Outrun 2.

Progear (CPS2, played through Xbox) - Holy fucking shit I love this game, but the 4th stage just destroys me. I refuse to credit feed through it.

Street Fighter Alpha 2 (CPS2, through Xbox) - I haven't played this one much in years, I'm still pretty fucking good at it. I'm probably better at this than any other fighting game ever.

[Mzo]

Finishing off BBS, but doing the same minigames and arena BS for all three characters is killing my soul little by little. Halfway through a Bayonetta hard playthrough and also picked monhun Tri back up after Tri U was announced. Tri is pretty small, almost done with it!

[sleeve]

Dark Souls (PC, XBOX): Got back into the DS groove for the new content, but then went back to the XBox version to work on achievements. The multiplayer is still pretty healthy on XBL. Dark Anor Londo and Painted World are still good spots for PvP.

Borderlands 2 (XBOX): I only really enjoy this on co-op. When it's good, it's really really good, but when it's bad (bugged fetch quests) it's pretty boring. There's enough customization and carrot-on-stick achievements to keep things reasonably interesting.

[Pineapple]

Trying to beat Spelunky "The Hard Way" and have been very close. Made it to Olmec after getting through the City of Gold and died out of pure stupidity, it was heartbreaking. Managed to get the Casanova and Public Enemy achievements along the way, at least.

Started Dragon Quest VI thanks to ARBM, so far I really like it. Great looking sprites and nice animation, although I really wish I had one of the bigger screens to play it on (still using a DSLite).

Trying to clean up the harder stuff on Mushihimesama Futari, last week I was able to beat Original and Maniac modes in Arrange 1cc back to back, then got to Larsa before dying on Ultra. I think if I had tried again that night I would have got it, but I waited a few days and it got real tough again. After that I will try the 1.5 modes again, maybe MAYBE might try the Black Label DLC.

Besides that I'm just cleaning up random other things, hopefully should have my PC back online again soon and then it will be really hard not to spend a bajillion dollars on Steam shit.

[MechDeus]

Finally finished MGS:PO. The story is okay and the ideas for the game are really good, but most of the missions are too tiny to give a shit about, there's very things about any part of the design that are well thought out, and the PSP platform in general just can't handle the game. The controls are too messed up and the camera has some really weird quirks about it that makes it crappy even when using a controller with a right stick. The 15fps or whatever that the game runs at makes some of the boss fights far harder than they should be unless I was trying to cheese them, since the low framerate and ghosting meant that I could shoot at someone's head but it's not actually where it's being displayed since they've already moved or dodged out of the way since the screen updated.

They also changed how to do some moves into freakish button combinations. Like in MGS3 you can shoulder slam a soldier by running up and holding down square, but in PO it can't be done from the front and to do it from behind means holding square to grab them and then having the stick go neutral and then pressing back + square. Why does that now require a three step process and can only be done from one direction when it was previously just a single button press?

Whatever, it's over now and that makes me happy. Time to see what Peace Walker on a console is like.

[Thief Silver]

Etrian Odyssey - Still working my way through it, but having a blast even with the lack of strafing which I still don't understand how that could have been left out. Midway through the 4th Stratum, pretty much slaughtering everything (There's a quest where you spend 5 days in the dungeon, and it's absurd for your levels).

Also if anyone has a copy of Etrian Odyssey II they want to sell I would consider it.

Bayonetta - I want to mail Platinum $40 to make up for my not buying this game at launch. I finished a normal playthrough, so I've started the hard one. I'm bad at these games though.

Persona 4 Arena - Still playing this even though it's pretty dead online, looking forward to Guilty Gear a lot more now though.

Borderlands 2 - Still a very mediocre RPG combined with a very mediocre gun game. If you liked the first one you'll like this one, dialogue is better and you have an actual villain, but none of that is really a big enough improvement. If you want more Borderlands absolutely buy this game, if you just want a loot crawler get Torchlight II.

[MechDeus]

I played like five minutes of Peace Walker and it just wrecks PO so hard. A lot of it is that it's on a system which can actually run it and has four shoulder buttons and a right stick, because while it seems the mission structure is similar to the bite-size nature of PO it's just a joy to play in comparison. And the normal soldier slam is back.

Also: there's an indicator for that second between someone seeing Snake and calling the alarm! That is so good! Punching downed enemies to get items quickly with a trade-off of waking them up instead of that slow-as-fuck picking them up and dropping them? I can't believe they went through so many games before coming up with this stuff.

But man, what's up with the orange life vests in the middle of the jungle? Was that a real thing? You know what, I don't even care. The shitty sound radar is still there so I'm okay with all the day-glo soldiers. I just hope that Metal Gear looks awesome this time, instead of that thing which looked like a retarded kite in PO.

Oh, and the control selections? "Would you like to play with a control scheme like MGS4, MPO, or Monster Hunter Freedom?" Monster Hunter Freedom? What the shit?

[Mzo]

Do you even know about the monster hunts?

[MechDeus]

I did not! But it just seems so weird that they would open the game and ask me if I wanted to play my stealth shooting game like I'm a crazy heavy polearm-wielding guy.

Hey, Assassin's Creed! Would you like the control scheme from Mega Man Legends?

I can't stand watching that video, the framerate makes me want to cut myself.