What Are You Playing (Summer 2012)

[Some Stupid Japanese Name]

Bulletstorm was a hell of a ride. One of the few fps i actually liked. So of course it didnt do that great.

[GohanX]

I need to play that. The demo was fucking awesome.

[Joust Williams]

I need to finish. So rad

[Rumpy]

Bulletstorm! WOO!

[Diff-chan]

The last thing I did in Bulletstorm today was blow out a dude's asshole with the machine-gun. This fucking game.

I also managed to restore my Guild Wars account and I wanted to mess around with it before GW2. I spent $50 on this damn game back in 2006 or whatever and barely played it. One level 8 character.

[bVork]

Blacklight: Retribution
Apart from Team Fortress 2, the best F2P game I have played. I really liked the original Blacklight, but it was painful trying to find any matches thanks to the miniscule player count. That is not a problem with this game - there are around 8-9k players on Steam, and that doesn't count the people running the standalone client. This game is very much like Call of Duty in feel. The twist is the science fiction spin, with things like grenades that scramble your vision, cloaking, mechanized suits, and a visor mode that amounts to wallhacking. I think they're all really nice additions to the basic and traditional formula, providing a nice escalation in firepower as matches progress (since you need to earn in-match credits to buy a mech suit) and preventing camping (hard to sit in one spot when you can be seen by anyone using the visor). The prices for items are a little strange. It costs about 200 GP (the earnable currency) or 25 zen (the real money currency - 1 dollar = 100 zen) to rent an item for a day. That's just fine if you're using GP, since you can earn that in one match if you do well and two matches if you aren't doing so well, but that also makes it incredibly pointless to pay for items with real money. To buy things permanently, it costs around 5000 GP or 500 zen. And these aren't really full guns you're buying - weapons are made up of several different parts, and it would cost you around $30 to put together an entirely customized permanent gun if you went the real money route. I could see myself buying a few things if it cost maybe 50 cents for permanent item, but the current prices are bullshit. Thankfully, it isn't pay-to-win and even the default assault rifle is quite useful, but this makes me really wonder if they thought things through: without P2W, with GP not taking too long to save up, and with real money prices being ludicrously expensive, how in the world are they going to make money? I was looking at the $10 starter pack on Steam, but ultimately decided to even pass on that, because it's hard to justify spending $10 for a few items when I could get a full game for that price. Which brings me to...

Binary Domain
It's currently $10 on Amazon. I'm not too far into it, but so far I'm having a lot of fun. The PC port seems to have been whipped into shape by the last few patches, with better mouse control and proper FOV adjustment. The shooting feels really nice. The game does a good job of varying up the level design to make you adjust your tactics, and the different effects you get from shooting robots in different locations (headshots will make them turn on the other robots, legshots will prevent them from walking up towards you, shooting their weapon is self-explanatory...) give you the tools to adapt to any situation you come across. The game looks fantastic on PC and runs at a flaweless 60fps on my system, which fixes one of my major complaints (the sub-30 and highly variable framerate) about the console demo. Even the story isn't quite as stupid as I had anticipated, with great voice acting and well-realized characters going a long way to making it interesting. It's not quite an AAA game, but if you're looking for a good covershooter, this fits the bill.

[GohanX]

I've been playing the Japanese/English mishmash of Ninja Gaiden 3 NES today, and even with the easier difficulty the game is still kicking my ass. The bosses are pretty fair, but the stages are pretty brutal, they make me long for the days when a random bird was my worst concern. Still, great game, even if it's not quite as good as the first two. At least it's attempting to be a little different.

[bbobb]

I loaded up Bulletstorm last night. I shot a guy in the nuts and kicked him off a cliff. Best Game Ever.

Bulletstorm really is a lot of fun. I would have regretted paying full price for it, but I gladly paid $10 for it and got a hell of a lot of value out of it.

[sleeve]

SMT: Devil Survivor Overclocked (3DS)

This might be the first SMT game I actually finish, you guys!

Finally finished Day 3, just about to finish Day 4. This game has some really weird difficulty spikes. If you haven't been playing the game correctly, the boss at the end of Day 3 is extremely fucking hard. There is only one character who can damage the boss, and if you take too long to beat him, he revives ALL the demons you've killed. It took a lot of grinding and skill cracking, but I finally beat him. Now my characters have been rolling through the battles without much trouble.

So I'm excited about playing SMT games again. I bought P4 and will probably make my way through that and P3 at the same time: P4 on the PS2, and P3P on the go.

I hope the Soul Hackers remake makes its way to the US.

[Thief Silver]

Devil Survivor is perhaps the easiest SMT to finish. Not that it's an easy game by any stretch! It's' just super friendly and engrossing to someone who isn't sure about the SMT games. Other than a few of the boss fights it's a fantastic game.

By the way for that boss he becomes easy if you have a Kinshin demon in your party. It allows your main character to attack twice. But yeah I'm pretty sure EVERYONE who has played that game has had trouble with that boss.