What Are You Playing (Winter 2012-2013 / Postapocalypse)?

[Finch]

Yeah, Skies of Arcadia and Grandia II came out nearly at the same time. I remember Official (or was it Unofficial) Dreamcast Magazine talking about it.

And it was good at the time. It would've been really good if it wasn't for the fucking encounter rate and spinning battle load garbage. The story was stupid, but it wasn't about the story, it was about the characters. THEY'RE NOT GENERIC, THEY'RE ICONIC.

[MechDeus]

I was going to say only if it's less than $30, but then I realized a local shop might actually have some that cheap. Time to check!

So the cheapest one they had was $70 and it was a 1001, so that was Nope x2. On the bright side, after doing a bunch of testing it looks like my battery isn't actually dead and the constant shutoffs while not plugged in was actually some kind of glitch with custom firmware. On OFW I had a steady decrease in percentage as I watched it but then when I would swap to CFW my charge would be at 92% and shut off, and when I turned it back on the charge would say 27% and then 56% and then shut off again, and turning it back on would say 86% and shut off.

So I changed the game speed setting back to default and it appears that all is well again. Hooray!

[Mzo]

Grandia is definitely ugly enough to be a Saturn game, with the added bonus that it runs like shit on the Playstation. Pretty rad! Other than that it's a surprisingly charming and fun adventure. ADVENTURE!

[jyoung]

I reinstalled Aliens vs. Predator 2 today using the HD textures mod and 1080p resolution mod that are still up on filefront from years ago.

The game holds up just as well as I remember. I even see that there are custom servers still up for online play if you download the multiplayer server mod. I definitely will try to go through this game again before Aliens Colonial Marines drops.

[bVork]

Mad Planets
What an incredible arcade game. I can't believe I didn't know about it until nimitz over at the Shmups forum used it to start off a small competition. They've moved on to other games but I'm still playing this. It's definitely up there with Robotron and Defender as one of the best early shooters out there. Waves are quick, there are worthwhile bonuses if you manage to kill every planet before one spawns some moons, the bonus rounds require a lot of skill, and everything just seems perfectly balanced and frantic. It's wonderful, and I recommend that everyone try it out.

Din's Curse
What if the dungeon in Diablo fought back? That's the basic gist of this action-RPG. Towns are randomly generated, and mobs actually do their own thing while you're doing yours. Quests can and will be failed, and if you ignore enemies as they level up by killing rival mobs, they'll eventually start building machines that screw up the environment or even send monsters up to the town to start killing NPCs. I just finally destroyed a machine that had cursed basically everyone in the town, causing some of them to attack each other, and vendor prices to go way up. While I was down there, a monster came up top and killed one of the major quest givers, so now I have to recruit another before I can turn in a number of my quests. I'm not usually into Diablo-style games, but the randomness and the very real possibility of losing a town is keeping me hooked.

Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed
The PC version of this is wonderful. It runs at a flawless 60 fps at 1080p for me. It's still a kart racer, but the weapon balance and the trick system both reward skill and ensure that the best racer really does win out. No blue shells here. The singleplayer challenges are varied and interesting. The only downside is that online doesn't seem to work well. I couldn't join any of my friends online, as I kept getting an error message when I accepted their invite or tried to join them manually. Playing with randoms seems to work well once it (eventually) finds a match, but who really wants to play a kart racer with random internet people? Especially since the game seems to enable microphones by default, so you hear a lot of random noise from stupid people who have not turned theirs off - and there's no mute.

[Changeling]

Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia: I had this back in the day but never played it. I'm up to Drac's castle now and its definitely the hardest of the Igavanias. Its more about finding the right glyph combos than anything else. Fun playing on the 3DSXL tho.

Skulls of the Shogun(WP)- Just started this one since there's nothing else on windows phone at the moment. I like it but its a lil clunky without tiles to move around. Good art and gameplay tho.

[epmode]

Bvork, Sumo posted on the Steam forum about the connection and mic issues in Sonic All-Stars. I don't know if they'll default mics to off but they're definitely going to add a mute option.

[gameoverDude]

Strania: The Stella Machina (360) 3.77M stage 6, Normal

Good G.Rev mecha shooter & one of the best $10 games on XBL. The weapon system (with nine to pick from like side, direction, laser, homing missile etc.) makes for some flexibility, with some combinations being better for certain parts. It's about 20-25 minutes to finish, but the length isn't bad at all. This invites replay, mixing it up with different groups of weapons on a future run while trying to get 1-dan on as many as possible by the end.

[jyoung]

After a week of trying, I finally cleared out the first mission of Aliens vs Predator 2 on the hardest difficulty. It doesn't let you save at all, and one Alien can fuck you up in a millisecond. This shit is intense. The second mission is awesome so far, but I can't manage to beat it yet.

[jyoung]

Crazy Taxi (Dreamcast) -- The models and textures still look good in VGA but damn, I didn't remember there being so much slowdown in this game. Do any of the other versions fix the slowdown? I believe there is a port on the Crazy Taxi 3 disc as well as versions for PS2/Gamecube/PC. I will not consider the trash ape Xbox 360/PS3 versions since they screwed up the soundtrack and store licensing.