What Games Are You Playing?

26 hours in to Fallout 4 and i've still barely scratched the surface. Getting a bit burnt out though, going to take a break for a week or so and head back to the Commonwealth after.
 
NieR Gestalt (PlayStation 3)
Continuing my progress with Operation Platinum! *not a pun considering Platinum are making NieR: Automata*

So I purchased the NieR: The World of Recycled Vessel downloadable content for $6.99 (remember I went for the US version since it was brand new), and it's a pretty good set of additional content. Not only do you get the chance to play as Replicant Nier (vice versa for Japanese owners) but you also have additional costumes, weapons and quicker access to rare materials like Eagle Egg, Titanium Alloy and Ores. Recommended if you're want to get through weapon upgrades pretty fast.

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My progress so far:
Endings: A B
Trophy Progress: 65%
Playtime: 37 hours 51 minutes
Level: 33
Weapons: 77% (Upgrades on Lv. 4: 0%)

Remaining Trophies:
Platinum Trophy Completion
50% Words
All Weapons Obtained
Ending C
Ending D
5 Weapons Max
15 Weapons Max
All Weapons Max
100 Sheep Massacred
Finish story in 15 hours
Defeat 'someone' within 3 minutes and 30 seconds
 
In the last few months I acquired a few games via Humble Bundle and Steam deals at ridiculously cheap prices...
And I was so done for last week I decided to play some stuff to de-stress.

► Portal
20 November 2015: Must say it is a fun game to play through with a nice kick-off to the story.
I played through the entire original Portal game and beat all advanced maps, as well as tried some challenges.
I acquired 12 of the 15 achievements on Steam already and have just over 10 hours of playtime on my name now.

► Civilization V
21 & 22 November 2015: After a few years I decided to play Civilization V for the first time on an actual Steam account.
First new playthrough took me 22 hours, I played as The Huns on a huge map with 12 civilizations and 40 city-states.
I used the alt. continents setting with "quick" as speed setting (still took 22 hours, lol).
I took over 4 of the 11 other civilizations and never was friends with any of the other civilizations (not intended).
Also took over none of the city-states, although they were all my allies / friends by the end of the playthrough (year 2050).

It honestly is one of those things that kind of bugged me how none of the other civilizations wanted to ally me.
Actually, when world congress was a thing they all voted to ban trading with me which nullified all my trade routes in viability.
Yet I kept on earning 400 to 500 gold a turn, as well as plenty of tourism and such. (one city earned 100+ alone)
Also somehow managed to get over 100 happiness for the first time ever, while owning I believe 16 cities.
The capitals I owned in the end were: Warsaw (Poland), Stockholm (Sweden), Gao (Songhai), Honolulu (Polynesia) and Attila's Court (The Huns)

Not NormanicGRAV
14 November 2015: Said weekend Steam had a free trial weekend for GRAV - early access stage game.
It reminded me a bit of FusionFall in some regards but has a lot, an awful lot of optimization to go through still.
While Portal and Civ V ran smoothly on high settings GRAV didn't run smooth whatsoever on my machine.
Other than that there is no clarity on how you need to get started and how you had to do and find things / monsters.
I quit after 2 hours thinking "I'll revisit this in the future hoping the game got way better".
 
I tend to find diplomacy the most disappointing part of Civilisation and related games, though I guess it's one of the more difficult ones to get right (it could end up being easy to make friends/manipulate enemies). It might be the way I do diplomacy though, usually it comes down to "surrender or die" (it's rare than anyone chooses "surrender" though, for some reason).

IncendiaryLemon said:
So I finished the main quest in Fallout 4 today.
There's a main quest? I should probably get on that, maybe I'll get around to visiting Diamond City at some point.

I have to admit, the more dialogue that I encounter the more I tend to agree that it feels like a step back. The options feel a little too limited, with the less personable options often also being the "refuse" option rather than giving you a real opportunity to be unpleasant but vaguely helpful (at least out of self-interest). I tried being horrible to Preston when you meet him but it was quite unsatisfying and mostly resulted in him yammering on about what I have to do to help. I even encountered one conversation where the only choices were to agree to help or use a speech check to at least avoid a fight, I would probably have gone with saying something insulting and then killing everyone. Luckily I was playing my less charismatic character so failing the check still achieves the killing, though it's less fun since trying to avoid a fight still felt out of character.

Being a villain really doesn't seem to be too well supported (at least in the early game), though at least being kind of neutral seems to be an option in most cases (though it helps to have Charisma to persuade people to hire you). This does seem to be kind of standard for these games, they really seem to want you to be a hero and they only occasionally think to include alternative possibilities (often in dedicated quest lines too).

Still, exploring is fun and there's a lot to see. Also, in terms of gameplay, the two characters that I've created do feel quite different so at least there are options there.
 
Some of the "moral" choices in F4 are weird as hell. I chose to let a character live in dialogue, another NPC accompanying me (one mandated by the quest, not a companion) then straight up murders them against my wishes. So naturally, I immediately blow their head off. A third formerly allied character then attacks me for meeting out summary justice to this tw@ (who he never liked to begin with and would have done the same earlier if I hadn't stopped them) and "Curie hated that".

What?
 
It is a shame that they don't always seem to consider the different possibilities of what a player might do (or want to do) and tend to be a bit too "black and white" about things. I suppose I've come to expect that to an extent though, Fallout: New Vegas having a different developer probably helped make it feel like it had a bit more Role Playing in the RPG. To be fair, it did have it's issues as well and I guess it's difficult to put a lot of choice/detail into these kinds of games.

Companions can be kind of odd, I maxed out the relationship with one of them by painting my armour (to be fair, I also upgraded a couple of guns beforehand). I haven't met many companions so far, they seem somewhat useful and less inclined to complain about you shooting them (which is handy since they often get in the way) but at the same time I can't say I really love having them around most of the time. It's nice that you can get the Lone Wanderer Perk if you don't want to take them along but don't want to feel disadvantaged (Lone Wanderer is arguably better even). It is strange the perk requires 3 Charisma though, I suppose I can understand wanting the Barter perk to be available to people who don't want to invest in Charisma (they might need it more) but it seems more likely that a character with very low Charisma wouldn't be a people person (though I suppose there are different types of Lone Wanderers).

On the plus side, I kind of like the lack of a "Karma" system telling me if I'm a decent person or not. Still, it does mean missing out on the neat Vault Boy logos (I'm still slightly disappointed they didn't put that old proposed "Child Killer" logo in).
 
NieR Gestalt (PlayStation 3)
More progress done with Operation Platinum!

First of, I have successfully managed to get the 50% of all words trophy. However I actually had to re-attempt this because I was unfortunate to receive the weird trophy glitch. The glitch meant that the trophy wouldn't unlock despite achieving it and thankfully there was a workaround to fix it - deleting the Game Data, resync the trophies and continue to a save point before unlocking the trophy. It took a while to find a shade with a word but I managed to get it in the end.

Next up, I finally got all of the weapons which means I can actually proceed to reach Ending C. But I want to get weapons upgraded first because sooner the better in my opinion and with the DLC I was able to acquire some rare items like Titanium Alloy and Meteorite etc.

Today I got 5 Weapons of 30 upgraded so that's good progress so far.

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My progress so far:
Endings: A B
Trophy Progress: 71%
Playtime: 47 hours 34 minutes
Level: 36
Weapon Upgrades on Lv. 4: 16.6%

Remaining Trophies:
Platinum Trophy Completion
Ending C
Ending D
15 Weapons Max
All Weapons Max
100 Sheep Massacred
Finish story in 15 hours
Defeat 'someone' within 3 minutes and 30 seconds

Weapons Upgraded to Lv. 4:
Nameless Blade
Nirvana Dagger
Moonrise
Blade of Treachery
Faith

The Annoying Things to Put Up With:
Finding Black Pearls is a nightmare. They're located at the Seashore but the problem is they rarely occur at all. It's a bitch to say the least.

Same goes for Machine Oil but for some reason I was lucky enough to get them quicker by changing the difficulty to Hard, perhaps I should keep the game on Hard difficulty to get rare items to occur more? Hmm..

On a Random Note:
18nkvz4ey3nlqjpg.jpg


Found this on Kotaku, made me chuckle.
 
Made a start on Hyperdimension Neptunia ReBirth 2 the other day. Quite disappointed that this game appears to be all reused assets. Out of the handful of environments and enemies I've seen so far, nothing has been new. I mean the maps are arranged differently but the art and enemies are identical. Oh well. Nepgear and the other girls are cute and, lets face it, that's why I'm here.
 
NieR Gestalt (PlayStation 3)
More progress done with Operation Platinum!

First of, this is my mood right now:
CUssDN2XAAEhVTO.jpg


I literally spent 11 hours straight sorting out these materials and while I've managed to make good progress, good lord this is torture. Some of the rare items will take ages to sort out with Black Pearl being a bitch but I've nearly sussed it out. There are some that I can't technically get because the enemies don't appear like the ones in Lost Shrine. Heck because I was playing this last night, I didn't even bother taking the headset out and so I've been playing without sound because I'm a lazy bastard.

And you know the game has had enough when the framerate and music start dropping like it's getting high or something.

Overall 14 Weapons of 30 upgraded so far.

ujpmbgb1uustl0n6mdof.png


My progress so far:
Endings: A B
Trophy Progress: 71%
Playtime: 56 hours 15 minutes
Level: 40
Weapon Upgrades on Lv. 4: 46.7%

Remaining Trophies:
Platinum Trophy Completion
Ending C
Ending D
15 Weapons Max
All Weapons Max
100 Sheep Massacred
Finish story in 15 hours
Defeat 'someone' within 3 minutes and 30 seconds

Weapons Upgrade Progress:
[spoilerbutton]Weapons Upgraded to Lv. 4:
Nameless Blade
Nirvana Dagger
Moonrise
Earth Wyrm's Claw
Blade of Treachery
Beastbain
Faith
Labyrinth's Whisper
Iron Pipe
Labyrinth's Song
Transience
The Devil Queen
Beastcurse
Dragoon Lance

Weapons Upgraded to Lv. 3:
Lily-Leaf Sword
Rebirth
Vile Axe
Iron Will
Labyrinth's Shout

Weapons Upgraded to Lv. 2:
Ancient Overlord
Kusanagi
Axe of Beheading
Fang of the Twins
Beastlord
Spear of the Usurper
Sunrise

Weapons still at Lv. 1:
Phoenix Dagger
Phoenix Sword
Captain's Holy Spear
Phoenix Spear

The reason? Motherducking Broken Wristwatches and Giant Eggs. :x[/spoilerbutton]

The Annoying Things to Put Up With:
The framerate.. good god it's literally fed up of itself.

And these frickin materials I need:
Black Pearl
Broken Earring
Broken Saw
Broken Wristwatch
Complex Machine
Elaborate Machine
Fluorite
Forlon Necklace
Giant Egg
Gold Ore
Memory Alloy
Rusty Kitchen Knife
Simple Machine
Subdued Bracelet

(ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻ (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻ (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻ (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻ (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻ (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻
(ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻ (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻ (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻ (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻ (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻ (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻
(ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻ (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻ (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻ (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻ (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻ щ(ºДºщ)
 
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I don't want to suggest you should stop, both because I think you know that and because it's clear that you have a goal you want to achieve, but... have you thought of stopping? ^^;
 
ilmaestro said:
I don't want to suggest you should stop, both because I think you know that and because it's clear that you have a goal you want to achieve, but... have you thought of stopping? ^^;

I did eventually. Though I'll be back on the game the moment I wake up (not literally but you get what I mean).

During my intermission I've just been watching YouTube videos like this one:
 
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NieR Gestalt (PlayStation 3)
More progress done with Operation Platinum!

First of, this is my mood right now:
c29aa5ba3b934db08639637b160b0fd147693651e40891709d57d61993fccdec.gif


So I decided to continue progress with the actual story and now I have enemies appearing at Lost Shrine and also finished a quest which grants me access to a 'dream' area of sorts (without going into spoilers) in Forest of Myth. I have managed to get some of the annoying materials out of the way including Black Pearl and Giant Egg. All that's left now are Broken Wristwatches (I can use the dream area for that), Forlon Necklace (the enemy itself is simple but it's such a random rare chance) and Subdued Bracelet (same issue as Forlon but worse).

Overall 23 Weapons of 30 upgraded so far.

ujpmbgb1uustl0n6mdof.png


My progress so far:
Endings: A B
Trophy Progress: 72%
Playtime: 63 hours 42 minutes
Level: 44
Weapon Upgrades on Lv. 4: 76.7%

Remaining Trophies:
Platinum Trophy Completion
Ending C
Ending D
All Weapons Max
100 Sheep Massacred
Finish story in 15 hours
Defeat 'someone' within 3 minutes and 30 seconds

Weapons Upgrade Progress:
[spoilerbutton]Weapons Upgraded to Lv. 4:
Nameless Blade
Nirvana Dagger
Moonrise
Rebirth
Earth Wyrm's Claw
Blade of Treachery
Beastbain
Faith
Phoenix Dagger
Labyrinth's Whisper
Iron Pipe
Kusanagi
Vile Axe
Beastlord
Iron Will
Phoenix Sword
Labyrinth's Song
Transience
The Devil Queen
Beastcurse
Captain's Holy Spear
Dragoon Lance
Labyrinth's Shout

Weapons Upgraded to Lv. 3:
Lily-Leaf Sword

Weapons Upgraded to Lv. 2:
Ancient Overlord
Axe of Beheading
Fang of the Twins
Spear of the Usurper
Sunrise
Phoenix Spear

The reason? Motherducking Broken Wristwatches, Forlon Necklace and Subdued Bracelets[/spoilerbutton]

The Annoying Things to Put Up With:
The framerate is still choppy especially when there's multiple people on screen. I guess the creators haven't optimised it right for NG++.
 
Just finished Spider-Man Shattered Dimensions. Was an ok game, but I found it to be rather easy. Could only play 2 levels a day, 3 at a push other wise it started to get tiresome.
 
Oh man, just beat Lady Maria in the Bloodborne DLC, think she may be my favourite Bloodborne boss now, she's also very cool from a lore standpoint as well. Alas I have to stop and working 12 hours a day for the next 6 days so probably won't get to play more until next Sunday most likely. :( It's a great DLC thus far though.

Also, I better get her bloody weapon.....I get I won't get all her awesome abilities, but fashion souls and all that lol.
 
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NieR Gestalt (PlayStation 3)
More progress done with Operation Platinum!

First of, inb4 this meme:
giphy.gif


Success! I have managed to collect the four remaining materials! Forlon Necklace appeared more common that I thought it would by sticking around at the top of The Lost Shrine. Subdued Bracelet, supposedly the most tedious rare item, appeared at least 30 minutes after each one which surprised me. Perhaps I was rather lucky. The last one I needed to get were the Broken Wristwatches which I had more chance of collecting through the special fortune area in Forest of Myth (as the Southern Plains was giving me no luck whatsoever).

Overall all 30 Weapons have been upgraded, now I can proceed with Ending C and not have to worry about the consequence of Ending D.

So yeah, this is my mood right now:
ujpmbgb1uustl0n6mdof.png


My progress so far:
Endings: A B
Trophy Progress: 75%
Playtime: 68 hours 30 minutes
Level: 46
Weapon Upgrades on Lv. 4: 100%

Remaining Trophies:
Platinum Trophy Completion
Ending C
Ending D
100 Sheep Massacred
Finish story in 15 hours
Defeat 'someone' within 3 minutes and 30 seconds
 
IncendiaryLemon said:
Are you actually still enjoying the game?

I love it, it's one of the best games I've ever played. The material upgrade could have been handled much better in my opinion (the randomising rare drops really killed it to be fair) and there are some bits and bobs that could've been improved (the framerate stutter is one issue I've noticed when there's multiple things on the screen). Everything else is excellent - the story, characters (Weiss is one of my favourite video game characters now), the music and even the gameplay is fun especially with the bullet hell style boss fights. Definitely an underrated gem and unfortunately a title that's pretty much out of print or priced quite highly nowadays (I bought it for £40 brand new at Amazon US, UK copies were completely OOP) especially when there's no digital version available.
 
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