[Fiend]

LOLZ NOTHX.

[andy_e]

Warning: no climbers were consulted in the making of this game.

[rich d]

Similar to my footwork to be fair

[JackAus]

Mad Max.

Put over 30 hrs into it and I'm prob halfway through the story missions. I have been doing A LOT of side stuff though.

Great combat (both on foot and in car), amazing scenery for a desert and whoever animated the explosions/fires deserves a medal...

[Fiend]

I've heard good things about it. Looks like Far Cry set in a desert with Batman combat and if you want that sort of thing I assume it is very good...

[Fiend]

Been playing Diablo 3 for no good reason, it is nice though. GFX aren't cutting edge but the atmosphere and style are good. It is also ridiculously easy on "expert" skill. Worth £15 if you want chilled-out RPG-lite gaming, the demo on battle.net is a good intro.

[JamieG]

Fiend. My brother and I spent quite a lot of time playing Diablo and loved it. Really good as a co-op game. Maybe a bit repetitive on your own. We constantly were adjusting the difficulty to make it hard enough. I think there are actually two scales. One overall difficulty and one sort of risk vs reward scale.

I'm playing a lot of Rocket League at the moment. Was sceptical at first. But it has the one more game thing going strong. One of the very few online games I've actually enjoyed playing. Very addictive.

Just started Batman: Arkham Knight. Very good. Although I still think the original was the best since it was a much tighter concept, it's getting a little too overblown now with lots of side missions.

[Fiend]

JamieG. I've only played Diablo3, and the Reaper Of Souls expansion. I found the difficulty quite screwy, D3 main game was waaay too easy on Expert, I did all the bosses without dying, and only ever died when getting caught out by the explosions of dead "Molten" monsters! This was also not using gems and not using the best items I had available (I was sticking to Legendary only even if I collected better Rares), also I am not a ARPG-veteran-min-maxing-optimal-build dweeblord either. However Reaper Of Souls was definitely harder, I'd say 20% harder for mobs, 50% harder for Elites, and 200% harder for bosses - I had it on Master most of the time but had to drop back to Expert for bosses. I understand there had been some difficulty tweaking throughout Seasons and patches, not enough IMO.

However I generally didn't mind the ease of it, and yeah it was a bit repetitive gameplay-wise (although the various effects and destructible scenery were cool), I found it was just nice to waltz through a variety of often very cool environments. ROS was particularly good for this, the Westmarch areas have an impeccable gothic fantasy vibe. Compared to, say, Path Of Exile, which was harder, much more involved build-wise, and had technically better graphics, but didn't have as good a sense of place or atmosphere.

[JamieG]

Hi Fiend, Oops missed the 3. We only played Diablo 3 co-op on the PS3 and so are definitely not veterans. Not my usual type of game but definitely sunk a huge number of hours into it. Co-op was really good, since I think they scale the mobs, bosses etc to you level which adds to the chaos. We had some quite good tactics going on. I played more defensively and provided crowd control, Robbie was the main damage dealer. Excellent game. Probably the worst story I've ever seen though! Maybe I should try the expansion out. Sounds good.

[Fiend]

Yeah story is 50% cliche 50% cheese! The ROS expansion is only one act but thematically I'd say it's the best act in the 5 total, well worth it.

[JamieG]

I recently played Her Story

http://www.herstorygame.com/

A very cool FMV game where you are investigating a murder by searching for and watching short clips of an interview with a woman on a old police database. Not much game i suppose, just searching for videos and watching them. Although I did find myself actually keeping notes. But an excellent story that saying anymore would spoil. Only costs a few quid on Steam and can be finished in a 2-3 hours. Highly recommend if you fancy something a bit different.

[Will Hunt]

Is anybody playing XCOM2? I'm getting absolutely hammered. Practically everybody is gravely wounded ALL THE TIME, the Avatar project is more than halfway done and seems to be speeding up big time.

Firaxis has a global stats page that tallies up the totals of everybody playing the game worldwide. Zero people have completed it on any difficulty 

[tommytwotone]

After one of the lads at work set up his Raspberry Pi to use as a retro arcade / console gaming platform on one of our breakout area's TVs I've been revisiting the old PS1 Tony Hawks Skateboarding 2 and had forgotten was a class (and ahead of its time) game it was!


Imagine my delight when I then found that while the more recent games of the series have been woeful, you can download Tony Hawks HD, which is a reboot of the old games (same levels, challenges etc) but with the luxury of better graphics / physics.

[Fiend]

Will I'm leaving XC2 for a bit until it gets patched for stability and other issues, although I am very hyped for getting on to it at some point.

It's meant to be hard from what I've heard, my gaming geek friends online are loving it though. One completed it last night.

Did you play EU/EW?? And know all the general principles??

[Will Hunt]

Yep I'd done Enemy Within so was familiar with the game. There's a few nice changes to gameplay which can make some situations easier, e.g. reloading no longer ends your turn, but there are plenty of things which make it harder.

Most noticeable is that the time constraints of the game progression are much stricter which means you can spend less time ensuring that you always have a technological edge over the baddies - which makes the combat sections of the game much more unpredictable. Most of the missions are on a strict timer as well. If your soldiers get gravely wounded (happens all the time) they have a chance of becoming "shaken" which means they start missions with 0 willpower! In EW my squad would panic very very rarely, even in the early game, in most missions now somebody loses it. If you can get a shaken soldier through a fight without taking any damage whatsoever AND scoring at least one kill, they recover their will, become immune to being shaken, and get a boost to their Will score. It's like the game is designed so that just about every soldier will have to go through this process at some point.

Basically its fucking nails, but in a good way. You should get on it now. My Mac is just about running it and I even had to remove a line of code from the game file which expressly forbade the game from running on a machine with a graphics card as shit as mine! I mean, it looks a bit like Pong, and the loading screen between base and missions (a view of inside the Skyranger) goes on for so long it's like you're sitting in on the flight in real-time, but...

[TheTwig]

Im playing it on hard difficulty and trying to beat the last level. It is fucking nails. Considering the final level of EU/EW was dead easy on classic ironman for me, this is a big step up.

As usual, the start/mid of any X-com game is the hardest. Once you get magnetic gun tech everything starts to get easier.

In general X-com 2 is a massive step-up in every area over Xcom. Flanking/ambushing works way better, and the conceal thing is nice. What skills your troops get makes a massive difference. In general I find 2x snipers, 2x grenadiers and 1 ranger 1 specialist the best setup. Building high-aim high-crit snipers is pretty much the key to beating the game.

GFX/loading wise I've never had any big problems, though the start and end of missions (looking at the inside of the skyranger) does go on for longer than I would like.

8.5/10

[Fiend]

Been playing Deserts Of Kharak:



If you want some slick sci-fi RTS in the desert action, you could do a lot worse than this. Easy controls, smooth camera, good sense of scale, good graphics and heavy sound effects.....and no fucking base-building. Although it is very deserty and as usual you miss out on 90% of the GFX details as you have to be zoomed out to play effectively.

[JamieG]

I just completed Bloodborne and thought it was totally amazing. After struggling to really 'get' Dark Souls, Bloodborne totally sucked me in. Absolutley addicted. On new game plus now finding all the secret areas etc I missed first time through (when I was playing no guide). Might have to try Dark Souls 3. :-)

[Fiend]

I too struggled to "get" Dark Souls due to console-focused releases, bad PC ports that were broken to the point of scarcely being valid, apparently unfeasible gameplay of endless reloading boss arenas with no skill settings and no saving. BB did look great but PS4 only....

On the other hand..... DARK SOULS 3....

Fuck me this a spectacular game. The dark fantasy style, theme, aesthetics and graphics are great - I'm playing on mostly Low settings to get the smoothest gameplay, and even then just scene after scene looks superb, it's like the gothic game equivalent of Wester Ross or something.

I'd heartily recommend it to anyone, I'm finding the much feared gameplay fine (even if, yup, it's another broken PC port with limited key rebinding and menus that don't adapt to KB&M, wtf how can devs not program this in??), sure there are some frustrating moments and you can't romp through casually, but there are enough options and bonfire save points to keep it bearable. As well as the graphics, the exploration and convoluted progression is superb, it's not open world and it's not linear, you explore around in many ways and end up linking it all up - really addictive and gripping.

Also the characters have English accents, and enemies - who are really characterful and freaky - fall off cliffs which never gets boring.

[JamieG]

I'm definitely going to have to give Dark Souls 3 a shot, but the Old Hunters expansion for Bloodborne waits first. If you can fiend i'd recommend trying Bloodborne, but you'd need to come over to the dirty console side. :-) Beg, borrow or steal.

[Fiend]

Never!! #pcmasterrace

If it gets ported tho.......

[JamieG]

Embrace your dirty console peasant side! Get down in the filth with us and enjoy! You know you want to . . .

Unfortunately I doubt Bloodborne will get a port, I believe Sony stumped up the cash for it and wanted it to be a PS4 exclusive. A bit like Demon Souls back in the day and I don't think that ever got a port.

[Fiend]

Just popped out of the Catacombs in DS3 to see this:



 

[JamieG]

That is a pretty looking game. And you know all sorts of monstrosities lie in wait.

[slackline]