What games are you playing now?

Originally Posted by lackblogger
Same here.

Their next game was…

A real time strategy (RTS) game about Zombies that was mildly popular in BTEA but released to the sound of mostly wet farts. I can't even remember what it was called now, and I followed it for a long time during development.

They are Billions. Never played it.

But Lords of Xulima does deserve a sequel. One can dream

Myeah, sometimes Bloodborne can go f itself. I was having such a good run, being careful. And step out of line just a little bit, with a boatload of currency on me, and 2 of the things I've been battling very easily one-on-one handed my ass back to me. I should've f-ing listened to my first instinct and not risk it.

My heart just sank. And it killed all my appetite for the game. Man, it's funny how you can easily go from "I respect the game, since it makes me seriously consider my decisions" to "God f-ing dammit! Why? Why am I putting myself through this?"

EDIT: And, after cooling down for an hour, I decided to go back and try to recover the blood echoes I lost, knowing full well I'm probably not gonna make it since I have to back into the same "pit" that got me killed. But fortunately, I didn't even make it close to that location. One of the random mobs just pulled out a flamethrower and blew me away in one hit. I guess, last time I killed these guys, I did it too fast and didn't notice they had flamethrowers.

Originally Posted by danutz_plusplus
Myeah, sometimes Bloodborne can go f itself. I was having such a good run, being careful. And step out of line just a little bit, with a boatload of currency on me, and 2 of the things I've been battling very easily one-on-one handed my ass back to me. I should've f-ing listened to my first instinct and not risk it.

My heart just sank. And it killed all my appetite for the game. Man, it's funny how you can easily go from "I respect the game, since it makes me seriously consider my decisions" to "God f-ing dammit! Why? Why am I putting myself through this?"

EDIT: And, after cooling down for an hour, I decided to go back and try to recover the blood echoes I lost, knowing full well I'm probably not gonna make it since I have to back into the same "pit" that got me killed. But fortunately, I didn't even make it close to that location. One of the random mobs just pulled out a flamethrower and blew me away in one hit. I guess, last time I killed these guys, I did it too fast and didn't notice they had flamethrowers.

Good old bloodbourne. I spent 650 hours in it earning my platinum. Great game. I never worried too much about losing souls (or echos) I was more focused on improving my stick skills over leveling. Do that and the levels will take care of themselves.

Originally Posted by Imo.
Good old bloodbourne. I spent 650 hours in it earning my platinum. Great game. I never worried too much about losing souls (or echos) I was more focused on improving my stick skills over leveling. Do that and the levels will take care of themselves.

Indeed, that's the ideal way to go. But it's still demoralizing when you sometimes feel you've improved, and other times you feel you've been lying to yourself that you have.

Ok, managed to kill the Blood-starved beast on my first attempt in this playthrough, but it was really really close. And I owe most of the success to summoning Alfred, an AI hunter who kept it busy a lot. Otherwise, I'm sure it would've been multiple attempts. But only managing to defeat it by such a close margin also worries me about future boss fights. But I'll worry about that when I get there (looking at you Logarious and Vicar Amelia )

I also realized that in my previous playthroughs I had never attempted the Chalice dungeons. But they're pretty generic. And I didn't manage to finish the first layer. I got crushed by the Undead Giant a couple of times, and gave up.

I'll probably get back to the main campaign, and only attempt the dungeons when I'm more overpowered.

I've settled into a more comfortable groove with Bloodborne. I've just entered Charnel Lane and headed for the the witches of Hemlock. A significant reason for this is I dropped my threaded cane, which is a fantastically cool weapon, but unfortunately it's kind of a pain in the ass to use, in whip form. And the damage isn't great either. It's more of a flash weapon.

I planned on using only dexterity weapons, since I want to use Eileen's Blades of Mercy, but I'll probably be stuck with my current, Ludwig's Blade (or whatever it's called), until then. Plus it gets a decent bonus from both strength and dex.

Anyway, it's been a blast playing. The world layout, from the point of view of how elaborate and how it coils back on itself, and winds in apparent random directions, only to suprise you when it connects back, and often has absolutely no logic architecturally (but I suspect there is a strong reason for this, narratively), but is just amazing to explore. FromSoftware really are masters of level design. The did it with Dark Souls 1, and did it again with Bloodborne. Fantastic. And all of this, besides the fact that it looks amazing and has fantastic victorian horror atmosphere, with a strong dash of lovecraftian cosmic horror.

Man are they shooting themselves in the foot if they don't release it on PC, in a proper state. They'd sell millions easily. It's just a way better game than the rest of the Souls games, imo. It's much more cohesive and with a strong vision. Whereas Dark Souls often feels like generic fantasy. In Bloodborne, even the frustration and feeling that you're slowly going mad retrying fights meshes perfectly with the setting and lore. It's just perfect.

Ok, the ship combat in AC:Odyssey is finally getting fun. I avoided it as much as possible, had zero interest. After some upgrades, my ship can take some hits, and im learning how to do the combat better

First off, the RPG elements of having my lieutenants that I've recruited around the world, on my ship, is great. Former friend or foe, whatever, they will board the enemy ship with me and fight to the death. So damn cinematic - all the Spartans on board stomp and pound their shields w/ a battle cry, and we all jump aboard the enemy ship and fight. Total chaos, it's great.

Hilariously, i spartan-kicked an enemy off the side - a shark swam up and immediately chomped him.

The sea around me turning red as the enemy ship is going down as I get some last minute looting in. Bodies floating everywhere. Here comes the shark. I jump to the side of my vessel, and pull myself up. My crew are bloodied and worn looking, it was an intense battle.

Hell yeah. I love this game

Made some significant progress in Bloodborne. I killed Vicar Amelia, killed Darkbeast Paarl, cleared the Unseen Village (holy shit, the music in that area has a 100x creepy factor; it's just constantly unnerving hell choir chanting).

And I'm about to start for the forbidden woods. This is just the worst area ever. It's frikkin huge. You get lost easily. And it ends with the Shadows of Yharnam boss fight, another terrible fight, which last time I had to cheese to finish. So, I kind of lack motivation to push through.

So I've been playing Crusader Kings 1 Deus Vult on two different systems. One is via GoG Galaxy on a Windows 10 on-line device and the other is an off-line full download in the traditional GoG style using a Windows 7 device - and the difference seems to be night and day.

The Win10 Galaxy one crashes all the freakin' time. Proper game-ending crashes. If you don't save every five seconds you can say goodbye to possibly hundreds of random events and their conclusions. It also seems to be much buggier generally.

However, the off-line Win7 one hasn't crashed on me once yet, though I hope that doesn't put the knockers on it. It also seems to be less buggy generally.

Against the advice of one codex thread I read, I started as an Ireland clan, the Duchy of Leinster on the Win7 system. And although my game has been beset by never-ending misery-inducing rage-fuelled random events and "Are you effing serious!" type what-have-yous, I've actually managed to complete my goal & take over the whole of Great Britain:



Well, all except that one tiny corner of white there in Kent.

And I'm dubious about taking that territory because it is, bizarrely, owned by The Pope.

Yes, you heard that right. While I was busy still trying to subdue the island of Ireland, right back a hundred or so years ago, the English imploded & for whatever reason the Pope decided to pop in and finish off the King of England.

By the time I got to that area someone else had then removed most of the pope territories, leaving me with just this niggly corner.

What's worse is that the owner of the title of King of England seems to have vanished as well, and I am unable to Create Title the KoE. However, the Pope holds a title called The Bishop of England which has a crown on it.

So my questions are:

1. Do you get automatically excommunicated if you attack papal territories?

2. Is the title BoE the same as the title KoE & it would change to KoE if I got it off him?

3. How did the Pope even get the title in the first place? In order for me to usurp the title from him I needed 20/30 English territories, however, the Pope never had more than 10 English territories, so what's the deal there?

4. Is it just deliberately boning me because it knew I'd want the KoE at some point to complete the set of King of Ireland, King of Scotland & King of Wales, like, you know, is this some kind of normal advanced "screw you" mechanic, where the game is merely making sure that difficulty progresses with expansion, or is it just one of those things?

[and, yeah, my current king has indeed just had 4 daughters in a row, so question 5. is there a cheat-code for 'Spawn Son' like there is for Medieval Total War 1? ]

I think you need to pull a Henry VIII.

Lol, possibly.

Originally Posted by danutz_plusplus
Ok, managed to kill the Blood-starved beast on my first attempt in this playthrough, but it was really really close. And I owe most of the success to summoning Alfred, an AI hunter who kept it busy a lot. Otherwise, I'm sure it would've been multiple attempts. But only managing to defeat it by such a close margin also worries me about future boss fights. But I'll worry about that when I get there (looking at you Logarious and Vicar Amelia )

I also realized that in my previous playthroughs I had never attempted the Chalice dungeons. But they're pretty generic. And I didn't manage to finish the first layer. I got crushed by the Undead Giant a couple of times, and gave up.

I'll probably get back to the main campaign, and only attempt the dungeons when I'm more overpowered.

You can skip the chalice dungeons unless you want to farm materials or get your platinum trophy. It’s mostly repetitive recycled content. Getting the platinum is extremely challenging. It took me at least 20 tries to defeat the final boss.

As for coming to PC there was a time I’d have said no way , but sony let demon souls come to PC so it’s possible. I’d love to see it come to PC as a remake. The treatment they gave to demons souls was fantastic.

Just finished mortal shell and am going to start a full play through of AC: Odyssey.

Originally Posted by Imo.
As for coming to PC there was a time I'd have said no way , but sony let demon souls come to PC so it's possible. I'd love to see it come to PC as a remake. The treatment they gave to demons souls was fantastic.

You must be thinking of another game. The Demons Souls remake was only released on PS5, at least so far.

I'd like to see Bloodbourne get a PC release too. Even though souls-likes aren't my thing, I still want to try it just because of how cool the setting looks.

Originally Posted by JDR13
You must be thinking of another game. The Demons Souls remake was only released on PS5, at least so far.

I'd like to see Bloodbourne get a PC release too. Even though souls-likes aren't my thing, I still want to try it just because of how cool the setting looks.

Yep, total brainfart. I was thinking of HZD. I even played demons souls on PS5.

“I’m so stupid” ( In my best Chris Farley impression)

@Nereida, because of you I started a playthrough of Xulima.

I am having more fun and even realising there are lots of puzzles in the game.

I had previously played on the harder difficulty levels, which ended up being less fun, not because of of the difficulty itself, but because it made it much grindier.
I would need to go back and forth a hundred times to find camps I could kill easily to gain experience.

Originally Posted by Imo.
Yep, total brainfart. I was thinking of HZD. I even played demons souls on PS5.

“I’m so stupid� ( In my best Chris Farley impression)

During the anouncement of Demon's Souls on PS5, they did make a blunder and show a final slide that said Demon's Souls Remake would be coming to PC. They quickly retracted that, saying it was a slide from a different game.

I really hoped that was more of an early-reveal mistake, than an actual technical mistake.

Anyways, with regards to Bloodborne I made some significant progress. I've easily bested the Shadows of Yharnam, even though I was expecting a hard fight. I guess I was a bit overpowered.

But Rom proved to be quite an adversary. Not exactly extra hard, but annoyingly hard since I remembered besting him a lot easier in last playthroughs. And now I get to either enter Nightmare Frontier or Yahar'gul proper. Yey.

I think I've waited long enough for this one, after helping sponsor it some years ago, I'm going to wade into Fell Seal today!

Yesterday I did the first three battle in Fell Seal, and so far it's a lot of joy. Yes, this game is much like FF:T and Ogre Battles, and that's a good thing. I can see that I'll likely pass quite a bit of time figuring out which classes suit me the best, I'll likely knock out a few more battles today.

Originally Posted by Carnifex
Yesterday I did the first three battle in Fell Seal, and so far it's a lot of joy. Yes, this game is much like FF:T and Ogre Battles, and that's a good thing. I can see that I'll likely pass quite a bit of time figuring out which classes suit me the best, I'll likely knock out a few more battles today.

I look forward to finding out what its like after you've knocked one out

After defeating Amygdala and starting to explore Yahar'ghul, I decided to end my run through Bloodborne. It's been fantastic, but I realized I started to use guides too much to streamline my playthrough. I would try my best against an area, and if it got too hard or I'd die too much, I'd watch a guide for some hints. And I believe it made the last few dozen hours a lot easier. And I kind of regret that. This game really is made to explore, and not just use a guide that reveals where stuff is hidden. You just lose too much of the experience.

So, I'm gonna hang it up for what I expect is to be a few years at least. I want to pick it back up after I've forgotten a lot of it. I also don't have the time it would require of me to dedicate to it, to play it properly. And I felt I was also kind of rushing the experience with the streamlining of it all.

But I do have a feeling in the back of my mind, that I won't forget many of the locations and experiences. I hope I'll be able to. So, I'm gonna do a media blackout for it.