What Are You Playing 8 (2023 Reboot)

[NeoVid]

As one of the few fans of the Dead Island franchise, I'm looking forward to playing DI2 one of these days, but as has been said, since it's on Epic, it'll be a while before I do. The original Dead Island DLC and Riptide also happened to give us plot hooks for a behind the scenes story about a global agency responsible for the mutation plague, and I've spent years wondering where that storyline is going to go. ...I'm expecting to be disappointed by what we get about it in the actual game, though.

Okay, curiousity compels me: What are the other two?

Guilty Gear Overture, and an extremely obscure PS1 game, Team Buddies. Overture and Brutal Legend had a shocking amount in common mechanically despite how different they look (though Overture did BL's take on the RTS genre earlier and with a lot more depth). Something that stuck with me was a part of the experience I had playing them that happened to be exactly the same for both games: I played through the campaign, found it fairly good, then decided to try out an AI practice match of the multiplayer mode. Trying that out, I immediately went, "Oh, *this* is the real game." The single player campaigns turned out to mostly be an extended tutorial for what the gameplay was built around.

Brutal Legend and Overture also happen to be the only games I've bought on multiple platforms. I couldn't play online on my old 360 (which died long ago, anyway), so I grabbed both games as soon as they got Steam rereleases.

And damn, has it been a while since I fired up either game. Time to correct that.

[oxybe]

Megaman Battle Network Collection: Just a fun re-release of the GBA games. For those unfamiliar, it's a deckbuilding-ish game with some real-time combat. you buy/find/are rewarded post-fight with "chips" (the stand-in for the deckbuilding element's cards that represent special moves like attacks, healing, buffs, or summons and whatnot), and use them to build yourself a deck and use them to defeat your enemies as they are randomly pulled from your deck. after a fight, all spent cards are immediately refreshed and thrown back in your deck. Yes there are random battles but they generally only last seconds once you get a hang of the combat system and get a decent deck built.

The story is about as shallow as your typical megaman game with Wily or whatever flavour of baddie looking to take over the world/internet/tri-state area and you're the small child with a souped-up Tamagotchi called Megaman that's gonna stop them.

It's huge nostalgia bait for me, though I did put playing it on hold for a moment because...

Monster Hunter Rise: Title Update 5 dropped. The last "real" update for the game featuring 2 new hunts, Amatsu and Risen Shagaru Magala, which means more weapons and armors and decorations to make, as is tradition. There is one more update to go that will probably cap off the main storyline of Rise/Sunbreak, which may or may not be a Risen version or a variant of Malzeno based off of what Capcom hinted at.

RSM, what it basically being Shagaru with more explosions, is a tougher fight then Amatsu, but the latter is a very nice cinematic fight, lots of big flashy set-pieces and telegraphed attacks and tons of small callbacks to it's Portable 3rd incarnation.

[AlanBruce]

Been eyeing Dead Island 2 on the PS Store. I played the previous entries before and they are flawed, but fun experiences.

Not ready to fork $70.00 on this one, though. Despite the gore mechanics and combat, survey says it has a lot of bugs and lazy writing (not that the originals were top tier story telling). I’ll wait until it goes on sale and gets the necessary patches.

Currently playing the Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster collection. It’s a trip down nostalgia lane, starting with the very first entry. I finished that and jumped immediately to Final Fantasy 2…

I have never played it before until now. Not too excited about the gameplay mechanics. The story so far is… fine. Not enough to get me emotionally invested in any of the characters, sadly.

[Batcathat]

After finishing the Blackwell games, I decided to take a brief pause from my Wadjet Eye playthrough for a game Steam recommended called "Whispers of a Machine". Now, obviously my recent purchases have made an impression on Steam's algorithm, because like the Wadjet games it's a retro-looking adventure game and so far it's a lot of fun. In addition to normal point and click mechanics, there's also the main character's cybernetic implants, which is a fun twist (and new ones are unlocked based on how you play).

The story and world building is also pretty good so far. As a Swede, I quite like playing a sci-fi game that takes place in a futuristic Sweden for a change, instead of a futuristic America or Japan or something (though all dialogue and other important information is in English, so no need to worry about learning Swedish. )

EDIT: Oh, and it's currently 80 percent off on Steam, so anyone interested might wanna buy it right away.

[warty goblin]

Been eyeing Dead Island 2 on the PS Store. I played the previous entries before and they are flawed, but fun experiences.

Not ready to fork $70.00 on this one, though. Despite the gore mechanics and combat, survey says it has a lot of bugs and lazy writing (not that the originals were top tier story telling). I’ll wait until it goes on sale and gets the necessary patches.

At least on PC I've had zero bugs, the game runs great even on my somewhat aging hardware.

As for the writing, I think its fine. The writers clearly got the memo they were making a goofy game about killing lots of zombies, and deliver on that. This is not a game that wants to be a movie, it wants to give you a fun reason to smack that zombie with an axe. Dialog is snappy, cutscenes are generally pretty short and to the point, and while it doesn't descend into self parody or fourth wall breaks, the game's tongue remains firmly in cheek.

Or spilling out of its shattered jawbone. One of the two.

[halfeye]

Currently Steam has decided to go tits up, so it's older games only, but that's all good.

Il*2 Ultimate Edition: The last commercial version of the 2002? 03? flight-sim game, there are later editions of the program if you want to sign up for some websites, but I'm too paranoid. There are up to hundreds of missions in a career and nearly twenty careers, Most missions are auto-generated, so they tend to be sonewhat samey, but they are never identical. There are hundreds of flyable aircraft, many that aren't , and thousands that are missing (British bombers, some American bombers. some Japanese bombers), but for WW2 this is the most complete set of aircraft that is currently available.

Go against bots and real people on KGS.

Dragon age Origins.

[LibraryOgre]

I utterly hate the endgame of Fallout 4. I'm very close to going into the institute and just opening fire on every living person in that building, starting with my son, and working my way down the tube. Then I will go to Boston Airport and do the same to the Brotherhood.

Get out of my Commonwealth, you bastards. Go back to irrelevance in the modern day where you belong.

[Quizatzhaderac]

Playing Octopath traveler 2.

Generally happy with it. It's very similar to octopath traveler one so far.

My pet peeve is when RPGs don't let you take the main character out of the party. This is worse here because (narratively) there is no main character, just the one you start with.

[Sermil]

What am I playing? https://xkcd.com/2765/

I made it to "The End"

[Zevox]

Brutal Legend is one of only three RTS games I've ever enjoyed, and the campaign is one of the funniest things I've ever played... which makes it so much more frustrating that EA pulled the plug on the dev budget and forced the game out when it was nowhere near done. There was supposed to be an entire other act to the storyline, which was obviously being set up by scenes like the return to the first zone of the game. On top of that, an entire fourth faction was intended for the campaign as well as multiplayer, Fletus' vehicle-centric Motor Freeks, which is why the guy got so many side missions establishing his character. Add on the fact Tim Shafer plans his games as two-parters in the first place...

Here's hoping those are accurate rumors about Tim Shafer intending to make a sequel now that Psychonauts 2 turned out to be a hit. There are still bands telling him they'd like to be in Brutal Legend 2... but you know, it just won't be the same without the Kill Master.

Yeah, I vaguely remembered the game ending pretty abruptly - and having just finished it, oh boy does it. There's a clear act 1 and act 2 to the story, and act 2 is noticeably shorter than act 1, and then immediately leads into a final confrontation out of nowhere when it feels like there should be a whole additional act before you get to that. EA doing their thing certainly helps explain that quite a bit.

If they were to do a sequel, I'd be more than willing to give it a shot, but I'd hope they could figure out a better way to handle the gameplay in that case, because I don't think that the weird action game/RTS hybrid style does it any favors. It just feels too simplistic on both ends. On the action end there's little reason to use what few moves you do get besides your basic attacks as Eddie, dodging is clunky since it's only usable when locked on to an enemy, and there's clear best weapons to outfit your car with. And on the RTS end it doesn't feel like your army composition or strategy matters too much (aside from certain missions that want you using a new unit you just got for a specific task) as long as you capture fan geysers quickly, keep your unit numbers up, and help your army with either solos or by fighting directly. To say nothing of how awkward ordering your forces around is - there's a good reason RTS games are normally done with overhead cameras and point-and-click style controls, not the over-the-shoulder action game viewpoint and a main character you control directly trying to issue commands through clearly secondary controls. Feels to me like an action game fits the overall style they're going for better, but if they really want the RTS stuff, it'd be better to just design it as a straight-up RTS game.

Still, the game definitely has great art direction and oozes style, and you really don't see anything this metal-inspired anywhere else, so it was fun to revisit anyway.

[Bohandas]

A few games...

Monster World IV for Sega Genesis. My first time, actually. I heard some of its songs, wanted to play it.

Does any of the music stack up to The Last Dungeon (from the end of Monster World 3 and then reprised at the beginning of Monster World 3)?

EDIT:
(and does anybody else find it strange that there were two Part 3's in the series)

EDIT:
Link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KBubL32NbE

[danzibr]

Does any of the music stack up to The Last Dungeon (from the end of Monster World 3 and then reprised at the beginning of Monster World 3)?

EDIT:
(and does anybody else find it strange that there were two Part 3's in the series)

Ooh I’ll have to check out The Last Dungeon.

Thanks!

Edit: huh MW3 is aka Wonder Boy?

I listened to it. Liked it. But gotta admit I prefer MW4.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

I utterly hate the endgame of Fallout 4. I'm very close to going into the institute and just opening fire on every living person in that building, starting with my son, and working my way down the tube. Then I will go to Boston Airport and do the same to the Brotherhood.

Get out of my Commonwealth, you bastards. Go back to irrelevance in the modern day where you belong.

Agreed. Although it won't really matter, they'll just respawn. Can't have player choices actually having mechanical impact on the game's mechanics after all. That might imply that your character might in any way actually change anything, or really have any agency whatsoever in the world he's in. We can't permit Todd's Perfect World(tm) be tarnished by players interfering with The Vision(tm)!

The plot is easily the weakest of any of the Bethesda offerings, which is a pretty substantial statement in and of itself. And the ending is *easily* the weakest since "Oh, I have a minion who is not only immune to radiation but actually *heals* from it, but I'm going to power-pose myself in there to make a Heroic Sacrifice for no damn reason" of FO3. Which they then walked back in the DLC's, IIRC. Only even worse because at least FO3's ending 'mattered'. The ending to FO4 literally is just a single thirty second cutscene. That's it. And it's the exact same cutscene no matter which side you work with (other than the Institute), the only difference is who is standing there with you.

In other news, I've found a new (to me, at least) game that I've found to be surprisingly engaging: Across the Obelisk.

The tl;dr is: Think Slay the Spire meets Darkest Dungeon set in someone's D&D campaign.

It is a roguelite deckbuilder wherein you control four characters in a party, and need to consider party synergies to really get the most out of it. As with most roguelite deckbuilders, there's substantial meta progression and you are almost certainly not going to beat the game on the first run. Heck, if you can even beat the first *act* on your first run, you'll have done better than me.

There are a metric ton of unlockables available. You start with four characters, one in each archetype: Fighter, Scout, Caster, Healer. There's three more in each archetype to unlock by finding and completing quests during runs. There's a ton of content to see in the game itself, although not every bit is available on every run. You have the concept of tiers of encounters on the map: common, uncommon, rare, and epic. However, just because you see an 'epic' encounter doesn't *necessarily* mean you're going to immediately want it. You might, but not always depending on what encounter and what party comp you have.

Now, let's get to some of the issues I've had with the game. The biggest one is the time investment. Completing a run and beating the end boss takes a good while, like four or five hours. You can save your game at any time and continue where you left off, but that's still a LONG time for a run for a game that tries to hit that 'I have an hour or two free, let's do something' slot. The acts are big, and you really do want to try and grind up along the way so skipping things can leave you weaker in the long term. They've been working on how to streamline combat, and it's gotten better, but it can still take a good while to get through each fight.

One final thing: It is multiplayer, and I actually like how they implemented multiplayer. You have one host and up to three players can join you. Each player controls one or more of the characters. The advantage here is that each one has their own resources to spend on fewer number of characters, meaning you have a slight but noticeable mechanical advantage, but it isn't going to be so huge that not playing multi is going to feel 'bad'. It's just a nice bonus for playing with your friends.

The ramping difficulty Ascension mechanic is called Madness, and it's got some interesting nuance to it. There are the tiers you can climb, but within each tier you have certain modifiers you can toggle on or off for additional 'madness' points. This lets you customize your difficulty, and help you discover how to play with certain training wheels disabled without throwing a bunch of other stuff at you at the same time. Well, at least until you get all the way to the top where you just get all the modifiers, but that's rather typical for the genre. It keeps the content engaging without just dumping everything on you, and lets you dip your toes into the difficulty scale at your pace.

On the whole, I have been enjoying the hell out of it. If you like the genre, I'd strongly suggest it. Just make sure to keep an eye on the clock, because seriously, each run takes a lot of time if you're on a good run.

[Lord Torath]

Currently playing through the old D&D Gold Box games via steam. Currently in The Dark Queen of Krynn.

Also playing DragonStrike - the SSI dragon flight simulator, not the game with the corny videotape.

And finally, playing Starcraft II co-op with my wife. She plays Jim Raynor, I play Kerrigan, and my sons (when they play) play Swann and Kharax (I think? He's the protoss version of Swann, the engineer guy)

The kids are mostly playing Warframe with a bit of Minecraft thrown in.

[Rynjin]

Been floating between Cult of the Lamb, the Megaman Battle Network Legacy Collection, and co-oping an Elden Ring Unalloyed (modpack, includes Randomizer) with a friend.

Cult of the Lamb is so far good fun. Cult management elements are light enough I don't get annoyed by them, and roguelike beat 'em up gameplay is nothing special, but serviceable. The tone really carries this game; it feels like a game that's way more than the sum of its parts because nothing specific about it is particularly revolutionary or exemplary but it all coms together to make a solid whole.

The Battle Network games are ones I remember very fondly from my childhood. Apparently I never played the first game, because I remembered nothing about it while playing it. Ultimately by the time I'd beaten the third boss I decided I really had dodged a bullet by not starting with the first one because it kinda sucks TBH and moved on to more familiar territory: Battle Network 2. Which is an immense step up in basically every regard. The Net is easier to navigate, subchips are in, and existing chips were rebalanced, with new ones added that do more than "deal damage in a specific shot pattern".

Even in 2 though, the new Buster Max mode is basically a necessity to keep your sanity. The price of being adapted from a handheld game designed to kill roughly infinite time on car trips: encounter rate is nuts. Honestly I would have preferred a slider to reduce or increase the encounter rate over a gun that kills everything in one hit, but I'll take what I can get.

And Elden Ring is Elden Ring, even in a Randomizer. Great game, but the Randomizer seed we got is currrrrsssseeeed this time around. I knew when I got to the Gatefront area and there was a big honkin' trumpet player there that will immediately aggro and snipe you with bubbles at BOTH of the bonfires there this was going to be an...interesting run. So far that has been borne out, every area feels like a remix of the most annoying elite enemies you could possibly jam into a single area.

Item drops have been pretty awful too. Almost nothing cool, and the stuff we do get is not suited for our current characters.

I have a concern that we're gonna get to Leyndell and from that point on we're going to be killing easy enemies by the dozens for insane rewards as opposed to the current paradigm of killing a boss and getting some Dragonwound Grease out of it lol.

[Bohandas]

The plot is easily the weakest of any of the Bethesda offerings, which is a pretty substantial statement in and of itself. And the ending is *easily* the weakest since "Oh, I have a minion who is not only immune to radiation but actually *heals* from it, but I'm going to power-pose myself in there to make a Heroic Sacrifice for no damn reason" of FO3. Which they then walked back in the DLC's, IIRC.

Plus IIRC even the fixed version was still pretty stupid because they just tweaked a couple of things where it should have been rewritten entirely, and IIRC the tweaks themselves were also implemented kind of badly

[LibraryOgre]

I utterly hate the endgame of Fallout 4. I'm very close to going into the institute and just opening fire on every living person in that building, starting with my son, and working my way down the tube. Then I will go to Boston Airport and do the same to the Brotherhood.

Get out of my Commonwealth, you bastards. Go back to irrelevance in the modern day where you belong.

I'm still salty about this, so let's look at the Commonwealth and immediate area (ie DLC-land) and talk about the settlements.

Settlements where I'm respected but have no authority:
Vault 81: saved them from plague, mayor gave me a room; I'm an honorary citizen, as I see it.
Diamond City: Saved Nick Valentine, helped a lot of people, own property. Likewise, honorary (if not actual) citizen.
Far Harbor: saved them, but that's it
Acadia: Saved them, but that's it
The Nucleus: Known, but nothing special (because I kept it quiet)
Nuka-World: Technically, they call me boss. In practice, they stand around naked and charge me full price.
Bunker Hill: just gotta do the quest, but they like me because I saved several people from raiders
The Institute: They do not know I am planning to kill them all.

Settlement where I currently have no influence:
Covenant

Settlements where I tell them what to do, what to grow, and build most of their buildings and defenses out of my own personal fortune.
Abernathy farm
The Castle
Coastal cottage
County crossing
Croup Manor
Egret Tours Marina
Finch farm
Graygarden
Greentop Nursery
Hangman's Alley
Jamaica Plain
Kingsport Lighthouse
Murkwater construction site
Nordhagen Beach
Oberland station
Outpost Zimonja
Red Rocket truck
Sanctuary Hills
The Slog
Somerville Place
Spectacle Island
Starlight Drive In
Sunshine Tidings co-op
Taffington boathouse
Tenpines Bluff
Warwick homestead
The Mechanist's lair
Longfellow's cabin
Dalton farm
National Park visitor's center
Echo Lake Lumber
Vault 88

Settlements where Maxson has authority:
Boston Airport

On another note, since I'm annoyed with the main quest, I've instead been bopping around building up settlements. I went HOG WILD on Hangman's alley; I built a second story over half the alley, and a third story over the entire thing. I cannot build any more without taking things apart. I've started using street lights instead of power pylons. Sanctuary has street lights from the bridge to my house. RIDICULOUS amounts of defense on pretty much every place. Slowly giving everyone a decent gun and a single round of ammo for it. Replacing all of the smaller generators with the smallest fusion generator. Greatly expanding Vault 88 with additional residential and farming areas. Buying power armor off the Atom Cats and trying to get one at every settlement.

[Erloas]

I've recently restarted BATTLETECH with the BTA3062 mod. So far I'm really liking the addition of vehicles and battle armor, though that might change as I progress and encounters get more deadly.
I read a lot about how the game is much more difficult in this mod and at least so far I'm not seeing it, with the exception of a mission that's 1v1 at 35T max, and that one I think is just because I don't have any great mechs at that size. With the number of mechs you can field and will have to keep on hand, as well as the pilots for them, I could see the financial side being a much bigger challenge than some of the fights themselves.

[tyckspoon]

I've recently restarted BATTLETECH with the BTA3062 mod. So far I'm really liking the addition of vehicles and battle armor, though that might change as I progress and encounters get more deadly.
I read a lot about how the game is much more difficult in this mod and at least so far I'm not seeing it, with the exception of a mission that's 1v1 at 35T max, and that one I think is just because I don't have any great mechs at that size. With the number of mechs you can field and will have to keep on hand, as well as the pilots for them, I could see the financial side being a much bigger challenge than some of the fights themselves.

The main difficulty issues I've found are:
- Vehicles are a loooot more durable than vanilla, or at least it feels like it; I think most of them had their armor cranked up (or possibly something changed in the hit-location charts so damage gets scattered around a lot more instead of focusing on the facing side so much.) This means enemy forces that are supposed to be 'easy'/disposable kills actually absorb a lot more firepower than they used to, and in return shoot back a lot more than you would expect them to. This is particularly notable when you run into a 'carrier' type vehicle.
- Compounded with: Evasion numbers are a lot higher in general for fast/small targets, and you can't strip evasion by shooting at something, so your accuracy in general is a lot lower, especially starting up through the light/medium mech phase (and when you get into heavy/assault mechs, you suffer penalties for shooting at smaller things, so once you get access to bigger guns they struggle more to hit lights and vehicles.)
- Because it's advanced the timeline and level 2/clan tech is around, almost everything sports more/bigger guns, but armor values don't really improve so trying to tank out fire is more dangerous.
- Enemy mechs can and will Death From Above you, which has an obnoxiously high hit rate even against very evasive mechs, and has a high chance of shearing off a torso, kicking you in the head, or just knocking over your mech. Which usually engages..
- Pilot injuries are much, much more dangerous. Personally, feels excessively so with the 'bleeding out' ones, which effectively force you to either punch out the pilot of an otherwise healthy mech or spend a major fraction of your turns using the special First Aid action to stop them from dying. This means pretty much any shot at your mech has a notable chance of killing or disabling that mech. It's especially bad with things like getting potshotted by LRMs that are otherwise inflicting no relevant damage.

[Triaxx]

The main difficulty issues I've found are:
- Vehicles are a loooot more durable than vanilla, or at least it feels like it; I think most of them had their armor cranked up (or possibly something changed in the hit-location charts so damage gets scattered around a lot more instead of focusing on the facing side so much.) This means enemy forces that are supposed to be 'easy'/disposable kills actually absorb a lot more firepower than they used to, and in return shoot back a lot more than you would expect them to. This is particularly notable when you run into a 'carrier' type vehicle.
- Compounded with: Evasion numbers are a lot higher in general for fast/small targets, and you can't strip evasion by shooting at something, so your accuracy in general is a lot lower, especially starting up through the light/medium mech phase (and when you get into heavy/assault mechs, you suffer penalties for shooting at smaller things, so once you get access to bigger guns they struggle more to hit lights and vehicles.)
- Because it's advanced the timeline and level 2/clan tech is around, almost everything sports more/bigger guns, but armor values don't really improve so trying to tank out fire is more dangerous.
- Enemy mechs can and will Death From Above you, which has an obnoxiously high hit rate even against very evasive mechs, and has a high chance of shearing off a torso, kicking you in the head, or just knocking over your mech. Which usually engages..
- Pilot injuries are much, much more dangerous. Personally, feels excessively so with the 'bleeding out' ones, which effectively force you to either punch out the pilot of an otherwise healthy mech or spend a major fraction of your turns using the special First Aid action to stop them from dying. This means pretty much any shot at your mech has a notable chance of killing or disabling that mech. It's especially bad with things like getting potshotted by LRMs that are otherwise inflicting no relevant damage.

The first and second are pretty related, and the solution to both is the same: Kung Fu fighting action. A kick which lands will unsteady and strip all evasion from a mech. A kick will strip two evasion from a tank. Unlike vanilla you can fire arm and torso weapons when kicking.

Consquently, you can also field larger and better guns and do the same to them.

Yeah, DFA's and melee suck, but fortunately they work both ways.

[Erloas]

It's supposed to be more true to the TT game, and DFA is very deadly there, though mostly a last ditch effort since it damages you too. Which isn't much of a draw back for a computer opponent that doesn't need to worry about repairs.
I'm only 3-4 missions in so I'm sure I'll see a lot more as I go, but the 60t (I think) tanks I've ran into so far haven't been that bad, but there haven't been too many of them either. TT they have about as much armor as a mech, just with fewer hit locations damage doesn't spread as much and more changes for crits and the crits are worse.

With the additional drop numbers I think they're expecting people to drop a larger variety of mechs. Having specific anti-light mechs like something with pulse lasers or precision AC ammo and your own light/mediums, and more pilots to do targetting effects.

How well that all translates to the game I'm unsure of, but that's how it's handled in the TT game.

[Triaxx]

Things get better after you go up in skulls a bit and tanks are less prevalent.

[tyckspoon]

It's supposed to be more true to the TT game, and DFA is very deadly there, though mostly a last ditch effort since it damages you too. Which isn't much of a draw back for a computer opponent that doesn't need to worry about repairs.
I'm only 3-4 missions in so I'm sure I'll see a lot more as I go, but the 60t (I think) tanks I've ran into so far haven't been that bad, but there haven't been too many of them either. TT they have about as much armor as a mech, just with fewer hit locations damage doesn't spread as much and more changes for crits and the crits are worse.

With the additional drop numbers I think they're expecting people to drop a larger variety of mechs. Having specific anti-light mechs like something with pulse lasers or precision AC ammo and your own light/mediums, and more pilots to do targetting effects.

How well that all translates to the game I'm unsure of, but that's how it's handled in the TT game.

With the DFAs I think most of the frustration/problem is that they are far, far more reliable and easy to hit than they are in the tabletop equivalent- you really should have about 0 chance of tagging a mech with 6-8 checks worth of evasion with it (equivalent to around a +3 or 4 move mod in tabletop, which is a pretty big modifier when your randomizer is 2d6) but all the physical attacks have very high base to-hits or to-hit bonuses in the mod. Combined with the difference in how turns/activations work in BATTLETECH versus tabletop - you don't have the split fire/physical turns, it all completes in that one mech's activation, so you don't have a chance to try to shoot them out of the sky before they land on you/knock them over to try to cancel the attack. Means your backstabber/scouty mechs that are supposed to be relying on evasion tanking to survive are always at risk of the AI randomly deciding 'you know what I'm just gonna jump on you', and their high speed/evasion stack at that point doesn't appear to mean anything any more.

In normal missions, yeah, you can use the extra drop slots to make up for a lot - dedicate a vehicle drop to utility purposes, bring some extra dudes in battle armors or in a mech built for Sensor Locking/TAG/NARC deployment. I picked up a Light Mortar Carrier pretty early on which has been doing a lot of good work with its Smoke and Acid rounds (..not so much the actual explosives. Those are pretty weak. Would love to rebalance its ammo for more of the specialty rounds, but you can't change Vehicle loadouts.) It's pretty rough with the Flashpoints that still lock you to the original 4 slot only drops, where giving up 1/4 of your total choices is a much bigger commitment than having 2/12 be utility players. I've been bashing my head on the Steel Beast one which I recall being pretty trivial in the vanilla. First stage of the mission you get sandwhiched between two groups at fairly short range, one of which is supposed to be a 'lesser' lance (vehicles/lower tier mediums) and the other is heavier but short handed. This is reasonably ok when the stuff at your back is medium lasers and LRM10s, and when you can snipe out the vehicles quickly. It's really, really bad when it's ER Large Lasers, Gauss Rifles, and multiple PPCs and even the vehicles need multiple rounds of concentrated fire to remove them.

So far I've cleared the scenario once without suffering some kind of unacceptable damage, and that was when one of the forces spawned entirely as terrible vehicles... then I reset it when the followup scenario saw my 8-evasion scouter/spotter/backstab mech get torn in half by a Death From Above (see complaint about excessively high reliability of DFA attacks.)

just with fewer hit locations damage doesn't spread as much and more changes for crits and the crits are worse.

This is part of what makes vehicles feel so much more durable in the mod, I think - the game doesn't do the tabletop extra crit risk when you shoot vehicles, you still have to pummel through all the armor. Vanilla it's cool because the vehicles just have a lot less armor. Mod, you have to beat through the same amount of armor a mech would have, but it's all concentrated on fewer facings and you don't cripple or limit the vehicle at all until you've gotten through it all - like shooting at a mech that has all of its armor on the torsos and you can't remove a softer leg or limb to reduce its threat while you're working toward the complete kill.

[Erloas]

I just had my first big hits against a mech (35t limited 2 per side dual) and it was interesting the way they had cores be destroyed and need to be replaced. It seems like it could be a big problem keeping mechs up to par, though I think that's the point.

But I was wondering if there was a combat log of some sort. On the second round one of my two opponents just disappeared in a flash of text scrolling past on the screen. I shot it, my turn was over, their turn started and it just went away. It's possible that it was because the hex it was in was on fire, I had used a flamethrower on it in my round, and it had an ammo explosion of some sort. I'm not seeing a combat log anywhere though, I thought there used to be a text file log but it's been too long since I've played to remember and I'm not seeing much on a search.

[warty goblin]

I continue to slowly progress through Sherlock Holmes and Dead Island 2. Holmes is fun, mostly because Frogwares sat down and had a very long think about how to make a detective game an actual game, and did a really good job of it. It's pretty slow paced - I don't think it even has a combat system - but this plays to its strengths, namely forcing you to pay attention and engage with the whole detective bit.

Dead Island 2 is a really fun throwback. There's zombies, you smash them. You also cut, fry, burn, stab and occasionally dissolve them. Along the way you meet some enjoyably deranged characters who need you to pulp, fillet and otherwise abuse the local undead on their behalf. The entire thing is almost gleefully un-modern; no open world, no endless cutscenes, no tacked on traversal mechanics or village management or towers to climb or NPCs to romance or anything. You just go places, kill zombies, get better crowbars, and kill more zombies. The zombie killing is also great, it's been quite a while since I played this good of a first person melee combat system, the hit reactions in particular sell the idea that you are just smashing things as hard as possible, and the gore system is a thing to behold. But even beyond that, there's limb-specific damage and reactions, so you can target specific body parts, and the game seems to mostly borrow Dark Messian's overlooked innovation of having really aimable power attacks. So you can stagger dudes by whacking out their knees, or chop off their arms, or just shank them right in the face with a combat knife. The whole package is really a perfect thing, it's like a 10/10 7/10 if that makes sense, just an absolutely ideal execution of a total middle of the road action game.

[Zevox]

I'm currently bouncing between shorter games, since I've been waiting for the last DLC for Midnight Suns to drop in order to start a new run of that, but it seems like it's not coming out in quite the same release pattern as the previous ones.

So I did a replay of an old XBLA game, Comic Jumper: The Adventures of Captain Smiley. A run-n-gun platformer that parodies comic books, basically. The titular Captain Smiley gets his comic canceled after the first stage, because it was frankly terrible, and has to do guest appearances in other comics in order to earn the money to relaunch it. So you play through parodies of Conan the Barbarian, a silver age style superhero comic, and a manga, before finally relaunching his comic in the final stage... which basically plays like the first stage but with a bigger budget, showing the characters have learned nothing (and yet manage to be successful anyway). It's goofy fun, if a bit juvenile in a lot of the humor. Also, harder than I remembered - I don't think I beat a single stage without dying at least once. Nothing amazing, but always good to revisit.

After that, glancing through my 360 games collection, since I'm aiming for short games for the moment, I decided on something unusual for me: I'm going to re-play the story modes of the modern Mortal Kombat games. So I tossed in MK9 and did that the last couple of days. Some assorted thoughts I had while doing so:
- How the hells did I ever play fighting games on an X-Box 360 controller? Maybe it's just the age of mine, but wow, any amount of precision with inputs eluded me. I couldn't even get special moves consistently. I turned the difficulty down to the minimum and still found some of the fights a pain. Especially Shao Khan.
- The game's age is visually apparent, but most of it looks good for the time it was made. Except the faces of half of the characters. Raiden, Johnny Cage, and the ones wearing masks were fine, but everyone else... yeesh. I'd forgotten how bad early NRS was at that.
- They put every female character in the game into some ridiculously skimpy outfits in this one, except Sonya. And even she mostly got the luxury of pants, she still had to wear a top that exposed her entire cleavage and navel, and she's supposed to be in the military. The worst though was Mileena when you first see her, where she's wearing basically just a few straps of mummy wrapping covering her naughty bits - and that one I actually remembered, because unlocking it for use while playing her was the reward for beating the game's tower of challenges, which even back then I thought was embarrassing and stupid. Another thing NRS has thankfully improved on since then.
- The actual story is, well, what MK's story always is: the video game equivalent of a B-grade action movie. Not bad, kind of fun, but nothing to write home about. A lot could've been avoided if future-Raiden had just said Shao Khan's name in his message rather than "he" so that his past self would actually understand what he meant, though.
- I'd forgotten about Cyber Sub-Zero being a thing, and now I can't remember how he got back to normal. Guess I'll find out.

Next up will be my first-ever play through of MKX's story, because I've never played the game at all before - I skipped it (and Injustice 2) after MK9 and Injustice 1 made me decide I just didn't like NRS games enough to bother. But I have it since it was a PS+ freebie at some point, so may as well actually play through it rather than re-watching a run on Youtube.

[tyckspoon]

I just had my first big hits against a mech (35t limited 2 per side dual) and it was interesting the way they had cores be destroyed and need to be replaced. It seems like it could be a big problem keeping mechs up to par, though I think that's the point.

But I was wondering if there was a combat log of some sort. On the second round one of my two opponents just disappeared in a flash of text scrolling past on the screen. I shot it, my turn was over, their turn started and it just went away. It's possible that it was because the hex it was in was on fire, I had used a flamethrower on it in my round, and it had an ammo explosion of some sort. I'm not seeing a combat log anywhere though, I thought there used to be a text file log but it's been too long since I've played to remember and I'm not seeing much on a search.

Cores usually only need to be replaced in the situation where you A: had a mech suffer Critical Existence Failure in combat (had the center torso destroyed, or a side torso of an XL engine) and B: managed to recover it anyways. Mostly they're used for refitting a mech to try to adjust its movement profile/modify the amount of weight and space used up by its engine. And for selling, they're pretty high value salvage. (This is with the settings where building a mech comes with full equipment. If the core is not included in the setting where you get an empty mech and have to insert your own weapons they'd be a lot more previous.)

No normal combat log, at least on a cursory search. There is a debug setting you can turn on to output combat rolls/events, but it's meant for.. well, debugging, and is not particularly easy to parse. There are apparently mods that can enable an in-game log display. So.. can't help there, but would be pretty sure that was an ammo explosion if the target was running hot already - the longer text scroll would be consistent with the string of pilot injuries + component damage reports you get when a make suffers catastrophic damage, and I presume you would have known if the pilot was close to the other thing that will remove a mech without you actively shooting them (the pilot ejecting, usually because they've suffered a bleedout injury and are close to dying if they don't.)

[Erloas]

I'm pretty sure the pilot died, I think the mission recap had the mech in red on the kill list, which I think is the pilot dying. It wasn't from my shooting though so I suspect it was an ammo explosion. It left salvage pieces I know.
I was just trying to figure out what actually killed it since it was during their turn, and it was turn 2 so not a lot of time to build up a lot of heat, and most light mechs don't have big alpha strike spikes.

My Hermes was cored (ct destroyed) so that's why I needed a new core. It wasn't part of the salvage though, just got it back, probably because I won?

Are there any other dual sort of missions with specific weight restrictions? 35 is a very limited weight, just want to know if I should look at keeping specific 45\55\etc mechs for that sort of mission.

[tyckspoon]

Are there any other dual sort of missions with specific weight restrictions? 35 is a very limited weight, just want to know if I should look at keeping specific 45\55\etc mechs for that sort of mission.

I think there's at least one that wants you to use up to medium mechs. I know there are a few Flashpoints that have tonnage restrictions, although that's usually formatted more like 'you can drop up to 300 tons and no single mech can be bigger than 75' so there's a good bit of flexibility as long as you have some good mediums to mix in with your preferred heavies. There's also one somewhere that has a max weight of.. I want to say 50 tons, which is really mean because it excludes all the best Mediums and makes you use lights or tests if you have some of the bad mediums on hand to use instead.

[Triaxx]

Funny thing. In BTA heavier mechs are not automatically better.. Plus it's massively expanded the variety of lights and mediums so there are a lot more good mechs than just those at the top ends of the spectruum.

Hollanders are quite devastating light duelists for example. The Swordsman can be quite a deadly medium and it's only 40 tons.