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What game are you playing now?

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Reply 7020 of 7024, by GoblinUpTheRoad

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Return to Monkey Island

The Secret of Monkey Island was the first PC game I bought way back in the 90s, pretty cool that more than 30 years later I'm walking around Melee Island again in a new Monkey Island game. The game start in Big Whoop was a bit weird, but I'm liking the game now I'm deeper in, currently in Part II. Good to see the art style has improved from the lows of Escape and Tales.

Reply 7021 of 7024, by Piemur44

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I played as usual The 4th coming, one of the first MMORPG. Was playing this back on GOA when I was a teenager. this game is all about consistency and making friends to play with.
You can get it on Steam right now and I play on Neerya which is a french server.

I also launched again Daedalus Encounter which is a real oldie game. and Last express game also on windows 95.

Reply 7022 of 7024, by Sombrero

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Breezed through Sam & Max Hit the Road.

I earlier said it'll be interesting to see does the game still hold up and the answer to that is resounding yes! I loved the game back then I still do today, Sam and Max as characters are awesome and the banter between them is just fantastic. I had a blast playing the game, got a few good laughs out of me too.

The 10+ years it's been since my last playthrough didn't slow me down much, most of the time I either knew what to do or subconsciously autopiloted forward, couple times I got stuck for a moment but figured it out soon enough.

Really have only two nitpicks: I prefer the old choose your command UI style to the cycle through them with right mouse button which is a bit slower than the old style, and also the story gets a bit too silly.

There is also one puzzle that's a bit too specific for my liking, there would have been a way faster and easier way to solve it than the oddly random solution the game wants. Otherwise the game gets a solid 5/5 by me.

Highly recommended to everyone with anarchic sense of humour!

Sam and Max after walking off screen:
- Max: "Look at all the cheese!"
- Sam: "I didn't think they could do that"

Reply 7023 of 7024, by Namrok

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Huh, thought I posted about this before, but now I can't find it. So from the top...

I beat Pikmin 4. Well, "beat", but I'll get to that. All in all, I was fairly underwhelmed by it. It wasn't bad exactly, but I really didn't feel like it lived up to any of the previous Pikmin titles. It feels like there are too many gimmicky pikmin with limited utility. Especially when most of them break down to "Ice Pikmin destroy ice barriers, rock pikmin destroy rock barrier, yellow pikmin destroy electric barriers" etc. It's just duplicating the same puzzle over and over again with different colors. Also, they introduced flaming, electric or frozen variants of assorted enemies to attempt to force you to use the correct pikmin, but it's also late enough in the game where you can solo them with just your dog who's been upgraded enough to be immune to everything.

So basically I found the game easy almost to the point of being tedious. Also, the change in control scheme from Pikmin 1 & 2 really contributes to shallowing out the gameplay. You used to use the Gamecube's C-Stick to direct your hoard of pikmin. This was useful to have them hug walls, maneuver around obstacles, or swarm a foe. Now you can't do that at all, and their pathfinding has been improved such that a swarm of pikmin won't just flop over a ledge because you didn't tell them not to. But along with this change probably half the environmental puzzles of Pikmin 1 got thrown in the garbage. All the repetitive "Match the color of the door with the color of pikmin" puzzles seem to be over compensating for this shortfall.

What's funny is, when I really think about it, Pikmin 3 suffered from all these problems as well. However, Pikmin 3 had it's soft time limit where you had to scavenge enough food to survive each night. So while the puzzles became much more one note and trivial, you still had the challenge of min maxing your hoard of pikmin. Since Pikmin 4 has no time limit what so ever, it's even more trivially easy than ever before.

So anyways, I say I "beat" the game because I accomplished the main objective the game started with, it summarized how many pikmin I made and lost, the credits rolled, and then it introducted this post game that I think is as big as the entire rest of the game up to that point. And it might be better? Like the entire first half of the game might have just been a tedious extended tutorial, and now the real game is finally starting? The one I was chomping at the bit to play as a long time Pikmin fan? Still no time limit I don't think, but the levels feel a bit more devious and difficult. We shall see.

Win95/DOS 7.1 - P233 MMX (@2.5 x 100 FSB), Diamond Viper V330 AGP, SB16 CT2800
Win98 - K6-2+ 500, GF2 MX, SB AWE 64 CT4500, SBLive CT4780
Win98 - Pentium III 1000, GF2 GTS, SBLive CT4760
WinXP - Athlon 64 3200+, GF 7800 GS, Audigy 2 ZS

Reply 7024 of 7024, by newtmonkey

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Having completed ArcaniA, I went through my Steam library and tried a bunch of games:

Bioshock 2
I completed the first game many years ago on the Xbox 360, but never tried this one, even though it has sitting in my Steam library forever. It seems alright so far, but I don't think Bioshock is the kind of game that needs a sequel. We'll see how it goes.

Classic Marathon
This is some kind of freeware source port of classic Mac FPS Marathon, and it's impressive. There are a bunch of optional QoL changes, but you can disable it all and play the game close to the vanilla experience (apparently; I never played the game back in the day). I've played the first couple of missions, and I was pleasantly surprised! It feels great to play, without feeling like a DOOM clone, and the developing storyline (told through terminals) is quite interesting. I'm liking this so far.

Half-Life
I've tried many, many times over the years to get through this one, but the platforming stuff always annoys me; I know you can save at any time, but I always end up saving before every jump (it's very easy to make mistakes)... so it just ends up feeling like I'm save scumming my way through the game.
This time around I'm playing the 25th anniversary version, which has a nice option to disable bilinear filtering even when using OpenGL. Even though I was around for the first 3D accelerators, I never liked the effect of filtering low res textures, and I definitely think that Half-Life looks better without filtering. Anyway, I'm already getting annoyed with some of the platforming just an hour or so in, so things aren't looking good for this one.

Project Warlock
This is an interesting little FPS that sort of looks and plays like Catacomb 3-D, but has an interesting leveling mechanic between episodes. Finding secrets awards you with experience points, and when you level up you earn points to spend on your character. It's pretty fun so far, and although you do have ranged weapons, melee combat actually feels pretty decent. A pleasant surprise.