Tempy wrote:

The gist is pretty simple - you and two others drop into a map full of zombies and monsters and have to find clues to the location of two boss monsters (they’re easy to find with an alternate CLUE VISION which takes away your ability to see almost anything else). As you find clues you narrow the map down into sections where the bosses can be. Other people are in the map too, doing this. When you find the boss’s lair - either via clues or accident - you get to fight it to kill it. After you’ve done that, you have to banish it. This takes 100 seconds, and when you start the banishment every player is alerted and they can use their cluevision to see where the banishment is happening. After the banishing is done you get two tokens, each token provides you with 5 seconds of walk hack supervision. From there you need to get to the extraction point on the map and leave, but it takes 30 seconds to activate the extraction point when you’re there. You don’t have to do any of this though, you can roam but i gotta players, or just fame XP and leave. Characters you take into a map are liable to die and you’ll lose all your gear and XP on them, but you also have a player rank which unlocks buffs you can apply to new characters when they have enough XP to purchase them. It’s ace.

This.

Seems like a great game for co-op. I'm continually getting kicked every time I try to play it right now but that may be my end.

Approaching the end of Yakuza 3. Probably the weakest of the series I've played so far, but I've still had a blast.

Typical Yakuza Cutscene

Kiyru: I've found you now. Tell me everything.

Guy: You want to know everything?

Kiryu: Yes, I [proceeds to list all the people, places and fights he's been in to get to this point]

Guy: Very well. Actually, it is [the exact fucking opposite of what you previously believed]

Everyone: NANI?!?!?!

Yep, loved it.

I found it decidedly meh

I love the manual aiming for headshots and ricochets and stuff. Super fun.

So Kentucky Route Zero is doing some really really subtle and clever stuff with it’s narrative and characters. It’s an absolute marvel tbh. Well impressed. Someone smart tell me how they’re doing it.

That’ll do.

It's a looker, in an unreal engine kinda way, but I thought controls were just off.

Or I was shit.

Good comp. I thought it was weak as a shifty clone though. Needed the perks etc (see shitness comment) and they were a faff and making it less instinctual and immediate than shifty.

Control. Don't know what's going on but loving it.

Eric wrote:

Control. Don't know what's going on but loving it.

This is still me too

What is this Ruiner you talk of?

I couldn't get on with Moonlighter.. although granted I didn't give it much chance. Nice little colour booklet in the physical release though.

Moot_Geeza wrote:

Link's Awakening (Switch version) Starts pretty well, turns out I don't mind the blurring that frames the screen if I'm playing myself, hated it when I watched someone else playing a while back, felt like I was wearing smudgy glasses.  One dungeon down.  I'm surprised this is based on a Gameboy game, the overworld/map design seems pretty advanced.  Goes to show I didn't have much of a clue what that machine was capable of when pushed (pretty much all I've played on it that I can think of rn are Mario Land, Alleyway, Tetris and Duck Tales).

Great to hear you're getting along with it!

Yeah holds up really well for a Gameboy game.  Really the only serious black mark against it is the lack of buttons.  You're constantly swapping out your items as the game goes on and it gets a bit tedious.  Not an issue on Switch of course.

That killing-enemies-in-order bit rings a bell... yeah.  Reckon MOST of that stuff is figure outable but there were a couple of unreasonable bits by today's standards.  I'm not shy about looking stuff up if it takes longer than half an hour to solve though, lol.

Yeah still a shame re: the slowdown.  Remember it not being an issue aside from one of the later dungeons.  Even then it was mostly annoyance about it being there and hurting the looks rather than how it played.  Really wish it got ironed out though.

I have been playing a bunch of Escape from Tarkov, which seems like the Ultimate GMAN and Crew game.

It's a dodgy Russian thing that has been in development since 2012, heavily based on STALKER but it's multiplayer. It's a lot like Hunt: Showdown (which I am sure was heavily inspired by this game) in that it is a battle royal style affair, but with the option of just... leaving when you want. The map is populated by lots of AI (Scavs) and a few boss enemies (BOSS SCAVS) who shout at you in Russian and shoot you a lot. 

Regular players enter a map called a "Raid" at random points to loot, fight Scavs, loot scavs, fight players, loot players, and extract. If you die, you lose all your gear. Every gun, health kit, any battery or CPU part you have on your person is gone for good. You are also then wounded, and needed to heal over time or by using health kits from your perpetual inventory stash back home. If you don't want to do that, you can do a Scav run, which is where you enter a Raid as a pre-generated Scav character with a mission to extract yourself. Other AI Scavs are neutral to you like this, but players are still hostile.

Not that you can tell the difference - there is nothing like healthbars, hit detectors or floating name tags in Tarkov. Your ammo count is something you have to track manually, you can look at your gun with a dedicated button to have a guess at roughly much ammo is in your clip, or check your inventory for an accurate number. If you reload after a firefight, you actually swap magazines. Magazines stay in your inventory even if they're half full. Want to fill up a magazine? You need to fill it with bullets manually. You also need to know what calibre bullets your magazine and gun take, make sure you get it right or else you're sat in a firefight trying to load a clip your gun can't use, sorry!

If you get shot you take location specific damage. Certain bullets will tear through your armour anyway, so if you take a torso shot or two you're dead. Arms and legs break and you have to heal them with splints and pain killers. 

It's a fucking ridiculous game, the devs are misogynistic weirdos who won't put women in their game for weird reasons, but it's also incredibly moreish. You can trade with AI traders at your hideout! Some of them will give you a bitcoin for a handheld Tetriz game. You can trade painkillers for guns! They give you missions to do shit like collect cigarettes and healthkits for them. You can build a toilet in your base!

Fucking hell, it's a nonsense. An absurd sim game that has your adrenaline running from the word go as you alt-tab to check a poorly made map of the area you're in to try and figure out if you;re going the right away based on the vague landmarkrs you can make out like "UN truck" or "railway bridge" all the while bullets are echoing around the abandoned factories and shoppingmalls that make up Tarkov. Proper batshit PC gaming.