Discussion The 2024 Games Thread

[GodisanAtheist]

Wrapped up The Pedestrian. Fun, clever, calm 2d puzzle game.

You're the little dude on street signs having to make his way through the world connecting various signs and together to proceed through your quest. Puzzles were all order of operation based, no twitch or timing based puzzles at all, some heavy duty lateral thinking gets involved at times, but its good to flex that muscle now and again.

Great "unwind after work" type game where you go at your own pace, no shooting or loud noises, soft pleasant graphics.

Took about 4 or 5 hours to complete. Strongly recommend if you like puzzle games, pick up for $5 or less and you'll be very happy.

 

[AlexanderSalazar]

This year, I think that I may consider replaying some old games, since nothing interesting is coming out.
1. The Witcher 1 - I passed it in 2010 and almost don't remember what it was about
2. Mafia - I am gonna play in the remaster version didn't pass it when it was launched
3. Gothic 2 - I passed the first one last year now I will move forward
If you have any advices for me I am ready to hear.

 

[igor_kavinski]

If you have any advices for me I am ready to hear.

Nier Automata
Elden Ring
Detroit: Become Human
Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty
Catherine

 

[SteveGrabowski]

Just finished Persona 3 Reload and what a masterpiece. Just all around amazing from the story to the combat to the art style to the characters to the music, and easily the definitive way to play Persona 3 now. No one does RPGs like Atlus, not even Square Enix.

 

[igor_kavinski]

art style

Atlus

I've only played Catherine but yes, the art style is superb.

 

[AlexanderSalazar]

Nier Automata
Elden Ring
Detroit: Become Human
Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty
Catherine

Thanks, I forgot at all about Elden Ring, since I bought my PS 5 I always wanted to try it, but I just keep forgeting about it. I already passed Sekiro on PC, and even though I destroyed my nervouse system while playing I still enjoyed it pretty much, so I hope that Elden Ring will not be a dissapointment.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

Completed Alan Wake American Nightmare.

Just a great fun little game with Remedy's traditional style and presence. Tweaked to be more combat focused than AW: plenty of ammo, regenerating health, more heavy weaponry, but still creepy/spooky/silly in equal measure.

I enjoyed the three maps three times motif, the objectives kept changing, the characters recognized they're in a time loop/story and made logical progressions each loop. The Arizona landscape and mini-open-world maps were a breath of fresh air living between linear gameplay and sprawling open world.

5 hours of solid Remedy style entertainment for $5 is squares in my book. If you like Alan Wake, just get it and have fun.

 

[DaaQ]

Going to give Last Epoch a chance, patch 1.0 is supposed to release Feb 21st.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

Fired up This War of Mine.

Day 10 with a father daughter pair. I am praying to any God that will listen that I will be able to get these two to the end of the war.

Great game that really shows what the gaming medium is capable of. I feel sorrow for every man, woman, and child that has ever had their life stripped from them through the horrors of surviving a war.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

I have to commit to either going back to Horizon Zero Dawn or starting Hogwarts...

 

[SteveGrabowski]

Ugh the fight against Elizabeth in Persona 3 Reload is so trollish. You have to take her HP from 20,000 to just over 13,000. Then when you get her there you have to have everything setup to take her in a range from 10,101 to 10,500 in two turns to survive her instant death spell when she gets to 13,000 and before she casts a second instant death spell. Get her to 10,001 to 10,500 in two turns and you can switch to a persona that can repel strikes to deflect her next attack back onto her, get her under 10,000 and she casts a second instant death spell, and then finally cast a spell to do 9999 damage and kill her. But quickly threading that needle between to get between 10,001 and 10,500 is a pain after getting her below 13,000 since you can only survive two of those instant death spells with careful management of personas and if she casts the second one between 10,001 and 13,000 HP you have no way of surviving the third one she casts after deflecting her hit to get her below 10,000 HP. Probably lost this fight 20 times.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

Completed Figment.

It was, ok?

Beautiful hand drawn graphics, but the combat was tedious (and really shouldn't have been there), the puzzles were either entirely too simple or weirdly frustrating because the game didn't really telegraph the "rules" properly, character felt like they were running through molasses (clearly slowed down movement speed as a padding element) and the voice acting was... there.

Kids enjoyed watching me play so it has that going for it, it didn't overstay it's welcome at 5 hours, as well as the fact that I got it for free, but I won't be jumping on Figment 2 anytime soon (especially given a lot of the core issues of this game are apparently still there).

 

[SteveGrabowski]

Finally beat that f----ker Elizabeth in Persona 3 Reload so I can say I finished the game.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

Alright, that's plenty of short palete cleanser games for the moment.

I have the whole Halo Master Chief Collection sitting in my library and I've been putting off playing through it until I realized I could download the individual games separately from each other to keep the download to a reasonable size (really smart move by MS).

I played a lot of Halo:CE back in the day on the Xbox (last console I ever owned) and played through Halo 2 a few times as well. But outside of those games I haven't really played much Halo at all, so I'll be starting with Halo:CE and playing through the series, taking occasional breaks to play something not so shooty.

Combat Evolved is harder than I remember (playing on a controller with my Steambox to replicate the console experience I had decades ago) and the game design is definitely aged, especially in interior levels that are all hallway/boxy room/hallway/boxy room but the outdoor "open world" levels still retain a ton of their charm, especially Silent Cartographer, which is up there for one of my favorite FPS levels of all time.

Oddly enough I'm really looking forward to Halo 2. While I played the pants off of CE back in the day and remember the game pretty vividly, Halo 2 only has a few brief snippets here and there. I definitely didn't beat the game nearly as many times as CE. Where CE left a lot of the lore to the imagination, I recall Halo 2 going full blown "anime" levels of lore with stuff like the Gravemind etc.

Anyhow, Halo MCC has been in the library for years now and I finally feel like I have a set-up and mindset to work through the series (through 4, I understand that things went downhill fast for H5 & Infinite).

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Halo 1-3 are comfort food for my brain. I play the old ones with the enhanced graphics. You can switch between original and enhanced on the fly which is cool. I hope you have good audio, be it cans or home theater; the soundtracks are truly epic. And yeah, the first one shows its age, but the flood levels with the musical score still make me edgy after all these years. My son and I co-op through 3 multiple times when he was a kid and it always gives me warm feels. It's also peak Master Chef.

ODST I haven't played in a long time. I think it was fairly short but the action is heavy so it's fun. Reach is one of my favorites for action, the story is good too. I played 4 on release BITD and thought to myself "343 Industries can suck it". I don't think I've played 5 yet, 4 left me too surly. 🤣 Infinite is a lot of fun gameplay wise, but the story is weak. Maybe because I don't have the setup from 5? I really should get around to that one and find out.

 

[igor_kavinski]

I think I started 3 but it just felt weird. The beginning level is in some sort of swamp? Wasn't compelled to keep playing so that was it for my Halo adventures. Now I believe there's a series too?

 

[DAPUNISHER]

I think I started 3 but it just felt weird. The beginning level is in some sort of swamp? Wasn't compelled to keep playing so that was it for my Halo adventures. Now I believe there's a series too?

Halo 3 ramps up with every chapter. Vehicles, weapons, enemies, big set pieces, incredible musical scores. Theater mode was great too. My son would get excited and ask if I saw what he did (I'd play the Arbiter) I'd say no because I was busy myself. We'd load up theater mode so he could show me, good times.

 

[igor_kavinski]

Halo 3 ramps up with every chapter. Vehicles, weapons, enemies, big set pieces, incredible musical scores. Theater mode was great too. My son would get excited and ask if I saw what he did (I'd play the Arbiter) I'd say no because I was busy myself. We'd load up theater mode so he could show me, good times.

Hmm..TBH I don't remember if it was 3 or 4 that I tried to play after Halo 2. Gotta get back into the Master Chief Collection, hopefully in this year...

 

[Racan]

Halo 1-3 are comfort food for my brain. I play the old ones with the enhanced graphics. You can switch between original and enhanced on the fly which is cool. I hope you have good audio, be it cans or home theater; the soundtracks are truly epic. And yeah, the first one shows its age, but the flood levels with the musical score still make me edgy after all these years. My son and I co-op through 3 multiple times when he was a kid and it always gives me warm feels. It's also peak Master Chef.

ODST I haven't played in a long time. I think it was fairly short but the action is heavy so it's fun. Reach is one of my favorites for action, the story is good too. I played 4 on release BITD and thought to myself "343 Industries can suck it". I don't think I've played 5 yet, 4 left me too surly. 🤣 Infinite is a lot of fun gameplay wise, but the story is weak. Maybe because I don't have the setup from 5? I really should get around to that one and find out.

Reach is my favourite Halo game and I think that was the last one developed by Bungie. It’s tragic that they’ve abandoned single player story games. I couldn’t care less about their multiplayer ones.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

It's a crying shame 343 didn't put any time into split screen co-op for the MCC. I know there are ways to mod it in, which suggests first party support shouldn't be *that hard* but I'm guessing the MCC is dead in the water as far as development this late in the game.

My first run is always unmodded, but I'll work my way back to split screening with the kiddos.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

Wow, I forgot how short Halo's campaign was, dayum how did I get literally 100's of hours of playtime out of this 20+ years ago?

I recall people really being down on The Flood as an enemy, but Halo is one of the very few FPS where the enemies (with the introduction of the flood and sentinels) dynamically fight each other and that goes a long long way to freshening up any combat encounter in the last half of the game.

Halo is at its best with multiple factions fighting in a large open space with plenty of vehicles to hijack and cause havoc.

It's at its worst when you're 30 minutes into backtracking through the exact same corridor wondering if you had an aneurysm and ended up in purgatory.

Think I'll go straight into Halo 2 and then Halo 3 before taking a break and playing something else.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

I have to commit to either going back to Horizon Zero Dawn or starting Hogwarts...

-Beat Hogwarts, it's a very mid open world game with a really good Harry Potter wrapper over it.

Your enjoyment, IMO, is basically entirely dependent on how "into" the HP property you are. The devs also did a stunning job on Hogwarts Castle, but that's basically where their entire level design budget went, otherwise it's paint by numbers open world.

The best part of the game for me was actually watching the kids geek out about something that is like their Star Wars or Lord of the Rings, and it was simple enough that my 7 yo got to the final boss fight almost entirely unassisted by me or his older siater.

While the broom controls are atrocious, there is something oddly relaxing about sailing above the placid Scottish countryside to your next objective. Hogwarts is another game where I used the fast travel mechanic less than I thought I would just because traversal on a mount or broom are just so damn relaxing (like the opposite of Spiderman or Prototype traversal).

 

[DAPUNISHER]

the copy pasta OG Halo levels were the biggest complaint we PC gamers had when it was ported over bitd. The arrows on the floor let you know if you are backtracking or not.

Spiderman games: PlayStation exclusive on PC with BT XBOX controller, man have times changed. I love the web slinging. Once you fill out enough of the skill tree and have the boost jump for the zip line it's easy to cheese black cat and the pigeons. Or do the drone challenges. Doing tricks to charge up focus before a fight is fun too.

I will start Hogwarts soon. The Mrs. is the fan. She read all the books, and we watched all the movies as they came out. I also played a Harry Potter game on OG Xbox so I know the lore pretty well. Imgur Harry Potter content helped too.

At the moment I'm playing Nightingale which along with AC:Mirage came with the A380 I bought. It's a decent survival style game with a plot and story so far. I have not put much time into the genre so it's fun and accessible enough for me. Aficionados may find it to rudimentary or uncompelling from what a YT reviewer was saying.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

Fired up Halo 2: Anniversary. Still in the New Mombasa area.

Great remake/master, graphics make it look like something from the 2010's rather than 2004. Redone cutscenes suffer from some uncanny valley with the human faces, but I forgot how tonally different 2 is with the cutscenes vs 1. It's almost like Doom 2016 vs Eternal, some people really like the less is more approach and for others more is more, just depends on what you're looking for from a narrative.

Combat is faster, chief is more durable, dual wielding gives you an alternate combat forward play style vs the grenadier you were obligated to play in CE, vehicles are less floaty. From a gameplay perspective basically everything in 2 is better than CE.

I think I'm gonna have a good time...

 

[Fenixgoon]

Fired up Halo 2: Anniversary. Still in the New Mombasa area.

Great remake/master, graphics make it look like something from the 2010's rather than 2004. Redone cutscenes suffer from some uncanny valley with the human faces, but I forgot how tonally different 2 is with the cutscenes vs 1. It's almost like Doom 2016 vs Eternal, some people really like the less is more approach and for others more is more, just depends on what you're looking for from a narrative.

Combat is faster, chief is more durable, dual wielding gives you an alternate combat forward play style vs the grenadier you were obligated to play in CE, vehicles are less floaty. From a gameplay perspective basically everything in 2 is better than CE.

I think I'm gonna have a good time...

dual SMGs were the best. damn that was such a cool moment when they showed that off at the E3(?) trailer.