Whatcha Playin?

[Dleg]

I may have ripped through Hearts of Stone too fast, but it was awesome and was very enjoyable to finish in two (long) sittings.  So many strange and interesting characters. For example the black cat and dog (demons?) - weird as F but unique and cool. Actually searched to see if I could get a coffee mug of them. Nope, but there's good graphics of them available so I might just have one made. 

 

[Supe]

All time favorite Witcher 3 moment happened the other day.

So I'm sitting in the theater room Saturday morning playing Witcher.  Had some General Tso's Friday night that wasn't agreeing with me, and the gas was pretty bad.  I have completed the main story line, and was just into the beginning of the Blood and Wine expansion again.  The majordomo was showing me around the newly acquired vineyard in Toussant, and one of the NPC vineyard workers was just in front of me by the servant's quarters. 

Just then, I let out wet, leather-searing, vomit-inducing fart. 

A few milliseconds after my fart ends, the servant inhales through his nose deeply and proclaims, "do you smell zat?!  Those are the vapors of Touissant!"

I nearly peed my pants laughing.

 

[Dleg]

^LOL. There are some great NPC lines and conversations in that game.  The Witcher's vineyard employees, in general, are a surly bunch.  

The Blood and Wine expansion is huge. I put another weekend of work into side quests and still have several to go. Per the game clock, I now have over 220 hours in the game (!) and I still have nearly the whole B&W main quest to go.

By the way, unless you are already very good at mounted combat, "The Warbles of a Smitten Knight" is going to suck. I played that one over and over again last weekend, trying to win the race, but just couldn't. It is a timed route and you have to hit targets with your sword and crossbow as you are galloping.  I can't do it.  But you can still complete the quest, you just get booed by the crowd and disappoint the knight who hired you, and don't get the trophy for the whole tournament, or the upgraded saddle.  It's a good quest though, I recomend doing it as soon as you can because you get cool looking set of armor and a shield with your crest to display at your home, and you get a chance at personalized, upgraded weapons. I for a crossbow with better stats than anything else I have found yet, and with Geralt's crest on it.

 

[Supe]

I've played through it once already, but just finished that mission a second time.  Granted I'm playing on normal hardness level, so I didn't have any issue with it.  I can usually get about 75% of the dummies and targets.  Not sure if you're playing on PC or PS4, but with the PS4, you basically just hold down the attack button, time slows, and then you just tilt the joystick towards whatever side the dummy is on and he'll move his sword to that side.  The targets are easier, but there's one or two on that course where by the time you see it, it's basically overhead already. The steel sword you get at the end is one of the nicer ones both in appearance and stats up to that point (I think I'm at around a level 37?)

 

[Tiger15]

I'm playing though the BotW DLC right now. I started it months ago, but stopped when my joycons were drifting so much that it became unplayable.

FYI, Nintendo is fixing all joycons for free after all the bad press they have gotten. Doesn't matter if they are out of warranty. Let me know if you need details.

 

[Dleg]

I've played through it once already, but just finished that mission a second time.  Granted I'm playing on normal hardness level, so I didn't have any issue with it.  I can usually get about 75% of the dummies and targets.  Not sure if you're playing on PC or PS4, but with the PS4, you basically just hold down the attack button, time slows, and then you just tilt the joystick towards whatever side the dummy is on and he'll move his sword to that side.  The targets are easier, but there's one or two on that course where by the time you see it, it's basically overhead already. The steel sword you get at the end is one of the nicer ones both in appearance and stats up to that point (I think I'm at around a level 37?)

PS4. It's the timing I can't get. I've got the slow motion,  lean to the correct side, but most of the time I miss. The crossbow is better,  but sometimes I ride off a bridge or something stupid in the process and then it's basically over.

 

[Supe]

PS4. It's the timing I can't get. I've got the slow motion,  lean to the correct side, but most of the time I miss. The crossbow is better,  but sometimes I ride off a bridge or something stupid in the process and then it's basically over.

Yeah, it can be frustrating at times, a hair too early or too late and you watch the sword go through the dummy but don't get credit for the hit.

On the plus side, once you have it down, it makes killing a lot of animals above your level (with the certain death icon) easy to topple from horseback.

I was doing the Grandmaster Feline Gear hunt last night and came across Arthach Palace Ruins.  Never saw that in my last playthrough!  Of course, after I got the plans, I realized you have to have the rest of the Cat School armor first, ugh.  Guess I know what I'm doing tonight.

 

[JayKay PE]

I'm playing though the BotW DLC right now. I started it months ago, but stopped when my joycons were drifting so much that it became unplayable.

FYI, Nintendo is fixing all joycons for free after all the bad press they have gotten. Doesn't matter if they are out of warranty. Let me know if you need details.

Is this for the switch?  Send me info.  I only like watching people play, but one of those people is my brother and I know he has a couple of those.

 

[Tiger15]

Is this for the switch?  Send me info.  I only like watching people play, but one of those people is my brother and I know he has a couple of those.

Yeah, for the Nintendo Switch. Nintendo has gotten so much bad press for bad joycons that they have decided to fix them all for free, even if they are out of warranty. If you google joycon stick drift, you'll find LOTS of people complaining about it. I think someone actually filed a class-action lawsuit against Nintendo for knowingly releasing a faulty product.

Anyway, go to ninetndo(dot)com and click on "Support". One of the top links on the support page is "Joy-Con Repair Setup". Click that and fill out the form. Explain the problem; I said something like "The Joy-Con control stick constantly drifts and cannot be calibrated." Within a couple days you'll get an email with instructions to ship the Joy-Cons to a repair center. And a separate email from UPS with a shipping label. I've done it twice. The whole process takes about a 10-12 days (ground shipping there, a couple days to fix, and ground shipping back), but you'll receive repaired Joy-Cons free of charge.

You can include as many Joy-Cons on the repair form as you want and ship them all together. Here's the direct link to the form (assuming you're in the US) for your convenience. 
https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/ask/ht/789

 

[JayKay PE]

Yeah, for the Nintendo Switch. Nintendo has gotten so much bad press for bad joycons that they have decided to fix them all for free, even if they are out of warranty. If you google joycon stick drift, you'll find LOTS of people complaining about it. I think someone actually filed a class-action lawsuit against Nintendo for knowingly releasing a faulty product.

Anyway, go to ninetndo(dot)com and click on "Support". One of the top links on the support page is "Joy-Con Repair Setup". Click that and fill out the form. Explain the problem; I said something like "The Joy-Con control stick constantly drifts and cannot be calibrated." Within a couple days you'll get an email with instructions to ship the Joy-Cons to a repair center. And a separate email from UPS with a shipping label. I've done it twice. The whole process takes about a 10-12 days (ground shipping there, a couple days to fix, and ground shipping back), but you'll receive repaired Joy-Cons free of charge.

You can include as many Joy-Cons on the repair form as you want and ship them all together. Here's the direct link to the form (assuming you're in the US) for your convenience. 
https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/ask/ht/789

Sweet!  Thanks for the info!  I'll def pass this along to my brother.  I'm not sure if he's already contacted them or not, or how much he's playing, but free repair is free repair, so I'll poke him.

I want to get a new switch...but for pokemon.  And I don't think it's worth buying a whole system for one game (at least, not anymore, especially since all the game I would have bought are now longplays, which I enjoy more).

 

[Dleg]

PS4. It's the timing I can't get. I've got the slow motion,  lean to the correct side, but most of the time I miss. The crossbow is better,  but sometimes I ride off a bridge or something stupid in the process and then it's basically over.

Yeah, it can be frustrating at times, a hair too early or too late and you watch the sword go through the dummy but don't get credit for the hit.

On the plus side, once you have it down, it makes killing a lot of animals above your level (with the certain death icon) easy to topple from horseback.

I was doing the Grandmaster Feline Gear hunt last night and came across Arthach Palace Ruins.  Never saw that in my last playthrough!  Of course, after I got the plans, I realized you have to have the rest of the Cat School armor first, ugh.  Guess I know what I'm doing tonight.

Same boat here. I collected all the Grandmaster Ursine diagrams then realized I never finished finding the others. I'll probably go back and get those after I finish the main story, to stock my stash for a New Game + replay. I've got the GM Wolven, Griffin,  and Manticore sets. But those are all medium armor so there's not much that distinguishes them other than appearance. Got them on display at my manor, though! Plus the Viper gear from Hearts of Stone.

 

[ulua808]

Hungry shark and sudoku. Just downloaded the new update for the former and working to get Dark Magic Shark. Already spent too much time on both games.

 

[Master slacker]

?

 

[Dleg]

Finished The Witcher 3 Blood and Wine DLC over two nights of concentrated playing. Not as good a story as Hearts of Stone, but some pretty good story branching based on how you decide to act on the plot twist involving Detlaff's girlfriend.  I ended up with the so-called "good" ending where the sisters make up at the end and Regis has to leave, but I wish i had saved appropriately so I could go back and try for the more direct approach, and meet the Unseen Elder.  

Anyhow, not sure what to do now. There's still a handful of side quests and places of interest scattered throughout the various game regions, and some witcher gear I want to build. But not sure how much more I want to put into it before starting another playthrough on New Game +. 

Plus I was given a Nintendo Switch recently with The Witcher on it, so I am looking forward to starting another playthrough on that, for travel purposes.

 

[Tiger15]

Also playing XCOM 2: War of the Chosen expansion (on PC)

 

[Supe]

Finished The Witcher 3 Blood and Wine DLC over two nights of concentrated playing. Not as good a story as Hearts of Stone, but some pretty good story branching based on how you decide to act on the plot twist involving Detlaff's girlfriend.  I ended up with the so-called "good" ending where the sisters make up at the end and Regis has to leave, but I wish i had saved appropriately so I could go back and try for the more direct approach, and meet the Unseen Elder.  

Anyhow, not sure what to do now. There's still a handful of side quests and places of interest scattered throughout the various game regions, and some witcher gear I want to build. But not sure how much more I want to put into it before starting another playthrough on New Game +. 

Plus I was given a Nintendo Switch recently with The Witcher on it, so I am looking forward to starting another playthrough on that, for travel purposes.

The first time through, I went the route where you bypass the tower where Detlaff's GF disappeared to, and went to the vampiress' place for help.  That resulted in a pretty unremarkable ending, since I don't even remember how it played out.  This time, I went to the tower.  WAY better - the whole fairy tale world is a trip, Geralt and the crazy GF did some naughty things, and you get a killer set of armor and a sword if you follow the little glowing thing.  I deliberately botched the sit-down with the GF though, and it ended up with both sister's dying at the end, and the town mourning over a giant statue of the duchess in perpetuity.  

I've played through all of the worthwhile B&W side quests as well now (clearing out the three vineyards, and the 15 contracts to clear out troubled spots across Touissant), and have just started Hearts of Stone again.  Still a bunch of spots in Novigrad and Touissant I want to wander over to, amazing how much I missed the first few times I played.

I think I'm going to pick up the Spiderman game on the cheap and binge on that over X-mas.

 

[Dleg]

The first time through, I went the route where you bypass the tower where Detlaff's GF disappeared to, and went to the vampiress' place for help.  That resulted in a pretty unremarkable ending, since I don't even remember how it played out.  This time, I went to the tower.  WAY better - the whole fairy tale world is a trip, Geralt and the crazy GF did some naughty things, and you get a killer set of armor and a sword if you follow the little glowing thing.  I deliberately botched the sit-down with the GF though, and it ended up with both sister's dying at the end, and the town mourning over a giant statue of the duchess in perpetuity.  

I've played through all of the worthwhile B&W side quests as well now (clearing out the three vineyards, and the 15 contracts to clear out troubled spots across Touissant), and have just started Hearts of Stone again.  Still a bunch of spots in Novigrad and Touissant I want to wander over to, amazing how much I missed the first few times I played.

I think I'm going to pick up the Spiderman game on the cheap and binge on that over X-mas.

Yeah I have something like 240 hours into the game and still have over a dozen question marks in the Novigrad/Velen region, and at least that many again around the Skellige islands. 

I recently picked up one of the Assassin's Creed games (Origins?) for cheap, plus Battlefield V. I might play those, but The Witcher has kind of spoiled me now. Not sure I will be able to get into those other games as well. I've started many games over the past decade or so, but TW3 was the first that I felt compelled to finish. Plus i am finishing the last Witcher book now (Season of Storms) and getting geared up for the Netflix series. So it is looking more and more like another Witcher playthrough.

 

[Supe]

I have a bazillion question marks everywhere - now that I've played through, I try to ride through the areas instead of fast travels.  Skellige for sure has a lot left for me, Touissant a few, and a bunch on the outskirts of Velen.

I was not a fan of Origins.  It got very good reviews, but I just don't see it.  It was super repetitive (take down a fortress full of people that are all set up/look the same), and was otherwise a very vast but boring open world.  Main character was a dud, too.  Witcher is going to spoil a LOT of games for you (I'd KILL for them to make a Ciri-based Witcher game).  Odyssey was better than Origins, but still not great.  At least with Odyssey, I have a chance to play through it again with a second character - you pick the brother or sister when you start the game, so it'll be interesting to see if they just swap characters in the story line, or if you follow a separate one and just join at the end.  I'm pretty convince the AC games are going to suck until they do a real feudal Japan one, not some sidescroller bullshit like they put out a few years ago.  The whole series really jumped the shark after Black Flag.  

I've definitely gone one more Witcher playthrough in me after I watch the series, this time going the Yennefer route.

 

[Supe]

To hold me over until The Last of Us Part II came out, I replaced AC Odyssey as the sister, Cassandra.  While the story line content was identical, the voice over for the female character was much better overall, so it made the whole game feel better than before.  I bought the "season pass" for 20 bucks which adds quite a bit of additional play time.  The first DLC introduces your character to one of the early Assassins, and shows how they create a lineage that passes through into some of the earlier games.  It was pretty good.  The DLC I was looking forward to though, the Fate of Atlantis, stinks.  Holy mother of wash, rinse, repeat.  It is just the same side missions over, and over and over to accrue tokens/skills/whatever to move onto another part, and the story isn't even interesting.  What a stinker.

Now, onto the one I've been waiting for: The Last of Us Part II.

I've been binge playing since Friday.  So far, it's definitely enjoyable.  There is a huge plot twist early in the game that effectively sets up the entire story.  What I did NOT anticipate, is that it seems as though > 50% of the game (at least to this point, and I've got to be a good ways in), is played as an entirely new character. 

The graphics are beautiful as usual, the time and money they spent doing the face capture for each of the characters is like nothing we've ever seen in the PS4 era.  The music/audio is perfect.  I don't think I've ever played a game where I felt this "uneasy" the entire time.  Just when you think you're safe, you're not. 

I don't know that I'm a huge fan of some of the new mechanics dealing with the enemies and dogs - it's just too hard to be stealthy/avoid combat in a number of scenes, so it turns into a lot of run and gun.  Some of the new zombies are a great addition (stalkers), some are a serious PITA to deal with (the new boss types/big ones), since you get swarmed at times in very tight/cramped quarters with nowhere to go.  You can't even tell what's going on at times, because you've accidentally backed up into a box/coffee table/etc and get stuck.  

So far, I don't know that I can say I like it more than the first game.  The reason the first game was so perfect was that you started seeing the relationship building/character growth from Day 1 of the main characters.  The majority of Part II is solo play, and lacks the interaction needed for character growth.  For the new playable character, it's mostly backstory to try and make the character relatable, but players have become so invested in Joel and Ellie during the series, it's almost like you don't really care what her backstory is.  That said, there's still a lot of game to go, and that could change.

What blew my mind, was that after seeing the 95% positive critic reviews prior to release, the game had thousands of horrid reviews within hours of release (it's like a 3.5/10 on metacritic right now, for what is absolutely one of the best PS4 games ever released).  Apparently, this was part of some big negative campaign, much based on leaked pre-release footage/story, that was launched against the game for prominently featuring two gay characters (one of whom we already knew was gay from the first game), and then a transgender character later on.  And there's no way of pretending that those bad reviews are anything other than some anti-gay campaign, because you're at least 20 hours into the game or more before coming across the transgender character, so you can't claim you were so "upset" by the game after it's been in stores for 6 hours.  What a bunch of fucking losers. 

 

[JayKay PE]

So....I finally bought a Nintendo Switch and Animal Crossing, because I was being heckled by the other EB girls.

I forgot how much I liked playing 'going nowhere' games.  I mean, always been a huge fan of Harvest Moon/Song of Seasons, and I never picked up Animal Crossing in the past due to my brother taking over the system a majority of the time and/or my parents not wanting to buy another game when we have enough.

Not sure if I'll ever be 'good', but I like it because I can dress like a Tiger King reject (I fucking love sport shade and cut-offs, so sue me) and spend hours fishing and fishing and fishing.