[inksb]

Anyone playing Elden Ring? I never played any of the dark souls games, but this one is really incredible, some of the best fun I've had with a game in a good while.

I beat it a few days ago. It's a truly incredible game. I've played all the Souls game and this is a culmination of all of them. So much freedom build wise and it's just so much fun exploring the world.

[texasvinyl]

How did you beat it so fast, I'm 100 hours in, and it just keeps going! I just randomly jumped down onto a hidden ledge, came to a grave, time went backwards, and a two headed dragon from hell called placidusax or something wrecked me repeatedly until I beat it. Incredible game I haven't played a game this much in probably 15+ years

[inksb]

How did you beat it so fast, I'm 100 hours in, and it just keeps going! I just randomly jumped down onto a hidden ledge, came to a grave, time went backwards, and a two headed dragon from hell called placidusax or something wrecked me repeatedly until I beat it. Incredible game I haven't played a game this much in probably 15+ years

It took me around 115-120 hours to beat it. You found one of the best bosses in the game imo, who is completely optional. Loved Dragonlord Placidusax. I'm pretty sure he used to be a 4 or 5 headed dragon as well, you can see his necks wrapped around his body. You're also right next what may be my favorite boss fight as well.

It's gonna be hard for any other game to top this for me this year.

[texasvinyl]

Ok I almost gave up. Took four days to finish the last boss. I tried it 100 times with 10 different setups. Super frustrating ending to that one but I managed to finish it all. That one and Malenia were so frustrating to finish.

[inksb]

Ok I almost gave up. Took four days to finish the last boss. I tried it 100 times with 10 different setups. Super frustrating ending to that one but I managed to finish it all. That one and Malenia were so frustrating to finish.

Elden Beast sucks. Terrible fucking design fight wise (very cool visual design though).

I actually love the Malenia fight, it's like a Sekiro boss thrown into the game. Her heal mechanic is bullshit, I really think it should be toned down, 2-3 hits of a basic combo should not heal her for 1/3 or more of her health bar when it takes 20+ hits just to get that off of her.

What did you think of Maliketh? I loved his fight so much.

[texasvinyl]

Elden beast was just a massive bastard, it puts so much distance and spams out ranged attacks. It does several of the worst attacks all at the same time in the second part. I died once and it died right after. That counts as a victory for all the other bosses but not that one! The last try I got it down to maybe 1-10 life, no red visible on its health bar, but it ran away and did an entire cycle of ranged stuff and I had no flasks left. Managed to evade and get back for one final hit.

Malenia spinning blade attack was horrible. I never managed to evade it. Just spammed damage very fast with the sword that does a drill type attack. Gave mimic tear the shabiri woe thing to aggro her.

Maliketh was pretty awesome. That was a fun one, and I didn't expect it. Very fast and hyper aggressive but I was somehow able to get past him without too much trouble.

Radagon was great. That gave me trouble at first but by the 50th attempt of Elden beast I was destroying him. I hope they add boss rematches in a DLC.

I am going to play around with upgrading weapons and trying out new things. Maybe a NG+ but not sure I can commit to another run through. I'm at about 120 hours.

[static14]

Just finished the main story line on Horizon Forbibben West. Still have a handful of side mission and stuff to finish up.

[inksb]

Just finished the main story line on Horizon Forbibben West. Still have a handful of side mission and stuff to finish up.

How was it? Looked really good. I'll have to wait til it hits PC.

[static14]

Loved it. The fist game was absolutely one of my all time favorites as well.

[inksb]

I resurrected my stickless controller from last summer which I gutted at some point in the last 12 months. This was basically a test for fancy wire management which I plan on doing with a controller in the near future. I fixed a lot of problems that plagued this test to begin with. This type of wire management is a huge pain in the ass but looks super nice.

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[NathanLurker]

How do you play without the stick ? Buttons on the left used as some sort of D-Pad ? Looks nice though. Do you play Makoto ?

[inksb]

How do you play without the stick ? Buttons on the left used as some sort of D-Pad ? Looks nice though. Do you play Makoto ?

So the small white buttons are Left, Down & Right. The big pink button below is Up (jump.) Think of it as playing a shooter on PC, you use ASD for left, back & right and space bar for jump. So your ring, middle and index fingers for your main movement and your thumb to jump.

I'm not good at using this type of controller but I do enjoy messing around with it. It feels unnatural to me as I've almost always played fighting games with an arcade stick.

And yeah, Makoto is my favorite character in 3rd Strike. She is my main but I also play Ken. I dabble in Alex, Ibuki & Hugo as well.

[inksb]

This is my most recent arcade stick. Just finished it yesterday. I've been wanting to make one out of a solid block of wood for a while, I ended up with two pieces left over from a project from work earlier in the year but was unsure of how I wanted to go about removing 1.5inches of solid wood effectively. My buddy put me in contact with a guy who had a CNC machine but his time frame was 2 weeks to 3 months ago I decided to do it myself.

I ended up using a forstner bit and router, took a while to do and had some issues. I bought a new router and the bit slipped causing it to go all the way through the wood, so I ended up doing the black epoxy strip to cover this fuck up.

I ordered Crown buttons instead of my usual Sanwa's, I've never used the Korean companies buttons before and wanted to try them out, they use keyboard micro switches inside. This has my nicest wiring job yet, I'm really happy with how it came out and don't want to do that wiring again for a long time as it's a huge bitch.

Overall I'm pretty happy with how it came out even though there were many many little issues that caused headaches and frustration. It's done and I'm not making any new controllers for myself for a long time.

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[inksb]

I just finished a game yesterday and want to sing it's praise.

Signalis

It's a survival horror game in the vein of Resident Evil 1-3 on PS1 and Silent Hill 1-3 on PS1/2. The basic premise is that you play as a replicant type entity who is sent in to a space colony/mining facility that has ceased communication, they were having issues with a "sickness" that basically kills humans and mutates replicant's into killing machines. The game wears it's influences on it's sleeve, so much so that the opening of the game you start in a dirty bathroom looking in the mirror (just like Silent Hill 2). The graphics are modeled to look like a really good PS1 game with almost Fear Effect style graphics (but better). You have limited storage on you for picking up items and ammo (it's six slots just like Chris in RE1), no expansions, it's what you will have the entire time. There are notes, books, memos, etc. spread across the game that fill you in on story, background of the world and just little details about all the types of machines the company uses, these are also used to help you with the puzzles.

Overall combat is pretty minimal or at least I tried hard not to engage and avoid as much as possible. There's a decent amount of ammo spread around but you also can't kill everything if you wanted to. Enemies will get back up after you "kill" them if you traverse through the rooms a lot, similar to RE1/2, that is unless you use thermite to burn the bodies which permanently removes them from the area. The puzzles are great, most of them are really good and a few that actually stumped me for a bit, they even used the water tank puzzle from RE3. I loved the world and story they created and it takes some turns I just didn't expect, it looks beautiful and was very tense at times. It felt good to revisit this style of game with some modern aesthetics (no tank controls!). It took me 10 hours total to beat it and I took my time, got stumped twice on two puzzles. I can't recommend it enough if you were a fan of survival horror in the late 90's/early 00's, this is right up there with Elden Ring as my favorite thing I've played this year.

[NathanLurker]

Cool. I have Signalis on my (long) steam wishlist, I'll get around to playing that one. I'm currently on Ghost of Tsushima though. It got discounted so I finally bought it.

[inksb]

Cool. I have Signalis on my (long) steam wishlist, I'll get around to playing that one. I'm currently on Ghost of Tsushima though. It got discounted so I finally bought it.

How is it so far? A few of my friends who played it loved it.


I also picked up Warhammer 40k: Darktide which is a spiritual successor to Vermintide. It's a lot of fun, it's similar to Left 4 Dead. Team of 4, 4 different classes, move through level completing objectives while hoards of monsters come after you.

[NathanLurker]

Cool. I have Signalis on my (long) steam wishlist, I'll get around to playing that one. I'm currently on Ghost of Tsushima though. It got discounted so I finally bought it.

How is it so far? A few of my friends who played it loved it.


I also picked up Warhammer 40k: Darktide which is a spiritual successor to Vermintide. It's a lot of fun, it's similar to Left 4 Dead. Team of 4, 4 different classes, move through level completing objectives while hoards of monsters come after you.

It's great. My girlfriend has started playing Red Dead Redemption 2. Ghost of Tsushima feels similar to that and to Assassin's Creed Valhalla in may ways, but with a setting that I enjoy way more. I just love the Japanese stuff, and we watch a lot of Samurai movies at home. If you played Trek to Yomi, I see similarities in Ghost of Tsushima how combat stances are handled. Combat is very fun, to be honest.


I never played Warhammer. I had a magazine catalog with photos of figurines that I found fascinating as a child but never had the money to play, never had friends who played, so I never checked out the videogames. Maybe I should keep an eye on it since we do like some coop games me and friends

[inksb]

Yeah I've never played actual Warhammer but Vermintide II I played with my brother bc he told me it was like Left 4 Dead but with melee focus. Darktide is very similar but it switches to both melee and ranged focus. There's lots of Warhammer stuff in the game for fans of the series settings & lore wise but you don't need to know any of it, for me it's just a fun game to play with friends.

[inksb]

I started playing Divinity Original Sin 2 a few weeks ago and while I find it incredibly difficult at first I finally made it out of Act 1 and absolutely love the game. This is my first real venture into CRPG's so it's very much a learning experience, lots of failing battles and restarting. Early on I didn't realize there wasn't a true quick save, well there is one but it only saves at key moments, so I fucked up and lost almost an hour of exploration. I'm currently running a team of Rouge, Ranger, Wayfarer and Battlemage, I'm not happy with these builds so I'll be respecing them now that I have access to that.

I also picked up HiFi Rush which is the new game from Tango Gameworks, the studio responsible for The Evil Within series. It's a very fun and goofy take on the character action genre (Devil May Cry, Bayonetta, MGR Revengence) with a new twist, rhythm. There is a constant beat in the game and if you manage to hit your attacks on beat you do more damage, get a higher score and look super cool. I highly recommend this one if you like these types of games. Even if you suck at rhythm games it's fully playable with out hitting stuff in time.

[inksb]

With Resident Evil 4 Remake coming out this week I decided to finally play RE3 Remake which has been on my computer for 2 years. Reviews were not kind and fans were even more ruthless which put me off from playing it. Admittedly I only played RE3 a few times back on the PS1 when it first came out in '99 and then I traded it in for some other game so my knowledge of it is very faded memory. I remember liking it and being stressed by Nemesis a lot but that's pretty much it.

RE3 Remake is actually a pretty good game that's kept back by it's weird choices of omitting sections of the original game and making Nemesis a staged threat instead of a constant threat. I think a first playthrough is fine but I can't see myself playing through it a bunch in the future as it just doesn't offer much in replay value (also the opening is a huge slog to get through on replay). The game was definitely rushed out and if they spent another year or two developing it I think we would have gotten a much better result.

I'm looking forward to playing RE4R this weekend. I may even revisit the original RE3 in the near future.

I also think I'm gonna play The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap as well. I tried it out at my brothers this past weekend and it seems really fun. I got a GBA emulator set up and running in Retroarch with a nice shader that looks pretty accurate to a GBA screen.

[Bezulsqy]

With Resident Evil 4 Remake coming out this week I decided to finally play RE3 Remake which has been on my computer for 2 years. Reviews were not kind and fans were even more ruthless which put me off from playing it. Admittedly I only played RE3 a few times back on the PS1 when it first came out in '99 and then I traded it in for some other game so my knowledge of it is very faded memory. I remember liking it and being stressed by Nemesis a lot but that's pretty much it.

RE3 Remake is actually a pretty good game that's kept back by it's weird choices of omitting sections of the original game and making Nemesis a staged threat instead of a constant threat. I think a first playthrough is fine but I can't see myself playing through it a bunch in the future as it just doesn't offer much in replay value (also the opening is a huge slog to get through on replay). The game was definitely rushed out and if they spent another year or two developing it I think we would have gotten a much better result.

I'm looking forward to playing RE4R this weekend. I may even revisit the original RE3 in the near future.

I also think I'm gonna play The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap as well. I tried it out at my brothers this past weekend and it seems really fun. I got a GBA emulator set up and running in Retroarch with a nice shader that looks pretty accurate to a GBA screen.

I remember that constant Nemesis threat! Didn't know they changed that in the remake.
So the remakes are different? I played the remastered version of RE1 and 2 I believe. Loved those.

[inksb]

With Resident Evil 4 Remake coming out this week I decided to finally play RE3 Remake which has been on my computer for 2 years. Reviews were not kind and fans were even more ruthless which put me off from playing it. Admittedly I only played RE3 a few times back on the PS1 when it first came out in '99 and then I traded it in for some other game so my knowledge of it is very faded memory. I remember liking it and being stressed by Nemesis a lot but that's pretty much it.

RE3 Remake is actually a pretty good game that's kept back by it's weird choices of omitting sections of the original game and making Nemesis a staged threat instead of a constant threat. I think a first playthrough is fine but I can't see myself playing through it a bunch in the future as it just doesn't offer much in replay value (also the opening is a huge slog to get through on replay). The game was definitely rushed out and if they spent another year or two developing it I think we would have gotten a much better result.

I'm looking forward to playing RE4R this weekend. I may even revisit the original RE3 in the near future.

I also think I'm gonna play The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap as well. I tried it out at my brothers this past weekend and it seems really fun. I got a GBA emulator set up and running in Retroarch with a nice shader that looks pretty accurate to a GBA screen.

I remember that constant Nemesis threat! Didn't know they changed that in the remake.
So the remakes are different? I played the remastered version of RE1 and 2 I believe. Loved those.

Yeah, all the remakes have changes made to them. RE1 has the least amount from a story standpoint but it controls way better, expanded some areas a little and has some tweaks but it's been a long time so I don't really remember what they are. RE2 Remake had a lot of changes the biggest being how Mr X works and making him a bigger threat. There were new rooms in the RPD area. The sewer section was expanded quite a bit and the lab section at the end, changed to NEST, was completely different than in the original.

In RE3 Remake they expanded the Hospital area which was actually really cool but omitted the clock tower entirely which had some fun puzzles in it, no graveyard or park and the opening area of the streets where Nemesis is "chasing" you actually feels smaller than it was in the original. The original also gave you choices at certain moments to make which altered the story in little ways, that was completely removed as well.

[Bezulsqy]

Then I think I only played the RE1 remaster. Can’t remember anything you’re describing from RE2 :-)

[inksb]

Then I think I only played the RE1 remaster. Can’t remember anything you’re describing from RE2 :-)

RE2 Remake is really good. One of my favorite games from recent years. Highly recommend playing it at some point.

[NathanLurker]

I loved RE3R, having never done a complete playthrough of the original I wasn't noticing the missing parts. And since it was so short, it's actually the first that made me want to complete all trophies on PlayStation, cause I loved it and wanted to spend more time playing it. So I Played inferno mode and all. Then I went back to RE2R to do the same ( I had only done one standard Leon playthrough, and one Claire 2nd run playthrough before). Did it for RE7&8 too (RE7 had some really tough DLCs) and these ones with the winters family became a bigger thing than just a game to me, I played them a lot during the pandemic and my girlfriend watched me play all of them and we used to randomly say quotes to each other all the time. Like she'd ask what I want to eat and I'd ask for Ciorba de Legume, which is what "Mia" is cooking at the beginning of 8. And we'd quote and do the voice of the Duke a lot. We would imitate the voice from Lucas (RE7) a lot.

Once, for my birthday she hired the voice actor of the Duke on cameo to send me a a message where he made the Duke's voice and called me John Ethan. My real name is Jonathan even though I go by Nathan online, and RE8's protagonist is named Ethan, so me and my girlfriend we got me that nickname when I play the game. JonEthan.

Love those games.