What are you playing now?

[Rath Darkblade]

I just started playing "Disco Elysium" ... and died. I'm not surprised. It's meant to be a difficult game, and it is.

[MusicallyInspired]

Funny you should mention Lego games as I've just started playing Lego Star Wars Complete Saga (prequels and OT in one game) again. From scratch and slowly 100%ing it over the past few weeks. I'm now halfway through Empire Strikes Back and then I just got Return of the Jedi to finish and the game is done. Then I can finally move over to Lego Star Wars III - The Clone Wars.

[DeadPoolX]

I just started playing "Disco Elysium" ... and died. I'm not surprised. It's meant to be a difficult game, and it is.

Yes, but it's also supposed to be a great RPG with a fantastic story. I haven't played it (yet) despite it being installed. I keep meaning to, but I get distracted very easily.

As for me... Maia and I have playing Kingdom Two Crowns together in co-op. This is a game that definitely straddles the line between fun and frustration. Probably the most annoying part is there are a lot of specific game mechanics that you won't know about until you play it, screw the game up, and learn for yourself, which to me is poor game design.

This could be fixed by actually including instructions and/or having a decent tutorial, neither of which are present. Unfortunately, the dev for this game does what a lot of developers do: rely on players to make a Wiki. The problem with this approach is that it puts the onus on players to create a half-decent Wiki, an assumption that's been proven wrong many times due to all the half-assed game Wikis with partial or missing information.

Even so, players shouldn't have to do the developer's job. Part of being a dev is including instructions or at minimum a useful tutorial.

[Tawmis]

Funny you should mention Lego games as I've just started playing Lego Star Wars Complete Saga (prequels and OT in one game) again. From scratch and slowly 100%ing it over the past few weeks. I'm now halfway through Empire Strikes Back and then I just got Return of the Jedi to finish and the game is done. Then I can finally move over to Lego Star Wars III - The Clone Wars.

I managed to unlock all the characters on Pirates. But didn't get all the extras (Red Hats, Gold Bricks, etc). I may do that when I replay on XBO.

Right now, with SW - I was 52% done on X360, problem is I had no idea what I had done. So since I tried it on XBO, and it worked - starting all over, so just playing it for story right now. May go back for all the extras after with the Free Play.

Pirates, is by far, the best designed so far. (I've played Pirates, Batman, Batman 3, Marvel 1 and Marvel 2 - and Pirates seems infinitely smoother, except that last fight).

[Rath Darkblade]

I just started playing "Disco Elysium" ... and died. I'm not surprised. It's meant to be a difficult game, and it is.

Yes, but it's also supposed to be a great RPG with a fantastic story. I haven't played it (yet) despite it being installed. I keep meaning to, but I get distracted very easily.

The RPG is challenging ... and the story is too, seeing how it's a struggle to keep the protagonist even half-sober and stop him from having nightmares. I died (again) and had to restart before, finally, managing to make it through day 1. I made it to the morning of day 2, only to realise ... ugh ... the protagonist is only wearing one shoe. And worse yet, due to having only one slot for shoes and no way to put the shoes together, he's stuck wearing only one shoe.

So, I had to delete all my save-games and restart ... again ... because it's the only way to get him to wear both shoes. Quite annoying, that is ...

As for me... Maia and I have playing Kingdom Two Crowns together in co-op. This is a game that definitely straddles the line between fun and frustration. Probably the most annoying part is there are a lot of specific game mechanics that you won't know about until you play it, screw the game up, and learn for yourself, which to me is poor game design.

This could be fixed by actually including instructions and/or having a decent tutorial, neither of which are present. Unfortunately, the dev for this game does what a lot of developers do: rely on players to make a Wiki. The problem with this approach is that it puts the onus on players to create a half-decent Wiki, an assumption that's been proven wrong many times due to all the half-assed game Wikis with partial or missing information.

Even so, players shouldn't have to do the developer's job. Part of being a dev is including instructions or at minimum a useful tutorial.

Absolutely. It's not my job to tell people what to do, but ... the devs know their own game better than anyone. If they can't be bothered writing down instructions, or programming a useful tutorial, who can?

[MusicallyInspired]

I managed to unlock all the characters on Pirates. But didn't get all the extras (Red Hats, Gold Bricks, etc). I may do that when I replay on XBO.

Right now, with SW - I was 52% done on X360, problem is I had no idea what I had done. So since I tried it on XBO, and it worked - starting all over, so just playing it for story right now. May go back for all the extras after with the Free Play.

Pirates, is by far, the best designed so far. (I've played Pirates, Batman, Batman 3, Marvel 1 and Marvel 2 - and Pirates seems infinitely smoother, except that last fight).

Pirates really impressed me when I first played it on Wii around when it first came out. Especially how it handles two players. In previous games you'd have to both be within the same area and if you walked to far you'd drag the other player potentially into a death pit it was terrible. But in Pirates when you go too far away it seamlessly transforms into a splitscreen game window, and then when you go near eachother again it seamlessly merges into one screen. It was really smooth and well done. After I'm done with Star Wars I'm going to go through each of them again. I never got around to finishing any of them yet and I'd like to rectify that.

I love secret hunting in games and Lego is *full* of secrets and collectibles and challenges. And they're all perfectly reasonable and not overtly difficult. Like time challenges, which exist, but aren't like ridiculous. You just have to complete within 15 minutes or something which most of the time is really easy to do. They definitely came up with a great game formula with Lego games and refined it as they went along.

[DeadPoolX]

Never liked the LEGO series of games.

Maia and I tried the original Indiana Jones LEGO game back in 2008 when we had a Wii. It was okay, I guess, but what I remember most is how annoying difficult it was, particularly when we had to deal with jumping puzzles in 3D with a poorly-positioned camera that couldn't be readjusted. It's incredibly frustrating to keep dying because you can't gauge where a vine I need to grab is or how far the next platform is due to the camera.

Admittedly, problems like these are hardly limited to the LEGO series of games, but this is also why we've never enjoyed platforming games that hinge on lots of jumping puzzles.

Maybe the LEGO games have improved since then, but unless they've undergone a massive redesign to be more player-friendly, include a number of "quality of life" features, and rely a lot less on platforming or jumping puzzles, I doubt we'll ever try them again.

[Tawmis]

I managed to unlock all the characters on Pirates. But didn't get all the extras (Red Hats, Gold Bricks, etc). I may do that when I replay on XBO.
Right now, with SW - I was 52% done on X360, problem is I had no idea what I had done. So since I tried it on XBO, and it worked - starting all over, so just playing it for story right now. May go back for all the extras after with the Free Play.
Pirates, is by far, the best designed so far. (I've played Pirates, Batman, Batman 3, Marvel 1 and Marvel 2 - and Pirates seems infinitely smoother, except that last fight).

Pirates really impressed me when I first played it on Wii around when it first came out. Especially how it handles two players. In previous games you'd have to both be within the same area and if you walked to far you'd drag the other player potentially into a death pit it was terrible. But in Pirates when you go too far away it seamlessly transforms into a splitscreen game window, and then when you go near eachother again it seamlessly merges into one screen. It was really smooth and well done. After I'm done with Star Wars I'm going to go through each of them again. I never got around to finishing any of them yet and I'd like to rectify that.
I love secret hunting in games and Lego is *full* of secrets and collectibles and challenges. And they're all perfectly reasonable and not overtly difficult. Like time challenges, which exist, but aren't like ridiculous. You just have to complete within 15 minutes or something which most of the time is really easy to do. They definitely came up with a great game formula with Lego games and refined it as they went along.

Yeah - I also like how when ye need to build something it shows the button. Also switching between characters (pressing Y for XBO) was super easy. In SW, you need to be close to the character ye wanna switch to which is annoying.

But that said, finished ANH and Empire, and now on the barge for RotJ.

Never liked the LEGO series of games.
Maia and I tried the original Indiana Jones LEGO game back in 2008 when we had a Wii. It was okay, I guess, but what I remember most is how annoying difficult it was, particularly when we had to deal with jumping puzzles in 3D with a poorly-positioned camera that couldn't be readjusted. It's incredibly frustrating to keep dying because you can't gauge where a vine I need to grab is or how far the next platform is due to the camera.
Admittedly, problems like these are hardly limited to the LEGO series of games, but this is also why we've never enjoyed platforming games that hinge on lots of jumping puzzles.
Maybe the LEGO games have improved since then, but unless they've undergone a massive redesign to be more player-friendly, include a number of "quality of life" features, and rely a lot less on platforming or jumping puzzles, I doubt we'll ever try them again.

No, some of the jump stuff - especially on pirates are disorienting when yer trying to jump on a rope.

[MusicallyInspired]

Yeah the jumping and camera angles are a little off. Many times I would never land where I expected to. But I think just from playing it so much I've acclimated to it. Definitely a sore spot in the design though for sure.

[Tawmis]

The plus side to missing is you just lose bricks. You can miss, infinitely, and you never technically run out of lives. So that's nice.

[Tawmis]

Finished Star Wars II LEGO.

Now doing Free Play mode to earn bricks to purchase the characters, and find whatever other things they have hidden that's only accessible if ye do free play mode.

[Rath Darkblade]

I tried the Lego LOTR game and didn't particularly like it.

Then again, this is fun: https://www.youtube.com/c/BrotherhoodWorkshop/videos . It contains short films of Lego Star Wars and Lego LOTR. I liked it.

[Tawmis]

Some incredible stop motion.

I need to pick up Indiana Jones and LotR LEGO now (should be cheap) and get through those.

[BBP]

Got a refurbished Win 10 laptop. Brilliant machine... except they don't have MineSweeper on it anymore

So now I divide my time between minesweeper.online , and Dungeon Crawler, which is basically a Minesweeper with RPG elements.

[Tawmis]

Got a refurbished Win 10 laptop. Brilliant machine... except they don't have MineSweeper on it anymore

Here you go -

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/micro ... verviewtab