The 2019 what we are playing thread

October:
Finished: The Book of Unwritten Tales

Started & Finished a few arcade games (ok, with infinite continues on an emulator, that is not really an achievement- it just shows the ones I tried and kept playing instead of quitting after 5 minutes:
Metal Slug 2
Golden Axe

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That one was pretty cool on… the Mega Drive and/or DOS.

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Yes, played it to death on the megadrive! But the arcade is the original of course (a bit shorter but with a funnier ending)

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They haven’t. :wink: Unfortunately the first part is the best in the series. IMHO.

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:laughing:

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Unfortunately this cringe doesn’t quite tickle my funny bone (also, Broken Sword deja vu :stuck_out_tongue:) :

So I’ve replayed the latter half of Disco Elysium, but I think it might need radically different skills to get another angle at the story. However, not all was for naught as I came across that one:


Gotta love how they snuck game design into an otherwise pretty serious scene.

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I seem to have put Secret Files on hold since I reached that Irish pub.

I started up The Council and thought I hit a loading screen, but apparently I missed an opportunity to do something because it was a countdown timer, not a loading screen. I probably should’ve known, because it seems to be one of those games that loads in a second while pretending to show you tips on the loading screen.

Also very odd, it started in UHD with everything maxed, so it was a bit choppy at ~20fps. I decided to go with HD 1080p with everything maxed instead at 60 fps but it was surprisingly hard to find.

Alt+F4 seemingly closes the game, but the process keeps on running. Odd bug.

I can’t really say anything about the game itself yet, other than that it looks nice and that theoretically it seems like you might have three fairly different games depending on your choices.

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To follow the rules of this forum and to get instantly off-topic: Which UHD display (vendor/model) do you use?

Almost five years ago I bought the first affordable UHD monitor on the market, a Dell P2415Q for ~€350.

It’s perfectly fine and it was still one of the best price/performance monitors for several years after I bought it (even if the price increased to ~500 for several years; it’s down to ~400 now), but today there shouldn’t be too much reason to choose it over another model unless it particularly strikes your fancy in some way. It doesn’t have FreeSync for example because it predates it, unlike a cheaper, more modern competitor such as the LG 24UD58-B (only 40-60 fps, but at least for me that’d be the most important range anyway). It’s possible that color accuracy is better on the Dell though; I didn’t check in close detail.

PS I don’t care a lick for any stupid stand that comes with monitors. I just want a VESA mount.

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Thanks, I’m still searching for a good UHD display. Do you have any experiences with the LG?

Not personally, but it was part of this roundup where they gave it an “Excellent” award.

The Asus RoG Swift PG27UQ for example got a better award, an “Ultimate”, but at ~2000 it’s not exactly in the same league.

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Btw, I’ve got one of these on my desk. With a shorter pole, unfortunately. It’s great and I’ve been using it for over a decade.

https://www.ergotron.com/en-us/products/product-details/45-295#

It’s not just useful because of the monitor positioning, although that’s the main draw, but also because it makes your desk much larger than it would otherwise be.

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Not bad actually. When shopping for my current monitor, I was looking for one whose height could be adjusted and that greatly limited the options. Almost any monitor provides a VESA mount, however. Oh well, too late now …

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I finished a playthrough of The Council. People say it’s more different when you make different choices than Telltale games; I’m vaguely curious. It was a game in the Telltale tradition, but with much harder puzzles. Somehow it got glitchier from episode 3 or so onward, and the things that made it stand out in the first episodes were tossed by the wayside a bit. I’d recommend it, but I wouldn’t call it a classic.

My wife bought an LG 27UD59P-B to replace her cracking old monitor. It’s definitely quite good and I’d recommend it over my own screen. It’s better yet cheaper. I don’t think that size-wise they come across very different,

My only quibble would be that the cables go straight on the back instead of downward, and perhaps that it doesn’t have a USB3 hub like mine but I prefer the one on my keyboard and the connectors at the front of my computer anyway.

Some people complain it only does FreeSync from 40-60 fps, but I don’t really see the problem. At least for me that’s exactly the range I’d want. Sometimes the framerate drops under 60, not by too much, and then you see a bit of a line on the screen. If you get dips so extreme that the framerate goes under 40 imo you should just lower the settings, although I suppose as far down as 30 would remain mostly playable.

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I’ve read that the display is glossy. Is that true?

No, not at all. It has a matte coating. O-o

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I just finished A Plague Tale. It had some merit, but I enjoyed it an awful lot less than The Council. I will for sure not be replaying this one. The graphics are mostly outstanding, but I found the gameplay ranging from somewhat boring to downward frustrating at times, except for the first hour or two when it was very promising. It’s a bit of a mixed bag and I wouldn’t really recommend getting it except to gape at the visuals. The voice acting is also good, in French (in which I played it) as well as in English.

The game reminds me of Alan Wake, by which I mean a game I kind of wanted to like but didn’t. I have nothing against games that aren’t all that much of a game (Life is Strange is one of my recent favorites), but when most of the game feels like filler in between the story there’s something not quite right.

After a while you become painfully aware that the game will randomly prevent you from jumping down a ledge or something because climbing up on it advanced the story, so bye bye collectible or fuel that you needed. Sometimes this is done slightly more elegantly with the equivalent of a randomly collapsing or closing doorway instead of an invisible wall, but it’s annoying all the same.

There’s a very contrived mechanic around torches. A torch is vital to our survival? And there are multiple people in our party but we have to put down the torch for a second to climb a ledge? Well blimey, I guess that torch will be lost now forever. Without this continuous torch losing those occasionally interesting puzzle aspects wouldn’t work but I’m actually surprised I stuck with it. I suppose I wanted to see more pretty churches & castles & Roman ruins.

Then there was an “emotional” moment near the end that felt incredibly contrived. It was very annoying to boot because there wasn’t a save prior to it, yet a bunch of materials and the ability to upgrade your stuff. And it’s very easy to die during this contrived sequence. The checkpoint was at the start of the area rather than at the start of the contrived semi-cutscene! This kind of thing happens all too frequently in the game. So there you go, collecting all the things and upgrading your equipment just to do it all over again when you accidentally die on the linear path.

For the €20-something I paid it was okay, mainly for the occasionally gorgeous art & graphics. But it’s repetitive, completely on rails, and the story is so-so.

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Completed Still There. Once I picked it up again yesterday, it didn’t take that long to finish. Puzzles mostly revolved around the many knobs and switches of the space station, with diagrams in the manual “explaining” their function, then having to figure out how to manipulate them for the given situation. The game does a pretty good job at steering you towards the right set of controls, so after the initial shock, the insane amount of hotspots was actually manageable. There are a few object puzzles too, but nothing too demanding. Overall, most of the puzzles were quite fun and the solution logical, but there was also one that I eventually had to bruteforce (luckily, there weren’t too many possible combinations).

In between I also played Pilgrims. Finished it in two short sessions. I had never played any of the Amanita Design games so fa, since I did not like their particular style. But the art of Pilgrims was nice, and it turned out to also be masterfully animated. Short but sweet! Or rather, amusing. There might be some replay value in trying to unlock all ways specific puzzles can be solved, but since I’m not into this achievements thing, I’m content with completing it once.

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The game reminds me of Alan Wake, by which I mean a game I kind of wanted to like but didn’t

What in particular didn’t you like about Alan Wake? I know that the gameplay/action tends to get a little repetitive, but I thought the story and atmosphere/setting are stunning and really carry it :slight_smile: