What Has Everyone Been Playing This Week? 4

[wakka]

I never knew this existed and now I'm wondering how the 4-hour cut scenes work in an arcade setting.

You can skip them, but you have to put another pound in.

[fuse]

Kentucky Route Zero - So far it's alright, barely any game to it but easy enough to get through quickly it seems

In total contrast, I've been playing Kentucky Route Zero lately and I think it's incredible. It's smart, beautiful, thoughtful... and definitely not something to be rushed through for the sake of checking it off a list.

[Neon Ignition]

I don't feel there's a way to rush it, I'm on Act III after not that long as there's not that much to it. It's enjoyable but pretty much just a simple narrative tale you follow rather than a game

[Dogg Thang]

You can skip them, but you have to put another pound in.

Totally worth it.

[ZipZap]

I never knew this existed and now I'm wondering how the 4-hour cut scenes work in an arcade setting.

haha, whilst the cut scenes are shockingly absent, for an arcade game there does seem to be quite a lot of messing about before you get to play. And given most of this is in Japanese, it's mostly a case of selecting options and hoping for the best!

[Team Andromeda]

PSO 2 is amazing on the One X. Its only Beta, but its game of the year 2020

[JazzFunk]

More New Vegas. Taking it out on the Bighorners with energy weapons, you get 50xp for a bull and I've just found a good pasture and slaughtered at least fifteen so far. All just waiting there for the guns. Pret a mourir.

[prinnysquad]

Kingdom Come.

Frustrated me at first when my ring got smashed in a fist fight. Then I read an article about it by a reviewer who stopped thinking of it as a wish-fulfilment action romp, and started to play it as the developers intended. As a peasant’s story set 600 years ago, where the player actually follows Henry’s story, rather than imposing their own on it.

That change of expectations has worked. I’ve enjoyed lobbing turds at someone’s house. I’ve enjoyed the father-son dialogue. I’ve enjoyed the different ways of doing objectives. There’s a level of freedom, but within Henry’s story. The combat is clunky, but then it’s meant to be. My character is a douche, though an amiable one, with a couple of wads sniffing around. The sedate pace is really nice, although I guess it’ll ramp up now with the latest events.

Visually it’s rather fine. The animations are decent and the textures quite lush.

Yep. Enjoying this peasant sim.

[Golgo]

Enthusiast PS1-style survival horror smorgasbord, 17 'demos' via free download:



Early contender for GOTY.

[wakka]

More New Vegas. Taking it out on the Bighorners with energy weapons, you get 50xp for a bull and I've just found a good pasture and slaughtered at least fifteen so far. All just waiting there for the guns. Pret a mourir.

I'm on this as well, very first time I've played it. I've wanted to play it for years, as I've always heard it's the best Fallout, and because it's a Chris Avellone joint, and he always tends to be good value.

In fact for ages I hoped they would do a remaster - but then I realised it was BC on Bone, THEN I realised it was also free on Game Pass!

So I started it about a week ago at long last, and I'm about 17 or 18 hours in. I've just reached the New Vegas strip.

Got to say, I'm really liking it. It's a little rough around the edges, but it's a hell of a lot of fun. The gameplay is the usual clunky Bethesda engine fare, but the writing and the ideas are really nice in this. It's not Ibsen or anything, but I really love some of the stuff they've come up with. I just did the mission at the REPCONN test facility last night, and it really took me by surprise. I thought it would be a straightforward 'go here, kill ghouls, come back for reward', but it turned out to be a multilayered series of quests, with a storyline that happily veered away from the obvious.

My character majors in Guns and Sneak, with a side of Speech, Lockpicking and Science (as there seem to be numerous skillchecks for these which open up alternative avenues for missions). I've got a healthy 7 in Luck, so I've been killing it at the blackjack tables in Freeside and the Strip, meaning I've finally been able to get myself a silencer for my 10mm pistol, and a scope for my hunting rifle. Plus some better armour. Looking forward to cracking it all out later on.

Really, really cool game. The load times are, I assume, much shorter than they would have been on 360, too, so that's nice.

[JazzFunk]

It's a long time since I played it on an actual 360 but assume the load times are improved, it's so quick to load a game or go into different areas, it's great!

Deffo a shining star of a game, so many ways to get through it as well. I've upgraded pretty much exactly the same abilities you have (Lockpick and Science are essential early on) but I've been making money in different ways, more by killing folk, stealing their stuff and selling it. Or stealing from shops. Accumulating Cartons of Cigarettes, lol, they add up! Pre-War money, it's not worth much but it takes up no weight.

I'm the grim reaper in a cowboy hat, right now. Just entered The Strip. So many opportunities to use the Silenced 22 but everyone can see me. I'm too good, though. My Sneak is nearly 80. Already picked two off.

One thing to beware of is the glitching. You can work around it but it's the glitchiest of the console Fallout games. It will freeze up intermittently, usually at least once on a long sesh.

The worst glitch is more an annoying one, it has to do with surface clipping on horizontal planes, sometimes you can 'lose' items beneath the floor. For instance, I think it's Miguel's Pawn Shop where there's two boost magazines on the counter, kind of on top of each other. If you steal one, then the other magazine will drop through the counter into the Uncanny Valley (weirdly, it just respawned after a further 20hrs play).

This can happen sometimes with enemies, I had to kill someone and take their head but their body had sunk through the floor. Luckily, you can still search around with your cursor and find a couple of pixels where you can highlight the lost corpse so it's not game-breaking. Doesn't happen often, though.

Couple of tips. You can pick stuff up by clicking R3/the right stick. Not only can you have fun with severed heads, putting them on tables n stuff, it also helps you steal items because you can pick them up and move them to places where you're Hidden (only just realised this little trick. Duh).

Also, when exploring confusing caves or Vaults, I've started dragging bodies to doors I've been through, almost like using a bit of twine to get through a maze. It's clumsy but it makes it a bit less confusing.

That's what I like about the game. Really does feel like there's loads of different ways to play it. Haven't even started on Caravan, yet!

[JazzFunk]

Also, there's an old woman in a shack with about three dogs near the Helios building. Whenever I try and buy playing cards off her, the game freezes. Every time! Doesn't seem to happen to everyone, tho.

[JazzFunk]

Also, someone tell me how to finish the ED-E mission! It's one of them half-glitchy things, it has to trigger at a certain point but it's actually an uncertain point...

Still, got two companions now and they're helping me make mincemeat of tougher or swarming enemies.

[wakka]

Nice tip regarding dragging items you want to steal to a place where you can be 'Hidden', Jazz, thanks. I knew about the dragging thing (I gave it a try since I remembered it from other Bethesda engine efforts, it was a 'wow' moment in Oblivion BITD), but hadn't thought about using it in that way.

I haven't started on Caravan either! I met a few people early on who were up for playing, but it said I needed at least 30 cards. That was probably about 15 hours ago and I've been buying every card I've come across since then, so I must have loads. Looking forward to encountering a willing player, now.

That's what I like about the game. Really does feel like there's loads of different ways to play it.

Yeah, when you research this game online - which I've been doing pretty frequently to ensure I don't mess stuff up - you can really see this. There is such a lot of love for this game on its subreddit and in other places, with people doing all kinds of interesting/crazy builds to tackle it in different ways.

One thing I have noticed is that it seems to use invisible walls a bit more readily than, say, Skyrim. Sometimes when trying to cross mountainous bits I've been hammering the jump button to try and finagle myself to where I'd like to get to, but it's having none of it. It doesn't look like you can quite reach everywhere in the same way that you can in other Bethesda engine games, but maybe I'm wrong about that.

Not sure what to tackle next. My next 'main quest' mission is to meet Mr House at his casino, but I'm wary of rushing through the main stuff too fast, so might step back and do some of the side missions that are currently in the docket.

One thing I will say about this game - it's the first Bethesda-engine game I've played that has an actually interesting main storyline. It's the most intriguing bit of this game, whereas in Oblivion and Skyrim, it was always the most boring compared to the fun to be had with the Thieves Guild, Dark Brotherhood, etc.

Also, there's an old woman in a shack with about three dogs near the Helios building. Whenever I try and buy playing cards off her, the game freezes. Every time! Doesn't seem to happen to everyone, tho.

Fortunately that didn't happen for me. You probably know this, but don't kill her. She has something you need for one of the missions at one point.

[QualityChimp]

One thing I have noticed is that it seems to use invisible walls

I once spent a whole night working my way around a mountain full of invisible walls. The walls just made me want to get to the top even more. Finally made it to the top and was rewarded with a mountain full of hidden missiles.
It comes into play a bit later in a mission, but it was fun finding my own way there.

This weekend I played and finished Untitled Goose Game. It's unlocked some more missions, but it was a lovely little jaunt and the final mission was hilariously tense!