What are you all playing lately?
I'm always wishing there was more interaction and discussion on the niche Lemmy groups. Today I got to wondering if there were some games we could focus on to help foster our small community. But what is everyone playing or interested in playing? Are we all off playing our own obscure indie favorites or are there some games we share?
Comment below and upvote the ones that you have in common!
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This community is kind of in the shadow of all the other gaming communities, it doesn't feel like it has a strong identity to separate it. There's already plenty of weekly threads elsewhere to discuss what we're playing and I already feel like I repeat myself between !gaming@beehaw.org and !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works. Do we need another one here? But sure.
I've been playing through the Ninja Gaiden series lately. Finished Ninja Gaiden Black and Ninja Gaiden 2 on normal, playing on Xemu and Xenia Canary emulators respectively. Currently playing through Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor's Edge from the master collection, though I'm not sure I will finish it.
NG3RE should have the best combat in the series. The fundamentals are better than ever, Ryu is more fluid in his movements than ever and the combo strings are more flexible than ever. It just... I dunno. It doesn't feel as good, satisfying or just fun. NGB had extremely precise, measured and deliberate combat, albeit slower than the later games. NG2 was an unbalanced mess, but it had a visceral pleasure when it clicked that is simply unparalleled. NG3RE changes the formula a lot, and not always for the better. Trying to play for Steel On Bone counters is what the game wants you to do, but it's more reactive and less fun than previous games. And the animations aren't as satisfying as the executions in NG2. NG3RE also has even worse bosses, which is a damn feat considering the series has some real stinkers.
And let's not even get into the atrocious story, which manages to be maximally bad and lame but without ever crossing over into "so bad it's good" territory. The Call of Duty or Ghost Recon-esque military special agent framing also ruins the vibe, and the boring and terrible level design makes me miss the wildly varied and interesting locations of NG2.
I really don't know if I'll finish it, all I want to do really is go back and play NGB and NG2 again. At least I found FiendBusa's "Black" mod for it, that makes it a bit better.
Yeah I don't see many posts here so I was wondering if quizzing the community might inspire some new interactions and maybe help develop the identity here. No need to force in weekly things that other subs are doing.
I used to love Ninja Gaiden - what would be the best place to start? NG2 then? Unbalanced but satisfying sounds okay to me.
Sorry if I came off as dismissive, my first paragraph was just me musing on why this community in particular hasn't taken off.
So here is my opinion on the series: Ninja Gaiden Black is an adventure game with great combat. You have exploration, platforming and even an almost Metroidvania-like hub area you backtrack back and forth through. It's occasionally almost Zelda-like rather than purely an action game. Playing it on Xemu also offsets one of its flaws - stingy checkpoint placement. Just use (but don't abuse) save states and don't worry about it. It runs flawlessly on Xemu without any specific setup, and you can set rendering resolution to like x6 and it will look great.
Ninja Gaiden 2 (Xbox 360 version) feels like the crack cocaine of action games. Or I dunno, freebase Meth maybe. It feels like the best action game ever 50% of the time and the worst action game ever 50% of the time. It's almost pure action, just one murder hallway after another. The sheer amount of enemies, the aggression of the AI and the speed of the combat gives you adrenaline rushes like nothing else. HOWEVER! The game was rushed to release as the devs chased a bonus payout, and the game is blatantly not playtested and balanced properly. It's especially apparent in the second half of the game. I developed a sort of love-hate relationship with it: I screamed at it in frustration more often than most games but I also cannot wait to go back.
Setting it up in Xenia Canary was much more fiddly than using Xemu. The game must be hard capped at 60 FPS. You need to tweak a bunch of config settings to minimise the occurrence of an audio bug where sound might cut out until you restart (I can send you my config if you want). If you want to increase rendering resolution by x3 you need to accept some minor graphical glitches (primarily in the first couple of chapters).
Don't play NG3RE unless you've already played the other two and can't wait for NG4. Otherwise just pick your flavour - more adventure game and better balance or an unbalanced but beautiful mess? I should also note that both games are fairly short, my NGB playthrough was 14h and NG2 was 13h, so it's not a big commitment to play one after the other.
Huh, probably Black is the one then, I'm a pretty big fan of that style you describe and have actually been hankering for one lately.
Ninja Gaiden 2 sounds like someething everyone needs to experience once too though so maybe I'll put both on my list. I'm not super excited to fiddle with emulators but it sounds like it'd be worth it.
Yeah that seems about right. For Xemu, you need the BIOS, MCPX and HDD Image Files separately, which can be found here. No further setup or config needed. You can find the ROM at The Vault. Ninja Gaiden 2 ROM is also available there.
I can send you my config file for Xenia if you want to avoid most of the fiddling, but most of it came from YouTube videos and Reddit threads I found when googling "NG2 Xenia". It ran really well for me in the end. I experienced the audio bug maybe five times, and restarting fixed it every time. The graphical glitch artifacts were somewhat annoying the first handful of chapters, but still worth it for the higher resolution and completely disappeared after that (apart from during loading screens, but who cares about that).
You said you've played before so maybe you already have some fundamentals, but watching a tutorial video on YouTube that goes over basic principles can help a lot. The games sort of expect you to rely on certain mechanics that are never explained, and while you can figure it out yourself it's probably smoother to watch a tutorial. Also just experiment with combos and weapons: NGB felt very well balanced and encounters that seemed impossible at first felt very possible once "figured out".
Nice thanks for all that info and the links. I'm not sure if I remember how the gameplay worked anymore at all actually so maybe the tutorials are in order too.
Either way I'll probably hit you up when I inevitably tire of Nightreign. I haven't even played all the characters yet but I can tell my attention is starting to drift.
Anytime! I love these games and love both talking about them and helping out so just @ me or DM me or whatever works best for you when the time comes.
This community is kind of in the shadow of all the other gaming communities, it doesn’t feel like it has a strong identity to separate it. There’s already plenty of weekly threads elsewhere to discuss what we’re playing and I already feel like I repeat myself between !gaming@beehaw.org and !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works. Do we need another one here? But sure.
What a helpful addition to the discourse!
I just don't know that the fragmentation is super helpful at this level of users, we have what - 4 medium sized basically interchangeable gaming communities? I am not as committed to community consolidation as some other uses but it still feels like concentrating interaction would be better than spreading it out at this point in time.
So don't interact with the topic everywhere if you think it is too spread out. I see enough activity here and patient gamers to warrant them being different as they have different focus.
Plus each one is on a different instance. If there was only the one on beehaw I wouldn't see anything since I blocked that instance.