What are you playing?

I recently finished up Plague Knight’s campaign and have been working on the challenge stages to get my Switch copy ready for the new Shovel Knight expansions. Here’s to hoping it’s a satisfying send-off to the saga because it’s ended up as one of my favorite platformers of all time.

I’ve been sucked back into Halo Reach. It still holds up, that’s for sure. the graphical improvements are sooo good. The anti-aliasing they used on the 360 version always bugged me with all the ghosting it made on everything, but it’s gone now. I just wish they made the PC version cross-play with the XB1 version of MCC. Reach became a family event at my house back in the day. My kids, wife, and I would play together nearly every night. So many memories, like when my son and I played on Exodus on Legendary with all skulls on…took us 8 hours but we did it. And then there was the time me and the kids did a multiteam king of the hill and won! it was so awesome.
And while we still can 4-player somewhat on XB1, we have 5 people in my family now. Yes, we can still do it on the 360 version with one game running on XB1 and one on 360, but still…

Also, unlike all the other games in the MCC, you have to grind to unlock all the armor. It doesn’t seem like it’s nearly as much as in the original version (took me 2 & 1/2 to 3 years to get to the Inheritor rank and unlock everything, but still, it would have been nice if it would have carried over or just had everything unlocked from the start like Halo 3 and 4 had.

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yeah i was decent at it, my biggest fault was always rushing down the enemy and over extending. so alot of the time when i was a rookie id get totaled bad lol. but after a while i learned how to outfit mechs and made better decisions so i brought in the kills. its pretty satisfying when youd blow stuff off your opponent, or youd get a gauss rifle shot right into their canopy for instant kill, or you blow up their ammo

I’ve always loved the idea of Mechwarrior but had mixed experiences playing it. I started with the vary first one bag in the barely recognizable polygon model days and have dabbled in and out since then. I played some of Mechwarrior online and enjoyed it but never quite ramped into the “proficient” category. I liked the Mechcommander games and the new Battletech game is great - I just don’t spend much tome on my PC so I haven’t gotten very far in it.

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I truly wish Halo: The Master Chef Collection was part of Xbox Play Anywhere, as I want to play on both my PC and console.

I picked up the Xbox One version this weekend since all the games are there, and I feel more like playing on said console, but I’m cancelling my Xbox Game Pass Ultimate at month’s end (not worth the cost to me since I don’t have the time to binge game anymore) and I don’t have, or want, Xbox LIVE Gold, so if I want to play Multiplayer I’d need the PC version.

I’m gifting my father the PC version for Christmas, and I’m mainly interested in Halo: Reach’s Firefight for Multiplayer with him, so I might simply pick up the PC version of Halo: Reach as well since I can get it for around $8.50 plus tax.

mechwarrior 5 appears to have a campaign similar to the strat game battletech that is fairly new. go planet to planet takin jobs, earn money/salvage, build up mechs, have diff pilots, not sure what else atm. im gonna buy it so i will be postin up here about it later

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I started playing Quake 2 RTX again. I hadn’t played it much before the RTX mod came out, and I didn’t realize that for some reason it didn’t come with the music files…after I found them online and added them…wow, what a difference playing with music makes! Quake 2’s soundtrack rocks!!

Also I finally figured out how to use my JoyToKey app and have it dialed in to where I can play older PC games with my XB1 controller now. Keyboard/mouse is out of the question for me anymore… my carpal tunnel syndrome is bad enough that playing for more than about 20 min will leave me hurting for days. I don’t have any issues with my XB1 elite controller though, so I’m glad I finally figured out a decent configuration for JoyToKey, because it opens up a lot of options for older FPS games to play that I’ve been avoiding because of lack of controller support.

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So I spent a few days playing through Shovel Knight’s last two expansions: King of Cards and Showdown. King of Cards feels somewhat Wario-esque with King Knight’s movement and attacks, and in some cases feels harder than Spectre Knight’s expansion (mainly since King Knight’s combat and platforming is not straightforward IMO). Thankfully I ran into only a few bugs in my playthrough: Apparently the game is crashing a lot for some people, but the worst I got was falling through the floor (which only happened once) and a cutscene that refused to work (it got stuck in a loop and I was forced to skip it). They did confirm a patch in the next few days, so hopefully it doesn’t stay like that for long.

Showdown is basically the multiplayer expansion, but it has an arcade mode with stories for everyone. The main problem is that you have to unlock most of the cast, but thankfully you can play on easy to do so (I only have one character left to unlock if I recall). I do find it weird how Shovel Knight is the worst character in the mode though, his moveset is far too basic compared to the rest of the roster.

Overall I can’t complain about what we were given. Shovel Knight was basically in development for years, and gave us a lot of content to show for it. Let’s hope the devs working on Shovel Knight Dig can give us a good game too; apparently that team has a lot of experience working on small indie games over the years, so hopefully they get the time required to make a refined product.

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Uhhh… I didnt know Ori and WIll of the wisps just dropped? I thought that was coming in 2020?

Its on Game pass as recently added and ready to install …but says March 2020. WHy would you install it now? Weird

It’s just an advertising gimmick to allow you to Preinstall the game so you can start it up the moment it’s released.

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WOW! Yeah I eventually figured that out… but Im like why would you install it 4 months early? Just seems like to much room for causing some drama with a consumer thinking they were about to play the game.

been playing mechwarrior 5 and its been fun in battle so far. its lacking in other stuff in the way of interaction with crew on your ship. its pretty bare bones, a bit disappointing whereas in battle tech, between each job you could talk to everyone on the ship. here, you just have 3 npcs and you cant talk to anyone of them lol. oh well whatever

so i had a solid lance of mechs. i picked up a rifleman mech, which had a good suite of medium and heavy lazers with a couple auto cannon 5 burst fires on it. i decided to try it out and put my top pilot in my centurion. to my dismay, i had forgotten to unequip my AC10 burst fire and just put a regular AC10.

lmao so long story short, the battle was absolutely horrendous with wreckage everywhere, fire, and death. we get back from the job and im well over a million bucks in damages and the idiot in my mech got both its arms and 1 leg blown off LOL, the other medium mech, same thing, ■■■■■■■ mech was a complete wreck. the light mech we had also no ■■■■■■■ arms and no legs, pilot injured 2.5 months. we came out 1.3 million on top and salvaged a couple of mechs which i sold for another 2 - 3. so it worked out, i came out richer but i lost a strong weapon. my brand new rifleman mech was also totaled in the battle, it was a completely different playstyle than what i am used to compared to piloting my centurion which rewards aggressive play. pretty fun so far! i just have to remember to stay on top of my lance and order them around more

Is this out now or are you playing a beta or pre-release build? I haven’t been keeping up…

After 4 straight weeks of Jedi Fallen ORder… wow what a great ending!!! Great game ! Must get if you are a star wars fan!

Now Im back on A Plagues Tale and Battlefront 2 Celebration Edition (such a great game)

its out now on the epic games store. thats an issue for alot of people, but idgaf. i played some more and me using my centurion things have been better. the squaddies are playing demolition derby with their mechs though lol. i seriously would hate to be our crew mechanic, we are goin to be the death of him

I didn’t think to look there. I think people get worked up over platform issues pointlessly. It’s no different than Xbox vs PlayStation fan boying.

i think its because people need various launchers and they see it as an inconvenience. to me its whatever, and not a big deal. if theres games tied to a launcher i dont play anymore, i just uninstall to free up space

It didn’t help that the Epic Store was grossly insecure for the longest time, and millions of accounts were stolen in just a few days. A lot of people won’t trust them because of that, myself included.

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So I went back into SFV recently, since pre-ordering the Championship Edition meant I no longer have to grind for Fight Money to unlock characters (which is honestly what made me despise the game for so long). I still don’t have as much fun with it as I want, but I’m still willing to give the game a chance, since I found characters like G to be a good amount of fun.

Also MK11 has now released Klassic MK2-style costumes for Kitana, Jade, and Skarlet. The catch is that it’s in their in-game store, so I’m playing to unlock as much of Skarlet’s items as I can to hopefully get a slight discount on the bundle (less than 30 hours left for the Skarlet set). They’re going to rotate the 3 costume/item bundles until January 4th, so there should be enough time to get all 3 sets hopefully.

Also note that there are two bundles for each character, two skins per. The Skarlett one that was up were alt colours. Each bundle should be up twice through this sale period.

For me, I have between 4000 to 5000 Time Krystals, but like any premium in-game currency, I’m going to continue to ration them for things I really want.

I main Kitana and play Jade, so I’ll buy the packs that have the primary colour of their Klassic skin. I’ve also done their character towers.

I don’t play Skarlett at all, so I won’t be buying any of her’s.

Ugh, I forgot they made 4 colors of each in MK11, that wasn’t the case in Injustice 2. Also I’m pretty much the opposite in that I only care for Skarlet; I honestly wish Noob and Cetrion played more like her, as she’s the only zoner I can actually do close range combos with (bad habit, I know).

Either way, I have all four colors of her Klassic Costume now. Whether or not I regularly use any of them is another story however; I already had a costume set I regularly use, but like with Terminator I sometimes change costumes for variety’s sake.

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So pretty much all of the major systems are having their Winter Sales now, did anyone else find something this year?

In my case I got:

Burnout Paradise Remastered (Xbox One)
Castlevania: RoB and SotN bundle (PS4)
Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight (Steam)

Honestly, I didn’t find much that interested me. I mainly just bought stuff I wanted for a long time, but didn’t want to buy at full price for some reason or another.

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