Video Games

Has anyone bought half life:alyx yet?

How’s everyone getting on with animal crossing. I kind of want to buy it, but don’t know if I’ll enjoy it.

Arriving in the next hour, already feel miles behind the rest of the world but excited to play

Want to ask the same question about Stardew Valley

I have, haven't had time to play it as much as I'd like but it's good so far. Only disappointment is no crowbar (and using a random metal rod I picked up didn't work).

Yep.

Obvious appeal of HL aside, I still find the movement in these games incredibly awkard. After rearranging the living room I've got a reasoably generous 4m x 4m space, but having to constantly think about when to physically move and when to teleport is a pain in the tits. Has a similar issue with rotation, you can turn either physically or using the controller. That's not stricly necessary, but not using it means getting tangled in the cable more often.

Some good gameplay mechanics though. After years of pressing 'r' to reload, in VR it's a frantic experience. Particularly when you drop the clip and a headcrab jumps on your face.

For added lols I discovered it's fun to start just before sunset. An hour later you take the headset off to find yourself in total darkness. Genuinely felt weird for a few minutes after, which has never happened before.

Animal Crossing is much like animal crossing (if you know what I mean)

Muscle memory keeps making me try to pull the stylus out of my 3DS, even though I'm playing Switch.

Today is a farrow day

Want to ask the same question about Stardew Valley

I haven't played Animal Crossing (no Nintendo) but oh my god Stardew Valley is amazing. It's just so... peaceful, you know? No stress. Just you, your farm, and your pretend friends. I love it.

Just the experience I need, it'll be the first purchase of a game on my phone, I usually only go for the free stuff

Which quickly devolves into figuring out optimum strategies for acquiring resources and expanding the farm which completely ignoring the social aspect until the farm starts looking after itself.

At least in any of my playthroughs!

Thanks for the heads up on that! An hour or so in and I'm enjoying it, great value for €4

Hahaha, yeah there is a tendency for you to move out of the capitalist ratrace to your nice, peaceful farm, and then just voluntarily implement the same industrialised capitalistic nightmare from which you originally sought to escape. But you don't have to do it that way! You can break free of your programming!

I'm more of a collector than an optimiser, so I seem to spend most of my time digging stuff up and taking it to the museum, or catching all them fancy rare fish. I work harder at Stardew Valley than I do at my actual job, I think.

I have it on 3 or 4 platforms. It's very good. There is a plateau which can be tricky to go beyond (You get to a certain stage and it's very grindy for example if you're trying to make a LOT of money to buy the expensive end game items) but it's lots of fun. Many hundreds of hours spent.

Completionist tips:

• interact with people and give them gifts they like or love as early and as often as possible.
  
• try to keep a few chests around your house with 'some' of everything so if you need one for a quest/build/ingredient you can come back to it rather than hunt for it and find out it's the wrong season.
  -Get the stick of returning from Krobus as soon as you can. See also obelisks and stable.
  -Get the greenhouse (community centre reward) as early as possible. First season is hard to achieve but well, well worth it.
  -Don't throw away/sell ancient seed when you find it. Grow it. Then pop the fruit in a seed machine. Repeat. Fill the greenhouse full of ancient fruit seeds. Turn the ancient fruit into wine. Put wine in cellar. Buy everything in the game with all the money you have.
  

Think I'm going to get back into my recent playthrough. I only had one more star achievement to unlock from memory.

Sound like solid tips, thanks a bunch!

Which boss is it? Did you manage to get past that part yet?

I find this game to be incredibly rage inducing at times but then on the flip side the satisfaction of finally beating the boss/part you were stuck on is great.

I've not played it in a few days, I'm still near the beginning of the game, currently stuck on the Hirata Estate.

Anyone played Twilight Struggle?

I have some friends/colleagues (political scientists) who really liked the boardgame.

Just picked up a One X direct from Microsoft with Jedi Fallen thingy for £259 delivered.

I've not gamed in years and i'm very much out the loop but it seems like a pretty heavy hitting machine for the money. I've got RDR2 and a set of wireless Turtle Beaches coming for old times sake.

I enjoyed this quite a bit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwwkjgHE2mk

Any recommendations for an external HDD for Xbox One?

The drive I currently has works fine on a PC but doesn't seem to play nicely with the Xbox (downloads constantly fail and the games on there rarely work) so guess I need a replacement.

I have one of these - great for speeding up load times.

££ though.

More my cup of tea:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrH0qN0Iw50

Cheers. A little rich for my tastes though.