General gaming discussion

I'm just after putting the controller down after an hour or so of Tekken 8, a game out over a year ago, where I'm still playing as the same character, have put over 350 hours into since release, and with the latest 60 level battlepass ending today, I reached level 115.

So yeah, I'd absolutely stay gaming, between my own (ever-growing) backlog, games I've never played, and just replaying favourites.

If anything, if they stopped releasing new games I might actually have the time and patience to become actually good at the ones I do play.

I installed a few backlog games over Christmas, in order to force myself to start playing through them, and instead of playing them I'm playing Tekken 8 and looking at Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 and Avowed and thinking of getting them…

I did play Cyberpunk 2077 a few weeks ago which had been on my backlog for a while and really glad I did go for it. Actually just starting a new game is always the hard part because a lot of the time I just want to jump right into a game I know, mostly shut the brain off rather than focusing on new controls, systems, mechanics etc, and just waste an hour or two.

I started playing Bioshock last night. Creepy and scary.

I never took to the original 2, but was a big system shock 2 fan back in the day, so maybe that tainted it for me.
Really liked bioshock infinite though, which felt a bit controversial at the time too mind

Just ordered a leverless hitbox controller for fighting games. Determined to try and become ever-so-slightly better at Tekken 8, but some of the inputs required for the best combos (particularly for Hwoarang) are damn-near impossible to do on controller.

Going to be a strange but hopefully fun experience learning to use it, and maybe in time it'd make me more inclined to try Street Fighter again, because that's one where the inputs on controller (eg. trying to do something like double quarter-circle forward) just always felt so iffy to me and I could never get the hang of them.

Yeah I'm definitely going to have to reset my entire muscle memory for it, and it'll take a few weeks of practice to start being in any way decent with it. That's why I'm half thinking of using it for T8 on PC instead of PS5, and use it as an opportunity to learn a new character too (though I did get a converter so I can use it on PS5 as well).

It's a leverless controller though, no stick. Having a finger on each of the directional inputs should help rather than controller where it's just thumb doing all the work.

Even then one of my main issues is that some of Hwoarang's inputs are really difficult on controller. For instance switching stance then directly into backlash (one of his main combo-extending moves) requires pressing X+O, then X~O (meaning X then O with no frame gaps or overlap between, you essentially have to swipe your thumb across the buttons to hit it). Doing that in the middle of a combo, even with X+O bound to the R2 button, is just something I can't do with any consistency. I think some people hold the controller in a claw-type fashion to make it similar to a pad like the above.

Yeah I have a lot of Hwoarang's main moveset down, and a lot of it ignored because it's too circumstantial or risky. That would be the same with every character in Tekken given how huge their movelists are. I've just hit a bit of a barrier because there are moves that are kind of key to extend certain combos and get that extra bit of damage and I just can't pull them off.

Learning to use the leverless might help, but also might not. It'll give greater control over directional inputs, and help with things like button buffering. Still though, I'm looking at it more as something interesting to try and learn rather than something that will have me rocking up to Evo any time soon.