games

Over the past week I have played and finished Disco Elysium for the first time. Masterpiece. I'll never play anything like it again.

Marvel Rivals is, surprisingly, quite good. They're leaning heavily on the comics style for the characters rather than another half-assed attempt at an MCU adaptation. The game is entirely FTP, with only cosmetics being something you have to buy as far as I can tell, and you start with all characters unlocked with no bullshit. If capeshit (or, perhaps more appropriately, the source material that was turned into capeshit) is of any interest and you can stomach multiplayer PVP, I'd recommend giving it a try.

Citizen Sleeper. Very engaging story so far. It does seem like everyone you meet immediately likes you and wants to be your friend, which is fine for most games. But in a RP heavy time management sim, I feel like you want to see those characters grow to trust you over time depending on who you choose to help, especially since you're an illegal sentient being in a stolen synthetic body who literally just showed up on their space station.

First time here, but I continue to play War Thunder.

Don't ever start playing War Thunder.

I started Farcry 5, having never played a far cry game before. They combine a lot of shit into Eden's Gate which I don't really like. The political commentary is just an aesthetic skin on the world, it doesn't really have any substance. Though, if you take it literally, you're a fed doing a color revolution against a revolutionary regime while pretending you're a smol bean resistance fighter. That kind of accidentally gives you some insight into how little the creators understand the right wing militia movement. It just comes off as if someone listened to some post-2016 podcasts and decided it would make a fresh setting.

I am yet again playing some shit I wouldn't have bothered pirating but egs gave me for free so why not.

I haven't played a Lego game since Lego Island (1997) but I've heard the Lego (insert franchise here) games are good and they're giving away 9 movies worth of Lego Star Wars so I decided to give it a try and first impression is holy shit this game is huge. I got a few of the glowing blue rpg elements upgrade token bricks and the game tells me there's 1200 of the goddamn things? So far the plot is literally just the movie scene for scene but with constant Lego based slapstick. Luke finding his family murdered hits weird when he's a little Lego guy.

Believe it or not, still UFO 50

Replayed No More Heroes before starting through the rest of the series. The 2000s must have been wild if having an apartment in californa, a pet, and still plenty of spending money counted as "being a failure."

I'm gonna try out Marvel Rivals later today, I like me a hero shooter now and then

Also not exactly playing but watching Northernlion play a ton of The Bazaar and it looks swag as hell. Hope it comes out of beta soon because you will not catch my ass paying $30 for early access

On that note I downloaded Hearthstone for the first time in like 5 years because I remember hearing about some PvE content they had that was pretty fun, which I thought might scratch the Bazaar itch. But all these solo adventures released in 2019 are still $20????? So I played a couple normal hearthstone games and it was... fine

Started a new game of Pokemon: Heart Gold

Deadlock. I'm playing the bodyguard of a djinn whose goal is to get a favor from The Patron to negotiate with the US government to have a piece of land of Wyoming for all djinns.

I have returned to playing The Isle with the updates to the newest version of the game. I would still never recommend anyone play it, but it has nice atmosphere for me to enjoy which is helping me unwind a little.

Also trying to get back into the headspace of thinking about developing my next game, now that things are potentially slowing down again... the egg sprites I made are calling to me...

Gmod sandbox rocks to this day. Got me off boredom after I had a timberborn overdose

Surprised no one's brought up Infinity Nikki, a lot of peeps here would love it (ignore the gacha, the free outfits are plentiful and cuuuuute)

Game's gorgeous even on lowest settings on my cheap non-gaming laptop, and I have NEVER seen another game put so much love and care toward fabric/hair textures and physics. Cute and relaxing way to spend time, though I've heard Nikki lore apparently gets unexpectedly dark, lol. I've been spending way more time playing since launch than I expected to.

I've been having a good time with Baldur's Gate 3. As someone who's never played D&D, I was very frustrated with the combat system initially and I still don't think it's good, but the rest of the game is just so damn great that it doesn't matter too much.

I finished it on Balanced and am now playing on Tactician, but I don't think I'll finish this run. Playthroughs are really long and it's probably too deterministic and solvable to keep me hooked.

Nobody Saves the World. It has an addicting gameplay loop. You get to transform at will into about 20 different forms and eventually you can mix and match their active and passive abilities. Each form has quests to level up, plus your character also levels up their base stats. There are bespoke quests scattered around the map as well. And some enemies have locks that make them invulnerable until you hit them with one of the 4 damage types.

Making up strong builds is encouraged in the major dungeons.

I'm probably two-thirds through the new Indiana Jones and I've kinda gone a bit more cold on it. It's still pretty good, but it does feel kinda limited in its design and with the locations never quite feeling as ambitious and unique as the first one, it kinda runs out of steam somewhat predictably. It is very well designed with a minimal amount of distractions or friction, but that also makes it feel pretty limited once you get over its surface level qualities, like the incredible production values, it falls quite short from its promise. Like if the game was a little bit more ambitious with its puzzles, had more in-depth item management and dialogue trees, this would actually be pretty close to a real first-person version of the old style of point-and-click adventure games, which would have been really amazing.

spoiler for an area halfway through the game

biggest disappointment so far must have been this: there is a part where you suddenly wake up in shanghai and it isjust absolutely gorgeously realized, with tons of details, many different districts and landmarks and different types of architecture, but your entire stay there only consists of a ten minute scripted setpiece of the city being bombed by the japanese, with lots of explosions and ridiculous action setpieces, but which is also weirdly bloodless and tame otherwise. like the entire point of the sequence seems to just be to brag about how many assets they crammed into there and how willing they are to waste them by just blowing them up in highly detailed explosions. for how much detail they put into the first vatican section in the game this just feels pretty iffy.

Tried PoE2 and fell off. I get the devs want a slower game but every aspect of it seems to be "pace of a snail". The loot, movement, campaign, boss fights. I don't need to be zooming like its PoE1 but I feel like I'm swimming in molasses. I know they'll adjust so much of it and it'll barely be recognizable by this time next year, but I'll wait until then. Or I'll just stick to PoE1.

So instead I've started Rimworld for the first time.

Partner and I are halfway through the North Downs in Lord of the Rings Online. We're like 10 levels overlevelled but this is where the main story took us and we decided to just finish every zone it makes us go to in its entirety. Except the Lone Lands, cuz even with 2 people on +3 Fearless difficulty, the group quests were a little difficult. Plan to come back later. Being overlevelled is a nice power fantasy and I feel like a sith lord zapping everything with lightning as a Rune Keeper. Game is so chill and I think it's going to take like 2 years for us to do all the zone at this pace or something.

Some stuff I've been playing lately:

God of War (2018) - This is my snowy winter game because I like to play games that are appropriate for the season. I was hesitant to start playing because I thought that the kid would be annoying but it turns out that the kid is cool and Kratos is the annoying one lol

Wildfrost - Another snowy winter game, this one is a roguelike deckbuilder with an incredible aesthetic. It's a bit too hard and punishing but I like it.

Risk of Rain 2 - It has the potential to be an amazing game but it's held back by some dumbfuck decisions.

Backpack Battles - Fun inventory management game where your backpack filled with stuff fights against other people's backpacks in asynchronous multiplayer.

Still on The Morrow's Golden Country, and it's still a blast. Also started another playthrough of Three Houses, and it feels so different now that I actually understand FE mechanics. There's so many potential builds, so many skills, and now I understand why Dark Mage and Dark Bishop are garbage classes. Also forgot how nice the game's aesthetic is, Intelligent Systems has been cooking with game presentation since Shadows of Valentia.

Still playing Sims 3. Through a combination of mod tweaking, removing conflicting mods, and starting over in a better town I've actually got the damn game to run smoothly for the first time ever. Obligatory fuck EA for not even putting an FPS limiter on the game; if you try to start it up without limiting the FPS it can literally melt your video card.

Got hooked on Balatro. Still playing the Silent Hill 2 remake at a slow pace. Installed Atomic Heart and Final Fantasy VII Crisis Core since I might play one of the two after SH2.

Finally got a free day to just unwind. Gonna play Guild 2 and Where the Water Tastes Like Wine. Was gonna play Bellwright, but sadly that game seems too intensive for my PC. :/

Just finished the first season of the walking Dead and just started the Wolf Among Us. Both for the first time.

I enjoyed TWD, definitely showed its age though and was slightly buggy a few times. But a great story none the less. Still on the first episode of The Wolf Among us, it's excellent so far. Top tier gameplay, graphics, animation, they really outdid themselves on this one.

Dominions 6 got updated so I have dipped my toe back into that absolute mess. Gonna try and take it real easy and not get into half a dozen games at once this time only to burn the fuck out.

Also been doing some Metaphor Refantazio, which is definitely an Atlus game. It's not like it's bad, and I am definitely having fun with it, but it's also just so fucking stupid and anime. I kind of love that though. I do have to say that the 3d environments fucking suck and it's sad to see that there was a lot of work put into them only for it to look like crap. Otherwise I have been enjoying how sexy all the menus are and the super fucking good battle theme with the guy chanting all crazy.

Murky Divers. Everyone should get it and join the gaming discord. It is all sorts of ridiculous and I can show folks the ropes. It's also only like $8. Good roguelite coop fun with a lovecraftian/anticapitalist bent.

I'm continuing my Half-Life 2 adventures with Episode 1. It's not too long, so I'll probably finish it this evening.

I wanted to replace my xbox one controller's joysticks, but I realized too late I don't have any desolder wick, and no hardware store anywhere seems to have any. I have some in for delivery so probably next weekend...

Not much, played a bit more Halls of Torment (finally finished the Vault with an invincible Shieldmaiden build), also played like 1.5 hours of Deep Rock earlier in the week.

I finished Rise of the Golden Idol, which I really liked overall, but the ending didn't do much for me, I thought it was going in a way that interested me, and the pivot to something that makes more sense, makes more sense but completely deflated it for me. Because the way the language puzzle works it meant my final guess was so far off that I only fixed it with the hint system. Also I really wanted it to be like 1 hour less of a game, so I wasnt up for another hour of being a detective and slowly swapping between screens and making notes on things. A very good game, but not as good as the first.

Persona 5, I've begun the second heist, and I really enjoy both parts of the game, but I almost wish I could just do the life sim and the dungeon crawler independent of each other, because it feels like I simply do not have the time to do what I want and I'm sure that's intentional, but it's the biggest struggle for me to play through these types of games.

Path of exile 2, it's good, it's also very poorly balanced, with needing a good weapon being so important and not really giving you the tools to get one. It has some really cool interesting boss fights, that have 20% too much going on. It does make it satisfying when you beat them, but also they need better sign posting for these boss fight mechanics. also the game has horrendous stuttering for me which I can only presume is because I'm on wireless internet that hiccups, but it's around 17ms ping most of the time so I really hope they figure it out. But given that poe1 had this issue for like 10 years and never felt great to play either. It's probably the thing that will force me to drop the game.

WFRP. We're closing in on the end of Shadows Over Bögenhafen. I'm particularly nervous that Bögenhafen is going to get destroyed. PC's haven't gotten much info on the chaos cult.

I’m playing Path of Exile 2 like my life depends on it, and I love it. It’s exactly the kind of game that o wanted poe 1 t become before it became super fast. Can’t wait for it to launch so that more friends can play it.

I finally picked up Stardew Valley again after the 1.6 update, and I am smitten with the game all over again. Perfect cozy game to get through the holidays too.

God damn trying to beat the time trials in crash bandicoot remaster is addictive. It’s just like being me back in ‘97 when my mum bought the ps1 to distract us kids from the divorce fr fr