What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them?

The husband bought Pokémon Legends Arceus. That means I have to play it too.

I’m one of those people who have become very disenchanted with the state of the series. It got dull a long time ago, and the series went the wrong way with trying to make it even easier with Let’s Go. Then the last mainline game came around with some changes, but not enough.

I guess someone heard me because this game got made. For some reason I had not heard anything about it until about a week before it came out. It looked like they were going to make the game in the same mold as Breath of the Wild and that seemed really interesting.

That being said, it takes a while to get to that point. This is still a Pokémon game. The game holds your hand way too much at first, and it was so frustrating to play through because it felt like it was trying to keep me from actually playing the game. I don’t know why it had to do this because a lot of the finer mechanics get little explanation or their explanations are otherwise made optional.

The game has three major flaws to it. The first is any and all attempts at storytelling. Everytime I see a text box on the screen I get irritated as I quickly try to tap them all away. All the interesting plot points are told visually anyways. The second problem is that the human characters all look kind of weird. To make things worse, anyone who is not the main character has really distractingly low resolution textures to them. And the third thing is that most of the music is pretty bad. The battle songs and a handful of field songs are good, but the most commonly played tracks, such as the village theme, are anemic and forgettable.

My final complaint is for the combat. Combat in Pokémon games has always been easy to break, but combat in this game is just plain broken. One hit kills are extremely common. At the same time, turn order is fungible so it’s possible to toss your Pokémon into combat only to see it immediately get attacked before you can do anything - sometimes twice.

That being said, it’s actually pretty good when you actually start playing. Combat is actually avoidable when it comes to wild Pokémon. You can capture them without having to fight. The fields have a sense of freedom and adventure. You can do just about whatever you want to do in the game. Just so long as you don’t go back home.

Over the weekend I started playing Axiom Verge, which is a sci-fi metroidvania. I'm not sure if it qualifies as horror but the atmosphere is hauntingly beautiful and the alienness of the environment gives me the heebie jeebies sometimes. Every once in a while I come across a weird new enemy with freaky movement patterns that sends me running in a desperate panic.

Still trudging my way through Kingdom Come: Deliverance, day-by-day, hour-by-hour. It is probably the most I have stuck with a single player game in a long time. While I have only put in maybe an hour a day for the past two weeks, it has been a pleasure to play. I'm looking forward to wrapping it up though so I can jump into Timberborn.

Stardew Valley: I hit the breaking point of my Joja run: Getting the Greenhouse after grinding corn and, later, cranberries. I've got strawberries growing in there right now and will be speeding into Ancient Fruit by spamming seeds in a Seed Maker until I get two (one for Gunther, one for me).

Edit: Ancient seeds from the seed maker are immediately plantable.

Half-Life: I started last night, figured I'd do it for the Backlog Burner. I started Source and Black Mesa at different times, but figured I'd experience the original on Normal difficulty. It's fun so far, and pretty horrific, but also almost campy because of how old it is, and how heavily memed it is.

Tyranny: I finished the first act, and am working on some side quests, but am getting back on track with the story.

Icewind Dale: I've wanted to play this one for years, and am slowly chipping away at it. I got lost right out of the tavern, which is a bad sign, but I'm back on track and just need to get to the quest point. I may abandon it in the short term to keep plugging at Pillars of Eternity, however.

Halo 1 - Infinity

I recently (re)played the numbered Halo games in order to prep for Halo Infinite.

The original Halo games were popular at release for their multiplayer, but they also exemplified co-op done properly: there was feature parity between players 1 and 2, the games could be played split-screen, and campaigns could be started from mission select. Plus the setting was just plain cool. Despite the story's linearity, the world appeared massive, an illusion accentuated by the conspicuous arc of the Halo ring across the sky.

Revisiting these games nearly two decades later, the game play still holds up today. But the story remains just as incomprehensible now as it did when I was kid.

Halo 1

The first Halo game actually tells a pretty interesting story, even if the delivery is a bit bungled. The story begins with you, a spacefaring supersoldier, repelling aliens from your skyscraper-sized spaceship. Cool. You crash onto an alien world, which is not actually a planet but a gigantic, artificial ring. Also cool.

You learn that this ring is actually a weapon, which you assume the aliens will mount against humanity. But -- and here's the twist -- the ring is actually a weapon against all living organisms, a tool build by an ancient civilization to destroy the Flood's food supply.

You see, even though this game presents itself as a game about shooting aliens, it's actually a game about shooting alien zombies. The entire premise is actually pretty intriguing, but as most of the story is told through cutscenes a few minutes long, the delivery is imperfect. (Imagine writing a script for this idea constrained to a 30 minute TV timeslot, and you can get an idea for how the story might feel a bit loose.)

Halo 2 - 5

But after the first Halo game, the story just becomes more and more convoluted. Halo 4 and 5, in particular, center on the Master Chief protecting his AI girlfriend, which is pretty far removed from the zombie-alien premise. I suppose this was the developer's attempt to humanize the Master Chief, but honestly it was pretty awkward listening to Mr Macho go through an emo phase.

The gameplay generally improves throughout the series, with the exception of Halo 4 (I did not appreciate constantly running out of ammo); in fact, I would say that Halo 4 was the least memorable of the games.

Halo Infinite

The hookshot really makes you feel like Spider-Man.

Jokes aside, the transition to open world was done pretty well here, but I wouldn't say it's perfect. The gameplay loop is something like: do mission, transition to new open world area, gather collectibles, repeat. There is a story motivating all of this, but unless you're familiar with the plots of Halo 1 - 5 (and also Halo Wars 1 and 2), you probably won't care about it. Unfortunately the game ends on a weak note (a few non-open-world, back-to-back missions, culminating in a mediocre climax), which diminished my interest in exploring the world after I finished the game. There isn't really any sort of post-game anyway, other than the finishing the open-world objectives.

However, there is a glaring omission here. Remember how I said the original Halo games exemplified co-op done properly? Well, co-op isn't even available for this game -- at least not yet. Worse yet, there is no mission select, so you must restart from the beginning if you wish to replay a mission (again, for now). That means some items (notably skulls) are missable.

I will probably replay the game co-op with someone when it's available (the campaign should be pretty amusing now that I have the infinite ammo skull), but I'm not sure that this game captures the magic of the original.

I just played through Gorogoa on my phone. It was short, but honestly an incredible game. Never seen anything like it. The central puzzle mechanic is just so cool. I almost want to play it again even though I just played it.

If you haven't heard of it it's hard to explain honestly. There's 4 panels, each its own navigable scene, and different panels can fit together or overlap depending on what you're looking at within each panel, and rearranging them is how you progress thorough the game.

Apparently one guy developed nearly the entire thing, it was his first game, and it took him 5 years or so. He did everything but the music/sound. Pretty impressive. The game does have a pretty singular vision.

Loved the game.

I started playing Reventure (thanks @kfwyre).

A few quick thoughts:

1. I thought they were overselling it when you get to the setup and they ask how brutal you want it. They were not. After one of my deaths I had a character who’s eyes got pulled out and were flopping about as I ran around.
2. Some of the endings are pretty wild, my favorite so far is the one where I hugged the cat and eventually died of a hairball lodged in my throat.
3. Gameplay is tight. Very easy to pick up and play for 15 min or 3 hours.

Loving it so far

Going Under was a game from the giveaway here, a roguelite in which you are an unpaid marketing intern for a company bought by amazon"Cubicle" and are tasked with cleaning up (killing) all the undead monstersemployees residing in the ruins of the other startups bought by the conglomerate: A gig facilitator, a crypto mining outfit and a dating app. It's fun, with a pretty solid gameplay based on slamming very low durability objects and furniture found all over the offices you visit on the monsters until they die plus a bunch of semi-persistence mechanics on top, and will keep you entertained for several hours, although towards the end of the content (where I am right now) it does get a little bit repetitive.

Contains many many puns.