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What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them?
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
Elden Ring: I'm going super slow, but killed Agheel and Leonine Misbegotten. Agheel was pretty tough until I learned to control his fire attack, after which he was still difficult, but I was able to gank Leonine with the nearby NPC summon and my bow, which was ridiculously easy. He's fast as hell, but that apparently doesn't matter if he can't close the distance. I'm now working my way through the Stormveil Castle dungeon slowly. I'm down to 1-3 hours a day depending on how I'm feeling because sometimes I'm just not in the mood for the sort of problem-solving this game has, especially in the dungeons.
Baba is You: I got it in the Ukraine bundle on Itch and will be buying this one at full price soon. I started it up, and the puzzles kept shorting my brain out with how the solutions played out. I'm used to them now, but where I am the puzzles have gotten incredibly difficult.
Lost Ark: I'm ilvl 596.66, I need to hone one more level to hit 600 to progress to the next continent just to continue the storyline.
I've exhausted every form of currency I have to buy mats.
I've run every dungeon, raid, and island feasible to get the mats to hone that last level.
I've used every method available to increase the chances of it succeeding at honing that one last level.
It's all failed.
No matter the percentage chance, it's failed.
I'm now out of the mats needed to get the next level of honing.
I am unwilling to grind for days to get them.
I am unwilling to pay real money for a slim chance at getting the last honing level just to be able to continue the basic storyline.
And if I'm reading correctly all the work to get my first tier gear to +15 honing is going to transfer to my second tier gear at +1. So the effort will be for naught and I'd have to go through all of this again.
Tonight, I will log in. I will do the raids/dungeons/dailies, etc I can do while in town/on a single continent; I will not travel, I will not island hop.
If I do not have the mats necessary to try my slim chance at honing at the end of that, I will uninstall.
If I do have the mats needed and the honing fails, I will uninstall.
If it succeeds, I will continue the story until I hit the wall again and then I will uninstall.
My time is worth more than this RNG grinding crap and I only spend real money on cosmetics in games, not gambling.
Elden Ring. So much Elden Ring. I'm done with almost everything I could find in the first 2/3 of the map, and finally being able to consistently hammer most remaining bosses in a try or two. Even with as many hours as I've put into it, it still is keeping my attention. There's still big empty areas on the map, so I imagine I've got some more to go.
Quest 2 - In addition to a now daily 30 minutes of Beat Saber, I have picked up Walkabout Mini Golf which is actually a great experience. It's so much fun, and the haptic feedback makes it feel like you're hitting a little ball. The courses are creative and very fantastical; many of them couldn't be done in real life, either because the setting is too fantastic (space station) or cost (gothic castle, private island). At the end of each round, you get a nice overview of the course in miniature.
The PC I have been trying to put together is still in pieces on the desk next to me, so no other computer games.
Boardgames - we tried out Codenames the other day, and my 7 year old is able to play and be competitive at it. He's a phenomenal guesser, but a below-average (for our household, anyways) clue giver; I'm sure that'll change quickly. The culminating turn in our game the other day, I was giving a clue for "iron, compound, lawyer" and gave the clue "steel, 3" (steal); he was able to quickly identify that iron was made for steel, steel is a compound of iron and carbon (it isn't really but an alloy is close), and that if you steal, you will need a lawyer. He was also delighted that he knew steel was a mixture because of how much he enjoys watching Alec Steel.
Your seven-year-old has sharp thinking skills and great background knowledge. He's better at Codenames than I am! Kudos to him.
He's better at guessing than I was, and I'm fairly good. He was good at the lateral thinking when presented with the clues, but he had a hard time forming clues with lateral thinking. But to be fair, he is seven.
I'm just happy that the kids like playing boardgames and are pretty good at them.
The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition — I played the original SMI (1990) when my best friend in grade 2 introduced it to me. We spent hours cracking up at the jokes and mulling over the puzzles. It's the first adventure game I ever played and one of the first games of any genre that I beat. Now my kid's in grade 2 and I realized it was time to pass the baton, so I fired up the 2009 remaster and gave it a play for the first time in at least a decade.
The original game is a legend and many words have been written about it. I won't rehash those here but I think it still holds up as a beautifully executed, hilarious and fiendishly difficult point-and-click adventure game. It's really the archetype in my opinion. Its absurdist, anachronistic take on the pirate theme remains unique. I only wish I didn't remember all the puzzle solutions, because the game feels a lot shorter when you know exactly what to do.
The Special Edition is a mixed bag... First I have to praise the incredible voice acting. The original two Monkey Island games were unvoiced, with text captions for all dialog. The third, The Curse of Monkey Island (1997), cast newcomer Dominic Armato in the role of the game's protagonist. CMI was itself a mixed bag, but Armato's voice so perfectly embodied the character that it would be impossible to hear anyone else in the role. The supporting cast including Earl Boen, Alexandra Boyd, Leilani Jones, and Patrick Pinney are also notable. Bringing them all back to voice their characters in the first game was a stroke of genius, and they all do brilliantly. They sound exactly like I heard them in my head as a kid.
The visuals are less good. Obviously they're HD and running at a nice smooth framerate, but they lack details in places the original didn't and feel fairly cheap. Some scenes are weirdly still where you would expect them to be animated. The original game featured a number of moments with highly realistic character close-ups, which have all been replaced with the new stylized cartoon art style. This isn't necessarily a problem, but I miss the old style. I noticed a number of layering issues where backgrounds would clip in front of foreground characters or distortion effects were poorly masked around objects. The most egregious issue was caused by the change to widescreen: there are a couple scenes that get rearranged off-camera as soon as they scroll out of view, but you can actually see it happening on the margins now because this wasn't adjusted for the new aspect ratio. Someone should've caught that in development.
I've heard a lot of covers of the iconic Monkey Island soundtrack over the years, and the Special Edition soundtrack is one of them. Not sure what else to say about it. It sounds good, but it's not particularly noteworthy. It works.
The game's controls and UI were changed for, as far as I can tell, no good reason. The original had a permanent menu at the bottom of the screen containing nine verb buttons and your inventory. This worked great. Now the verbs are hidden behind obscure keyboard shortcuts. However the game will usually give you the verb you need when you right-click an object, which is problematic in two ways: First, it takes some of the challenge out of constructing a solution; second, it happens often enough that you take it for granted, until you need a different verb and you're out of the habit of selecting one manually. This is most apparent when you need to GIVE something to another character.
It's frustrating to have to open the new inventory modal to see what you're carrying instead of having it always visible at the bottom of the screen. Especially when you need to combine multiple items to solve a puzzle. Here's a particularly frustrating difference I encountered:
Puzzle spoiler
For one puzzle, you must transport a highly caustic liquid across town, quickly transferring it from one mug to another, to another, as the acid eats through each vessel. In the original game, you would do this:USENow, the process looks like this:
Ikey to open the inventory modalUkey to USEIkey again to open the inventory modal, since it closed after the last stepEven when you know what to do, it's much more frustrating to get through this part of the game in the new way, especially because the mugs melt quickly.
Despite its flaws, I did enjoy the Special Edition and I'm looking forward to playing through the sequel knowing that it will have the same strengths and weaknesses. My kid was less impressed. Monkey Island will always have a special place in my heart, but it's no Minecraft or Pokemon.
IIRC, you could switch it back to the original style / graphics at runtime?
Yes, I should've mentioned that is possible. I kept the remaster style enabled for my whole playthrough.
So, in Elite: Dangerous (still playing!), in PowerPlay (the political conquest game mode), things have gotten even more interesting. In the group I'm in, we roleplay being honourable and ethical, or at least having good sportsmanship; whereas the group which opposes us does the opposite, or at least is painted to be the opposite. (And, whether it's actually roleplaying, or accusations about the morality of the human players themselves is up for debate.)
It's been revealed (or alleged) that the opposition has exploited a (known) bug which gave them an unfair advantage in a recent (week-long) contention for gain/loss in a star system. So, just like in real world politics, humans can't be trusted to act ethically and "within the rules", and the "good guys" have to deal with it and employ compensatory countermeasures.
It's fun and interesting to me to engage in these coordinated, long-running grind actions as a large group, and seeing the combined contributions result in tangible in-game effects and events. The strategizing, the tactical maneouvering, the surveillance, the intel... and, all over the course of days, weeks, sometimes months. It's like watching a large group of people slowly shift mountains.
Vampire Survivors
There has been a long list of people mentioning this in past weeks, and I'm happy to have finally joined that train.
Life has been hard recently, on both a broad level for the world and for me on an individual level as well. I haven't really been in a gaming mood, and when I have been, I've only wanted to play something that's very mindless and feel-good.
This game is wonderfully, beautifully mindless and feel-good.
Continuing to play more Guild Wars 2, in the past I've mostly been playing solo, but I've been having a great time since joining a new guild. I've tried to get real life friends to play, with limited success, but finding nice people who already play and making friends with them is much more effective. I for one am shocked that engaging with the 'guild' part of 'Guild Wars' would have positive results. No one could have seen that coming.
I've also been playing Timberborn which is a relatively standard city builder, but you play as a civilization of sentient beavers. The tech tree is pretty simple, but the difficulty comes in managing water. Water irrigates land and makes it so you can grow crops and obviously your beavers also need to drink it to survive. So the maps have large rivers cutting through them which you can build your settlement along. But every year there is a drought where the river dries up. And each year they last longer and you have more beavers you need to take care of, so you have to take perpetually more extreme measures to keep your people alive.
The tutorial shows you how to store water between seasons in water barrels, but for some reason it doesn't tell you that you can just dam the river and ride out the drought with a huge reservoir of water. And if you do it right you don't even have to stop growing crops. Discovering that was game changing and I wish the tutorial had mentioned it and explained the actual mechanics of the droughts and how to dam rivers. I thought it got hot and all the water dried up, but what actually happens is that the river's source stops producing water so all the water flows downhill until it finally goes off screen. If you interrupt the flow you can hold onto a bunch of it and droughts become MUCH more manageable. Again, no one could have predicted that the key strat for a game about beavers would involve damming rivers.
Timberborn is an excellent Banished-clone. Probably even better than Banished itself.
I agree that the tutorial should have put way more emphasis on the water mechanics. Because the water management aspect is so core to the game. Everything else will wither away and die without water. So using dams, reservoirs, and canals is to your maximum advantage.
Districts are another area like that. They're so important for expanding and gathering resources, yet there's really little direction on how to effectively use them. And managing district trading is super clunky, at least when I played a few months ago.
A particularly positive area, at least compared to Banished, is the AI. They're not nearly as dumb as Banished's people that will starve to death, even though food is plentiful, because all they want to do is hoard food. So far, I haven't encountered that issue in Timberborn.
All in all, great game. I'd like to see them add more depth (ha) to it though, especially on the industrial chains. I'd love to see a vanilla Timberborn with something like Banished's Colonial Charter mod.
Yeah, I haven't figured out how districts work yet. I would love to build another settlement, but my builders only have so much range, so it's unclear to me how to actually make that new district in a way that benefits me more than just making my main district bigger.
And yeah, the food hording in Banished was a problem
Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin
I've been at the final boss for a while now and keep getting my ass handed to me. This game in general is really brutal with it's boss battles, easily wipes the floor with anything SotN threw at me. The actual levels are pretty doable, though. Overall I like the game, though I have my issues with the boss battles and the quest system. Love the anime aesthetic, too, not too hot on the older style.
SMT Devil Survivor
Dropped this one a while ago on day 5-7 since I got stuck, so I'm going through it again now. Stuck at the first of the Bel boss fights, definitely one of the worst fights in the whole game since everything is super rigged (enemy teams have their weaknesses and strengths spread almost perfectly, and I only have magic attacks that target multiple enemies so I'm forced to rely on physical attacks, Beldr can only be hit by the MC's physical attack, Beldr has Vampiric Mist which is ridiculously broken, all demons can be revived when defeated, etc). Frankly I'm on the verge of dropping it again, but I just know that if I do down the line I'll just replay it again so I want to really beat the game for once and all this time. Not sure how to get out of this predicament though.
Drakengard
Going through this for the third time after dropping it twice. I'm not sure what it is with Yoko Taro's games, as I really hate his edgy ass doomer writing style (I just really don't appreciate how all of his games seem to solely exist to subvert and criticize action and RPG games), but his sense of aesthetics and atmosphere is something to behold, at least (especially so in NieR). Kinda just want to put this one behind me as I keep coming back, so this time I'll finish it for real (currently in the desert stuff).