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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.
Hardspace: Shipbreaker finally exited early access and released the last part of the story, so I played it through for a final time on the top "no respawns" difficulty. It was pretty much perfectly balanced. Right as I was finishing the overarching storyline, I had enough cash and parts to finish my personal goals as well. It was bittersweet to finish it, and I credit the writing and voice acting for making something that could have been solely a mechanics driven game into a deeper experience. A+, would recommend. Even Zero Punctuation liked it, and he rarely likes anything.
I’ve been playing a whole bunch of random games. Mostly I have been playing some of the PlayDate season one games. I know a bunch of people still are waiting for theirs so I wont talk about them other than to say that The Zipper is the one I am enjoying the most right now.
Among the other games I have been playing the one that stands out the most is a fan translated SNES RPG called G.O.D - Growth or Devolution: Heed the call to awaken. When you first start it seems like it’s something of an Earthbound clone, giving you heavy-hitting childhood nostalgia. You have a baseball bat to equip as a weapon and you also have a bike, which of course you have to get off to enter any buildings. You can even put in your preferred nickname for your mother.
So you go off on this bike trip on your own to visit your grandmother and stop in this town where you get goaded by local kids into checking the top of this mountain because the animals are acting up. You do so and find this strange rock and then as you leave aliens come down from the sky and start attacking the planet. Then you wake up 10 years later as an adult who aparabtly had amnesia and is one of a handful of people with psychic powers who can stand up to the aliens.
I’m case you couldn’t tell, this game is extremely weird. The writing is chocked full of comedy and as an RPG it doesn’t seem to actually want you to spend time grinding. Even with the similarities , this isn’t an earthbound clone, but if you want to play something entertaining and offbeat this might be worth looking into.
I've been attempting some Portal 2 speedruns lately. My last two full game runs were ~ 1 hr 35 minutes or so, which would put me at 475th or so in the No SLA leaderboards at speedrun.com if I submitted them. The video files are ~3 GBs per run, so I don't really want to submit one if I beat it a day after.
My biggest problem so far is keeping the concentration to not botch the execution for an entire hour and a half. Every now and then, I accidentally hit my quickload bind (on a mouse side button), which throws me back a map or so and loses me time for no real reason.
One of my other problems is not knowing all the skips. I am currently doing what I remember (and what feels easy to me) from watching runs, so I probably need to look up an entire tutorial for the run at some point (if it even exists and the knowledge is not just lost and doomed to be asked again and again, forever, on a Discord guild)
edit: after this comment, i got a 1h 30m time. i'll likely publish this and maybe attempt to submit it to speedrun.com. also, no accidental quickloads happened
i finally picked up Hades and started playing last night. i'm thoroughly enjoying the loop of gameplay, and death doesn't feel like so much of a chore since all the characters at home base have new things to say every time. it's very cleverly made!
It has also highlighted that i need to get my switch's joycons repaired, since they're drifting hard
Crackdown 3. Sometimes I just want to jump over buildings, throw things hundreds of feet, drive crazy cars, and wingsuit across a map from the top of a skyscraper, and this game delivers that in spades.
Started playing VRising recently and managed to start a server name on Linux by using wine. Sadly no native server available yet, but the first issue on the issue tracker is Linux support for the dedicated server. Actually tried decompiling the server executable with dnspy to see if I could manage to create a native build, but it didn't work out of the box. It might just be that dnspy is for .net projects and this might be based on c++... not sure.
I'm pretty sure the game is Unity with Mono scripting. That seems to be the case based on the burgeoning mod scene anyway, which uses BepInEx for injection.
I'll need to try again in that case. I did modify Valheim to ensure only one player was needed to sleep by modifying the DLL with dnspy. That was based in unity and could be decompiled quite easily.
Metroid Prime
Thanks to @TheJorro, I got a DIY remaster of the game up and running on my computer, including keyboard/mouse controls, high-res rendering and textures, and even a mod that changes the in-game button prompts to match my key config.
I’ve always wanted to play the game before but don’t do well with first-person games requiring stick controls (or WiiMotes). Thus, this is my first foray into it. I’m really enjoying it so far, though I’m absolutely terrible at navigation in the game. I have a good sense of direction and am quite used to mentally mapping game worlds, but in Prime I’m having to check the map a lot, and the routes between different areas don’t seem to have any sort of “stickiness” in my brain. I’ll often know where I want to go, but have no idea where it is on the map or how to get there from my current location.
Nevertheless, I’m still liking what I’m playing, and I’m genuinely impressed at how well PrimeHack and the texture packs run. It doesn’t feel like a clunky, imperfect mod — it feels like I’m playing a legitimate PC release of the game.
Rogue Legacy 2
I got my Steam Deck!
This is the game I decided to break it in with, and it’s honestly perfect for the device and sells it very well.
The game feels like a really solid iteration on the first, taking what it did well and adding more to that as well as polishing it up to a bright shine. The graphics are also gorgeous, so it’s absolutely lovely to play on my new little handheld masterpiece of technology.
Einhänder
Time on my deck is going to be split between indie stuff and emulation. Rogue Legacy 2 was for the former, and this is for the latter.
The PSOne is the console I’m most excited to emulate as it’s the main one I grew up on. My goal is to tackle some of the games from gaming magazines (remember those?) that looked awesome but that I never got to play because they weren’t stocked in my local Blockbuster (remember those?).
Einhänder is a scrolling shooter where you pick up different weapons that enemies drop and can shoot them alongside your main gun. Each weapon has two modes that you can swap between, so you can change up your firing style to meet the enemy patterns.
I don’t know if it’s a particularly noteworthy game, but as a kid it looked SUPER futuristic (it was in 3D when a lot of the rest of the genre was in 2D), and it was also published by SquareSoft who was a big name in gaming at the time, but not outside of JRPGs. I always wanted to see what a SquareSoft scrolling shooter would be like, and now I can!
And it’s… alright. It’s punishing and the kind of game you’re meant to kind of keep throwing yourself at over and over again to get through — very much “of its time”. I’m not interested in that sort of old-school play in the slightest, so I set the paddles on the back of the Deck to save and load savestates so that I can cheese my way through the game.
Also, this is my first time using DuckStation for emulation, and it’s awesome. Very easy to configure and super smooth to play on, even with increased resolution and PGXP turned on. The game looks great and there’s not a hint of the trademark “wobbliness” that defines the original PlayStation’s native playback.
I cannot tell you how thrilled I am to spend the coming months scratching gaming itches from 25 years ago! There is so much of the PlayStation library I want to explore (to say nothing of ALL the other consoles I also want to emulate!).
Wow, I haven't seen anyone mention Einhander before. I remember getting a demo of it with one of those demo disc packs that came with the PS1 and playing it for hours upon hours. I could never find a full copy of the game anywhere around me growing up, and as a result nobody else seemed to know the game existed.
I have found that a lot of games from back in those days don't really hold up all that well, especially after all the QoL and lessons learned since those very early days of 3D. Another game that kind of fell away from the time of demo discs that I don't think holds up well: Blasto!
Those are the exact kinds of games I’m interested in emulating! I’m under no illusions that they will hold up well. We’ve had two decades of game design advancement since then, and early 3D games had obvious sealegs even at the time that makes them age even more poorly than expected. Nevertheless, there’re some itches I’m excited to scratch, and I think there’s even an amount of non-negligible charm to older games — often on account of some of their flaws.
Also I hadn’t heard of Blasto until I looked it up and oh wait I actually did play that 20 years ago what a throwback. I’d completely forgotten about the game and don’t remember much about it other than I rented it (from my trusty Blockbuster!) one weekend. That one’s definitely getting added to my emulation series!
cc: @TheJorro
I tried out Blasto! and you were right. It doesn’t hold up.
It’s got tank controls which feel super clumsy by modern standards, and the shooting is imprecise, so you basically point in a direction and hope auto-aim makes your shots land. Plus, the limited draw distance gives the game that sort of unintentionally claustrophobic feeling that a lot of exploration-based 3D PSOne games have, where the level is only visible within a very short radius around you. Pop-in is constant, and not very far away from your character. I don’t really fault this particular game for it though, as it was a limitation of the system and happens across the PSOne library.
The game unfortunately also has the casual sexism that was rampant in games at the time, with you saving “babes” in scantily clad clothes who are rendered helpless by the level (e.g. locked in cages).
Also, platforming in the game is particularly bad. Tank controls just do not lend themselves well to it. I found myself using save states before what should have been even simple jumps or jump sequences, simply because I wasn’t sure if I’d screw up the inputs.
This one is definitely a casualty of time.
That definitely wasn't in the demo disc version!
Loved the Einhänder ost but I also don't know anyone else who has played it irl. The gameplay was, yeah.
So, this actually brings up one of the current dilemmas I'm facing right now regarding emulation.
I absolutely loved Mega Man Legends back when I played it ~20 years ago. I genuinely adored the game.
Part of me wants to return to an old favorite and re-live it, while another part of me wants to leave those memories intact and untouched. I feel like returning to old favorites might dim their shine, as from an older, modern perspective, all I'll be able to see are the game's flaws and issues, rather than what I originally loved about it as a kid.
I still haven't decided how I'm going to proceed with this and the many games I loved back in the day that I'm tempted to boot up again as an adult. Right now I'm explicitly playing games that I myself didn't play (or, if I did, that I don't have particular fondness for), and I haven't yet figured out if I'm going to cross over into "old favorites" territory or not.
Days Gone. Just got a ps5 horizon bundle and I’ve been playing days gone more than horizon or ratchet and clank rift apart. I love the survival-lite aspects of the game, making sure you have fuel for your bike, scavenging for ammo and scrap, the story isn’t anything mind blowing but the gameplay is very good. The world is also beautiful and I could just drive around the map on my bike for hours. If I had one complaint it’s the amount of missions for each faction could be increased, I need to get rank 2 in one of them so I can get better weapons but there are no more available missions for me and I have to wait until I progress in the main story for more.
There have been several games I've been playing lately, but hands down my favorite has been Splitgate, which is pretty much if you took Halo and added portals from the Portal games. It is really, really fun IMO. I've always been a PS-owning Halo fan, so playing a game that scratches that same itch is nice. The portals add a lot of unique, fun gameplay I haven't gotten from anywhere else recently. Though, it does suffer from a similar problem Fortnite had with the building mechanic. The portal system is easy to learn but challenging to master. Portals are really powerful and allow for an absurd amount of mobility. If one team (or even one player sometimes) has a significantly better understanding of how to abuse the portal system, the games can feel unbalanced. I've been playing for ~5 days, and I have only had 1 or 2 games that felt like that. The other big pro the game has is that it supports cross-platform play (but not cross-platform accounts). I play a lot of Rocket League because I have a ps4 and my two best friends have a PC and an Xbox. Any game that supports us playing together will automatically get a big gold star from me.
Note: I also mute everyone's mic as soon as we enter the game, so I cannot tell you anything about the community.
Morrowind (OpenMW): I'd abandoned it for a minute, waiting for 0.48 to come out, but they don't have a date, so I'm sucking it up with the grid spawn bug (a mob leaves the grid its spawn is in, check fails, spawns another). It's not so bad in most of the map, but the Ashlands got to be brutal. It's already fixed in
master, so it's just waiting for the rest of the release to be finished.Enderal: Forgotten Stories: I've gotten mostly bored of TES and Fallout, and wanted something similar but different and figured I'd just settle into this. I got rocked by wolves (fine... "coast deerstalkers,") so I turned it to easy, as apparently SureAI's games are harder than what they're based on. It's pretty interesting so far, I just got to just short of the first town, after you "Leave the Ravine" for your first quest.
20 Minutes Till Dawn: I watched a Twitch streamer play this for two days straight and was curious to the tune of $2.99, so I bought into it. It looked like Vampire Survivors, but you point and aim. I get why it's so addictive, I just played 81 minutes (according to Steam) and while it seems easy to unlock everything, getting to the end is incredibly difficult. What pulled me in is the description which invites you to "Choose from a variety of upgrades to create unique and game-breaking builds," which made me think of a killer run in early Risk of Rain 2, just that feeling of maybe not needing to play, and that you built yourself into that position. I haven't gotten there yet, but it seems possible.
Vampire Survivors: I don't get it. It's only a few bucks, so I figured I'd check it out. It's making sense, but I don't quite understand, in an intuitive sense, how to move through/around the horde and time the attacks early on. I get the design now, however, and it seems like once I get the hang of it it'll be as fun as 20 Minutes Till Dawn
Mintest + MineClone 2: Quite a bit is a little different from Minecraft due to engine differences (Carts, for example, are powered by punching them). It scratches my Minecraft itch but runs better, and is trivial to mod. I want to play peaceful, and be able to build everything, but you need mobs in MineClone for slime, for example, just like Minecraft. I'll probably turn them back on, as damage and dying is part of the game.
Final Fantasy XIV. There's an event right now where the mini-game rewards are increased and I've done nothing but race chocobos for three days. (To be clear: I like racing the chocobos, I'm not doing it JUST for the extra reward.)
If I had more time I'd write a bit more, but I'm having fun with the game overall. It has an absolutely massive amount of things to do.