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

World of Warcraft: Shadowlands.

Season 4 just dropped. It's terrible.

I mainly do Mythic+ as my main activity. Blizzard upended the entire dungeon pool for Shadowlands and decided to replace the eight core dungeons we had on release with six past ones, only keeping Tazavesh Streets and Gambit. - which in themselves are the split-up parts of a shitty megadungeon that nobody likes doing because its mechanics are more annoying and difficult than the eight launch dungeons.

This has three problems. Firstly it doesn't replace the core Normal, Heroic, or Mythic dungeons, meaning the only way you'll be able to experience these six dungeons is on Mythic+ difficulty, which means keystones. Secondly, gear that drops from the launch dungeons on Mythic difficulty can't be upgraded with Valor because they're not part of the Season 4 M+ pool. Thirdly, they chose the two megadungeons from Legion and Battle for Azeroth, along with two boring dungeons from Warlords of Draenor, which was the only things put to a public poll.

Lower Karazhan is so incredibly overtuned that a Mythic Keystone run of any other dungeon eight levels higher is probably less challenging. It's so bad that one of the bosses can 3-shot geared tanks. Upper Karazhan has boss mechanics that will lead to an immediate wipe if one party member fails them. Mechagon meanwhile has been nerfed considerably but still has a lot of gimmicks and unintuitive mechanics which heavily punish the less knowledgable. It says a lot when Iron Docks and Grimrail Depot from WoD are the least problematic dungeons in the pool.

I'm actually astonished that Blizzard managed to fuck things up this badly.

The Looker

This is a bit of an odd one: it’s a genuine spoof of The Witness.

You can beat it in about an hour. It’s a decent parody with surprisingly high production values. It does some stuff I didn’t love (and there’s one puzzle I had to look up a solution to), but it also does some neat stuff too. Nothing at the same level as the original game, mind you, but it’s not exactly aiming that high in the first place.

Vampire Survivors
This game is addictive as hell, and an absolute steal for $3. It's basically a reverse bullet-hell game where you're the one firing all the shots, wading through waves of enemy, trying to survive for 30min until the Grim Reaper comes for you. As you kill enemies you can then collect experience from them, which you use to upgrade your current abilities or select new ones, and when you get the right combination of abilities the synergistic carnage you can unleash is oh so satisfying.

The dev is frequently putting out game updates, so despite being Early Access, it already feels like a totally complete game with a decent amount of maps, tons of characters, and abilities to unlock already. So don't let the Early Access part put you off, even if EA is something you usually avoid. I highly recommend this game!

Stuck in Time (formerly known as Loop Odyssey)
As the old name of this game suggests, this is a looping, RPG/exploration, idle game, a bit like Loop Hero (whose devs DMCA'd this dev, forcing the name change). However, instead of looping around on predetermined tracks like in Loop Hero, you actually custom design the loop path yourself.

The basic premise is that you're stuck in a time loop, in a Fantasy world, with no memory of what happened before waking up in the loop. You need to figure out what happened, and how to break the loop. Every action you take uses up your mana, which quickly runs out at first due to the high mana cost, but as you get more "familiarity" with each action the mana cost gradually gets reduced. So at the start you can only do a few actions before your mana or health runs out, which causes you to die, and the loop to reset. But gradually you're able to explore more of the map, and interact with more characters. This makes it pretty grindy but that's kind of the point, and it's not as bad as it sounds since you can just leave the game running in the background while you do other things.

This is one of the very few games where I 100%ed it... which took 179 hours, of which only about 10 hours was me actively playing it, so that should tell you a lot.

Melvor Idle
This is a single-player, "Inspired by RuneScape", idle game, and that's a perfect description of it. That may sound a bit dumb, perhaps, but I've really been enjoying it. It scratches the MMO itch for me, but without requiring me to actively devote hours of my attention every day to it (treating it like a second job), or having to deal with the annoying demands/expectations of guildees. It also has iOS and Android clients too, which is great since that allows me to occasionally check in on my characters' progress while out and about.

I recently picked up FTL again on a whim for the first time in nearly a decade. Never got a win first time around, read some posts on Reddit this week and that was enough to get me my first win on Easy. It’s enjoyable enough and easy to jump in and out of that I’ll probably stick with it until I get a few ship unlocks and get a Normal win

Just one update on the Live A Live remake.

The Near Future chapter has the theme song sung in English. Therefore the whole game has been ruined.

That being said, I’m actually really surprised that it’s the same singer as the Japanese version. It brings it a little closer to that shonen anime style. But I just can’t forgive it when it should have just kept the original lyrics and put subtitles on the screen. If they wanted to be extra awesome they could have had Japanese subtitles for the lyrics and have English subtitles written over them.

I should also mention that this chapter also has the best music remixes. I think I need to buy the OST for this game. Legend of Mana may always be my #1 Yoko Shimomura soundtrack, but this one easily makes it to #2.

I'm emulating because I can take it with me easily with my Deck:

Hot Wheels Turbo Racing For whatever reason I couldn't move my save from my "native" RetroArch to my Steam RetroArch, so I restarted it. I'm playing on the most difficult setting, as well, for a challenge. I like the game so much I don't mind trying to get to the same place I was.

Super Mario World, which I'm playing via Super Mario All Stars + Super Mario World. I also have a reverse hotkey set, since that's a thing that finally works now, and it helps me stay in the game more when I choke on a spot that would've made me rage. I frankly wanted to do this after the Mega Man Collection.

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater I'm sure this game speaks for itself. I just like playing it.

Not emulated:

Necesse: I've seen this game for years and it's somewhere between Minecraft and Terraria, top down, open-world, randomly generated, and I assume equally great as a single or multi player game (I only play single). I'm not in a rush to learn it, but it makes sense after the tutorial, and is pretty fun.

No Man's Sky: I haven't played as much as I want to as I've been quite tired, but it's still got me. I'm ignoring the expedition for now, because I want to do more in my main save, and there'll always be a new expedition.

League of legends. I don’t know why I started playing this but I’ve always wanted to get into a moba. I couldn’t get any of my friends into dota2 as that’s my preferred moba, but they would play league so I started playing and it’s been fun if not frustrating. The lore of runeterra is amazing and really that’s what has drawn me into the game.