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

In the past few weeks, I’ve blasted through The Ultimate Doom (minus Thy Flesh Consumed because it’s too unfair for me), Doom II twice (once vanilla and again with some GZDoom enhancements), Doom 64, Doom 2016, and I’m now about halfway through Doom Eternal. (I’ll get to Doom 3 at some point, but it’s so different that I don’t feel an urge to make it a priority.)

I honestly don’t know what compelled me to just go through the series like this, but I’ve been having a great time. I hadn’t played the original, Doom II, or 64 to any real extent, and I’m stunned by how well they all still hold up. I have a better appreciation for what Doom stands for now: high-octane action gameplay that keeps you thinking on your feet, cheesy heavy metal, horror/sci-fi, moddability, and gratuitous violence and gore purely for the sake of spectacle and fun, in direct defiance to the brown cover-based modern warfare trend that FPS games were stuck in for so long. It’s been a lot of fun to see how each of these games does this in different ways and emphasizes these aspects differently.

The surprise standout for me is Doom 64. It’s the same essential formula as the first two games, but tweaked a bit with slower movement and a much heavier emphasis on macabre horror. Its modified version of the engine allows for some things like moody colored lighting and some 3D stuff with bridges that I’m still not sure how they pulled off in iD Tech 1.

I played two and a bit hours of No Man's Sky and found it incredibly boring. Ship flight was incredibly awkward too.

I started playing Ooblets on the Switch yesterday. I didn't have very high expectations, but it is really knocking it out of the park for a $30 game. There's so much to do, the art style and humor is on point, and the dance battles are actually pretty fun. The music is also really well done. I've been describing it as a mix of Stardew Valley, Pokemon, and Animal Crossing. I think I'm only scratching the surface, and I've already sank 8-10 hours into it.

A bit of Wastelands 2: Definitive Edition. I'm probably going to play Wastelands 3 just after this. WL2 is a squad based post-apocalyptic RPG. I'll share that the main reason I picked it up is because a friend of mine is a CM at inXile (the game company that made this) but I would have been happy to have purchased the game even if it wasn't to support a personal friend. The game is funny, the gameplay is good, the story is good, the voice acting is good. It's all pretty good.

I'm trying to finish off Ascension 20 in Slay The Spire. I got through Ascension 19 without really reading any guides, but I broke down and started doing some reading and I've found that I have come to some fundamentally different conclusions from other people, so I'm trying to adjust my thinking and get better.

I fired up Elite Dangerous the other day and played for a half hour or so. I'm on the Engineer Slog right now, which is why I stopped the last time I was really into things. It is... a slog. I wish it wasn't a hard requirement to do things because the story right now is absolutely cool and I would love to be taking part in the Thargoid invasion more, but I have like 20 hours of engineering grinding before I'm even going to meet the bare minimum of being a bug hunter. Ah well.

Barely getting into Hollow Knight.

I’ve played many dungeon crawler types, my favorite so far being Blasphemous and Dead Cells being a game I constantly go back to. I actually bought HK when it came out and have been sitting on it this whole time. Seemed like a good time to finally play it with all the DLC out and silksong somewhere around the corner.

Obviously the game is great and feels very familiar. I’m maybe 12 hours in and it feels like I have uncovered lots of the map already but I don’t know for sure since I don’t actually know what is base game and what is DLC.

I set up Tale of Two Wastelands, which is a conversion of Fallout 3 to Fallout: New Vegas, with a train that takes you back and forth. I'm not enjoying it as much, which is to say I'm enjoying it about as much as i did FO3, mostly because there's this emphasis on scrounging for stuff, but I never seem to have enough ammo. I also don't like how everything is in the subway tunnels, essentially, it just makes things too claustrophobic, and they aren't even particularly interesting environments with all the local hubs being identical with the exact same threats. There are balance issues that wouldn't be so bad if I had some damn ammo, like the super mutants being more tanky apparently (but, I had that issue on vanilla FO3). Even on Very Easy combat seems off balance.

SUPERHOT: Mind Control Delete: I don't get this game. It's trying to have a narrative, I guess, and fake endings out the ass which are getting annoying. I'll see if I stick through it, but since it lacks the novelty of the first one I simply feel it's a harder sell.

EDIT: FO3 has a rough start and does similar stuff to FNV (I know, FNV came after). I noticed approaching the Capitol building that there was a super mutant camp. I snuck past it and there were super mutants and mercenaries, and the mercs would turn on me after dropping the nearest mutant. It was reminiscent of the direct route to New Vegas rife with danger, and they're forcing you to not go directly too the Cool Thing, and instead to take the sewers. It's not so bad, and it does help give the game a sense of scope.

As forseen last week, I have been playing the Yu-No remake.

I actually like it quite a lot. I’ve never seen a remake that respected the source material more.

The one thing I am surprised the most is that I actually like the remixed soundtrack. But to be frank that is because there are very little changes to the original. It’s basically just slightly different instrumentation for most songs. Some have a slightly different drum beat. I think one or two have an extra bridge. Strangely one song has been completely changed. The original used a version of Beethoven’s moonlight sonata for a certain cafe scene, whereas the remake has something that fits the overall soundtrack better. I don’t hate it but I really don’t like it either.

When I first saw the new art I thought that it looked kind of cheap when compared to the original. The lower resolution pixel art with limited colors just make everything seem like there is more effort into them. But now that I have got to see them up close and personal, the art in the remake is actually fantastic. It turns out that removing limitations can be a good thing when you the person doing the work is skilled enough.

Of course there is no secret that this is an H game. Thankfully for me, this is a censored release. Any sex these characters have are entirely implied. That being said there are still some scenes that are pretty racy that you are forced to play through, like when you have to help one friend by taking her clothes off or the infamous “full moon” scene where you have no choice to continue the game without giving the center a poke. Multiple times. It’s kind of a shame too, because the more regular “girls in sexy poses” are legitimately some of the best art in the game. I’m not attracted to the female form, but these scenes tend to just draw you in. This might just be me but many of those drawings seem less exploitative than the original works, but I can’t put my finger on exactly why.

The one thing that I think has the greatest improvement is the voice acting. Everyone really knocks their performances out of the park and with the help of the games famously great soundtrack it really draws you into the game.

There are a handful of quality of life improvements that make this remake much better to play. For one, there is a force skip button, so when you are reading characters talking about things you already know about because you had this conversation in a parallel world you can skip over it and check the logs if you accidentally skip too much. There’s also optional guides that will tell you where to go and what items can be used in a scene, which I would suggest enabling regardless of if you have played it before because wandering all over the place wondering where to go and where those alternate paths are is frustrating and unnecessary IMHO.

Right now I’m at roughly 60% completion. I’ve really enjoyed playing this game so far; the writing is utterly fantastic and it has an unforgettable story. This remake is the perfect entry point for people who got into VNs from playing games like Steins;Gate (especially given that this remake was made by the same company). I’ll probably be playing this game well into next week.

I've been playing Trombone Champ, available on PC. It is a rhythm game where you play a trombone simulated with your mouse and keyboard, and you are awarded "Toots" depending on how well you do. You can use the Toots to purchase collectible cards related to the game's absolutely bizarre lore, which is also shared via loading screen tips (such as the first trombone having been invented 20 million years ago). There is a hidden component to the game as well which I have yet to fully figure out - a few menus and secret things to click on that hint at something more.

It's challenging, and I'm not sure I'm 100% on the control scheme, but honestly if you do poorly it's still fun because you just sound... so terrible. The game does NOT provide a backup horn track for you, you make all the noise yourself, and at no point does the game ever boot you out of a song the way that many other rhythm games do. You go through the thing until it's done no matter how bad you are.

If anyone is in the market for an MMO, Return of Reckoning is having a double xp/renown week that coincides with being featured in a TheLazyPeon video. As a result, there are a ton of new players right now, so it’s a good time to jump in. :)

Guild Wars 2

I continue to play this, but I'm feeling divided. Parts of it are enjoyable, but there are some aspects I don't like. The combat is finally getting challenging, and I have to play carefully to avoid dying -- which is great because I want to be challenged by a game. I wish dying had more severe consequences, though, such as a bit of XP loss, or even equipment loss. As it stands, the only penalty of death that I see (in PvE mode, anyway) is merely to have to respawn at a waypoint on the map. You seem to retain all your XP and eq. I prefer a more punishing game. (Update: I was mistaken. It costs in-game currency to respawn.)

The cut scenes are nice, since you get a more cinematic feel to the storyline. However, they don't come up as often as I'd like (budget constraints?). In between those, the gameplay is starting to feel a bit monotonous, with the same kind of travel, fetch, and combat mini-quests, which, after having done 30+ levels worth of them by now, have become uninteresting. The group quests/bosses are better, because they're hard enough that I can't complete them on my own.

My current endeavour is to come up with effective ways to survive once I get into combat situations which are too dangerous, such as being outnumbered 3+ to 1. Usually, I do not survive these, but it's a fun puzzle to try to figure out how to "play my cards" with the spellcasting abilities I have. I'm coming up with strategies like: 1) cast a slow spell, 2) cast an evasion spell, 3) magically increase speed, 4) run.