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

On the last thread I had an update that I bought Shenzen IO.

What I didn't mention is that I spent 6 hours on a puzzle trying to solve it, found a description of a solution, borrowed the first sentence (using one controller) and had it solved in five minutes. This game is fun for exactly the reasons it was intimidating to me a few years ago (and I never bought it) the multi-level programming (graphical + in-game assembly), and resulting multi-modal thinking required to solve a given puzzle.

MUD diaries, Week 3

MUDs are text-based, multi-user dungeons games.

Starmourn

The mechanics, tutorials, and help systems continue to be excellent. Unfortunately, I had to disable the long room descriptions because my screen was a mess. I wish MUDs verbosity settings were more granular. As it is, the options are either to get 200 words every time I enter a room or barely any description. When needed, I can access the full texts with look.

I had my first experiences of MUD roleplay. There are never more than 15 or 20 people in my faction, but somehow that is enough. It is not hard to find people in my location, and there's also the in-character faction channel.

It got intense very quickly, I was not aware players were so serious about staying in-character. Soon, I was frantic alt+tabbing to the game's wiki to avoid saying something that was unsuitable to my character's race, class, and background. At one point, a player told me to follow them, patiently teaching me about locations and the fictional world's mechanics -- all in character. When I asked about their role in the Song faction, another character/player informed me that I was talking to the High Commander of the planet. My character was tremendously ashamed of their disrespect, talking informally to the High Commander, and all of that was properly roleplayed.

The game has a system of "emotes", which is probably common in these kinds of games. Essentially, emotes serve for you to describe the actions and reactions of your character, which are rendered in distinct formatting on the client. So for example, if I write: emote looks down in shame, the game will render it Mordgrew looks down in shame. There is also a way to manipulate items. I don't know how to do that, but a player offered a beverage, and, when I typed "drink beverage" (or something like that), my character actually drank it.

Because my character is basically a cybernetic, existentialist Treebeard, I tried to engage in a somewhat philosophical line of conversation (that was adequate for the character and the situation). However, my fellow players were odd, and had a twisted sense of priorities... unlike me, they were very focused on having fun :P

The tone is coherent with the game's Star Wars vibe, which makes me think: are there hard sci-fi MUDs out there? Would anyone have the energy and dedication to consistently roleplay something like that?

In any case, being welcome by human beings that help me figure out the game reminds me of my first experiences with World of Warcraft, and that is a wonderful, heartwarming feeling.

I've been playing Idle Slayer which is a fun incremental. It's not really idle though, you get very little progress if you only play idle.

I wanted something simple and easy that I could play in a window while I was watching YouTube or tv, and Kingdom Rush (I have the GOG version) is fun. Once I've completed it I don't know whether I'll get the rest in the series, or if I'll install a GB emulator and play the Advance Wars games.

I've been having a blast with Mario Kart 8 Deluxe on Switch. I play with my kid and he beats me most of the time, so I need to practice a bit more.