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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.
Walkabout Mini Golf
This was recommended to me by @godless as a great VR game, and they were right! (Thanks godless!)
The game is just a mini-golf game — no twists or fancy bells and whistles — but it’s supremely well-executed. The golfing feels perfect, just like the real thing. Actually, it feels better than real-mini golf because if my ball lands in a water hazard I don’t have to fish it out, and I don’t have to worry about people behind me on the course rushing my play, and I don’t have to deal with that annoying situation where I have to move the ball out from the wall to be able to make a putt…
Basically, I would rather do this than the real thing. I realize that makes me sound like a complete shut-in, but would a shut-in have just installed blackout curtains in his VR space?! (The answer is: …yes, definitely, why would you even ask that question?)
Anyway, it has cross-platform multiplayer too, so I’m hoping to, after the holidays, coax some of my friends with Quests to play it together and we can compete.
This is the first non-rhythm VR game I have played and loved.
Slay the Spire
I know I’m way late to the party on this but I finally tried it out and got immediately hooked.
I now understand, three years later, what my husband and all my friends were on about back then.
Oh wow. Same.
Those are the same two games that I have been playing this week.
That's quite the coincidence!
Are we clones? We might be clones.
It's funny, this brief interaction spawned several thoughts, and as I'm winding down work for Christmas, I thought I'd share them.
One of the lovely things about the internet in general, and Tildes specifically, is these moments of shared experience. I'm up here scouring mini-golf courses for the secret balls on each hole, and then you're over there doing the same thing; both of us hanging out in a room with an admittedly sort of goofy looking headset on, wandering digitally through a pretty well crafted world - or space station - just putting and looking at scenery and having a chill time. There's probably loads of people doing the same thing, but seeing it explicitly like this reminds me how similar people are.
The clones comment - I had a pithy "ha ha, yeah" response. That made me think again about interconnectedness, as above, and how it would be weird if you looked like me. I got to thinking about how I don't have a real concept of what you look like (and I'm not asking for one - I respect your privacy) but that I do have a sort of mental image of the people that I interact with online with any frequency. In my mind, when I read "kfwyre" there's a human attached to the name, and I have some ideas about what the human looks like. I had a conversation about this with a digital friend a while ago - he pictured me as something like Arthur from Red Dead Redemption 2 - and I realized I do the same thing with people. I know there are other people who don't do this, but I wonder how many people do? Anyways, your "avatar" in my mind is fairly Ryan Gosling-ish; kind, wholesome, good.
Man, Slay the Spire is such a good game. I'm so close to beating ascension 20. What is your favourite class? I have finished through Ascension 19 with Ironclad and Watcher, but I really enjoy the Defect the most. I just wish that I could be more consistent with it. Also this game made me realize that I'm generally not that great at evaluating card power and utility in games. I realized that from the ol' days of Hearthstone, but I think that getting better at this game has actually also made me better at Magic.
Anyways, that was a long meandering way of saying how interesting it is that we've both been focusing on the same games this week.
Oh wow, this response is so much better than my jokey one! It gave me genuine warm fuzzies. 🥰
Regarding point 1:
To further your point about us in particular and people in general being similar, I didn’t mention anything about searching for collectibles in my comment, but you better believe I’m doing the exact same thing as you! As soon as I learned there was a hidden ball on each hole, I pretty much forgot about actually golfing and instead spent my time scouring the landscape trying to find them. For a while the actual mini-golf felt like a secondary part of the game! 😆
It still feels kind of goofy to me to do things like look inside a barrel or underneath some stairs in VR. Every time I crouch down to look under something or, sometimes, go nearly prone on the floor, I’m struck by a dual sense of “this is so cool” and “I probably look ridiculous”. It’s nice to know that other people are out there doing the exact same.
Regarding point 2:
I’m very flattered (this has happened to me a lot on Tildes lately — y’all are way too nice!). Also I appreciate that my avatar is someone as easy on the eyes as Ryan Gosling. My husband would love that! 😁
I’ve relatively recently learned that I don’t really visualize the same way that many other people do. I have literally no mental image of what anyone here looks like except for the few of you who have posted pictures (and even then I can’t keep the visual details in my brain without referencing the picture). Instead, my brain creates character trait constellations for people. In my mind, aphoenix is something like “good father, Canadian, warm, thoughtful, reflective”.
One of the things I like about exclusively text-based interactions in places like Tildes is that we can all be people together without having to be beholden to our bodies. That's an unavoidable reality of living in meatspace, but online we get some separation, and I think it's refreshing.
Regarding point 3:
It's actually somewhat out of character for me to like this game. I'm like, the ultimate casual game player and mostly like things that let me turn my brain off. I actually use gaming as a background activity for listening to audiobooks a lot of the time.
Occasionally, however, I'll get sucked into a game that makes me think, and it's occasionally wonderful. Slay the Spire is the first game I've played in a long time where I get into a flow state and just kind of have no idea how much time has passed. The last game that did that for me (and that scratches a similar itch) is Dicey Dungeons, so if you like StS, definitely give that one a look if you haven't.
As for where I'm at in the game, you are WAY further than me. I haven't even tried any of the Ascensions and am just trying to beat the game with each character. I've won with the Ironclad, Silent, and Defect. I just tried my first one with the Watcher but didn't really get a good grasp of what I'm supposed to do and died pretty early (if you have any tips, let me know!). Thus far my favorite have been the Silent and the Defect. Both of the builds I had with them took off in ridiculous ways, and I'm excited to try those strategies again but with harder challenges.
It is rare that I play a game more than a few hours. I'm often "done", even if I haven't finished the game, after a couple of hours max. With this game, however, I feel like I'm just getting started after ~15 hours.
Oh yeah, me too. Maybe we're clones! ;)
I like how silly it is to look around inside things in the game, and my VR sessions are often with a couple of kids; we'll stream what they're seeing and watch them move around and look for things. It's actually a pretty good time, and it is pretty awesome to watch my 11-year old knock out Beat Saber songs on expert.
I also like that we can be people together without being beholden to our bodies. There's so much judgment and preconception that comes from visual cues, and it is nice to escape that. I am also grateful for the terms that you used for me, and feel like if I exude "good father" then I am doing something right in my life, because fulfilling that is my number one goal.
I think it's entirely just how long I've been at it. I think I've been at it... maybe 5 years? It's very much a play-over-lunch game for me, taking over from Hearthstone. I can usually knock out one or two runs while watching Good Mythical Morning and eating a breakfast burrito.
The Watcher is maybe my current favourite, but part of that is that she is a bit of a broken character. I think the best possible deck is the starting one, minus two defend cards, add two damage cards, and upgrade an Eruption. Everything else is basically not needed and just dilutes your best cards.
I bought a Steam Deck for my partner! With the added bonus that I'll also have access to it. I know the Steam game library is huge, so I'm looking forward to finding new games to play, as I've been almost exclusively on the Switch for the past several years.
Steam has very good discovery tools, but they're based on your previous game activity. For a brand-new user, I can imagine the vastness of the game library can be a bit overwhelming.
What kind of games did you enjoy on your Switch? Someone here can probably recommend something similar-ish on Steam.
I already have a few games on Steam (Stardew Valley and Factorio, plus some I’d bookmarked but couldn’t play on my Mac), so I think I’ll be ok!
I generally enjoy exploration and resource management games with some life sim stuff thrown in. Definitely not a fan of any rogue like games.
Yeah, with those two, you should have enough to do for the next few hundred hours. :-D
I have sunk so many hours into both, lol.
What about a roguelike, exploration/resource management/city builder game?
I haven't played it yet myself, but I have watched it being streamed several times, and heard really good things about Against the Storm.
That looks intriguing! I'll add it to my wishlist. :)
Ratchet and clank rift apart. This game is an awesome entry into the series and it’s usage of the ps5 hardware is spot on.
I've only played two games this week.
I picked up a copy of Kamaitachi no Yoru at a bookoff that had a ton of them in stock for $3. I wanted it because it was referenced as a historically important VN. As a Super Famicom release, I thought that I might be lucky and it would have really simple language that I could understand. I was very wrong. I will say, however, that the visuals and music are both shockingly good. I must say that Chunsoft is one of the single most underappreciated developers out there, at least from a western perspective; I don't think I've ever played any of their games that weren't a fantastic shining example of the genre it belongs in. I'm really glad that as part of their merger with Spike that they are going to continue making games in the English speaking market.
I also got to spend a little bit of time playing the Toejam and Earl game that @scrambo graciously gifted me. I had somehow completely forgotten that it was an enhanced remake of the original. It was so long since I've last played the original that I just played through the (surprisingly lengthy) tutorial mode. I think it's a fantastically well-done remake because it keeps all of the basic mechanics of the original, but it's not afraid to add in a pinch of new stuff to make it fresh. I like how they've redesigned the main characters but because the originals were so iconic it's barely even noticeable; I don't think I would have found out if they didn't offer the ability to play with the original designs (which are still redrawn to fit the style and the higher resolution).
Eagerly awaiting Star Citizen 3.18 PTU. Even though the game is a buggy mess I still love it. Nothing else comes as close to that feeling of actually being in a sci fi universe
It is poorly optimized but manageable with some tricks imo. The game is heavily cpu bound so you actually want to leave your graphics on high/very high to keep that load on the gpu rather than the cpu. I’ve got a 2070 super and ryzen 3600 I believe and I can keep above 30fps most the time which I fully realize is very bad compared to other games haha. I’m just willing to put up with it. They’re also working on implementing a new renderer which should improve performance eventually
Your GPU should actually be okay. Up until a few months ago, I was playing with a 1070 and getting reasonable frames most of the time. The biggest immediate performance gains you can look to make:
I played for a long time with a stock i7-9700k, 32GB RAM, and a 1070. I've since overclocked my CPU and upgraded to a 3070, but my performance is much the same.
Certain areas are always going to be worse than others, mainly cities, and especially the cities/planets with clouds (Orison on Crusader and Lorville on Hurston), plus the first time you view objects the game builds a shader cache for them, making stuttering frequent, so performance is kinda bad the first 5-10 mins of the game being launched for the first time. It smooths out after that, especially once you get into space.
3.18 is especially buggy right now. I played some last night and severe stuttering in lorville with the new gen 12 renderer, making it difficult to even leave the city. Things got better after I finally made it out but 30ks are abundant and the inventory bug (spinning never updating inventory) will eventually catch you and there's no workaround except to restart the game. There's also some weird bug where you can't get up from seats, even ship seats, but there's a somewhat usable workaround of power cycling the ship a few times and trying again.
It's gonna need some time in the oven before it's ready for a wider PTU release and eventually live. Really looking forward to it though!
I am continuing to play nomifactory, I like this minecraft mod a lot. I have been building a new base which is supposed to be more well designed. I have my power generator system perfected, and scaled up. So I can power all my machines. I have also rebuild my fluid processing systems using digital storage and this has simplified how it all works a lot. It's pleasing to optimize things in this way so that they all run well on their own and don't require constant manual intervention.