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

VR has been on hold for me because I had to RMA one of my Index base stations, and with my Christmas travel plans disrupted due to both weather and Southwest Airlines, I had a good amount of time on my hands to play some games in pancake mode. Given that it was the end of the year, I decided to tie up some loose ends and finish some games that I had started earlier in the year but fallen away from:

The Outer Worlds

I had played through everything in the main game (save the ending) and the first DLC, Peril on Gorgon, before I dropped this. I didn't have the steam to do the second DLC, Murder on Eridanos, at the time. I came back, finished it, then finished out the game. The ending, where it shows the results of all of your choices, was a good summary of reminding me what I'd done and forgotten about six months earlier.

Overall I love the game and think it deserves much better than the tepid-to-hostile response it seems to have gotten at large. My one complaint would be that, much like its inspiration, its level cap is way too low. I hit the level cap before the end of the first DLC. I understand they don't want to just keep giving you skill points and have you be an overpowered master of everything, but they could have definitely give a bit more -- or maybe let me still get levels but drop the skill points doled out to the bare minimum. I'm sure I probably could have easily found a mod for something like that, but I wanted to do a full vanilla playthrough.

Also, the two DLCs are probably nice for people who had played the game previously and wanted to return to it, but playing them in the sequence of the main game made it a little too long for my liking and also killed the pacing of the main story. As the tension on the main narrative ramps up, my character decided to... take two large sidesteps to do lengthy mini-campaigns elsewhere. Ultimately they were enjoyable but not necessary.

System Shock 2

I started this up for the Ludonostalgia! pop-up and then dropped it after I was about halfway through the game.

In my memory from my original playthrough, this game was amazing from start to finish. Replaying it now has revealed my memory to be a LIAR. Apparently I never actually finished the game way back in the day! I think I made it as far as the Operations deck -- maybe the beginning of the Recreation deck? I definitely remember the end of the game, so I must have looked up a video of it or something, but I feel like that might have come way later than my initial playthrough? Videos of games weren't exactly readily available on the internet back in 2000.

Anyway, I still love the game, but now that I actually played through the whole thing for the first time, I've come to appreciate the widely levied criticism of the game that the back half of the game is way worse than the first. I wanted it to be over long before it was and pretty much finished it out of obligation. I suspect my nostalgic fondness for the game is so strong in part because I never played through the bad half back then, so I've ridden the high of the front half for decades now. I still consider it landmark and iconic and ahead of its time, but yeah, it does have some issues. Even outside of the back half, the respawning monsters are a huge pain in a game with so much backtracking, and if I hadn't modded the weapon degradation to be much slower, I don't know if I would have finished it.

Peglin

I've been playing this on my Deck, which is perfect for it. If you're not familiar with the game, it's a roguelike version of Peggle. I had played Roundguard before, which attempted something similar, but it didn't fully grab me. Peglin does a much better job of being what I want.

My only complaint about it is that it's not fully developed yet. I don't want to have to wait for more!

I finished "Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky SC" (Steam) a couple weeks before Christmas. It started to get a bit long in the tooth. I think it was like 10-15hrs longer than the first game, and I'm not entirely sure it was merited. But all in all, it was a good game that wrapped up the principal storyline.

I started the last entry in the trilogy, "Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky, The 3rd" (Steam), which I'm assuming will wrap up the remaining, secondary storyline, but I haven't played it much. Needed a break from 2-3mo straight of JRPGs. But hopefully I'll get back into that soon.

Otherwise, have been back to Timberborn (Steam), which is a Banished-clone -- probably the best one out there -- and playing Stellaris and Cosmeteer with friends.

Cosmoteer (Steam) is a a new one for me. It's a top-down 2D spaceship building game, where you take on missions to kill space pirates, do courier missions, explore, etc. It's fun, but the fighting and flying systems I think could use some more work. Also, repairing is trivially easy, with a click of a button. Wish there was a time component to it so you can't just "instarepair" as it is.

Over Christmas break, we broke open our copy of Wingspan, and I cajoled some family members into playing it. It is an exceptional worker placement game. It's very well made, the art of the cards is beautiful, and in general I cannot recommend it enough. My eight year old son can play and be competitive, and it only took ten minutes to learn to play, thanks to one of the many "learn Wingspan" videos available. The balance in the game is superb, and my kids especially like to read the little bird facts on each of the cards.

My middle child and I have also been playing Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle - Defense Against the Dark Arts. It's a deck building game for two, somewhat similar to Dominion. It is long - one game takes at least 90 minutes - but it's also pretty fun, especially if you like deck building games and Harry Potter. There's nothing particularly groundbreaking about it, but it's a self contained game (ie. not a tcg / CCG) and plays differently every time.

The breakout hit game that we received for Christmas was called Hot Seat. It's a party game for four people and up. There's a deck of cards with a prompt that one player reads out. It may say something like "As a kid, what did I want to be when I grew up?" Every player writes down what they think the reader would say and passes that to the reader, who writes their answer as well, then everyone tries to guess the correct answer. You get points for guessing correctly or for fooling people into guessing your answer. It's good for large groups; there's no "turns" where your aren't participating, and it can get a bit raucous.

I got Secret Agent HD from a gift exchange. It's an old NES "style" puzzle platformer from Apogee (3D Realms). You control secret agent man, a secret agent... man. The story's a bit fuzzy, but ostensively he's trying to save the world from Dr No Body. There are a bunch of James Bond puns. It doesn't matter much. You have to play through 64 levels in which you must shoot down a radar dish, collect dynamite, blow up the door and escape. Usually this requires avoiding or killing enemies, collecting color coded keys, turning platforms on, turning lasers off, etc. There are additional collectibles for points, as well as leaderboards in this version. The game is punishingly, unfairly difficult with spikes that damage you intermitently poking out of pretty much anything solid and two out of three hazards instantly killing you and sending you back to the beginning of the level. It's speedrunner bait, basically. I 100%ed it!

The thing I was expecting to do yesterday evening was cancelled so I picked up (and finished) one of @kfwyre 's gifts, Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion. It's a very short game but strangely charming. Despite the dumb internet pop culture references and snarky humor it ends up having something of a congruent plot (to my surprise). The gameplay is based on simple top down combat and doing things for NPCs; unlike Secret Agent it's very easy. At the end of the game you unlock an infinite mode with daily challenges that's actually kind of fun? I also ripped up every document in the game which gave me access to a special boss fight. I'm done with it, I guess!

I started playing Strange Horticulture thank to my SO. We were able to do Steam family sharing so I have access to a bunch of his games! There's a lot I want to try, but for now I've been diving into strange horticulture. I love the atmosphere of the game, the puzzles are fun to solve, and the mysteries abound are all intriguing to me. I quickly surpassed where my SO was in the game and I've just been really enjoying it overall. It's pretty easy to play, though some things weren't exactly clear at the start but I guess that's just part of it; trying to figure things out lol.

So for Christmas my husband was planning on buying me a fancy screwdriver but my uncle ended up buying it for me before Christmas actually came. So my present was $100 in Steam vouchers.

The first game I bought (which was at my husband's goading because that was the specific thing he wanted to get me but didn't really know how to do it) was Sonic Frontiers.

And I love it!

I mean, it's certainly not what I would have expected for a Sonic game, especially for a modern Sonic game, but it's a surprisingly well put-together package overall. Just from a mechanical point of view this is probably the single most polished and jank-free Sonic game since he first jumped into the 3rd dimension.

One of the things I appreciate the most about the game is how it reinvigorated the concept of enemies. Enemies haven't really been much of a threat lately. In the newer 2d games they seemingly just exist to function like roadblocks, and in the newer 3D games they are usually too easily dealt with by the homing dash. But in Frontiers, encounters with enemies means actual combat. And what's nice is that except for boss fights most enemy encounters are completely optional; Sonic is fast and he can simply run away.

I am actually surprised at how much of the content in this game has been made optional. It feels like the designers put a lot of trust in the player to figure out what they find fun and let them ignore the things they don't like. You can bypass almost everything by playing the fishing minigame and using your tokens to buy the mcguffin that unlocks what you want to do. They actually put a lot of effort into that minigame, too; it's a really simple game but there is a huge variety of things you can catch and they put a lot of effort into modelling and animating them. People who hated Big the Cat might actually appreciate him here.

I also bought a few other games that I played for a short while.

Arcade Paradise is something that I've had on my wishlist for a while but didn't want to spend real money because it felt like a crapshoot as to how engaging it would be. And now that I have played it for a while it kind of still is. At this early stage it seems like the best way of making money is to spend most of your time by doing laundry, and that is both the best and worst ways to play the game. It's got an incremental game style addictiveness but it doesn't actually grow any bigger over time. You'll probably want to spend your time actually playing the games instead, in which case the laundry timers will all bug you like crazy; if you don't immediately take out the clothes and do the next step you will lose out on income. I don't like being forced to choose between enjoying the games they have for me to play or making more money.

I bought Raft on a whim because it was super cheap and I just saw a video on youtube where someone completely broke the entire game. The actual mechanics actually sounded interesteing to me so I figured I'd buy it. But it turns out that I hate the mechanics in the framework they are put in. Twice I have had to rebuild my world because the game wants you to do certain steps but you are never told what those steps actually are. The controls also suck on Steam Deck.

I also bought I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream even though I've already played it. It cost less than $2 and I figured I wanted to add it to my library since Steam keeps recommending it to me anyways. I swear it wasn't that long since I last played the game, but I forgot how INCREDIBLY OBTUSE everything in this game is. Gorrister's scenario is particularly bad; you have to give your heart to a jackal, examine a slab of meat with a magnifying glass, tie up a woman into a zepplin to power the engines, and give a dead woman a drink of a cloudy liquid, and finish the story by shooting a bar with a pistol which somehow makes it explode. There actually is a logic behind this but the actions are all symbolic so I don't see any way anyone could actually figure them out.

I bought it a while back but I have just finally gotten past the prologue section of Utawarerumono: Prelude to the Fallen. It starts off with a very, very slow burn. The characters are surprisingly simplistic for a visual novel (at least so far), but the quality of the writing is excellent; the scenarios the characters are experiencing are all fairly dynamic; things are constantly changing. You have to hand it to a game where the Best Girl starts off being an 80 year old grandmother.

Utawarerumono is also part Tactical RPG, but so far the gameplay has been really simple. I do like the timing-based bonus system, but I hope that it gets to be a little more complex as it goes on.

I was also happy to see that this version of the game was made by Sting. I was honestly starting to worry that they were going out of business.

A friend gifted me Gotham Knights, which is apparently set in the "Arkhamverse" of games. It's not terribly important, except that the Arkham games do set up the backstory. You can play as Barbara "Batgirl" Gordon, Dick "Nightwing" Grayson, Tim "Robin" Drake, or Jason "Red Hood" Todd (as the opening cutscene tells you, Batman is unplayable on account of sudden retirement syndrome). Each has their own move sets, combat style, and skill trees. There are loads of costumes to unlock (with multiple color schemes...want a cotton candy schemed Batgirl? Because you can), gear to upgrade, and an immense open world.

The combat flows beautifully, most of the time. You can chain attacks from one guy, to a guy sneaking up on you, back to the first seamlessly (unless you get "locked" onto one target, as I seemed to sometimes.) It has a great stealth system (because, well, Batman game), a Batcycle you can call in at will (which I never use, because...) and a great grapnel line system that makes it almost feel like a Spider-Man game.

The open world holds many clues, threats, and side quests, and at the end of each patrol night you head back to the Belfry, your centrally located HQ, where you can train, craft, read clues and files... and most importantly, switch characters if you want to. You also restock medkits and other supplies every time you return.

It's a wonderfully acted, breathtakingly rendered world, and there's really only one flaw that I can ding it for, but it's a big one... it's very unstable. I've had it CTD multiple times, sometimes less than five minutes after restarting it. A lot of people have been reporting this problem, but when it does work, it's probably in my top five third person action games ever.

My Stars Without Number campaign is shaping up nicely. I have a bunch of players interested. It'll be an in-person campaign, I'm not a big fan of online communications for this kind of thing.

Below are some world-building ideas I'm working on.

It will have Trek-like elements with a slightly hard sci-fi twist.

It'll have an ultra-advanced Afro-Futurist civilization. Kinda like a twist of Wakanda in space, but way more advanced and only weakly connected to a long-forgotten past of tribal and monarchic organizations. They live on a planet-sized spherical ship that is mobile and without a fixed location. Despite their historical ties with the Terran civilization, the Space Wakandans (provisory name) are entirely unknown to them and little is known of their activities within the Solar System. They are citizens of the universe, and one of the few civilizations that managed to establish an ongoing relationship with the The Prospects.

The Prospects are an AI civilization. Among them, there are non-sentient servant robots, Androids, and a ruling class named The Prophets. The Prophets are highly advanced AIs, some of which live exclusively as digital beings. They are the founders of a "religion" centered on the belief that the entire universe was created and is governed by transcendent beings called The Logicals. No one ever saw them, and there is no physical evidence of their existence, but The Prophets support that their existence is guaranteed by their exoteric calculus. You may think of The Prospects as very intense AI Vulcans.

The Logicals may or may not exist.

The Terrans largely occupy the Solar System and are barely aware of anything beyond. Although advanced for our current standards, they're woefully primitive in the game's universe. I may give the Terrans something resembling Star Trek's Federation or Starfleet.

I don't intend to use any ship piloting mechanics or ship combat, as in my universe there are no manually controlled spaceships.

For the first two or three sessions, my focus will be to get acquainted with the system and create a bond between characters that feels natural and strong. So I'll put them through my version of 1979's Alien ;)

Started playing Hunt: Showdown with some friends; we have been having a lot of fun with the game in the few hours we have played. Its not too intense, and the PvPvE is fun! Fight other players if you want, or run, hide, and get our alive!