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

I play Horizon Zero Dawn for the second time this year. I finished it with themajority of achievements in february and I loved the game so much that I had to play it once again. This time on Ultra hard (New game+).

I love the setting of the game of fantasy/medieval and sci-fi combination. But I what I love even more is the story and how it is made and unveiled in the game. I wen blind into it knowing just screenshots and nothing else. I was completely... I can't even describe it... Overwhelmed? I haven't played such a great game in a long long time. It is one of the best I have ever played. Well crafted game, really.

Here's my Steam review of it for anyone who wants to know more.

Played on Steam Deck and playing on Steam Deck again. Runs okay-ish (28-30 fps, would do more from time to time if not limited by me to 30) on High details, 9W TDP and graphics clock set ti 1100MHz, battery life 2-2.5 hours (OG Steam Deck).

I just finished the Modern Warfare 3 2023 campaign and I’m just stunned. I haven’t played any of these games since the original Modern Warfare 2 and exodus of devs so I didn’t expect much and I was still underwhelmed. I have so many criticisms:

• The story is almost entirely gruff voices talking over a picture of a shirtless Russian proud boy.
• Most missions are “free range” slow paced slogs of opening weapon crates, but maybe five minutes of actual mission tasks.
• Massive install size, multiple restart screens, weird EULA agreements and a UI heavily focused on micro transactions that I have no idea on what they’re for.

But what really got to me is the ending. Just an abrupt end on an awkward character death. No payoff. Just a couple of dudes recreating the ending to the Big Lebowski.

I'm playing Alan Wake 2 right now.

I was honestly ready to drop it because I was getting so frustrated with some poor gameplay elements and having the immersion constantly broken by characters not being able to step over or around simple things, but I just played Alan's 3rd chapter and now I'm totally stanning for this game lol.

I picked up Coral Island. It's strongly derivative of Stardew Valley, but honestly I don't fault it for that. It introduces a couple of interesting mechanics and has a strong environmentalist/eco friendly theme which I've come to quite like about it. Mostly because the people don't get mad at me for letting loose my inner raccoon and rummaging through their bins.

I get some graphical glitches with textures flickering a fair amount so it's a bit unpolished for what they're calling their full release, and there have been a handful of bugs but nothing game breaking.

All in all, I'm really enjoying it and it feels like a great spiritual successor to Stardew. Oh, and the characters are all super attractive and a ton of them are dateable if you enjoy the dating-sim aspect of this kind of game.

Also, the clothes and outfits you can wear are actually pretty great. I'm almost at the point in the game where I can finally afford to buy something new to wear without slowing down my progress and I'm stoked to make my farmer a cute outfit or three.

I blasted my way through the Super Mario RPG remake over the weekend and had SUCH a good time. It's a really really great remake - it captured all the feels of the old game while introducing some new minor fun/extra mechanics and very sensible cleanups.

If I had one criticism, it would probably be that combat is too easy compared to the original - I used like maybe 5 items total while playing (and most of them were in the new bonus bosses which are actually challenging) and definitely remember having to use them way more back in the day. But too easy and fun is probably better than frustrating and not fun so I don't blame them for skewing/designing the game more casually, especially since some of the changes made (e.g. around the casino) were very clearly intended for literal children :)

Played Dead Cells for the last game review of the season for my roguelike podcast

It was such a breath of fresh air to come back to Dead Cells after a long time. I originally played the alpha at PAX West 17 and knew there was something special about it.

I remember playing when it first came out in early access and being excited to finally get my hands on the full release. I've played off and on since then but I was glad to have a forcing function of the podcast episode to really chew hard on it.

Turns out Dead Cells is still great. The fluidity, the tough item decision making, fighting to get those times, and finally getting to the Hand of the King, all a great experience. Maybe I should keep an eye on those DLCs as the next steam sale approaches....

Been playing "Wall World" after getting it in a humble bundle. It's a fun little rogue-lite where you pilot a spider mech up and down the side of an infinite wall. You have to fend off increasingly dangerous monster attacks inbetween drilling into the wall to leave the mech and mine for resources to upgrade your abilities. Eventually you're overwhelmed and die. You lose your upgrades, but keep money that can be used to start the next run with different permanent upgrades.

There's an interesting risk-reward element. Can you squeeze in one more mining run before the next wave? Should you try to move faster up the wall to the more powerful upgrades, but also more powerful monsters?

Every time I start to think it's going stale, there's some new twist or thing I havent seen yet that's keeping it fresh.

Gravity Circuit has been really fun. I'm working on completing all the achievements now that I've cleared the game.

I really like the design choices they made in the game. I had seen some reviews mentioning that the focus on melee combat is worse than Megaman's gun because of the need to get in close range, but I think they did a good job tweaking enemy behavior to accommodate that with your physical hits stunning many enemies, and the grappling mechanic let's you fly through levels once you know what you're doing.

I was on the fence about the discrete nature of the special attacks, but I think the specials in Gravity Circuit are useful enough that it would be overpowered if they gave you a large energy tank like in the megaman games. There's a good mix of offense, utility, and support/healing moves and being able to swap them out in real time makes up for only being able to equip 4 abilities and 3 upgrade chips.

The first playthrough was fairly tough to get through, but subsequent playthroughs I am flying through the levels with ease, which I think is the mark of a good Megaman style game.

I've been running through Risk of Rains Returns, it's soooo much harder than the original one imo. I still haven't beaten it on Normal difficulty yet lol.

I also started Persona 5 Tactica, and it hasn't gripped me as much as Royal or Strikers has tbh. Not sure why, I still really love and miss the team a lot, I don't hate chibi art styles but there's something missing with this current iteration.

Dave the Diver has also been gripping my wind down time, it's actually super fun and simple, almost relaxed in a Stardew way, complete with weird time constrictions lol.

I keep playing Doom (1993) and its sequel with dsda-doom. Played through the first three episodes for the umpteenth time and then played through "Doom the way Id did" which is a (great) full set of three episodes emulating the style and theme of the original game.

I also just now finished Creature of Despair without saving for the first time. This level gives you a lot of weapons and ammo and then just throws a shit ton of monsters at you in an arena that opens up as you progress. It's probably the easiest map I've played in this style, but not for a lack of monsters to shoot, so I enjoyed it.

I'm trying to play through the fourth episode in Ultimate Doom, but I find around E4M2 that I just don't enjoy it at all. Maybe it's just that map, though, because I like the first level and I have a vague memory of having finished the whole thing at some point. I like when it's hard, just not punishing in the specific way John Romero seemed to be going for with it which feels more like a puzzle in which you have to find the correct sequence of things to do instead of a dynamic situation you have to manage tactically.

On my way to 100% every Zelda game, I have been working through BOTW. Getting so close to the end. Pretty much everything is done except the stuff in Hyrule Castle and the fucking Sword Trials.

I like the game, but there's just way too much content in it. There doesn't need to be 900 Korok Seeds, they could easily have done 500 with everything else being the same. Especially considering SO many of them are the same things over and over again.

A lot of the game has been a slog because of how much shit there is to do, and how much time it takes to do it all.

I am dreading TOTK when I start that next year after I take a few months break when finishing BOTW.

Games don't need to keep get bigger, they just need to have meaningful content. Had a similar feeling to Starfield. Though I had more fun with that because I'm not going to try to explore every planet or anything insane like that.

Started Like A Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name yesterday, and beating up random thugs on the street as Kiryu Joryu is just as fun as it was when I first started this series. The new, more technical fighting style with the gadgets is a cool twist, but straight up brutalizing people with Dragon of Dojima style is still immensely satisfying (though I hear they reduced the activation frames on my beloved tiger drop, how dare they). Sure, the locations are just reused from the previous games, but RGG studio has a way of making them fun no matter how many times you've already been there. Even the minigames are still more or less the same but still fun. First thing I did once I got to go back to Osaka was beeline to the golf center, unlocked the expert difficulty in "closest to the hole", and kept playing it til I got an S rank. I plan to crush everyone in darts next, and after that maybe I'll progress the story a bit more.

Still no idea how to win mahjong though. You will never get me to like mahjong RGG. Those hands are bullshit.

I'm playing Fallout 4.

I'd heard so many good things about Fallout over the years, so I'd been meaning to give one or more of them a try. Earlier this year I tried out the original Fallout, but the controls were just too clunky. I couldn't get into it. I probably would have liked it more if I'd played it contemporaneously with its release.

Anyway, I expect I'll be playing Fallout 4 for quite a while. It should be fun.

Then earlier this month Steam had a 75% off sale, so I got Fallout 4 and the DLC for about $10. I've been playing it ever since.

This game is enormous. I've put about 22 hours into it and I've explored just a small sliver of the corner of the map. The base building aspects seem like they could be an enormous time sink all on their own. I keep comparing it to the last game I finished. It took me about 35 hours of gameplay to finish The Talos Principle after getting all of the stars. (I'm planning another playthrough at some point to get all the achievements.) Fallout 4 looks like it'll take many times that to finish.

I'm really enjoying the open world exploration. The base building is decent. I haven't really run into much plot yet, but what I've read online is that the plot is pretty thin. I'm okay with that tradeoff for the rest of the gameplay.

I kind of like the semi-turn-based combat, now that I've gotten used to it. You can just point and shoot like in most FPSes, but you can also hit a key and go into this interface where time slows down drastically, you can see percentage odds of hitting each enemy (and each part of them, e.g. torso or head or arms), and you can plan out your shots before hitting “go” to do it. Each shot takes a certain number of Action Points, so you have a limited number of planned actions before you have to go back to normal time and let your AP regenerate. At first it seemed like a gimmick, but now that I've used it a bit, it adds an interesting dimension to combat. It looks like the RPG character development options would let you do a build that did well with the more traditional FPS approach, but it feels like the game generally expects you to heavily use the pseudo-turn-based combat.

The controls have their own challenges. I'm left-handed and I have my computer set up with the mouse on the left side. Consequently, I'm used to remapping games' controls to focus keyboard actions around the numeric keypad. Fallout 4 mostly lets me do that, but there are quite a few hardcoded things that assume you're using the default WASD controls. So some things have awkward reaches across the keyboard to hit the right keys. I think there's a mod that fixes this, but I haven't yet gotten around to mucking with mods.

I'm still deeply in The Division 2 on PS4. If anyone else is playing, shout me on here because I'd love to join you.

We're in year 5 of TD2 and they still have content coming, however they have now announced 3 so I expect it'll dwindle. I'm definitely going to need a console upgrade for that. If you love a FPS looter shooter, with great mechanics, I can highly recommend it.

I blitzed through Inscryption a few weekends back. It was a wild ride. If cards games and puzzles are favorable, then just buy this game. Don't research it. Just get it and play it.

I am currently playing through Half-Life for the first time. It is interesting because it is nice mix of puzzles and combat and it does have the Valve humor tucked into it. The only thing that I don't really like, and really only gripe that I have, is how floaty Freeman is in the game. It feels like he is on ice skates. Which makes the platform puzzles a lot more harder than they should be. But overall I really like the game. And I had already played Half-Life 2 and its episodes, so I already liked the series.

Last night I spent a few hours playing through Star Ocean 4. Boy, it reminded me of why I never finished it when it was still a new game. It throws wave after wave of easy enemies at you that can even go down with the same basic three-hit combo, and then you'll reach the boss and those attacks will basically do nothing. You better hope that you remembered how to do all the skill-based moves like dodging, jumping, blindsides, chain combos, juggling attacks, rush mode, rush combos, and so on. Because the fodder enemies go down if you sneeze at them, you might not be able to practice them without making the long trek back out of the dungeon, through the field map, and back to your ship where there is a battle simulator.

It might not have been that bad if you were playing in a continous run, but if you're like me you are picking this game back up after a long hiatus and most of these things are extremely opaque and difficult to figure out. I think the devs know this because the battle simulator has a painfully in-depth tutorial built into it It's just a shame that they made it so hard to get to. It would be nice if I could just get it from the main menu.

I don't know why I'm complaining about it; this is a Tri-Ace game, and every Tri-Ace game is like this. I think I may have lost sight of what made me such a fan of their work in the first place.

Cobalt Core: Holy shit, this game, y'all. This is just as addicting as Slay the Spire. It's pretty similar in that you're choosing a route through a map and you're building a deck. However, you actually pick three characters at the start of a run to be your crew, and each has a different deck and theme, so combining 3 of the 8 characters in different ways gives you a ton of different play styles. Some crew are focused on defense, some are focused on offense, some are focused on putting out drones, etc., and then the card rewards after fights might have cards from any of the three decks in it. It's easy to learn and not that difficult to master, but even though I'm getting a winning run about 50% of the time, I'm still having a lot of fun and would ultimately like to get all the secrets done (when you win a run, you pick one of your crew and unlock one of three memories for them, so you have to get something like 21 or 24 wins to get all the memories). This very quickly became one of my favorite roguelikes. I don't see myself spending 200 hours in it like FTL or Isaac, but after 10 hours, I'm pretty sure I'll be playing this for about 20-30.

Modern Warfare 3 (2023): This game as a whole is hot garbage (and reviews correctly indicate that). The campaign is one of the worst single player experiences I've had in any game, in any genre. Half of the missions are basically roped off areas of the warzone map, complete with you having to participate in warzone mechanics (finding and opening weapon crates). I completed one of these missions in about 2 minutes, in a series where the campaign is usually a fun action film romp with epic set pieces. Utterly disappointing. I never thought I'd miss the crafting mechanics from MW2 (2022), which were also trash, but at least the campaign as a whole was decent.

However, I do find the multiplayer fun. It's nice to have all the maps from the original MW2 (2009) back. They're all remastered to work with the modern games (interior spaces, doors, etc.) and they play well. The multiplayer as a whole plays well... when people aren't exploiting it. I thought MW2's pace was plodding, but there wasn't a lot of movement tech to abuse and the game was generally pretty fair. In MW3, pace is heightened and time to kill is heightened. There are also some exploits with slide canceling and mantle speed (and a perk that increases it) that make your character model near unhittable. Additionally, the higher speed and higher TTK means that melee weapons are ridiculously powerful now (still one hit kill, but the wielders are faster and can't be killed easily). So the multiplayer experience is just bad when there are people in your match exploiting the mechanics, which is a shame since the multiplayer is very good in matches where people are playing the game as expected.

Some examples of game breaking movement tech:

https://vxtwitter.com/modernwarzone/status/1726841567590391941?s=46

https://youtube.com/shorts/6U4eLaweD14?si=1FLRwqICIduQgxv7

https://www.reddit.com/r/ModernWarfareIII/comments/17xbems/tried_playing_terminal_247_and_this_is_what_every/

Hardspace: Shipbreaker: Holy cow, I wish I picked up this game months ago. This is hitting the same notes for me as powerwash simulator, which I also didn't think I would get addicted to. I am very much not a person who normally vibes with games like this, but there's something so satisfying about it. For those unaware, basically you're just a space ship salvager and the gameplay is just finding safe ways to dismantle ships (they have hazards like fuel lines, electrical lines, and reactors that you all have to deal with) and deposit the various parts and materials in one of three deposit areas. The game world has a fun, but unsettling vibe. You basically sold your rights as a person to LYNX for a job (reading the lengthy terms of service your character has to sign was a fun time) and are now paying off a huge amount of debt that they saddle you with immediately. I'm not that far, but the rest of the story seems to be other salvagers talking to you about life, the company, what they want to do when they get out of their, essentially, prison, etc. I'm guessing the story is not gonna be anything to write home about, but the gameplay is relaxing, yet exciting when you find a nice puzzle of components.

Warhammer 40k Boltgun: KILL THE HERETICS. DESTROY. I MUST DRINK THEIR BLOOD IN SERVICE OF THE EMPEROR. This game is fucking awesome. I love retro shooters and this is giving me the exact power trip I want, of being a near invincible space marine (except in boss fights, holy shit they fuck you up) and stomping out heretics. It's a very fun time and is gonna get me to pick up a whole mess of other retro shooters, which seem to be having a bit of a renaissance right now.

Fortnite: After being unsatisfied with CoD (which I detailed above, lol), I tried this out since I still want a brain-off shooter I can enjoy, and there seems to be a shortage of arena shooters like CoD right now. Honestly, I'm having a great time. I'm not a huge fan of battle royale games (I played like 200 hours of PUBG when that was popular and that burned me out), but this has been fun. I like the lack of mechanical density, it allows for simpler fights that really just come down to who is aiming better (obviously there are still some things like grenades and rifts that can turn the tide).