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

The Finals released this past week and I popped in and bounced right off of it. Felt like I was getting destroyed by sweaty try-hards all the time from Fortnight and Apex Legends. I gave it a couple of days and came back with friends and trying to be more methodical/strategic and found a lot more depth that way. The game can be played a number of ways but I’m having a blast with it now.

I played a lot of Baldur's Gate 3 over the weekend. I still haven't beat the game, I just keep starting over when I get an idea for a character. Usually just rehashing old D&D characters. Current one is Quinric Balbalar, a perpetually stoned elf druid. A "high elf" if you will. Can't really RP him as such very effectively, but eh. It's still fun to bring my own characters to life. Although there's a reason I canned that character in D&D. He's a great comedic character, but had very little depth to him and wasn't all that fun to play when the moment didn't call for comedy.

--- Spoilers for BG3 ahead --

I'm playing Honor Mode and I made it farther than I expected. First attempt I got overrun by goblins in their camp. Second run I took my time and tried to clear as many of the side quests as I could think of before re-attempting the goblin camp. I very foolishly thought taking on the Hag was easier than it actually was and nearly lost it all there. But fortunately I managed to narrowly survive the fight with Shadowheart and my OP owlbear druid mostly intact.

Then I made my way to the Underdark (perhaps a bit too soon) and really, really, really stupidly decided to pick a fight with the dwarves down there. I was about to cheat honor mode a bit by killing the game process and reloading, but I accidentally clicked "verify file integrity" in the game crash popup and was forced to wait and think about my own integrity while the game verified its. I had previously "cheated" it once earlier in my playthrough due to a bug that was beyond my control, which I'm okay with. But to actually say "I don't like the outcome of my decision, I'll reload the save" completely undermines the point of the mode.

I'm still kind of torn, tbh. I like that honor mode locks me into my decisions, because it's far too easy to quickly reload a save and try again for better rolls, strategy, etc. without it. I might reload the save, attempt the fight I was about to lose again, then when I lose (and I will) I'll convert to a custom game and see if I can disable or limit load/saves without honor mode. Because I am thoroughly enjoying the extra difficulty of honor mode, but would like a little more forgiveness when it comes to death itself.

I finally was able to start Alan Wake 2. I love every game Remedy has made and really enjoyed Alan Wake back in the day and oh boy is this game my jam.

I just recently played through Alan Wake's chapter 4 and it is basically one of the greatest things in gaming I have experienced.

The game play and the mind space/writers room have all been enjoyable as well.

I tried out Dave The Diver this weekend, and it’s great. It’s got a cute and charming style, and the two gameplay loops are tight and enjoyable. It handles the rouge-like power curve well, and progression feels satisfying. Def recommend.

Other than that, Rocket League is life.

I've been playing a lot of lethal company, and it's scratching that itch for multiplayer co-op really well. At only ten bucks with a strong modding community, I see a lot of promise for the title. I just have to condition myself to have a manlier scream...

After all the GOTY noms, I finally picked up Baldur's Gate 3 knowing a steam sale is probably coming up in the next 10 days. It's fantastic! I feel like I want to change my character constantly though, and I'm kinda sad that there's no Artificer class (understandable though). I play an Artificer in Decent into Avernus with my DnD campaign so I'd love to bring him in but the character I rolled is still very fun!

Breifly returned to Baldur's Gate 3 to play the new epilogue. I reinstalled a 60GB game for ~15 minutes of playtime and it was entirely worth it.

Tried Gotham Knights via GamePass. It didn't seem to be going anywhere interesting so I got bored and dropped it. Also tried World War Z, which was a lot more fun but clearly made for multiplayer and replayability, niether of which really interest me.

Still thinking about The Talos Principle 2 even though I finished it a couple weeks ago.

I think I've spent more time recently working on an app to track what games I'm playing (and books, and other media) than I have actually playing games.

The Messenger - was looking for another platforming game and this was recommended in a random reddit thread, and I had gotten it for free on Epic. I've played for about 6 hours according to the profile screen (too bad Steam doesn't track playtime for non-Steam games you've added to your library!). For most of that time, you progress linearly through different levels, punctuated by some reasonably difficult boss fights. It's been fun enough. The main standout mechanic is that when you land an attack in midair, you can jump again. You can do this off of enemies, their projectile attacks, or lanterns which are all over the levels (and usually give you money when you hit them).

I've now come to a point where it opens up and you can travel back to previous levels and access new areas of them by walking into time rifts. The goal now is to hunt down hidden notes. I got my first one. I'm not big on backtracking and scouring maps for collectibles...I've taken a break, and may or may not come back to finish the game.

Mirror's Edge - A retrospective video on this game popped up into my recommended videos on youtube. I also own this from years ago but never got past the first level or so and decided to give it another shot. Man, parkour sure has come a long way since then. Having played Assassin's Creed 1 makes this feel almost unplayable (wait a second, this came out the year after AC1! Oof!) It is different in that it's 1st person and there is more of a sense of speed. But almost everything feels unreliable, like sometimes you'll vault off objects and sometimes not. I played through the tutorial and a couple of levels (so further than I got last time) but I don't see myself finishing it. There were a couple of rooms where the game ground to a halt on Steam Deck (down to around 10 FPS). Sometimes you are forced to take down armed enemies, meaning you have to disarm one and shoot the rest with the gun you stole. It feels out of place in the game and the shooting itself feels clunky. Finally, from what I saw so far, I don't like the storytelling or the look of the cinematics. So really the only draw of this game to me is running and jumping across buildings and stuff, which I can get in a lot of other places if I want.

I've been saying up and down the backlog threads how I'll make a bingo card for 2024 (since I couldn't participate in the backlog event in November). I finally put my money where my mouth is, generated a bingo card, aaaaand now I've been playing GTA: Vice City on Steam Deck and enjoying it a surprising amount. I never got to play it as a kid and I bought it on Steam fairly early (10 years ago 🙈) but the one time I tried to play it, it just wouldn't run properly on my PC, and over time, I forgot about it.

Gotta say, despite recent reviews saying how the game didn't age well, it's still very entertaining - I expect a large part of this is due to having no nostalgia (and therefore no expectations) tied to it. It's janky, the graphics are bad, the controls are only half working, the jumping animation is hilariously terrible, and falling into water instakills you. But at the same time, it has so much soul - all the vehicles, the radio programs (!!!), random comments on the street, the missions you encounter by just interacting with the world. I have barely advanced the story, but I spent a few hours just riding around, and a few more hours delivering pizza. I hit a palm tree headfirst while transporting a badly rendered lady to a club and we both flew several meters through the air. I ran over a lot of Vice City residents and tried to run from a helicopter. Several cars exploded. It's rudimentary, sure, and it requires a bit of patience, but I can see why people love(d) it so much. (Side note: I'm really impressed that, for a game that's not supposed to be supported at all, it runs on the Deck without crashing or really any significant issues at all.)

Didn't get much video game time this weekend. But I did play Against the Storm based on this Ars Technica write-up. It's also on Game Pass so it was an easy decision.

So far I'm a big fan. I love RTS and 4x games but rarely play multiplayer because the economy loop is the part I like. Often multiplayer matches focus on military/conquest which is (imo) the uninteresting part. This is a single player game which doesn't even have that aspect. Rather you are tasked to increase each town's production of various materials. It's a "cozy game" for people who like Stellaris.

Also spun up Cocoon after seeing it mentioned around Tildes. I didn't play it long but immediately love the approach to puzzle design and the feeling of iteratively falling "deeper. My impression so far is puzzles seem to flow naturally as you walk through the world and I have found little back-tracking to implement an obvious solution. Keeping that time delay between understanding the solution and implementing the solution is key for games like this. Also on Game Pass.

Edit: OFC spun up a new BG3 campaign. Didn't feel like playing my wizard so created a lawful good paladin. I really wanted to use Lae'Zel this time through but her adversarial nature just doesn't work with this paladin.

World of Warcraft: Season of Discovery. It's not entirely new, maybe old new? New old? I mean it's a newer version of the old game, but not the older new version from 2019. It's new old new 🤔

Anyway it's pretty good, although there is some debate about whether or not it counts as vanilla plus or something halfway there. But who cares, it's fun! The base game is the same as it was in the mid 2000's but it's a lot of fun as they added a few things, switched other things around, modified things, and the level cap is 25.

Having a lot of fun just adventuring which is something that's really missing from the current game that feels a lot more like a playground or theme park where you just go from ride to ride on your insanely fast flying mount. Not to throw too much shade at current expansions but I'm very happy to have been brought back to what pulled me into WoW in the first place!

I got through the first two scenarios in Frostpunk! That first one was hard, especially since I was learning on the go. I was also way too slow. And caring: sometimes people have to die. Lots of them, even (god, that sounds awful). I almost lost the scenario, but got through by the skin of my teeth. Started with 80 people, ended up with 82...when my pop high was like 250+. Yikes.

The second scenario was a cakewalk since a) I was fully mostly prepared for what needed to be done, and b) the game gave me plenty of time to do it. Planning on starting the third scenario tonight.

Separately, I picked up Good Company, which bills itself as a "Corporate Machinery Simulator." I've only played like an hour, so I don't have many thoughts on it yet. I enjoy "efficiency management" games, so this should be up my alley. We'll see.

On MMOs, I'm of course playing FFXIV, as usual. But I've also gone back to playing Eve again. I found myself "alarm clocking" for like a 5am fleet stat-op on Friday morning, before work. Hopefully I won't be doing too much of that.

My goal is to get back into faction warfare, after taking a ~6mo break. Low-sec PVP is a lot of fun. Even PVE can be fun because of the PVP threat. And it's usually all "small gang" stuff. So like 10 vs 10 typically (instead of null-sec's 500+ vs 500+ battles). It's a great place to hone actual PVP skills, with little risk. I'm still garbage at it, but it's fun. Maybe I can get a couple of my IRL friends back in again.

I have been on a huge nostalgia trip after installing a PS2 emulator on my pc. For the last month or so I've been working my way through some of my favorite Madden games, specifically Madden 2002 and Madden 2005. It's kind of amazing how much better they are than the modern editions to the franchise. Madden 02 has an awesome feature where you can add an expansion team in place of the Houston Texans who joined the league the year after Madden 02 was released.

Madden 2002 is my personal favorite as it was the first version of the game that I played, but it is a little lite compared to 2005. In Madden 04 and 05 you can move your franchise (I like to move to Anchorage and play in the snow every home game), set prices for tickets/parking/merchandise, hire coaching staff, and complete a preseason training camp to improve your players. None of those features are available in the modern versions of the game. I also took a crack at NFL 2k5 which has arguably the best gameplay of any football video game ever and a really cool feature that has an abbreviated version of ESPN NFL Primetime. I really wish EA would get their act together and reintroduce some of those features, or better yet, the NFL and NFLPA should end their exclusive rights deal with EA and open up some competition for a good NFL game.

Feel kinda bad admitting to this, but a Tencent mobile game, Arena Breakout. Basically a direct ripoff of Escape from Tarkov, but surprisingly good for a mobile shooter.

Didn't think I'd enjoy the extraction shooter genre, but it is miles better than Battle Royales.

It's mostly not pay to win, since a single bullet can destroy your fancy load out...but there are some things that give an in game financial lead, primarily reinforced cases that still allow you to bring out precious loot even if you don't extract successfully. The battle pass and in game currency purchases might give a bit of a lead in terms of better equipment, but again all it takes is one well placed head shot for you to lose it all.

I've found that designing the cheapest "minimal viable product" type load outs work pretty well for managing the risk reward dynamic of only taking in what you need to get out with more than what you put in.

Also the "loot tetris" mini game is surprisingly entertaining.

I've been focusing on Pikmin 4 this last week. I believe I'm getting to the end of the campaign (without any spoilers, I've 100%ed all of the levels up to the house level you see in the intro), and I'm liking it so far. I think it's a little cheap that monsters on the surface can be permanently killed (I guess the focus of the game is in caves so they have them respawn there instead), but I can forgive that. It makes the gameplay easier, and the game is marketed to a younger audience anyways. My biggest complaint is that they seem to retcon the previous games in the series. Pikmin 1 and 2 had proper continuity - Olimar crashed on Earth, made it back home, and then went back to the planet to raise money to save his failing company. Pikmin 3 had him crash land on Earth again for some reason, be saved by the crew of the S.S. Drake, and return to Earth in the DLC to retrieve his ship and its parts for his company. Pikmin 4 seems to subtly rewrite all of these events and potentially chalk up the events of Pikmin 2 as a bad dream Olimar had. I probably need to finish the game before passing full judgement on the story, but it seems a bit tired to have Olimar crash on Earth every game and I can never forgive trying to retroactively erase a game by calling it a dream. Story aside, though, its been a solid game and I hear it really hits its stride in the post-game Dandori mode. I can't wait to see how everything plays out

Stellaris Nexus has a beta playtest going, and should hit EA tomorrow.

It's amazing. Basically a stripped down 4x that you can actually play in an hour, with interesting decision making that doesn't require spreadsheets. I keep hearing it's lightly inspired by twilight imperium, so if that means anything to you, great.

Lots of factions, each with their own leaders and levelups, and then on top of that you have a randomish galaxy, tech tree (you see 2 from a pool of however many), and so on. You also draw "edicts" each turn which are the actions you can take, so it's kind of a deck builder as well.

The most important mechanic is it's victory point based. First to 100 wins, and every 7 turns there's a scoring session where anyone who's met the previous goals gets points (first to reach it gets 12, next gets 10, then 8 and so on), and you vote on a new goal to add to the list. This keeps games fresh as you aren't always going to get the victory conditions you expect, so you have to be able to pivot and handle new outcomes (which is kept easy enough thanks to how all the systems interact). Finally if you control the planet at the center of the galaxy, you automatically get 12 points, which is of course very powerful but makes you a huge target.

To me though the best thing is having unique factions that actually keep and use their faction identity. There's still so many ways to build them, but it actually feels like a different game if you play a different faction, rather than just a couple of unique moments. I'm really excited to see where they go, but as it is right now I'm already happy with it.

I've been playing Sekiro. I just keep dying, which is expected. Currently stuck on Yamauchi, because I spam the block button out of panic and always screw up somewhere.

The Binding of Isaac: Repentance: I love this game. It's become an all-time favorite lately, after watching streamers play it for years. Slowly on my way to unlocking everything. Have maybe 320 / 637 achievements down (with all the DLCs and particularly Repentance DLC installed, the game is huge- rooms, characters, items, synergies, everything- definitely the recommended way to play IMO- the DLC's aren't like "adds on to the end" style DLCs- they broaden the base game in general).

Path of Exile - new league started so I've started a character to casually enjoy and see how far I get this time around. I always need that Diablo-style loot itch scratched for me, and PoE does it well. If I get burnt out, I take a break for a league or two then come back. Grim Dawn's always a great alternative when I want something else. I regret buying Diablo 4, still play D2/D2R. F Blizzard, should never have given them money again. I must have been out of my mind to make such a decision.

Risk of Rain Returns - This game can be brutal but I loved the original, loved 2, and really think the remake is a beautiful return of the original. Because it's brutal and runs can take a while, I often put it down for a while, so currently on a break from it but will probably pick up more time on it once my Isaac gets more completed (or gets so difficult that I give up haha)

I picked up EA Sports WRC this weekend. I love watching rally, but I mostly road race, so I haven't done a ton of rally racing. I'm absolutely loving it! The cars feel great, the courses are properly terrifying, I have no complaints so far!

On top of that, I've been playing a lot of Fortnite and The Finals. Obviously everyone knows what Fortnite is, but I never played it before 2 weeks ago and it's surprisingly fun. It helps that I have a dozen friends that play it, so I can squad up whenever.

With The Finals, I'm really appreciating how mechanically simple it is. You just pick one gun and a few gadgets per character and you're good to go! The gameplay is smooth, fun, and often hilarious. I'm loving it! When it was being advertised, it very much seemed geared towards the GTA/Paydayl/Rainbow 6 crowd I thought, and that was a bit of a turnoff (I don't like those communities), but I'm glad I took a chance on it!

Lastly, I think I'm finally divorcing Call of Duty. I've been in a love/hate relationship with the series for a couple years now. I enjoyed MW3 multiplayer on launch until movement exploits were found. I stopped playing, since it was no longer fun with people exploiting mechanics every match. Some fixes actually came out this week, so I booted up the game and it does indeed seem fixed, but I also found I wasn't having that much fun, either. I think I'm finally over the game and can start saving $60 a year lol.

I just beat Honor mode on BG3 and absolutely loved it! The legendary actions add so much to the boss fights and not being able to undo bad rolls stresses me out so much.

I've been playing Skyrim once again, this time with the Nolvus mod pack. The nicest thing about it is that it has its own installer and very clear install instructions. It took a while to install since there are over 2000 mods, but it's been working really well (which isn't to say that I haven't CTD'd a few times, usually after a frustrating amount of fiddly gameplay without saving, of course).

Overall, it adds a ton of excellent content and really enhances the feel of Skyrim to be something more than it was. Melee combat is actually interesting to me now! Oh, and accidentally drinking an alchemy ingredient that gave my desperate and close to death mage character lycanthropy and immediately turned her into a werebear who mauled the pack of enemies into submission was a boatload of fun.

The best gameplay/roleplay moment I've encountered yet was as I was about to leave Riverwood to go adventuring, I heard a man's voice pining over wishing to see a woman again. I looked over and saw this guy sitting at the edge of the river and talked to him. I ended up getting totally involved in the story he had to tell, it was fantastic! I don't know if he's tied into some larger mod content, but my experience with him is that he's just an NPC with a storied past who'll tell you his story for a good 20 minutes if you keep asking him to give you details. It really enhanced the feeling of being in a lived-in world, and the writing of his story was excellent.

There are some slightly less-than-quality mods in the pack though, there's a very poorly written and AI-voiced mod that I had been interested in the premise of when I got the note inviting me to start the quest, but after my first interactions with that place I'm never going back there.

Either way, if you're looking for a new Skyrim experience I think I'd recommend Nolvus!

P.S. Oh yeah, one other downside: It takes a full few minutes to load up on my fairly beefy gaming PC. 2000 mods can definitely be a killer if your machine isn't up to date, but there are a few configurations that run lighter if you need it.

Road 96 is a first person, story driven, hitchhiking adventure game set in a country that doesn't exist in a 90s that didn't exist, with an interesting cast of characters. You play a hitchhiking teenager making your way across Petria, trying to get to the border so you can sneak across to freedom. You interact with a lot of characters, and in the course of events, you play several different teens. I believe it's procedurally generated, so multiple playthroughs should feel different, and I think there are also multiple endings. I've finished one playthrough, and started another, and it has already been wildly different. I'm enjoying this a fair bit, 4/5.

Aces & Adventures is a game I came across during the Tildes Backlog Burner, and it's still one I turn to when I have 10 or 15 minutes to kill. It's a blend of Slay the Spire and Poker; in previous comments I said Hearthstone as well, but it doesn't feel particularly Hearthstone-y to me anymore, as I have unlocked all the cards. It remains very good, with challenge modes that changes up daily.

Raft is a game my son wanted to play, so we've been doing multiplayer, and it's pretty good. You are adrift on an endless sea, and you have to fish things out of the ocean to upgrade your raft. We're not going particularly hard with it, and I hate the shark and revel in hunting her down and eating her.

Edit: almost forgot Forgetful dictator, which is a geography game, thanks @Wes the recommendation. It's free on steam, and is really enjoyable!

Been playing Jump King on /u/whereiswaldo’s recommendation, and it’s definitely hitting the spot. That perfect feeling of nailing a jump only to fall halfway down the map after you screw up the next one. I’ve gotten through 4 ‘zones’ now, but fell back down to the drain most recently. It’s been great!

Playing 1.0 of Ready or Not in single player, can't comment on coop yet. Props for the rare dev these days that still care about team AI instead of relegating everything to coop. I like the shields (and the AI that have them moves up front during a breach), canted sights and being able to choose low/high ready.

The other side of that is it feels like every encounter ends up in a massive shootout to the death and there's no gradient of suspects compared to the SWAT games. Sometimes it feels like the game was supposed to be Terrorist Hunt but they actually had to make a spiritual successor to the SWAT games so they threw in civlians on the maps. Suspects shoot you on sight the moment you step 1 pixel into their area, and do the occasional John Wick moves against a squad in full body armor. As a bonus your SWAT AI also gets those traits, I've seen them occasionally wallbang a suspect before I even hear the dialog.

Map design is "bigger and better" syndrome drawing notes from the later stages of SWAT 4. Large multi-level compounds with multiple entrances connected by wide open spaces all tasked to a 5 man squad. I kind of miss the smaller levels like the Fairfax residence (there's one as a mod) or the earlier levels in SWAT 3. If you think the gas station (the first level) is huge, it's pretty much starts like that for the game.

The UX leans more on form than function. The police station, while pretty, could've been a menu. The NPCs there just stand around not doing anything and everything there is essentially set dressing. You walk around the station in full armor with a loaded weapon walking your way to the next point. Compared to SWAT 4, there's no UI for tweaking a level before you start where you can fine-tune suspects and civilians.

The loadout menu makes you constantly wade in and out of menus in this little section of the screen in tiny font while there's a giant preview of the character taking up the view. Not like that preview matters since things like changing armor doesn't show the difference. Would've liked more standardized descriptions and numbers like weapon caliber and muzzle velocity similar to Insurgency Sandstorm.

On sound design, guns are very loud which I like. A bang and clear on a room packed with suspects is appropriately tense. Dialog is pretty much lifted verbatim from SWAT 4 just with different voice actors, including "trailers".

Suspect AI tuning aside, overall it feels like a mix of SWAT 4.5 and what a modern remake would be.

Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 2 (KOTOR 2). Again. I am currently doing another play through of KOTOR 2, but this time I am being on the dark side. Mostly because I did the light side ending before and never got to do the dark side ending of this game. My thoughts on it is that it is a fine game, it is not as great as the first one. But it can stand on its own, I'll chalk it up to Obsidian's writing. And what is up with Obsidian making rushed sequels in less than two years?

I've been playing the Dead Space remake and the Saints Row reboot. I am giving up on the former as I played the OG only a few years ago and the remake is too similar to it for me to be interested in playing right now. The latter is neat, but my PlayStation Plus ran out and I am not renewing because of the price hike a month or two ago. Looking at starting Star Wars Jedi: Survivor in a day or two now.