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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.
I've been sinking most of my gaming time recently into Helldivers 2. The game certainly has problems (especially with the servers always being full, grumble grumble), but this game has been so much fun! The gameplay loop is just so damn satisfying. The game is tactical (like if you reload halfway through a mag, you lose the rest of those rounds), but not finicky. It's some of the most fun I've had playing co-op games, as well! A bunch of my friends have it, but even random players have been nice. The progression is good, the strategem feature is so unique and adds a TON to the game.
For those that don't know, to call in orbital strikes, special weapons, etc., you need to enter in fighting game combos, like up, down, left, left, up, right or something. The game shows you the combos for all your equipped strategems and it's always the same for the same items (each strategem has a unique combo), but it means that in a brutal firefight, you really have to find cover and concentrate to call in that orbital strike to help you out, you can't just press a couple buttons to solve the problem. In the same vein, I absolutely love the objectives being interactive (like going through 8 steps to launch an ICBM) instead of just pressing A and you're done.
Overall, a fantastic experience that I will be sinking time into and that I definitely recommend! $40 is a pretty good price for the game. I will say that it does have a premium battle pass, BUT, you unlock premium currency from playing (you can find it while on missions) as well as some from the free battlepass, so you should be able to get the premium pass without spending extra money, provided you play enough. I have a dozen hours of mostly playing difficulty 4 and 5 and I'm a bit over halfway through the number of pages on the free battlepass (though probably only 1/3 of the way through on costs, the higher tier items are more expensive). It honestly feels more like a skill tree than a battlepass, with how quickly the first few pages go.
For other games, I've been booting up Destiny 2 again. The "moments of triumph" title for 2023 is available and I just finished that up as well as finished up the current season's story (for non destiny players, it's basically an in game title saying you did all the content in the previous year, including dungeons and raids and stuff). I'm honestly probably going to be taking a break now again until right before The Final Shape comes out, I'm still fairly burned out (1k hours in about 1.5 years of playing now). I do think the game is in a good place, still, and some of the upcoming sandbox changes and from what we've seen from TFS has me hopeful that the game will get at least one last hurrah. Most of my friends that played have quit at this point, so I'm hoping they come back in TFS for a few more raids (we used to have a dozen raiders in our clan and were doing at least one or two a week through most of Witch Queen and the first months of Lightfall). If not, I'll be looking for a clan, since there's no way I'm missing the TFS raid, I want to finish this fight!
I also booted up DCS and Microsoft Flight Simulator last week. My friend is going to be running a DCS campaign for a group of us soon, so I wanted to get some practice in. I also bought TrackIR 5, which is an IR sensor that goes on top of your monitor (like a webcam) and it tracks either a thing you attach to your headset or a clip you put on the brim of a hat and it allows you to have head tracking. It's honestly very intuitive and natural and I really don't know why I waited this long to buy one, considering I have hundreds of hours in flight sims over the last 3 years. It will help me a TON during dogfights in DCS, as it was pretty hard to track targets before with having to use a hat on my joystick to move my view. This also frees up a hat for me to map to more functions (probably radar functions for most planes, since I don't usually have those mapped).
Lastly, Balatro comes out tomorrow, it's a card game roguelike I've been looking forward to. I played the demo for a few hours and was pretty impressed at how much fun it was, so I'm definitely picking that up on release. I think I mentioned it more in depth in a previous week's thread, but I'm just excited for it to be out soon!
My brother and two BILs asked me to pick it up Helldivers 2 this weekend. Unfortunately all 2 hours of my playtime have been sitting in the server queue. I'm hoping I can get on to try it out some evening this week and try to drop with them next time they spin it up.
It sounds great, hoping to get some other friends in it if I like it and they get the servers sorted.
That's unfortunate to hear but sadly your story is hardly a unique one. Any of the community forums for the game (reddit, steam, discord, etc) have all become much more toxic in the span of a week due to people raging that they bought the game because they heard how awesome it was, and now they can't even play it. It's definitely a rough launch, though at least it's the best kind of problem a game could have. For the devs' sake though, I hope they're able to fix whatever is bottlenecking their servers soon, since folks are starting to refund and leave bad reviews.
Agreed. As a veteran of Blizzard launches it's nothing new to me. I sympathize with people who have a restricted gaming budgets and understand refunding if you'd prefer to buy something playable. But I'll hold out, I've read enough about the game design that I'm happy to support a dev house doing something different and avoiding the predatory microtransaction designs.
Yeah, I'm hoping they figure that out. It doesn't seem like the game is getting any less popular (their steam player count actually peaked last night), so I'm hoping they actually beef up their servers instead of relying on player counts coming down soon. It's really refreshing to be getting a multiplayer shooter that is both good and isn't shoving microtransactions in your face.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills hearing things like this, and people just accepting that "the servers are full."
If I buy a game and can't play it with my friends whenever I want? That's unacceptable. Why can't they just let people host their own servers? Then there wouldn't have ever been a max capacity issue and everyone would be able to play.
And, presumably, it would be a lot cheaper for the devs (or Sony, I guess?) to not have to pay for all this server space.
So, this game is made by a relatively unknown developer and is the sequel to a relatively unknown game that didn't exactly have a large playerbase. I'm not sure they expected to be getting 500k concurrent players in their game and they are actively taking steps to improve the servers so they can raise or remove the caps. I think I saw some updates were going out this week. If the servers still have queues a month after the game comes out, I'd definitely say they need to hurry their asses up, but the game has only been out since Feb 8, so I'm willing to be a bit lenient given the context and given how good the rest of the game is.
It's less so people just "accepting the servers are full" and moreso people understanding that this smaller developer had no way to predict their game would blow up this much and seeing that they are taking steps already to fix it. It would be different if the servers were full and the devs were silent on the server issues.
I absolutely understand why some people are frustrated, I am too, but I'm also trying to be understanding, considering the game has been out for like 11 days.
To add further context to your point, Helldivers 1 peaked at less than 7,000 players. They projected HD2 to have a peak of like 50K, and laid infrastructure for like 100-150K CCU.
They got this up to 250K sometime in the middle of the week last week, and then this weekend got it up to 450K.
And between PC and PS5 they were getting hit with like, 700K CCU this weekend.
But this wasn't a problem 20 years ago. If 5 people or 5 million people were playing Unreal Tournament, they could just host their own server, and no one was worrying about the mercy of the devs and their publisher to have enough capacity to allow everyone to play.
The step to fix it is easy: let people host their own servers, rather than only connect to official ones.
Hosting a bunch of players in your servers is a lot more complicated than it was 20 years ago. Player hosted servers also don't really work with a game structured like Helldivers, which pretty much needs matchmaking to have a good online experience (though you can still just have 3 of your friends join you instead of matchmake), rather than a server browser, which is just a worse user experience for most games these days. The issue here is that the servers did not initially have a cap, but Arrowhead had to add a cap of 450k to ensure stable servers for the people that were currently playing, as there was a lot of instability in the first day or two of play. This cap is in effect while they fix their server stability and can then raise or remove the cap. They're putting out fixes this week, the second week of the game being out, to hopefully resolve the issues. That is honestly pretty speedy when it comes to server stability fixes.
I'm not trying to say you or anybody else is wrong for feeling frustrated, I'm just providing some context for why most people aren't upset about it, since the context of this situation is a whole lot different than if a new Call of Duty or something came out and had server queues.
It's not really that simple.
Firstly, the game is being shipped as a GaaS, not a one and done.
Secondly, the game's big "meta" focus is on all players playing on the same galactic map. Planets are attacked and the community collectively has to defend or liberate the planet, and it fills a % for the planet slowly. What planets are under attack and by which faction, plus the types of mission, changes for every one depending on the in-game events occurring.
It is unacceptable. Reading whatever the community managers are putting out there, Arrowhead thinks so too.
Hosting your own servers is not going to happen though, as it defeats the purpose of the game. It has an actively unfolding story that Arrowhead themselves guide by hand based on what players do, you don't get that with self hosted servers.
The community built around HD1 was made through the collective effort by the players. Taking that away makes the game worse, even if you don't personally interface with it.
Even so, you're right it's unacceptable. But you too can see they are trying though right? It's not like they want to piss off their entire playerbase on purpose.
I feel like it rings a little hollow, given that they're published by Sony. If it were a case of them being actually independent, or even having a smaller publisher-- even something like Paradox, I think it'd be okay. But Sony? This is up there with things like Final Fantasy XIV telling people "hey sorry, we know you pay us monthly but there's a login queue (:" and pretending like that should be acceptable, too.
And to be completely honest, I have no skin in this game. I don't own Helldivers 2 and probably won't buy it until it's deeply discounted.
Perhaps, but Sony is just the publisher. They do not own the infrastructure of the developer, just the storefront and marketing as far as I can tell. It's up to the developer to provide the game.
And Arrowhead is not pretending it's acceptable. They're open about their issues and how they're working round the clock to solve it. I'm not saying this to absolve them of responsibility but you can see from the effort that this is hurting on both ends. It's costing Arrowhead a lot of money in refunds too.
These things ultimately happen, people make mistakes. It's not about the mistake, it's about the response to the mistake and the effort to solve it. I think Arrowhead deserves at least some slack because of their response. But I also think they need to give the users something back after all is said and done, because the wait is not ok.
Not the devs, and not even well versed in network infrastructure, but from what I can surmise the reason people can't host their own servers is due to a combination of the need to avoid saving data client-side to avoid all the really easy client-side cheating, and everyone's data being stored in one location to update the galactic war information. At any rate, I highly doubt we'll see player-hosted servers or even an offline mode anytime soon, if at all.
It's been continuously peaking every day, it's remarkably popular.
Seeing the game growing to 400k+ consistently despite the hardcap to 450k total (including PS5) means there's room for a lot of growth still.
People are right to be disappointed, but it's taking the internet form of extreme vitriol which is totally unwarranted. The developers are clear about what they're doing and how they're really in over their head with this player count. It's a lose lose situation for everyone. At least in the short term.
I'm one of the lucky folk that have almost none of the issues aside from the general matchmaking being disabled, so I've been having a ton of fun and I recommend it to anyone getting the chance to pick this one up. You won't regret it. This game is incredibly cinematic without even trying to be.
I was hesitant it would live up to Helldivers 1 in terms of fun but it has smashed my own expectations.
Yeah, I was a bit frustrated yesterday and not being able to play without queuing, but I accept that Arrowhead looks to be doing what they can and they'll probably have fixes soon. I don't think anybody could have predicted this many people would play. I fully expected this to just be another niche title that maybe peaks at like 100k players and goes down to 20k dedicated players after a week or two.
Sadly I ended up refunding. My play time was 3 hours spent in queue and no actual time anywhere else. But the reason I refunded was that it just stopped working, would launch and just get a black screen. I was able to fix it twice by reinstalling but that eventually failed to fix the issue.
Hard to justify spending 20-30 minutes reinstalling (have to redownload each time), just to spend another hour in a queue. I think it is an issue with the DRM and the fact that while in queue there is no way to gracefully exit the game.
I appreciate the devs are being communicative and responding to the issues. I really want to play the game. But I will have to wait until it functions.
Yeah, at launch, I was able to get in for the first week or so without issue and mostly play without issue (matchmaking was fucky, but playing with friends worked perfectly), but since they implemented the player count caps while they implement changes, I haven't been able to play. I don't blame you at all for refunding, the smart thing at this point is to wait another few weeks to see if everything gets resolved and the queues are hightened, removed, or the player count goes down. At the point I made my above comment, I think I had only been locked out of the game for a day and now having been locked out the last couple days, in addition, I'm getting antsy to play. I hope it's fixed soon....
The black screen issue was server related. It happened when you would launch and fail the initial connection to the login authentication server. That's been fixed now.
What is the reason I wonder? Word of mouth? Tiktok? Twitch? I was shocked because as I was playing over the weekend the servers were slammed and I noticed ~300-400k people online via Steam Community Hub. Then Tuesday comes around and I'm thinking that it must have cooled off a bit so I can probably play a bit more. Nope, Tuesday evening at like 8pst 450k in Community Hub. Felt bizarre to me because even that is pushing like 11pm est so you'd think between it being a weeknight and late at night you'd start seeing numbers fall off.
Of course it's an incredible game and deserves the success, I just thought it was wild how the game had more players on a Tuesday vs a Saturday.
What's honestly more baffling is that these numbers are hardcaps Arrowhead introduced to make the experience smooth for the people that are actually in.
There's even more players waiting in the wings. If they manage to stabilize and remove the cap before people move on to the next shiny, you may see even higher numbers. And that's not even counting their PlayStation playerbase!
I would second the opinion on trying a track IR if you play any flight sims, it is really an amazing way to look around in a game. When I first read about it, I thought that is silly, you can't look left you wouldn't see the monitor. But the trick is that it is mapped on a curve where say 30 degrees left look should get you turned around mostly behind you and it works really well.
My flight sim playing is really just I played the 90's ones all the time like secret weapons of the luftwaffe, red barron etc. As the sim levels increased over time, I realized I was not great at them, and they became something I read about, then watch YT videos of, more than play. But I had a phase a good 10 years ago or so where I thought I'd give them a big try again, got a HOTAS and rudder pedals and was all hyped up for IL2.
I could not afford the track IR at the time but there was facetracknoIr which let you use a webacam to do the same thing. Once I got it set up and learned to reset my POV with a button I recall even to this day following a carrier landing tutorial where I was circling around parallel to the carrier low to the ocean preparing for a landing, and I needed to turn left, and I banked the plane, looking to the left to see as I was going, and the view responded perfectly, shifting the angle exactly to where I needed to be looking. It was so, damn, intuitive, life changing for flying sims.
This experience is what made me excited for VR when it was coming, like ok track IR is great but imagine the whole thing in VR. My experience with that was also a strong memory, 10 seconds of movement and I was about to puke all over the place, so, not to be, unfortunately.
Some of my reading has also lead me to see there are a few apps for your phone where you can mount it to your head on a hat or with as trap and use the phone's gyro to give you the same movement. Ultimately, the track IR 5 still looked like the best and most comfortable set up, but it is a bit pricey at close to 200 dollars. If you are tentative though, i'd suggest that you find one of the phone apps and use an old smaller smartphone and baseball cap to check out how amazing that kind of looking around is in a flight sim. I also think some people use it for games that have independent look action like the ARMA series as well.
2023 holiday season continues as I played Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective, a cult classic from the DS that was released last year on Steam with higher resolution graphics and rearranged music. It was created by Phoenix Wright's creator Takumi Shu, and gifted to me by... no one here this time around; it was my brother's gift.
Sissel, the protagonist, awakes in a junkyard at the beginning of the game to find that he's dead and doesn't know who he is. After witnessing the murder of a young police detective, Lynne, he quickly learns that as a ghost he has some special powers: To move from object to object (as long as they're near each other) and over phone landlines (definitely wouldn't work in 2024), to slightly manipulate objects, and to travel to four minutes before the moment of someone's death and witness or change their final moments. Using his powers and his (or, well, ours) puzzle solving ability, Sissel saves Lynne. And again. And again. Lynne gets killed a lot, actually. He also saves a number of other people as he searches for his identity and helps untangle a conspiracy involving kidnapping, revenge and politics.
The game feels Visual Novel adjacent in the vein of the Nonary Games. It's divided in self-contained chapters and contains a mind-boggling amount of dialogue. Things are thoroughly explained to the player, backstory is provided and there's plenty of banter too. The art style and animation are excellent, with each character oozing with personality and delightful tics and silliness that keeps the mood from becoming too heavy despite all the killing and tragedy. Just like the Nonary Games (and as you might expect from the protagonist's main power of traveling to the past and preventing killings), it has some timeline shenanigans.
The puzzles are hit or miss. I was able to solve most of them unaided, but some require some real moon logic and I confess on a couple of occasions I looked them up. Puzzle sequences (traveling from object to object and manipulating them in the right order) are almost all of the gameplay and there are essentially two types: Non-urgent ones are usually fine, since you can't run out of time. You can make mistakes that you have to undo. Murder prevention puzzles, on the other hand, are time sensitive, and often require performing actions with fairly precise timing. Since you can always rewind to four minutes before the murder, the designers had no qualms about using fail states here, and you're expected to repeat these puzzles several times, which can get frustrating. As a mitigation, there's a limited checkpointing mechanic (which isn't always sufficient) and Sissel will drop some hints to the player after a few failures.
In the end, I'd say this was a good game. It's very unique and memorable, and I can understand why so many people think the world of it. I was a little annoyed by excessive amounts of dialogue/cutscenes. It took me 15 hours to play through and I got some of the special objectives (achievements), but I didn't bother going back for the rest because you have to replay each full chapter (complete with all the dialogue/cutscenes) only to get to the sensitive moment that you're supposed to solve "better", only to potentially fail it again! I suggest not worrying about these and just enjoying the story.
You forgot the most important thing.
Ghost Trick has the best dog in video games, the top pom.
That's for people to find out when they play!
The recent Subnautica 2 news gave me a hankering so I jumped back in and am replaying the first game.
Oh my god, this game is so much fun. Even knowing most of the stuff from 4 years ago when I first played it, it's still a blast.
This game is just perfection. Everything it tried to do it excels at. Gameplay, atmosphere, aesthetic, tension, progression, story, exploration. It's all perfectly executed.
And immediately jumping back in I am hooked again. Even though I've played this all before it's just as much fun again.
The updated creatures and building stuff is great. I love that they back ported the large hab buildings from Below Zero.
Even games I love and games I enjoy more (not many but there are some) I couldn't say are perfect, but Subnautica truly is and I'm so freaking excited to see what comes next!
I got Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor a few days back when it released and it's been pretty fun so far. I'm a fan of other 'survivor' games like the OG Vampire Survivors and also Brotato, but I never played DRG so I worried that I'd be missing out on some background, but luckily it was still enjoyable.
One interesting thing about it, which I'm not sure if it's because I didn't play the original or not, is that I was totally lost at first. Other survivor games are VERY straightforward in concept, but still fun of course. Run around auto-shooting enemies until you level up and then select an upgrade. Then rinse and repeat with different weapons, characters, abilities, enemies, and levels.
DRG:S has all that, but then it also has a bunch of different resources you can mine or collect that upgrade and unlock different things. And the game didn't really do a great job of explaining what they were or how they were different from each other. Not sure if this lack of explanation was just because it's early in development or because they assumed most people would have played the original game, but there's gotta be plenty of people like me who hadn't. So I had to discover these resources and what they do manually, which honestly was a lot more fun than I thought it would be when I first started the game.
Like the best example I can think of was this resource called red sugar. It's red, naturally, and looks very similar to some other red resources that you can mine, especially nitra (which I also didn't know what it did). Eventually I realized that one was nitra, which I could use to upgrade weapons during a run, and the other was red sugar, which seemed to.... do nothing? Sometimes I would mine it and it would do no thing and other times it seemed to be collected, but I wasn't sure what it did. What gives? Eventually I realized that it healed you, and those times when it wasn't doing anything was because I was already at full health. Suddenly everything made a ton more sense and I was able to use that information accordingly.
Seems pretty stupid typing that all out but it really made for an interesting bit of discovery that lasted for the first few hours of the game until I got a hang of what every resource did and how to accomplish what I wanted to accomplish. I still don't know exactly how to unlock certain things like character loadouts. I'm not sure if the game even tells you. I've unlocked some, but am not sure why. Do I need to reach a certain level with that character? That's my best guess, but it would be helpful if it said something like 'unlocks at level 10' or whatever. Regardless, I am having plenty of fun discovering things in the meantime.
You do need levels for loadouts. Class levels specifically. You can see everything you can unlock on the Milestones page.
Didn't notice that page, will check it out. Thanks!
In the original game, red sugar heals you. I assume it does the same thing in Survivor, but I haven't played it.
It does indeed. Hadn’t played the original so I wasn’t sure.
I'm in the middle of Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. My second game in the Yakuza series or fourth if you count the Lost Judgment games.
Rpg gameplay has improved but somehow this feels like a side story but maybe that's just because I've yet to finish it. Still, I highly enjoy the hooks, the side activities etc. The game's so weird, fun and full of its own specific low-budget-clunky charm that's like no other.
I do find it kinda hilarious how much of a shit hole the game presents the US, or more specifically Hawaii.
I'd love to hear other opinions about the game
I've been holding off on last epoch for a bit now and waiting until it was far enough along, and with the 1.0 coming this week it looked like it was time. Grabbed it this week ahead of launch just to get a feel and from looking at their 1.0 patch notes it seems a lot will be changing, which makes me glad to have played the earlier version.
I really, really like watching games change and evolve and be patched over time. Updates on games I still have installed are really exciting, and I keep looking to see if they have changed enough to warrant more time with the ones I like.
For my ARPG background, I would say I am not very hardcore at it, just due to time and not being a great character builder. I occasionally play path of exile and have near 800ish hours on it but have only played maybe 3 or 4 leagues and generally am following guides. While I really enjoy the vastness of POE, my preferred playing would be to make a character to end game, then take it to the first giant power spike to see the build come online, and maybe a touch more, but then when it comes to pushing through that to that last part I don't have the heart for pushing on and grinding currency out. At this point I want to twink up a character and try another build and do the same thing.
POE does not support his very well IMHO. I HATE engaging in any game economy. If there is one there is certainly some iron fisted bot farm that is spending 24x7 managing the market while I'm just a person trying to play a video game. That attitude doesn't work for POE endgame because you are basically grinding out currency and you can only get that currency by doing vast amount of trading of small drops and I just don't want to deal with it.
So POE for me is going in super pumped to try out a bunch of builds and one day not have to follow a build guide, that ends up with me leveling up, doing some minor trading and then grinding for a few days and not wanting to sort through and sell my stuff so I can buy pieces for the build. Also chances are that being not great at making builds I am follow a guide and the bots are already scanning the market 24x7 for pieces related to that build and basically price fixing everything.
That is a lot of paragraphs to say that I'm liking the POE lightness of last epoch. It is complex enough that I feel like there are a ton of build options to explore and the respecing is easy enough I don't mind experimenting. The crafting is also not as punishing as POEs crafting, another disappointing aspect. I WANT to engage with POE crafting and make something but either you engage with trade again and bulk purchase craft currency and spend a fortune or you spend 1/100th of it for something on the AH that will be better.
Last epoch seems to understand what I want as a player, I don't want everything to be easy, I want things unreachable to me that I won't work. But what I do want is to be able to engage with the game and the systems without being a trader by day and raider by night. Anyway, I'm very excited to be playing later this week.
While I am waiting I grabbed palworld to check out. I can see why the game did so well in sales, it is an amazing foundation of a game, similar to how I felt playing valhiem as well, the bones are good. All the systems have the groundwork to play together for an amazing game and are individually executed well in design.
I do think the game has a long way to go still. It goes beyond quality of life, it is that over the course of playing it the player growth and obstacles in front of you don't force you to engage with the systems. I generally am not caring what type the PAL is nor the abilities on it beyond maybe getting a flyer and 'looks cool'. It is pretty easy to achieve food / item/ sanity stability on the base building and didn't take much thought for it to be self sustainable. The tech tree isn't too exciting after a point, it feels like just bigger numbers on bigger numbers. I'll be done with this game probably either today or tomorrow and just in time for last epoch release, so glad to have tried it. This will also be a game I watch over the years to see how they grow with it, they have made enough money that I hope the devs will keep working on it for a long time coming.
Off the beaten path a bit, but I started replaying Planescape: Torment (Enhanced Edition). I'm using a pretty exhaustive walkthrough this time, since I've spent many, many hours in the past just wandering and I'd like to actually get to the end this time. I'm just rocking a high wis build and enjoying the story and incredibly crafted city of Sigil.
I need to jump back into it, but I'm just not ready yet. I started it and played an hour or two, got out to Sigil and then just didn't feel like talking to all the people, so I put it down for now.
One thing I'm really liking about the EE though is that it's tablet friendly. I've been playing it on my Surface Go in bed and it's a nice fit for that. Can actually see the text unlike on my Deck.
Finished God of War (2018) this weekend. The fastest I've played through a game in a decade. I ended up dropping the difficulty to easy about 25% of the way through. I think they nailed the difficulty, I would have preferred to play on the default difficulty but also didn't want to spend the time figuring out some boss fights with the limited play time I usually get. Really enjoyed the story and will be picking up God of War: Ragnarok in a couple weeks. I just want to cleanse my pallet with some other games before revisiting the world.
Been playing casual games I picked up on Netflix, so worked my way through Storyteller and Oxenfree. Oxenfree has a humorous/ominous vibe with strong notes of Control, although the actual gameplay is nothing like it. Both are fairly quick to play and I found them enjoyable.
I started up Sable the other day. I’d seen it previewed a few years back and thought it looked really interesting, and then it came out as a free monthly game on PS+ back in December, so now I’m finally getting around to it as part of an alphabet platinum trophy challenge I’m doing this year.
The art is simple but gorgeous, and I love the type of game that plops you into an unfamiliar world and just lets you explore and figure out what led you here. I would call it relaxing, except for the fact that its performance is so bad that at times I’ve been concerned that my PS5 was breaking down. There have been times when I’ve been climbing gigantic skeletons and the only thing onscreen was my character, a few lines to illustrate topography of the bones, and then nothing but white, and the frame rate still sputtered trying to keep up.
I want to like it far more than I actually do, but when I can’t even open the simple fishing minigame for fear that it will lock up my game again, I just can’t see it as anything better than ‘alright’
Yeah, from what I can tell it looks like there is a memory leak on the PS5 port so the longer you play without exiting the game, the worse the performance. It's a damn shame too. The game is pure vibes. Honestly, I'd go so far as to say that it's better to pick it up on PC if you enjoy it at all rather than play it for free on the PS5 because of how frustrating it gets. If you want to stick to the PS5 version though, just know that most problems can be fixed by quitting the game (ie. back to the title screen) and reloading. In particular, I had a lot of issues with the fishing minigame and my hoverbike getting lost, and that would resolve it.
I have been playing FFIV Pixel Remaster recently because apparently I can't stop myself from giving Square money for old Final Fantasy games.
It's fine. A lot of people have said it's too easy but I'm landing somewhere between harder than the original NA SNES version but not as hard as the Japanese/DS version. Graphics are fine. I like having unlimited inventory space and unlimited arrows but miss item duping. Although I have found that I always have more than enough money so I guess item duping isn't a big loss outside of having more throwables for Edge. Not losing money when running away also helps I guess.
Music is pretty good. I enjoyed the Mysidia remix but the moon music isn't as good.
I guess I still prefer the SNES version and will probably go back to playing that way for future play throughs so it's not the worst effort but also not the definitive way to play.
It feels like such a missed opportunity to have not done and HD pixel remaster like Live a Live or Octopath for these later SNES games.
Agreed. It is not the best version and the graphical improvements are super minor, and yet idiots like me still bought it so I guess they don't need to do better.
I would literally kill for an FF6 with Octopath Traveller or better graphics.
Islands of Insights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islands_of_Insight
It's an island (hah!) full with logic and 3D puzzles. Think "The Witness" (one of my favorite games ever).
So far it's fun, the areas are absolutely packed with various kind of puzzles, and the difficult puzzles are interesting (there are a lot of easy ones, which introduce the concepts and techniques. I'm familiar with the World Puzzle Championship (WPC) puzzles, so that's a bit boring). It doesn't look at deep as The Witness (very high bar), but it's a lot of "just one more puzzle then I stop" (one hour ago).
(frankly, nowadays a game just reaching "I didn't refund it" is already a compliment ;)
I keep hearing about this one this week. It's been on my list/radar for quite a while and I'm eager to try it out as one of my next games after the game I'm currently playing. Glad people are enjoying it.
(The Talos Principle 2 is also on my backlog, which one would you play first?)
Well, if you already own TP2 I would do that one first :)
Islands runs pretty bad sometimes. I have a recent but very average video card and sometimes FPS drops to the 10s. It's not usually an issue, only happens when you see a lot if islands at once (but it does look good).
Still making my way through Jedi: Survivor. Game says I just past the 75% mark and just unlocked the last ability to open up blocked paths lol. So going around exploring and collecting everything up. It's a bit tedious, but it's nice since some nights I only have an hour or so to jump in.
Downloaded a GBA emulator on my phone. Started my very first Nuzlocke run on Pokemon FireRed. Learned quickly that there's going to be a lot of grinding to beef up my Pokemon. Also need to cut some bad habits. Like taking a Pokemon down to little health before catching. That cost me a Weedle when i killed him by accident. Started with Bulbasaur though. I'm a Charmander guy, but I wanted to change things up. This really helped me since grass is an advantage in the early game. Bought the expensive Magikarp before Mt. Moon. At that point, I only had Bulbasaur, Pidgey, and Spearow. So I thought of Magikarp as an investment for the future haha. Lost my Spearow at the end of Mt. Moon though. That really hurt. Didn't really want him since I have Pidgey, but Spearow represented a lot of time. Did get a Geodude from Mt. Moon, so that's good. Finally got Magikarp up to level 15 and learn tackle. But since he wasn't fighting, his stats are garbage. But at least Magikarp can beat some Pokemon on his own now lol.
In Marvel Snap, this week's Spotlight rotation had a few cards that I didn't have. Used my saved up keys to get some good pulls. Already hit infinity. So I've been having fun trying out this Black Knight + Corvius Glade auto-build deck.
I've been dipping my toes back into Elden Ring here and there. Haven't made a ton of progress, but I'm exploring the Dragonbarrow area, I think it's called. Ran into an optional boss who's kicking my ass (Black Blade Kindred), but I'm probably just going to keep pounding my head against the wall for awhile until I can properly determine if I'm having a skill or a power level issue.
Moreso, I've been playing a good amount of Advance Wars 2 still on GBA. My free time right now is taken up by a project I need to keep hammering away at, so when I find a minute here and there to game, I've been firing it up and taking a few turns before putting it back down again. It really just fits into my available time right now.
Just finished red dead redemption 2. Just the masterpiece i imagined it was, storywise. The gameplay is more or less what you'd expect from rockstar. Only the ending is too watered down anyway... Great.
And now I am trying elden ring. It does no disappoint though I was really lost at the beginning. In fact I am not 100% sure an open world is OK for soul games even if I really enjoy stumbling upon small dungeons and discover them with the torch. I preferred sekiro combat system, to me this seems... easy? Anyway I have killed two bosses... so... I still have a lot of road ahead ^^
I've been on a pretty long gaming break for a while actually...
My previous gaming binge was Factorio Space Ex mod and Id gotten to about midgameish before I had to take a week break for work.... Unfortunately that kind of got me out of the zone completely so when I returned to the game I just couldnt get back into the groove of it so maybe Ill try to pick up where I left off some day.
That said I love the base game (enough to commit to playing space exploration), its just great in how I can spend an hour (or five) to make my one factory work optimally and then to be able to see the results and know that if I ever need to expand itll be easy to just copy paste and know wverything will just work.
So I've finally gotten over my gaming break; and I started Vintage Story today, what some people might call a hardcore 'minecraft' clone.
So I'm speaking from when I last played Minecraft, around when beta was released, but the first thing I realised about an hour into VS is just how beautiful the game is for a voxel game. Theres just so much variation in biomes and plants and textures that at some points its pretty easy to gloss over the fact that the game is based on a 1x1x1 grid.
Getting into the game; it HARD at first. I had a moose curbstomp me because I was close to its young I think and then I pretty much got spawn camped by a flock sheep of all things.
There are various hardcore elements that I really appreciate with VS that I felt (obvs could be outdated by now) really just completes what minecraft promised in a survival game. Im 4 hours in and it STILL feels like im barely surviving. I went out mining for my first copper ore, but that meant I wasnt foraging enough fresh food to keep my satiety up. (I know I should start farming but I'm still looking for a better base location than my hobo cave)
Not sure if you are tracking factorio's expansion they are working on but it will be all about space exploration except with a lot more changes that can be done on a deeper level than just a mod. I THINK they have hired the creator of space exploration to work with them as well, not 100% on that. Either way they have posted about a series of really amazing quality of life and feature updates they are adding in and it has me really excited for whenever they release it. Really worth checking out their friday factorio facts to see what is in the works if you have the time.
Played through Hell Pie which I though was a mechanically fairly fun and decent platformer, but thematically, I was not impressed. Leaned very hard into the gross aspect and missed the fun, I'd say.
During last week I watched Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. I thought it was amazing, but the ending broke me. I needed a few days to recover emotionally. I'm usually not that affected by the media I consume (perhaps in the moment, but rarely more), but after the ending I just walked around sighing at home when I thought about it.
In the end I felt that I wasn't entirely ready to leave Night City, so decided to get Cyberpunk 2077! I've been wanting to play it for some time, and with 2.0 being out for some time and there being a sale, it felt like the right time. So far it's missing the magic that I felt from Edgerunners, but I'm ~5 hours so it's too early to say anything definitive yet.
I've heard Cyberpunk 2077's DLC was very good.
Yeah, I've heard the same! Haven't gotten far enough in the story yet to unlock it, so no chance to see for myself yet.
Video games:
Celeste
After Celeste 64 came out and I got frustrated with the 3D platforming, then I tried and failed to get the Strawberry Jam mod working on my Steam Deck with Heroic Launcher, I just decided to replay the base game again. 8C gave me a lot of trouble as my control stick seemed really unreliable at getting the down+right dash jump. There's a pair of them you need to do right at the end of the level. I eventually started using the D-pad for just those jumps (then of course it took me a bunch of attempts to recalibrate my brain after them and get the heart right at the end). This is the only level that I have seemingly gotten worse and worse at because of that jump. Everything else - 7C, Farewell, Moon Berry - went smoother (but still very challenging of course!).
Slay the Spire
I had a cool run where I was able to win (A20H) with the Brimstone relic (at the beginning of your turn, you gain 2 strength and your enemies gain 1 strength). Usually it's a big liability and makes your enemies too strong. I got the relic really early so was able to build my deck around it with multi-attacks and Heavy Blade (an attack that deals damage as if your strength was multiplied 3 times or 5 times if upgraded). I got Feed to crank up my max HP and Reaper to heal myself for huge amounts when I got my strength up. I also bottled (relic that lets you start every fight with a certain card in your hand) an Evolve+ (power that lets you draw 2 cards whenever you draw a status card such as a Wound) and got a few copies of Power Through+ (skill that gives you 20 block and puts 2 Wounds in your hand). So after going through the deck once, there were a lot of Wounds in there that helped draw me extra cards.
Board Games:
Great Western Trail: Rails to the North
Got to play a second game with this expansion and this time did not have a brutal time due a massive misplay in the early game. I was able to make a lot of points with deliveries thanks to buying an early purple cow then unlocking delivery locations to the North. I played the Engineer strategy and was 1 turn short of "ringing the bell" (upgrading the final station, which lets you immediately go back and upgrade another one you missed). I think I could have maybe found a way to do it without the extra turn had I planned the whole round for it, but I didn't know how fast my opponent was going to force the end of the game.
This particular game was a bit weird in that there were very few craftsmen/builders available. There are some tiles in the north that give you free build/upgrades that just seem wildly overpowered, and building was already the best strategy in the base game in my opinion. It makes me worry what the game would look like with more around. Maybe all players are just forced into taking as many of them as they can...
Overall though I kind of like the expansion. I like that that the new aux action helps you cycle through your deck while also unlocking benefits.
Cat in the Box
Trick-taking game with a very cool twist: players get to choose what suit their card is as they play it. They mark on a board which card has been played so there can be no duplicates in a round. If they choose not follow suit, they mark on their own board that they can't play that suit anymore for the round. If they end up in a scenario where they can't legally play a card, the round abruptly ends and the player who caused the "paradox" loses points for the tricks they took instead of gaining them. There's also a bidding element where players try to guess how many tricks they will take, and if they successfully get the exact number of tricks they get to score bonus points based on how many of their markers are adjacent on the board that tracks cards played.
I had previously played it at 2 players, where instead of bidding you just have to try to get 4 or fewer tricks (out of 8). I liked it better at 3. However I lost my 2 player games and won my 3 player game by a landslide, so that might be colouring it...
Project L
Tetris-y game where you collect puzzles, place pieces to solve them, then gain the points and additional pieces from them as a reward (as well as getting back the pieces you used). Once per turn you can place 1 piece out per puzzle you have (up to 4), which is really what you have to plan your turn around doing to give you the most rewards and keep the pieces flowing. I think the game is well designed, I would probably recommend it, though it's not really my kind of game.
Back to No Man's Sky with their latest expedition, which is actually very good. It's like an extensive sped-up tutorial that covers many parts of the game, and gives you many rewards along the way to reduce the grind. I'm enjoying it, but encountered a few bugs (can't dock in a station, can't go through a black hole) that forced me to restart the game.
I also bought Dinkum which is a chill life sim (basically Animal Crossing x Stardew Valley, in Australia). For a small-ish indie game, there seems to be a decent amount of content, and new mechanics (fishing, farming, ...) are introduced through a system of permits that you unlock one at a time. The game isn't real time, and you can definitely rush things if you want.
Hyperrogue (Non-Euclidean, open-source indie roguelike, set in hyperbolic space and/or other curved geometries) has been my time-waster for the last several weeks.
At this point, I feel like I've been playing it for so long that sometimes I catch myself expecting hyperbolic geometry in every other game I play (e.g. Minecraft, RPGs...)
It's a really fun, interesting, and challenging time-waster. The geometric projections might give some people motion sickness though.
Paging @Pavouk106
So I did restart System Shock Remake; I've only put in an hour so far (previously played 11 hours), but I'm feeling the way I previously felt about, which is: cold. It just doesn't feel fun to me, but I can't exactly put my finger on why that is.
I love the original, put in 22-hours and completed it, but the Remake just feels entirely soulless to me. It feels neither tense nor scary, which the original did and so far my only working hypothesis is that it has something to do with the controls. The controls in the original were fiddly and so things felt difficult and tense, very much how a Resident Evil is designed around fussy controls and limited camera angles. The new one feels so smooth and easy, it feels a lot like there should be more going on; hits should carry more weight, for example. Swinging my wrench and connecting with the head of the mutant feels like nothing; no different from hitting air, but this is just one example.
Again, I'm struggling to put my finger on why I just feel meh about it, as I feel like I must be wrong since so many people (including yourself) love it, but I'm just not sure what it is. At this point, I feel like I should just go play the original or 2 again.
I have struggled with controls la lot, but that was due to playing on Steam Deck :-) You might be right, the game is modern in some ways, yet old school in others.
Resident Evil is great example! I remember playing 4 where you couldn't walk when you were aiming. While it's not logical, I percieve it as great game mechanic.
You may actually want to replay OG System Shock, or Enhanced edition (haven't really played myself). If nothing else, you will have direct comparison woght now when the memories from remake are live.
I wonder if I felt like this with sone other game... Where remake or similar project was worse in some unexplainable way. It's not remake but rather restart of the series - Fallout 3. While I liked the game and how it transformed turn-based isometric into first-person "not really shooter", it lacked and still lacks something from the first two games.
I've started challenge running Dark Souls 3
My first run was a run without levelling. I didn't had the stats for any 100% shield, so I did the whole run without any shield. I also went with the lightest armor, to still be able to fast roll. Most boss attacks were able to oneshot me, which could be quite frustrating. At least loosing souls didn't have the same impact, since you have no use for them.
My weapon of choice were the winblades with a fire infusion which was pretty busted. For the last fight, I switched to raw to triple my damage. I used the Caestus in my off hand, for some parrying (looking at you pontiff sulyvan).
The bosses that gave me the most trouble were the princes , dragonslayer armour and the dancer. Funnily enough, the endboss was beaten on the second try.
My current run is only with sorceries (no physical hits). With this run troublesome enemies become a piece of cake and vice versa. I had the fear that I would have trouble with having enough mana for the bosses, which up till now was not a problem.
The hardest boss by far was the tree, since it is so hard to hit the eggs without locking on and the crystal mage, since you just can't burst him fast enough and have to stand still to cast the spells which opens you up for clone attacks.
Future runs might include:
Great choice. I finished DS3 at SL1 and had a blast with it too. It's really amazing how some bosses that normally feel trivial suddenly become a challenge. I really appreciated Dragonslayer Armour's moveset a lot more after learning the fight at SL1. Twin Princes gave me trouble too. Dancer I did pre-Catacombs because I wanted to get some early titanite to upgrade my toothpick of a weapon.
It might be a little too similar to your current run, but I'd suggest an "ashen estus only" run. ie. no healing estus. It puts a lot of focus on different schools of magic without feeling overly prohibitive. Definitely easier than SL1, but gives you a good excuse to get into miracles or regeneration builds.
Another common run is "Broken Straight Sword only". I've completed this in the previous games, but not yet DS3. That's high on my todo list. Though in DS2 it was "ladle only", which is far more amusing. Fists do more damage until you're able to enchant the ladle.
I co-oped a bow only run through all three games, and that was also a lot of fun. DS3 has the most variety by far since weapon arts add a lot of flavour. You can only hold 99 arrows of each type though, which actually became a problem at Yhorm! Hardest boss? Probably the Deacons...
The ashen one sounds interesting instead of miracles only. It would allow for a blessed weapon and makes the beginning possible, since there is no attack miracle for any starter class. I will probably put a few other runs before this, because it is quite similar to the sorcery only run.
If I remember correctly you can find the broken straight sword only after gundyr. In which way would you kill him without voiding the run?
I forgot to mention the firebomb only run, which is also on my list.
I would also love to d a riposte only, but sadly there are a few non-parryable bosses...
Yep, it's directly afterwards. I'd say it's up to you how to deal with Gundyr, but I don't think anyone would fault you for fighting him normally. Going fists only be very unfun, and you'd not have enough consumables to take him down with just firebombs. So I'd say consider Gundyr to be "just a tutorial" and start the run properly afterwards.
I'm not sure if you're interested in the other titles, but DS2 has some great challenge runs basically built into the game. You get special rings for completing a "no bonfire" run, as well as a "no death" run. I've done the former. You're allowed to light a bonfire to set your spawn point, but may never sit at them to warp (except for primal bonfires).
I have actually completed a no death run in DS1, and it took around a dozen attempts! Palms were very sweaty on the final boss. It was surprisingly a lot of fun, and plays very differently than other runs. Instead of over-preparing like with SL1, you tend to treat runs as "throwaway". Like a speedrunner you can skip 95% of items, only collecting those that help you achieve your goal (usually titanite or souls on corpses). It's similar to your comments about how SL1 changes your perspective on souls, and that losing them means nothing. It's the same idea here with running past all the loot on the ground.
I'm not as into challenge runs as I used to be, but there's still a few I'd like to accomplish. As I said broken straight sword in DS3 is up there, and I've not done an SL1 in Elden Ring yet. I'd also like to play some more Bloodborne in general. That's tough because I can only play it through PS Now streaming, but I'm sure there's lots of fun to be had with arcane and bloodtinge builds.
Anyway, I hope this post doesn't read like a brag! It's rare to find others who are interested in these kinds of challenge runs, so I may have gotten a little over-excited. Kind of makes me want to go play some right now...
I just finished Like a Dragon Gaiden - The Man Who Erased His Name yesterday, after 26 hours of play time. I enjoyed my time with it a lot. It was my first Like A Dragon/Yakuza game. I'm now going to give the Like a Dragon Ishin remake a whirl since it is also on Gamepass. It'll be interesting to see how this kind of game translates to feudal Japan after the modern, dense city setting of Gaiden.
Still playing Genshin Impact with my niece. Lately we're playing hide and seek, which the game doesn't really support. Originally the rule was that the seeker isn't supposed to look at the map and you had to stay within a certain area, but we've switched to letting you go anywhere, but the seeker can use the map, so it's more of a chase.
I tried out Endless Legend after hearing great things about tactical combat, but I ended up utterly disappointed by that. Plus apparently building a city over a lava river does not mean there's a road, and units will happily jump in to their deaths, among other issues that kept making me think "devs really should have known better". At some point I even thought "well if that situation ends up as stupid as I think it will instead of something intuitive or reasonable, I'll just Alt+F4 and uninstall". Seconds later it was gone.
To conclude my 2023 holiday games playthrough for now, over the last week I (finally) played Supraland: Six Inches Under, a game released in 2022 that I didn't have the time to play before (bought it during the 2023 holiday steam sale). It's a sequel to the original Supraland, which I played long ago, and was originally meant to be its second DLC but eventually released as its own game.
Supraland and Supraland SIU are open world 3D puzzle platformers where you play as a little plasticine/play-doh person in the vast world of a young boy's backyard sandbox. The world of the game is filled with other plasticine people with their own cities and kingdoms. The many NPCs have goofy lines of text dialogue and plenty of unreasonable "quest" demands. Memes abound, such as the smudged Ecce homo Jesus, Minecraft blocks and pickaxes, plumbuses from Rick and Morty and Super Mario style pipes (in SIU, we play as a plumber). Structures are made out of toys, pencils and erasers, finger-smudged glass panes, boards with "giant" nails, AA battery powered circuits, buckets of play-doh and more. Once in a while you will see the kid who is "playing" the story looming over everything.
World traversal requires negotiating a vast quantity of puzzles and obstacles that make use of more traditional mechanics like pressure plates, timed buttons and levers, but also more interesting ones like having to send colored things through hoops or using colored keycards. Use of color in Supraland is interesting in that it's possible to paint things in other colors, and if you can make it, it will absolutely work. As you traverse the world, you can find many, many coins and chests spread throughout, all of them unique (non-respawning). There are many upgrades for the player, some in chests, some in shops. Some of the rewards are really well hidden as a reward for finding ridiculously difficult to reach locations. Part of the fun in Supraland is trying to "break" the game by using your movement options and equipment to go somewhere you think you shouldn't go, only to find a chest, a bunch of coins or a mocking NPC there. You will almost never encounter invisible walls or ceilings.
SIU was different from the original Supraland in some key ways. In the original game, very soon after you start the game you have obtained a bunch of movement upgrades like the ability to triple jump, which means you can enjoy (at least I found it enjoyable) trying to break the puzzles all the way throughout the game. Designer David Munnich was vocal about regreting that choice in the years since, and in SIU you spend most of the game with the same movement speed and single jump. Instead, SIU wants you to rely on a set of items to progressively extend your mobility, especially the laser beam gun (the beams stick to wood and are solid), the translocator (shoots a physics-affected ball and lets you teleport to it) and the magnetic belt buckle (lets you hover around and boost off any and all metallic objects). SIU also takes place "underground", where all the meeple people fall after the kid takes a rake to the sandbox and wrecks the whole thing. This means the bulk of the game feels a little more linear than the original, as you're traversing a seriers of tunnels that connect to a central location. Things open up a bit toward the end, and I found the game no less fun, but the design definitely felt tighter and less confusing in exchange for losing some of that sense of openness that the original game had.
Even though I tried to be thorough, I felt like SIU suffers from the same problem many exploration-oriented games do: If you don't like exploration for its own sake, the rewards are often very unsatisfying. There are way too many combat upgrades that are essentially useless, not only because this is a game where combat is fairly limited and easy (think "walk backwards while hitting the monsters until they die") but because chests are so well hidden or otherwise impossible to reach early that when you find most of them (likely when you get the chest detector upgrades available in the post-game), you will not need any of this stuff anymore. Seriously, I think there are more combat upgrades than actual battles in the game. I much prefer to have the opportunity to find most upgrades early when they're still useful, even if it means incessant detours - but SIU's more linear, "guided" objective design discourages that more than the original game did.
EIther way, I still greatly enjoyed the game. At the end of the game you do get a double jump, item counters and detectors and you can go and find all the (now useless) chests you missed, which in my case was almost 50% of them. I played the game all the way to "98%", leaving only a single chest unfound. I have no idea where it was and there are definitely diminishing returns to scouring through the same locations over and over, so I'm done!
Yesterday finished Persona 3: Reload and had an absolute blast with it. I'm kinda glad now that I never bit the bullet with Persona 3 Portable as the current remake has a very good quality. Despite not having played Persona 4 Golden that long ago now I do secretly hope for a higher quality remake of that to be produced. Unlikely, I know, but still.