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

I've mainly been playing Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door for the first time and I just got to what I assume is the room before the final boss. I've seen a lot of hype around this game and (professor) frankly it totally lives up to it! The writing is great and the combat is extremely fun and I am now retroactively upset with Nintendo for ditching this formula. Also Vivian is the best character and I love her so much.

BZZZT

2D platformer with a double jump and a dash that you can use multiple times midair. Optionally there are things to collect and time trials. Seems pretty fun so far in the first 45min. The reviews say it only takes a couple hours to beat the main story, so even though it was only 10 bucks on sale I still don't know if it'll really be "worth it."

Celeste

I got the 1B and 2B golden strawberries in a reasonable amount of time but got stuck on 3B. Definitely much harder than the C's. I also replayed a couple Strawberry Jam mod levels.

Balatro

I'm at over 215h into the game, and working my way through the stakes. Currently on purple. Finally got my first "e" capable deck (which seems like it should have an achievement); best hand was 9.674e19. Pared my deck down to only Aces of Spades (thanks Perkeo and double Blueprint) and had The Idol (the joker that gives you 2x mult for every time you play <card, randomly chosen from your deck>), but since my deck was all 1 card that meant I was always getting Flush Five and each card was doubling my score....and all my cards were either glass (2x mult when played) or steel (1.5x mult when held in hand). Unfortunately I had only just put Foil on a couple cards before I died. Onward to NaNeInf! :P

Slay the Spire: The Board Game

Played 1 session with 4 players. 2 of us were experienced video game A20 Spire slayers, the other two not so much. Everyone seemed to pick it up pretty quickly though. Though despite us knowing what we were doing, we still played kind of slowly, partially because we were fully open in sharing information and talking out combat strategy. We only completed Act 1 and half of Act 2. Having fun so far, looking forward to clearing Act 3 (and maybe one day 4?).

Star Fleet Battles

This is an ancient (1979) tabletop game meant to simulate, you guessed it, space battles in the the Star Trek universe. I've been playing some single-player scenarios with a friend who really likes the game and is sort of DM-ing and answering questions about the game's systems. Sometimes I think it's kind of cool but most of the time I find the systems overly-complex and a pain to interact with and learn. My biggest pain point is that a lot of things in the scenarios rely on the outcome of dice rolls, which can be anything from "you take a little / a ton of damage this turn" to "you win the game / try again later / learn how to work some weird additional system and you will win in a couple turns". I really hate those RNG mechanics. The highest impact ones are related to the scenarios but they also affect weapon damage (if heavy weapons hit or not, how much damage phasers deal, and what internal systems in your ship take damage if it is greater than the shield can absorb). Resolving internal damage also takes forever to resolve. I would definitely not play this game if it weren't for my friend. A couple times I have had more fun than I expected to though.

Magic: The Gathering

OK I haven't been playing it much...I played a chaos draft at a friend's place where we each got 1 Mystery Booster and 2 random standard boosters. The Mystery boosters ended up being really fun. I got to draft a reanimator control deck with Animate Dead and Pestilence. Normally I don't like drafting because I feel like most of the cards are bad, but I liked having something to build around from pick 1. Kind of makes me want to build a cube but I already don't use my cards much. A bunch of the standard cards were double-sided which just feels so dumb to draft with...since it was a casual group I just stopped making any effort to hide the cards. Must be a huge pain for competitive drafters.

The full preview for Modern Horizons 3 is up. Here are the cards I find "interesting". The ones with a watermark on the textbox are old cards that are being "reprinted into Modern". The new free spells require you to sacrifice a nontoken creature that shares a color with the card, which is a much steeper cost than exiling a card from your hand. I still find them kind of annoying - we'll see how much play they end up seeing. At least they don't leave me with a sick feeling in my stomach like the Evoke Elementals did. There are a few cards I have a really hard time evaluating - could be banworthy, could be just below playable. Also curious if we're in for Eldrazi Summer...WotC had to ban Eye of Ugin to end Eldrazi Winter in 2016, let's see if Ugin's Labyrinth can get us there again.

Bought the Hexcells complete bundle for $4 based on a recommendation from the gaming sales thread, and have been playing it as a bedtime game on the deck. I'm nearly done with Hexcells+, and both have been fun so far. The puzzles are relatively simple but difficult, and mostly fair (I've only had one where I had to look up a guide and then "ugh"'d when the solution was to use the "# remaining" count in the top right to deduce stuff, which hasn't been relevant before). Overall def worth the $4, nice change of pace from sudoku while hitting a lot of the same brain energy

Tinykin

This is a Pikmin-inspired 3D platformer from the devs that made the severely underappreciated Splasher.

Each level is a room of a house. You are a tiny little character who can find little pikmin tinykin in the level who then follow you around. The tinykin have different colors which gives them different abilities, and there are various tasks around the level that require certain numbers of them (for example, you might need 15 pink ones to carry an item from one area to another).

The levels are great. Like, seriously great. Some of the best and most memorable levels I’ve played in a good long while.

They have a Toy Story feel where you’re in familiar home environments like the kitchen or a bedroom, but you’re shrunk down to such a small size that they seem impressively huge. Each level is sandbox-style, so you can go where you like and explore different areas at your own discretion. The game uses verticality as progression, so you’ll often execute a big climb, and then you can drop a rope down from the top as a way of getting back up to that spot again in the future without having to do the climb again.

The game’s draw distance works in its favor here. You can see clear across the levels all the time — especially when you climb high up to get a good vantage point. This reinforces the sense of scale and also helps you identify new areas to go to or collectibles you need to get. It evoked a really great and satisfying sense of exploration.

Each level has collectibles you can find, secrets, and a few fun tasks. Also, they are big. There are six levels total, and it took me nine hours to beat the game. I definitely averaged over an hour per level (though, I will also say that my playstyle was very thorough — I did end up 100%ing the game).

Despite the game’s obvious kid appeal, I do think it’s a satisfying play for adults. It does for games what Pixar does for films — it is a rare title that’s fun for all ages.

I thoroughly enjoyed it for what it was. If anyone does play it, I do not recommend 100%ing it like I did. There are no in-game methods for helping you find remaining collectibles, so you have to scour the very large levels looking for little hidden nooks where you missed things (the collectibles for each level also number >1000, by the way, so there’s a LOT to make sure you’re getting). The only reason I went for it was because I had been so thorough in my initial playthrough that each level only had a few things missing, and the satisfaction of closing them out rather than leaving them open felt tantalizingly within reach. It was still a pain though.

Nevertheless, outside of that one complaint, I have nothing but good things to say about Tinykin. It’s a new favorite for me, and it’ll definitely be something I replay a few years from now as a “gaming comfort food” title.

As part of my games left behind month, I decided it was finally time to focus on Eastward. Technically speaking, I started this game in September 2023, but I quickly found I hadn't even made it past the prologue yet.

I'm happy to say that I found this game way better than I expected from its positive but lukewarm reviews, and relative lack of popularity (the 2021 "pandemic" release probably didn't help?) I'll try to be succint, but there's a lot to the game, so strap in!

I will compare Eastward to two games: A Link To The Past and CrossCode. It is after all a classic JRPG featuring a silent protagonist in a beautiful 16-bit-inspired pixel art top down world who whacks enemies in real time combat using his swordfrying pan, who collects quarter heart containersorbs from chests, and who breaks cracked walls with bombs. Eastward is more like CrossCode in that it doesn't feature Zelda's fully open world, but a string of limited open areas you can freely explore but not really backtrack to as the protagonists travel, um, eastward. Like CrossCode, it takes place in a world with advanced technology, and I'd put the limited "puzzle" areas in dungeons at a difficulty level somewhere inbetween the two (sometimes harder than Zelda but fairly straightforward, nothing like CrossCode's more extreme bouncy orb puzzles).

Eastward has not one but two co-protagonists: John (the quiet one with the frying pan and the bombs) is a gruff, bearded, middle-aged digger. He's taken under his wing Sam, an apparent orphan, a bubbly younger girl with white hair and mysterious powers. She does all the talking for both of them. The mystery at the core of the game has to do with who she really is and what's going on with their world, which is being devastated by waves of a strange, toxic miasma that wipes out everything that lives. The plot takes John and Sam (on a train) through multiple different communities where they meet a lot of interesting people. The world is sometimes cheerful, but mostly melancholy, as humankind clings to what's left of their devastated civilization. Expect mutant monsters, radioactive junk and sentient robots living freely among the humans. The many characters are fairly unique and charismatic, and often funny in that 16-bit JRPG way. There's a lot of dialogue.

The player can freely swap control between John and Sam to use each one's specific strengths and abilities. Normally the protagonist you're not controlling follows the other, but you can also separate the two and control them independently. This is a really cool mechanic and works quite well, especially for puzzle solving! Another core mechanic is cooking. John, the frying pan wielder, is - or so everyone says - a really good cook. The cooking mechanic, which brought to mind Spiritfarer (or maybe Aquaria?) is central to the game; sometimes it's part of the main quest, but it's always useful since the various foodstuffs you cook provide different amounts of healing and buffs, and some fights require tight timing and therefore taking a whole bunch of damage. You can buy straightforward "health packs" from vending machines if you don't want to bother, but it's fun to try out different ingredient combinations and find all the recipes. Ingredients are dropped by monsters or bought from grocery stores - each region sells their own unique stuff!

Another thing you can find in the various towns are arcade machines. These all contain Earth Born, an 8-bit style JRPG every single child in this world is crazy for, as well as many of the adults. And you can be too! Earth Born is a full game-within-a-game. It features a simplistic but large world and turn-based combat. The objective is to assemble a strong, well-equipped party of specialists and defeat the Demon King before 7 "days" have passed within the game. In the world of Eastward, you can use tokens in gachapon machines to collect various "pixballs", monsters that are usable within Earth Born amiibo-style. This gacha mechanic is extremely forgiving and it's very easy to collect all the regular pixballs. I confess I didn't finish Earth Born; I did reach the demon king, but was trounced. I loved the idea, though. Maybe someday!

I appreciated that Eastward respected my time by providing me with a button that can be used to fast forward almost every cutscene/animation/dialogue. Though I talked to most if not all NPCs, and I did genuinely read what they had to say, I'm a fast reader, so I made liberal use of this button. Even then, Eastward provided me with 24 hours worth of content, divided in 8 "chapters" and 5 main areas. I collected all the ingredients and recipes, almost all of the upgrades and all but one heart container piece (argh!) Post-game, you unlock a chapter select ability that lets you start a new game by combining existing save data (inventory, etc) with any starting point in the story. If you're a completionist, you can use this feature to retrieve or do things you missed. It's still a big game though, and you have to know what you're looking for!

Work has been painful lately and I don't get to game as much as I used to, but I still sneak away for a couple hours here and there.

I've been playing a fair bit of PUBG again after years away. I have always thought the gunplay in pubg surpasses every other BR I have played. I don't typically play on my own, I like duos and squads because there's more activity and less bunkering down in a house waiting for someone to let their guard down. I was nudging my friend group to give it another shot and they were not keen on it because helldivers was still relatively new and they were having fun, so I let it go for a bit till one of my friends brought it up on their own in conversation, which got the ball rolling. We've been having a blast playing the last few weeks.

When no one's around and I don't have a mission to do, I'll play Smite, which is kind of like league of legends but in a 3rd person view and not top down. I have been playing since original closed beta on and off and it's my go-to for a quick couple of games on lunch break etc. Smite 2 is coming soon which I hope will revitalize the player base. We'll have to see how well received it is but it looks promising. It's practically the same game but rebuilt from scratch on UE5 to enable a lot more creative space to work in.

If all else fails, a couple of rounds of Balatro can kill a few minutes :)

I finally finished Hitman World of Assassination's campain for the first time, with 5 stars for all levels except for one. I'll grind out the last one tonight or tomorrow lol.

Might post a seperate topic about this but I do really like games where the campaign functions as a tutorial for the main "meat" of the game, which is just grinding levels for time and contracts. (kinda similar to Monster Hunter for me too)

In the IRL front, I went to the Flesh and Blood release for the newest expansion and it's actually a really fun expansion! Would recommend getting into it, it's a fun game with a pretty elegant system, and it's nice to get away from Magic for a bit.

Last night I stayed up till 3AM playing the Slay the Spire Board game with a friend, I consider myself an above average StS player but I haven't played in a minute, it feels a bit harder than the actual game which is so interesting. I think adding the co-op made us think about the game in a bit of a different way, and it's such a tight game in general anyways.

I've been playing Forza Horizon 5. I've missed racing games a lot. But my accessibility needs certainly make playing it properly a challenge. I can't just pick up a controller. Which is the best way to play Forza games. I got my old G27 racing wheel hooked up to my Windows 11 computer which was a pain in the ass but ultimately pointless since it ended up hurting my hands anyway.

Anyway, I'm having a good time with it. I just wish there were easier ways to acquire rarer cars than to use the in-game auction house, which is full of speculators and obscenely high prices.

I'm getting back into Gen 1/2/3 romhacks, and looking for some similar DS/3DS hacks.

Pokemon Ultra Violet on my Analogue Pocket. It's part nostalgic, but also I enjoy that this is a mod that allows catching all the generation's pokemon. Gold/Silver Pokemon are in a custom region I believe you get after the Elite 4.

Pokemon: Crystal Clear I'm trying to get into this one. It's Pokemon Crystal with badge-based Gym Leader scaling, expanding the Kanto mechanic to the entire map. This also allows you access to the entire world at once, so you can do whatever you want. Otherwise, it's largely untouched except for changed for what was needed to allow unfettered world access, and the ability to complete the game's PokeDex.

Casette Beasts,: Playing Pokemon reminded me I have to finish this game's story. I'm lost after not playing for a year, but am getting my bearings back and re-learning the mechanics. It's a bit deeper in type interactions then Pokemon and even has type transformations, like a Plastic type beast hit with a Fire attack becomes Poison temporarily, or a Plant type doing melee on a Ground will "seed" it, an effect like Pokemon's "Leech Seed." It has a similar Ranger (like Gym Leader) system as the Gold/Silver/Crystal system I mentioned, but all Rangers are scaled by who you've beaten before, but the world is statically levelled.

So while I dropped out of Backlog burner I'd call it a resounding success. I didn't complete my goal os playing all my FromSoftware games. But mostly because Elden Ring completely recaptured me. With Shadow of the Erdtree on the horizon I am hyped to the gills.

Last weekend I achieved my goal of beating Mohg, Lord of Blood (around level 90) which means I'm all set to step into the expansion. My character is around level 120 and the preview event last weekend seems to suggest 150 is the lightly recommended level. Since mainlining the game up to the Fire Giant I decided to take a break until the DLC. I want to go in fresh and at a slower pace than how I've been playing the game.

So I have been cleansing my palate with some other games

• Untitled Goose Game which I didn't play at release. It is a very cute game that I had fun with. Worth the time if you haven't tried it out.
• Parappa the Rapper was a game I envied from a distance in the PS1 games. Played a couple hours recently and love the quirkiness of it. A reminder of what games from the era were like and how goofy they used to be.
• Astro's Playroom comes preinstalled on the PS5. I spun it up while waiting for Baldur's Gate 3 to install when I first bought my PS5. My initial impression was "this is a cute tech demo, but all the playstation product placement is gimmicky." After last week's Sony State of Play I've heard a lot of buzz about announced Astrobot. Apparently this little game is beloved by a large group of 3d platformer fans. Based on that I decided I'd give it an serious playthrough.
  It is a quite a tight little game. The playstation theme began to grow on me. The physics and mechanics that leverage the PS5 controller are quite fun. It's convincing me to try more 3d platformers... a genre I've generally avoided aside from old Spyro and Mario Odyssey. If you have a PS5 and haven't checked it out, I recommend it. It's just a fun, lively game. Probably takes 3-4 hours to play through. There is a "speedrun mode" that you can unlock that I haven't touched but if you really fall in love with it, there is some good replay value.

I've been playing Capes. I did some QA work on the Linux port last year but wanted to see how the final release looks. It's made a lot of great improvements since then but it isn't getting the best reviews on steam. I think because a lot of people expected it to be a base-building x-com clone and not a story game with more puzzle-like challenges. I think for a small 5-man team they've done quite well in producing a solid AA title and anyone who likes TBS games that take some planning will enjoy the more difficult levels.

I don't know who suggested it, but I've been playing the How Long to Beat: Game. It's a quick daily game where you have to guess the completion times and score of a game. There's a total score of 300. Last week I finally broke 200. I was pretty happy with that 😆

The Magister

It's a mystery-solving card game roguelike except it's actually an exercise in time management min-maxing because the goal of the game is to gather clues by doing quests for suspects until they trust you enough to give a fake alibi which you then tear apart for useful info within the 10 or 15 day time limit. While the exact details are different between playthroughs, the gameflow already felt the same by the 2nd playthrough (there are 3 ascensions); I got the achievement for doing a perfect conviction on max difficulty so I don't plan on replaying it. I did get 20 hours out of it so I can consider it a flawed gem as a Fanatical bundle grab.

Combat I didn't enjoy. All the animations must play out (it's square-grid based tactics) which involves a lot of real-time waiting with no speed up option. Either you take "quick" short turns, or you smartly cycle through your deck which involves a lot more waiting for your next turn instead. Just to make sure you're still there, you have to click whenever someone falls in combat. It says something that I'm mentioning the waiting times first when the combat does have neat aspects like how melee cards allow you to teleport to the enemy at the expense of dealing half damage or dealing bonus damage when hitting the enemy against an obstacle.

Diplomacy is a little more nuanced, but can easily be screwed over by RNG. Each time you start a talk, you have to generate energy from your inital crap deck to buy cards for the current discussion from the store each turn. Generally, you're looking for cheap cards (because of the opportunity cost of just playing the default wincon card. Ex. there's a draw 2 discard 1 card that costs 1 energy compared to the draw 2 costs 5 energy; the default wincon card starts at 5 energy and costs 1 more each time it's used), Draw power (because you only draw 3 cards by default), and energy generators or other wincon cards that are worth clogging draw power. Best class-neutral card IMO is the one that draws 1, grants 1 energy, and refreshes the shop.

Notes and such I've took

• Talk to the Innskeeper, Waitress, and Dock Worker twice for all info. IDK why they did this, but they did. Noted in the Initial Routing box.
• Examine clues in the clues menu. Same issues as above which ignores a clear QoL thing.

Unmetal

This is a parody of the Metal Gear series (of which I've only read the Hiimdaisy comics and finished MGSV), in the style of the 8-bit top-down entries. At first, I found the humor tolerable and liked Fox as the narrator choosing his answers and messing around with his story. That didn't last long because the game's idea of being subversive is introducing surprise out-of-genre segments with instakills. Why yes, I love using a metal detector every second for half a level to not get insta-killed. Sure, let's add a submarine section where every little bump shaves off some more health. Why not have a dialogue boss where you're supposed to brute force the dialogue options and keep dying until you get it right? You can argue that's the point, but being subversive generally relates to the core element (one example of the game doing this right is allowing you to shoot guards with a pistol instead of the slingshot, but also requiring to you use up a medkit to heal them to enforce Fox's in-universe Pacifist run); these segments of pure frustration are just the designer being an asshole to the player on purpose *ironically*, which is to say, still being an asshole.

Chapter 9 of 10 is the tipping point where I'm dropping it, and yes I'm aware I'm basically 30 minutes from finishing it. My patience for the game ran out at the bomb disposal and I looked up a guide for it; turns out the answer was to more or less punch everything on that floor for materials with no prompts to do so. I finally dropped it at the maze segment: you're given a long string of cardinal directions to follow to go through it. Take one wrong turn? Die and restart at the beginning. Can't kill the ghosts before they latch onto you? They lifedrain fast enough that you can't run out of the room in time, die and go back to the beginning. This section is clear, both about what you're supposed to do and that the dev thinks this is a funny twist instead of a complete waste and disrespect of time.

Lost Castle

I didn't do enough research again. This is a "Roguelike" "Beat-em-up". "Roguelike" as in it follows the Rogue Legacy school of "Screw you, grind more for a basic working character" and "We're raising the cost of your skill tree each time you buy something and you can only keep a little leftover. Didn't put your points right? Screw you, grind more". "Beat-em-up" as in hitstun is more of a weak suggestion than a rule, boss enemies move faster than you by default and will track you down and hit you no matter what, and the most optimal way to play is to hit-and-run by using a ranged weapon, spamming jump attacks, or spamming jump attacks with a ranged weapon because the normal attack chain is laggy enough to belong in a souls-like instead. I'm reminded more of an arcade dungeon crawler where the only way to win is to facetank and scarf down healing food and put more quarters into the machine. Younger me was stubborn enough to finish Rogue Legacy despite disliking all of its mechanics, current me doesn't have the time for something that comes off as a soulless trend chaser.

I picked up Dream Tactics (Steam) recently. It's a card-based TRPG. I'm normally not someone who's into card-base strategy games, but after playing Cobalt Core on a whim and liking it a lot, I've been willing to give this genre a try.

Anyway, I've only played about 45min of it. But so far it's alright. I'm playing on hard mode (I think this is level 3 of 4 difficulty levels), but so far it really hasn't been hard. But maybe that's because I might still be in a sorta tutorial area. Either way, it's a game that's easy to pick up for like 10-15min and then put back down, which is something I value in TRPGs and JRPGs. Sometimes, I don't want have to commit an hour or more per session to a game. If I had to make one critique, it'd be that some things aren't explained very well. Like stats and moves/card actions. I'll figure out eventually, though, I'm sure.

Just picked up New Star GP on sale the other day and it's a pretty fun little F1 arcade racing game. Plenty of management options too but so far it's been a bit too easy on the normal difficulty. I think once I get the hang of more of the game's systems I'll try a new save in the Pro difficulty.

I'm a big fan of their other games (NS Soccer on mobile and NS Manager on tablet) and would highly recommend those as well for anyone that likes football/soccer.

Currently working through the Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord remaster. I've never finished any of the older Wizardrys before (well, the ones older than 6-8) but I'm finding the grinding to alternate between soothing and terrifying depending on which horrible abominations ambush me and threaten to destroy my party.

I’ve been playing Hollow Knight and I’m at what I presume is the final fight.
It’s the first ever metroidvania I’ve played, and I’ve really enjoyed it so far. I love the way of storytelling, not too direct but not too vague either. The combat is brilliant, the boss fights are difficult, and the charm system allows you to optimise if a fight is too challenging. The music is just incredible, I feel like half the feel of the story comes from the music.
Overall, really great game

I just beat Live a Live. What an awesome little game! There's a bunch of small things I'd criticise it for, but it never outstayed it's welcome, the twist was excellent, and the final scenes were great. I'm so happy I gave it a go.

Trying to learn how to be badass, like @kfwyre, playing Rollerdrome. It's great fun, and the art style is really growing on me. If you haven't already, read about it from kfwyre, who wrote a great review, which is incidentally why I installed it. I am very much enjoying it.

I've also been playing Monster Train, and am starting to get the hang of some card synergies. I just had a run where I had an Entombed Explosive infused onto a Legion of Wax, and that unit had Endless on it. Basically, each time that unit dropped it was a guaranteed 350 damage (in a game where base attacks start at about the order of magnitude of 10), and it would drop every turn. I think the Melting Remnant are my favourite clan, maybe tied with the Umbra.

Overall, I recommend both of these games; if you like skateboarding games, try the first, and if you like deckbuilding roguelikes, try the second.

I've been playing V Rising almost exclusively lately, both single player and co-op with a friend in a private PvE game. I have to say it is really quite fun, it plays like a top down ARPG (think Grin Dawn), but with the base building and tiers of items like Valheim. The game clearly has a PvP leaning that I've avoided as I don't personally find that enticing, so I can't comment on that portion of it.

Was playing Abiotic Factor quite a bit but after about 10 hours, I'm gradually losing interest. I do intend to play some more, but I get fatigued every time I think about going back to my safe area, digging through and organizing boxes and having to craft stuff. The crafting in this game is relatively painless overall, but I've always found crafting in games to be incredibly boring and while AF is somewhat different and I'm enjoying the exploration a lot, I'm not sure if that'll hold my interest in the long term.

Friday night I picked up Skald: Against the Black Priory and I am absolutely loving it. Played it late into the night Friday and then a majority of my flight on Saturday, which is unusual for me, because I rarely actually game on Planes. The entirely of the Ultima series passed me by back in the day, with a little dabbling in Ultima 7 a few years ago, but you really don't need to have any familiarity or nostalgia for it to enjoy Skald.

Nobody Saves the World Really fun indie action-rpg with a bunch of goofy classes (slug, magician... like the card trick kind, egg) that has a goofy "Ren and Stimpy" 90s cartoon art style. Really great, highly recommended.

I recently finished Hellblade Senua's Sacrifice.

So it was worth playing, but maybe didn't live up to what I had heard about it.