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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 haven't written anything in a while because I spent a few months of my life playing Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth. The sequel to Remake covers Cloud & co.'s memorable journey after leaving Midgar, from Kalm (where Sephiroth is introduced in the original) to Mt. Nibel and then to the Forgotten Capital of the Cetra, where you-know-what happens (end of CD1 or 2 in the original depending on whether you played on PC).
In this beefy beefy text I will casually reference the 27 year old game assuming you at least kind of know it. There will be minor spoilers for things in the game throughout. I will dodge around some spoilers and spoiler tag the ending.
Let's get this out of the way: This is overall a Good Game. It's also a massive, polished production that exudes effort and quality. It's probably (taste notwithstanding) worth playing, regardless of what you may think of what you read in the following paragraphs. It really does justice to the fantastic story of the original and I'm happy that it got made and that I played it.
That said, let's delve into the details.
The World
One thing Rebirth really nails is the scale of the world. Much like how Midgar really felt huge in Remake, now we get the whole frickin world (well, most of it. No Wutai yet!) As the journey progresses, instead of the old game's overview, Rebirth presents the world as a series of loosely connected but self-contained "areas" that are vast and fully immersive and explorable, with various characters and locations to be found.
And it's scenic! Mountains really are big, jungles really are dense with trees and everywhere is full of all manner of garbage and ruins from abandoned locations and past wars, in line with FF7's history and ecological message. I thought it was hilarious how the massive quantities of clutter go flying like styrofoam props when you ram into them (specific objects have better physics, so I can only assume this is meant to be funny, and it was). There's a photo mode if that's your thing.
The game teases the player by progressively zooming out the "world map" with each new area. Finally, when you get the Tiny Bronco, you get the freedom to travel between areas. Good stuff. Fast travel becomes available earlier than it should, but in ways that make sense.
Characters
In Rebirth, Red XIII finally becomes a permanent member (equippable and swappable) of the party, and is soon joined by Yuffie Kisaragi, the completely missable ninja from the original that you could only find as a random encounter in a random nameless forest. Yuffie has become a major character with a lot of protagonism and a strong connection with a (probably to be completed in part 3) Shinra vs Wutai war subplot, and I wholeheartedly approve of how this was done. I like rewards for exploration, but no one was going to record a million voice lines for a missable character. And she's great!
The third and final new playable character is Cait Sith. His history with the others is much like you might remember from the original. Perhaps because of that, he is the only character who can't develop a good or bad relationship with Cloud (more on this below). He's great!
The remaining two of FF7's nine protagonists, Cid and Vincent, are both also introduced, but they are not controllable or usable in fights yet.
The voice acting in Rebirth (in english) remains world class. I love the actors they chose for the new characters. Red XIII's voice actor, Max Mittelman, is such a boss. If you've played the game, you know what I mean. I remain in awe of the quality here.
But I'm not sure how I feel about this game's eagerness to introduce everything earlier than it should. We got a taste of that with Sephiroth in Remake; I felt Rebirth fucked up by spoiling Cait Sith's identity almost immediately (at least if you're paying any kind of attention) and bringing Cid in way too early. In Rebirth, Cid is a fully sympathetic character, so I'm not sure if they can bring in Rocket Town later and get the same impact. Or maybe the domestic abuse was considered too risky in 2024.
I also disliked how characters couldn't just live somewhere. You get a whole bunch of characters who follow you around the world for some reason, sometimes getting their own subplots. Sometimes this works - Chocobo Billy's plot was fairly cute. Other times... not so much.
Cinematography
Rebirth has fantastic animation and cinematography. The poses, the lighting, the camera angles, movement and framing all look great. The choreography is sometimes a little over the top, but you'll be spoiled with loads of cutscenes integrated into the gameplay and cool scripted attacks integrated into the combat. The character models remain great and I particularly appreciate, stay with me here, the wardrobe. In some modern JRPGS the characters' outfits are... less than practical. For the most part, it is not so in FF7.
While there are lightyears of additional footage in Rebirth, care was taken to make the most memorable moments of the original, such as Sephiroth walking through the flames in Nibelheim, look much the same. Good job there.
Unfortunately, the cinematic nature of this game comes with an important drawback. The director is king... not you. That means you are often not allowed to skip things you might want to skip. Frequently you can't even skip lines of dialogue, since the characters aren't just saying them; they're also walking, moving, gesticulating, emoting, everything is part of the show. Even when you can skip lines of dialogue, it's usually in the middle of an unimportant conversation - you're never allowed to skip the final portion of the conversation. The camera must always transition smoothly.
The sins of Open World games
Big footgun here. I'm sorry to say that when you actually start exploring the beautiful world of Rebirth, you'll find it commits every sin in the book.
Almost all world exploration objectives are filtered through Chadley, the friendly boy robot from Remake. He was OK in Remake. In this game, early on, he'll give you a communicator. He will then proceed to call you about a thousand times. Every time he calls you, a chime will sound, Cloud will stop and, unprompted, take out the communicator and a holographic view of Chadley will appear. This animation takes a few seconds and is not skippable. Chadley will stare at you uncannily for a moment and then yell: "Cloud!" Then wait for another second, and say something I don't care about, such as "You did the thing! Good job!" Seriously, fuck this character. He also introduce a female-voiced AI that also calls you and sometimes they banter with each other on the phone while Cloud listens patiently.
Their quests are almost all all run of the mill. Go find something in location X. Go fight some enemies in location Y. In order to unlock objective locations, you also need to climb and activate these towers for some reason. The whole thing really detracts from exploration because all the information is in the UI rather than in the world, or filtered through a character. There are many so-called "Cache locations" which are just locations where the UI will throw up a big prompt letting you know there are chests nearby because god forbid you find anything on your own.
You can take non-Chadley quests in towns, but they're also pretty annoying. Most questgivers are rude and entitled and Cloud is forced to accept their quests entirely out of character. Then you have to... escort dogs as they deliver things you could just deliver yourself, while deliberately zigzagging to force you to fight clumps of enemies? Everyone loves escort quests that make no sense right? Un-frickin-believable.
If you're not a completionist like me, you can just not take the side quests. Unfortunately, by making that choice, you will miss out on most opportunities to improve your relationship with your friends (every damn quest has a friend that's keen on you doing it, and who'll be pleased when you finish), you will miss out on powerful items, you will miss out on locations, you will miss out on summon materia...
One final note on consumables. You can get far, FAR more consumables and ingredients throughout the world than you could possibly need. They're lying around everywhere. Unfortunately, nothing really feels rare. Ingredient distribution seems to be per-region, which will lead to immersion-breaking nonsense like find fresh sage down in the rocky depths of the Mithril Mines...
Small, cozy spaces
I wrote how Rebirth is really good at handling the massive scale of the FF7 world (it's still a videogame world, but it's way more believable than the original). Unfortunately, it failed at doing the opposite.
Rebirth has little in the way of small, cozy spaces. The best you get are narrow hallways. Places that were small in the original are now (also) big. This means Kalm is now an overcrowded, noisy holiday spot rather than, you know. Calm. Gone are the Cosmo Canyon's ladders and narrow shafts; it is now a bustling
hippystudent commune with gentle spiraling walkways and much larger rooms. The Shinra Mansion (Shinra Manor in this translation) is no longer explorable at all; the only place you can go is directly underground. The vanishing of the spooky stuff in the manor makes Vincent's choice of, uh, sleeping location somewhat out of place.The very rare times you get yourself into a narrow space, the camera will handle it rather poorly, happily rendering crap (tree leaves and such) inbetween the characters and screen, with sometimes hilarious results for whatever scene is supposed to be playing out. I don't know if they didn't bother to make the camera handle narrow spaces because there are so few, or if it's the opposite.
I was also annoyed by how narrow the camera FOV is. Maybe this is meant to ensure the game's complicated graphics are always smooth on the PS5 hardware? I'm usually a 90 degrees or higher kind of guy. You can set the camera to zoom out more, which it won't always do, but it's almost always centered on the character you're controlling anyway - usually Cloud. Now, Cloud is a hot twink. Easy on the eyes. No complaints there. But you know what I'd like to get a better view of? The world! I have a poor sense of direction as it is. If you don't let me see around me, I'll get lost!
Minigames
My biggest gripe. Remember how FF7 the Original had a few minigames in it? I looked it up online and a website lists 12 for the whole game, including parts not covered by Rebirth and optional Gold Saucer fare.
FF7 Rebirth alone contains 23 official minigames as well as several more minigame-like odd jobs and you can be damn sure you're going to be forced to play every single one provided you complete all the major quests and objectives. Want to get on with the story? Tough, first you need to win at dog football! Or collect balloons with Priscilla's dolphin! Every minigame is replayable and has its own controls and mechanics, and some are absolutely miserable.
It's not all bad. The ol' Gold Saucer Chocobo Races are now a fully realized kart-style game-within-a-game that's actually rather polished and fun enough (if you're not in a hurry to, you know, save the world from Sephiroth). There's also a The Card Game (that every Final Fantasy must have since Triple Triad). It's called Queen's Blood, it's very well designed, fun to play, and the way it's integrated with the world doesn't make a lick of sense. I just want to have the option, though. Let me choose if I want to play these games or not.
Rebirth is in general pretty bad about letting the player choose, I guess. You can't choose not to pick up the phone when Chadley calls. You can't choose to to skip half of the dialogue. You can't choose not to play the minigames. You can't even choose not to use a character. Every single time the party is split, you will go back in time to play through the same time period with the other characters. Party compositions are often forced (usually for contrived reasons) to ensure you have to explore the synergies between all the character combinations.
Chocobos
As a quick note, chocobo breeding is gone. No longer acceptable in 2024? Or maybe it was both too grindy and too powerful, granting too much map-traversal power, at least for now. Maybe you can get those Knights of the Round in the third game.
Instead, every area has its own local chocobo breed, and they all have a traversal power specific to that region, in a way that kind of makes sense. You are required to use chocobos for various things, but first you have to wrangle them... which is... of course... a minigame.
Overall length
It took me just shy of 90 hours to play through this game. That's a lot of time! To put that into context, if I'd spent that time watching TV, assuming a generic streaming season of ten 45-minute-long episodes, I could have watched 12 seasons. That's a lot of Netflix.
There are dozens and dozens of mechanics all with their own little tutorial sequences. They keep happening throughout the game but especially in the first few hours, as you learn about all kinds of stuff not in the original game, like upgradeable weapons with skill trees or item crafting (yes, seriously).
Because I realized early on that Rebirth wanted me to spend the rest of my life playing it, I soon changed the combat difficulty to Easy, greatly shortening the length of the fights and making death almost impossible, which made the game much shorter than it would have been if I'd had to retry some of the battles or fight against bullet sponges. I also set some other rules for myself: Even though I tried everything (that I found) at least once, I didn't go for additional "enemy intel" objectives that I missed, I never replayed minigames if I could help it, I didn't make an effort to level all of my weapons or materia. I did play the card game and finished all the world intel and all the sidequests except one. I played as swiftly and efficienty as I could, and yet according to the statistics at the end I still missed the majority of the grind objectives by count (only finished one category). Even so. Ninety hours.
It wasn't at all unpleasant to spend this time in the world of Final Fantasy 7 remake. It looks good. I like the story. I really do like the characters. But honestly... Why? It could have had as much if not more of a positive impact on me if it had been half the length. They really didn't need to miss anything important. Just streamline all the little mandatory annoyances.
The ending
This part talks about the ending of Rebirth. Big Spoilers!
Much as in Remake, I liked most of the game as far as core progression goes, and only the ending left me lukewarm. They were doing so well!In the original, in an emotional scene that made videogame history, Sephiroth drops down from above to slay Aerith, a major playable character and love interest, as she prays. It's abrupt. It's shocking. It Just Wasn't Done at the time. You spent hours and hours building an emotional relationship with this ridiculously good person and now she's dead, gone, you won't be seeing her anymore. Sure, it looked like crap in 1997 3D graphics, but it worked.
Rebirth works this scene into the plot, sure. Sephiroth does fall down and stab Aerith at one point. Does Aerith die? Yes... Probably. After like four hours of foreshadowing, and lots of shenanigans involving a multiple-worlds subplot. So we see Cloud batting Sephiroth's sword away, saving Aerith. Huh? Then he kind of phases into another world and she's dead just off camera? Then stuff happens and she appears again, but now she's in the world of these confusing incongruous flashbacks we've been seeing all game in which Zack is alive in Midgar. Sephiroth's voice accuses her of hiding in a different world. Then everybody goes to space so they can fight Jenova and Sephiroth, as you do (the original did that stuff as well so I can't complain). Then it's back to the real world, except Cloud still sees Aerith around, even though she's dead. Red feels her too so she's actually a mako ghost I guess? She's still there all the way to the very final camera shot.
Nomura. Man. Let the girl die. All this fooling around completely robbed the scene of its original impact. Was that really necessary?
(EDIT: Added the paragraphs on items and tutorials.)
Thanks for this. I finally got into Remake on my PC with the intention of being ready to play Rebirth when it eventually makes its way to PC. I'm allowing myself to not 100% the game to prevent myself from going insane, which is much easier to do knowing that nothing carries over to Rebirth. It was nice to read your approach to playing it, I will probably do the same thing. I think the thing that annoys me the most about Remake is being interrupted mid attack and wasting an ATB bar. The number of times I have been in the middle of casting Cure only to get hit, interrupted, lose ATB, have a character die, then go through the hassle of getting enough ATB to revive and heal is a real slog. It's not like the battles are hard, just time consuming.
I don't remember about Remake, but in Rebirth interruptions felt pretty rare (and there were some upgrades to minimize their impact too).
Easy mode does have its drawbacks. Since the ability to use summons is on a very slow timer, you can't use them in most fights or you will use them once at most. Conversely, if you're in a fight with some nonsense mandatory objective, like "stagger the enemy three times!" You risk the fight being nearly impossible to complete successfully because if you stagger the enemy once the characters you're not controlling will quickly finish it off.
Even though you can get things like Haste or United Refocus synergies to increase the speed of refilling ATB bars, it's still a huge limiter on how many of those many, many items you find in the world (in Rebirth) you can use. The design just doesn't feel plausible there; you can't possibly use all of those items.
Another tip for speeding up the game: In some areas (not talking about the open world; actual story-relevant rooms and hallways and caves and such) with some finesse you can skirt around the room and avoid fighting the monsters parked inside it.
Pokemon Emerald version (GBA). Never played a Pokemon game ever, so thought it would be good for, you know, general knowledge.
It's fine. A bit boring, but there are numbers getting bigger, so that part of my brain is happy.
You started with a good one, imo. Leaf green and Ruby are also very good Pokemons.
It can be boring initially, but once you get more difficult fights, it does get more engaging.
This hit me with a wave of nostalgia. I think Emerald was one of the pokemon games I've played the most, and I have a core memory of spending most of a 10+ hour roadtrip soft-resetting my game so I could get a shiny Mudkip.
That being said, this feels like the most accurate description of a pokemon game I've ever read:
If you end up liking Emerald enough that you want to keep playing pokemon, consider trying gen 2 (Gold/Silver, or the remakes Heart Gold and Soul Silver). It's still my favorite generation, because it does something that no other pokemon game has done to date:
Post-Elite Four spoiler for Pokemon Second Gen.
You can visit the Kanto region from Gen 1, and challenge all eight gym leaders from that regionIt took me a couple years as a kid to figure this out, and it blew my mind.
The Heart Gold/Soul Silver remakes are peak Pokémon. The games that came out before are essentially the same minus QoL features, and the games that came after weren't able to bring anything meaningful to the formula. The DS games are also gorgeous.
Though if you've never played any Pokémon game, I'd recommend Black/White and their sequel (the sequel is considered better). They're the best games to play if you're not a 30-something nostalgic of their gameboy.
I take it you weren't big on exploration? Lol
I was under 8, and I think I just wasn't connecting the dots haha
Well did you get it?
Yeah! I still have it in on a cartridge of a DS pokemon game!
If you want a bit more quality of life at the expense (IMO) of the graphics, you could try Pokemon Alpha Sapphire / Omega Ruby; they are remakes of Sapphire and Ruby for the 3DS. (Granted the art direction got a lot worse, and those fucking games are still somehow $40).
Wow I'm pretty sure that's what I paid for the original Ruby and Sapphire back in the early 2000s. Here's an Xmas sale from 2003 with them going for $35 lol
(disclaimer: I know inflation exists, just thought the comparison was funny)
I have finished Ruby way back. It was great fun for around 60 hours, which is kinda unbelievable. And I even hadn't gone through everything the game has to offer!
Have a good time!
I started playing Void Crew over the weekend when it was on sale. I love the concept, it feels like a game I have been wanting to be made for years.
You and your crew of up to 3 other players are on a space ship traveling through space. The objective is to reach the last sector where there is a boss fight, with each sector before having a mission to accomplish before progressing, as well as loot to scavenge from enemy ships or derelicts.
The fun comes from the coordination of running a ship with friends. Pilot, engineer, gunner, and scavenger, the four classes have their own perk tree that very heavily defines what role a player can play. The chaos of ship combat while trying to keep the swarm of enemy fighters from killing your engineer on the hull of your ship patching hull breaches, and your scavenger is on the derelict space station looking for supplies is a great feeling, and becomes all the more fun as you get better at coordinating with your crew of friends.
The game is still in early access, but v1.0 is scheduled to come out this November. I'm excited to see the devs flush this one out a bit.
That sounds like FTL, is it rogue like?
Yeah, I have compared it to FTL when talking with friends.
It is a rogue like.
Balatro
Finally beat Gold stake with every deck! I took some screenshots of my stats in case anyone is interested. Flushes are good.
At first I was worried because the achievement didn't unlock, but I found a reddit thread where others had mentioned the same problem, and their solution of just winning any other run worked. Took a little White stake Checkered deck victory lap. [edit: just wanted to note playtime: 312h]
Here are my thoughts on the patch 1.0.1's changes to Orange and Gold stake difficulties, now that I've played with them a lot. They add some new "stickers" that add negative effects to jokers that appear in the shop and in packs.
Orange stake: Jokers have 30% chance to have a Perishable sticker (debuffed after five rounds)This is almost the opposite of the Eternal sticker introduced way back in Black stake (can't be sold or destroyed). Perishable jokers can be sold for their regular sell price, even after they become debuffed. This means they are still useful to Temperence tarot cards, Swashbuckler, etc. Design-wise, I really like these. You have to be mindful of how many more rounds you have left with them, and plan your round skips accordingly. Similar to other jokers that tick down like Turtle Bean and Selzer, sometimes you need to just skip all the rounds you can so you still have access to your strong jokers for the boss(es). Though sometimes that isn't a good plan at all!
Gold stake: Jokers have 30% chance to have a Rental sticker ($1 to buy, but cost an additional $3 each round)This is a really interesting way of spiking difficulty. If you take one in the early game, it can feel like you're treading water and barely have money for things you need to stay alive. Taking 2 can be a death sentence - unless you have a really strong econ joker like Rocket or Constellation to keep you afloat.
Having a 3rd sticker type is a really big nerf to the round skip tags that give you jokers in the next shop. The 1.0.1 patch made those tags way better by making the joker free, but as you go up the stakes, it's not always a great deal. "Sure, you can have a free holographic joker! How about this Eternal Rental Diet Cola? Or perhaps a Perishable Rental Flash Card?"
The thing I don't like about having too many of these stickers floating around is that it can be another early run killer. I think in the early game it's still correct to try your luck with the free joker tags and hope you get a good one.
I didn't play too much Orange or Gold stake on the old patch (packs cost +$1 per ante, -1 hand size), just enough to get 1 win with each, but I can say with confidence I like the new versions much more. The old ones felt horrible.
Magic: the Gathering
I mentioned before that I quit playing sanctioned Modern events after the Modern Horizons 2 set came out, but earlier this year I put in some effort to put some my old decks back together to have them available to play with casually. This summer I got to play with them a lot while visiting family, and I was glad I did! I had a lot of fun with them.
In the meantime, Modern Horizons 3 came out. It seems to have committed the same sins as the past Horizons sets:
MH1 had a card that dominated the field and needed to be banned - Hogaak. MH3 gave us Nadu. Frank Karsten wrote a great article in July advocating for why it needed to go, but the tl;dr is it was dominantly powerful, and also the play pattern was terrible - it was a combo deck that played out non-deterministically so one player would sit and watch the Nadu player take hundreds of game actions. In the last tournament it was legal, former world champ Brian Braun-Duin took a 48 minute turn on camera. Now it's banned, yay!
MH2 printed so many powerful cards across all colours that it invalidated or introduced mandatory "upgrades" to most of the existing viable decks, mostly the free Evoke Elementals. The top decks of the metagame were "MH2 Tribal" decks. MH3 has done an impression of this with Boros/Mardu Energy, Jeskai Energy Control, and various Eldrazi decks. Thankfully the free Flares are not as busted as the elementals (WotC did eventually ban the red one, and just finally banned the black one along with Nadu). They're closer to the power level of the free Forces from MH1. I still think free (mana-wise) cards should be made VERY sparingly and I strongly dislike them being injected into the format without going through Standard.
Another straight-to-Modern set, the Lord of the Rings set, introduced The One Ring (currently played in around 40% of decks) and Orcish Bowmasters (currently played in Mardu Energy and Dimir Murktide - an MH2 deck that switched from red to black for bowmasters and MH3's Psychic Frog). WotC has said multiple times now in ban announcements that they are keeping their eye on the Ring, but it seems like they are blind, or maybe just planning a reprint. "WotC cast it into the fire!" "No."
In summary, post-MH3, in my eyes, Modern is still borked. New, massively power-crept cards are being injected en masse to the format and invalidating old decks. It is now basically "Standard Premium" where a ton of cards rotate out of the format every few years. Not made illegal, mind you, just irrelevant. You are free to play your old decks and get stomped. I wish a "Modern but no cards from straight-to-Modern sets" format would gain traction, but it doesn't seem to generate enough interest. There was something called "Project Modern" that tried to do that, but it died, in part because the players couldn't agree on what they wanted to ban. The streamer d00mwake sometimes hosts Magic Online tournaments with his subscribers called Pure Modern. I guess that's the frontrunner for community traction for now.
Ok I want to talk a little bit about Balatro. I've been playing this for a while and I unlocked several decks but I'm getting a little stuck on the challenges.
The thing I want to comment on is that you said "Flushes are good".
I almost never play flushes, unless I get a joker or modifier that makes them better for some reason. I am way more likely to play pair or 2 pair or 3 of a kind or full house. In fact, it is a decent strategy to mostly play pairs or high card and just buff them a lot because they are easy to get and that works well when you have bonuses for not discarding.
But you are farther along than me and you like flushes. I'm sure it depends on what jokers you have and which you try for, but why did you say "flushes are good". :)
Main advantages:
Just higher base score (chips x mult) for a single hand (compared to High Card, Pair, 2 Pair, 3 of a Kind. Only a mere 5 chips behind Full House). This means you will have more hands remaining at the end of the round and earn more cash. Also you get to add 5 cards' chips to the base chips rather than 1-4.
Easier to dig for than a Full House (or Straight). Let's say you have 2 pair in hand (2s and 8s) and are digging for another 2 or 8. That means you've got 4 possible hits left in the deck. Now imagine you have 4 spades in hand and are digging for a flush. Now you've got 9 hits in the deck and are far more likely to find it on your next discard.
Planet cards for Flush scale mult faster (+2 mult) than High Card, Pair, and 2 Pair (+1 mult).
On higher stakes, 1) the point thresholds scale up faster and it's harder to win with the lower value hands, and 2) you get -1 discard to work with.
Suit-changing & wild tarot cards can be pointed at pretty much any card whereas Strength/Death can sometimes be frustrating if you don't see the right number when you open a tarot pack. The drawback is opening the wrong suit changers after you've picked one :P
Sinful jokers (+3 mult for each <suit> played) are common and can give you a pretty consistent +15 mult boost if you decide to commit to one suit. This can carry you through a good chunk of the early game.
All that said, it's important to be able to pivot to the right hand type if the right joker presents itself and it's not too late. Somewhat counterintuitively, High Card / Pair builds (with scaling jokers like Green Joker, Supernova, Ride the Bus, Burnt Joker, Square Joker) can be more powerful - but you've gotta find the right jokers.
Thanks I didn't notice the planet scaling difference for flush.
Like I said I think it is very powerful to use pair because you can get them almost every hand (or high card, which of course you get every hand) and I seem to frequently get a joker of the type "the multiplier is how many times you have played this hand" and also "bonus if you never discard".
But I think maybe this strategy doesn't work very well with the strange limitations you get in challenges, such as "a joker is destroyed every hand".
Great points! Thanks for the top-tier advice. I especially like the one about it being easier to fish for than full houses and the one about it being easier to pick cards for the tarot cards. I fine myself prioritizing full houses a lot of the time (since it's easy to default back to two pair or three of a kind if you don't get the full house), but your post has made me want to try using flushes more.
About the Modern format:
I've tried to play a lot of formats over the course of my Magic "career". I played Pauper, Modern, Standard, Draft, Pioneer, Premodern, and a lot of Commander. I haven't kept track of upgrading all my Modern decks for a while, and now with MH3, I can throw all but one of my Modern decks into the garbage. Even the Enchantress deck that was introduced as a new archetype in MH2 got no support in MH3 so it is a goner. I guess I'll continue to play Merfolk in Modern when the opportunity for a tournament arises. But I'm not getting the fix from Modern that I used to get. I am now selling my obsolete Modern decks and building a Battle Box of 2018 Modern decks with the proceeds. That way I can play the kind of Modern I enjoyed with my friends anytime. Plus, a lot of the cards that made those decks so expensive back in the day are now significantly cheaper thanks to reprints. I'm getting Burn, Mono-Green Tron, UW Control, Dredge and Jund.
I do enjoy Pioneer but the tournament scene isn't really there in my region. The local Pauper scene died a long time ago, here too I built a Battle Box for me and my friends. Now I guess I'm all in on playing regular Premodern tournaments. My premodern deck never rotates out.
In a way I become what Wizards wanted all along: a Commander and Standard player as long as new sets that they constantly release are concerned. I'm certainly sick and tired of following endless spoiler seasons on Reddit. I think my enjoyment of the game will improve with my new priorities of no longer trying to make 8-year old decks somehow work in Modern by buying expensive new staples that still didn't help my jank to win a lot of games.
Nice, I like your battlebox selections. Good colour and archetype representation. I wonder how the win% matchup matrix would look. Part of me wants to buy Tarmogoyfs and Lilianas now that they're a fraction of their old prices...but on the other hand they still feel overpriced relative to how much play they actually see in Modern now. Death's Shadow has been filling my midrange deck niche.
Pioneer is a strange format. It's larger than Standard and can have decks survive longer but also new cards from Standard impact it far more frequently and dramatically than they do in Modern. And their ban choices seem even more mercurial than in Modern. When they announced the format I was excited about it and played for a bit. But it changed too fast for my taste and I didn't want to keep up with buying cards.
Pioneer is great because of the gameplay it allows. The financial aspect is quite frustrating as you've described. My LGS only has a Pioneer tournament every three months or so, and by that time a new set or even two have come out and I will need to update my deck. Every set has new cards that are relevant. It's a constant goose chase.
I have been playing mostly Minecraft and Ace Attorney Investigations Collection which has been really fun! I got the DLC and the new tracks really improved the vibe of the game.
I've been interested in playing a lot of the Ace Attorney games, but I've never played any and was wondering if you need to have played some in order to have background for others. Like is there a preferred order to play them in? Or are they mostly standalone?
It's for the best to play the Ace Attorney Trilogy first. At that point you can either decide to play Investigations (which released after it) or the Apollo Justice Trilogy (Which continues the story) I recommend playing first Trilogy and then Investigations
The Great Ace Attorney is completely standalone. But it's the last one they made
Will check em out, thanks!
Please do! The only one not available on modern platforms is the Layton crossover but that one is pretty much an AU. If you have a 3DS or means to emulate it I do recommend it if you like Ace Attorney and at the very least don't mind Layton gameplay
I just started playing the Investigations game, and it has LOTS of references to the Ace Attorney Trilogy. Luckily, the original trilogy is also fantastic, so there's no real reason to jump straight into Investigations! I think it's very fun to get a chance to see Edgeworth's side of things after experiencing him as an antagonist and rival for three games.
Definitely start with the original trilogy (imo far higher quality than the others, but ymmv). I don't think others reference each other much, so you can play in whatever order after that, but they'll all have at least some references to the original trilogy.
Good insight, thanks!
Really enjoying it as well! So fun, and what a miracle it finally got translated!
Game I started playing yesterday: Sea of Thieves. I think most of you know this one. Avoiding PvP as much as I can and just sticking to Forts and Treasuries. I think tonight I may try to find an open crew.
Game I will be playing tomorrow: Satisfactory 1.0, which launches tomorrow.
Honestly I'm going to wait on Satisfactory a little bit. It seems like every game update the last few years (for every game) releases with issues and things usually stabilize after a few patches.
Maybe this won't be the case, but rather than get hyped to finally play the game, better to let it get to a working state to jump in. I played it for about 6 hours a few months ago and was enthralled, but stopped cause I wanted to wait for the 1.0 since it was so close.
The past updates have been very stable and 1.0 has been too, so far anyway. I played on the experimental build from update 6 on and I've never really had any big issues.
I've had some very mild flickering issues but I think those are related to the dedicated server I'm playing on rather than Satisfactory itself.
In fact, the optimization they've done really shines. It's much smoother than U8.
That said, there's nothing wrong waiting for a bugfix patch or two before getting started.
That's good to hear! I'm in the middle of another game at the moment so I'll probably start Satisfactory when I finish this one.
Can't wait!
Have had very limited time lately, but played a little bit of Everspace 2 here and there. It's still fun, but I haven't felt very motivated to fire up my Steam Deck and play more.
Instead, I've been sneaking in sessions here and there with my RG 405m, playing Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door which I'm enjoying. I just picked up a new companion, the cloud lady and just got into the little bug tree or whatever it is. It's been a nice, chill game in the evenings.
Also started playing Shenmue on it, which seems pretty interesting so far. I've only played maybe 20 minutes or so, so far, but it seems like my kind of game: janky, but ambitious. The thing it most reminds me of so far is Gothic; a little janky, weird voice acting, NPC routines (at least, I'm assuming that) and all in the early 2000s. Looking forward to spending some more time with it.
“Janky, but ambitious” is the perfect way to describe Shenmue.
When I first played it back in the day, it felt so forward-thinking. It was like I was playing a game of the future that perfectly captured a feeling of the past.
It’s rough around the edges, especially by modern standards, but it’s got heart and a vision.
Dredge - Enjoyed it. Short enough that it the grindy-ish mechanics didn't wear me out. Moody enough that the open world felt coherent and small enough that I didn't feel there wasn't anything of interest around. My only complaint was that the pacing of the game is kind of uneven, as it often is with these games, where you go from under powered and helpless to a bit over powered but only at the end. 8/10
I really enjoyed dredge as well! I feel 8/10 is adequate rating as well. I know they have a new dlc (oil rig I believe) coming out, or perhaps it is out but I want to play it as I enjoyed the arctic themed dlc
Kingdom Come Deliverance. It's reallllly good. Reallly fucking frustrating at times, but somehow still worth it. For example, the devs got me to weed a virtual herb garden, and I wasn't even mad, actually kind of enjoyed it. How do you make that happen? Weeding is boring and awful in real life, but they somehow incentivized it enough that I was willing to do it virtually.
A lot of the missions are like this, kinda "ah man, do I really have to do that?" at the beginning, and then by the end you realize it was actually worth it, and at least mildly entertaining.
My biggest complaints would be glitches, crashes, and some tedious NPC dialogues you have to go through frequently (renting a room).
Lol I felt the same way about bathing in that game. "What? Does the game seriously expect me to rinse off my character before talking to nobles just to not look so disheveled..." and then fast forward to later in the game and I'd be like "oh hell yeah a trough, might as well wash up".
Oh man, I just hit that point today, finally had enough to repair everything, and people stopped asking if I had been attacked by bandits. Now I have small repair kits to keep that up cheaply.
The time has finally come to play Core Keeper 1.0.
I got a server for my friends and 5 of us got stuck in.
The headline is, its Terraria but in 2024. A lot of the content seems like a direct lift from either Terraria or Calamity. Which is great if you like Terraria.
I think we've done essentially the wall of flesh kinda tier of bosses and working our way through what we assume is the mid game. Everyone is having a great time if you ignore some little annoyances.
One difference is Core Keeper seems to have more automation than base game Terraria which is interesting. A friend has setup a Minecraft style monster farm for drops and a bunch of almost Factorio like drills and belt to mine too which I didn't expect.
I guess I'd say, much like Terraria, you're probably going get more milage out of this one in multiplayer.
It is totally playable single player but having a squad who's happy to split mining, gardening, fishing, exploring, farming drops, building the bases yada yada is the good stuff I think.
Finally picked up No Mans Sky. The most recent update added fishing, and I love fishing, so I figured it was a good time as any to get in.
I stayed away from the game for a long time, as while I love scifi and exploration, I hate "make your own fun" type games (like Minecraft). I need direction and something to do besides build a cool base.
Well, turns out there's so much to do, maybe too much haha. I'm still on the initial story thread to find a missing guy, and there's also so many technologies to gather resources for, and so many other systems that I've barely even seen or scratched the surface of. 9 hours in and still enjoying my time.
As far as fishing though.... I can't really figure out what it's for? I can catch some fish, but they don't seem to have a use besides selling. The fishing mini game (if you can even call it that) is crazy simple too, literally just press trigger at the right time, so that's a little disappointing, I would've preferred something closer to stardew valley. If anyone knows a way to make fishing more fulfilling please let me know!
There are many mechanics of NMS that are like this. Many features get added to support the story of a given expedition, but taken in the main game feel "unfinished". I think this is where the "Make your own fun" aspect comes in. A lot of the same things have been said about settlements, exocraft, cooking, underwater exploration, etc. I've sort of become accustomed to new features only very loosely fitting in with the rest of the game.
As for purpose... I think mostly fishing serves as a distraction. Another thing to do in a vast universe full of distractions. But there are some little tidbits.
I generally like to play the game for the overall experience of being an explorer in a vast universe. There's always something new to see and experience.
Yeah as mentioned in the other comment, No Man's Sky is one where you need to really just be OK setting your own goals and sandboxing a little.
There's a properly huge amount to do and a lot of it is weirdly disconnected from anything else. Some features and systems you'd legit never know about unless you read it on a tooltip, see it online or a random quest takes you there.
For me I was done with it some 100 hours plus into it after I had an impressive collection of shit and unlocked all the fast travel stuff. At that point it really seemed like I has to find my own fun and the multiplayer was a bit of a let down, but I had so much fun getting there.
For me I might go back after the next Worlds update, because this one looks amazing, I think the follow up will round it off.
My current rotation is,
Cyberpunk 2077 - on my fifth playthrough as time has gone on, still one of my favorite games of all time. Heavily modded, this go-around, and doing a build and making choices that I haven't done before. Still astounding just how damn good the game is, and unfortunate that a messy launch on consoles will give it a bad reputation for years to come. I feel bad for people who won't give it a shot.
Space Marine II - well, my friends love Warhammer, I hate Warhammer, I skipped Darktide (terrible game) but figured I'd bite the bullet on this one. Setting is still really, really awful, but the gameplay is very enjoyable and rewarding, at least. Optimization could be a bit better, but I'm not going to complain when the game is rendering as many enemies at a time as it is - it's shocking it doesn't run worse, honestly.
Deadlock - I haven't actually played this in about a week because I'm a very progression-motivated person and there being no progession at the moment really hampers my enthusiasm, but damn this game feels so good. Looking forward to the full release. Same can be said of Marvel Rivals - two games that largely share a genre that I'm very excited for.
Fortnite - I got sucked into Fortnite a while back when they did the Solid Snake stuff and my buddy, who is obsessed with MGS, asked me to help him farm it out so he wasn't playing alone. At the time, I said "the only way they get me to play this game again is if they bring back Doctor Doom." Well, they brought back Doctor Doom. My dickhead friend is not reciprocating the favor and made me farm out the entire pass on my own. Not proud of this one.
Star Wars - Galaxy of Heroes - I'm not a fan of gacha games, but I am a fan of frivolous little time-wasters for me to occupy spare minutes otherwise just spent waiting and staring at a wall. As far as gacha games go, this one is incredibly generous, very easy to F2P as long as you aren't chasing all of the brand new stuff. I'm finally getting my account up on its feet properly after about a year of just kinda goofing around and I gotta say, the dopamine hits from completing long-term goals are VERY nice.
I started playing Anno 1800 yesterday evening
Interesting game so far. It scratches a particular itch my brain has had pretty much since SimCity 2013 shat the bed. Definitely a learning curve to get started, but I'm enjoying it. I've had a few "blink and it's an hour later" moments already
I’ve been playing Deadlock and man it’s a blast
As someone who has enjoyed both league and csgo in the past, a slick third person shooter MOBA from valve feels great
It really is a lot of fun for a game still in mid development. It's such a blast to play in the same lane with a friend when you can co-ordinate really well too.
Definitely - two huge things I like about it from a social/community perspective:
it pulls together an audience from 2 genres, my friends that play csgo and vehemently hate MOBAs like it and my moba friends love it
no one playing has much idea of how to min max and there is not much of a meta yet, so it feels good to just try stuff out and people aren’t too toxic. I played DotA and early league, S1/2 of league felt very similar
Black Myth: Wukong has sucked up all my gaming free time for the last week or so! It’s a gorgeous game.
I have two big gripes with it:
Even still, I wouldn’t say the combat is bland. I think the game does a good job of adding variety to the enemies to force you to adapt your battle cadence often. You can’t get through the game mashing light attack and dodging randomly. Some enemies will absorb your hits and pancake you, so it’s best to keep your distance while charging up heavy attacks. Others are way too nimble and will chip you to death if you try to overpower them without matching their tempo.
This is also a super boss-heavy game, which I personally love. There’s a boss (or mini boss) every 10-15 minutes it feels like. The bosses are challenging and, for the most part, feel unique. When they aren’t it’s usually a) for a justifiable plot reason, or b) the moveset is different enough that it doesn’t feel like the same boss. Haven’t found any bosses with an unavoidable “delete player” move yet either. When I die, it’s for a good reason and I feel like I actually learn a lesson from it instead of just being punished for not having superhuman precision at dodging.
Dying is a big part of it, and it has a bonfire-style soulslike mechanic to it. However, there is no penalty for dying, and the checkpoints are close to places you might die. No mad dashes across the planet to try to snag your 3 levels worth of souls and then hoping you have enough OJ left in your flask to make it back to the bonfire. As much as I love that challenge in souls games, it’s freeing to know that I’ll respawn right outside the boss area without any consequences.
Overall I’m having fun with it and it feels worth the cost of admission!
Yellow Wind Sages kick grab comes close and perhaps I'll count his entire arena too because it's such bullshit that the entire fight is tainted unless you have a specific item, and Yin Tiger's grab is also terribly difficult to dodge unless you are out of the way to begin with.
In fact, most grabs have been nonsense. Yellow Loong's (luckily very rare) grab nearly one shots you from full.
Difficulty is all over the place with story bosses being pushovers most of the time and random encounters being stupidly difficult -I prefer the latter over the former being honest, Non-Able was fantastic- but even so most fights do feel fair. With the added caveat that almost all bosses have some sort of terribly telegraphed move that feels impossible to anticipate or react to. I feel that mostly comes down to Game Science's experience rather than design choice however.
It sounds like I'm griping, but it's honestly difficult to find flaws in this game beyond what you mentioned, overall performance, and the above.
I've been enjoying it so much because it just oozes style from every lovingly crafted mob, to boss, to area, to lore text, to cinematic. It's a labor of love and it shows.
Well said. The aesthetic is unmatched. I was absolutely blown away by all of the interstitial animations too — what a total treat to find an incredible animated short film between each chapter!
Finally picked up Baldurs Gate 3, and just getting started. Having a lot of fun so far!
It's been on my radar for a while, but I wanted to wait until I'd taken care of various life stuff before buying it. I received a copy of .. maybe.. BG 1 way back when I got my first computer, and remember really enjoying the exploration (even though I never finished the story). Really liking the world and exploration in this one, too.
I don't play d&d, so I dont have a deep understanding of the game mechanics, but Im having fun bumbling my way through in easy mode. I like that the game seems quite forgiving in letting players change their settings and characters after initial creation.
I'm trying to roll with my failures somewhat and not savescum (much), but I'm also giving myself the grace to experiment in battles and then go back to last save to try somethibg different. It's helping learn the game mechanics and tactics better.
My only real gripe is, on pc at least, I'm finding the camera controls in particular to be a bit clunky. To be fair, Im still learning and haven't played around with changing the defaults, but but controls/ interactions dont feel as intuitive off the top as they maybe could.
Did you choose one of the pre-made characters, or build your own?
I made a custom character! I just generally enjoy character creation, even though I'm sure I didn't make the most efficient choices when it comes to character strength.
I know from other games, like skyrim, that I tend to enjoy magic so that guided me toward one of the magic classes (sorcery), and from there I I kind of winged it based on what seemed interesting to me at the time.
Road 96. I received this game as a gift from @kfwyre in last year's Holiday Game Giveaway, and just this week got a chance to play it. I finished my first run through the story with my 13 year old as copilot, and we both enjoyed the experience very much. The game is very rough around the edges, but the story and game mechanics drew us in and really made it fun.
I also finished the Aquarius Expedition in the latest update for No Man's Sky. It's a minor update that introduced fishing mechanics to the game. I have to admit I was a bit "meh" going in. I love fishing in Minecraft, but most other games fail to capture me with their fishing mechanics. I think it becomes too tedious or anxiety inducing in other games. But I'm pleased to report that NMS has captured what I like about Minecraft fishing. The previous update added a technology upgrade to allow spaceships to "land" on water, so it's super fun now to just find an ocean in the middle of nowhere, land, and cast my line while standing on the wing.
Next up, I think I'll finally give Satisfactory a try. I've owned it forever, but have been waiting until 1.0 to give it a full playthrough. I have a feeling it's going to suck me in, so I thought it best to wait for the full experience.
I've been fully sucked into Satisfactory for the last couple of months. I got pretty far into my game but started over on a new map after 1.0. I learned a lot in my first save, so starting over doesn't feel bad. The game tickles my brain in all the right places.
I've sunk quite a few hours in over the past couple of days. I had an old save with almost nothing unlocked from like 2 years ago, so I just started fresh with 1.0. There's a lot more hints and tutorial than the last time I played, which is nice. I also noticed that the dev team added some more humor since the last build I played. Overall it makes the game feel a bit less sterile. My oldest son is playing shapez2 right now, and there's quite a few shared concepts. So we've been comparing notes to improve our automation. It's been a really good time
Should be short and sweet for me this week instead of my normal blog post ass length. The Black Ops 6 beta resumed this weekend. Still a fun time and I still recommend thinking about Black Ops 6 for former CoD fans who want something more reminiscent of old (until it later inevitably gets ruined by skins and crossovers and all that).
A friend bought me Squirrel with a Gun and it's been pretty funny so far. This type of game isn't normally my thing, but I booted it up while hanging in discord with friends over the weekend and streamed it to them and we had a good time. The game does have some satisfying puzzles to get some of the golden acorns, though, like figuring out how to grill burgers for angry people at a picnic while being just a squirrel. It's definitely good for a few hours of laughs.
Lastly, I haven't actually played it yet, but I watched some videos on Skyrim mod packages over the weekend. I'm no stranger to modding that game, but I haven't used complete overhauls yet. This morning I downloaded and installed Lorerim and at least got through character creation. I'm going to play a bit tonight and see how I feel. I'm trying this one more out of curiosity than anything, but I do still love Skyrim, so let's see! If Lorerim ends up being a bit too much for me, there's another conversion that caught my eye called Nordic Souls (not actually a souls like), which is a little bit closer to vanilla skyrim, but still unique.
Otherwise, I'm debating if I pick up Astro Bot or Space Marine 2 this week. I'll get both eventually, but I don't need both at the same time. Probably Astro Bot to start.
Edit, I did buy Astro Bot and proceeded to play it for five hours straight. This game is constructed with such love and such care. It's cute as fuck, the gameplay, while simple to pick up, is incredibly satisfying. The zones, the music, and the art all rock, the character bots from other games, like God of War, Ape Escape, etc. are treated with such an attention to detail, it's mind blowing. You know the feeling you first got when you played Lego Star Wars as a kid? And do you remember the feeling you first got when you played Super Mario 64? It's both of those at the same time.
If you have a PS5, don't look up anything about this game, just go buy it and just go play it. It's such an innocent and pure gaming experience. It's going to be hard for anything else this year to top this for me and I'm only a few hours in.
I think it was @hungariantoast who had just completed a playthrough of Borderlands, and I looked and saw that I hadn't played it in over a decade, so I installed Borderlands, Borderlands 2, Borderlands TPS, and Borderlands 3. I've played to about level 20.
My first playthrough I played Mordecai (I finished the game as all characters), and I'm giving that another go. I love sniping, I love Bloodwing. There's a lot of things I don't remember about the game, and I'm rediscovering things. It's grittier than I remember and tons of fun.
Played a bit more, and I recall this issue from previous playthroughs now, though I thought the memories were lost to the depths of time. I like doing quests in games like this, so I will do all the quests but in Borderlands, there is a point where you are then overlevelled for every quest, so at New Haven, I have mostly given up on side quests and have started sticking to only the story quest. It's a bit disappointing, but I'll go back to the other ones later.
This week we played the fps looter shooter Void Bastards for our podcast on roguelike games.
VB has a great aesthetic going for it. All the art design is on point from the cool comic book animation take on 2.5D, to the high level of spaceship revurb, to stealthily listening in on eny footsteps to avoid. Narrator is from the Stanley Parable as well, which is fun.
But that's about where the charm wears off I think. The gameplay loop of boarding a ship, frantically looting it while your oxygen runs out, and avoiding monsters is generally fun, but its the only gameplay loop available.
There's a lot of promise from the Immersive Sim genre that could have helped add some depth to the gameplay, but I wonder if the studio ran out of time or money to implement. The ending to the game is also legitimately bad and frustrating.
I do have high hopes for it's spiritual successor Wild Bastards, though. From what I remember of the nextfest demo I played, it may have solved a lot of issued we had with Void Bastards.
Dustborn (PlayStation 5)
I've reached the lore-heavy part of the game, and so far I'm on board with it. There's some philosophy in here about the power of words and the connection between language and consciousness. In the game, words have the power to alter reality. There's a bit of social commentary about echo chambers and disinformation, but for the most part I think the game just wants to tell a story about a bunch of weirdos in an alternative timeline. I'm not entirely sure how far into the game I actually am: Judging by the map, I should be almost exactly halfway, but I'm learning about the origins of the protolanguage and the broadcast, which I assumed would be third act stuff. And I keep picking up new characters along the way, who are all great.
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine II (Windows)
I have a friend who is a huge 40k fan, who basically bullied me into buying this game. Don't think I've ever died this many times in the tutorial section of a game, but the control scheme on mouse + keyboard is ... fascinating. Movement/aiming/shooting is all normal, but they've mapped melee attack to right mouse button, so they had to move aim down sight to middle mouse button (except if your weapon has alternative fire modes, then MMB instead toggles between modes). You can also long-click RMB for a more powerful attack or a combo ender. E is interact, but it's also execute (when an enemy is glowing red, after being successfully stunned). F is using stims to heal, while the much more commons grenades got the G (G for Grenade, logical if less practical). When an enemy's attack flashes blue, you can counter it with C (C for Counter, sure why not), but if it flashes red your only option is to dodge with Space (the game has no jumping, so fair enough). The tutorial takes you through this at a breakneck pace, so suddenly I was up against an enemy with a long-range melee attack that sometimes flashed blue and sometimes flashed red and I had to react quickly and remember what the flashing colours meant and try to remember the right keybinds and I died so many times. I haven't been this frustrated with a video game since Xcom 2. When I mentioned this to my friend, he said I should play with a controller, and thank the God-Emperor, the key mapping on a controller actually feels intuitive!
Last night, me and him and a common friend played through the first few missions in coop. One of them mostly handled the melee action, allowing me to stay back and shoot, which I'm at least somewhat competent at. Tried a bunch of different weapons before deciding on the assault rifle with underbarrel grenade launcher as my favourite. The game is honestly mediocre: Visually bland, uninteresting characters and story (at least so far), tiresome combat, and lore that feels like it was written by a committee of 10-year-old boys. But a mediocre game in good company equals good times.
TL;DR: For the love of the God-Emperor, play this game with a controller!
I was meant to get through a few other games this week, but predictably haven't had much time to really sit down and get into a new PC game.
Instead, I was instead introduced to Super Auto Pets which I've started playing on my commute to/from work. It's really fun so far, I dig the simplicity and how quickly games go by. Will probably keep this in my rotation for a while.
When I have sat down at my PC, I've been going through Core Keeper again to see what the 1.0 update has to offer. Nothing major to report yet, but I liked the game to begin with so I'm looking forward to playing more.
EverQuest - specifically the Project Quarm private server. I've played some private servers in the past (like P99). But always found them so top-heavy with max level characters and masochists who refuse to have any quality of life benefits that weren't there back in the day. Quarm has TONS of QoL benefits, and it's still got plenty of active low-mid level players out there.
I just got high enough level to fear kite hill giants, so that what I'm doing! It's really fun high risk/high reward. Thinking about joining a guild for endgame stuff, but don't know which one is best for a filthy casual such as myself.
Mahjong Soul has a "Balatro"-like game mode (I don't really know how else to explain it) out right now for an event. I've been addicted to it. My friends and I were talking about Balatro and how much we like it even though we don't play poker, so we were wondering what a mahjong version would look like. There are a couple floating around that we knew of: Ultimahjong and Aotenjo, but both ended up being incredibly disappointing. I really hope the Mahjong Soul Sky-High Ambition game mode becomes permanent. I would buy it, if that's what it takes.
I'm still playing Mega Man Battle Network for the GBA and I still absolutely hate it.
There are these cheap-ass enemies called Cloudy that are invulnerable to attacks most of the time, and you have to time your attacks perfectly to catch them during the brief moment where they're low enough to hit, all while they continuously spam the most annoying attack ever that basically turns half of the area you can occupy into moving death traps. If I run into an encounter that has a couple of those guys it's very unlikely that I'll survive, and if there's also a second kind of enemy whose patterns I have to account for while the entire play field is spammed with rain clouds it's gotten to the point where I just reset because that's a guaranteed game over.
I hate this game so much, but I've heard that the series gets a lot better in the sequels, and it would bother me to jump into those without having first finished this one.
This is an interesting perspective to me. Is there a story line you want to be caught up on, or is it moreso from a feeling of completion?
There's absolutely zero chance I could force myself through anything I consider as a fun leasure activity if I wasn't enjoying it. Personally, I've watched let's-plays of games I was curious about but didn't actually want to play, or of earlier games in series to catch up on a current game I wanted to play.
Well.. good luck, I hope it's over soon :)
I guess it is a kind of a completionist thing. I personally get a lot more satisfaction out of games when I'm invested in the characters and stories, even when that means suffering through earlier games for the backstory. Reading summaries or watching other people play just isn't quite the same for me. I watch movie franchises the same way--can't skip over the stinkers even if I know they're going to be awful.
I've been playing Astro Bot this week. I haven't used my PS5 much in the last year and was actually thinking of selling it but when I found out that they basically made Astro's Playroom into a full standalone game, I dusted it off and decided to hold off on selling it. I absolutely loved Astro's Playroom and how it showcased the Dualsense controller's ability. Astro Bot takes the basic concept of Astro's Playroom and transforms it into a full game. I'm only about 1/3rd into the game but I absolutely love it. If you've got a PS5 already and you enjoyed the basic gameplay from Astro's Playroom, or just enjoy a simple 3D platformer, I definitely recommend checking this one out.
Really liking TWW so far. Finished the campaign last week and just yesterday I finished the rest of the quests and got Loremaster done for this expansion! Tried some PvP after a very long hiatus and it is as chaotic as I remember. Liking Delves a lot, and gotta try some more dungeons as well. Just chilling, smelling the flowers and having a nice time
I played MW WWII yesterday on my son's insistence and my lord did we have a fun time! The missions are just super enjoyable and there is nothing better than getting sniped by my son on the beaches of Normandy!
Arknights' in the middle of Operation Lucent Arrowhead, the second Rainbow 6 collab.
Event-wise, it's great, the event mechanic (enemies get the ability to hit targets in any cardinal direction regardless of range, you can counter that using Barricades which block Line of Sight, but those can be destroyed if they take enough damage) feels like a good way to bring in a mechanic from R6 (destructible cover) in a tower defense game.
The story is a (mostly) self contained one that's funny, makes it's conflict clear, has some good plot twist (if with fairly obvious foreshadowing, one piece of it in particular is pretty cool for how many uses it has), and is... pretty short? Not that long? I mean, Arknights' story is infamous for characters monologuing (and convos going on forever), and this one doesn't do that.
Then there's the gacha side and, well, it's weird.
For reference, we're in something of a hell rush since in about 2-3 months we got 4 banners of importance (3 have broken characters, 2 are FOMO via collab; this one is both btw).
So, on one hand, I got everyone for cheap (two free 10-pull, one paid), which is good (and nowhere the best luck I've seen from the game), but on the other I kinda think that's my luck here.
It's pure desire sensor/RNGesus but, those are a thing for a reason still...
I also started playing Monster Hunter Now since I needed a reason to get out and I don't think Niantic has gone all out on their greediness there yet.
Overworld gameplay is the Niantic classic: walk around in real life, get to map nodes for resources, and fight monsters. No PvP elements anywhere like mainline titles.
Something I do find cool is the presence of "dimensional link" monsters, which let's you matchmake with anyone across the world hunting that monster. Useful since I'd be surprised if there's more than 5 people playing where I live.
Hunting is a simplified version of those titles, just one fight (no area change), not as much upkeep (sharpness isn't a thing, for example), the weapons' moveset is a simplified "best of" version of the full thing (for example: Heavy Bowgun has only 2-3 ammo types, reloading moves you down the list of ammo, and that can only be done from empty), and considering how much had to be cut/simplified to fit this game-loop I'm surprised at how much is still... there (charge blade is still too complex for it's own good amusingly enough).
Edit: I'll note that the (very strict) timer is in real time while the game has performance issues, so it's entirely possible to lose because everything takes 2-3 times longer to be done than the game expected (I legit had the game freeze on me for 2 seconds with no change in the hunt outside of losing said 2 seconds from the timer, I'll add that you have 75 seconds to hunt a monster and at around 5* they take at least half the timer to go down without slowdowns).
I'll also note that HP is effectively your stamina in this game, you can't fight large monster is you have less than 30% HP to start and it recovers while out of combat, so being good at hunting (or at least dodging) actively lets you keep hunting.
It's still a time waster (and excuse to get out), but one with a surprising amount of complexity compared to, say, PoGO.
Oh, and Rajang is still an absolute menace.
And not just because I'm still using 2-3* armor against a 5* Monster.Last one is Warframe, specifically the Circuit (take on an endless series of challenges with a limited selection of gear to make your loadout), which reminds of how broken a lot of stuff I never use is.
Take Trinity for example, the support 'frame. Doesn't mean she's squishy or unable to deal damage directly.
For tankiness, Blessing gives everyone in range HP, shields, and Damage Reduction. She can max out the top ups, and the DR goes up to 75%, combine that with Link for another up to 75% damage redirected. In total, we go from 270 HP to 4320 EHP according to wolfram. Except I'm skipping over armor calc or the fact that there isn't a cooldown on Blessing (and any other sources of healing), so it's even worse!
Damage-wise, besides the fact that everyone can use any weapon, Trin has another ability that can be used for pick: Energy Vampire. It creates 4 pulses that both gives energy to nearby allies and damage the enemy for a part of their current health (under 25%, it takes after their Max HP instead).
Now, because you want high duration it usually takes a while to deal it's damage in full, but with a low duration it can be used as a pick nuker. At the cost of basically every other ability.
Meanwhile, your guns can do some impressive numbers pretty easily depending on your mod collection, so while it's impressive, it's not actually viable.
Just don't underestimate the power of "You. Halve your health. NOW.", it can help kill bullet sponges a lot, even if in regular gameplay it's mostly used on fodder to quickly max out everyone's energy by killing said fodder to release all remaining pulses at once.
Now remember: this is the White Mage of Warframe.
Meanwhile, I learned thanks to a decree that Mesa (a cowgirl 'frame) only does headshot when using her Regulators during Peacemaker, so that's one aimbot even stronger than I thought.
Also, kinda unrelated, but it's kinda funny seeing the community twisting their logic into pretzel trying to make Koumei (the next 'frame) into the elusive spiderframe.
Ultrakill. It's a satisfying shooter with a retro visual style but very modern very mobile gameplay. It's so good at conveying its game mechanics that by the time you've made it through the campaign you feel like a genius switching between weapons at a million miles an hour. The endless waves mode is going to keep me busy for a few hundred more hours easily.
Tears of the Kingdom: I bought the game but emulated it on Yuzu, got all the way to the last fight with Gannon, and lost my save. I decided to use my Genki Shadowcast to hook my Switch up to my PC and play it through that, and am frankly excited to play it again. I love the game as much as BOTW, if not more for various reasons (dungeon and shrine design especially, as well as the Depths being very compelling).
No Man's Sky: They added fishing and a new expedition! It's a perfect example of one of their chill expeditions, so I'm picking away at it as I want to.
DOOM ('93): I played the E1 on the newest port and... it's Doom. I frankly like it more than GZDoom even, but like GZDoom for anything that isn't the official stuff.
An interesting mod I found was this Wolf3D TC for GZDoom, which plays just like the original, maybe with slightly different outgoing damage rolls (One shot, one kill on all the low level soldiers). It feels great still.
I forgot Buckshot Roulette when I was actually playing it, but it's a nice $3 roulette game. It's not suicide, it's deathmatch, but I like sort of "Monty Hall"ing my way through it periodically.