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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.
Balatro
Bought it on mobile. Wasn't sure I was willing to pay for it again, but caved almost immediately the first time I was bored on my phone. They don't have a way yet to import data from other platforms (though they say its on the roadmap), so started from scratch. It's kind of crazy how fast you can unlock stuff when you've got a few hundred hours of experience under your belt. I've just finished unlocking all the jokers and vouchers (though still need to collect a few), which took me about 5 weeks less than my first go :)
Progress pic. The jokers I'm missing are 3 uncommons 1 rare and 4 legendaries. The vouchers are the level 2 hand, discard, and Void. Still haven't gotten a Black Hole or the Mega Spectral Pack. For achievements, other than completing stakes challenges and collection, the only one I still need to get is Tiny Hands (thin a deck down to 20 cards or less).
There was a bug on launch with the Campfire joker that made it not upgrade when selling other Jokers. I had the one that generates 2 commons every round and got Campfire and was sad. Apparently they fixed it already!
Dune: Imperium - Rise of Ix and Immortality expansions
I think both added some interesting things to the game and enjoyed aspects of both of them, though I would give the edge to Rise of Ix over Immortality. Playing with both at the same time didn't seem ideal, at least for my first time trying them.
A potential problem with Rise of Ix is that visiting Foldspace becomes overly important to get 2 influence with the Spacing Guild to unlock the double Shipping action (since Heighliner is prohibitively expensive in the early game, and Shipping replaces the Sell Melange space, which was the easiest way to get a burst of Solari before).
Dreadnoughts are cool! I like having an immortal unit you can chuck into combat just to see if you win anything. I was worried they were going to be too similar to sand worms in Uprising but they didn't feel that way at all.
One of the biggest pros of Immortality is that it replaces your "Dune, the Desert Planet" starter cards with cards that have more upside and that interact with the expansion's mechanics. Seems like a fantastic idea to swap out some of the most "boring" cards so experienced players have more fun things to do from the beginning of the game. Oh yeah, and the other is the family atomics (each player get 1 token they can spend during the game to refresh the card market). Previously I had always played with the "sand worm eats the cards" house rule where at the end of the round, the last card in the row gets refreshed. Since the market can get stale and no one wants to buy a bad card just to see the next one.
I am now curious to see how these expansions play with Uprising, since they are supposed to be compatible.
Haven't looked yet, but is Balatro on mobile just the same layout at the pc version, or is there a way that you can play it while holding your phone vertically?
Yeah it's the same horizontal layout as PC.
Bit of a weird week for me.
First I tried out Rainworld after getting it recommend a lot. I heard the controls were a hurdle but wow I wasn't expecting basically getting hand cramp after an hour.
Also I died maybe 10 times already without making much progress, its a hard grind. I think I'll watch some new player tips videos and go back to it.
With my friends we all re-downloaded Outward.
We played like 20 hours of it during Covid and didn't get far with the weird coop. However with the power of mods the game is incredibly fun! We played for hours at the weekend and got loads done. The combat feels very satisfying with some tweaks and we fixed the shared quests which was basically the huge killer for us. Big recommend for anyone looking for a coop game with a bit of difficulty.
Lastly we had one game of Lethal Company. None of my friends nor I had played before and wow I see why it was so popular. I've not laughed so hard in a while, but I also couldn't play for more than like an hour because my adrenaline was going so hard. Always fun to find a game like that!
Astrobot: This is probably GOTY for me. But for one particular reason: my partner who doesn't game likes it as well so we are able to play it together swapping the controller back and forth. I really like how the difficulty is curved in such a way that she can play the first several worlds and at a certain point wants a break just as it starts getting difficult enough for me to enjoy it. It's really been a lot of fun to share this hobby with her.
I also picked up an NES and a couple games:
Ninja Gaiden: I really love playing this on original hardware. It controls extremely tightly and I'm really enjoying it.
Joust: We haven't had a chance to play it. My cartridge is pretty sensitive so I just figured out how to load it in so that it is playable. Might have to wipe down the pins a bit.
Excitebike: Having fun learning this one. It's a simple game but has more depth than I remembered.
I discovered nobody saves the world last week, and I had an absolute blast. I’m about 10 hours in, unlocked eight-ish characters and did the first five or six dungeons. The combination of the open worldiness of the game where I can just walk around and discover new places while smashing crates with the procedurally generated dungeons (which I had to retry like 6 times before clearing them) really works for me. It’s just the right amount of grindy. (I like to overlevel)
I’m not normally too skilled in character building, but the game takes you by the hand in terms of the types of skills you can combine and it’s easy to switch between characters to test if a different character is a better fit for the dungeon you’re trying to clear.
The writing is also pretty funny, which compensates well for the almost non existent story. Some side quests are ultra short and absurd, others span multiple npcs/areas and require you to have unlocked specific characters. That makes me feel like I’m always unlocking something. So great pacing.
I also bought UFO 50, and I would love to love it, but after an hour I’m stuck in the first game and it just handles too poorly for me to enjoy it. I know they’re mimicking oldskool games, but the first game just feels too slow for me to enjoy it. Maybe I’ll try again in a few days. (if anyone has any advice into which game is a great starter game in the ufo 50 series: feel free to share!)
Literally any other game in UFO 50 will pull you in way better than Barbuta. Barbuta is more of a historical artifact than an enjoyable game (even though a lot of masochists do seem to enjoy it). It was very courageous for the devs to place Barbuta first. Even the second game, Bug Hunters, is a huge step up. If you want to skip to a really good game that will appeal to your modern sensibilities then my personal favorites are "Mini & Max", "Party House", and "Night Manor"- although there are plenty of other great ones.
Oh I’m so glad to have you post this, thanks! I felt so incompetent playing Barbuta, like I couldn’t understand the rich gaming history the game was celebrating. Happy to hear I’m not the only one struggling with that game. Im going in with renewed energy, and start with your recommendations. Thanks again!
While you're checking those out, you also might want to start the idle game (Pilot Quest). And feel free to join the main discussion thread.
I will! & bookmarked the thread, thanks!
The games in UFO 50 are by default listed in "chronological order." So Barbuta is supposed to feel stiff, difficult, obtuse. I commit about 10 minutes to each game and move on, if something grips me I play it until I get bored. It's really quite awesome to see all the ideas in these games.
I knew that, but I wanted to clear them all in chronological order. Probably a bit too perfectionist, your approach sounds a lot more fun.
Started and finished 1000xResist over the course of a few days. In general I often find myself turned off by games with aging graphics, not for any good reason but more that I just find less of a pull towards them. I have more trouble being engaged or immersed, unless there's a really strong art focus. This is one such game that I was worried I wouldn't get pulled into, and in fact one that sat on a list of "maybe I'll pick it up" because it was so highly reviewed but I was worried about that facet. It did not take very long for the game to grip me, however, because of it's excellent storytelling. In fact, the game is almost entirely about storytelling, so there's not a ton that I can share other than to say that it deals with a lot of difficult themes like intense trauma, bullying, having a tough childhood, extreme ideologies, and the long term effects of violence. It also deals with more societal and human issues like protests, fascism, extreme duress, how self-interested and powerful individuals can cause serious problems and inflict violence, being optimistic or nihilistic in the face of overwhelming odds, and the threat of extinction.
While it isn't a very long game, consisting of maybe a dozen hours of gameplay, I found myself putting it down for a while after certain chapters in order to process what just happened. The story throws a lot of curveballs and reveals information that can easily change the way you frame entire chapters of the story from earlier, but it never feels like it's done in a way that inspires whiplash - nothing ever feels like a 'sudden' realization and I'm honestly not sure how much of it can be attributed to such a difficult story (if everything is fucked, what's one more thing?) and how much is because they do a masterful job at slowly unraveling the enigma of the story that very few pieces of information ever really feel out of place. There's unfortunately only so much I can write without spoiling the story, but I will say that it was one of the best stories I've heard or played through and I'd thoroughly recommend it to anyone who likes a good story or wants to explore the themes I've mentioned above. Also, if anyone else out there played through this, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the story... what did you think? Do you have any lingering questions left over? Were there parts of the story that irked you or that you found particularly moving?