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

I tried BeamNG.drive for the first time and... it was a bit of a let down. From friends and some online outlets I had gotten the idea it was quite far in its development and support linux/vulkan already but what I got was a flashing nightmare. It also didn't support multiplayer out of the box so me and my friend couldn't even play together. On top of this the multiplayer client wasn't available for Linux it seemed, only the server. All in all, a bit of a let down.

Windblown on the other hand has been an amazing experience thus far. Rogue-lite, dashing visuals, high-speed fun and multiplayer support after you unlock it. It just works, even for an early access title. Really good and highly recommended.

Pokemon The Card Game Pocket officially launched last week. I haven't played any collectable card games out of 2 or 3 MTG matches with a family member.

I like it. It is really simple (your deck consists of 20 cards) and a match is 5-10 minutes (You need to get 3 'Points' by knocking out Pokemon, some Pokemon having a point value of 1 and others 2). Basically, I find that if I am playing a game with another person, I like quick matches and simple concepts, so this is right up my alley.

This is the first time I've played a gacha style game, and I get the addiction of collecting things for the first time. The art on these cards is amazing, and while I haven't drawn one yet, the immersive art cards are super cool (an animation that explores the environment that Pokemon is in). I actually went ahead and spent a bit of real world money, that is something I have NEVER done before in a game.

The solo battles are fairly good - you get rewards for meeting certain criteria. I wish there were more solo battles, and more specifically I wish there was a rogue-like mode. I don't play other digital card games, but it seems to me that you could do a lot of interesting things with something like that.

Anyways, I'm thinking about getting into the standard card game. I'm looking to pick up a couple of decks this week and mess around with PTGC Live. I touched it a little bit but it feels kind of janky, not very intuitive to use/things aren't explained well, and has no solo mode (other than a deck test feature) to practice on.

This week I have been playing the crap out of Drova Forsaken Kin.
This game is WILD GOOD.

Honestly I haven't played something so engrossing in ages. The devs quote influence from Gothic and Morrowind, saying they don't treat players as dumb and the world should have lots to do and see. And it works!
I'm 30 hours in and if you like RPGs with lots of exploration and world to see, this is it.

The combat is solid, the story is decent so far (not winning any awards but its interesting), the quests are all fun and interesting, the characters are decent. But the world is the main character. Its just so good.

Go and try it and post back next week with results!

Since Stalker 2 is coming out soon, I updated Anomaly and did the whole deal of grabbing a bunch of mods.

One of the most impressive to me has been Screen Space Shaders. It's modular, so you can pick out which elements you want. Turns out, you can use just about all of it without much issue, so I did that. I love the dynamic weather effects, the puddles forming in the rain really transforms the look of the game and the interactive grass/wind stuff adds a lot of life to the world. Along with that, I installed addons for immersion, like animations for using different items and more complex behavior with your weapons (like holding your gun up when you're up against a wall, more realistic/accurate recoil, etc). There's also a few that change up how factions behave and what sort of tasks folks give out.

When I play Anomaly, I like to set up Warfare and disable the story mode, taking time to really finely tune how the game begins/what factions end up doing. This time around, I decided each faction would begin with only a few squads/a single base, in a zone with a massively increased mutant/zombie population. The factions are set up to aggressively pursue territory, while the mutants/zombies present a constant threat to everybody. The zombies provide a good opportunity to scavenge gear in the early game, and as time goes on and the factions take more territory, it's a smooth sort of progression to take them on and get better stuff.

My character, "Puvic Puchik", began as a Loner/Free Stalker, wandering around and completing tasks for folks until I had some decent gear. Then, I made my way to the Great Swamp and joined up with Clear Sky, because their base is my favorite. I led a squad across the swamp to take territory, until it was just us there/I could send out squads independently to take more spots. Over that time, the other factions did their thing, and I think we're approaching a point where there's going to be a big war. Monolith has swept the northern part of the zone, primarily the CNPP and Pripyat. The other factions control the areas immediately south, and I control the whole of the southern-most territory. The big issue at the moment, is that Monolith has pushed a bunch of bandits and military into the middle, so there's a bunch of fighting going on there. My goal is to eliminate the bandits/military to build relations, and then hopefully get everybody in on a war against Monolith. The northern zone is especially difficult because it's more urban, so while I could probably go in on my lonesome and make it through, I would just frustrate myself trying to capture and hold the territory. Getting the other factions aligned means both an easier time and much more opportunity to scavenge high end gear as folks get taken out in the fighting.

Small scale, the goal right now is to get a pair of good night vision goggles so I can conduct a nighttime attack on a bandit base. I've armed myself with my favorite shotgun, a sniper rifle with some armor piercing ammo, and about a dozen grenades. If we can take out this base, the territory is a good spot to try to gather folks up for making our way north. I've also arranged a bunch of tasks that take me to this area anyway, to maximize how much of a relationship benefit I get from doing all of this. I don't know if it will be enough for the other factions to really ally with me, but I'll see, and holding this territory should mean we can keep Monolith from heading south any further than they already have. While the factions have been fighting in the middle, I've been strengthening my presence in the south, so I've got several squads heading to where I'm at to set up this new base.

Bigger picture, if we can eliminate Monolith, I'll assess my relations and go after the other factions, one by one until we dominate the whole of the Zone. If I get to that point before Stalker 2, I'm going to disable new spawns for my faction, increase the mutant/zombies to maximum, and see how long we can hold out against them.

I've been way too addicted to Valve's Deadlock for the past couple of months. I'd never played a MOBA before and still don't totally understand some of the game flow but I've been (mostly) having a great time.

I finished Killer Frequency the other day, which I enjoyed, but wasn't...amazed, I guess, by. I'm thankful it was a nice compact experience at 7-hours and I really enjoyed exploring and picking up everything, but the story was either very predictable or very telegraphed, as I had worked it out pretty handily before the final hour or two and I am not a smart guy or anything; I almost never work these things out, so I'm not sure what was going on there. Would I recommend it? Eh. It was hitting right for me at the moment, where I wanted something fairly chill, mostly story driven without any real challenge or fail state, so I'm happy with it in that regard. I'm not sad I bought and played it.

I picked-up Pacific Drive in a bundle with Killer Frequency and I'm strongly considering returning it. I've been avoiding it for awhile due to the fact that it has zero mid-mission saves, which is generally a deal killer for me, but I am still pretty intrigued by the game, especially for the fact that I am a car person, so the fact that the car is a main character sounds intriguing. Plus I loved Jalopy, which is a similar game without mid-mission saves where you're constantly fixing up various components of your car.

Now that said, of the 90 or so minutes I've played, I am completely unimpressed and overall quite annoyed with it, mostly due to it's incredibly awful performance for it's fairly mediocre looking graphics. I picked it up in the hopes that I could mitigate the mid-mission stuff by playing it on my Steam Deck, but it struggles to maintain 30-FPS on the lowest settings and just looks atrocious to boot. Running on my laptop with a 5500XT eGPU produces similar results whether I'm running it at 2160x1350 or 1280x800, no real performance gains for dropping the resolution. It's frustrating, especially when I can get Cyberpunk running at a solid 30 and looking great on Deck; Pacific Drive has no room to run this terribly. I may ultimately return it before my 2-hour demo is fully up.

Mostly what I've been playing since completing Killer Frequency is Advance Wars: Dual Strike, running it on emulation with a single screen handheld; one of those DS games that doesn't really make use of the second screen, so it works very well. In the last couple of years I've run through and completed the GBA Advance Wars games, but it's been years since I played the DS version and I'm really stuck into it again. There's nothing quite like this series, I find Fire Emblem utterly boring and uninteresting and all the spiritual successors to AW have never really hit the mark for me, so I'm not looking forward to finishing out the series I get around to playing Days of Ruin. I'll just have to start playing the GBA versions again.

Spent the last week playing Mario Party Jamboree. I'm having a great time with it.

The new boards are all fun and different in their own ways. Pro mode is okay. It removes a lot of the variability which removes some of the fun for me. I like most of the mini games, including the motion ones. The new Jamboree buddy is a great mechanic. I like that everyone has to compete for them. The competition is longer than a regular mini game which makes it more satisfying to win.

The best part of this is the new Koopathon game mode though. I am hooked. I love the fast paced competition as well as competing against 19 other players. The Browser minigame is tough enough that it can always throw things for a loop, so you can usually jump up the rankings by winning.

I bought the Switch online 2 vouchers for $100 deal for LoZ and this. MP is definitely worth the money for me

Honestly I've been bored with games. The only thing I play daily is Chess and working on some other hobbies.

I've been killing time again with Hero's Hour .

A very light take on a Hero's of might and magic style game. They recently reworked how hero skill trees work, which is a massive change given how much those affect your playstyle. I still suck overall but it's been fun to try out new builds and the new to me factions such as delirium

I have been playing nothing but Black Ops 6. After a week and some change, I'm still hopelessly addicted with no end in sight, they really knocked it out of the park. I also got 5 friends to download it who either already had gamepass or were willing to put down $10 for PC gamepass or whatever it is to play games with me for a month. I still haven't started the campaign because I've honestly just enjoyed multiplayer so much! I just got to prestige 2 last night and I'm continuing to truck on.

This weekend was mostly filled with trying the Open Beta for Monster Hunter Wilds on various platforms, my desktop Linux setup, Steam Deck, PS5 and XBox Series X. Realised I am going to need a video card upgrade for Wilds on PC! Gunlance is feeling pretty fun though, so that's good.

After that, I decided to try Disco Elysium, as it seems to review well and I tend to enjoy story driven RPGs. Did not like it at all. Put a couple of hours in to it, could not stand the way the dialogue was presented, didn't much care for the milieu.

So next on the list to tide me over until February, is likely to be Subnautica on the Steam Deck. Haven't booted it up yet, that's a job for tomorrow night.

I'll also do some more Dystopika most likely.

I played Rivals of Aether 2. It's a platform fighter (a smash bros clone), with its own unique cast of characters instead of using existing IP. I'm really enjoying it. Basically all non smash platform fighters are either really ugly, or feel bad as platformers. Rivals both looks slick, and feels slick. It's got a good soundtrack too. The only drawback is that most of the player base feels pretty hardcore. If you've got equally casual friends to play it with it's great, but I can see someone fresh having a rough time online.

THE FACTORY MUST GROW... to more planets! Factorio Space Age has been eating my time. I guess it can be described as even Factorio-er? A lot of rough edges polished that make it possible to do things I enjoyed that required mods before with base game systems like the new train scheduler and global signals with radar. Elevated rails are magical. The new planets are requiring new ways of thinking (having gotten Fulgora and Vulcanus up and running so far), although I'm kind of dreading Gleba as someone who's not as big in to the combat aspect of the game.

Other than that, I broke out the Switch for enjoying some of the nicer outdoor days of fall on the patio and I've been working my way through Triangle Strategy. I got it just after it was released but moved shortly after that and it got forgotten about, so I'm enjoying it quite a bit. The story has been interesting enough to keep me engaged, I like the characters, and the combat is nicely challenging.

I have fallen deep into the rabbit hole that is pico-8. It’s a fantasy console that runs indie 8bit games. The games themselves are just png files that look like carts. I swear the whole thing is just a blast.