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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.
The Rise of the Golden Idol is a sequel to The Case of the Golden Idol and is a fantastic detective deduction game. You are presented with a bizarre scene rendered in an interesting art style. As a nameless, omnipotent being you float around and look for clues to determine exactly what happened (i.e. who did what action using what objects and when). There are usually several red herrings or logic puzzles that need to be solved and the mysteries are challenging enough to make you feel smart for finally solving them. There is an overarching story between the scenes which takes some wild and entertaining turns.
Highly recommended. Especially if you enjoyed Return of the Obra Dinn (although if you've heard of one you've probably heard of the other). Although you should start with The Case of the Golden Idol first, since there are many direct references even though they take place hundreds of years a part. I also slightly prefer 'Case' too, especially the 'old point-and-click game' aesthetic and that each case actually revolves around a murder/death in a clever way. But if you enjoyed the first game then you'll definitely enjoy the second.
I love the series enough to buy the 'season pass' for the planned DLCs, something I have never done for any other series. Looking forward to the new cases next year.
Case is on my list, along with The Investigation at Hobbes Barrow, but I just haven't felt ready to buy them each time they're on sale.
Really, I ought to, so that when I am ready to play them, I have them at the ready. I loved Obra Dinn and Case is constantly on my mind.
I believe Barb was playing this today. I remember enjoying the premise of the original. I've seen games like this that were not so good, however. Investigative games are so easy to do badly! I'm happy to read that Rise is good.
I have been utterly addicted to Satisfactory. I have played about 60 hours in the last 8 days since I started. It has consumed my life. Pretty much every free moment I have outside of work has been playing it. Love it
I sunk so many hours into Satisfactory during the pandemic, after starting during the open alpha week back when it only went up to Tier 2. It's so satisfying to see a grand design come together and to work on a bunch of little things and see them come together in to a grand construction.
Is this your first time playing with the 1.0 release, or did you play before?
I played the game for a few hours when I first picked it up in the summer, and like right after that they announced 1.0 so I figured I would wait for that, and then gave it a little time after 1.0 to fix any bugs or updates before finally diving it. It has been a wild ride
I played the hell out of Satisfactory when 1.0 launched, but I always hit a wall right about where I unlocked petroleum fuel generation. The difficulty of logistics over long ranges just killed any enthusiasm I had for it. The fact that fluid dynamics are just obnoxious in the game didn't help.
Additionally, I've started maybe four or five runs, and each time I ended up disgusted by the sheer ugliness and haphazardness of my factories. The absolute pain in the ass of tearing down large operations and managing inventory overflow was enough to sour me on even attempting it.
I'm torn about whether to blame the game or my own brain for the walls I hit in progression, but I lean toward blaming myself for the most part. Fluids could probably be a little less assholish, and the long-distance logistics could be a little less annoying of a hurdle maybe, but ultimately I think it's down to me. The game demands a little more creativity and patience than I think I'm capable of.
I think the progression does a great job of giving you the tools you need when you need them.
I needed steel and coal, so I traveled a long distance from my base to where several coal spots were. I got annoyed running all that distance back and forth over and over and it seemed too long at the time to bother with a conveyor. But then I unlocked hypertubes so I could zip over there and fill my inventory and zip back for what I needed.
Then I got into oil and had to go really far away from base to find a bunch of oil. Got all my oil production going and man is it a pain when I need a ton of plastic to run back and forth 3-4 times to bring back enough plastic for projects. And this is definitely too far for conveyors.
But then I unlocked trains! Oh my so much faster and easier and I only had to run tracks once. Way faster than my 3 minute hypertubes ride as well. Like 1.5 minutes on a train plus tons of resources.
Now I've had to go even further away for another oil spot because that first one wasnt giving me enough resources. And I've just unlocked and started playing with drones. Which don't carry as much as trains do but are faster and no need to run tracks. Just build a port at each side and it automatically collects and brings back to the home port.
Also as far as aesthetics, I gave up trying to make anything look nice, it's a giant haphazard of spaghetti and I have no intention of fixing it cause it works. And I need function over fashion.
Next hurdle is going to be nuclear although there's a few uranium nodes nearby but need to finish my second oil factory and then upgrade my main factory (I need so many circuit boards and they craft so slowly!) before I can get started on that
Same here, except I hit the wall in the last phase of elevator parts when I was building a giant rocket fuel power plant. Somewhere around placing my ~96th fuel generator, It just sort of stopped being fun and started to look like work.
In my case , I came to the conclusion it was also a "me" thing. But I came to the realization that I'm just not a hardcore factory game fan, and that's totally fine. I like building logistics and factories in modded (and vanilla) Minecraft, and I enjoyed other games that have some automation and logistics. The Planet Crafter fits this description, and I enjoyed that one all the way through. At this point I'm comfortable putting Satisfactory aside as "complete". :)
I'll probably go back to Satisfactory occasionally. I'd consider it complete as well, except I have this feeling like I could've accomplished something more in it. I have this hunch like I might just have an epiphany and suddenly logistics and factory design would all just snap into focus. I've had similar experiences with games before, so I recognize the feeling.
Oh for sure. I'm not deleting my save either, and I'll be keeping up with the game's development. If they were to implement something like an in game 3D copy/paste/bulk edit (as opposed to the current clunky blueprint system), I think I could probably pick it back up.
After a couple of restarts and almost 400 hours I finally finished Phase 5 a little over a week ago. I wanted to take a break and figured I might be done with it for a while but I'm already thinking of starting a new run lol. It's so so good.
Dang, why so many restarts instead of moving to the next phase?
While doing the Backlog Burner, I did actually finish one of the games: The Gardens Between.
Cute little puzzle game, where you control time and space as the two characters navigate these little "memory islands." Basically just trying to get them from beginning to end of each level, solving the puzzles while doing so, to create paths for them. And these unlock the memories of their adventures together.
None of the levels are particularly hard, though some are move involved than others, nor are they long. The game is trying to tell a story of friendship more than anything. No audio, other than music and effects. No text dialog; only visuals. Story isn't particularly deep, but it's probably something we've all experienced at some point in our lives.
It's fun and relaxing, and not very long. I finished it in about 3.5hrs.
Zephon
Still love this. Again made by the team who did 40k gladius, so the combat is actually interesting. Helps that there's not just enemy players, but two super powerful neutrals (and a 3rd not as powerful one) that massively shift how you're going to approach games.
Magic Archery
Free incremental game on steam that takes less than an hour to finish. As with most games in the genre it struggles with finding depth/decision making for parts of the game, but it's still fun to mess with given it's quick and free.
A few months ago I got back into Diablo 2 in an attempt to finally get to the late game/Uber stage. Unfortunately, I just don't have the patience to farm for runes and so I got burned out and decided to give D3 a try since it was included in the bundle. All in all, it's pretty fun. Unlike D2, there's a happy middle ground between the early stage and late stage that I can hop into for a few hours a week. Plus it's not a crazy overwhelming flurry of images and numbers like D4.
Did they ever go back and add controller support on PC for Diablo 3? I've played D2 Resurrected recently and I love the fact that it works well on my Deck with a controller, but I've always wanted to try D3 with a controller, but last I checked it wasn't an option on PC.
I'm not sure. I've been playing it on my switch
The Factory Must Continue To Grow in Factorio. I now have the 5th planet's science automated and have unlocked Legendary Rarity research. Playing for rarity equipment is definitely a different way to approach the Factorio gameplay loop, although some of the technologies unlocked on the other planets do some pretty significant changes to how you approach even traditional builds, like the Foundries and doing liquid metal.
Outside of that as my primary game target, I've got a couple phone games I've been playing at. On is my at this point year and a half long Sudoku quest. I use OpenSudoku on my phone and have "The Learning Curve Collection" from their site, which is 2500 puzzles that span the full breadth of difficulties. I started in to it last June and I'm almost exactly 60% of the way through (1509 solved, 991 to go).
The other is my on again/off again addiction to incremental idle games. This got kicked off originally by Universal Paperclips, back in 2019, which is a pretty quick one - you can finish in about 2 hours if you know what you're doing, and 4 if you don't. Alas, the phone version of it is a buggy, crashing mess at present. Since then I've fully cleared with all achievements Exponential Idle and Magic Research 1 and 2. This week I started Kittens Game. Out of the five, it has felt like the most traditional/classic sort so far, although I'm still pretty early (not even through my first reset yet).
Last night I beat Nier: Automata for the first time. I have some thoughts.
This is my third attempt to really understand this game. My friends rave about it. Most recently, about a year or two ago, I got stuck on a quest that was just a bit harder than I was really ready for. I play the game on easy, but I’m just not very good at action video games. On my break, I got into Elden Ring until I got stuck there. Coming back to N:A felt totally different. I’d gotten so used to how unforgiving Elden Ring is, it was wonderful to play a game that felt like the devs really wanted me to beat it.
It’s unlike any other game I’ve played in that I immediately started playing again. I have heard that it takes 3 play throughs to see the whole game, and it was very obvious while I was starting the game anew that there was more going on than was apparent after one ending. I thought I would get bored playing through things a second time, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. It feels like a fresh perspective.
So that was ending [B] this time?
I'm still playing ufo 50. I've had it since it came out and I've won about 10 of the games. So far I have over 130 hours in it. It's a tremendous value if you like retro games.
Some of the games are like an album that you don't like at first but later become your favorite.
Here are the games that I've played the most (enough to win):
There are a lot of other games that are quite popular but I don't care much for them. Like "Magic Garden". I'm just not good at it. I just started "Valbrace", which may be great, but I'm finding the early game to be pretty frustrating because you have to replay an entire floor if you die in battle.
I need to give this one more of a go. My buddy picked it up and gifted it to me and I've liked some of what I've played, but nothing has really entranced me too much yet. I am a big fan of retro games, but every time I'm playing something out of UFO, I have this feeling that I ought to be spending more time with my vast ROM library rather than trying something "illegitimate", if that makes sense.
I kind of understand your point. I see these more of like homages rather than substitutes for retro games. Like "Shovel Knight" is extremely retro but also something a little different. Most of the ufo 50 games have some quality of life improvement that wouldn't have been in an NES game. Like a continue without a password. Of course, if you are running ROMS in an emulator you have that kind of stuff with save states.
Your comment somehow reminds me of a lot of games that came out in the early 90s, at about the time when VGA cards and soundblaster cards were popular but before emulators really took off. There were a lot of homemade clones of games like Asteroids and Defender and Galaga. Then Microsoft came out with Microsoft Arcade. These were very good ports of original Atari games, not emulated. They were fun, but somehow they seemed like a waste of time because they were slightly easier or had weird controls like mouse support in Tempest.
Star Wars Outlaws. What a super safe bet from Ubisoft. So safe that it's barely interesting enough to play through. Skill unlocking is annoying and stuff like faster crouch walk is just... aren't we over this? Make the skill unlocks interesting and game changing, not just a bit better. If a bit fast crawl worth unlocking it's not worth locking behind a skill tree.
The story is okay but minimal, not enough time is spent with the characters. Open world is open world, you have random stuff to do.
It's an okay game if Star Wars open world sounds interesting but if not there's not a lot to miss. It's okay.
When this came out, I was so disappointed and I haven't even played it yet. At this point I'm waiting for a deep, deep sale and for all the DLC and updates to come out. I still want to experience it at some point, but like you said, the game is much too safe and much too "okay" for full price.
Finished Citizen Sleeper, which I quite enjoyed. From my review:
You might enjoy I Was A Teenage Exocolonist if you want a game in the same vein with more gameplay shenanigans (not really cyberpunk though).
Turtle WoW - I saw a post a while back about how the private World of Warcraft server, Turtle WoW, was remaking the WoW classic engine in unreal 5. This is still quite a way out but on the mention of Turtle WoW I decided to check it out.
It's basically an expanded version of classic WoW with lots of tweaks, balance changes (including talents revamp and more class skills) and so, so much extra content. It knocks Season of Discovery out of the park and there's no rush/fear of missing out.
It took me a while to apply optional patches to the client and set up some addons to my liking but since then I've been enjoying playing a High Elf paladin. I plan to set it up on my Steam Deck next.
You may have seen one of my posts! I've been playing Turtle on and off for many years now and always go back when I'm needing my WoW fix, because it's everything I want in WoW these days. Plus, it's really fun and exciting to come across all the new areas where previously there was absolutely nothing.
I haven't made it super far into it yet, as again, I play it fairly sporadically, but my highest is a 34 Priest and I have a 29 Hunter on Turtle mode that I like to play, but I always get a little discouraged when I die and lose exp, as Turtle mode is quite a bit slower.
That said, I'm concerned about the migration over to Unreal engine. I feel like it's created such a huge amount of buzz that Turtle is bound to get noticed sooner or later by the "Eye of Sauron" and shut down just like Nostralius.
I played this for a week or two earlier this year! I got to the end of Westfall before falling off, ahah. The slow pace is a little more brutal than I'd remembered...
Booted up Remnant 2 for the first time in a year to play through all of the DLC and having quit Destiny 2 a few months ago, this game really does scratch that buildcrafting itch again. The new amulets, rings, and weapons open up the already expansive build variety even more and I've only unlocked one of the three new archetypes so far but I'll give those a whirl when I get them too. I've completed one run of The Awakened King and though it was short, I did like how they expanded on the Victorian London/fantasy elf castle map design in a few ways.
Boss design is still very hit or miss though, and there was that one boss with a scripted one hit kill which was a real pain in the ass, though at least it was incredibly telegraphed so not hard to dodge once you learned the tell. Would still rather not have those though, that's not fun difficulty, that's some Ninja Gaiden shit and not very fitting in a game that lets you build to increase survivability significantly only to get deleted anyway.
Well @kaffo, I'm sorry but I've abandoned Drova for the time being. Not that it's bad or anything, but I got a bit of "Big Town Syndrome" when I arrived in Nemeton. Just kind of had this prevailing feeling that I didn't really feel like talking to everyone at the moment and getting more story and more quests, so I ended-up setting it aside for now. I'm sure I'll go back, as I was enjoying what I was playing, but some switch in my brain flipped and I just started feeling overwhelmed with the game.
I saw Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D 3D Super Mega Remake Much Improved Graphics finally launched and I'm damn curious about it, having put something like 20-hours into DQ3 on Gameboy Color over the summer while traveling. Unfortunately, the game is $60 and I just can't fit that into my budget at the moment, especially when I have so much else to play. I did end-up trying to go back to DQ3 on GBC, but at the same time that I'm excited about the new release, I'm feeling rather bored with the GBC release; I'm at the point where I've received the boat and the game is now encouraging me to wander, which just isn't doing it for me. I ought to consult a guide and figure out where to go next, but wandering around and doing countless random battles has quickly become tedious and is one of my least favorite parts of a JRPG. That said...
I've started another JRPG in Dragon Quest V on PS2. I figured I'd see if my mid-range handheld system can handle PS2 and while I know it can't run the entire PS2 library, it's running Dragon Quest 5 absolutely fantastic. I flitted around with the DS version for awhile, but ultimately I just don't want to play on such antiquated hardware and lose Fast Forward and Save States, plus the PS2 version just looks utterly fantastic and has its orchestral soundtrack to boot. So far, I've only put about 3 hours into it, but I'm hoping this one really enraptures me for the long term. I've played a lot of Dragon Quest games, but the only one I've ever actually finished is 4, decades ago at this point and I'm hoping 5 ends-up being similar for me.
I've also been playing a good amount of Call to Arms - Gates of Hell: Ostfront and the new US Airborne DLC. It's basically hewing pretty closely to the Band of Brothers HBO show, but I'm fine with that and it's been fun to have a campaign to go through. It's challenging as usual and well..I'm not sure what else to say other than the fact that there's nothing else like this series (and Men of War, for that matter) and I'm enjoying the hell out of it. I just wish they wouldn't disable repairing enemy vehicles and turning them on the enemy in some of the missions, because that's one of my favorite parts of the series.
I've been playing Lego Horizon Adventures with the wife and it's been okay so far. It definitely feels like a baby's toy. You mostly walk around and point at stuff with your hands.
I think this video review is pretty thorough and I share many of the same thoughts: https://youtu.be/x7-Dc8p9u1s
The game is trying to do too many things at once. It seems like there's less brick-building compared to the Lego Star Wars games I guess because they're trying to preserve a lot of the game mechanics from Horizon Zero Dawn but they don't want to overwhelm the player with too many interaction points. Overall, it's an interesting experience but the lack of open-world really takes away a lot of the mystique...
Just finished Disco Elysium: The Final Cut after about 50 hours, and I quite liked it. Maybe the highest praise I can give it is that I almost immediately thought about replaying it in a contrasting style just to see how different my experience can be the second time around, and I probably will. I typically try to squeeze as much content out of a game in just one playthrough, so that'd be highly unusual. Some of the political and philosophical allusions went over my head - my custom character was more or less a thinker, and the game can give you A LOT to chew on if you dig - but I love how extensively they built and fleshed out the world.
The disparity in the Steam reviews is hilarious, and does a great job of showing just how much the game reflects your own mentality. I didn't necessarily get any moments of profound self-reflection out of it, as compared to some of those commenters on YouTube, but maybe that's because I'm moralist scum. I recommend it.
I'm envious of you! I started playing it a while back and enjoyed it for about 10 hours and then just entirely fell off and never got the drive back to finish. Glad to hear you enjoyed it though!!
Still mostly playing Black Ops 6. The new season started, so it's nice to have a few new maps, weapons, and perks, with more coming through an in-season event. This is comfortably my "I just wanna play a game, but not start something thick" game and I still love it. I'm already prestige 3, though, and need help, I have played waaaaay too much. I finally started the campaign as well. I'm only three missions in, but I like it so far. Also, this game has pretty much replaced Destiny 2 in my rotation now. I keep going back to D2 for new content drops, but it's hard for me to stay interested in that as a daily or even weekly game. I've kind of just been there done that. I'll probably still keep up with the game since it is my favorite franchise right now all together (the lore is just ridiculously good), but I don't think I'll be sinking in hundreds of hours a year anymore.
I finally booted up UFO 50! I've only played about 6 of the games so far, but it's super charming and genuinely does feel like you're playing old NES games. I don't have that much to share yet because so far it's not super deep, but it's a great collection of games that give you a nostalgic feeling, are simple to play, but some are up to date with modern gameplay standards and are surprisingly deep for only having two buttons and a d-pad.
Otherwise, both Flight Simulator 2024 and Stalker 2 come out this week! I'm looking forward to both! I'm going to wait to see if FS2024 is stable on launch before buying, since I likely will be buying the $130 premium deluxe and want to make sure the darn thing works first. With Stalker, I'm probably buying it either way since the devs have been through hell, but I think I'll also thoroughly enjoy it as long as it doesn't turn out to be a dud or something.