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

Started Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 and as a fan of the first one there's a few things I've noticed already:

• Combat feels more fluid, though still with its signature jankiness. Either way I can blame myself more often than the game now when I lose fights.

• Alchemy is somehow even more hilariously overpowered now than it was in the first game, which is great cause I love making and selling the strongest potions.

• People are really nice to Mutt but really mean to Pebbles :(

• There's a lot more humor in the writing now. Henry can be a pretty funny guy and there's some hilarious and ridiculous interactions you can get into with persuasion checks and some quests, especially with those folks camping next to the nomad camp.

It did take some getting used to the UI again since it's been some time and they've added a few things as well as tutorial boxes all over the place, but I've more or less adjusted to it again. For a first time player though, hoo boy you're in for a rough time. If you can get past that and get used to the combat though, this is a top tier RPG just like the last one, super immersive, great dialogue and characters, and very rewarding when you put the effort into improving your skills. 10/10 would die to a small group of bandits 8 times in a row before giving up on fighting and waiting til night time to choke them out and slit their throats while they're unconscious to get my first real suit of armor again.

I've been playing Remedy's Control (Ultimate Edition) after kind of bouncing off of Metroid Prime Remastered on hitting the Phazon Mines on normal mode. Friday night I finished the main campain, and Saturday night I finished the AWE DLC.

It's been interesting! At the beginning, it feels fairly mysterious, spooky, and dangerous. By the end, once I got to the last act of the main campaign starting with that maze while fairly powered up, it felt like the power fantasy lovechild of Starwars (the Jedi telekinetics) and The Matrix (the gunplay and environmental destruction).

I've found myself comparing the design of Control to Metroid Prime Remastered, given that they're both considered 3D metroidvanias:

• Survivability: Jesse's considered something of a glass cannon, where survivability means keeping up the offense while moving quickly to avoid getting swarmed. By contrast, Samus is in power armor with energy tanks to help with that. But survivability in Control actually felt at least as good as Metroid Prime. Every enemy drops lots of small health elements when damaged and they don't despawn. (The radius around which you gather them is also much nicer, compared to Metroid where you have to directly touch energy pickups or use charge beam to pull them.) Jesse also feels way more maneuverable and fluid which helps to avoid getting hit in the first place. It also feels like she has more tools in the box, what with shield, sieze, evade, etc.
• Checkpoints: Comparing control points to Metroid's save rooms, they both fully refilled health and provided a save point. However, I really appreciated the generous frequency of the control points, the way they provided fast travel, and the fact that dying and returning to the last control point kept my progress. I remember my first time beating Thardus on Prime; I got a bit off-track and missed the next save room, died, and had to beat the boss again, which was super frustrating because it wasn't a particularly hard fight, but it was a tediously long one.
• Respawns: In Control, it seemed like the first time through an area (i.e., large room/arena) you'd always have to battle the enemies. But on revisits, they'd sometimes respawn and sometimes not, depending on how long since your last battle. If you'd just re-cleared a room of enemies, the next few rooms revisited would probably be peaceful and you'd have a bit of a breather. In Metroid, the enemies would always respawn, which made backtracking much more tedious.
• Enemy scaling: Combined with that, I'd noticed that in Metroid, at certain points of game progression (e.g., after beating a certain boss), some enemies would be upgraded which could make backtracking still more annoying. Control seemed to do this too; revisiting an early area, the enemies that I'd see would typically have higher level numbers. But again, since they wouldn't always respawn this was much less annoying.
• Interaction: Swapping to the scan visor in Metroid got rather annoying, especially since I tend to be a completionist and want to get all the lore. Likewise with the scan visor where it was the way you triggered switches. Just having a simple use button in Control was much nicer. I also kind of hated dark areas in Metroid where I was forced to use the heat visor. So blurry!
• Customization: I do like that Control gives me the ability to tune things for my preferred play style with ability points and a skill tree. Likewise, with weapon and personal mods, though inventory management here is a bit of a pain. Metroid offers no such tuning whatsoever.
• Destruction: I love how much I can destroy the environment in Control. The rooms properly look like warzones after a good battle. And even when not in a battle, just going around punching things is fun. Metroid, being a product of its time, is much more static.

Other fun details that I'd noticed that don't really have a comparison:

• Levitation: Levitation felt really clumsy at first; you just rise to a certain height depending on how long you hold the jump button and stay there until you start to slow fall, and can't go up again until you touch ground. I had expected it to be more like entering a free camera mode where you go up and down freely, and move towards wherever you point. As I got used to it, I realized why it's the way it is: during battles you can levitate around while looking down and firing on ground enemies easily.
• Hub area: I did like that Central Executive fills in with NPCs and clutter as the game progresses. They did a good job with making it feel like an emergency base that the survivors are gathering at to coordinate.
• Post game: It doesn't just reset after you win! So many games seem to do a thing where you beat the final boss and then you get a star on your save slot, maybe some new stuff unlocks, but in-game it's as though you're back to just before you entered the final dungeon/area. In Control, by contrast, everyone acknowledges you've defeated the main enemy but there's still a ton of mopping up to do. Very nice.
• Graphics: This was the first game I've played to have ray tracing (I upgrade about a year ago from a decade-old desktop to an 7950X/4090 desktop; 4k gaming is glorious), so while I've been working for years with ray tracing on GPUs professionally, it was fun to see it in action in a game played for fun. I did have to turn off some things that annoyed me too much due to lack of temporal stability, though.

Okay, I think I'll leave off there.

Spider time!

Continued playing Avowed this week, about 12 hours in and at the beginning of the second open zone. This game works well both as a "Sit and lock in" or a podcast game. What I enjoy doing is grabbing a ton of quests, then going out and exploring while completing quests as I stumble into them.

Exploration continues to be very rewarding. What is really nice about the world is that it is so dense that short distances can feel long when unknown but are fast to navigate on subsequent visits.

The dungeon are also pretty cool linear affairs. Platforming works well and I usually don't like first person platforming; but it is well implemented here. Some light environmental puzzles. Boss fights have been pretty easy so far.

Last week I mentioned that the equipment/crafting system was poorly explained. It may be, but how it's currently tuned works very well for me. It is critical to keep equipment upgraded, and the materials you need are available but take some effort to find. I actually use merchants to buy equipment, materials, lockpicks, etc. Which is fun to have an economy which actually requires interaction. Once that is figured out, I haven't encountered any other crazy difficulty spikes.

I won't lie this week was a total mess.
I played a couple more hours of Kingdom Come and struggled to be honest. Didn't get very far.

I picked up Keep Driving having seeing some insanely good reviews. Both outside and on Steam people are SO EXCITED about this game. I've only played 5 or so hours but I have no idea what people are talking about.
The art style is nice, but beyond that I feel like there's little substance? The blow by blow gameplay is fine, no complaints. The story though? I picked up a hitchhiker expecting some dynamic and interesting back and forth and there was kinda like a dozen generic lines then nothing?? The hitchhikers have skills and stuff which is cool but it's not deep or interesting.
Likewise nothing interesting or cool seems to happen when driving around. Towns and cities are beautiful but they are just the same items, stores, random jobs, randomly generated explore locations.......

The long story short is the gameplay isn't interesting or deep enough to keep the game going on it's own. The story does not seem to be good enough either to support the average gameplay.
I feel like I'm missing something!

Lastly I played hours and hours of Plate Up! And to be honest I always do even when I don't post about it on the thread. It's the game my partner and I play together, but I got another friend to try it recently and it has been a real blast. I love that game, it has to be the best couch coop game ever made in my opinion.

Over the last week I've given Project Zomboid a third and most likely final chance.

I purchased the game a few years ago primarily to play with a group of friends. Three of the six players quit within the first couple sessions, two because the difficulty of survival was too much for them and the other because the game was simply too slow for their taste. The remaining three and myself continued on for a bit longer.

With the four of us being fairly proficient zombie survival players having spent quite a few hours playing the old DayZ mod meant that thriving in the world and getting a base established wasn't a very tall order. After that nobody really was itching to jump back into the world of Zomboid as there wasn't much more to do beyond loot, expand our base and grind out skills. Whenever it was suggested for game night it was always met with a resounding "meh" and so it sat on the shelf collecting dust.

With the recent news of build 42 it felt like the right time to give the game another try, this time with the first goal of spicing up the gameplay by using a silly amount of mods. I thought if I could give the game a bit more of an action oriented flavour that maybe I could convince the others to give it another whirl.

I raided the workshop like it was a cupboard filled with canned pineapple, grabbing everything that seemed like it might help. More maps, more cars, more clothes, more traits, more zombies, more QoL, and a lot more America (guns)...

I entered the world for a trial run and in about a dozen hours was able to get a small, somewhat safe house locked down and set out from there to start collecting/fixing cars and prepping to build/secure a larger more permanent compound.

Despite the additional guns and weapons the combat of the game still left a lot to be desired. I feel like the melee is far too monotonous and devolves into doing the three-step swing/push/stomp combo over and over again.

On a particularly successful supply run I found myself having to hunker down in a random house for the night as the zed activity was far too high to safely navigate back home through the pitch black. So I began the usual nightly routine, eat, read, watch some TV, disassemble all the tables/chairs and then get a bit of exercise. As I was instructing my character to do some push-ups I thought "I've been playing for a couple hours, I should actually do some push-ups myself while my avatar is busy doing the same".

With that thought I closed the game and got some real exercise. I get why many people love this game, but I don't believe I'll be coming back.

Finally beat Red Dead 2. The ending was as good as I had hoped, based on the quality of the rest of the game. It's a true masterpiece - the soundtrack for the finale is amazing too. I'm not a horn guy, but.. god damn! I feel like Josh Homme's contribution was on the weaker side of the soundtrack, which is definitely saying something.

I'm probably going to replay the ending at some point to see how different things can get. The outcome is absolutely affected by player decisions.

Over I still give this game a 10/10 recommendation.

Now it's time to finish the elden ring dlc I guess!

@gingerbeardman will approve of this - I picked up the Playdate!

Binary Dungeon is a nice little roguelike with very few mechanics that play well with each other. The quick version is that you start on the top left corner of a grid and need to reach the bottom right while fighting monsters (for exp), collecting coins (to buy items), collecting items (to not die as much), and collecting armor (to survive fights). The trick is that you can only go down and right, so you have to choose your path carefully. Very worth the $8 or whatever it is, great for a few minutes of downtime. I have completed the first dungeon and unlocked most of the side characters (unless some are hidden).

Echo: The Oracle's Scroll is a puzzle based metroidvania that I am having a good time with. The puzzles are pretty tight without being kaizo level frustrating and the art is very cute. I mean, just look at this frog trampoline

I'm playing Evoland 2. I have finished the first game, which is more like an homage to old games than a game of its own. The second one that I play now is... Unbelievable. Not only is it full fledged standalone game with references to even more old games, but is goes beyond. Game of this genre from older era would have already ended, but Evoland 2 keeps on going. It is pretty deep and well thought through. I believe I'm at around 90% completion and I played through so much. It seem like I played at least two Zelda games from Gameboy (Advance) era. Not in hours clocked, rather in how much content there already was.

Evoland 1 and 2 are great homages to old games like Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy, Diablo and much much more. They are full of references and to older player like me they are like going down the memory lane. Really good games for this kind of enjoyment.

Balatro

I did it! Completionist++. Stats.

I wasn't super committed to it but I had been chipping away at it for a couple months and when I saw an article with the dev talking about the upcoming 1.1 update this year that would add new jokers and re-balance some things, it lit a fire under me and I suddenly really wanted to get it done before that dropped.

After experimenting a bit with some of the decks, I ended up sticking with Yellow deck. I find the extra cash helps tremendously getting off the ground, whether being able to afford a joker and a voucher, or just holding it to start accruing interest. A lot of my runs resembled the 3 Joker challenge (except on Gold stake): Get 3 very powerful Jokers that win the run by themselves, but then fill the other 2 slots with any Jokers that don't have gold stickers on them yet. Though sometimes you get to make it the 4-Joker challenge if you have to. It was really satisfying when I could cobble together builds with 4 or 5 Jokers I needed! But that gets much less possible as you finish more and more of them.

Two of my runs almost got ended by the boss blind that disables a random Joker each hand, and it kept bouncing back and forth between my 2 strongest ones. On the first such time, in the final hand, it even disabled Mr. Bones, which would have saved me from death if I didn't make it. But I ended up having enough anyway. The second time was actually my final run. I had a Burnt Joker (the last one I needed, a Rare) that was already disabled from the Perishable sticker. I was hoping it would "disable" that one, but maybe it just can't choose it. There are some other things in the game that work like that. I was prepared to be mega-upset, but my last hand had a bunch of Steel cards that made up the difference for my disabled xMult Joker. Whew!

420BLAZEIT 2: GAME OF THE YEAR -=Dank Dreams and Goated Memes=- [#wow/11 Like and Subscribe] Poggerz Edition

I freed the memes (finished the last level)! The level with the helicopter boss (PRISON BR3AK: Helicopter Drift) seemed harder than the others. It took me a bunch of tries to defeat Mr. Chopper. There's a randomly-selected power-up spawn in the middle of the fight area; I don't remember which one I got on my winning attempt, but whichever one it was, went from "how to I beat this?" to "that was easy". Maybe it was double damage? There's a gatling gun you can get that usually only chewed through half its health, then it starts shooting seeking missiles and spawning more enemies with guns.

I still recommend this game if you like the /r/montageparodies style humour. I might spend some time replaying the levels. Each one gives you a checklist with some bonus objectives.

Dune: Imperium - Bloodlines Expansion

I like this expansion a lot! It adds Tech tiles from the Rise of Ix expansion, while making it easier to purchase them (visit any green space). And instead of Dreadnoughts, you get Sardaukar Commanders, which cost 2 Solari to recruit, but come with a skill that you get to choose (from 4), which could boost their combat strength or give you resources. And it adds 9 new Leaders, which is a lot - the same number as in the base game. And there are some really cool designs!

We played with Dune Imperium Uprising and it felt like a really good combo. I would kind of say the other expansions aren't necessary if you have these 2, unless there are certain Leaders or Tech tiles you like from Ix (or if you really like the shipping track). The Immortality expansion is still pretty orthogonal but I found the complexity still a little cumbersome when playing with both it and Ix. I wouldn't mind playing with it separately, but it doesn't add any Leaders.

I finally took the time to get some games ready for play on the Sharp X68000 MiSTer core.

I'm happy to a point because I haven't been able to play any X68000 games for a while; I hadn't found a good emulator that works with MacOS (though to be fair, I haven't really looked that hard). But the computer cores on MiSTer aren't usually that great with systems going into the 90s, and the X68000 core is one of the worst among them. The system has a number of chips that are off-the-shelf and so it emulates things like the CPU and sound chips perfectly, but the graphics are bespoke and that part is not well recreated. Even in the Human68k command prompt, if the text scrolls fast enough the graphics memory seems to corrupt and there's now-like artifacts on the screen.

While a lot of games work fine - every Konami game I tried worked without any noticible artifacts - a lot of them also do not. The only Zoom game I tried that worked properly was the original Genocide, which is particularly annoying because Genocide 2 is one of my favorite games from them.

In any case, Cho Ren Sha 68K works perfectly, and that's enough to make me happy.

I picked up Vostok Inc. on my Switch, been playing that off and on for the past couple weeks. It's sort of a mix between a super basic twin-stick space shooter and a make-numbers-go-up idle mining game.

It's not great...

The combat is frustrating, the whole manager rescuing system where your bonus can completely tank just from dying once (which can and will happen in an instant even against the weakest and most basic enemies if you get unlucky) is rage-inducing, the idle/clicker aspects are even more monotonous than is typical for the genre, and the upgrades you slowly unlock (for both your ship and the idle mining part) often don't make any sense for how much they cost, because by the time you can afford them they make no significant difference to anything.

All that being said, I did play all the way through, beating all the bosses and unlocking every possible upgrade, so obviously it scratched some kind of itch that kept me going despite its mediocrity.

I had played Steamworld Dig 1+2 back when those came out so I bought the steamworld collection during the holiday steam sales last year. I recently got around to playing Heist. I got several hours into it before starting to get a bit bored of the gameplay loop. Not a bad game, would probably like it more on switch/mobile.

I switched over to Build and found it's more my type of game. I like its pacing, it does a good job of introducing the additional units/building types gradually but more quickly as you dig deeper so it's not overwhelming but also not like you're being spoonfed. I'm still on my first game with the tutorial mode set so I'm curious if replayability works out as well as most city builders as it is more objective oriented than sandbox. But there are a lot of mode options when starting a game so I'm hopeful. I also like how the game doesn't feel like its developers have an adversarial view towards players.

I finished Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia. tl;dr it's real, real good and probably my #3 for the franchise behind Path of Radiance and 7. Sometimes it takes simpler systems to get what's fun about a game loop.

Before I go into Antonblast, let me just say that I hate Wario Land 4 and think it's the worst game in the series for a lot of reasons (too short, bad gameplay design choices, bosses are poorly designed damage sponges, shitty minigames, the few unlockables in the game for the Sound Room are some of the weirdest experimental "music videos" ever.)

But I absolutely love Antonblast despite being very obviously inspired by Wario Land 4. It has the personality of an Adult Swim cartoon series, has lengthy levels, far better and more interesting boss designs, and the main villain reminds me so much of the Red Guy from Cow and Chicken.

Tomba! Special Edition also came on sale recently and I got it for a good price. I only ever played the demo of the PS1 original so finally getting to experience this was great. I haven't had the performance issues that a lot of people in the Steam reviews complained about, but I will admit that the loading times are lengthy (as if they were just blatantly using emulation.) All you're really getting aside from the main Tomba game is some artwork, a developer mini-documentary and a relatively decent remastered soundtrack (seriously, the steel drum/marimba in the Village of All Beginnings theme is fucking immaculate.)

I played a bit of the weekend-long beta for Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves -- full release in a couple months. For those in the know, this is an SNK fighting game, which I'm aware of but have never played. I've been wanting to get into a fighting game again, but haven't felt like picking up Tekken 8 or Street Fighter 6 again for various reasons. So CotW just happened to swoop in at the right time for me.

I only played a few matches, but I did really like the characters, game feel, animation style, and music. The main menu music is weirdly addicting. I didn't care to invest much time to really learn combos or game mechanics. I know enough for me to want to buy the full game when it's released (assuming there are no big lingering technical or other issues), and I'd rather learn at that point in a contiguous manner.

Otherwise I picked up Snowrunner again, which a couple years ago I stupidly started playing on Hard mode and got burned out on without making it far enough to really understand it. It turns out playing on Normal mode is a better introduction to the game, and I am finding it satisfying. And given its slow pace and methodical gameplay, it's pretty easy to play while watching a show/movie, so I've been spending a lot of time doubling up.

We burned through Type Help, an Obra Dinn / Roottrees style deduction game about retracing mysterious deaths using only transcriptions of audio recordings. I really liked it!

On my site, I said:

Ingenious little puzzle game about using (written) audio logs to track characters' paths through a house as they die dramatically. Its minimalistic UI helps the writing shine. The nonstop chain of logical deductions kept us on the edge of our seats. We made a spreadsheet to track everything, which is a marks of a great puzzle game. I would have liked some actual sound effects (keyboard, music, or even voice acting) and there were a couple of nits we had with the ending, but it was a blast nonetheless. Excited for more!

It's free to play in the browser: https://william-rous.itch.io/type-help

The latest Guild Wars 2 expansion. It's more of the same, exactly what was expected. It's still a great game to just run around in and join whatever random groups you run into. Not much thinking required, and it's great co-op hang-out game.

I just played the wanderstop demo and I have never had a game hit me so hard in so little time. I played about an hour and it has been one of the most profound and beautiful experiences I have had while gaming. That will of course be personal. But if the premise of the game - a burned out fighter unwilling to relinquish - resonates with you in any way: do yourself a favor and pick up the demo.

The writing is excellent. A bit on the nose but combined with the freedom in the dialogue options , it worked for me. If I’m correct, it’s written by the creator of Stanley’s parable. The music, by the Minecraft composer?, is also perfectly attuned to the experience.

I’m just raving here, sorry if I’m being incoherent, but it feels good to share this somewhere.

I haven’t had much time for games lately, but I’ve been putting some more time into Euro Truck Simulator 2 since it’s so easy to pick up and play for anywhere from 20 minutes to 4 hours. I finally picked up the Greece DLC and then made a delivery to Lesbos in my lesbian flag painted truck, lol. I’m excited for the upcoming DLC that adds more of the Nordic countries! The game is just perfect for me when I wanna talk to friends and play something light. You can go full sim in this game and use a wheel and pedals and stuff, but it’s a perfect controller game for me.

I’ve also been continuing with Assassin’s Creed Mirage. I think I mentioned last week that I like it a lot and I like that it’s a pretty focused game and a good way to vibe with some ancient culture. I could play games of this style basically forever.

I still need to go back and beat Dragon Age Veilguard, but I’ve just not been in the mood for a bigger game right now. I reckon I’m about 2/3 of the way through.

Played the cult classic PS1 game Azure Dreams for my podcast on roguelike games.

Overall: it’s neat and worth a look if you’re into tinkering with emulators. There’s a strong nostalgia factor that might be missing for people coming to it the first time, but if you’re a fan of original PS1 games, it feels way ahead of its time.

Some of the games systems are janky, some of the mechanics don’t quite come together perfectly, but there’s a lot of interesting ideas presented that other games would polish on over roughly 30 years.