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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 have been mostly playing Balatro, it is an addictive card game, and it is my first one in the genre, too. Described as a mix between solitaire, poker and rogue-like. I highly recommend it to people who like deckbuilding games, and even to those who don't!
I too have been obsessed with Balatro over the last few weeks. However, I've been trying to unlock the last deck for several days and it's getting to be more frustrating than fun. Nothing pisses you off more than being late in a run and needing any one of a dozen cards to make a flush and not getting it after 4 discards in a row, when statistics should be on your side. This game frustrates me more than XCOM lol.
Yeah, this is the reason why I've been trying to move away from flushes in my recent runs and focus on getting chips and mult mostly from jokers
Oh, just wait until higher stakes when you only get 2 discards per round!
After unlocking all of the decks, I did Gold Stakes on Checkered Deck. That's pretty much the only deck where flushes are a viable strategy (unless you luck out with an early Negative Smudged Joker).
I've been working my way through all of the stakes on all of the decks. I've beaten every deck on Blue Stakes and I'm starting to get burnt out on Purple Stakes (where score requirements scale faster).
It just feels like the number of viable builds (that aren't dependent on legendary jokers) get fewer and fewer on the higher stakes and pretty much defaulting to the Photo-Chad (Photograph + Hanging Chad with Glass/Red Seal face cards) builds just to get by. Hell, that's what I ended up beating the Abandoned Deck (the deck with no face cards) with on Blue Stakes, thanks to a Pareidolia Joker.
In the very early game it makes sense to go for flushes with every deck cause it lets you clear Blind 1 in one hand and is very likely to be obtainable vs straights or full houses etc. I find a lot of times I just don't pivot out of it if I don't find jokers that care about hand type. You can scale with them pretty well if you find a blue seal from a card/spectral pack and copy the card with Death. Bonus if you can make it steel first. There are a lot of other viable jokers to go with it, Castle and Ancient Joker (the GOAT) to name a couple. You do need to find some kind of powerful joker no matter what type of hand you're going for though.
That's funny that you made a face card strat work with Abandoned deck. My last memory of going for face cards was on Plasma deck where I somehow cloned 2 jokers so I had double Hanging Chad and double Scary Face and then I face-plant-ed into the boss that debuffs face cards.
I just finished the Pokédex in Pokémon Violet! This was my first Pokémon game that I made it past the opening sequence, and I was around and the prime target age for Red & Blue. Always enjoyed the show when I was kid, always liked the characters and general idea, but it wasn't until my 3 year old was suddenly really interested in Pikachu and Pokémon for who knows what reason that I really started getting into it.
I tried to make sure the kids were watching for all the main story beats, then spent the in between times leveling, searching the map for missing Mons, and then using the Pokémon Home app for trades (way more convenient, IMO, than trying to set up trades in Violet). I'm asking for the DLC for my birthday in May, so I'll have a couple more Dexes to finish up, but it's been fun this time for some reason - maybe because it was easy and I didn't have to think too hard.
Anyway, I also got a few Legendaries in Pokémon Home trading after cannibalizing my Pokémon Go account from 2018. Hit or miss on what was allowed to be transferred in straight from Home, but it's neat having Mewtwo, Lugia, and Ho-oh on my team.
Congrats on finishing the Violet Pokedex! Violet and Shield are the only ones where I've finished my Pokedex. I used wonder trades a lot, though I also used some of the trade codes that circulated online. Given how Violet was the better selling game, it took a lot of tries to find someone who could trade me the Scarlet paradox Pokémon. I think I bred some of the other Scarlet Pokémon just to trade them as a consolation thing.
I'll second the recommendation for Let's Go for your kids. I got Let's Go Eevee, and it's a lot more polished than the rest of the Switch games. It feels like it was made with kids in mind, and it's also a nice way to do Kanto for a third time without getting stale. At the very least, the fact there's only 151 Pokémon (or, 153 with Meltan and Melmetal, I guess) and most of them are monotype simplify the battles a lot. Not nearly as much strategizing needed when you're not trying to figure out how to counter every potential type combo.
Also if you want a taste of the old school Pokémon experience, Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl are near-direct copies of the originals, and for that reason I recommend them to new players. A lot of old players are salty that Platinum didn't get adapted (which, fair) and that it uses the chibi art style to just copy over the tilesets, but they run a LOT better than the other games. All the glitches in them are fun ones, not literal game-breaking ones like falling through a hole in the world before it autosaves (which was one of several glitches a friend encountered before they could even get their starter in SV, and the one that made them just quit). It just overall manages to feel more polished and complete than most of the Switch games.
They're also a bit more challenging than most of the newer games. I was shocked to feel excited I lost to a gym leader and had to strategize for the rematch—and even then, the AI went a different route and I barely won. I've gotten used to coasting through gym battles, so it made the victory feel even sweeter and like an actual achievement.
Appreciate the thoughtful reply! I actually started both Platinum and Black 2 today on Delta to see if having played Violet might make me more interested in an older game. I think I’m going to go with the latter for now.
Definitely considering Let’s Go Eevee down the line. Next up on Switch will be the Violet DLC, which “my kids got me” for my birthday (I bought it yesterday, and they will give it to me in May).
Good choices! Those are both considered some of the best games of the whole franchise. White 2 was actually my pick when I showed older Pokémon games to my cousin's kids. There's some genuinely spectacular scenery there.
Hope you enjoy the Violet DLC! I had a lot of fun playing it. I still need to finish the second half of it though, I'm not the biggest on high-level battles and that has some tough ones.
I lost like 3 hours to Black 2, so that’s looking like a win.
Looking forward to the DLC. I discovered the Pokémon Home app when I started trying to complete my Paldea Dex, and now I’m a weird addict with it. I think I’ll have all the Scarlet DLC exclusives, including the end game legendaries, before I unlock the DLC to play. Already have 6/9 legendaries, plus the 3 you have to play co-op for.
Glad you're enjoying Black 2! I think the BW / BW2 generation is really the pinnacle of the series in many respects, so it's very exciting to hear someone else getting into it!
I found the DLC to be really charming and fun. Definitely a huge difficulty spike in Blueberry Academy though, so good luck!
Probably preaching to the choir here, but in case not, be sure to pick up Let's Go Pikachu/Eevee when your little one's old enough to play. I had a lot of fun with my kids playing that and it's very kid-friendly. Player 1 controls movement and Player 2 jumps in for battles and catching pokemon. Plus it's a revisit of the Red/Blue games with Pokemon Go catch mechanics
I definitely considered this, and may yet get it. I finally decided on Violet because there is a YouTube channel called Pokémon Kids TV (basically Pokémon's version of Cocomelon plus other types of content) where they found out about Sprigatito. I think we could maybe do Let's Go Eevee now that there is a venue for Sprigatito.
I've been absolutely obsessed with Backpack Hero. A fun little roguelike about stuffing items in a backpack.
You know games with a grid based inventory system where you try to arrange everything to hold as much as possible? The game is basically that. You always seem to have more stuff than space so you have to choose what weapons, armour, potions etc to keep.
But the arrangement is also important. Some items have better stats when touching certain other items, or not touching them. Some do different things depending on their rotation.
Once you've got everything arranged you use the items in turn based battles and dungeon encounters.
Between dungeon dives you bring your loot back to a town you're slowly rebuilding. Some items have no use in the dungeon but will have benefits in town. So you need to decide how much space you can space for treasure. Some items can be upgraded unlocking new items that can be found in the next run and townspeople will give you bounties where you start with specific equipment.
It's very easy to keep doing just one more run until it's suddenly 2:00 in the morning.
Never heard of this game, but it sounds pretty awesome from how you describe it
I really enjoyed that game when it came out, but story mode lost me very quickly because it required a bunch of short runs to progress the story.
I think there is a "classic" mode?
A few days ago I decided to finally get balatro on steam, since I only had it on my phone before and it was a bit inconvenient to play it on a small screen all the time (also, I wanted to be able to play mods). That was when I noticed that there was a Balatro + Slay the Spire bundle with a pretty nice discount... So I ended up getting it, and now I'm having a blast with Slay the Spire. I managed to get a clear with all characters so far, and I'll be attempting ascension 1 today!
Heck yeah! The fun only gets better from there. Who is your favorite character? I love the playstyle of the Silent the most (love me some poison and shivs), but can appreciate all of them.
Also, have you tried Monster Train? Slay the Spire, Balatro, and Monster Train are my top three roguelike deckbuilders by quite some margin and in no particular order. I know I might sound like a shill, but any time someone on here posts about one or two of these games I always make sure to recommend the other(s) since all three are just so damn good!
A bit of a late reply, but so far I've been enjoying the Watcher and the Silent the most. I've also been trying to get better at not taking a billion cards, since I learned the hard way that in the lategame you need to get things going quickly and there's no time to spend multiple turns going through the deck
Yeah that was the first 'ah ha' moment for me as well when I first started playing: realizing that getting more good cards =/= better deck. Better to have a smaller deck that lets you consistently pull off your powerful combos, than a large deck with tons of strong cards that don't always fit perfectly together. Unless, of course, your strategy is to just have a shit ton of good cards in your deck, plus the card draw and mana to play them all, lol.
Interesting that you like the Watcher! I like her the least of all the main characters, but that could just be because she came later, so I was already set in my playstyles for the other three.
Yeah from what I can tell Watcher is the least-liked character by a fair margin for people who play the game a lot. She is glass cannon-y a lot of the time. When I was first learning the game it took me a really long time to get my first Heart kill with her because I was avoiding leaning into "stance dancing" because I was so afraid of getting stuck in Wrath and taking too much damage.
And at higher ascension levels it feels like pretty much the only viable strat is to try to assemble an infinite combo (usually with Rushdown), which are tedious to execute and require you to just ignore almost all the card rewards. I've spent some time specifically trying to make non-combo builds work. And while they're more fun, I die a whole lot more.
Played Noita this week for our podcast on roguelike games.
I was glad to finally cover this one as I’ve been dabbling with it off and on since early access. Phenomenal game that I’m phenomenally bad at, but the bottomless pit of mods help a lot with some accessibility to help you get familiarized with the systems and difficulty.
The wand programming logic is fascinating, I just wish it was more visually clear how your spells are grouped and triggered sequentially. The Spell Lab mod helps with this and there are some external tools as well that are amazing, I just wish I didn’t need those as a crutch. Though once I got some simple spells going on good wands, the learning curve started to be more approachable.
More roguelikes need the Daily Practice Challenge mode that Noita has. Random start location with random equipment. Great way to learn later stages with new toys. Something I desperately wish Caves of Qud had.
All in all, amazing game with more content than I could ever dream to fully see, but maybe one day when I figure out the perfect black hole teleport digging wand so I can easily visit every biome outside the critical path.
Noita is a wonderful game and I do agree with you to a great deal that (as wonderful as the spell/wand system is) it is explained horribly to a new player. And yes the ui isn't great for wand building either, we'll call it functional!
I'd like to chime in here as a player with 500ish hours, I'd suggest if you've got things like the health mod or other such "cheats" to start disabling them sooner rather than later.
It's not so much they are a crutch, rather that the game itself offers you pretty much all the tools you need (and often more) if you know it well enough, and having the mods (which are often made by new-ish players who get frustrated) don't make you go out your way to seek the in game solution.
Off the top of my head I can think of at least 5 ways to heal from the start of the game, 2 of them are always going to happen, the rest are luck based but you'll find them with some exploring or other knowledge.
Anyway, good luck! Have fun! There's a lot to explore!!
Recently I 100%'d Dark Souls 1, but my imposter syndrome told me I was still not good enough at the game because I had to use a guide, so I finished the game again without leveling up to make myself feel better.
So now that I'm more confident about my gaming skills, I re-took one of the hardest games I've ever played: Rhythm Heaven for the DS, and it is still a very hard game.
The good thing is that now I feel my coordination have improved a lot since the last time I played it, I still don't know if I'll ever beat the final remix, but so far I've beaten the fist half of the game.
I also have been playing Balatro a lot, I purchased it both at steam and at the iOS Appstore, so I can play it on the go and at home.
I fucking love guides so much. Especially old school ones like on GameFAQs. It gives me a lot of nostalgia because I was constantly reading them as a kid FOR FUN. Not even playing the game, just reading people little guides they made.
I've been playing FFVII PS1 for the first time, and I'm using a guide. Not constantly or step by step, but if I feel like my progress in grinding to a stop, I check out the guide to get my momentum back up. Also I look up what monsters have to steal. I just don't think I'll ever find the time to play it a 2nd time through, and I'm mostly in it for the story.
Not that I don't get what you mean. I'm sure I've had similar feelings in the past. With Dark Souls, I've definitely used guides to figure out what weapon I want to use and such. It's just so sad finding a weapon that I would love, but I don't have the stats for.
Rhythm Heaven is amazing and I'd die for a new release.
IRL game guides were great too! I miss those, though to be honest I probably wouldn't buy one again today if they were still around. There's a lot of other places to find the information they provided, so I can see why they disappeared. But boy do they bring me a lot of nostalgia!
For long RPGs like Pokemon or the Final Fantasy series, they were extremely useful to keep track of where you were, which enemies you'd encounter along your way, any secret loot you might have missed, and some random bits of lore pertaining to the region/town you're in. They also usually provided a physical map, as well as various indexes like a Pokedex or item lists which were super useful before online game wikis were a thing.
Omg yes, love when a game has a physical map. I'm with you, I probably wouldn't buy a guide unless I was just head over heels about a game and doing it for novelty reasons. It would need to have some damn good art in it. I would absolutely take a guide as a preorder bonus! (even though i never preorder games). Back in 2003 when TLoZ Wind Waker out, I preordered the game at KMart. Just for preordering, I received a strategy guide for the game AND the full game of Ocarina of Time for GameCube. You'd never see a company giving away a preorder bonus that good anymore. They'd charge you an arm and a leg through a "Special Edition" box set.
Online guides give me joy because it's someone who just really loves the game and wants others to have a resource for that game. I know those guides take forever to write so it's extremely kind.
Ha! That Zelda deal sounds incredible even today!
And yeah online guides were/are great too. They were my first real entryway into gaming forums and online discussion. Opened up entire new ways of playing by reading people's guides on how to build the perfect party in a Final Fantasy game, or how to play certain factions in early total war games. And I LOVED those ascii illustrations that often featured at the top of these guides. You can tell someone really poured a lot of love and time into making that guide.
It's still fun!!
In 2024, I was playing Dragon Warrior 3 GBC (I didn't finish it, but I'll go back) and I resolved not to use the internet for it. So I found the Prima Official Stategy Guide and put it on my tablet; any time I needed some help or just wanted some general strategies, I opened it up and started looking for what I needed.
It's such a satisfying way to play a retro game and I bet you can find whatever guide you need. Just give thanks to whomever scanned it and uploaded it, because in order to get a quality scan, the book needs to be completely disassembled and destroyed.
I still have some of them for Pokemon and Animal Crossing, they helped me a lot since those two games have very few clues on telling you where everything is or at which point things are available (like the fish and bugs seasons in AC).
Right! Like how the hell am I supposed to learn the ins and outs of that bug-catching contest in Pokemon Gold/Silver/Crystal when I couldn't just look it up online? Or say I really wanted to catch a certain Pokemon that ten-year-old me saw on the animated show, having that physical pokedex at the end of the guide was the only way to see which routes and zones I could find them in.
Hell yeah, I’ve been meaning to do more non-normal runs in dark souls. I’ve played through it normally probably 15 times, but I have yet to do stuff like no leveling, no hit, randomizer, etc.
No leveling was actually easier than I expected, since you don't need souls to level up, you can use them to buy consumables, so it's less of a grind, and since you can't equip the majority of fancy weapons, you can focus more on killing the bosses than looting
Rhythm heaven's difficulty is so enjoyable to me. The pressure of a perfect opportunity when you don't have a chance to rehearse is so tense. It is the best performance simulator I am aware of, but I love Rhythm Heaven and am biased.
Are you playing on original hardware? I haven't had my DS for a while, but I'de like to play it. I am not familiar with DS emulation at all really. Especially a game like this that relies on touch and frame rate accuracy.
Yes, I'm playing it on my DSi XL, which in my opinion is the best way to play DS games; the quality of the screen is better than the 3DS.
Also I tried to play it on emulator but it's more laggy so it makes it more difficult.
Avowed:
OK, I've only been casually interested in gaming the past dozen years. This is the first game I've finished since Borderlands 2. Most games only get a few hours out of me. Between Borderlands 2 and Avowed, I think the only game to get more than 10 hours of my time was Outer Worlds. I don't recall exactly, but It was between 40-60 hours before I got bored.
I sunk about 76 hours into Avowed with my first character. I have some criticism, that aren't too consequential, that I mentioned a week or two ago, but I ended up loving this game. Loved the design of the different regions. They did a great job of making them feel more expansive than they really are. Once I cleaned out most of a region or leveled up enough to be able to blast through a herd of baddies with ease, I could traverse seemingly vast distances on foot in not much time. Gameplay was great, I stuck to a wand and elemental grimoire. I thought the dialog was fairly good, and story and lore interesting.
I already have about 4 hours into a new character. I have a sword and shield load out, and a long gun to switch between. I'm considering going tank with this and no magic, but I may try to balance out brawn with some defensive spells. Unsure so far, but the combat is a lot of fun, and there are several decisions I could've made differently, so we'll see how much I stick with it. Because, speaking of lore...
Pillars of Eternity:
Avowed prompted me to give PoE a fair shake, since they are in the same universe. Only about 3 hours in, still learning how to do everything, and familiarizing myself with details of their system. The writing, so far, is very good. I've heard it is outstanding, but it's too early for me to tell, and I only have so much to compare it with. I'm way behind on a lot of games highly acclaimed for their writing. It's quite possible this will steal my time away from another run through Avowed. I think I should play more CRPGs.
I spent most of my week finishing off On Your Tail with my kid. She's 4 and I'm trying to play games with narrative and endings so we can move on and not get trapped into the endless Slime Rancher grind again.
But what started as a little side game to play with the kid turned into an experience I actually got lost in. It's far from perfect with plenty of bugs, half baked ideas and narrative issues. But it's one of those games that has a ton of heart baked into it.
Its a pretty simple puzzle/mystery game set in a lovely Italian location and starring a cast of eccentric anthro suspects. And beyond the main story, its crammed full of minigames, character interactions and side content. It feels like the origins of a great mystery series protagonist and I hope the studio does well enough to carry on. Would love to see this formula in the Alps or a cruise ship setting.
Its a narrative driven game where you play as Diana, a student writer and the story starts with her being told that her writing looks AI generated and that she needs to get out more. After that brutality she gets a bonus of overhearing her parents doubting her choice to become a writer.
I know it's weird to harp on about something like this, but the first ten minutes of this game is an excellent exercise in characterization. We know Diana is cognatively gifted given her ability to use a full on mind palace but she is drawn to creative pursuits. She loves mysteries and has a stong sense of justice since her mom is a detective but her dad is a writer, explaining her love of literature and fiction. She also likes board games and TTRPGs if you check her shelf. Her grandma was an explorer and she inherited some of that adventurous spirit. She is a very emotive, stubborn and impulsive person, not afraid of wearing her heart on her sleeve and venting pent up frustrations. The house blackboard hints at a close knit family and dispite being angry, Diana still leaves a message before storming off.
This is important to me because throughout the story, Diana is an incredibly proactive detective and I can't think of any of her choices being contrived or out of character. I hate mystery's where the case happens to the detective so it's fun to watch Diana be a battering ram through this mystery over being shepherded around. She's actually portrayed as a goat which is a nice touch. Even silly little details like how you recreate a crime scene as a little tabletop map, complete with minis. Or how every detail and clue is like a TCG card that needs to be collected and played at the right time.
Anyway after the opening, Diana storms out the house and heads to a seaside town her grandma liked to clear her head and she arrives just in time to witness a masked burglar flee a break-in. And from there Diana is driven to figure out this mystery, in spite of a lot of opposition. But since she left home without her phone and wallet, you get to do a bunch of cozy life sim games to pay your way. And after a tutorial day and getting your bearings, you are let loose on coastal Italy. And theres a baffling amount to do with not all of it hitting the mark (I still have no idea how the ice cream shop works). Luckily not a lot is strictly necessary but you'll have to engage for the side content and to pursue a relationship with an NPC. (Chea is best girl/cat/chaos gremlin).
And on the topic of NPCs, they somehow populated near very house in the city. Unfortunately only a dozen could be modeled and animated so the streets are fairly empty. But when if you choose to deliver mail, you can get a little window into everyone's lives in this town. And it also meant that I needed to make up and remember 70 different voices when reading to the kid so that was fun.
Like I mentioned above, the game is fairly buggy and some ideas could have used a few more iterations. Also the story is excellent, until tbe very end where it goes a little off the rails. Granted it did make for an interesting final puzzle and elements were hinted at throughout; but it just throws a massive wrench in the worldbuilding and any future stories.
In terms of recommending it, it's interesting. It's clearly gunning for a cozy narrative focused audience. The vacation, life sim is a fun little fantasy and the world is this charming mix of storybook fantasy and cartoon nostalgia. Puzzles are fairly easy (save for the ice cream one) and there's no real fail state to worry about so you get a nice low-stakes game to enjoy over 20 hours.
Turtle WoW
I'm kind of reaching that stage in my WoW playing cycle where I start to ask myself "what's the point," in terms of the eternal grind for more and better gear and more gold and more more more.. raids are the same, now that the guild has everything up to BWL on farm, repeating doing all these raids every week gets tiring.
The guild is great and there hasn't been a single time in about 20 raids I have attended that anyone yells or gets the slightest bit toxic. And I can choose which ones I want to attend but still, it just gets very old. The leaders also want to start getting both MC and BWL into one night, 3 hours, so this means that I am starting to feel really stressed out about it, because it's always gogogo now, instead of taking our time and it feeling more casual.
I feel myself losing interest in the end game stuff (it's also laughably easy but that's another conversation). Leveling with a friend is still good though. We started a pair of hardcore characters, meaning you cannot die even once, and that's pretty fun. It's a PvP server though so I would be surprised if we make it to 60.
I'm not in a guild, so this may not apply, but the nice thing about Turtle is that you can just drop it when you feel done with it and then go back and pick it up when you're ready. I've been playing WoW since one of the betas and periodically go back to it; whenever I was still playing whatever Retail was at the time, I always agonized over the decision to spend the $15 to jump back in and then felt like I really had to maximize my dollar spent, so I have to play, you know what I mean?
At this point, I just jump onto Turtle, maybe get a bit addicted and then put it back down for a couple of months until me or my friends get the itch again. We just had a month or two where all of us were playing pretty much everyday, but we seemingly simultaneously got bored and all of us put it down without speaking a word to one another about it.
Again, I figure this is different when you're in a raiding guild, but that's also why I've never raided. I do not like feeling that obligation to play, I want to play in my own time for as long or as short as I want and be able to drop it and do other things with my life. Plus, I really just enjoy the leveling experience the most. Maybe it is time to just take a break from raiding? Drop out of doing it so often and maybe just go do quests or level another character or just play a different game entirely.
I definitely feel you about the subscription on the official versions. It is a price that has not moved since the game released, and it is maybe defensible for the modern game as they often release content. The server cost is nonsense though. And that they require the subscription for a 20 year old version of their game? Just absurd.
I don't feel much obligation to this guild since there is an abundance of players on the bench waiting to grab open spots, so that part is fine. But yeah, I may dial it back a bit. Besides, I only need like 1 thing from AQ20 and 2 from ZG so except for the reputation farming it's not really necessary. I like those the best though as they are more casual and you can smalltalk a lot more than in our BWL raid especially.
I hit a different kind of break point with WoW (Classic Anniversary) late last week. I'd found a really laid back guild that was more or less my speed in terms of raiding and I was hitting it off with folks. But then I hit 60 and the grind set in. Constant dungeons for the chance to roll on some pre-raid BiS item. Then the raids themselves were fun, but Onyxia was on farm and we were poised to complete our first full MC on Friday. And all the while I was struggling to even put out mediocre DPS. I was the lowest-DPS mage in the raid usually. Nobody seemed to care, but I cared.
So I started looking into gearing up a bit more and grab more potions, flasks, and food items. It would've meant even more dungeon-grinding and turning WoW into a part-time job to make enough gold to afford flasks. And it just very abruptly lost its appeal. It's not fun to grind for things. And I don't have a lot of uninterrupted time to run dungeons that take 45+ minutes. I was lucky to be able have a few hours late at night to even raid!
It all got a bit too sweaty for me and just isn't compatible with my life right now.
I find TWoW to be a lot more relaxed in terms of consumables and pre-raid gearing etc. etc. Only the top guilds, the tryhards, require that stuff. Even on our progression raiding they don’t require almost anything at all - just healing potions and fire protection potions for example. I am thankful for it because I truly don’t believe that it is needed for raids like Onyxia and MC.
The official servers do have this culture though which I despise. Friend and I got into the guild’s MC run the day after hitting 60. We didn’t even have 5 blues. Quite a few of the guildies do have really good gear, a couple in T3, so it was kind of a carry run for us. But still, you can definitely do find as a dps in just blues. I totally understand why that felt too sweaty for you though - I would have found it a bother to spam dungeons for blues before being allowed into raids. I mean back in the day, they took level 58’s into MC too just to fill the group. They would be stuck on Garr or something but they still made it through a few bosses.
As people say, vanilla was solved like a decade ago. So it’s crazy that the culture now is so much more strict than back then. Maybe it’s because of very experienced raid leaders or the well geared raiders, but these raids are truly feeling really easy compared to modern raids. The mechanics are ridiculously easy. Shazzrah for example gets downed in less than a minute. There really is no need to be in pre-raid BIS. Those items are practically as good as tier 1, so.. yeah. Just stupid in my opinion.
I’m starting to get bit by the MMO bug once again. I was thinking of going back to wow classic and trying hardcore (never done it), but turtle wow seems neat! Destiny 2 still has claws in me for now, but I’ll probably tire of the current season at some point in the next few weeks.
There are multiple challenges in TWoW for both hardcore and other ways of leveling :) For example a challenge where you can only level by killing boars, another where you can only wear gray and white quality armor, another you can only wear gear you craft yourself, another where all mobs take twice as long to kill, etc etc.. and you can even do them all at the same time.
There's a lot of effort put into custom zones but they are not very good to be honest. Been sticking to the old classic zones 99% of the time.
I'm in a great guild on Tel'Abim server, so feel free to let me know if you want to join us! It's a PvP server though so hardcore is basically idiotic because you never know if a level 60 randomly decides to kill you.
Alright, if I do decide to hop in, I’ll let you know. Are you Horde or Alliance?
Alliance :)
THE CORRECT CHOICE. KING’S HONOR, FRIEND.
This week I played a little more Terra Invicta but honestly came to a bit of a wall when I got to space.
They've improved the AI (both factions and aliens) a fair bit since I first placed 2+ years ago and it's quite hard!
There's just something about the blend of it being rediculously long to finish a game, it being pretty difficult to win and it also being a very in depth game that kills the enthusiasm to power through. I want to love it and dump in hundreds of hours but it's missing some important parts.
Otherwise I stuck another 10 or 15 hours into Derail Valley which I originally got to try some cool train driving in VR but since I uh, crashed and legitimately thought I was going to die, I reconsidered playing on flat screen.
It's a great game, it's incredibly well thought out by the developer to be honest, but not quite finished early access.
Essentially you're working as a contractor on a rail network doing various freight and logistics jobs. You start by borrowing locomotives and the basic licences for freight then quickly get new licenses for better locomotives and more dangerous/complicated loads.
Eventually you unlock a museum which let's you find and restore your own locomotives which is sick.
Highly recommend to any train or logistics nerd it's great fun!
That sounds like both a terrifying experience and a resounding endorsement at the same time. Well, perhaps if you're into trains, or almost dying, or both.
Honest to god you're right on both counts. I was having a wonderful time for around 5 hours in VR playing with the trains and doing some small jobs, enjoying the amazing landscape. Then I was doing a medium job just cruising through a yard, set up the signals wrong...
I saw the stationary cars coming, I slammed on the brakes and there was about 2 seconds where I knew it was gonna crash, I felt that deep feeling of impeding doom and I saw my life flash before my eyes.
What an experience haha.
We've finally come full circle to spectators jumping out of the way of the train movie hahaha
I've been playing quite a bit of Monster Hunter, but after getting my fill it inspired me boot up Dragons Dogma 2 again. I loved it the first time I played through, but I felt like it was lacking on the story front, even more so than the first game.
The first Dragons Dogma has one of my favorite cosmology's in games - spoilers of course - It's cyclical nature of a tired god giving up their power to a worthy successor. However, if the successor fails their trials they become the herald for the next one, the Dragon. It also has a bottomless pit call The Everfall and it's just something that has to be experienced, it's a fantastic concept. It's much more involved than what I said too, a YouTuber called "Your Favorite Son" has a great long form video on the game detailing all of its bizarre ins and outs, and I recommend it.
The game was just lacking that oomph to tell that story as well as it could have. I was hoping DD2 would have been the opportunity to expand on that and investigate its cycle a bit more, but it ended up being more confusing than the first and more unclear - leaving a lot for theory crafting, but not much to latch on to.
Where DD2 shines however, and why I love it so much, is its gameplay. It's just so much fun to play, the combat is stellar and the world is interesting to explore, even if it's a little too packed with enemies. It's a game where shenanigans ensue in almost every fight, and watching your pawn learn and copy your fight tactics will never get old.
Yesterday I threw a goblin at another goblin, and my pawn had a comment about me doing that. A few encounters later, I find myself battling some more goblins. I'm stabbing one as you do, and from offscreen comes another goblin flying through the air and nails the one I was fighting. My pawn learned from me to hit a motherfucker with another motherfucker. It caught me so off guard and left me chuckling about for the next few minutes.
The game is just chock full of little moments that remind you that you're playing a game that wants you to have fun. It will sometimes cheat you, but it lets you cheat it right back in very unexpected ways. It doesn't hold your hand, and because of that you can truly use its sandbox in very unexpected ways.
I recommend it greatly (the first one too) and I sincerely hope it gets an expansion to help clean up some of its rougher edges.
I finished my run through of Black Mesa for the first time last week. I've repeatedly played the original game since it released (having finished it again about 2 weeks ago), but only ever watched my wife play through most of Black Mesa about 10 years ago when it was pretty much complete but didn't have Xen implemented.
I really loved it and perhaps it's apropos to say this, but Xen left a bad taste in my mouth and kind of killed the game for me. At first, it was neat, it was cool and it was beautiful (if a little paint by numbers alien world); I had a great time initially, but then it just started to drag...and drag...and drag. By the halfway mark of the final chapter, Interloper, I was all done and basically just going through the motions to actually finish the game. I was sick of the constant puzzles, the constant fights that by the time I got to Nihilanth, I made it about 90% of the way through the fight and got tired of the Save/Reload cycle, so I threw on the cheats, put God Mode on and pumped the last couple of shots into Nihilanth just to be done. Even that boss fight was tedious and drags; he has multiple phases and it essentially becomes a first person bullet hell game; Xen is all entirely too long. I was also pretty disappointed with how dramatically cut down On a Rail is, as it's my favorite section in all of the original game; I'm pretty sure it's much maligned these days, but I enjoy how maze-like and exploratory it feels.
It feels disappointing to say that, because I really loved a vast majority of Black Mesa and even loved the early bits of Interloper where we see the Vortigaunt slums and get to interact with them a little bit as slaves, it really builds on what we see in Half-Life 2. It just feels like the Devs did a great job when they were working from a template with the first 2/3rds of the game, but once they're given carte blanche, they go off the rails and don't know where they could use some editing.
I've also been mucking about with PokeMMO. I'm not really much of a Pokemon fan; I continually try the games but tend to get bored rapidly, the only one I put any appreciable time into was SoulSilver back on the DS, which I had about 140-hours in. So I don't know if I'll stick with PokeMMO, but one of my good friends is very much a big Pokemon fan, so I thought I'd try it out for a bit and then introduce him to it. So far, I've only played about 3 or so hours of it, but it's been fun enough; it's certainly got some challenge to it that other Pokemon games are lacking and it's pretty fun to see random people wandering the world, especially when they have interesting or fun customization to their character using the clothes you can buy. I also appreciate that it can be played on pretty much anything; I installed the native Linux version on my Deck via the Discovery store, I have it installed on my various Windows PC's and I also installed it on my phone and Android based handheld, so I've got lots of options when it comes to how I want to play. We'll see if I stick with it.
As a bit of a patient gamer/high backlog guy, I finally got around to OG Life is Strange and finished it on the weekend. I knew I'd have to find the right frame of mind to fully immersed myself in the story to get maximum value so it took some time to find the right 'spot' to play it.
Thankfully, my partner didn't hear my sobbing when I finished it.
One of the best narrative games of all time
Been doing Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous. Kingmaker was great on its own, but Wrath takes it to a new level. These two games got me deep into the source books from Paizo too, and I never seem to be able to get enough. I have 300 hours on GoG, and I recently started playing again, this time with the season passes on Steam (60+ hours and going). It's crazy how long I can spend just tinkering with potential builds, but the storyline is outstanding with all the mythic paths and available options. The game world is intensely immersive as well, and the overworld combat done ala Heroes of Might and Magic is a nice little side game to play around with.
Avowed (PC): This is most of my gaming time right now, currently at 25ish hours. Not much more to say other than it continues to deliver a fun experience with an emphasis on combat, exploring, and environmental puzzle solving. Quests and storylines are good enough to keep me interested as well. I rarely play games beyond 15 hours so that it's still engaging me is a great sign.
Two Point Museum (PS5): Given the buzz around this game, I picked it up this weekend. Really enjoyed my time playing through the first starter museum. The campaign is a series of different themed museums with specific challenges. The challenges aren't very difficult to pass, but there are multiple star ranks you can reach if you really like a specific museum. The game has a kind of British, vaguely Wallace and Gromit, sort of style and sensibility. I'm not big into cozy games, but this is the type of game that is extremely cozy for me.
Both are games I'm interested in checking out, so thanks for the insight! Avowed is on my list for sure for when I have some more time to be able to focus on the story. And Two Point Museum intrigues me since I work in the museum field. But I worry that I might not want to think about designing museums after coming home from a long day working at a museum, haha. I wonder if others have had this problem before, like doctors playing hospital tycoon games, or zookeepers playing Planet Zoo or something. I know there's quite a few civil engineers and city planners that play Cities Skylines, so maybe I'm overthinking it!
I'll be interested to hear your take on both, in particular Two Point Museum if you spend time with it. I can understand not really wanting to think much about museums outside of work. It is light and goofy/stylized enough that it doesn't feel like a "real" museum. For example, the second museum it has me working on is all Atlantis themed and the artifacts are things like a giant fork for some giant Atlantean.
Ha! Funny you mention that! I was going to a museum conference last year that ended up being cancelled, but prior to it being cancelled I was asked to give a workshop on these certain museum procedures. So I created a whole bunch of silly fictional museums for the audience to use as hypotheticals. Like "say you work for the ____ museum and you're presented with the following artifact, what would you do?" and then we'd discuss from there. And one of the fictional museums happened to be Atlantis themed! No giant forks though.
I'll check it out later and let you know if I get it.
I've been hopping back and forth between Deep Rock Galactic and No Man's Sky over the past week.
For NMS, I finished the latest expedition and got all of the goodies last weekend, and now I've done the quests to unlock the new purple star systems in my main save. I actually enjoyed the quest a lot this time around. I thought it struck a good balance between tutorial and story. Now that I have everything unlocked, I have decided to traverse the Sudzerbal galaxy attempting to find a giant paradise planet. The non-gas giants are already pretty rare, so finding a paradise might potentially take a while.
RE DRG, I've just been playing with my kids and leveling up my Engi. I've settled on a build that uses the Stubby's lightning stun along with the Shard Diffractor to melt bugs. So Satisfying. I'm working through the quests to fully unlock the weekly core hunts next. Looking forward to overclocks to add some features to my weapons of choice. I also played a few rounds online with strangers now that I don't feel like a total noob and it went pretty well. I at least didn't embarrass myself. :)
Hows the planet variety in No Man's Sky nowadays? I haven't played for a few years, but really enjoyed it early on. The thing that got me to stop playing was that the whole point of the game (to me) was exploration, and after seeing a dozen planets or so, they started blurring together a lot. I know there's been a ton of changes and updates to the game since I last played, so I'm curious how different planets look and feel like now.
There have been a lot of exploration improvements for sure. To name a few:
I will say that the game still can feel repetitive at times. Maybe that's just a function of how this type of infinite sandbox game plays though. There are still a lot of features of the game that have been added and seemingly forgotten as well (looking at you, settlements), but it's encouraging that Hello Games has been circling back on some of the most frequent player requests.
The release log is huge
That all sounds amazing! Yeah I'm definitely a fan of how they've handled updates and the sheer amount of content they've added to the game since launch. I've been meaning to give it a go for a long time now, just never got around to it. But your list is making me excited to try it again! There's definitely enough new things that it should hopefully feel the same way it felt when I first played it, which was pretty magical.
After hearing that Lies of P is coming off game pass, I decided to put the Elden Ring DLC on hold and crush out Lies instead. I actually finished it this morning before work - it was way better than I was expecting, even after having played the first couple levels around a year ago.
It took me 40-50 hours, which is longer than any guide says it should (which is weird, because I only struggled on the final boss). I did search everything pretty thoroughly however, and did a "victory lap" through the whole game before the last boss to pick up anything I missed.
I'd probably give it an 8.5/10, and would definitely recommend it for any fans of Dark souls, Eldin ring, or Sekiro. I would not recommend paying $80 for it, however.
It's 35.99 USD on Steam right now!
It's the only non-From Software soulslike that I love. They really nailed the formula and wrapped it in a pretty charming setting. There's so many ways to build a character that feel viable. Any game with tons of builds, sign me up.
I really enjoyed this one and actually played through most of it with my wife and young children watching; for whatever reason, my kids loved the freaky looking enemies and while they got scared occasionally, they were always asking me to play more.
I got 27-hours out of it by the time I reached the final boss, but I never did actually kill the final boss. I gave him about a dozen or so tries and kind of just said, "I'm good." and left it at that. Not exactly sure why, I've beaten Dark Souls multiple times, Dark Souls 3 and all DLC, played 50-hours of Elden Ring, but I just couldn't be bothered with Lies final boss.
I think it may have something to do with the crystal shards or whatever you use to summon help. I still have plenty, but I think I have this subconscious knowledge that if I fail enough times, I'm going to need to go farm for these things and that just sounds so completely unappealing to me. Then there's other idea that I know I can beat the boss, it's just how many times am I willing to bang my head against the wall to see a final cutscene that I could probably just watch on Youtube instead?
Again, I enjoyed the game, but am trying to come to terms with my interest completely falling off at the very end.
Makes sense to not want to do something that frustrating a ton of times if you have better things to do.
Personally I feel like the final boss of Sekiro prepared me for anything, that fight took me like 2 weeks. I was not good at that game, was hands down the hardest thing I've beaten. Besides the last boss, I'd say that Lies of P was generally closer to Bloodborne in terms of difficulty.
Yeah, I wasn't amazing at P, which might have something to do with it. I did have few occasions where I got perfect blocks and even once where I did it several times in a row.
But I really didn't like that I was obligated to parry or whatever. I liked the game, but felt forced into that play style, where in Dark Souls I can try a wide variety of different approaches, ignoring parry altogether.
But again, I know I can do it. I beat the penultimate boss and that was a very challenging fight, I just don't feel like banging my head against the wall until I have the confluence of factors to win it. Maybe it's just me getting older, I'm not sure. I'd like to finish P, I know I can do it, I just lack the motivation.
Playing Gotham Knights (thanks to @phoenixrises for giving it to me!). I've been on a Batman fanfic kick since October last year, and the game is just as fun as I'd hoped. It's really cool to actually explore and see Gotham. The grappling reminds me a lot of Spider-man for PS4, I honestly use that more than the Batcycle. Just had my first big boss fight with Mr. Freeze.
In terms of mechanics, I think my favorite characters to play are Batgirl and Robin. They just move so fluidly.
Glad you're having fun! I honestly forgot I gave that key out already haha.
Alright, updating to say I've started a new game tonight: Wanderstop. I don't usually buy games so close to release, but it actually came out on my birthday so felt like I should splurge.
I've completed apparently the first chapter, which made me suddenly keenly aware that this game is more finite than I initially realized. I tend to be rather "efficient" with my gameplay time, so I'm putting it down for the night so I can really savor it rather than blaze through it in a couple days. Which... Heh, kinda lines up with the themes. Some of Alta's lines about needing something to do matches up with my gaming style a bit too well.
So far, I really like it. The graphics are really charming (though the bright blue water will forever bug me), and the gameplay feels pretty refined compared to a lot of cozy games I play. I'd love to go to an actual store or business that looks like the shop's interior, there's a genuinely cozy vibe to it that real world businesses tend to lack.
I can see where the bittersweet feeling people mention comes in, though. Hoping I'll get closure for character stories after they leave (and anyone playing probably knows exactly who I'm talking about), but... We'll see!
This week I played ENDER MAGNOLIA: Bloom in the Mist (EM). It's the sequel to ENDER LILIES: Quietus of the Knights (EL). For those who don't know, these are top tier 2D metroidvanias with hard but satisfying combat.
EM takes place in the same world as EL, an unspecified amount of time ("decades"?) in the future. The medieval theme is gone, and we're now in a decaying magictech type city where some few humans are still alive. In the past, the city's leaders have created artificial magic-powered lifeform called homunculi, and those are being corrupted by the Blight (same as in EL) and turning into aggressive mutants. You play as Lilac, a(n) (in)conveniently amnesiac white-haired girl who is an atuner, a sorcerer who specializes in homunculi handling.
The game's beginning is very similar to EL's, which is probably deliberate. Lilac awakens in a tank in a garbage dump and is helpless until, soon after, she meets the homunculus who calls herself Nola (also amnesiac!) Homunculi take the place of EL's Spirits, and will fight for Lilac by appearing and performing an attack when assigned to a gamepad button. Just like in EL, you will be able to recruit to your cause some of the homunculi you defeat in combat. If you played EL, you may remember you can recruit quite a lot of spirits, some less useful than others; this time, the developers have opted to give you a much smaller amount of recruitable homunculi, and instead you can upgrade them using drops from other boss and miniboss fights, unlocking more or better attacks. I found this a very positive change, since it allowed them to make each homunculus more interesting, and develop their personalities through many conversation breaks.
In general, I agree with what seems to be the consensus that the gameplay in EM is an improvement over EL. Combat is boosted by several systems, including the homunculus upgrades, equippable relics, relic upgrades, level ups, parry effects, special attacks, etc. It's responsive and feels good, despite the disappointingly slower than EL's (at least when compared to the Guardian Silva upgrade) dash. There are difficulty levels and you can change difficulty in benches without being penalized for it; you can also fine tune each aspect of gameplay difficulty individually, inclusively making them even easier than "easy" or much harder than "hard" if you're that brand of crazy.
EM has great, polished art. However, the world of EM feels less interesting and distinctive than EL's, at least to me. Gone are the great castles, ruined villages and blighted underground caverns; instead, the various strata and side areas of the city Lilac is climbing rely on muted, consistent color schemes with less contrast and variety, which I think robs the world of some of its charisma and immersiveness (with some rare exceptions). On the other hand, I thought the music was still pretty good and memorable.
The world also felt less "open" than EL's; this happened largely because of the hard separation between the Lower Stratum, Central Stratum and Upper Stratum portions of the game, which often resulted in the game becoming linear for a time, and the player being forced to defeat a certain boss or another instead of wandering off to do other things if they're having trouble with it. At the same time, since there are no other constraints on where you can go, it can still be somewhat confusing narrative-wise what you're supposed to be doing at any given time; the game definitely leans heavily on the metroidvania genre player's "just explore everything" fallback behavior.
Or maybe I just sequence broke it by not getting two traversal powers (horizontal flight and upwards flight) until as late as I possibly could, and instead cheesing the game by abusing two homunculi attacks to reach pretty much every distant platform. But I love that this was at all possible!
It took me 29 hours to 100% this game, including some half hour of grinding in the endgame in order to mop up a couple remaining purchase-related achievements. I played the whole thing on Normal, except the final boss of the "good" ending, which teleported and had some pattern luck/RNG based attacks that annoyed me enough to eventually convince me to lower the difficulty.
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There’s even a relic to boost the player ability to sequence break, it’s the “slightly lighter”, so I feel like they designed around it.
I found the game more enjoyable for me when I toned enemy damage way down.
The Ender series has a quirky feel to it with a myriad things to nitpick, but they’re overall enjoyable games and a must play for metroidvania fans.
I'm a big fan of indie Boomer Shooters and have been completing Nightmare Reaper. It's a roguelike retro fps with randomly generated levels and weapon stats. What sets it apart from other shooters in its genre, apart from its varied and engaging gameplay, is the subtle storytelling and psychological horror inspirations. While I do enjoy the game, there are moments where it can be a bit of a slog when you roll bad weapons or get a boring level, especially in the first episode. However, because the game was originally released in early access with updates coming regularly, you can see how the single developer gradually improved their skills and started to implement more and more creative ideas. The overall game is finished, but the dev plans to add multiplayer in the future.
People in this thread have already talked about Balatro, and I've been playing that game also. But I got bored of it pretty quickly after beating my first gold stake. I gave up the game for a while until I found out about the Cryptid mod which completely overhauls the game. It adds dozens of new decks, stakes, jokers, blinds, and so on. It completely renewed my interest in Balatro and my academic record is now under threat ;)
A few months ago I beat Blasphemous 2 which is a metroidvania heavily inspired by Spanish Catholicism. The game was excellent and the art style is just stunning. Very challenging but rewarding, I want to play it again.
Still on a Monster Hunter Wilds binge, I've finished all the story and side quests, and I've got a somewhat decent Switch Axe build put together with a few endgame pieces, though I'm still not very good at using it to its fullest (the offset attack is so damn hard to time). This game is considerably more generous in regards to monster loot than World is, so I've crafted a few other weapon types and I might start learning those because there isn't really a good excuse to limit yourself to just a main or two now.