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

Expedition 33: Clair Obscur

It's a turn-based game, but boy does it feel action-packed. The story is great. The music is great. There's strategic depth of how to play, I'm engaged in finding out how it'll end. The universe is interesting in its own right.

I can understand why this is getting incredible ratings. I just hope it isn't too long a game, as I think the story needs to close, I cant' see it playing out for a game with 100 hours of gameplay. That's not what big titles should give though, rather a polished, cohesive story of 30-40 hours than a gigantic open world something

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion: Remastered: I was a hard skeptic that this was even coming out. Then when Virtuos accidentally opened the files two days before, and Bethesda had their stream, I kinda got too excited. I bought it as soon as I could find it in the Steam shop, and... It's everything I could have wanted from a remake. The game plays exactly the same as before with a great, new coat of paint that really smooths out the rough edges and gives a modern experience that is still somehow 1:1 with the original. I played about ten hours this weekend and had a blast with my Argonian monk (in-game class). I don't like the difficulty settings because the jump from Adept to Master is half of the original slider, leading it to be 1/3 damage out, 3x damage done to you, which makes the game nearly unplayable for that build, or I think any others for anybody except the most die-hard masochists. So, I'm playing on Adept and will do the quests when I get to level 18, and the enemies/goods scale up and difficulty gets to an interesting place. This is an issue with the base game as well, but I could turn things up to 1.5x difficulty instead of 3x, for example. I also know once i start hitting gates at a high level, and certain dungeons (those with zombies) will be difficult. Despite that one issue, it's still a ton of fun.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (PS5)

This game has been on my radar since maybe SGF last year (maybe it was Game Awards in December)? The impression I got was "JRPG seems good but maybe not my thing." I generally want to like JRPGs but pacing and gameplay dampen the enthusiasm I initially go in with. Metaphor: Refantazio is a good point of comparison. That game is worthy of all its hype, but it still requires acceptance of certain genre tropes in storytelling and gameplay.

Then this game hits and throws all that out, creating a reimagined genre. It is a game that wears its inspiration on its sleeve. But that inspiration spans 30 years of gaming and is assembled to be its own cohesive experience that is a sum greater than its parts.

I am about 14 hours in and I am playing on expert so several of those hours are repeated boss attempts (positive).

Story 10/10: I cried in the first hour. The writers clearly respect the players' time. Things don't take longer than necessary. The game's story surges forward with the urgency of a team that knows this is the last year of their life and their mission is to save their families back home. Their is side stuff to do, but you as the player do it, the characters are focus on doing what they need to to progress their mission forward.

Cutscenes and dialogue is excellent, natural, and efficient. I want to hear what people say because I know it's going to be interesting and it isn't going to be overly drawn out with some manufactured gravitas.

Combat 10/10:
Are you like me and you play From Software games like they are turn based? So does this dev team. The learning curve on these bosses is insane. Many times I waltz into a boss encounter and get one shot. But after progressive attempts I get the parries down and soon I'm no-hitting bosses and weaving in my party's abilities to maximize their effect.

While expert might not be for everyone, it really fits the tone of the game. My party is barely scraping by from one encounter to the next.

Systems 9/10
Due to how smart the resource system playing as a party at the ragged edge works very well: you essentially have OOC flasks, and then in combat pots, revives, and ethers. They refill when you rest and you can upgrade their charges. Other than that very little inventory. I've never actually been strapped for resources. Bonfire equivalents are liberally placed and you can rest on the overworld map essentially anywhere.

Weapons similarly are streamlined though they get upgraded with smithing stones.

The trinket+skill system is alright. Probably where most of my bug bears occur. In summary, you find pictos (essentially trinkets) and each character has 3 slots. You equip the pictos and gain the listed attribute buff and passive perk. Once the character has won 4 encounters with the pictos equipped, the passive perk gets unlocked as a luminas skill.

Unlocked luminas skills are unlocked by allocating luminas points. So you have a budget of 15 and skills use a different amount. One skill might take up 1 point of your budget, while a different skill takes a whopping 10 points of your budget. You are free to swap this stuff around and you can increase how many luminas points a character has to allocate.

This stuff is impactful and something that you should manage. I wish there were fewer of these things and that the UI for managing the luminas skills was better. Probably the clunkiest part of the game.

Character levels up as usually. You get 3 attribute points to split up how you want. You also get a skill point which goes towards unlocking new active abilities. An item is available to reroll attributes or abilities. They drop in enemy encounters, so while I'm not flush with them, you aren't going to be locked into a build you regret.

Been into Blue Prince since release and even though I finished the main Room 46 puzzle, the inner sanctum puzzles, the chess puzzles, cheesed my way to the blue room puzzle and have most of the trophies already; I'm still playing because I just really like building the house. And at 60hrs, i will still occasionally come across a new room, upgrade or story note.

It feels like a nesting doll of puzzles. Each room has its own little system. Rooms of the same type has their own rules and synergies. There are parallel narratives to uncover. And there are multiple paths to work through the grander puzzles. And even with everything is done, there are hints of something grander as well.

The best part is that you could luck your way to credits at just the lowest level sof complexity with bit of note taking. My wife was curious and managed to get up to the locked anti-chamber in about 5 days (granted, she had a lot of permanent upgrades to help) and she'll occasionally play a few rouds since she's convinced that there's a path to the eastern yard.

Its just a very impressive package overall. There's some fair complaints about bad RNG and it sucks when you're constantly boxed in at early days without some permanent upgrades help you along. At the same time, late game RNG dependent puzzles just suck to slog through. But there are ways to amass massive stocks of resources and other tools to rotate rooms or adjust the various odds. It just requires a lot of conscious decision making and planning.

Very curious how they intend to do the sequel that's being hinted at. My only expectation is they bring back Alzara because more games needs mysterious figures to deliver tidings of doom. I swear, the day those dumb bird statues get knocked over I'm just deleting the game.

Pikmin 2.

I had finished Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door after commenting on the last thread. It was an incredible experience, worth waiting two decades for.

So, I tried Pokémon Colosseum next, but didn’t like it.

I jumped to Pikmin 2 and have been enjoying it immensely. I’m on day 9 and have 50% of the debt paid off. Save states really help. I’ve been loving the experience so far. It’s like the original Pikmin, but more and better. I highly recommend it.

I'm still endlessly playing Blizzard's almost ten year old MOBA, Heroes of the Storm. It's the only MOBA that's ever actually hooked me, I think because of how "simplistic" the gameplay is. Shared XP, no item shop, just focus on the character you're playing. A little over two years ago, I decided I wanted to challenge myself, so I started exclusively playing the worst character in the game (Worst win rate character, anyways -- Medivh). With a learning curve, I've gotten pretty good at him. His kit is so unconventional and unlike any other character's, that you can very effectively surprise people. But in the last week, I've experienced way more matches with leavers than I ever have before. I'm not sure why, but it's really been tilting my ability to have fun playing the game. Even if I'm on a losing team, I'm usually pretty good at staying positive and just having fun even if we're going to lose. But the leavers have been getting under my skin in the last week.

I need a new game. I should find a new game. I got in to Helldivers 2 last year and even finally upgraded my 1080 Ti to a 4080 Super for it. But eventually I fell off that wagon and landed back on the HotS wagon. Three kids later I just don't feel like I have the time to learn new games. But in my head, I would love to. Even if not on my PC, on the Steam Deck I was gifted and have only used a handful of times.

Horizon Forbidden West

What a game! I'm almost 40 hours in and sinking more really fast!

I have written it in previous thread - this game is continuation of Horizon Zero Dawn. And it is like the first one didn't really end, this is just like a part 2 to it, not like a new game as ie. Oblivion and Skyrim are.

If you olayed and loved Zero Dawn, you MUST play Forbidden West. You just have to. In those 40 hours I managed to get to 31% completion and uncovered quite some part of the story. Many things from the first game are answered or rather branched here. It really is just like they started working on Forbidden West (the second one) before they actually launched Zero Dawn (the first one). Or they have some really good writers who know their craft unbelievably well. In this time and age when there are even AAA titles that are lacking in many things apart from near real-life graphics, Horizon games come in and they are made whole. They are full fledged completely done games that have well done background they are built on.

I finished Zero Dawn twice in one year - this is a thing that last happened to me like 20 years ago when I was a teenage college student. Zero Dawn is that good you have to play it more to enjoy the great setting and story.

Now Forbidden West... It is just as good so far. It is a game that will sit very high on my list and it will sit hand in hand with its predecessor Zero Dawn. This duo makes it to the same spot legendary games sit on, games like Half-Life (innovative), Talos Principle (captivating setting) or Final Fantasy X (superb storytelling). There are games I value absolutely highest and their position is absolute no matter what time period we are in. Horizon games are on that spot for me.

I'm looking forward to finishing Forbidden West, but it is still a long way. A long way I'm more than willing to go.

Elden Ring - Yeah, I'm super late to the party but I started it a couple weeks ago and it's been a fun game. Interesting, a good challenge, generally just fun.

I do have one observation though: I'm being reminded why modern games have quest logs and destination markers. I like to think I'm fairly smart, and able to piece things together quite well, but the questing in Elden Ring is incredibly frustrating. Lets take the early Blaidd quest for example: You get word from a merchant that you can find him in some ruins, just use an emote to talk to him. No problem, that's fine. I wander right over, find where he should be and use the emote to summon him. He tells me that he's looking for someone and he thinks they're nearby, and I think "Great, he's somewhere in this area, right? Let me hop on my horse and scour the area" to no success. Many hours later, I decide to just look up what I need to do. Turns out, I had already beat the guy he was looking for, I had no reason to go back to that spot to find Blaidd because there was nothing there for me.

Also, you need to talk to someone ALL THE WAY THROUGH, meaning there are multiple, unique conversation pieces that you need to ensure happens before you can progress to the next phase of the quest. If you only do 2 of the 3? That NPC isn't going anywhere until you trek your butt back and have that last bit of conversation.

Great game though, still having a fun time despite these flaws.

As I predicted, I've completely lost myself to The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered. I must have already played 20ish hours in just the last week? Oblivion has always been one of my favorite games and I still played the original as recently as a few months ago. I'm very happy with how this particular remaster ended up. I can see how this may not be as welcoming to those that haven't played Oblivion before or Elder Scrolls before as many of the mechanics are unexplained (like who knows that you can yield to NPCs you accidentally attacked?), but I personally enjoy that it's the same old oblivion with a new coat of paint. I like the jank, even if just for nostalgia reasons, and the new graphics on top of it make the game utterly beautiful. There are, however, some visual glitches here and there, performance is not the best (even on PS5 and when running in "performance" mode, it can struggle to hold 60fps), and some of the shaders just seem "off", like when I was doing the Killing Fields quest, the goblins just seemed too "bright" and out of place in the daylight almost? But then on the other hand, walking the streets of Skingrad at night or seeing the White Gold tower from the road between Chorral and Bruma is just breathtaking.

As far as balance and difficulty goes, I'm just playing on the default difficulty (Adept?) and the game is relatively easy, but I've had a few challenging fights. Because of some of the tweaks they've made to things like the leveling system, I seem to be leveling up much more quickly than in the original. I'm character level 16 or so and already have 90 in destruction magic despite being a spellsword and hitting things with swords just as much as casting spells, yet my blade skill isn't even 50 yet. So there are some weird things with leveling and whatnot, but the game is still very fun.

I definitely do recommend this to Elder Scrolls fans. For those that haven't played Elder Scrolls before (somehow), I don't think this would be a bad first entry, but expect to have to use wikis and guides to learn how the game works (not necessarily for things like quests, but there are game systems that are somewhat confusing). There is a new "help" menu in the game, but IDK how thorough it is.

The other game I dabbled in last week is that I was invited to the alpha test for Marathon and because the NDA was changed, I can talk about it. I'm very mixed on it thus far. I'm a huge bungie fan (as you could tell by my endless Destinyposting) and the things they usually do well are done well here. The guns feel great, the presentation is fantastic, the aesthetic is eerie and unsettling, but in a good way, and the overall gameplay loop could work. My hangup is that I think you require friends to regularly play with to enjoy this game. I'm the only person I know out of my multiple destiny servers that actually got an invite, so I haven't had the chance to play with anybody but randoms in matchmaking. Randoms thus far have not used their microphone or text chat or attempted to communicate at all besides pings. In a game like Apex, that's fine with me, but in this game, you have contracts which require you to complete objectives in certain parts of the map. Unless you and your teammates can tell each other where you need to go, then you just have to hope that your teammates will respond to you pings and follow you, otherwise you either have to go it alone or wait until another match.

So lack of communication between teammates is killing this for me and I will likely only pick it up if I can convince a handful of friends to also pick it up or if Bungie does decide to add more solo friendly modes. I'm personally torn on that part. They've mentioned the game is very much designed for trios and I don't want a solo mode just shoehorned in and at the same time, I don't want the design and balance of trios negatively impacted if they balance the game more towards solo players. I'm also kind of saddened in general by the lack of interaction people want to do in online games these days. On the other hand, a solo mode would be nice to get your contracts done. You can drop in with very little gear, just do the objective (progress is saved even if you fail to extract), and you're good to go. You can do that right now by turning off squad fill, but it makes it extremely hard.

So yeah, I'm mixed. The gameplay is good and I feel that the game is accessible enough for an extraction shooter, I just feel it's stuck between a rock and a hard place in terms of keeping it for trios or catering to solo players or whatever they end up doing.

I've been immersing myself in puzzles and nostalgia for weeks now. I finished Proverbs and Her Story, enjoying both on their wildly different merits, and I'm about 3/4ths through a replay of one of my absolute favorite PS1 games: Brave Fencer Musashi.

Also known as "the game that came with the Final Fantasy VIII demo disc", Brave Fencer Musashi is a fantasy action adventure akin (and, in my heretical opinion, superior) to a Legend of Zelda experience. You play as the titular Musashi, a young swordsman summoned to rescue the Allucaneet Kingdom from an attack by the Thirstquencher Empire. Yes, the names are silly. The tone is generally comical, the bad guys are cartoonish morons, and it's steeped in a kind of Ghibli-esque European pastoral steampunk aesthetic. There's a light puzzle element, using elemental abilities you unlock in each chapter as well as enemy-power-absorption like a Kirby game. It absolutely oozes charm, the music is excellent, enemies and areas are nicely varied, it contains critical levels of tongue-in-cheek humor, and the difficulty ramps satisfyingly. 10/10 experience all around.

I started Last Defence Academy and its been surprisingly good, I really had my doubts about the game but the story is pretty interesting and the gameplay is what most surprised me, despite not really offering a way to grind, it manages to be challenging but not impossible. It really does combine the best Kodaka and Uchikoshi has to offer. It's such a long game as well, and I can really see the improvement in character writing when compared to either Danganronpa or Rain Code. I am nowhere near to completing the game but I already wanna try to complete all of it.

Been playing a ton of CK3 lately (Crusader Kings III for those who don't have the urge to purge pagan lands). Started it up about a week or two ago after not having played in about a year, and today a new expansion just dropped focusing on nomadic governments and the Mongolian steppe. After playing various vikings and conquering Britain, Scandinavia, and even the Mediterranean this past week, I think I might want to try my hands at a nomadic horse-archer army.

From the Abyss.

I pulled out my Nintendo DS because my husband has been asking me about the sequel to Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow. Presumably because of that Castlevania GBA collection release. I have a flash card for it and decided on a whim to play one of the games that's currently popular on GameFAQs and this is the one with the last post in one of it's forums.

I'm fairly happy I gave it a chance. It's an extremely basic game and it's not particularly well put together, but it does the job surprisingly well in spite of itself. It's an action RPG, sort of. There's no world map, there's just one randomly put together dungeon with different skins put on it, and the town is just a bunch of icons to tap. There are about 10 or 11 characters that you can talk to, including Mr. Tutorial and two shopkeepers who don't really say much of anything beyond their short introduction. There's not much of a plot to the game, except some surprisingly interesting character growth in the townies that are only really enough to add a bit of extra flavor to the experience.

The game itself is just a third-person dungeon crawl. The first thing you get in the game is a skill that allows you to take skills from monsters in the dungeon. It's not actually that great of a mechanic, to be honest; it takes a ton of SP to use it and most of the skills you learn are not as useful as the basic attack combo.

There's very few things going for this game but what there is actually makes it fairly addictive. It's a short game; you can easily finish it within 10 hours, more or less, but you level up very quickly and it's fun to assign points to your attributes. I wasn't aware that it wasn't happening automatically at first, so I actually died a ton of times in the first dungeon before getting to save because I was being overwhelmed very quickly at level 1's stats. And when you die, that's it; you get booted to the title screen to reload the game.

The combat isn't honestly that great; you can stunlock almost every enemy, but the flipside is that they can stunlock you and there is no invincibility outside of maybe the split-second when you get knocked back. The second or third boss has a spell they cast that if you are directly underneath it when it casts it (which you will probably need to do because the game hasn't given you the skills to make magic viable at this point, IIRC) it will insta-kill you.

But in spite of the jank, it's a fun experience. It's been a while since I've had a game that just hooks me with a simple premise and runs with it. If it were longer, I would have probably hated it, so I'm glad that it didn't overstay it's welcome.

I've been playing Master Detective Archives: Rain Code. It's a mystery/puzzle game where the player character is a detective sent to investigate a city controlled by a shady corporation.

The game is written by Kazutaka Kodaka who famously also wrote the Danganronpa series, but I haven't played any of those and had no expectations about anything going in.

I'm up to the third mystery and generally having a good time:

• The protagonist's ever-present ghostly companion is constantly chiming in with observations and banter. I can see this being grating for some people (especially if they're not into this style of writing), but I dig it. It kind of reminds me of Spirit Tracks where Zelda's chatty spirit would follow Link around and comment on everything.

• The mysteries are fine and generally properly pitched at the appropriate level of 'not immediately obvious but also not impossibly obtuse'. Some of the specific steps are a bit implausible and probably not something a villain could count on working as part of their plan, but there was nothing so glaring that I couldn't suspend my disbelief.

• The gameplay loop of story setup / investigation and gathering evidence / deducing the culprit and proving how the crime was committed will be familiar to anyone who's played games like Ace Attorney. My one complaint is that in the deduction section, sometimes the game inexplicably prevents you from opening the menu and reviewing the evidence, so you're basically forced to work it out based on your memory of the clues. Having said that, the 'health bar' is very generous and you can just restart from shortly beforehand if you mess up and get a game over, so it's not a big deal.

• The character designs are wild. Some of these guys look like they've come from a character generator with randomised outputs for every element. You do get used to it pretty fast though since everyone looks and dresses like that.

I have finished Xenoblade Chronicles X. It took about 140 hours to do the main story and most of the quests (barring the ridiculous ones like 'find the 60 things we scattered across the gigantic main city with no hints').

• All of the additional main story content from the 'Definitive Edition' is contained in 3 extra chapters taking place after you finish the original main story. The original main story kind of ends on a cliffhanger with a bunch of unresolved plot threads, so the intention is for the new content to answer all of those questions and wrap up the story. Unfortunately, the new story is bananas and also a total tonal shift from the somewhat-hard sci-fi of the main story. I loved the additional stories they did in the DLC for Xenoblade 2 and 3, so this was a disappointment for me.

• Like XC Definitive Edition and the DLCs for XC 2 and 3, there's an additional new area to explore in the new content. It's pretty cool looking and fun for what it is, but it's way smaller than the new areas in the other games or the areas in the base game. Most of the content in the additional chapters takes place in the base game and you'll likely be way over levelled for it if you've already finished the original main story.

• The story connection to XC 1-3

  is there, but it's so small that you'll basically miss it if you blink. They could have cut it completely and the main story would still work fine.

I am back on Factorio Space Age. I stopped playing it pretty suddenly shortly after my last post about it. But I am back in completely, and have spent most of my free time over the past two weeks on it.

I've gotten so much further in the game. In my last post, I had functional builds for all science before Aquilo, and now I have functional builds for the exact same sciences except Fulgora. So it actually seems like I have regressed. But I have rebuilt almost every part of my base from the ground up, and it is much more reliable than before. I have learned quite a lot, and I would like to share some of what I have learned.

Vulcanus is absolutely fantastic. All of my science production is currently on Vulcanus, except the specific planetary sciences. The largest issue is oil products, specifically plastic and lubricant. I started with coal liquefaction, but coal resources are somewhat limited on Vulcanus. Now I am importing lube barrels and plastic, although my transfer ships and rocket capacity isn't quite enough to support this yet. I need to build up my infrastructure to allow better rocket launches from the other planets. My only planets with perfect rocket reliability is Nauvis and Vulcanus.

I finally got a hang of Gleba. I had to power through the sciences to get the placable soils. I think my jelly nut and yukamo mash harvest was entirely insufficient for what I was trying to produce. Now I have so many seeds that I should probably look into burning them soon. It is pretty fantastic to have truly limitless resources that never needs resource outpost expansion. I still don't feel fully satisfied with my Gleba production lines, but it is close. I need to redo my bioflux production line, but once I get that done, I think my Gleba base is going to be rock solid. I actually plan to relocate my mall to Gleba and make it my "central" home base. It is just one jump from all planets, so it makes it quite convenient for logistics.

Fulgora has been frustrating. Fulgora was my first planet, and it was definitely interesting, but I just can't get a build that doesn't deadlock all the time. I feel like my usual Factorio habits bit me in the ass hard on Fulgora. I typically make large builds that can eventually do high throughput once fed the resources. The islands on Fulgora just aren't large enough to make this work. For example, I started with 2-4 trains, which are a pretty standard size on Nauvis. I am still using 2-4 trains on Nauvis and Vulcanus without issues. But that just doesn't seem to work with Fulgora. I am now rebuilding with 1-1 trains. So far the additional train traffic has not been an issue at all. I actually think smaller production on Fulgora is better since it can be more reliable. It is so weird to me that I got the hang of Gleba before Fulgora. Right now Fulgora is having trouble supplying lube to Vulcanus. Lube is a single step production from heavy oil which you pump directly from the oceans, so it is free. The current issue is rocket parts, which you literally mine from the ground. I just can't get things balanced enough for reliability. I even need to rebuild my Fulgora science pack production after having all these issues.

I am just starting my Aquilo base. Not much to report now, but I think I like this planet so far. I am just starting my production of the quantum processing units, and looking forward to playing with fusion power, especially for my spaceships. My current ships use a 2 core nuclear reactor, but I am definitely starting to feel the limits of this setup without making my ships huge.

My previous playstyle was to have minimal interplanetary logistics and have every planet be somewhat self-sufficient. I think that was a good plan for that point in the progression, but I think I need to start making planets more interdependent. Rockets are so incredibly cheap, and building yet another mall on each planet isn't super interesting. Now I have a selection of ships rotating around the galaxy. They just restock items as they move around and send items to planets as they need it. This seems to be working well for low throughput and bursty items, but is bad for high throughput items. So I am planning on adding some direct ships between specific planets. So mall type items will be transported with the rotating galaxy ships, and high throughput items, like rocket supplies, lube, and plastic, get direct ships between planets.

I also have a new relationship with robots. I previously would make sprawling robot networks just to make building easier. My Nauvis network had become particularly sprawling, and I was starting to get some issues. But now I can produce basically all the spidertrons I want. They are the absolute greatest. Every planet has a small army of spidertrons equipped with construction robots. I plan on having every planet have a small logistics network for restocking spidertron, but all construction will happen with spidertrons. I am even considering removing construction bots from my networks entirely.

Fantastic game and fantastic expansion. Absolutely worth every single penny I have spent on it.

Edit: When I do a game like this I like to see what other people are doing in it. I found a channel with some ridiculous videos of what you can do in Bannerlord, and includes his mod list. I play with a bit of a different setup for what appears on the campaign map but the numbers will get up there toward endgame. I think I'm gonna try to get good at doing 8 divisions on the steam deck.

Bannerlord continues

In the last post I wrote, my thought was to seize a Vlandian castle for the sake of leverage, to try to bully my way up into the world of the nobility. After spending some time developing relations with the bandit clans, this plan has changed, and a whole different way of playing has become clear to me.

I found a bandit hideout up north on a large island with a long peninsula. On the island there are three major cities, and about a dozen smaller villages along with the hideout. For a while, I raided caravans at the bridges connecting the island to the rest of the world, and donated the loot/prisoners to the hideout to develop a relationship with them. Eventually, this led to an option to build a safe house, so I did that and discovered a whole bunch of new stuff.

The safe house, which I've named Scumbag's Repose, is a small farm + cave system in a ruined castle by the river. It progresses and builds up similar to other stuff in the game, so I've been working at improving it and expanding the range of what I can do. The primary way to grow the hideout is to recruit more bandits (referred to as "Your Lads") and turn prisoners into slaves. The Lads can either guard the hideout, which maintains order, or go do banditry, which earns some money to offset the costs of maintenance. With the prisoners, once enslaved they either can serve in the hideout, which helps to rank it up/build improvements, or work in the stone mine, which delivers high short term profits but results in folks dying on a regular basis. The hideout has a Scheme Room, where you select a companion to manage it and then train recruits, as spies, thieves, and assassins.

After first establishing Scumbag's Repose, I spent some money to outfit my guys with the best stuff, and took a new name. "Pruggnard the Merciless" has become "Mallgoth the Loiterer". For a while, I roamed and continued raiding caravans, but where before id just sell everything off (loot and prisoners alike), now I dump the resources into the hideout. At present, we have 400 Lads, and about 600 slaves. With the gigantic pile of gold I'd accrued from the raids, I went around the island and invested in it. I own workshops in the three major cities, producing beer, velvet, wood, and weapons. In each of the smaller villages, I bought 10-20 acres of land which produce and sell goods for me. Once I achieved profitability, I decided to gather my companions and a big squad of cavalry and embarked on an expedition to the south.

I went there by doing a crescent along the eastern side of the map, got to the south and established relations with the bandit clans of the steppe and desert. They send emissaries to the safe house, where I can donate stuff or call them forth as a fighting force. On my return trip to the safe house, I met a woman, Yana of the steppe, and married her by giving her mom a big pile of gold. Yana's standout character traits are "ferocity" and "cruelty", I think I did good. I renamed her "Yanagoth", outfitted her as elite cavalry, and got her pregnant before finally returning to Scumbag's Repose.

Because Yanagoth is of noble lineage, now I occasionally receive messengers from the Khuzait Empire, who ask me to do things like assassinate and defame their enemies for a sizeable chunk of change. As the Scheme Room gets more effective it gets easier to do these, but a major part of it relies on establishing a network with the gang leaders in major cities. I decided I needed to leave once again, and made my way west to the highlands, where the kingdom of Battania lies (near Vlandia) to try to build up this network. In the highlands I traveled from town to town, doing pit fighting under different gang leaders to get in their good graces. With the network established, I can spy on the various kingdoms, and better accomplish the schemes the Khuzait ask of me. As the network develops I open up more options, to go after nobles of all the different clans, so I've begun to try to assassinate the Vlandian clan heads who hate me the most.

At present, I've amassed 1.5 million denars (gold), raised around 200 troops to their highest tiers, and opened up the options for calling forth support from the other bandit clans. Im going to split the elite troops among my companions, turn them into individual parties, grow them further and then unite them all into a proper army (my goal is 1200 total fully upgraded troops). Once established, I am going to take my army over to Vlandia, and instead of seizing a castle I am going to attempt seizing Vlandia itself. My assassins will get their most entrenched nobles while I make my way through their lands, and when we've reached their king I will call forth the bandit hordes and finish the job.

The wonderful thing about Bannerlord is this is but a step along the way. Once a kingdom has been established I will be in competition with the others directly, they will not take kindly to my bandit uprising. Too bad, so sad, all the earth shall march beneath the banner of Mallgoth the Loiterer before I am finished.

Yakuza: Like a Dragon, where I have spent maybe the last five hours of my 20 hours total playtime playing the business management minigame. Unfortunately the fear of failure (I can't let my fictional NPCs down!!!) meant I did look up a basic guide including ideal properties to invest in, which in retrospect was unnecessary unless I wanted to speed through the minigame entirely. In double retrospect though, it does get a little tedious, even the shareholder meetings.

Oh, right, the rest of the game. It's fun! The JRPG combat is nothing to write home about but I like that it's not terribly challenging because I actually am a bit invested in the story now, and something tuned to the level of the SMT/Persona games would unfortunately tune me out pretty quickly. I actually got the game because I got a severe itch for... overly-long JRPG with a ton of minigames / fake achievements to accumulate. I heard the next game, Infinite Wealth, is even better in that regard - but that I should play Like a Dragon anyways. I went into the game knowing nothing about the Yakuza franchise other than the classic memes and am pleasantly surprised by how the story seems very serious and un-serious without dropping a beat.

When not at the PC I'm still slowly going through Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War, emulated on my 3DS. Some of my friends are huge old school Fire Emblem fans and this one has been pretty consistently praised as one of the best. The game shows its age here and there in its design and while I can abuse save states, I don't have a fast forward and sometimes I'll just put the 3DS down and take a 5 minute nap because that's how long it'll take for all the enemy armies to take their turn. The arena can be a terrible slog too, though this one is definitely my fault (trying to abuse rerolling the RNG for positive arena outcomes).

I'm not a big FE fan (as in, I do not have the brain or patience to play strategy games well) and I've only played the modern ones (Awakening, Fates, Three Houses) so that's all I have to compare this one to. The huge maps and limiting item management system are neat. They feel punishing for someone not using a guide, especially when enemy reinforcements come in from a place where you wouldn't know ahead of time. But there's something about the sense of scale when a single map consists of what would be maybe 4-5 modern FE "chapters".

Taking a short Blue Prince break while my better half is on a trip. In the meantime, I've been deep into Nine Sols, which is as good as everyone says it is. It's a metroidvania with Sekiro-inspired parry-heavy combat (or I've read; I haven't actually played Sekiro yet).

The art is gorgeous- seems hand drawn and there's a lot of depth to every area. The map design is cool- rooms are interconnected in exciting ways and there's plenty of secrets to find. The combat is fun too- definitely demanding, but I haven't found it that hard so far. The key thing is that it's fair: you have a lot of opportunity to block/dodge and once you've learned the patterns, it feels much more forgiving. I've been stuck on some bosses but have gotten past them eventually. Taking breaks for some Power Wash Simulator is a good way to reset if I feel myself tilting. The story is good too. There are little interludes with NPCs and you learn more about the world as you go.

There was one (very brief) psychological horror thing that I'm not looking forward to, but otherwise no complaints!

SuperTaxCity

This game is great. A bona fide hidden gem at the moment, but it might take off soon (it hasn’t been out very long).

It is clearly inspired by Luck Be a Landlord but is different enough to stand on its own two legs. The main difference is that you aren’t reliant on luck for positioning. This entire game is built around you specifically choosing where you put things (rather than hoping they end up in the right places on the slots).

You have a 5x5 grid that is your city. At set intervals, you draw 3 random buildings and choose one to put in your city, with each building having different abilities and potential synergies. Your townsfolk randomly wander the city and complete tasks at the buildings, which is what gets you currency to pay your taxes. At the end of each round, if you can’t pay the (ever increasing) tax bill, you lose.

The game hits a good balance between being casual and having depth. There’s a surprising number of buildings available, with lots of interesting potentials for strategies. The game also has different stages with different conditions.

Like Luck Be a Landlord, synergistic items tend to be thematically linked. So, Convenience Stores work well with Supermarkets, while Clubs work well with Supermarkets. In making my city, I try to have little “districts” that focus on a particular area so I can try to make the synergies happen (of course, the fun and frustration of the game is that your ideal city planning never quite gets built the way you want).

I will say that, compared with Luck Be a Landlord, it does feel a little tamer. I haven’t had an absolute blowout runaway run like I did in that game, but that also could simply be because I haven’t learned to optimize the game enough. That said, even though it’s less flashy, when a run does take off, it still feels just as sublime.

Also, like in LBaL, you can get utterly screwed by bad RNG even after you use the game’s methods to work things in your favor (holding items, re-rolls, changing probabilities, etc.). You just have to accept that sometimes you didn’t get what you needed, and yes, that’s probably part of what keeps me coming back to the game. If I won every time it wouldn’t be fun, but the allure of “maybe this time!” is the sort of slot machine behavior that gives this game legs.

I’m playing the game by streaming it from my PC to my tablet via Moonlight (it doesn’t have a mobile release), which is preferable to playing it on the PC for me. It’s a nearly perfect touch screen game. The only issue is that some info requires you to hover the mouse, but I can do that by a touch+move gesture (rather than just touch, which gets interpreted as a click).

I’ve been back at my 3DS roots playing fantasy life. It’s such a great little ARPG crafter. I have some minor issues with the systems but overall it’s engaging and there is a lot to do. The story is very fluffy and goofy but it’s a good one.

I started by paying it on my actual N3DS but I’ve moved to emulating on my steam deck to see how it compares. The added graphical bonus from the emulator makes it feel a lot fresher.

Castaway

Bought it because the game's aesthetic reminded me so much of the Game Boy Zelda titles. Unfortunately, the game is far too short, far too easy and doesn't really scratch that Zelda itch. I completed the main story (3 dungeons, retrieving my hammer, hookshot and dog) and progressed to Floor 41 in the Death Tower (there's 51 floors) in just 51 minutes of playtime, and that was after getting confused and spending 10 minutes figuring out how to progress through a particular room in the third dungeon.

Mobile Legends Bang Bang

After eating a 7 day chat ban in League, I uninstalled it and tried to find another MOBA to play, because fuck Riot and the fact that they allow players to sabotage my games with impunity. The uninstallation process was an absolute pain in the arse, because my system BSOD'd three times from trying to remove Vanguard.

Going back to MLBB... The game's a shitty mobile League clone which somehow has a big esports scene. It's been advertised as playable on PC via Google Play Games beta, but that means no gamepad support and limited keybind support, which sucks when the game was obviously designed with touchscreen controls in mind. The only good thing I can say about MLBB is that they don't spam you with anywhere near as much promotional crap as Riot do in their Wild Rift menus.

The only match beyond the barebones 3 game tutorial I played (which seems blatantly copied from League's) felt like a stomp where I had achieved multiple quadra kills. I'm genuinely convinced the "PvP" aspect of the game is fake, or I may be some kind of MOBA god (which I seriously doubt, because I'm Iron 3 in LoL.)

I suppose you could play it via Bluestacks and get a better experience, but people have supposedly been banned by Moonton for using emulators.

SUPERVIVE

I won my first match. Haven't touched it since. Battle royale games just aren't for me.