I just rage-quit Last Epoch.

I was playing with a cool weird build for my warlock, really enjoyable, without following any guide. I'm doing decent damage, never dying, and just having fun overall. And then here comes the "skill-check" boss that essentially wrecks you. I won't beat it with my build, and I have absolutely no desire to use a popular premade build, nor farm items and materials to get new gear.

I'm not a (hard)core player, I progress slowly, so this is essentially wasted time. I don't understand this kind of design, the game goes from a great walk in the park to an insurmountable wall, without any ramping or warning.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (PS5): Still playing this though I switched from expert to normal difficulty. I like the expert difficult but i wanted to progress the story faster and I was feeling pigeon-holed into the most efficient builds and was hesitant to experiment.

The story continues to be really strong. Curious where this is going and the characters are all likable and I'm interested in their relationships. I'd say around 30% there end up being more cutscenes in the camp. You can skip these but there are gameplay benefits to activating them. The performances are also excellent so while I might be impatient to continue gameplay I feel bad skipping through them too fast.

More combat systems also get introduced. Aside from block and parry you also get some defensive QTEs to jump (and earn a counter attack) as well as "Gradient Parry," which is highly telegraphed and nets you a huge counter, and a "gradient attack" bar which fills up based on the action points you spend. When you have gradient charges (from filling up the bar) you can use a stronger potentially party based attack.

And the combat system... this dang combat system is perhaps one of my favorite in gaming. Playing souls games I'm used to viewing real time combat in a pseudo turn based way. Learning enemy animations and attack sequences and waiting for openings I like that this system ends up being more structured and having a broader toolkit based on party composition.

I expect this is a game I'll continue playing past credits because I'm very interested in exploring the world and engaging more with this combat system.

(About 24 hours in, Playstation says I'm at around 40% but I think if I had railroaded on normal I'd be closer to 75%)

I recently relapsed back into my long-time on-again, off-again relationship with Satisfactory. I was drawn back in at the announcement of the new semi-major update v1.1, which is now available on the experimental branch.

At first I was just playing the v1.0 branch to try and get my factory-building legs back, and as with every other dalliance I've had with this game, I was experiencing some sort of conceptual block that kept everything from just clicking into place for me. The main gameplay loop involves setting up and managing supply chains, and for some reason, I just couldn't wrap my brain around how best to set up logistics over distances.

I'm happy to report that with just a touch more progression down the established tech trees and some timely inspiration from the huge QoL improvements introduced in the experimental v1.1 branch, I think the epiphany I've been waiting on for around five years now has finally arrived.

I know at least a couple of my fellow Tilderidoos have flirted with the game in the past, so I'll give a brief rundown of some of the biggest changes introduced in the new experimental branch to catch people up [Edit: in retrospect, this didn't turn out to be such a "brief" rundown as I naïvely expected. My apologies.].

First and foremost, Coffee Stain Studios has finally introduced vertical nudging (Hallelujah!). Prior to v1.1, the only way players had to precisely place buildings on the vertical axis was to play elaborate build and demolish games with foundations and beams. It worked alright and could be done fairly quickly, but it took a bit of practice to really nail down the method. Now, all you need to do is set the sample hologram of whatever building you're trying to place and nudge it wherever you want with the PageUp/PageDn keys. Since CS also eliminated the 6-nudge limit for all axes, precisely placing buildings and blueprints along any axis is a breeze.

Logistics and organization got boosts as well, with new lift-snapping mergers and splitters, conveyor throughput counters, and a programmable priority merger. This last could prove immensely useful in the late-game, as it might simplify load balancing immensely (I can't say for certain yet, as my factories aren't yet elaborate enough to really sweat load-balancing, but I can see the possibilities).

The new feature that seems to excite the playerbase the most however is the new autoconnect blueprint mode. Previously, you had to place blueprints as complete structures and then manually go through and connect all the logistics points with conveyors and pipes to get your components and products flowing correctly. This took forever for larger setups, and left open the possibility of making mistakes when connecting that could cost lots of time and effort to diagnose and fix.

In theory, this new placement mode should handle the connections for you; all you should need to do is link a proposed blueprint to an already existing one by clicking on the already-placed BP with the sample hologram of your proposed placement, which should autoconnect the open logistics points of the placed BP with the compatible open points of the new sample building. You're then free to place the new BP according to your needs with the logistics already connected (you still need to manually connect power, however).

In practice, I've found this to be a mixed bag. It works very well with simple logistics blueprints like belt highways and pipelines, which tend to have clear and unambiguous input and output points, but gets easily confused when whichever blueprint you're trying to connect with has multiple possible connection points. For instance, I have a generic blueprint for 10x smelters that's designed to simplify materials injection and keep throughput high with a minimal footprint. Since I use the same BP whether it's an end cap block or inline, there are always a few open input/output nodes at either end, and the game can't quite figure out as yet which open logistics connections need to be linked to new blueprints. Whenever I've tried using the autoconnect mode to place another of the same block or a different BP for a block further down the production line, the game's autoconnect always seems to pick the wrong outputs to connect to the wrong inputs. I think this is likely down to my own lack of understanding of how the game decides which points to connect, so the issue could probably be resolved by some experimentation and blueprint redesigns. I thought I'd mention it though, since my experience with the feature hasn't been exactly seamless.

The last major improvements I'll mention are two new logistics line placement modes: "curved" for all logistics line types, and "straight" for pipeline placement.

Straight mode has been around for belts since v1.0 dropped last year, and generates straight 90-degree turns in beltlines between the start and end points of your proposed belt. It was mostly a time-saving feature, as you could make perfect 90-degree turns in beltlines using the default mode with just a bit of practice and fiddling, but the mode's inclusion removed one small point of friction between your vision for a build and its realization. Now the same is true of liquid pipelines, which is a welcome relief to me, since liquids logistics has always been one of the major friction points that's led to me putting the game down out of frustration. Any improvement to pipelines would've been welcome, but two major ones (the autoconnect mode for BPs and straight placement) and now liquids and I are on cordial terms.

The other mode, "curved," is not one that I've personally found much use for yet, but that seems to have huge implications for railroad design and placement. Like straight mode, curved takes the beginning and end points of a proposed logistics line and calculates a path between them, but instead of a sharp, perfect 90° turn, it calculates a smooth curve. This is largely a decorative consideration for belts and pipelines, but simplifies railroad construction immensely. Railroads cannot handle 90° turns well, and instead require smooth curves to handle turning. Prior to curved mode, this meant you either had to develop intuition for how to place rail supports to achieve a smooth, visually appealing curve, or you had to do tons of the same sort of build/demolish workaround games as you did for vertical placement, only a thousand times worse. Now it seems to me that all of that fiddling is a thing of the past. As long as you correctly orient whatever blueprint you're using for rail support, the game will just draw a smooth curve between the connection points automagically.

Unless you've tried building long railways in the game in the previous versions, it's difficult to convey just how big an improvement this is. It's the difference between trying to start a fire by bashing two random rocks together over a pile of tinder and splashing some gasoline over wood and setting a blowtorch to it. I haven't yet delved into rail line construction in my current playthrough, but now that actually placing rails over terrain has been streamlined I no longer feel intimidated at the prospect. Now I just feel intimidated by the prospect of familiarizing myself with signaling.

Two last relatively small additions that bear mentioning are the new elevators and supply shelves. I haven't touched the latter at all yet aside from unlocking them in the AWESOME Shop, but I have played with elevators a bit. The biggest gameplay feature of the elevators is that they can act as vertical power conveyance. This helps keep power lines tidy within factories with multiple floors, which is a nice addition to streamline vertical construction. It's not nearly as game-changing as the autoconnect or curved building modes, but again, removing any point of friction between vision and realization when designing factories is always a good thing. Also, you can choose the easy listening music in each elevator from a handful of options, which is the kind of kitschy-cute thing you'd expect from the guys who made the Goat Simulator games.

I can fully and without reservation recommend the game to anyone who likes logistics games like Factorio, Dyson Sphere Program, Shapez or (to a lesser extent) Timberborn. The Hollywood elevator pitch is "what if Factorio and Subnautica had a love-child?" If that sounds intriguing to you, I can assure you this game will exceed your expectations.

The current best available price in the US is $27.99 USD at the Humble Store with activation for either Steam or Epic, which is the lowest it's been offered since the launch of v1.0 last year. The current price on Steam is the normal $39.99. My current playtime according to Steam is ~355 hours, so I'm about to blast through the dime-per-hour mark at PSRP–well worth the expense IMO.

If you're a returning player and want to try the new experimental features out for yourself prior to their rollout on the stable branch, go to the game's library page on Steam, click the "Manage" gear icon to the right of the play button, open the "Properties" window, select "Betas" from the categories on the left, then choose "experimental - experimental" from the "Beta Participation" drop-down.

Coffee Stain recommends backing up your save files prior to opting into the experimental branch, as it's possible that bugs might corrupt your save file. Those files can be found in Windows at %localappdata%\FactoryGame\Saved\SaveGames. I haven't personally experienced anything but minor graphical bugs since moving to the experimental branch, though some players did report problems with some logistics connections early on. Those issues seem to have been resolved in the three minor patches CS has released since launching v1.1 on experimental though. YMMV as usual with betas/experimental branches, so caveat lusor.

I've been playing the Hundred Line - Last Defense Academy a lot recently. A joint project between the makers of Danganronpa and the Zero Escape series. I've managed to get one of the endings, and boy. This game man. It breaks so many unwritten rules in writing and gameplay, but it does it in a fantastic manner. Unfortunately I can't give any more specifics because even the smallest detail about the breaking of the 'unwritten rules' can be a spoiler. ;_; But it's so gooooood.

No specific games played recently to discuss just yet, but I got a good deal on a Steamdeck from a coworker and it's arriving today. I'm very excited for it and my plan right now is to load it up with a WiiU emulator and play the remake of Wind Waker with my kids. I need some cozy, cartoony Zelda in my life again :)

Update:

Had a very productive evening with the Steamdeck. Got it setup with Emudeck so I can play Wind Waker and began playing that. Managed to get to Dragonroost and I'm greatly enjoying it.

Sneaking into the Forsaken Fortress was every bit as obnoxious as I remember it, although I'm fairly sure the remake made it a little bit easier? I remember constantly getting caught sneaking around guards in a barrel, and that didn't happen here. I drew their attention, but had time to hide before they could actually find me. Maybe I was just really bad at this game when I was 14? I also love/hate how unforgiving parts of that mini dungeon can be. I was getting toward the end of it and was sneaking around in a barrel near some guards and a rat saw me and hit me off of a platform and I basically had to run through the entire thing again.

Also it's really fun to see the early seeds of what we now consider to be standard Zelda concepts. Improvised weapons, being able to take enemy weapons, enemies dropping collectible loot, etc. And Link's facial expressions! My god I'd forgotten how hilarious they can be and how much they add to the game.

I've been enjoying Blue Prince! I'm very, very deliberately avoiding all spoilers because it's just so good at progressively revealing clues and introducing new layers of mystery. So far I'm on Day 22 (about 17 hours in) and loving every minute. It's like a combination of Betrayal at House on the Hill, Myst, and Christopher Manson's MAZE. I'm really curious if it'll have any replay value once I've solved everything; the roguelike randomness and strategy may continue to be fun. There's plenty of lore to be uncovered which is cool too.

I'm also playing Oblivion Remastered. Only 7 hours in. I commented a couple weeks ago that I was curious to see if it would satisfy a few specific complaints with the original. So far I'd say it (mostly) does. The visuals are great, the gameplay and UI are significantly improved, the voice cast is expanded. I assume the Oblivion gates are going to be as annoying as ever, but I haven't gotten that far yet. And the lockpicking still infuriates me. But generally I'm having a great time with it. It feels way more approachable now that it did all those years ago. I do have to call out that the framerate is disappointing on PS5. It's not remotely unplayable, but frequently stutters depending on what's happening. And there are weird graphical artifacts, like a "halo" around my weapon that interferes with shading and reflections behind it, and the fact that according to my shadow, my character's apparently just a floating sword and quiver.

I picked up and finished Dredge recently. It's short, and very cute; the low-poly artstyle is adorable. I do wish it was that bit longer - quests are very short and the game is never difficult. I'm still very tempted to buy its DLCs next. Maybe I'll try collecting each fish.

Here are some fun screenshots from various moments in my ongoing Bannerlord campaign.

This past week, I tried to continue my strategic goal of destroying Vlandia, and ended up in deep shit inciting rebellions across their periphery. Along with that, I have become a notorious criminal, so throughout all my activity I am regularly having to thwart attempts to assassinate my companions and sabotage my army.

On the island where my hideout is located, there are three cities: Omor, Varcheg, and Reyvl. I went to each of them, befriended the local bandit gangs, and worked those relationships by engaging in various bandit related activities. Heists, insurance scams, tavern brawling, and pit fights, mostly. By doing these, I grew my relations until I could challenge the leaders in each city. I won, and installed companions as new gang leaders, which opened up running a Criminal Enterprise, an alternative to the hideout stuff I'd been doing earlier. I relocated my main base to Omor, and opened up smuggling operations, gambling dens, and brothels. Then, I went back out to the highlands, which have been slowly overtaken by Vlandia in its effort to seize more territory.

Thanks to the enhanced bandit network I could establish relations with the gang leaders in the highland towns, and over time opened up the option to incite rebellion in each of them. One by one, I traveled to each town and drove them to the point of rebelling against their lords. When that happens each city becomes independent, and the controlling empire always sends an army to try to retake the city. I gave the rebels piles of money and food and stuck around to help their defense. It was in one of these, a city called Seonon, where I fought what's been the hardest battles of the game thus far.

When Seonon rebelled, the first siege attempt simply wasn't up to snuff. Not enough people, not good enough at building siege engines. We crushed them before they could reach the gates with well placed catapult shots and ambushes. Some time later, a second army showed up led by the king of Vlandia himself, Derthert. When the siege took place they built a trebuchet and managed to destroy part of the city wall. When the actual siege battle commenced, I decided to lead a division of cavalry through the gap in the wall and charged Derthert himself. We got him, scrambled back to the city and successfully defended against the rest of his forces. When the battle was over I beheaded Derthert and triggered what turned out to be four more sieges.

By the sixth siege we were losing momentum. I got stuck in a battle of attrition. The enemy was able to keep up with our siege weapons, so I led ambushes to destroy their towers and battering rams, over and over and over again for weeks, until they ran low on food and opted to attack without them. By that point we simply didn't have enough men - I led my infantry in a square formation, and fought to the last at the city gates. When the battle was over, we successfully escaped as Vlandia retook the city and I left to go rebuild my forces. While I was out in the field I actually spotted Derthert's successor Alfric, recruiting out in some peripheral villages. We were outnumbered, 2:1, but I couldn't let the opportunity go and engaged him.

This battle was rough. i commanded six divisions - two infantry, two ranged, horse archers, cavalry. The map had a lot of ridges, so I positioned my archers behind one, and the infantry in square formations on its left and right. Leading the horse archers and cavalry, I baited Alfric's army into running up and over the ridge, where my archers picked them off as the infantry tore through their flanks and cavalry ran along their rear. Because we were still outnumbered I pulled everyone back, and drew the enemy down into a valley. With archers firing from a ridge behind us, and the infantry keeping them busy in the valley, I led the cavalry around and sandwiched them, managing to slap Alfric myself with a zweihander I'd named "Retirement Plan". We won, captured Alfric and beheaded him. Though the kingdoms all fight each other, they typically don't kill each other's nobles, so beheading two kings has put me at odds with about half the realm's noble clans regardless of their allegiances.

Across this time Yanagoth gave birth to four children (two sons and two daughters): Tyranae, Bolverkr, Porg, and Kalevala. Mallgoth is 40 at this point, so we should be good for succession if he survives about another decade. With the Six Sieges and Alfric having depleted my forces I've been back on the island, eradicating barbarian hordes to train up more troops. The highland cities continue to rebel, which is whittling away Vlandia's forces. Beheading their last two kings has disrupted the balance of power among their noble clans, so they also can't organize as well as they could in the past. My bandit network includes gangs in all the highland cities - I conduct sabotage and assassination attempts against the lords while they try (and often fail) to retake them.

Edit: Today I was fortunate to have some extra time, and pulled off something I did not expect. There was a castle in between two of the towns I've been causing a ruckus in, that ended up depleted of its garrison to the point I could siege it successfully with just my warband. We took the castle, and now I'm filling it with elite troops. Vlandia has to choose now, city or castle, and if they go for the castle I'll get a third king if I have to.

I finished RDR2 yesterday. Really wanted to get the 100% achievement but the challenges and collectibles were too much for me. This is the most emotional I've ever felt about finishing a game. I loved that world so much. I know I'll give it another go soon.

I started Guardians of the Galaxy. So far, I'm delightfully surprised at how well-tuned it is. The action isn't great so far, but the story is well told, voice acting is very good, and the visuals are fantastic. Gameranx put me onto this. They're a great way for discovering hidden Gems. They also put me onto Driver San Francisco, which has great gameplay and a story featuring a psychopathic cop.

Still playing Pikmin 2. I paid off the debt and am in the “post game”. I still remember what playing the first game in the series was like all those years ago. It feels like a tech demo in comparison to the sequel. There’s so much to do!

I’ve also been playing Animal Crossing: City Folk on the side. That’s the entry in the series that I played the least of all, just because I got a copy around the time that I began to leave the nest (2009). I had tried playing it a few times throughout the years, but the controls on Dolphin just didn’t work for me. Thankfully, this time, I figured out that I can use a controller and a mouse simultaneously, so I’ve been playing the game mostly with the former, and have been using the latter for navigating the inventory and typing. I’ve already played more than 10 hours. I want to commit to at least 100 and see how far I can go.

We recently played Reignbreaker for our podcast on roguelike games.

A sadly mediocre copycat of Hades, I feel like it would have been better if there was more budget behind it. And that’s the problem with Hades-likes: you’re going up against such a juggernaut of quality that you’re almost doomed to fail out of the gate.

The voice acting is bad, there’s almost no depth to the variety in content and the studio wasn’t bankrupt so there isn’t even a hope that they’ll add more content later on.

The game feels too “safe” theme wise as well. Your character is supposed to be a badass anarchy punk, but I most just got the vibe of “concerned older sister”. I really wanted a Furiosa or a Tank Girl instead.

The gameplay is fine but extremely repetitive. The only case I could see someone going deep on it is if you liked Hades combat but not the story. Even then there’s a half dozen better approaches on that design front.

I was inspired by the post here on Tildes about running a big Archipelago game and polled some friends to see if they'd be interested in doing one. I have a few friends who have done a good bit of ALttP randomizer in the past and have done multiworlds before, and so I was able to get a group of about 6 people together to run a bunch of different games. It went well enough that we decided to start another once the first was done!

Takeaways so far have been:

• Civ 6 is weird for multiworld randomizers
• Having games of wildly different lengths can be frustrating if expectations aren't set ahead of time, but it's not that big of a deal if you know what you're in for.
• Doing all of the campaigns for Starcraft is way too much for a multiworld, and if you do that you'll wind up with the majority of people's checks being items sent to the Starcraft player.

I played Lacrimosa with some friends. It's a great little euro game. Takes a while to set up and get in the groove but I imagine it has very good replay-ability. It took us about 4.5 hours to play through a full game which is a simulation of the five stages of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's life and the completion of his unfinished Opus Requiem:

In Lacrimosa, players take the roles of patrons of the late musician, contributing with their fundings to the composer's works one last time. During the game, you play in two different timelines: the present and the past. In the present, you commission the missing parts of the Requiem from other composers in order to complete it. When developing past events, the game takes place in five epochs in which you contribute by buying new compositions from the composer to sell or exhibit, accompany him on the different journeys through the main courts and theaters in Europe, and gather the resources you need in order to support the musician during his career.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/348450/lacrimosa

I had a weird week of playing more Blue Prince until I decided I was done with it and then half arsed playing some Soviet Republic.

Blue Price

I'm going to spoiler this whole thing so I can talk about really late game stuff.

Soviet Republic: Workers and Resources

Weird game this one. It feels like someone played Cities Skylines and was upset they didn't get to do enough city logistics and management so they made their own game. And maybe that's true!
I've not played much but it looks like there's a lot to it. I'm struggling to understand what long term goals might be expect for "build a city" but I thought I'd give it a blast with a YouTube video on the background or something and it's quite easy to play.
It does have quirks of being an indy game, but nothing I'd quit over. My biggest gripe right now is it seems difficult to get all the information you want to know before you build something and just try it. Maybe that's intentional.
So I'm just messing around and having fun!

I just finished the JRPG "Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky, The 3rd" (Steam).

This was my second attempt at this game. I had played "Trails in the Sky FC" (First Chapter) and "Trails in the Sky SC" (Second Chapter) back in 2022 ("FC" was actually a replay; I initially completed it back in the early 20-teens on PSP). So after completing two JRPGs, back-to-back, I dived into the last entry in this trilogy...only to find that I was burned out. Got like 10hrs in and was like, "nm, I need a break."

Which lasted until this past March where I restarted "The 3rd" from the very beginning. After at least 108hrs, I finished it yesterday! It was pretty good.

That said, in this trilogy, "SC" is the best game, IMO. And that's mainly because it's a weird trilogy. "FC" and "SC" are one complete story. "FC" sets up the world and story, while "SC" unveils the existential world-ending threat and the actual meat of the story. "The 3rd" picks things 6mo after the events of "SC," where the big baddy is dead and the world is saved, and our brother & sister duo—who became lovers weirdly; the brother was adopted, so I guess that means it's OK?—are off adventuring the world together. So then "The 3rd" is kinda the odd one out. It doesn't even focus on our brother & sister dating duo. It focuses on a playable, but supporting character from "SC."

Which is also part of the reason I put it down the first time; I wasn't sure where the story was going, since technically it was completely wrapped up. Nor did it make sense that this priest guy was the main character all of a sudden.

That said, it did answer a question from the end of the "SC" that I didn't know I had, but is worth exploring: What actually happened to the interdimensional entity that granted the ancients all their wishes—which led them to insanity and the downfall of their civilization—after we destroyed its core? I just assumed it vanished into nothingness. But that wasn't the case. And that's what "The 3rd" explored, along with the priest's backstory. Since pretty much all the playable characters from the first two games are also in this game, it also added a lot more to their individual backstories, along with more lore about the world of Zemuria, where the "Trails" series takes places. I love lore and worldbuilding, especially in this now 13-games series so I definitely enjoyed that.

From here, I'm onto the next entry, "Legend of Heroes: Tales From Zero" (Steam). I started it yesterday, but I'm only about an hour in. This is the first in a two-game ark, so we'll see how it goes. Maybe I can complete both this year! Or I'll just get burned out again, which is likely.

Other than being neck-deep in JRPGs, still slowly getting through "Ace Attorney Investigations 2," also on Steam.

I didn't get an invite to Marathon or ARC Raiders playtests over the weekend, but fortunately I was able to distract myself with pre-launch access of the Frostpunk 2 major content update 1.3.0 beta. Fans of the first game that didn't like the changes to heat management in the second can rejoice, temperature has been shifted from city-wide to per-district, so you have way more control over heat allocation, and there's a whole slew of new research and laws to go along with it. This also means there's a lot more micromanagement with heating though, so if you prefer how Frostpunk 2 did it before the devs have saved that version of the game for you to select if you so choose. For the Utopia Builder (endless) mode, they've also added 3 "tales" you can choose from to add an interesting difficulty twist:

• Steam Core Factory - you start with 0 cores and there are none to find in the frostland. You have to complete a rather RNG heavy quest in the frostland to build a factory that produces unlimited steam cores.

• Beacon of Hope - You will continually waves of refugees, about 50k in total, over 100 weeks, many of which will be sick.

• Apocalyptic Storm - You will have 400 weeks to prepare for a whiteout that covers the entire map and lasts 200 weeks.

These aren't limited to just one at a time, if you're feeling particularly invincible or unhinged you can have all of them active at once, which seems impossible especially on Captain (hardest) difficulty but apparently is doable somehow. I wasn't really feeling like savescumming that much so I just started one with Apocalyptic Storm on Steward (hard) difficulty. Didn't have time to get to the storm before the beta ended though, and now my game freezes on the title screen, so maybe I'll have to wait til the full update drops on the 8th to finish it. I sure hope they don't nerf Heat Auctions though, getting 1 heatstamp/week per warm housing district is so absurdly strong.

I've been enjoying The Bazaar . Think of it as an auto battler meets Slay the Spire, or perhaps more accurately Super Auto Pets but way more complex. You alternate between going to shops, events, and PvE fights to get better cards and skills to create increasingly crazy combos to improve your board. These PvE steps are interspersed with PvP battles. It's quite fun to try new combos and assemble a deck that can get 10 wins. I recommend it, but it does suffer from F2P issues. You don't have all of the characters unlocked, and it would take quite a bit of playing to unlock all 4 without spending some money. However, I think the F2P is pretty generous. For example, when the new patch comes tomorrow, you will have everything unlocked for the starting character (who is very competitive) including the two new sets of cards for her.

It Takes Two. I've played through the game with a friend, with me playing as Cody and him playing as May. We finished the game in a single sitting, which I regret because I enjoyed it so much I just didn't want to stop. So now I'm playing it with a different friend, and this time I'm May and we're playing in shorter sessions so it's not over too soon.

The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy. Pleasantly surprised I'm not the only person in this thread playing it.

It's a strategy RPG with a heavy visual novel element-- the hook of the game is that it's a true crossover between the authors of the Danganronpa and Zero Escape series. Like Danganronpa, the game starts fairly linearly, but then you get the Zero Escape-style decision chart with each decision unlocking a little bit more of the mystery surrounding the setting. It's ridiculously addictive. I'm about 115 hours in now.

I've been deep into Monster Hunter Rise. It's my second Monster Hunter game, following several tens of hours put into Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate on the Switch. I've always been interested in the series stemming back to the very first game that was released, but never actually played any of them until recently.

It's been a blast - both in terms of playing the game, but also because my son has gotten into it as well and we've been playing together.

NGU Idle. Finally beat Rock Lobster v1 and unlocked the seventh ingredient for Cooking. Normally you'd kill bosses and get a new feature that greatly increases player power, but Cooking is an annoying minigame where you adjust 6 to 8 ingredients each day in order to get the Meal Efficiency as close to 100% as possible for a minuscule permanent XP gain buff, which caps at 300%. Killing Titans 11 and 12 actually increases the amount of dials you need to adjust and makes this feature shittier.

My problem with this game is that it really feels like 4G half-arsed further development on the game. Almost every entry in the Bestiary from the Beardverse (early Evil) onwards has no Flavor Text, only showing "To be added in a future patch."

At the moment the main source of power increases is from doing ~24 hour rebirths and popping MacGuffin Muffins every other day to double the effectiveness of the MacGuffin Fragments you have in your inventory (equippable items which can can level past 100 and grant a permanent buff on rebirth such as increasing your Adventure Stats, Attack/Defense, resource caps, etc. Even with my Adventure MacGuffin at Level 90804 and having an Adventure Stats multiplier of nearly 3000%, progress is still slow to the point where it's going to take weeks of 24H rebirths just to reach the next stage of a titan or the next zone.

I do not recommend NGU Idle as an idle game because it is the biggest timesink I've ever seen. The humour/writing is on point, but the novelty quickly wears off.

My Mythic+ climb in World of Warcraft isn't going so good. I'm currently maining a Protection Warrior with a 643 ilvl and 4pc tier set and the problem is that pugging keys just gets me paired with morons that don't know how to play at all. To illustrate this, I did a +6 Rookery key earlier today where I got paired with DPS players between 654 and 662 ilvl, and I was still second on the DPS meters during trash pulls. On top of this, our Hunter kept doing ninja pulls (no Misdirection) and Distracting Shots to aggro mobs away from me, both Warlocks didn't know how to cast multi-target spells, and people kept dying to perfectly avoidable boss mechanics. You question how the fuck people geared enough to do Mythic raids and with 1.5 to 2k rio could possibly fail to handle basic boss mechanics (like... using the AoE effect to destroy the Voidstone Fragments on the final boss...) in a +6 key nonetheless.

Just started up Stalker 2 Heart of Chornobyl. I'm enjoying it so far, but it is brutally difficult. It plays more like a horror game, especially after I turned off the ammo UI so I often have a gun go empty right when I need it. I have had to look up multiple quests, one due to a bug (interacted with a door before the scripting and couldn't open it later) and one due to a complete failure on my part to figure out what I needed to interact with. I think I'm at like 25 deaths in 3 hours? It keeps track which I do enjoy but does get a little frustrating when I die multiple times and keep forgetting to save. It's a nice change from Persona 3 Reload, which I love, but I need something a little more interactive at times.

I kept running across gameplay from The Stanley Parable (deluxe), and reaized I must obtain it. So I did.

Quickly realized this is a game I wanted to play with my wife, so I stopped - after a half dozen....well... resets, let us say (trying to not spoil).

I can't get her to sit down and play, so today I really wanted to play it, and so I got a bit farther, but again I've stopped because I R E A L L Y need to play with game with her, dammit.

I am so completely in love with this, and I know there's just no way I will find all of the options, and I am saddened by that. Although - as I think I'm still relatively earlyish - I'm already a bit impressed how they present these things. I just can't wait to find more and more.

I'd poted elsewhere things are a bit tough right now. The above is a perfect metaphor - it is making things better (the game) and worse (wife won't take time for me). lol.

Well, I feel better for getting to be excited about this game somewhere. :)

I picked up Star Wars: Outlaws over the weekend and I'm enjoying it greatly! This is just giving me everything I want, the atmosphere is incredible (out of any star wars game, it most feels like the one where you're "living in star wars"), the story is fine to good so far, and I'm actually really enjoying the open world. I'm still pretty early in the game (about 10 hours in?), but I love it!!

Other than that, Destiny 2: Rite of the Nine starts today, which is an event leading up to the next expansion in July. It's similar to last year's "Pantheon" event which was a raid boss rush, but this time it's three dungeons being reprised with new mechanics and harder difficulties. I just finished the first of the three dungeons today on normal and it was fun to revisit as well as get some revitalized loot!

Lastly, I picked up Nuclear Option. It's been on my list for a while, but I was wishy washy until a couple of friends picked it up. It's a military flight game that has a mix of arcade controls/concepts with some surprisingly deep mechanics. Like yeah, you can target 8 things at once and shoot out 8 hellfires, but on the other hand, the filght mechanics are extremely good and you have to notch correctly to escape from missiles. I've only played multiplayer servers so far and I'm having a blast, but it looks like there are a bunch of single player missions as well. The game controls incredibly well on gamepad, so it's a very easy flight game to pick up and play if you want to fly some cool jets or helicopters!

God of War 2018. It's taken a long time for me to warm up to this one but I'm about a third of the way through and it's finally clicking with me. Can't wait to play ragnarok afterwards.

I've been playing Warzone 2100. It's an RTS from 1999, and its source code was released in late 2004. This was kinda miraculous for the day, and it's what keeps the game pretty alive even today. I think it has aged pretty well, the interface, graphics and sound design are quite ok and it has some interesting features. For instance, the units are designed by combining a chassis with a movement platform and a weapon. Also, later in the tech tree there's an interesting focus on artillery and counter-artillery which I don't I've seen a lot in RTS games like this.

I want to go into Oblivion Remastered but haven't gotten there quite yet. I've already done all the side quests with the original game, and perhaps could play the main questline also this time.

I played Lost Judgment and this is the second time I try to play the game after giving it some time off, I don't know why, but I'm not entertained with it, I usually like every other Yakuza game I've played including Judgment, and Lost judgment has the best combat in the series, just not the best enemies.

Maybe the realistic setting is what put me down so much, every situation requires lots of talking to explain the same points, repeating mini-games, and Yagami is simply too perfect that he can do anything, be a detective, a lawyer, fight, dance, It's so completely flawless that it is boring.

The secondary missions is what brings me to these games, they trend to be funny and unexpected, and while the ones in this game have some nice twists, it feels like the writers and developers are simply too burned using the same formula.

I'll finish the main story just to see if it will motivate me to continue the rest.