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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 bought the Switch 2, some points about the system and games:
The lack of OLED or Hall effect sticks are honestly so crazy to me. It feels purposely done so they can sell an upgraded pro model in 3 years.
I read that Hall effect joysticks might have issues due to the magnets holding the joycons. I guess we'll soon see if that's true with third-party peripherals.
Surely they didn't learn their lesson from the OG Switch? Or did they decide that adding a class action waiver in the EULA would be better?
I've seen it referenced to as a Je'RPG considering its French roots. Honestly pretty apt.
Been playing Faster Than Light for a little bit again. I have over 1000 hours and know the game like the back of my hand but got burned out over it. It'll probably only be for a short time but it's nice to come back to old games every now and then.
Have you tried the demo for Void War? On the surface it's FTL but in a WH40K-esque setting, but there are significantly more ship systems, items you can equip on your crew, weapons with varying effects, etc. that it ends up being as complex as a heavily modded version of FTL.
I haven't, might check it out later today thank you!
Picked up Tametsi recently and have enjoyed it a lot. Similar to minesweeper but with more/different/interesting rules and variations. Very similar to Hexcells which I've played before and loved. All puzzles can be solved using logic, no guesswork required. Both are excellent for anyone out there that enjoys puzzles and has a couple bucks to spare. Great for playing while listening to something or even watching something else in the background.
I wish I could play Tametsi for the first time again; it's one of my favorites. I also think the drawing mode should be included in more puzzle games or built into the Steam overlay somehow.
Agreed! Definitely check out Hexcells and its variations if you haven't yet. Playing Tametsi now is giving me the same feelings I felt when I first played Hexcells a few years ago. Very chill games.
Cricket: Jae's Really Peculiar Game is a 3/4 perspective JRPG in the venerable tradition of Earthbound - or, if you want a more modern comparison, Omori. It combines elements typical of games in the genre, including child protagonists, an adventurous journey and a lot of whimsy. Jae is a child living completely alone after the passing of his mother. Along with his boxer buddy Zack and armed with a garden rake for hitting people and weird creatures with, he embarks on a journey to the moon (mainly on foot or hitchhiking) to wish her back to life. On the way, he accrues a party of several other kids.
The characters are great, with distinctive personalities. I particularly enjoy that they really feel like children - they're over the top, quick to forgive, use goofy logic all the time, and have the suitable short attention span and difficulty expressing themselves properly. Stellar writing! Combat is turn-based, consisting in a basic system of physical and "spell" attacks and consumable items allied with team (combined) attacks and a rhythm/precision based system that can be used to boost attack and defense and compounds into advantages or disadvantages. The world is also fun - the art style is very simple, but there are a bunch of imaginative little details, like how your entire "pause" menu is in the screen of an old Nokia phone, item "chests" are actually very recognizable blue tins of danish butter cookies, or how all the area maps are hasty drawings by Jae.
Without spoiling too much, all the kids in this game are a little fucked up in the head - just like Omori - and with good reason. The game contains prevalent themes of parental abandonment, bullying and abuse among others. There is a trigger warning before the main menu which I entreat you to take seriously. So far, this game has legitimately made me want to feed a child into a meat grinder.
Nobody has played this game - it only has 20 reviews on Steam - which is a pity. I can only ascribe it to the devs' failure to market themselves properly (or possibly the art?) The game is solidly made and the developers seem friendly and responsive. Overall, good experience! I'm 12 hours into it, so it's not too short either.
Previous
Blue Prince has devoured my entire life. It’s all I think about. I’m near the end (day 140something) and still discovering new things every day. Absolutely one of the best games of all time.
I’m a bit stalled now in blue prince and I wonder: does it get easier the further in you are? I don’t really notice much run-independent progression for the moment. (It’s not a big issue, but I’d like to know if it stays that way.)
Easier? Depends on what parts are hard for you. It gets easier to draft the rooms you want because you get some tools to adjust probability and a better understanding of how the rules work. But the puzzles get harder and more time-consuming the deeper you dig.
Without knowing how far in you are: there are permanent upgrades and changes to supplement your growing knowledge so progression is measured in a few ways.
I was on holiday last week and my friend hasn't been avaliable for RoadCraft so it's been some single player games this week.
Pacific Drive
This one has been on my to play list since it was early access and I finally felt it was time to try it.
So it's like a rogue lite where you drive a car deeper and deeper into a Stalker-eske quarentine zone full of anomalies. It's got a pretty intense car and workshop upgrade system which is a big hilight of the game. Obviously crafting too.
I've not got many hours yet, I only got as far as the game letting me choose my own routes for the first time (after driving the car through the spooky anomaly in the local town).
So far, it's honestly been pretty overwhelming on the "standard" difficulty. I've been trying to take it slowly but there is a lot of information back to back and some information is not entirely clear.
The vibe feels great, there seems to be a gigantic amount of content and the driving feels good too.
I like the scrapping and crafting but I do wonder if I'm meant to be spending as much time as I do outside the car. I feel like I drive for 2 minutes then loot outside for 10. I think it would get better as I'm able to identify loot I actually want and get better tools etc from looking at the upgrades.
There's a lot of cool systems in the game that interact together like the anchors used both to escape back to the workshop and also upgrade when you get back.
I'm looking forward to playing some more when I'm less sick lol, I need all my brain power for this one.
On a side note, I tried it with my PS5 controller connected via USB and it's the first game that has native support for the adaptive triggers. And it was weird!
I get what it was doing, it gives adaptive force from the trigger like it would be if you were actually pressing the gas/brake. But after like 30 mins my fingers were sore from how much work it was! I know there's a slider to turn it down, but honestly I went back to the xbox controller.
Cash Cleaning Simulator
I got the cold coming back from holiday and I just needed something easy to play over the weekend. I'd seen some YouTuber playing this and thought it looked pretty slick so I got it and so far it's been exactly what I wanted.
It's another one of the simulator games with a light story about you owning someone a million dollars and having to do dirty work to pay it back. In this one you get boxes of dirty (in come cases literally dirty!) cash coming in and you need to sort it and make sure it's right for the customer. Some of them only care about if the cash is dry and clean (you need to actually put it in a washer and dryer lol), some want you to give them legal, non counterfeit cash or specifically marked cash. There's different currencies.
It's pretty good! There's not much automation but I think that's intentional because the cash handling is so fun and easy.
Most of your game is taking arm fulls of cash in and out of various machines and trying to sort it in a way that works for you, it's pretty satisfying and reasonably chaotic.
I'd say my only gripes so far are the writing is insane, like it's AI slop. None of it really makes any sense and it's all a little too quirky, but whatever it's barely important to the game. Second it could do with a little more automation, but I think they are planning to add it in a patch soon according to their road map, which is great!
I've been wanting to get into Pacific Drive too, but also find it pretty overwhelming. It's one of those games where I want to find the groove that lets me just brainlessly grind and have fun but so far I always have to think about and remember too many things so I can't get into that flow state I've been hoping for.
I agree heavily with you! It throws a lot at the player. I've been spending a lot of time trying to absorb everything going on in that game and there always seems to be more stuff!
I mean it's good there's so much content and it does give me that feeling of never knowing what is coming, keeping me on my toes. But like wow I don't get a second to think lol.
I got Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma for Switch last Thursday. And I've been living in it ever since. I'm not even through spring yet, but I love this game so far. I feel like this one places slightly more emphasis on having a party than previous titles, since you can't recruit/befriend monsters until the autumn village. There doesn't seem to be magic spells this time (closest thing are talismans, which I tried once and then ditched), but you get sacred tools with elemental powers and... Yeah, I spam those a lot.
Also, wow I like a bunch of these bachelors way too much. It might be harder to pick who to marry than I originally thought... Made slightly easier by the fact Tsubame isn't a marriage option, because I love her design so much.
I've played the series since the first title since I was a Harvest Moon fan, but I never really realized just how much I love this series until now. I knew I liked it, since I've played all of them (though uh, haven't actually completed one yet...) but as the release got closer I found myself increasingly hyped and excited. I had a similar feeling with Rune Factory 5, but this time it was way stronger. Maybe it's because I'm an otaku and former weaboo who still loves Japanese culture, and this game is set in RF Japan.
Also, the Switch's physical version has a physical booklet. I think that alone shows a lot of care from Marvelous and has earned my loyalty.
Yesterday Shokuho was released, so I've been knee deep in that to the extent I can be. It's just unbelievable what these folks have made. Here are a few screenshots I took from the deck.
Shokuho is a total conversion mod for Bannerlord, set in Japan in 1568. Along with the new setting, they integrated features from other popular mods and expanded the game in really every aspect. The campaign map is about 5 times the size of what you got in vanilla Bannerlord, with over 50 cities and 150+ castles. It is the whole of Japan, minus the northern island/Ainu, but it straight up says on the map screen that's a work in progress/it's coming. When you set up the campaign, you can choose whether you want the historical battles to play out or just go freeplay with it, and from there you can choose who you want to join up with or go it alone in the typical Mount and Blade sort of way.
I decided to do my usual and be a filthy bandit. Motafukaru Gorogunaku, whose banner is white with a big red O on it, has made his way in the world picking corpses and convincing looters to go with him through the age old art of slapping them until they do it. The corpse picking is a legit thing in Shokuho - when a battle large enough concludes, there will be a spot left open on the map to go to, and you can find various bits of loot, get jumped by other bandits, etc. The basic progression is just as it was in Bannerlord, but there is more to get into and the tactical situation is pretty much totally different.
With respect to gear and character building, you are much closer to being a glass cannon by default than anything else. There are no handheld shields, and armor tends to be focused on the chest and head (location based damage matters). You can get something like a horo for your back (it's crazy expensive) and that's about it for protection beyond your armor. As well, it being 1568 means you can get guns. They're very slow to use but awesome to deploy - a full volley aimed well absolutely shreds. In the campaign mode, along with aspiring to vassalage or forming your own kingdom, you can do a full career as a mercenary or as an enlisted soldier/officer in someone else's army. There are more quests, both in number and type, so you can also just sort of go adventuring and get into shit.
Along with starting a campaign I did some custom battles, to see the castle sieges and naval battles. Both are very impressive. The castle sieges are especially fun, because they operate almost totally differently from Bannerlord. Instead of marching up on a castle with siege towers and trebuchet-ing the walls, the castles are typically up on steep cliffs and surrounded by multiple gates. To win the siege you have to push through, gate to gate, and when you're on the defensive you might have to do that against multiple fronts. It's a totally different tactical situation and the troop trees have a lot more options. Naval combat is completely new to the game, no one has done it prior (that I know of) and the Shokuho team beat out the devs to implementing it. I'm terrible at it but it's just a matter of learning what I need to be paying attention to.
On the level of aesthetics I don't think they could have done a better job. The maps are gorgeous, the music is great, the dedication to a realistic portrayal goes a long way toward making you feel like you really are just wandering around in a different time and place. And, other mods work with it, so I could keep stuff like an over-the-shoulder camera and my dedicated button for yelling at people. The RTS camera works too, so you can flip between the usual action-rpg setup and something akin to Total War - literally, this setup is what one of my friends and I would daydream about doing matches in Shogun Total War ages ago, it's so cool.
I can say for sure this is gonna be something I get into for a while. It's like getting a whole new game in the franchise, a project that reminds me of the best of Warband. Warband had a similar mod, Gekokujo - it's like getting a sequel to that. And with the way it's been built, it's all but guaranteed other modders will make their stuff compatible, so it will grow and expand even further (likely pretty quickly too). It takes minimal setup to get going (download a few mods, put them in a folder, check some boxes, done) and performance is more or less in line with the vanilla game. The campaign map chugs a bit (because it's massive) but battles and towns and things are pretty much the same. Works just fine on the steam deck too. I've had it crash once in a few hours of play - for a mod project, for Bannerlord, that's great lol. I can't wait to see what else is in it.
I’ve been in the Fantasy Life wormhole and it has been utterly amazing. It’s like a cozy, more accessible version of final fantasy XIV, a grind I (temporarily?) gave up on a small year ago.
The first 20 hours or so I kept thinking this game is too expensive for what it is. But I’m past that point now. There are just not that many games that can grip me the way this does without feeling like junk food. Fantasy life does it.
I folded and bought Fantasy Life last night after the family went to bed. What started off as my quick casual hour of gaming before bed rapidly morphed into a 4-hour session before I could tear myself away. So far it's been absolutely delightful and I can't wait to play more. Almost brought my Steam Deck to work today, but I'm positive I won't have enough time to actually do anything so, it'll have to wait.
I’ve been playing Star of Providence. This bullet-hell shooter has you flying a spaceship in an enclosed square space. Bigmode continues to hit with games that are retro with simple graphics and fundamental mechanics but with modern polish. If this genre becomes Bigmode’s niche, I might buy every game they publish.
The highlights of Star of Providence are the precise movement and weapon variety. The bullets are everywhere and often with weird movement, but they have generous hitboxes so you can move ever so slightly next to a bullet to dodge it. The game offers a dozen or so different weapons that all play very differently, and you can make slight modifications with keywords like Homing. There are also cursed and legendary variants which have tradeoffs and special effects, respectively.
I’ve also been improving my records in Neon White, a fantastic speedrunning FPS where you use guns as movement to progress through stages quickly.
Finally, I’ve started a new save file in Into the Breach where I only play on the hardest difficulty. I think I’ve won 4 or 5 runs and lost once, but my most recent run is likely super doomed; I killed 2 pilots on the first island.
I played enough Oblivion: Remastered to have enough. Pretty much the exactly same game as before, which is a good thing. Funniest sort of glitch I got was what I wrote about earlier: wraith -type enemies that look like they should be floating falling into a trap.
After that binge was over, I tried to get into Factorio for the 3rd time and again failed. The game feels like work and I get to do that at work. I think I'm allergic to this whole automation type of games, although I did enjoy Shapez.
Then Steam offered me Skin Deep, which is an indie sort of mix of Dishonored -type sneaking, Prey-style spaceships (in and out), Deathloop-kinda vibe and cats. Clearly the developers have played all Arkane games. It's not bad. It has been released quite recently, April 30th.
Also I tried the Songs of Syx demo, a Dwarf Fortress -like game. I had only about 15 minutes to try it out, which wasn't quite enough to form an opinion. Nice background music, interesting graphics that remind me a lot of Amiga games. The first 10 minutes of those 15 I was trying to figure out how on earth I'm supposed to build things, only to find out that the fullscreen window resolution was wrong which caused the bottom toolbar to not show. This could be an ok game, but seems to be quite micromanagery, which I'm not a huge fan of.
Also playing Portal 2 with my kids. Great game, obviously.
Songs of Syx is a really interesting and detailed city builder. It does have its issues though.
I had trouble getting into it (I'll be honest I never go the to stage of building anything near a "city") because of the way it is balanced it ends up quite game-y how you develop your city I found.
Don't hold me to these opinions by the way, I might be very wrong or very bad at it, but I found I was doing horribly badly and needed to restart (lack of food, lack of money, lack of resources) if I didn't try to game the right start or build in a specific way or research very specific things early.
I mean I felt a little too restricted? I think it is a problem because the dev himself said in the latest update he was planning to make the game more fair and a little easier to get into for new players.
Don't get me wrong, I don't expect it to be cities skylines where you can just about do anything and not fuck up, but I do want some creative freedom without going all dwarf fortress death spiral because I didn't build enough farms in the first year and now everyone is dying a year later.
Personally, I'm planning to come back in 1.0 and see how the balance is after his pass. It has so much stuff I like in it.
If you do pick it up and get into it please post some more I'd like to hear some more opinions on it.
I binged Shapez for two weeks and then uninstalled before either hating the game, or myself. Now I'm waiting for Shapez 2 to get out of early access. I love it because there are no limitations, no resources to collect, only pure abstract automation mechanics.
I tried Factorio and Satisfactory, but they both add different layers and constraints on top of the automation gameplay, and... nope. I dislike both games.
Have you tried playing without biters or turning their expansion off?
I know when I want a more chill experience I have a save with no biters where I can play as I wish.
I also prefer the Railworld preset which turns off biter expansion and places resources further away to encourage the use of trains. I like being able to clear the nests and not need to worry about them coming back, and usually only play with expansion when I'm playing with a group of friends.
I'm about 10 hours into Cyberpunk 2077. Storywise, it's feeling pretty predictable, but I'm enjoying the gameplay overall. It's reminding me of Sleeping Dogs a bit.
Cleaning up sidequests in FF8 before I finish disc 3. Next up: Ultima Weapon, then Obel Lake and the Card Queen because I intend to go into the last act fully overprepared.
Blue Prince lingers, waiting in the wings. Another couple of friends have picked it up and I've enjoyed going through my notes to find spoiler-free nuggets of wisdom to guide them.
Nailed it. Even with all that preparation I got bailed out by the Phoenix twice fighting Omega Weapon. Irvine and Squall did eventually wear it down with Limit Breaks and Eden spam. Ultimecia thought she'd be clever and force in unjunctioned Quistis but that just made it easier to throw Mighty Guard up over and over.
I'd love it if this game got a proper remaster with expanded Sorceress lore and more time with Raine but Squenix isn't going to do it.
Though I have a soft spot in my heart for FFVIII, I absolutely agree with Square on the firm choice not to remake, or even give the prospect enough brainpower to dismiss (I suspect a remake is what you really intend by saying you want a "remaster," considering the game has already been ported and remastered for multiple platforms).
It's got great vibes, but the game mechanics are utterly broken to the point where you almost have to try to not exploit Junctioning, and the narrative is a completely incoherent mess. I don't speak enough Japanese to confidently order a cheeseburger, but even I know it wasn't just the translation that doomed that script.
Which is all fine for a cult classic (if a mainstream entry in one of the biggest game franchises in history can be called such), but how do you "fix" that in such a way that both the general JRPG audience and the loyal fans of the title can be satisfied? They'd need to rebuild it from the ground up a la the FFVII remakes, but this time without quite the diversity of environments or the distinctiveness of art direction that the original FFVII had, and they'd be doing it without the assurance of quite as large a ready-made audience. It was a minor miracle they've managed as well with the 7 remakes as they have, but to pull it off with an 8 remake would be on par with the Second Coming.
(The ports and remasters are pretty sloppy and mostly worse than the original experience, but you're right that a ground-up remake with new models that more closely match the style of the original is what I'd prefer)
Junction is easy to exploit but it's also easy to just not sit and Draw 100 of something from a disabled monster. I think you could probably re-balance it by limiting the Stock option to ~20 per encounter but that's just the first thing that came to mind.
The narrative: disagree. There's a lot that isn't clear until you get to Esthar and they move pretty quickly through most of the plot but I think the pieces are all there if you're paying attention. Riiight up until the end with Ultimecia who is mostly question marks. I think they could have stretched out the "GFs make you forget" stuff more and expanded on the themes of loss and moving on but broadly I think the problem is depth not incoherence.
Diversity of environments? Art direction? I really don't see 8 as lacking in those areas. Each city feels distinct and fantastical in a magic-futurism way, even the humble little port of Balamb has impressive architecture, but there's lots of unifying elements (except in the intentionally removed places, which makes sense). Plus you travel through at least six major biomes and into space and even under water if you're chasing side content.
The biggest problem is that they haven't spent 25 years hyping that specific entry at every opportunity. 7 got Crisis Core, Advent Children, better representation in Kingdom Hearts, crossover appearances in games from Ehrgeiz to Super Smash Brothers... the "minor miracle" is that they keep finding fresh wells to tap. One-Winged Angel is a great villain theme song but I think it's the worst game of the PS1 trilogy.
I have finished Danganronpa 2.
Each case was fun to play and generally pretty well written. There's a much greater variety of locations than in the first game, which is not only more interesting to look at but also opens up more possibilities for how the murders are carried out / solved.
I was a bit divided on how the story turned out. The main plot twist for this game is one you can see coming from a mile away, but there's a good deal of misdirection and surprises for the smaller plot threads which kept things engaging. Most of the overarching story started in the first game also gets wrapped up without any major plot holes, but the story itself is so ridiculous that it feels wrong to apply any lens of plausibility to it - it became more a question of whether I could enjoy the ride and buy into each turn of the story moment to moment (which was a yes from me).
I'm now playing Danganronpa V3, the last instalment in the series.
If you start up the game in Japanese, it's billed as New Danganronpa on the title screen, which is pretty much what this is. The references to the story arc started and concluded in the first two games are kept to an absolute minimum and there's a fresh new story, cast and setting.
The introduction was a bit of a slog as the game has to reintroduce everything to the player again, but I'm enjoying the story now that it's been established. The risk with making this sort of game into a long running series is that it starts to just feel like a reality TV show with endless seasons of new contestants going through the same motions, but I get the impression that the developers have put some thought into how they can differentiate the story in this game from the first two, and there are a fair number of unconventional twists right off the bat.
Mechanically, the game plays very similarly to the first two. Probably the biggest change is that in addition to rebutting or agreeing with assertions, you can now just straight up lie. I'm of two minds on how this shakes out in practice. On one hand, it's a really interesting idea and the game lets you direct the trials into hidden routes if you lie skillfully. On the other, this really goes against the whole premise of the gameplay in this series - i.e. gradually revealing the truth by paring away incorrect theories. It kind of feels like if someone made a Batman game where in addition to fighting criminals hand to hand, he could also murder them with firearms. Sure, maybe that could be interesting gameplay-wise, but is that something a player would want to do in that sort of game?
Visually, the game looks a good deal better than the first two. It's now running in 1080p and the courtroom scenes now use 3D models for the text, which sounds like a small thing but allows them to really spiff up how each line is presented with special effects (in turn impacting the gameplay, since you have to parse and shoot the text). The 3D modelling in the first person exploration sections remains the weakest point and still looks janky, but my expectation for this sort of game will always be that they put their resources into the characters / writing / mysteries, and all of these are pretty good so far.
This is supposedly the longest game in the series by far (at about 40 hours - twice the length of the first game), so I'll probably be chipping away at it over the next week or more.
I recently saw that the new MMO BitCraft was releasing their source code and gave the demo a try. The gameplay seems pretty solid for a crafting MMO, although performance isn't great even on low settings when wandering anywhere near the first town. Will have to see how the full release goes in a week or so before giving it a full review.
This week we played the first person puzzle game Blue Prince for our podcast on roguelike games
Overall we really liked it! Very innovative merging of old school point-and-click adventure games with deckbuilding randomization mechanics. I think if you’re remotely interested in either, you’ll have a lot of fun with Blue Prince.
My main criticisms are twofold: RNG and note taking. I think the complaints about the games RNG are valid. I tested some nexus mods that give you a bit of help with rerolls and it helped immensely. You can bend the randomization to your will a little bit, but I don’t think you’re given enough meta progression tools to counter it.
A major part of the game is taking notes yourself in an actual physical real world notebook. This is fun to compare notes with others, but if you think you have a solution to something and it turns out wrong, it could be days until you find out by either someone else telling you or looking up the answer in the wiki.
The Outer Wilds has a genius system of in-game reference manual design that helps to keep your focus and guide you along the main quest and story. If something like that existed for Blue Prince, it would help me a ton. My podcast cohosts had no problem with many of the puzzles, so it’s likely a me thing, though.
In the end, I had a great time with Blue Prince. It definitely plays better as a “two brain game” where you can turn your steam deck screen to the person next to you on the voice and ask “what is this painting?” I like the cutscenes, art direction, and narrative a lot. I just sort of wish there was more of it.
I’m excited to see devs take this formula of randomized building design and apply it to other genres like survival horror or classic dungeon crawls like Legend of Grimrock. I think there’s a lot of potential to run with the formula and open up new gameplay styles from this, so kudos to Blue Prince for innovating it!
Jumped back into Enderal with both feet. Just got to Ark and am ready to start exploring new areas; I'm focusing on quests and areas I never got to in previous playthroughs.
Two or three days ago, I finished playing all five Super Bomberman games for the Super Famicom (SNES) that I bought during a trip to Japan last year.
(Almost) all of them were amazing, sincerely it makes me feel bad how Bomberman is not as highly praised as some other classic franchises.
For the record I only played the first one back when I was a kid, it was one of the best games to play at the arcades1 for the multiplayer experience, then a few years later I managed to finish it on an emulator when I had my own PC.
The games mostly follow the same formula, but add enough changes for them to be separated games.
I can't say if I'll be able to rate them properly, since I played them one after the other and I didn't have enough time to "marinate" them in my gaming-taste-buds, but here it goes:
In my opinion, it has the best soundtrack but it lacks diversity in the songs, if you play it for the first time that will not be a problem thoug.
[1]: In my country, we did not have real arcade machines but homebrew ones made with a regular CRT TV, and a console built into a cabinet (SNES in my days).
Normally the games were homebrew cartridges with around 10 or so games to have a more diverse pool of games. The most common ones were, (of course), Super Mario World, Donkey Kong, MK3 Ultimate, Megaman X, International Super Star Soccer Deluxe, Top Gear, Aero Fighters, and Puzzle Bubble (Bust-A-Move), but you could find more obscure games like Congo's Caper and Dragon Ball Z: Super Butōden, some of the obscure games where in Japanese, but that didn't stop us from playing them, just like it didn't stop play the rest of the games that were in English.
Instead of using coins for lives like in real arcades, the coins were used to extend the time we could control the system, each 50-cent coin gave us around 5 minutes or so of gameplay.
Back into Blue Prince! Loving the "you don't have to keep putting the codes in" update. I had a very productive few runs netting me the Trophy of Sigils
Room 46 content
I opened the secret panel too, but nothing about the deed and will strike me as a "clue" at this point. Seems like lore, same as the letters.
Even deeper spoilers
I've gotten pretty far into the tunnel and am now faced with a big blue holly door and I am stumped. Probably gonna let that one be for now while I work on the chess board and whatever the hell the CASTLE thing on the wall is. Also still working on Shrine donations to get the Monk blessing so I can mess with that.
I'll probably try some challenge runs too since I'm filling the trophy case pretty well. (But I'm not 100% certain how to activate those)
I just finished my playthrough of Hollow Knight. Many years late, but still in plenty of time for Silksong. What a beautiful game. I hope everyone who wants to is able to experience it. It is the first "hard" game I've played in a long time, and he's still got some gamer skills in there, which felt great. I think I did a pretty good job of completing the game, all masks, charms, dream bosses, but decided against doing the pantheons and I forgot about the third coliseum. Maybe I'll do that today as a final hurrah. Either way, spectacular game, one of the best I've played.
I've been playing a lot of Fuser lately. Crazy that almost everyone I've talked to (myself included) wasn't aware of it until well after it was delisted. I was initially playing it just as research for the music game that I'm making, but at this point I'm definitely just playing it for fun. It's a lot of fun to just do freeplay and be a DJ for a bit. It's also pretty great at parties/gatherings, because people will come over to see what's going on, and then it's super easy to set them up with their own mix and get them started, and from there you can basically just do hot seat Fuser sets. Highly recommend going through the effort to set it up yourself; it's not that difficult!
I'd been back to dabbling with Yakuza: Like a Dragon, I had 25 hours, but now I've added an addition 8 or so and I still love the game and the characters. That said, I don't think I'm necessarily in the mood for what it's offering at the moment and with my limited time to play games, I'm not entirely sure I'll go back to it at the moment.
I also just started (as in, two days ago) Resident Evil 7, as I was feeling in the mood for it's particular style of game. I've started it many times over the years I've owned it, but found it too freaky to make it past the intro. Well, this time I'm at an hour and a half and have made it past the intro and into the house proper. It's still pretty freaky, but I'm doing better with it now. It's funny how much a first person perspective really gets me through; I've played and completed plenty of other RE games, as well as Dead Space and those just don't bother me even in the slightest, but first person, yeah that does me in.
I've also picked up Final Fantasy Tactics on PSX. I've tried a few times in the past, but it never really hit right, but this time I thought I'd do something I enjoy doing when I play retro games: find the Prima strategy guide and put it on my tablet. So yesterday, during a long car ride to visit some in laws, I cracked out my tablet and learned the basics of the game, then grabbed y handheld and finished a few battles, while also finally understanding how the job system and abilities work.
At this point, I'm on the third story battle and getting my ass kicked, so I think I'm just going to wander back and forth for a bit to see if I can get a few of my characters to level 4.
Only adjacent, but I bought a Retroid Pocket 5! It's amazing! I've been splitting my time between Star Ocean Till the End of Time and FE7. And I beat Sonic and the Black Knight a couple of days ago.
I've been trying to get back into Eve Online, especially with the war going on it seemed like a good time.
Unfortunately most of the people I knew back in the day are inactive, and my main activities are a bit opsec, but still having a good time.
The Legend of Heroes Trails in the Sky Trilogy
For those not in the know, the Trails series is a very long running serialised JRPG franchise known for its worldbuilding and narrative. The series is 13 games deep (with at least 3-4 more to go depending on who you ask) and pretty much every game in the series requires knowledge from every previous game. The series also has had a fairly troubled localisation effort which made getting into the series as an English player a bit difficult until a couple of years ago where finally every game had an official English localisation and it more or less got caught up to the Japanese releases.
After watching most of a 4 and a half hour video on the first game, which I've owned for a while, I took the plunge into this beloved series. I ended up beating the first game in around 4 days, and immediately bought the second (while playing I had planned to pick up the second during the upcoming summer sale). The first 3 games in the series form the 'Liberl Arc' and focuses on events in the country of Liberl in the continent the games are set in.
The World/Characters
This is by far the most captivating part of the games for me. Estelle, the main character for the first two games, is a very strong character from minute 0 after she dropkicks an injured child for complaining too much. Joshua, the other lead character for the first two, is also a well done character and his situation in the second game kept me hooked throughout the whole playtime. I could gush about the characters in these games for probably longer than a post deserves, but I will say that Olivier is the GOAT and I will not hear otherwise.
Your party throughout the games isn't a constant either, especially in the first game. Outside of the final dungeon, you can't select members for your party as the characters come and go depending on their personal situation. This goes away partially in the second game, and more or less fully in the 3rd. The games also do react to who's in your party and whether they'd actually say anything in situations.
The world itself also feels very realised. A lot of the questions you'd ask about the world and how it functions the game either tells you or shows you. And the game does take its time setting up everything, but it pays off in the long run.
The Combat
So, I'm not the greatest fan of turn/menu based combat. It ends up being something I tolerate rather than something I enjoy about the games. I find that most times it slows the game down as it takes you out of the world to then fight.
The combat in these games are based on an actual grid, with many moves pushing/pulling their targets around. The games also have a visible turn list, where the bigger the action a character takes, the longer until their next action. So, casting a big spell will take a long time to execute, and then take a while until their next action. The counterbalance is that the big spell might one shot the pack of enemies you're fighting. I do generally like the additions to this compared to something more standard (Atlus games are what I'm comparing them to in my mind), and it gives you more to plan/ strategise with.
You progress your character in 2 main ways - Levels and Orbments. Orbments work kinda similar to Materia in FFVII where you slot Orbments into a grid and then the game uses some arcane calculations (that there is an in game wiki for) to figure out what spells (called arts) you get. Slot some big red Orbments, you get a lot of fire arts - simple as. Levels get you other abilities called Crafts. Crafts don't take any time to use, but will deal less damage compared to Arts. These have a nice trade off, but I did find the Orbment system hard to figure until about halfway through the 2nd game.
The Other Bits
These games initially came out in 2004-2007 using pretty old tech, so the graphics aren't the greatest compared to what they could be. However, they're serviceable enough and during some of the cutscenes I was genuinely hyped to see fancy PNGs doing anime battles.
The games run fine (as expected), although I did have a weird issue with the 2nd and 3rd games crashing when my PC switched from light to dark mode in the evening.
These games also have no voice acting, but there is a mod which imports the Japanese dub from the PSP/Vita versions of the games and I'd highly recommend that.
I'd honestly recommend these to anyone with a passing interest in JRPGS, they are also pretty cheap too, you can get the whole trilogy on discount for around £50.
If the graphics or gameplay do turn you off, they are remaking the first game in their current engine, with an English dub to boot. You might have to wait a while if you want to play the whole trilogy this way, and from my experience once you roll credits on the first you are going to instantly be purchasing and downloading the second.
I started playing Dune: Awakening when it launched on June 10th. Managed to snag the character name "Ivermectin" which I believe makes me immune to the Sandworm.
It seems like my kind of game though it is still early days. I'm running it on Linux through Proton without issues so far. It reminds me of Valheim play loop wise. You gather materials to build a base and tools, discover new materials to further upgrade base and tools.
There's an in game story, but I haven't played super much attention to it since I am busy staying out of the sun and harvesting blood for water!