Started playing Crusader Kings 3 again. I can't seem to quit my beloved Haesteinn of Montaigu. He's just so versatile. My current save had him sail to the Mediterranean and conquer the islands east of Spain. I had big plans to keep it simple and play tall, but a Viking's gonna Viking, so I decided to conquer much of the eastern coast of Spain.

This was going quite well as I integrated cultures and was pretty loose with religion. But then I foolishly allowed a Spaniard Vassal to retain his duchy post-conquer and he grew in power and he's been a thorn in my side since. His lands grew rapidly without me realizing it, so I worked quickly to placate him. Gold, friendship, and lowered taxes quickly removed any thoughts of independence from his mind, but then he died and his son was pissed. I managed to stave his lust for freedom off for a while, but then my dear Haesteinn died and his son was a total loser. Instant civil war.

The downside to being a Viking far from home is that allies are few and far between, unless you give in to peer pressure and convert to Christianity. Which on principle alone, I will not do. There's a place for Norse paganism in the Mediterranean, dammit! So anyway, what's the son of a Viking to do when everyone's angry and you've no allies? I may just give up on Iberia entirely and just keep my islands. Go back to playing tall and see what I can do with my islands. Although Sardinia's looking awfully unprotected at the moment...

Rimworld: Odyssey just released and I've been playing the crap out of it. Just passed 400 hours in game, so I know I'm basically a Rimworld casual lol.

The first game I started on the expansion was a vampire run, I decided to set up shop on one of the new special locations on the globe map (ancient mines) and it didn't work out too well. Started over playing a research team in the desert at the intersection of an ancient highway and a river, and this one is going great.

I'm doing Anomaly stuff this run lol, which I actually never did before. Don't think I'm going to build a gravship or go to space this run, maybe if I get bored later.

Fishing is a fantastic addition, makes it so much less fraught to get meat for fancy meals. It would be nice if they had broken it out from hunting on the work assignments though - hunter pawns need ranged weapons while fisher pawns don't.

The river my colony is on experiences seasonal flooding which is so cool, idk if that's new or not.

About half my mods worked with 1.6, including the most important one, RimSaves. I'm missing Haul Urgently (is that the name of the mod? Or does that come from Allow Tool?) Assign Prisoner Bed is another small but nice one that I'm very happy worked.

I was thinking about picking up Royalty and Ideology while they're on sale, but haven't yet. I'm not super jazzed about the Royalty mechanic, and while Ideology sounds fun I can only realistically handle so many mechanics in a given colony.

Avowed (PC Game Pass):
Wrapped the game up this weekend. I did really enjoy my time with it. In particular exploring the environments remains rewarding throughout the game. Creating your build and experimenting with different weapons is fun and pairs well with engaging combat. THe larger storyline is okay, though I can see it being strong for some people. I did in particular like the smaller vignettes from side quests.

But I ran out of steam near the end. This is partly a person thing, I get bored after about 10 hours in 99% of games and my playtime was right about 40 hours. But I guess I finished it? That's a mark of praise even if I felt a bit obligated near the end.

Slitterhead (PC Steam):
A 2025 release that has been on my radar despite middling reviews. It's a chinese action horror game set in a dingy neon city inspired by Kowloon Walled City. You are a disembodied spirit that can possess humans. You have a primal urge to hunt down these creatures called slitterheads. A slitter head also can possess a person but they transform into these big body horror monsters. Do you explore this city learning lore/memories and hunting slitterheads.

What's interesting about the game is how much personlity they give your human pawns, but you are quickly jumping between peopel to use their bodies in your fights with the slitterheads. The concepts echo Humanity (2023) but in a darker, action setting. So far it's delivering. I expect to finish it (time to beat estimated around 20 hours).

Magic the Gathering Online (PC):
I was deep into paper magic back in 2016-2019. I playd a lot of modern and dipped into legacy, standard, and commander. Over the past year a commander group has formed at work. One of the guys was a high level Pokemon guy and he's developed a deeper interest in 60 card magic. This has given me the opportunity to bring out the old decks and introduce him to 2017 modern. Which has consequently reignited my love of this game.

The recent unbanning of Mox Opal inspired me to finish building Lantern Control in paper. But finding games near by is kinda tough with my commute. So I managed to recover my MTGO account and signed up for Cardhoarder's loan program. I spent a lot of this weekend relearning the current modern format, getting decklists and the primary collection loaded into MoxField. It's really scratching the itch and I'm excited to be back in the game.

Still playing Binding of Isaac (Repentance+). Got dead god a while ago, now just playing blue baby runs (+delirium most times) with my favorite character Cain. I love this game so much, crossed 1000 hours in rebirth not too long ago (and idk how many on OG flash), might be my favorite game of all time.

Also picked up some games in the sales, and have been playing the Crash N-Sane trilogy. Given it's a pretty simple game I've decided to try and 100% it, but some of the time trials are actually real difficult and require some precise pathing & timings. Overall fun and easy time-spender, and at $4 it was worth buying over emulating IMO. (Sidenote: weirdly kind of a battery hog on Steam Deck, although tbf I may be spoiled by Isaac which sips almost nothing)

I've been playing a review copy of the basically-a-Zachtronics game Kaizen: A Factory Story! It's been great so far. The puzzle/programming gameplay is great (as expected) and it's got all the hallmarks of the series (histograms, solitaire, story elements, etc). I was especially impressed by the theme, which places the game very squarely in 1980s Japan. It's been a pretty relaxing way to end my day!

As always, you can read the full review on my site: https://david.reviews/articles/kaizen-review/

I got Pico 8 and I’ve been playing a lot of the games. It’s really nice to play short simple games and some are very good and some are nostalgic. There’s an overwhelming number of games but also a lot of articles with recommendations.
I think I’ll create a pico 8 game soon. I’ve made a few things in godot and I like the idea of having more limitations so I don’t spend too much time on it.

I’d appreciate any recommendations especially if someone here has made a pico 8 game.

Some friends and I got sucked back into Warframe for the last few weeks. I hadn't played it in 3 years or so. I enjoyed it a lot back then but stopped because I felt overwhelmed by all of the different currencies, etc. Now that I'm back it all makes sense and managing it all feels way more straightforward. Now I just need to find an easy and simple way to farm plat that doesn't feel too tedious and/or time-consuming. This is easily one of the best free-to-play games I've ever seen. To me there's no predatory push for mtx. Sure, you can spend real money in-game but it's not necessary at all.

I bought a Switch 2 a couple of weeks ago and I've been playing through Mario Cart World with my wife, slowly unlocking all the characters, costumes, and carts. It's been enjoyable, but soon enough we're going to have to start seriously trying the 150cc races, and that'll add some significant challenge for us. Even so, it's fun to play together!

I've also been catching up on Pokémon. I didn't end up ever getting a Switch (1), so I missed out on Gen VIII and IX. Just last night I completed my Galarian Pokédex, and probably just need to breed a few extra 'mon, then my living dex will be complete up through Gen VIII! Only took about 50 hours of play to get caught up there, I'm glad there weren't really any event-locked 'mon that would otherwise be unobtainable, though Meltan and Melmetal were a minor hassle since they need to be transferred over from Pokémon GO which I had dropped years ago.

Next up: Gen IX! I'm kind of stoked to get caught back up with the series, and I hope they end up doing some fun things with the Switch 2 hardware.

After a couple hours of tinkering early last week, I finally had a breakthrough and got DOSBOX Staging working correctly on my Steam Deck so that I could play Might & Magic 4 + 5 - World of Xeen. I could have just added it via Heroic Games (as I own it on GoG) and ran it via Proton to DOSBOX, but it was two layers of emulation and I had some odd issues, so running it on a native Linux port of DOSBOX resolved many of my issues, plus DOSBOX Staging has a built in CRT Shader, which is pretty cool.

Anyway, I've been playing it pretty extensively, finally through the early portion of the game, clearing out the starting town Vertigo and then tackling the Red Dwarf Mines, Witches Tower, The Temple of Yak and even Rivercity (which was pretty easy after the Temple). My party is level 10 and sporting some pretty decent gear now and mostly kicking ass, though I have run into a Lava Golem in the North-East who, while we eventually killed it, knocked two of my party members unconscious and broke all their weapons, so I'm not quite ready for that yet. At this point, I'm kind of just exploring and seeing if I can find some more quests and level-up my party some more, as I'd like to go defeat the Master Lich in the Temple of Yak, as he is the only thing left in there and he was kicking my ass. Eventually I'll finish things up and try to defeat the final boss of Clouds of Xeen and then move on to the Darkside of Xeen (the other side of the planet, thus composing the World of Xeen).

One thing that has kind of enhanced the fun for me is avoiding the Internet for walkthroughs and tips. GoG has the Clue Books for both games, which I loaded onto my tablet and have been referencing along with the maps and manual. Whenever I need a hint or a tip, I look to my Clue Book and not the internet (with the exception of Status Effects, which are missing from the Clue Book) and it's just been...nice. The Clue Book is like a guide or a walkthrough, but it somehow feels more freeing to play it in such an old school way than to be bound to wiki's and GameFAQs.

I've actually enjoyed it so much, I went and found the Clue Book in physical format on eBay. It was only $25 (in comparison to many other Guide Books, such as for Dragon Warrior 3 and Final Fantasy Tactics which can be up to $100) and it's been fun to have with me instead of my tablet for referencing when I need. I ended-up going and buying the Clue Book for Darkside of Xeen for when I eventually need it, which was a little more expensive at $40, but I got the map for the Darkside with it as well.

That's all I've been playing. The game itself has been very fun and addicting for me; it's really hitting just right for me right now, where it's pretty much purely gameplay, minimal story. I had actually put down Kingdome Come 2 a couple of weeks ago, because while I love the game, I just didn't feel like doing the legwork of talking to all the NPCs, listening, etc, etc. I'll get back to it eventually, but Might and Magic is just what I need right now.

I have reacquainted myself with Satisfactory because my son wanted to play some more, so we have been playing some with no build costs and all the tiers unlocked right from the start. We have mostly been using it to artistically recreate buildings that we like, including a "to scale" CN Tower. We're going to get started on the actual factory some time soon though.

I also started a new playthrough on my own. Started in the desert, and I made a spreadsheet to keep track of factory requirements

Satisfactory is a solid game. I really enjoy it.

I've been playing No Place Like Home. It's sorta like My Time In * but farming more than crafting. Like 90% of the gameplay is mining piles of trash everywhere mixed in with occasionally tending your animals and plants. And there's some background story about finding your dad but really the point is to explore the map, which requires being able to unlock upgrades, which requires doing missions and growing the new plants.

It's rough honestly. It plays like it's early access and it's utterly lacking in quality of life features which makes inventory management and the daily chores really really painful. Even things like the hitbox/targeting things is non-sense; you don't look at them, you just move your cursor randomly and move around a while until you get the right hint text displayed when you're aimed 40 degrees away from the thing you're selecting. If you die you teleport to your bed the next day and get a pop up saying it saved but it's bugged and, at least on PC, it creates the save file in the wrong place so loading doesn't use that save file. And the one thing that really bugs me is that you meet a handful of villagers scatter throughout the map but it doesn't give you a way to see their name after the first introduction and some of them appear in multiple places but with different stuff. So you'll get a quest saying to visit "Rudy" and hope you remember who "Rudy" is and hope you visit him in the right map. God it's rough.

But it's an enjoyable mindless time-waste that gives a nice sensation of "numbers go up" as you build out your farm. It's apparently made by a miniatures maker who got into tabletop games and then got into video games.

Parcel Simulator

I finished it yesterday. It was really fun automating the whole process then I decided that I wanted to get all the achievements, which included getting a million dollars. This ended up with me just leaving the game on for hours at a time just going on occasionally to go to the next day and that was rough. Just waiting for the money to go up and each day took like 10 mins real time to process all the packages.
I'm sure I could have spend the time making the place even more streamlined because I had a little buffer on some of the inputs so they still ran for a few minutes after the day ended. But it was way too much effort to do when my system already worked pretty much perfectly lol.
Anyway I really liked it, it's a fun little automation game but it's quite short.

PEAK

I got this randomly because my friend and I wanted to try it randomly. We played like 2 hours and found it really fun! Not many thoughts so far but watch this space for next week.

Umamusume: Pretty Derby is like crack; I am genuinely so invested in the success of the anime horse girls I am training.

A mobile gacha game? Sure, and it comes with many of the flaws of the genre. But I can stay competitive without paying a cent, and the weird roguelike-social sim-sports management-team building gameplay combo is incredibly addicting

I just picked up Haste and wow! It's a blast. It's like Trials meets Sonic. And the music is just so much fun. Great buy from the steam summer sale.

Was looking for a game to fill the gap between Super Mario RPG (which I finished last week - very solid!) and DK Bananza. I eventually settled on Splatoon 3.

I finished the singleplayer some time ago and really loved it; it feels almost like a spiritual successor to Super Mario Galaxy. The multiplayer always intimidated me as I know these games usually get really sweaty and people have been playing for years at this point. However, I dipped my toe into Salmon Run (sort of a Horde mode) and it really feels like the best of both worlds. I've fallen totally in love with this game and can't wait to be there Day 1 for Splatoon 4.

My only problem is that my friends are all pretty anti-Nintendo so I have nobody to play with :( I know about LFG discords and whatnot but I really just wanna play and joke around with my buddies and send them Big Man memes (Ay! Ay!)

I'm playing Undertale Yellow due to Deltarune withdrawal. It's... Fine.

They get Toby Fox's sense of humor, especially his cause/effect twists. But it feels like they're really adhering to skeletons of what Undertale's structure looks like, sometimes without the meat or fat. (And there aren't even any skeletons! Yuk yuk.) Like, the fights have had some creative bullet patterns, but I think Fox had a pretty good idea of how to telegraph what's happening, then nail you for slow reflexes, and still make feel like you deserved to get hit. (When Undertale does sucker punch you, it's often for a joke, it's because the character is explicitly sucker punching you, or a character is exerting control and it's for plot reasons.) In Yellow there's some hot bs for certain attacks that made me edit Clover's HP to 99, especially the last lab fight.

Also, the characters aren't bad, but they're not endearingly wacky in the same way. To me it's missing Undertale's and Deltarune's way of sliding into serious tone pretty gracefully. The cast feels more appropriate in OneShot than Undertale, I think? And the chapter structure is played too close to the original, so it makes the middle meat of the game feel pretty predictable. And the environments don't feel quite as natural or reactive as Undertale's.

I can't fault it much for not matching Undertale's music, but it's just not as... hook-y and zany as it could be. Does have some great tracks, though! I love Starlo's music and the Snowdin rearrangement is beautiful.

At this point I'm just playing to see it out. I adore fan work, but when they try to recapture the spark of media it's difficult - more so to do that for a work so close to a particular person's vision. Something in the ending got spoiled that made me interested in it, though, so hopefully they nail that...

I decided to give Far Cry 6 a go since it's been sitting on Game Pass for a while.

Man, what went wrong with Ubisoft games? It feels like 90% of the game is filler and traveling to the many, many waypoints on the map. Normally, I like the freedom of an open world system, but it doesn't make any sense in this game. You can take over a dozen bases and checkpoints in a region and they'll still keep a lonely checkpoint up and running in the center of said region. It feels like there are no consequences to anything, which severely undercuts the immersion that is supposed to come with an open world game.

The gameplay itself is fun, but over time it starts to feel like a chore because there are so many repetitive tasks.

Mario Kart World - After watching the speed run at GDQ and getting secondhand boredom on the straightaways I decided, armed with newfound knowledge of at least two shortcuts I could pull off and the ability to dodge blue shells with the rewind function to give some of the tracks a go again to see if I could get gold in the three knockout tours left.

And I got item spammed, missed a few corners (my fault), and watched the AI effortlessly stunt on my ass leaving me with yet another second place finish. I turned off the game and played a few rounds of Tetris 99. The rubber banding in Mario Kart has always been kind of bad but it's more noticable when the tracks are so long and Wario has a ten second lead on everyone and you can't catch up but meanwhile 12th place is chomping at your heels in 2nd. I dunno, there was certainly some enjoyment to be had in the game but I really don't think it's totally worth the asking price.

Also, beat The Saboteur, Pandemic Studio's last game ever made. On a kick after getting Mercenaries on my phone, I wanted more. I recalled starting this one a few times but never getting far so I booted it up and tried to stay focused. There's a bit too much to do on the map but that made the noise easier to ignore. Not a long game but certainly a fun time.

Having started it in 2018 and left to sit dormant since then, my significant other and myself just beat Cuphead for the first time. Not like anyone hasn't already said it, but the animations in that game are phenomenal. I was also really glad to see that I enjoyed the bosses leading all the way up to the end (as infuriating as they are).

I also recently picked up Spiritfarer: Farewell Edition during the summer sale. Its first hour is mainly tutorial and exposition stuff, but not too painful. Imagine fallout shelter except you're on a boat that you sail to find more dwellers instead of them coming to you. This is yet another game with beautiful animations with very charming characters. I think I have some pent up anxiety or something as I typically wouldn't play a farming cozy game with light combat scenarios. But once you've got the boat navigation and spirit quests/interactions down, the game just kind of flows. Also has co-op where your friend/SO can play as an adorable cat along for the ride.

Am playing Logic Town right now. It's a logic puzzle game that fully exploits your compulsiveness to maintain order; it's basically procrastination for cleaning your room when you should be doing something else on top of that. These puzzles are created on the spot from the game's rather complex algorithm that is able to fully explain itself using a word/icon hybrid language, making for a smooth playing experience that rings of sameness throughout. Hard to put down, even harder to get someone else to appreciate the hard work you put into playing it.

Been playing Peak here and there when we can find a time that works for people. It's a lot of fun. Sucks when some of your team don't want to work together, or make their own decisions without consulting the group or wander off on their own, etc. But that depends more on your group than the game.

If you have people to play with, it's a lot of fun.

Still playing Darktide.

I've been assembling all the narrative scraps you get from playing the Mortis Trials. They're actually pretty interesting and while the story in Darktide is still in the backseat at this point they have me pretty hopeful for the future.

Warframe's latest operation (Operation Eight Claw) is ending soon.
It's all about running the Isleweaver node repeatedly, with no alerts running in parallel.
Fairly sure we could see DE pushing the track early on, it was that much of a slog.
It really wasn't helped by Duviri nodes being 3x longer than regular nodes.

I've also gotten back into Monster Hunter Wilds, the game loop is still enjoyable, although I may have made my wishlist useless by putting every armor I don't have either version of on (I have 230+ entries on it), so just about everyone is a wishlist monster.

Lastly, and this one goes a bit weird, I've gotten the Mythic GM Emulator (2nd edition) pdf, with a bunch of compilations of its companion magazine.
Now, I do (plan to) use it on, y'know, TTRPGs, even if all I've done in one is some light prep because I'm waiting for it's second edition to come out first.
I've done too little to really test the system, and it's not helped by not having a proper TTRPG setup in any way (just installed MapTool but don't use it (to the point I didn't realize it was missing dependecies*), heavily rely on google sheets), or my 3 first adventures being a pair of West Marches Campaign-style stories (instead of a set party, you have a host of characters handling a bunch of stuff), and a retooling of the system to give a boardgame a not-really-legacy-but-that's-the-closest-I-got variant.
(That game is Rallyman DIRT, and I might include GT, but that might wait until I have more stuff for it and*or they rerelease RX first, but it only matters for context)

The thing is, I spent hours so far redoing a bunch of sheets to more easily make characters and use some other homebrews to give the Rallies more personality than just the terrain ratio and setting the vault to do all of that, to no boardgame time yet. And it was enjoyable?
...At least it something I might share with KamSandwich, I guess?

* Technically it was Java/JaveFX missing dependencies, but I found my answer on the MapTool github.

Played about 12 minutes of Umamusume: Pretty Derby because I saw so many YouTube shorts about it, and I really didn't like it at all. It's a gacha game which depicts Japanese racehorses as cutesy anime schoolgirls, and the mere idea of this, or that every race ends with a j-pop idol concert just feels really contrived to me. On top of this, the game's UI looks really bad, to the point where I question if this was originally a mobile game.

Also played more Rocket Knight Adventures: Re-Sparked and made it to stage 3 of the first game. There is already a lot I don't like about it. Sparkster's controls feel too slippery, some of the platforming sections are brutally difficult to the point where I question how people got through them without save states, and some of the screen filtering looks awful, i.e. the stage 1 miniboss you fight near a waterfall just seemed like the screen flashing at me.

Stage 2 had the problem of making you jump precisely between minecarts and avoiding spikes. One slip-up equals instant death.

Then Stage 3 had a lot of instant-death bullshit with rising lava platforms, but at least you could extrapolate where platforms were from the lava's reflections. And then you fight a boss that seemed like a carbon copy of a certain Sonic 3 & Knuckles boss, except this time touching the lava instantly kills you. Perhaps the sequels are better.

Finally, I played the demo of Agent 64: Spies Never Die (months after it was first released) and my hype for the game has honestly died down a lot for this game. Maybe it's the stupid AI, the lack of health pickups, John Walter's low health pool, or the fact that this game is seemingly in development hell with no sign of an upcoming release, but I don't think the game is going to live up to the Goldeneye 007 or Perfect Dark hype.

I've been playing Fallout 76 with my partner. This is the MMO-ish Fallout that came out with very bad reviews, for valid reasons. It is a one-time purchase and not a monthly subscription* if anyone is interested or may have purchased it before.

They recently overhauled the difficulty and it's much more enjoyable. This cannot be overstated. It's now 1000% better, and you can accomplish a lot more, even by yourself.

They also added fishing, which is a little silly but an interesting new thing to do.

I recommend giving it another shot if you've played it before and have it sitting in your library. Might also be worth the cost on sale now.

*There is an optional subscription that gives a handful of benefits, but we don't want to buy in, and we don't have too many issues. The storage limit sucks but now there's less reason to stockpile as much with the changes that have been made. There's also a store where you can spend "Atoms" to get some extras, mostly cosmetics for your character and camp. You get a low amount of these for free while playing the game.

Played Echo and finished it.

The gameplay was interesting, basically you fight copies of yourself, at first the copies can only do basic actions, your actions are copied during a period of time, after that any action you did can also be used by your copies, for example if you shoot someone, now your copies can shoot as well, if you ran, jump, crouch, etc..., which forces you to be strategical about the environment and creates many tense situations, were you have to execute fast decisions or be lucky.

I would also say the game it's not for everyone, unless you like stealth and challenging gameplay that can be a bit repetitive.

Without spoilers, the story is not stellar but definitely not bad and the fractal semi-infite palace was gorgeous.

I have been playing a lot of Final Fantasy VII Remake. This is the second Final Fantasy I have made large progress in - I played the Pixel Remaster of FFI and fell off FFII early on.

The gameplay was not my cup of tea at first, but it has grown on me a lot. It took me a long time to grow on the characters. It doesn't help that I don't like a lot of common anime characteristics - for example a lot of women giggling to show how playful/cute they are. That said by the halfway mark when you are infiltrating a mob boss's mansion the characters have grown on you quite a bit. And this game will always be fondly remembered for the "Nailed it. I know" dialogue between Tifa and Cloud, I haven't literally laughed out loud in a game for a long time but I was almost beside myself laughing at that point.

I am in the second to last chapter and have some complaints, particuarly since I peeked ahead at the next chapter in a guide. The game suddenly is just dumping boss fight after boss fight after boss fight, with bosses having multiple stages. Its not necessarily hard, but it is kind of exhausting. Hoping they give for information about Sephiroth because I know knothing about him other then a) He's the bad guy and b) He kills Aerith in the original game at some point. The pacing is kind of a mess.

Guidus Zero

It's a mixed bag. Like I definitely enjoy the gameplay, it's a real time grid-based roguelite, kinda like Crypt of the Necrodancer without the rhythm and more like a room-by-room roguelike. There's just also a bunch of unpolished stuff/design decisions that makes it hard to really recommend to other people.

Despite that giant bullet list, I'm still having fun because it feels like a good game underneath all that mess. There's basically 4 biomes with 2 floors each and a chest, shop, and boss on each floor. There's 3 playable characters with a choice of 2 character specials and a 2-choice skill tree on level-up.

Crab Champions

My 3 complaints are the lack of in-game codex to say what an item's base stats/stacking do and which portal reward pool has them, the sidegrade unlock gacha only being usable once between runs (though restarting the game bypasses it), and the enemies having perfect tracking/reading your movement inputs which force you mash directions once they start targeting you. Aside from that, it's a fine TPS that's kinda Risk of Rain style with the item stacking, but more kiting and killing everything and getting the item reward after completing the room. Not really sure how to build aside from getting enough damage reduction to not get exploded though, but I'm still trying to get diamond ranks for each equipment piece.