5
votes
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 finished RoboCop: Rogue City a week or two ago and since then, have just been playing Chrono Trigger for the CGA.
Much as I like Chrono Trigger, I'm a little afraid to start something else because I fear it'll take over the little game time I have and I won't end up actually finishing CT. Which I suppose is ok, but I am at least enjoying it enough at the moment that I want to continue.
I've been playing starfield recently and tbh I don't think it's as bad as people say it is. Is it as good as fallout 4 or Skyrim? No. But it's an ok game.
I enjoyed the side/faction quest lines well enough. The main one had so much potential, did so many cool things, but I absolutely hated the ending.
To the point it soured my experience of the whole game. I thought the gunplay mechanics felt pretty good, and a couple zero g gags were neat. But then I followed it up with Cyberpunk, which is a better game in every way.
I felt this way too. I think I put about 80 hours into it when it came out and I had fun with it. It felt like a Bethesda game, which is all I needed or wanted.
It didn't change my life or become my forever game (no Bethesda game has) and that's ok.
I've been playing Hades 2 so much recently. As someone whose wrists physically hurt from playing so much Hades 1, Hades 2 absolutely lives up to the hype. The gameplay is so good. It's just as addictive with even more variety of things to do. I've put too many hours into this game so far and I'm thoroughly pleased
Ditto, and agreed. Supergiant Games has yet to disappoint me.
The only minor complaint I have is that the topside run is a bit too lengthy, IMO. By the time I get to the final boss of the run I'm pretty burnt out from having already fought 3 guardians, and 3 monsters just to get to them. So I have been really struggling to take down that final boss. I beat them once, but have failed quite a few times in a row now, even after I managed to successfully fight my way to them again. I know I will beat the final boss again eventually, but it's been rough going, somewhat frustrating, and feels like a slog... especially now that I know I need to beat them 3 more times before I can progress the story.
p.s. Ironically, a supposedly "negative" Oath of the Unseen (Vow of Denial) has actually been the biggest help for me. By permanently eliminating the 2 other Boons choices from the rest of the run whenever I pick one, it has allowed me to finally start consistently getting more Legendary, Infusion, and Duo Boons... which has made getting to the final boss significantly easier.
(Psst id probably spoiler tag part of this bit, as someone who eagerly awaited the release but didn't follow development the discovery of
Was a big happy surprise.)
But agreed, this game is amazing, it is more of everything that was great about Hades, but further refined and expanded and with so much content, really everything you'd hope for in a sequel. I've only beaten Chronos a few times
and Typhon only once
I finished a Nier Automata I mentioned here a few moths back and I remain ambivalent about the game.
The story and the various perception twists it takes the player through during the various stages of the game is exceptional, but only in the medium not in the wider body of fiction. In my opinion it then fails to be actually good game and so it drags on. As I went through the story I was mostly tired of the gameplay and so it failed to make me very interested.
Also personally I had a large problem with the ridiculous anime like breakdown of 9s. Sometimes less is more and sometimes less is simply better. Generally lot of the elements were unnecessarily garish and absurd.
I think that if it was just very slightly different it could have been one of my all time favorite games but as it is my main impression of it is just mediocre.
The intro made a massive negative impression that never went away. If the game absolutely has to have a long unskipable part right at the beginning that has to be completed without saving then at absolute bare minimum remove any unnecessary portion of it, don't introduce three sequential boss fights.
I don't consider the various camera angle induced gameplay changes bad necessarily but they were far too frequent and far too abrupt. I think more moderation would have served better here.
I actually think the added perspectives on the same events in the second playthrough were neat but again the simple fact of the second playthrough absolutely made the game worse. The third one was not so bad since it was sufficiently different but the first two were effectively identical bar a few differences.
I am not actually sure what changes could be made here to have the same impact. But adding the perspective in the first one would make the game shorter and more concise even if it had negative effect on the overall atmosphere. Perhaps revisiting the battle sites later could have some of the impact.
Started playing PokeMMO a week or so ago. Basically just an MMO version of the GBA/DS Pokemon games. It's neat seeing other players on screen doing stuff, and the game has some increased difficulty and the encounter tables have changed a bit. But that's about it? I don't have any interest in PVP, the buy/sell pokemon feature is a mess...so many Magikarp...and it feels over-powered and against the spirit of the early-to-mid game. Plus you can filter the pokemon list by just about anything but type? Which is annoying.
But all the same I'll keep on playing because it's interesting enough that it's getting me through yet another play of Fire Red.
I've been playing "Subway Builder", a game where you build subway systems in various US cities and see how high your ridership can go. It's decently fun but also fairly buggy for me. I think it's developed by just one guy so it'll take time for bugs to be fixed. As much fun as it is, I'd probably wait a bit for it to be less buggy.
Had some time to kill this weekend so cracked open one of the Zachtronics games I hadn't yet tried: Last Call BBS. Like most Zachtronics games, its focused on puzzles, automation, and programming-esque challenges. However, unlike others from the publisher, this is a collection of 8 smaller games rather than a single puzzle type. I've liked pretty much all of the games thus far, though none of them individually as much as some other Zachtronics games.
I'm not sure if it's the game or me, but I haven't appreciated the story/worldbuilding as much as other Zachtronics games. For all the love these games get for their puzzles (which is extremely well deserved), one of my favorite bits were the quirky ways the narratives are presented. I still have my "Technical Documents" binder from SHENZHEN I/O and zines from EXAPUNKS. That's not to suggest its just the physical materials that make the narrative immersive, but the notes in Last Call BBS just haven't hit the same way.
On that note, anyone have suggestions for other games that make clever use of physical components? The only other one I can think of is the guide from Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes. I suppose those code wheels from old games count, though they weren't really part of the game.