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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.
We bought the kids a Switch 2 for Christmas (I know I'm on the record bitching about it being overpriced. I fully acknowledge my hypocrisy) and I got it ready last night. Preloaded their Nintendo accounts, preinstalled Mario Kart World, synced up the 8bitDo controllers I bought, etc. And then ya know...my wife and I had to test it out to make sure it worked.
So my wife and I played Mario Kart World for a bit. I wasn't immediately wowed by it, if I'm being honest. It certainly is a Mario Kart game and it's about as fun as 8 was. But I never re-purchased 8 for the Switch, so it's also a very nice graphical upgrade for sure. I think the real fun it will come when the kids get to play it and we can do 4-player races. I'm weak-willed, so we're probably going to give it to the kids tomorrow after school at the start of their Thanksgiving break so we can have a huge staycation playing Switch together :)
The 8bitDo controllers are fantastic though. Hall Effect sensors and only $30 a pop. Compared to more than twice that for Switch Pro controllers.
Do it! Kids are only kids for a short while, before you know it they'll be ignoring you and won't want to play anything with their stuffy old parents.
I decided to dive back into Dwarf Fortress now that it's getting regular updates again. My first fortress got hit by a small army of undead in the first year which wiped out the entire fortress before I had even finished digging through the aquifer.
Rather than reclaim it I started another fortress nearby and managed to dig a moat and get everyone inside before the (now much larger) undead army approached. The moat and wall held them at bay this time and I managed to pick most of them off with marksdwarves to end the siege. Unfortunately a couple of them fell to the bottom of the moat out of bow range and since undead cant drown they remained there and kept scaring off any dwarves working nearby.
I finally came up a with a cartoon inspired plan to run a minecart track to the edge of the moat and fill the cart with anvils. Hilariously it actually worked! The undead goblins got squished to bits, although a couple more dwarves also fell in and drowned in the process. Their engraved slabs shall remain to forever remember the =+FUN+=.
Do you have any advice for getting into dwarf fortress? I picked it up a while ago but only played through the tutorial and then a bit after that. It seems like it's something I'd enjoy once I get more into it, but I kinda have no idea what the heck to actually do >_< basically I can't find any short term goals and things of that nature that would slowly improve the fortress, so I got stuck wondering what to do
You do have to set your own goals to some degree since there is no win condition. It can help to focus on a particular industry you haven't done anything with before. Maybe start simple with a fully automated farming and wine production then move onto something like war animals, steel weapons or bees. Or play around with the physics by pumping water or magma through several layers to setup flood rooms for invaders. There's also the more zen-like approach of just slowly building up huge structures above ground. You can also play around with the nobles who will give you demands to produce things they want. Then when they demand something you can't possibly produce in time you can introduce them to the previously mentioned flood room.
If you want to focus more on the story side of things and need some inspiration then definitely check out Kruggsmash. His latest Spearcavern series is quite good.
If you get hung-up on the basics then take a look at BlindIRL's tutorial series. The official wiki is also invaluable.
I played a few games of Magic: The Gathering in the last week, and there were two that were potentially of interest, maybe even for people who don't play Magic.
The first interesting game, I was playing a deck called I'd rather not play which is all about doing a particular combo. There is a card called Lethal Vapors that allows you to skip your next turn, and there's a card called Teferi's Protection which basically stops you from being interacted with in the game until your next turn. You cast the "I'm outta here until next turn" spell, and then activate the "skip my next turn" ability an arbitrarily large number of times (I chose 273 trillion). To cap it off, you need a way to get rid of the Lethal Vapors so everyone else can't do it. I managed to do all of those things. This leaves the remaining players to figure out how they can survive for that many turns. Info for non-magic players: you draw at least one card every turn, you have 99 cards available, and you lose if you can't draw a card, so they have to figure out some way to get their cards back into their draw pile so they can redraw them. I did not end up winning, but it was pretty funny to see everyone switch from mostly leaving me be because I seemed non threatening to trying to figure out collectively how to deal with a bullshit game problem.
I played another game with a deck called The Untouchable, which is a fun one to pull out with new people, because the commander (a special card you have access to in a special zone) is Phage who has an ability that says "When Phage enters, if you didn’t cast it from your hand, you lose the game." It's notable that the command zone is not your hand, so for people who do not know, it seems like a game where you have build a deck that says "when you cast your main card that you build your deck around, you lose". I did stress to them in the pre-game discussion that if this creature hit them, they lose the game, but two people were like "whatever, you can't get it on the board". My brother was the fourth player and also tried to explain to them that it would be problematic. Relatively late in the game - after one player was already out - through tricks and chicanery, I did manage to cast the general and not die, and then my brother cast a card that let him control how I attacked and how other people blocked, and he took out the other player. Then, on his own turn, he stole my general and hit me with it and took me out.
edit: this is probably mostly aimed at @streblo - I know there are more people into M:TG here, but their usernames elude me
I used to play Magic, and I've got to say: I seriously love your rather not play deck. I have at least one friend that 100% would have played that deck with boundless joy. At least until the rest of us all included alternate win conditions in our own decks that don't need you to lose, just not win.
My early forays into unconventional win conditions largely revolved around Donate and either Illusions of Grandeur or Delusions of Mediocrity alongside some kind of enchantment bouncing/disenchantment.
Oh, I love all of those cards - I have both illusions and delusions in a Zedruu deck that gives people things like this that they don't want, and also Nine Lives which you give to someone in response to putting the last incarnation counter on, and they instantly lose.
I've never played Magic, but that card combination sounds pretty hilarious (and incredibly evil). Suddenly, the other players have to survive the heat death of the universe.
Ha, yup that's exactly it. It's almost funnier that it ended with one guy saying "by the way I survived the heat death of the universe, just to kill you."
Cool decks! I'm jealous as I haven't played in person magic in a while.
I assume you need a Grand Abolisher type effect here, no? Or they can just activate Lethal Vapors 273 trillion times in response to you removing it?
This is the ultimate "I'm going to go make a drink, you guys figure it out" combo. :P I guess they are pretty much forced to play it out if anyone has a 'win the game' card or an infinite that can keep them alive?
Yea, that tracks. I'd probably hang onto the clone effect in my opener too if I was up against Phage.
The easy way to do things is with Grand Abolisher, but you can also get rid of the Lethal Vapors in a way that people are unable to respond to, using something like Auratog which has "Sacrifice an Enchantment" as part of the cost. So you cast Teferi's protection and hold priority, activate your Lethal Vapors and arbtrary amount of times, and then (still holding priority), activate Auratog's "Sacrifice an enchantment: Auratog gets +2/+2 until end of turn". Because the sacrifice is part of the cost of Auratog's ability, the Lethal Vapors is then gone, and other people cannot activate it. The super style option is to use Teferi's Care because that just feels like a nice interaction with Teferi's Protection.
You can also Trickbind your last Lethal Vapors activation, or use something with Split Second that removes it.
In this game, one player had Blue Sun's Zenith which is actually a pretty common card in our meta, so he basically could have everything at his disposal, because he could loop through his deck and continually cast that for X = 0 and draw no cards, but return it to his library.
I didn't realize until after we had started, but my brother was playing a joke deck that he made specifically to play at my sister's house, because they have a small table. So he made an Ur-dragon deck, but the general is nonsense because he has no permanents other than lands. He also swaps out his normal playmat for a small mousepad when he plays it. So I ended up losing against a joke deck, and maybe almost more painful was that I actually had a Homeward Path in my hand and could have played it for land drop on my previous turn and thus avoided the Insurrection that he played.
Ah well, it was a hilarious way to die.
That's amazing haha. Unsolicited holiday gift idea for him.
Ha, that's an awesome idea, thanks!
I've been all over the place this week, trying all sorts of new games while keeping up with the old ones.
ARC Raiders continues to be fun. I'm into it, but not too into it, which I think is the right amount. I mostly play free loadout, which allows me to play risk and worry-free. I had a blast in Stella Montis this week, where we were cornered in a room by three different groups and managed to beat all of them. Things usually don't go our way, but in that instance it did. I was a bit upset about not being able to get the recording because I was testing the game on my new Linux setup and forgot to enable the Steam recording feature.
In a similar vein, I gave Escape from Duckov a go, and it's such a fun experience. I'll probably play it more because I can do so at my own pace and it's single player only.
I got a bit bored of Megabonk, so I gave BALL x PIT a chance. It made me think about the way games are being made these days. Why does every single game need to have talents and buildings and farming and all that? It's a fun game, and the base mechanics don't feel oppressive, but I still can't help wondering whether I'm playing the game the right way.
Lastly, I played BeamNG.drive for the first time. I'm not the biggest fan of driving games in general, but this one's so much fun with all the ways you can mod it. I've been looking for a calm driving game to occupy myself with while watching a video or listening to a podcast, and this certainly scratches that itch.
I think this has a lot more to do with the kinds of games each person actually looks for rather than the gaming landscape as a whole. For people looking for games with action and progression those elements are basically a given since they're very clear upgrades and goals for players to work towards. For someone that's interested in a completely different genre, like very casual cozy or puzzle games, these things rarely show up or if they do they're never the main focus.
Free loadout is good if your stash is empty and you don't have seeds to buy yourself basic crafting mats. Otherwise it's better to craft yourself a minimal kit so that you have at least one safe pocket and never come back home empty handed.
If I'm running a free loadout and I loot a purple item (or a blueprint!) that "worry-free" run is instantly turning into a survival horror.
I'm still deep into The Witcher 3 - Wild Hunt. I've posted before about how this passed me right by when it originally came out, and holy hell, what a great game. I don't think I need to go into details on a game with the reputation this one has. It's just damn good.
I'm also playing through Grand Theft Auto 4 on PC, using the fusionfix mod to make it pleasant on modern systems and to restore a lot of the stuff that didn't originally make it to the PC port from the consoles. It still holds up rather well.
Aside from Backlog Bingo entries, I decided to start up Cobalt Core again.
It's been so long, that I didn't even realize my current playthrough was on the third zone, or final zone, which is the furthest I've gotten. And that I apparently had a banger deck. I was halfway through the sector when I came back. So like 3 or 4 battles til the end of the zone. There was an elite enemy that had A LOT of hull and shield, which I thought was unusual, so I started thinking, "...Am I getting close to the end here?" Beat it pretty easily though. Then like two fights later, I got to the zone boss and it had even MORE hull and shield! It was pretty clear I was at the end at that point. That took me a bit and I thought I was going to lose near the end of the fight, even though I had gotten the enemy ship down to very low hull. But on the last draw, the right set of cards popped. So anyway, I started blastin'...and I won! First time that I finished a loop!
Afterwards, I got to see a teeny bit of the backstory. I learned that if I wanted to see the other tidbits of story on how the crew got here, I'd have to do it, I think, 17 more times, including with a character I don't even have yet! So we'll just save those for another day...
Million Depth
This is a pretty interesting game that tries to both be a roguelite and have an interesting storytelling. Overall I enjoyed it even though I have some issues with certain elements (you can refer to the review I posted on steam for more). Also, the music is fantastic. I can still recommend it despite some flaws.
Factorio
I am once again growing a factory, but this time with some mods! Since the release of space age, the community created a whole bunch of fun mods including adding new planets (and a moon) and more uses for crushers, among other cool things.
...I haven't actually made it to any other planets or moons yet, but I do have a space platform so that should be coming up soon. Once I solve the iron situation that is (oh my god I'm making like 1/3 of iron that I need it's awful). The crushers are really cool though.
I cannot stop playing The Bazaar. I don't typically even like deck builders like Hearthstone so.. it's been interesting. The game doesn't seem to have a large community yet but I am also very absent from online spaces, too. Jules, the new hero is a ton of fun to play and has ruined my sleep schedule. I can't wait to get home and resume my game from last night!
I haven't played in a while, the 20 dollar per hero thing kind of scares me off. I watch kripp play it and it seems pyg is in a bad spot, he and Vanessa are my two favs. I liked one weapon Vanessa builds but I have a feeling I'd have to stick to a burn build with vents and stuff like that.
I'm hoping they'll eventually make in-game ways to gain heroes, their monetization has shifted so much since alpha that it's not out of the realm I hope
that's fair criticism. the $20 per hero is very steep and would price me out if they had not been gifted to me. pyg is.. my mortal enemy so i can't say much about where he is at, either. i am too casual and too low in rank for it to be any type of noticeable :(
Dying Light: The Beast
Zombies, gore, puzzles, loot, parkour, not bad. I'm having fun w it. The scenery is really great, but my TV is lookin real old these days. The blacks aren't black enough for a dark game like this! The story is alright, and the voice acting makes me cringe sometimes, but it's really fun to smash things and then artfully run off on top of buildings and swing from lamp post to pipe to rooftop.
And
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
Good lord this game is gorgeous. It immediately made me think of the day when I'll be able to put a full suit on, or maybe some kind of chip insert to experience worlds like this one. I think because we're coming to the end of a console cycle, I'm starting to see the cracks in everything out there, and wish the "next gen" graphics were actually that. I think this might be the closest to it, and I'm only an hour in. I love anything these folks make, so I'm excited to see how it ends up. The written notes and articles etc, are really well written too.. I put the camera on Cinematic, and I'm playing the movie. It's amazing.
This will seem like a pretty lazy comment, but it’s only because I’m at a loss for words. I’m definitely open to any discussion though. I recently finished Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.
I had my doubts in the first couple of hours of playing it, especially when seeing some of the low-budget jank. But the game has so much heart & craft in it, that I could easily overlook any small flaws.
I have been gaming for 30 years, through every genre on various platforms. This might honestly be the best game I have played. Definitely one of the most memorable stories in visual media.
I loved it when I played it. I’m so glad I picked it up, and highly recommend it to anyone considering it.
Also one of the first games I’ve actually “finished” in a while (I tend to hit my skill ceiling in games pretty early, or run out of time before something else comes up and I forgot what I was doing in the game and struggle to get back into it).
The combat system was fun, the story was really good at keeping me engaged, the music was great, and the voice actors & motion capture actors were phenomenal.
Recently begun with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. With English interface but French VA as I've been learning French anyway so that's a plus. I like it so far! It feels like it mixes JRPGs with more western-style games somehow, along with a beautiful melancholic, unusual apocalyptic setting - which admittingly I'm a sucker for.
I'm also still addicted to Hades 2 despite, aside from a few Chaos trials, having finished nearly everything to do. It's soooo good.
Since all the hype and positive reaction to Silksong, I decided to pick Hollow Knight back up. Not sure why I didn’t finish it when I was playing it originally, but turns out I was pretty close to the end of the game (at least the first ending). I’m not aiming to complete it, just to get the true ending, then I can justify playing Silksong!
Yeah, this game is so good. The visuals, soundtrack, and overall atmosphere are top notch, and the combat is terribly satisfying. My main issue with the game is I don’t quite like the feel of controlling the Knight - moving around and platforming in general feels fairly light and floaty, and I find it somewhat unsatisfying. As a platformer fan in general, I suspect this is somewhat of a general Metroidvania problem, in that the movement has to be reasonably optimised for combat, and this comes somewhat at the expense (in my opinion) of the feel outside of combat. But overall I am extremely enjoying my return to this game, and look forward to playing Silksong when I’m done.
Backpack Brawl saw the release of a new hero. Hob Gang is honestly a pretty shit amalgamation of multiple different hero playstyles. Their main weapon is a blowdart which can fire darts that have limited uses (basically Sage's ammo gimmick but worse), their unique bags have different effects based on whether you're going a DPS or armor build (building for armor is basically like playing Ronan but worse), and they have a Heist mechanic where you need to craft particular items and place them next to a Heist card to unlock new items, which can unlock random items that would otherwise be exclusive for a different hero. Whereas I had managed to consistently attain flawless victories with Pepper (the last hero, whose chef playstyle was pretty OP), Hob Gang has given me some pretty bad runs, which is not what you want in low Bronze League.
BALL x PIT is a game I wish I could have sank more time in while I was in Exmouth for a long weekend, but a combination of shit hotel wi-fi, me having to clear the download cache on my Steam Deck and me forgetting to charge the damn thing meant I only got about 3 more hours in. I'm currently on the Fungal x Forest (4th level) and found the game to have serious difficulty spikes. The game's characters also aren't built equally. The Repentant and Embedded are ridiculously overpowered, whilst the Warrior, Itchy Finger and Empty Nester are pretty shit by comparison.
A game about digging a hole
Exactly what it says on the tin. You buy a mysterious house advertised to have treasure buried in the backyard, pick up a shovel and start digging. The entire loop of the game is digging further down, selling the stuff you dig up for funds to recharge your shovel / jetpack (that you use to get back out of the hole) and purchase further upgrades before heading back out to dig again.
The game remembers all the deformation to the backyard as you dig your hole, so I was expecting it to get a bit wobbly as the hole got deeper, but remarkably it only crashed once. Saving before you head out is very fast, so I didn't lose any progress.
Short but fun game that only takes a few hours to run through.
I switched to a phone with a 120hz display earlier this year and this week, I had a light bulb moment - wait a minute, don't they also make monitors with high refresh rates?
Up until now, I've been doing my PC gaming on my old Dell Ultrasharp, which is a good work / production monitor but is very much not a gaming monitor. I picked up an entry level gaming monitor (for about half the price of my current monitor!) which does 180hz and HDR and it feels like a huge upgrade in every regard. Final Fantasy VII Remake looks fantastic and manages to push about 80-100fps on my potato GPU, and even Windows feels more pleasant to use. Definitely worth looking into if you're still using an old monitor but have hardware that could push more than 60fps.
Side note on FFVII Remake in particular:
Lifting the frame rate cap above 60fps caused the game to start crashing a lot more. Diagnosing the problem became a whole side quest of its own, as people seem to have problems with it crashing for every conceivable reason under the sun (with a correspondingly broad range of potential solutions to match).
Ultimately, I managed to track down the problem to my GPU being factory overclocked. FFVII Remake is made on Unreal Engine 4 which for some reason really dislikes this and will crash the game if your GPU is hauling hard on a scene and unresponsive for longer than it likes. Luckily, I had run into the same problem with Rain Code (also UE4) and knew that I could solve it by underclocking using MSI Afterburner. Sure enough, it now runs rock solid even at max settings!
Hopefully helpful to anyone else who runs into the same problem with UE4 games and similar hardware.
Windows did a thing and unbeknownst to me set my refresh rate from 240 back to 60hz and the entire time I was wondering why my PC felt sluggish. It took me a while to figure it out because I didn't see it change the monitor settings but it was just wrong.
In other words: enjoy that refresh rate, it's a quality of life change that's more impactful than you realise.. until you go back to 60hz.
I rolled credits on Hades II and did some progression afterwards as well. This is my personal game of the year. It's just so well crafted and lovely. It's exactly my kind of game and I love the gameplay, the characters, the story, all of it! I'll continue going back to this for a time. I do need to finish up the list of fates, which requires quite a bit more progression.
I also picked up Megabonk on a whim. I had heard of it when it came out and knew it would be my kind of game, I was just trying to finish up a bunch of other games I was halfway through. I can confirm this is also a fantastic roguelike. I think it being 3D is adding a lot for me over vampire survivors or the like. It feels a bit like Risk of Rain 2, I love it. So far, I've had quite a few varied builds, so I'll also be coming back to this one for a while.
I also rolled credits on Star Wars Outlaws. Yet another fantastic game that I played recently. I didn't play this game on release, so I can't say if the internet chatter was accurate at that time, but by the time I started playing this this year, I really don't understand all the hate it got. The immersion is excellent and it's one of the most "star wars" feeling star wars games. It really brings me back to the early 00's lucasfilm games. It feels like you're living in the world and while the stealth and combat are systems you've seen before in other ubisoft games, I think they're done well enough in this for it to be a great experience if you're okay with open world games. I do heartily recommend this to star wars fans.
I then started Lies of P this week as I've been in a soulslike mood. I'm only about four hours in, but the game feels crisp so far and is scratching the souls itch. I'm not a fan of victorian steampunk settings at all, but the gameplay is good enough for me to keep going.
On a whim, a friend also invited me to play Elden Ring with the seamless co-op mod. We've both played the game a bunch (me for 100 hours and my friend for 900), so we kind of already knew what builds we wanted to do and in the last 7 hours, we went from game start all the way through killing Malekith before I called it a night for myself. We only have three main boss fights left, though we are also going to do the DLC and I want to do Malenia. But still, even though I know speedrunners can do all main bosses in an hour solo, I'm proud of my friend and I for absolutely wrecking the game tonight. The most attempts we needed on any boss was two (on multiple). We otherwise downed most of the bosses on our first attempt, lol.
Same! Took me a while since I'm bad at the boss battles, but I managed. Great fun, and the music is /so/ good.
Finished Split Fiction. It's a very creative game, looks great, and until the end it keeps mixing up the mechanisms. Recommended for that. It's a bit long, but the story stays interesting enough (unlike the game before this, about the parents).
However, it gets pretty hard sometimes, I wouldn't want to play this with a 7 year old. Some bosses are tricky, and some jumping puzzles are not easy.
The networking code is unbelievably bad, I don't know who said "yup, done, ship it", but it's unacceptable. The status of the world on my screen is very different of that of the other player. I can rotate something so that it's 90deg for me, and for the other player, who is standing next to me, can have the thing rotated at 180deg. Which usually doesn't matter, but sometimes you have to sync things for puzzles. We generally just laughed about how bad it is. Sometimes it was enough to shout "go!" to the other player, even though their local state made no sense, but it worked for the other player. However, some puzzles were unplayable, and we got through those with some actual remote-play-together sessions, since nothing else worked. That's just not good enough.
And finally it's published by EA, which is now related to some people I don't want to give money, but that happened after I bought the game.
It's really too bad, since parts of the game really are amazing.
I picked up Europa Universalis 5 - it's fun, but I think I'll wait for a few more patches before I really dig in. In the meantime, I also finally took the plunge and got the Roads to Power and All Under Heaven DLC's for Crusader Kings 3. I really, really enjoy playing landless adventurer.
My first game with one, I started in 867 as a Persian Muslim explorer in Indonesia. I had to restart a couple of times due to poor choices leading to sudden death, and I also I realized I would never be able to get a wife unless one of my starting companions was a woman. That out of the way, I spent the next 30 years roaming SE Asia and China, amassing wealth and skills and earning the amazing epithet of "The Wolf-Father". After that time, my character got a bit homesick and also I wanted to make the Hajj before I died. So I trekked across India and Persia to make it to Mecca around 905 or so. After that, I bought some land in Hormuz and settled down to live out the rest of my days. My adventurer died peacefully in bed at the age of 71. Fifteen years later, his grandson would inherit the throne and immediately lose it to a Holy War so.... Now we're adventuring again!
I think this time I'll head north to Russia and maybe visit Europe before heading south to West Africa and then making my way back to Persia where I will (once again) try and stake a claim to some lands.
Have they expanded the map? I don't think there was a China or Indonesia last I played CK3. Maybe I'll do another run once I finish my current Transport Fever obsession. Adventuring sounds fun!
They sure did! It's huge now, and each area manages to feel distinct and unique. Roaming around China was a very different feel for me than in Persia.
Also, another transport fever obsessor! It's one of my favorite games, though at this point I'm just waiting on TF3.
I like TF1 better than TF2, so I'm not super excited about TF3. I'll probably pick it up at some point though, especially if it gets good reviews.
Last night I finished setting up a new long-haul system feeding planks and steel to a goods factory, including iron and coal to the steel mill, and logs to the sawmill. I'll finish it tonight by setting up goods delivery to a nearby city, but all the new trains also created a bit of a traffic jam that I have to look into.
What makes you say that about TF1 vs TF2? Not that I disagree but I'm curious about why.
I've been with the franchise since Train Fever. I feel like that game was probably the closest to the developers' vision, but it wasn't very well received, and since then they've gradually caved more and more to demands of the players. So every iteration has more quality of life improvements, but less soul, and Transport Fever 1 for me hit the sweet spot between vision/soul and QOL.
What do you consider the soul of their vision?
Imo my biggest complaint about TF2 vs 1 was that they dumbed down industry. It feels like a much more linear game in a weird way.
Also the music from TF1 slaps.
Ultimately though, it isn't anything I can't fix with mods and I like the slightly updated visuals and extra themes. I'm optimistic for TF3 though I recognize I might not be thrilled about it from the get go. Luckily I'm a patient gamer that can wait for a few patch cycles.
Industry is a good example; it's simplified and streamlined, which makes the game more accessible, but doesn't feel quite right. But it's hard to pinpoint specific things, the whole game just feels slightly off.
Age of Empires 2. I've been playing the HD edition from 2013 with my 8-year-old son since it runs better on my old PC laptop he's using to play, but I normally play the Definitive Edition with my friends, which has even more updated mechanics, civs, etc. HD still rules though. Playing AOE2 with him has been such a joy because it's pretty much my favorite game of all time (I also watch some pro games), or at least I struggle to think of any other game I've consistently put as much time into over the course of my life, starting with the original AOE release in 99.
I played a ton of AoE and AoE2 as a kid, but when Warcraft 3 came out, with that custom game browser, that became my all time number one and still would be today if blizzard hadn't completely ruined it all with their half-assed remake.
For some reason, I was having the itching desire to 100% Portal 1.
Little did I know what I got myself into. The advanced testing chambers were simple enough, and the least portals challenge was definitely do-able with a guide.
The least steps and least time challenges however would probably take me weeks/months to complete however. I did get gold medals for 2 of the 6 for each of those challenges, and then admitted defeat and used no-clip on the console to pass the rest of the areas. This is definitely one of the harder challenges I've ever played in a video game.
I now just need to get the hidden radio transmissions, and I will finally 100% the game (although it is not legitimate because I cheated for half of the challenge rooms)
This wasn't meant to be a review of the game, because there's not much I can say about how great this game is that hasn't already been said in the 18~ years it has been out.
Those time and step challenges were annoying but totally doable following a guide like the portal one was. It doesn't take that much time as you're thinking.
A recently released game called Cleared Hot. It's a super fun, very arcadey helicopter shoot em up. You can get a heap of different helicopters and weapons for them, but so far I've enjoyed the starting 'little bird' the most. It's in early access and it would be great to have more (maybe even randomly generated) levels, but it's an absolute blast to play and replaying the missions with different tactics is quite fun.
Oh I was looking at this. I'll give it a bit more time to cook.
About two weeks ago I finished Digimon Story Time Stranger. It has some good parts, some weak parts and some bad parts. The story itself is pretty solid and the locations in the digital world are distinct, though the human world's locations are quite forgettable. The digimon themselves look great. A lot of quests don't have any voice acting, even some main story quests are completely silent which is bizarre. The game's side quests are quite weak, some are just "Go here and talk to a guy". I think the worst part of the game is its UI. For example the keybind for the full screen map is Right Shift. Renaming a digimon is a hassle. Using the digifarm is a hassle (You can improve a digimon's stats at the farm like its speed or defense), thankfully you're not forced to use it. I think all the interfaces for interacting with your digimon could have been streamlined into a single pane of glass. Also the game will censor the names you give to your digimon even though this is a single player game and the censoring is language specific.