8
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 recently bought a Miyoo Mini Plus, with the main goal being to emulate GBA games on the go. It’s been working great, and I’ve replaced a lot of doom scrolling on my phone with picking up this guy instead and playing some Pokemon or other games.
In particular I’ve been playing Pokemon Emerald Seaglass, a ROM hack for Emerald which visually overhauls the game - it looks great! - and adds various QoL improvements, notably a party-wide EXP share available early and running shoes available immediately with an auto-run toggle. I haven’t really played much Pokemon since Gen 6, so it’s been very fun to re-discover the joy of catching Pokemon and collecting gym badges. The fighting gym was a bit rough however given that my two strongest Pokemon when I arrived were Marshtomp and Marill, who both got one-shot by the gym leader’s Heracross. Fair to say I had to do a bit of grinding to get some ‘mons with more favourable types up to a suitable power level.
I’m also playing Goodboy Galaxy, an indie metroidvania released for GBA and Steam in 2024. This game is really cool because it has a lot of modern design sensibilities, as a modern indie game, but runs on a GBA (or GBA emulator in my case). It looks fantastic for a GBA game, the platforming is satisfying, and has a bunch of cute characters! It seems that the main gimmick of the game is exploring the same area multiple times but with different abilities enabled (due to environmental obstacles which disable either your gun, shield, or jetpack). I guess this effectively triples the map size of the game - since the same area visited with different abilities must be explored differently - which seems like a very smart way to expand the game, given that the constraints on overall maps size are probably quite limited due to the GBA.
I’ve also been spending a bit of time with Apotris, which is a very polished Tetris clone. It’s available on many platforms, not just the GBA, but it seems to be a great way to play the classic brick-packing puzzle. As far as I know it supports a bunch of more advanced customisation features, which is probably important for the Tetris experts, but from my perspective it’s just a version of Tetris that feels great to play.
Seaglass is a lot of fun!!
I also enjoyed Pokemon Gaia, Glazed and Unbound
Another vote for Seaglass. It's just beautiful!
Marathon 2026
Love it. It’s smack dab in the right spot for me. Resources, gunplay, TTK, vibe, etc. I’m worried bungie will screw it up but so far I’m happy. The battle pass is dumb but it’s also just cosmetic.
Actual gameplay is great. Solo/teams/randoms/rook I love it
I've been playing a lottt of Slay the Spire 2! I put in about 25 hours this weekend according to Steam (including Thursday). Finished A10 with Silent and working on some of the new characters now.
I've been really enjoying the improvements they've done so far, it truly feels like a solid sequel to StS. Some of the nerfs on Silent's discard makes me sad, since Calculated Gamble was one of my favorite cards, but with the new Sly keyword, I feel like it was definitely necessary. Bringing back some of the familiar cards but adding more and taking away the broken ones or nerfing them makes a lot of sense. It feels like they've moved some synergies away from the other characters to give them to the new characters, but I think that's fine overall. Necrobinder is really weird to wrap my head around right now, but I've been working on Regent and really enjoying it!
The new relics are pretty fun, some of them seem kinda useless though (the snowflake one and the vambrace one come to mind and probably need buffs), but I've been really enjoying the fact that the boss relics don't really rely on giving energy per turn anymore. I think with the constrained design it makes a lot of the game more interesting revolving around 3 energy per turn.
Outside of StS2, since none of my friends picked it up I've been playing a lot of LoL: Mayhem with them. It's been really fun trying to find broken off meta synergies and I think it's taken over a lot of my league life. I probably won't play anything else since they "solved" arena.
Finished Prison Escape Simulator yesterday. It was so much fun. I don't know what it is about these low budget, silly, simulator games but they have an addictive gameplay loop and this one was a lot of fun. Something about digging a big hole and getting loot and selling it to upgrade your tools/stats. It's simple and highly effective and entertaining.
The only part that sucked was I was doing one of the challenges where you have to do it in one shot and can't save, and had a bug where the guard came back earlier than the timer when I was 80% complete so I had to do the whole thing again. Which takes like 2-3 hours to do in one go
So, around the time of release I picked up Baldur's Gate 3 and proceeded to dump about 80 hours into it, with 60ish on a main campaign and the other 20 spent dicking around rolling new characters and experimenting with classes. I burned out early in Act 3 and hadn't touched it until a month back. With most of the plot forgotten I decided to go fresh with a Dark Urge playthrough and was having fun living deliciously...until I reached Moonrise Towers again at the end of Act 2 and just got completely fed up with how tedious the battles were becoming. I honestly don't have the patience for spending an hour on a single goddamn fight. I'm at a standstill now and debating whether to mod the shit out of it and just infinite fireball my way through to the ending or else drop it for good.
Prior to this I had finished Clair Obscur and that was a truly exceptional experience. Any game that comes after will need to have mastered the Fosbury Flop to get over that bar...
I agree that the fighting can get tedious; it's an area where you've really got to make your own fun. The thing that carried me through acts 2 and 3 was finding builds that were fun to play, moment to moment. A giant tavern brawler Karlach who spent her time charging into battle and throwing enemies around was the center of my party for much of the game, and the fact that every turn was another opportunity for shenanigans meant the fighting was fun. She could jump across half the battlefield, and throw people across the other half. I laughed basically every turn she got.
Finished Kindergarten 3. I enjoyed this. I really like this series. I thought 2 was better though. I didn't feel the need to collect all the Monstermon cards this time around. I just looked up the secret ending. Game still has that dark humor & storyline that I enjoy. I forgot this is all in the same week. This game was Wednesday and the next is Thursday. I suppose the final one is Friday. I have that to look forward too.
Started Kirby & the Forgotten Land. I got this because I got one last Nintendo Switch Game Voucher last year before they ended the program. Used it on Pokémon Legends Z-A and this. So far it's fun and chill. Not as high energy and chaotic as DK Banaza, but I'm liking it. Only a few levels in and it doesn't seem too difficult. I imagine I'll be able to 100% fairly easily. I don't mind that. It's Kirby, so the highlight is taking on all the different abilities. The large object transformation is fun too. This is on Switch 2 and the performance is great. Looking forward to the rest of the game
I finished Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero last week. Took over 100hrs, but still took me less than a year, which is very good for me and JRPGs.
Which means I started its direct sequel, Legend of Heroes: Trails to Azure.
With LoH's "Trails" series, the first game in each arc is just the intro (each arc is at least two games long). It's a long-ass intro, being a full-length JRPG, but still an intro. So that means Azure should be the real meat of the story for this arc. So I'm excited to see how things develop and how they eventually resolve.
Friends and I tried out Marvel Rivals. I don't normally play hero shooters, but it was actually pretty fun. largely had no clue what I was doing, but did get some kills and assists. Prob not something I'll ever go hard on, but something I'd be willing to play here and there.
Just beat disk 1 of Sakura Wars. Had to figure out how to get the Sega Saturn emulator to load my save in disk 2, it's definitely not seamless like in PS2. It's a bit of a simple game with a simple story, but it's quite charming.
Have also been trying out the new Diablo 2 dlc, Reign of the Warlock. Man, I had forgotten how much I just absolutely love this game. Everything from the itemisation to the story and the way its presented. I'm kinda cheesing my way through it, as I let my two buff goatman kill the enemy while I loot their corpses. But getting a new class is Diablo 2 is absolutely wild. Conversely, Diablo 3 was absolutely unmemorable for me and I've had zero interest in Diablo 4. There's something specific about 2 that ticks all the boxes for me. And it must obviously still resonate, because 2 got a new class while 3 didn't.
I stumbled across the Hark the Ghoul demo during the Steam Next Fest, and I enjoyed it so much that it inspired me to boot up the PSX emulator on my Steam Deck and finally work my way through all of the King’s Field games I’ve been putting off. I’ve played through the first two so far, which is to say King’s Field (the Japan-only release) and King’s Field II (jp), aka King’s Field (everywhere else).
KF jp - it’s so very… slow. Not like boring, like literally physically a very slow game. I actually turned the emulation speed to 200% once I got the hang of combat lol. Way easier to time things.
The exploration and general unforgiving combat is very DS-coded. It definitely feels like a game with the same bones.
Separately, this game got so brutal at the end. I legitimately don’t know how I could have reasonably beat it without a proper meta endgame build. It feels like it almost forces you to 100% it to get through the final area, especially the last boss.
KF II (jp) / KF - Generally enjoyed it more. Really didn’t enjoy the navigation though, the map felt incredibly same-y, to the point where I still could not reliably find my way back to points in game that I had visited and revisited probably a dozen times. And these weren’t like little hidden dungeons or locked chests, I’m talking entire villages.
Gameplay itself felt fine, minor improvements from the first entry and, while the end game was still very tough, it felt considerably more reasonable.
These were both 3/5s for me, the rough edges of the first game and its ending were salvaged from a 2/5 by the fact that I really enjoyed the navigation and map structure (generally), and the miserable map layout of the second game stopped it from being a 4/5 in my book.