What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them?

Played a few missions of 007 First Light after letting it simmer for a bit after launch and get some patches in. Background: casual fan of the Bond movies, the last Hitman game I played was Blood Money and burnt out on the Sony Open World Singleplayer Game format.

• I love how it has the bones of a classic, old school single player game. You go from place to place and occasionally given the Hitman style freedom to tackle the levels (with less fiber wire and bombastic accidents). Many missions play like the third act of a Bond film. He infiltrates a big place, does the objective, something happens and maybe Bond's cover is blown, then he has to fight his way to safety. All gadgets are hotkeyed with a quick shortcut and everything you need is within reach. Might feel weird playing a modern game where you're not constantly walking from A to B, filling progress bars or killing the story pace because of inventory juggling. After playing the intro, you get the sense that Amazon MGM and EON are also treating it as a serious Bond entry as well, not some random tie-in game attached to a "proper" entry reminiscent of the late 90s and 2000s.
• There are moments where you expect a loading screen. Like with Indiana Jones, load times are fast enough you're wondering how IOI pulled these off.
• The bluffing mechanic should be shamelessly put into more games with social stealth or an open level where you can talk your way through, but the game has to have a charismatic and likeable lead to pull it off. It feels smooth here because it never interrupts active gameplay and it's short enough it doesn't cut into an RPG-style dialog scene with awkwardly standing characters. I feel the bluffing also works here because of the quintessentially British writing and Patrick Gibson's acting. There's plenty of understated quips and obligatory Bond one-liners, and it doesn't cross Joss Whedon and Disney/MCU territory.
• Graphics scaling is weird, there's no overall presets and most changes don't seem to make a difference FPS or frame time wise. Settings menu is atrocious on PC and clearly designed to be played with a controller, but you don't have to deal with it much after initial setup. In-game controls at least is fine, climbing and descending ledges felt weird at first but you get used to it quick. Texture work especially people's faces looks off from videos, but I got used to it quick after playing the game. I feel if this game had the skin shaders of at least Uncharted 4 or TLOU 2 since you meet so many people in the game, it's going to absolutely take it to the next level since the gameplay is already up there.
• Highlight goes to the combat system. A great scrappy blend of hand-to-hand and gun combat on top of letting you pick up any random object you can get and throwing at the enemy. There's also plenty of contextual animations too, like if a mook you're fighting is close enough Bond will smash their head in with the object instead of just a default throw. Or how he hip fires if you throw an enemy then immediately shoot with a pistol after. Love the little flairs like catching a pistol in the air or kick flipping a shotgun lying on the ground that reminds you you're still playing a Bond game after all. If it had more contextual grapples and takedowns while letting you shoot, it is very close to how I imagine a big-budget Jason Bourne or a John Wick game would play.
• Highlight also goes to the stealth system. Enemy awareness is localized, so you don't get something like a body being discovered then the entire city is looking out for you. It can get hilarious in easier difficulties when you're taking down a dude behind a thin wall while his buddies are blissfully unaware chatting about something else. Heaps of ways to distract enemies, my favorites so far is kicking a pushcart and pushing down shelves. You are also not hard penalized for breaking stealth, it encourages you to be brash in short bursts and use whatever you have at hand to contain the situation as long as you're able to actually contain it. It's a great gameplay analog to Bond's attitude to dealing with things.
• You love ambient dialog? This game has so many. There's a room you have to go through before you get your mission briefing, I always spend at least 10-15 minutes there to soak it all in and also see if there's new collectibles around. Soak in the understated snark of nearly everyone at MI6 putting up with Bond's stubbornness, the sighs of the scientists when you mess around with the prototypes at Q-Branch, and how the characters down to even generic NPCs at MI6 are confident at their job and not pushovers.

For all the game discourse about "cinematic" games, this hits the balance just right while still having enough gamey game in there where you can make your own moments. The individual gameplay systems alone can be spun off into their own games, but here they come together into something greater than the sum of their parts. This and Indiana Jones are now 2 great single player games based off long-running franchises that also buck the trend on how a modern game is designed.

On Friday night, I platinumed (on Steam), Dragon Quest XI S (Definitive Edition) after defeating the last super boss.

I'd had no idea what I was getting myself into when I picked it up back in march on sale for $20. I ended up clocking something around 165 hrs, all told, so that works out to about $0.12/hr. I'm pretty sure it's now the longest single game play-through that I've ever done. (I.e., not counting the sort of forever-games like Civilization, Unreal Tournament, or World of Warcraft.) I might have put more hours into my play through of Skyrim over the years, dinking around on random side quests when the mood strike, but I'm not certain.

This was also my first ever Dragon Quest game, so it's been interesting to see how those play. It was surprisingly easy, I'd say, and I perhaps should have cranked up the difficulty rather than leaving it on easy. I didn't actually see a game over screen until my first attempt at the last super boss. Still, considering the sheer length of the game even at that, I think I'm okay with the easier "story mode"-like difficulty.

Things that I liked about it or found pleasantly surprising:

• A quick summary of the story whenever I load my game, along with a reminder of the current goal on the map screen. And if that's not enough, there's the Party Talk, where the party characters can comment on the situation. All good for reminding me what I'm doing when I come back after a break.
• Characters can be set to auto play with different priorities. The default is to put in orders for the main hero, and let the other party members auto play - nice for e.g., just setting my healer to heal and not worrying too much about it when clearing trash. You can change this on the fly during battles.
• Speaking of battles, I can swap my active characters in and out in the middle of battles! (At the expense of their turn.) I can even re-equip them during a battle! And if my first-string group falls in battle, the second-stringers automatically step in. Neat!
• A "heal all" and a "handy heal all" on the menu. Both automatically have your party use their healing spells to heal. The difference is the former 100% tops off all characters
• Automatically purchasing crafting resources while crafting, if you've seen a vendor with them. No need to spend time chasing down the vendors and buying the exact numbers of missing items. Some rare resources do need to be farmed directly, however.
• You can pick and choose your battles. Enemies wander around on the field, and touching them starts a battle with the group of enemies represented by it. But the ones that you see wandering aren't aggressive and don't come after you in any way (unless you have a certain cursed item equiped). So if you just feel like your leveled high enough and they don't have any drops you want, you can just skip right past them.
• When mounted, if you're holding down the button for galloping and you collide with a weak (i.e., below a certain size, plus lower level than you) enemy on the field, you'll send them rag dolling. You can actually get some XP for this, though your characters won't level until you win the next battle. Still, there've been times when I've been lazy and finished off the last chunk of XP a character needed to level this way.
• Speaking of XP gains, all party members alive at the end of a battle gain XP, including the second-stringers who aren't in the active battle group. I really appreciated not having to rotate my party members just to make sure the XP was distributed somewhat evenly. Or end up in a situation where a certainly party member was mandatory but underleveled.
• The story is a fairly simple one of good vs. evil. It had some twists I didn't foresee. But it was kind of refreshing, knowing that for the most part the good guys are the good guys, the bad guys are the bad guys, and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri. It also felt quite episodic, especially in the beginning. Go from place to place where each town is dealing with some issue and put things right. Spend a couple of hours of play there, maybe a good gameplay sessions, and then move on and tackle the next problem the next day. It all integrated nicely with the recap when you reload. They were clearly not trying to anything groundbreaking here, but rather going for a well done, comfortable, cozy, fairy tale vibe.
• There's a place you can go to rewatch any of the cut scenes! In games that give me enough save slots for it, I often like to have a group of saves at the ends of acts or just before other plot-critical so that I can rewatch those story moments if I feel like it. But it was pretty cool during discovering that nearly every single cut scene was organized by "episode" and available to rewatch in-game once I reached a certain point.
• And speaking of the cozy fairy tale vibes, the "cute" monster design was kind of fun and a nice change from grim-dark JRPGs.

Still, after nearly three months I'm a bit burnt out on it. I think I tend to favor 10-30 hr games as my sweet spot. Long enough to do something interesting with their ideas, but not so long they overstay their welcome. On the shorter side, I started Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow for CGA over the weekend, and I'm making pretty good progress, I think, judging by the map percentage (now at about 70%). It's been a nice change of pace.

I started Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, a recommendation from my brother. It's an investigative game! Caught me a little by surprise coming from him, especially as this game is not all that casual (though still not as hard as the heavyweights of the genre).

The visuals are very stylish, almost entirely in black and white, and cherry red highlights. Vaguely (I don't want to spoil anything for you) the protagonist is a woman called to a small, remote hotel by an italian filmmaker with an eccentric, disturbing personality. This hotel is bristling with padlocked doors, cryptic messages, all sorts of clues and - probably - ghosts.

Like in any good Myst-like, you must read in-game books (booklets, I guess). Old timey computers are available in-game, and do double duty by both letting you save and load (no autosave!) and read floppy disks you find in the hotel. At one point you also acquire a totally-not-a-Game-Boy-please-don't-sue-us. Fortunately, the protagonist has not only a vast inventory capacity, but a "photographic memory" - all the clues you find are carefully catalogued and acessible from this menu no matter where you are (phew!) There's also a detailed "task list" (quest log) containing anything even remotely mysterious you have encountered. Good stuff! The puzzles also seem fine. No one has made me play "simon says" so far, but I have had to do math.

The controls are weird and infuriating. The same action button is used for interacting with things and people, opening your status window and navigating menus, depending on where you are and which direction you're facing. There is no "back" button; instead you have to select a "return" menu option in whichever window you have open if you wish to return to the game, and these are not consistently designed or placed. Maybe the game was made for iOS? I didn't look into it. The status window has various stats which may or may not come into play later. I think I will be able to make coffee at some point.

Previous

It finally happened, @CannibalisticApple.

I finally played Squirrel With a Gun!

I rolled credits and am now working on the (surprising amount of) post-game content and the Pride DLC. This game really is a delight. Looks like an asset flip, plays like devs just having a ton of fun.

I have a few minor quibbles, mostly with the game crashing on me a few times as well as some QoL stuff (reclimbing in the waterslide area is a pain), but those are far overshadowed by the fun I've had with being a squirrel (with a gun).

It's not even that the shooting is that exciting really. Instead, I've enjoyed engaging in the game's more realistic squirrel problems, like "how do I find more nuts?" and "how do I get onto this house?" and "where are all the other squirrels in the neighborhood -- I need to know if they like my outfit."

What I truly didn't expect at the outset was all the different ideas the game would have baked into it. It's got the standard shooting and the 3D platforming you'd expect, but then I find myself making my way through a minefield or trying to drive a car up a tall vertical wall. It's noteworthy that nothing in the game is done particularly WELL, but also that the game owns its jank and lives by the rule of cool.

I was also surprised at the amount of movement tech in the game. Using different gun types to get different double jump types? Genius. At one point I couldn't figure out how to get into a particular house, so I shot out the windows, climbed a tree, jumped out of it, and used the ragdoll bounce you get when you hit the ground to sail right on through the now-open window frame. Is this the intended way to do that? Of course it is, because the game wants you do to whatever you want however you want -- the more ridiculous the better.

A big thanks to you, Apple, for selling me on the game and then re-selling me on it so that I actually finally played it instead of letting it languish alone and unappreciated in my backlog.

I finished up Chants of Sennaar this weekend.

Thoroughly enjoyed the puzzles and working out the different languages that are presented.

I have been playing Mina The Hollower. I will not spoil anything.

I beat the game. When I first started playing, I didn’t enjoy it because I thought it was too hard/frustrating. The game grew on me over the 2nd and 3rd dungeons.

Some parts can be frustrating, both the platforming and bosses. It really is a Souls game in the sense that you can’t just hack and slash your way through. Bosses have tells just like in Souls games; you have to do the choreography in order to be successful.

I've... had a relapse, you might say.

Roughly 30 years ago, I started using the Internet regularly through America Online. One feature there was roleplaying chat rooms, which is where the name Durinthal eventually came from. But before I had that I had another character named something like Silverfrost who was a silver dragon that shapeshifted into an elf because I was a teenager and that was cool, okay? Someone in chat once asked me if I was the Bard guild leader in DragonRealms and I asked them what that meant, which lead me to the world of MUDs and eventually their modern counterparts in MMORPGs.

DragonRealms (DR) was at the time a new addition to AOL and it hooked me more than the free-form chat rooms ever did even if it was still nothing but text. It was an evolving world with hundreds of other people wandering around to talk to, hang out with, or even stealing money from because my long-term character ended up being a thief and the game supported it mechanically, often leading to PvP. I ended up having a fun dynamic with a paladin (antithesis of any thief) because we were in an organization together for members of a niche character race.

DR was my primary hobby for years at a very formative time in my life, and also why I learned to type mostly with my left hand which I continue to do to this day: because the number pad was used for directional movement (cardinal/ordinal directions and up/down/out of buildings) and I kept my right hand there while typing other commands with my left. It's subsequently been my baseline of comparison for a lot of other RPGs as well; while there are classes with unique abilities, the game's primarily based on a variety of skills so you can be a mage wearing plate armor or a thief wielding a two-handed sword. Its experience mechanics encouraged socialization through productive downtime so you could still be advancing while hanging out in a room with other people rather than being out in combat.

Eventually life got busy and I retired, giving away all of my items (many rare, a few truly unique because it's all text and you can get alterations customizing descriptions of things exactly how you want) and logging out for the last time on August 8th, 2004 — I still have some logs from that era backed up. But while I was too busy with other things including hopping from one MMO to the next, I never forgot about DR, and ended up poking in again briefly a few times over the years with new characters on free-to-play accounts since those became a thing, but never for more than a brief walk around. Even so, I kept an eye on the new (at the time) wiki just to see what changes were happening. A couple of times there were major overhauls of systems that I wanted to dive into the details of, even for a game that I hadn't played in years.

The announcement of Guild Wars 3 gave me an urge to return to GW2, a game I binged when it came out and then put aside, more than a decade ago. While I thought about installing it and jumping back in, another thought game to me... what if I go back to DR instead? I've had the itch for years. There are still a few hundred characters on at any given time but socialization is down significantly, development still happens but it's effectively little more than life support outside of a few dedicated GMs. I know it won't be the same. You can't go home again, after all.

And yet... it's been a week since I've started playing again. I've gotten to level 10 on a brand-new character in under 48 hours, which might have been literally impossible back in the day under the old systems gating how quickly you gain experience. My old character sits there beckoning, and while I've thought about it I'm leaving him behind. His granddaughter is instead taking his place, born on his 100th birthday because in-game time is roughly 4x that of the real world. The itch has been scratched, and it feels good.

Spent a bit of time on Destiny 2 to experience the final update and so far I'm not disliking what they've added, but as someone that hasn't played since Final Shape, I will say this - the UI is somehow even more convoluted than it was before and I've already had years to get used to it, so I can't imagine how incredibly lost a new player would be trying to find a specific menu or activity. Some positive things though:

• All activities are pretty rewarding now and the ability to customize them with modifiers to either make things easier or harder with an impact to the score multiplier is nice.

• The hugely increased vault space and ability to access vault from the inventory menu is nice. Still not as good as DIM, but a big improvement especially for console players.

• Sparrow Racing League's alright. It's brutally simple and lacks a lot of the things that most kart-racers would consider core features but as a barebones racing game mode it works.

• Being able to swap between different seasonal artifacts is huge for buildcrafting since some of those artifact mods are super strong.

• Weapon tiers as a replacement for crafted weapons with enhanced perks isn't bad. Armor tiers are confusing to learn though, including the tuning slot you only unlock at tier 5. Armor archetypes are alright, being able to target certain ones through a ghost mod is neat.

• Armor set bonuses are an improvement from seasonal armor effects and actually give you an excuse to use non-pinnacle armor pieces.

Overall, definitely more positives than negatives, though still not enough to keep me around for a long time. I picked up the two latest expansions on the deep discount they're offering and I'll play through those, the new dungeons, and the new raids at least once.

So I finished Staffer Case over the weekend. Case 4 (out of 5) was excellent. The "True" ending had a twist I did not see coming at all. And it really did a good job of pulling me in different directions; between emotion and logic. Like on one hand, I felt, "This kid did nothing wrong. He's innocent and this is 100% wrong what we're doing." But on other, "...But he is super dangerous. Even being watched, he could destroy it all. He's a true danger to the world; to the greater good." It was very much the trolley car problem. I don't think I've played an Ace Attorney or clone game where the case was so morally ambiguous.

The fifth and final case was alright, but it didn't hit as hard as the fourth. It, too, had a twist, but mainly focused to tie up the game's overall story. Pretty decent detective game all around. Reminded me of the anime Psycho Pass, with a little bit of the SCP universe mixed in. The main party is literally comprised the same way: "latent criminals" serving under and supporting a regular, non-criminal investigator.

Afterwards, played it's brief sequel, Staffer Reborn. It's super short. Like where Staffer Case was a full game (put in 20-25hrs), Staffer Reborn was barely 2hrs. Really just a way of saying, "Hey, the story of Staffer Case isn't over yet!" Another Staffer game is due next month; maybe it'll be a proper sequel.

Over in FFXIV, been doing the latest Variant Dungeon, "The Merchant' Tale." These are just "choose your own adventure" dungeons. I will say, this one's bosses don't seem as difficult as past Variant Dungeons'. Idk, I enjoy doing these and wish more people did them, but the rewards also seem pretty mid. So I get why people don't, especially if they're incentivized to do content through rewards.

I have been continuing Megaman ZX Advent.

After finishing the normal mode as the male character Grey, I am now playing Expert Mode as the female character Ashe. The two have different stories, although Greys story was pretty threadbare.

Expert mode is a real challenge for me, which highlights some interesting design decisions in the game. My first objective was to beat the first 3 main bosses(plus the tutorial boss) so I could reach the Oil Fields level, where there is a free life I can use to stock up to 9 lives instead of the usual 2. This is easier said than done, since the bosses are pretty difficult. They are sped up and have some new or enhanced mechanics compared to normal mode, plus deal extra damage.

The first of the bosses, Buckfire, took me a few attempts, but was easy enough to learn the patterns for. Next I decided to skip the storyline second boss and go straight for the 3rd, because the boss, Chronoforce, has the ability to slow down time with his charge attack, which is insanely useful.

Unfortunately this meant navigating through the underwater area with only 3 lives, which is difficult alone without considering the boss. Luckily there are checkpoints you can unlock, which in normal mode cost 100 credits but in expert cost 500.

This cost difference is significant. In normal mode I can just about afford most checkpoints from regular gameplay plus or minus some depending on when I want to donate to the optional tunnelling project. In expert mode I need to pick and choose when I can afford to drop 500 credits at once. In practice this meant a mad dash to the area 3-4 checkpoint right before the boss, a run which was a difficult enough thing to do, plus running back to the hunter camp so I could save my progress.

See, you can only teleport TO checkpoints, not from them. And unlocking a checkpoint with money doesnt last if you gameover before saving. So if you want to avoid losing progress at a gameover, you need to manually backtrack before using your last life.

This is an interesting game mechanic that is a result of transitioning from isolated stages to a metroidvania-ish world, but one that I didnt really experience during normal mode gameplay, because it was just too easy to get through the first few stages on just 3 lives.

An interesting example of the value of difficulty in games, is what Im saying.

My roommate and I finally decided to rent a server for Factorio and start a new map. He's a veteran, and I'm only 200 hours in. Two days in, and he's not hopped on yet because he's busy with Final Fantasy Something, but I've got a big old bus set up and a steady supply of Red, Green, and Grey science. Crude oil has been located, incidentally, not far from where Grey science brought my bus, and I expect to be doing advanced refining by end of day tomorrow, and hopefully be fully on electric furnaces and nuclear power.

So far, I'm not totally loving the server we rented. There's plenty of up time, but the lag seems to hit just as my vehicle is approaching a biter nest or as I'm zooming into my base. It doesn't love when I pick up full belts. Maybe it'll settle down, maybe this is just how multiplayer factorio is.

All in all, though, I'm having a good time.

What game I'm playing? One of the best racing games ever made - Test Drive Unlimited! Managed to find it on the internet, as it's not for sale anywhere (at least I couldn't find it), unpacked it and it works!

Then I copied the game on my Steam Deck and... Hell, yes! What a great game it still is! Cruising roads of Oahu, Hawaii in fast cars, preferably not using GPS looking on the map from.time to time to get your bearings. Buying a car and then hoping you will come across tuning shop for it sometime in the future. Driving 50 kilometers for 15 minutes, because, you know, it is 15 kilometers and your average speed is just 200 km/h. Driving around the whole island in a few dozens of minutes, because it's the wholr island! Doing various challenges, driving supercars of bygone era up to.modern ones (at the time of game's release), learning how to handle each of them.

TDU was unbelievable game when it came out back in around 2007. And it didn't lose any charm for me throughout those almost 20 years, it is still amazing! And as I already said - having Oahu in your (oversized) pocket is the best thing that could have happened to this game.

I realized that there has been quite a few good games that I haven't played. One YouTube video I watched mentioned Kingdom of Amalur as a hidden gem. I have an old PS3 so I went and bought an old original copy of the game for ~$15 and have been working my way through it.

I really could care less about graphics, I enjoy good gameplay and an interesting story. In this particular game the gameplay is quite nice and the quests/story is of varied quality. It is nice that they've built up quite a bit of lore for the game and I've been playing for +40h and I'm guessing I am about 1/3 through it.

Anyway, I can highly recommend just getting really old good games! There are plenty out there and if you are like me and not really bothered by dated graphics it is fairly cheap.

This week I finally reached what I thought was the fifth and final Lord/boss in Tales of Arise and... nope. lol There’s a lot more after that, it seems.

I had already preordered The Adventures of Elliot, so... I guess I’ll be playing three games at once until I finish Tales of Arise.

Third one being my beloved Pokopium.

I’m currently addicted to Forza Horizon 6. Im a long time fan of the Forza series, having played every game since Forza Motorsport 2 on the Xbox 360. This is my first time playing any of them on PC, and on an unsupported operating system to boot (Linux). It was a bit rough getting it running properly with various combinations of proton versions and parameters to fiddle with, but it does work and that includes multiplayer.

I just really enjoy the Forza Horizon gameplay loop. The cars feel great to drive, there’s tons of them, lots of different events to partake in, and of course the Japan setting for this instance of the game is what the fans have been asking for for years, and I think they really did a great job with it.

It still has some of the usual Forza quirks, like fugly human models and cringeworthy bits of dialog, but that’s totally unimportant in the grand scheme of things.

If you liked previous Forza games or you just enjoy racing games that are a bit more arcade than sim then give it a shot. It’s fun.

I've been playing a lot of Guild Wars 2 recently, ever since GW3 was announced. You'd think it would be the opposite, that the sequel would make me less interested in what we have now since it'll eventually be superceded, but they also announced that they'll keep GW2 up for over a decade at least, and that there will be active development on it. This whole situation is so wild, it's strange enough that they're gonna make a new MMO in the modern gaming climate, but they actually care about preservation as well? They sure know how to get my attention.

As for the game itself, it's the same pretty damn great traditional MMO it's always been. Lots of absurdly long grind projects out there waiting for you to maybe eventually do them all, but no major stat benefits associated with them, which I've always thought was a good balance. Someone can be at their maximum possible combat power a couple months into a new account, so they don't have to feel like a burden, but they can always be getting a new mount or a legendary or something, so they're still excited to keep going.

Unfortunately, this does mean that it is fundamentally a grind game, even if it markets itself as not being one. It's true you don't have to, and you'll still be equal to the other players, but you need a goal to work on while you play, and the goals are all grinds, lol.

It took me a while upon returning to decide which grind I'll be working toward during this stint of playing. In the end, I decided I'd go for legendary gloves, and the legendary staff The Bifrost. Both weren't projects I was up for back in ye olden days, but modern changes have made it a lot more reasonable - you can get the gloves from just doing a bunch of easy fractals with the new quickplay system, and several weapons including The Bifrost now have "starter kits" you can get from your dailies to make them much easier to create. I'm very down for changes that make things easier over time in an MMO, imo it only stands to reason that once the most intense players are done with a piece of hard content, it's made easier for the rest of us to try it out later.

I'm also not entirely alone, because not only have I joined the guild of a streamer I like, EndyD20, but my wife has also decided to play for a while! It's really starting to feel like it's back in the old days again.

I'm sure that after several months, I'll take another multi-year break, like I always do with MMOs. For right now, though, this is really fun!

I was enjoying playing Arc Raiders, but they updated their anti-cheat implementation to use Denuvo, and now it marks every Linux device as running "disallowed tools" including the Steam Deck. It has been rolled out over several months, and they somehow neglected that 5% of Steam users run Linux. Last night I kept getting disconnected because of this. According to their official patch notes, they're aware of this, but haven't been able to roll out a fix.

I used to love playing Rocket League, but once they got acquired by Epic and rolled out EAC, the game would no longer work on Linux. Running anti-cheat software at ring 0 is just unacceptable.