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

Car Park Capital. Graphically it's a throwback to Rollercoaster Tycoon but instead of the goal being to make a pretty theme park your job is to expand your parking lot empire by evicting residents, destroying public transport and setting up production chains to make vehicles and supply drive-thru services.

You can build quickly and cheaply but it triggers citizen protests which you have to stomp down with police forces and propaganda. Then you have to find ways of increasing car demand by either building service industries or just releasing alligators to scare pedestrians off the sidewalks.

The game of course is entirely a satire of the auto industry but it still manages to be a fun to play management sim.

Ace Combat 8, lots of Ace Combat 8, both campaign and online. Went for a gun-only run for the medal but I must've fired a missile by accident at some point so it didn't count, which was annoying. Going for all of the secret aces in each mission now with one of the endgame not real planes (name omitted for spoiler sake) and this thing handles like I'm trying to grip a stick of warm butter, it rolls and pitches with absolutely zero resistance haha.

As for online, I've been grinding sorties for more Zoll (in-game cash) because it takes so damn much to raise the level cap of a plane, and that's even with the 2x Zoll boosters. Wouldn't be so bad if Emergency Sortie and Scramble showed up more often since they give way more and are also just the most fun game modes by a lot, but I'm lucky to get 2 of them to show up in a play session. Current favorite planes are the Su-33 for air-heavy missions and dogfighting in Warfare, and the Su-34 for groundpounding, which it does magnificently. Sukhoi planes are just real pretty.

I'm playing Need for Speed Underground PS2 version through emulator on Steam Deck. It is great! It just sips power from the battery, yet it runs fine. I play all the races on hard and I do that with Mazda MX-5 (starter car). Right now I'm in the worst part of the "career" - my car is plenty fast, but I will start losing in drags dues to just having five gears and either blowing engine or not winning to save engine. The only thing I can do is restart all over until other cars total themselves (or at least the fast ones). Or lower the difficulty. Or exchange the car for some other.

I also play CrossCode. I like the game, but the story is still kinda non-existent, I can't wrap my head around it yet. The game is like old-school probably 16bit kinda hack'n'slash RPG. It is very strange concept and it kinda requires player to understand the workings and put them to use heavily - you have to learn combos, switching attacks, enemies and their abilities etc. It isn't exactly the game for me, but it was talked a lot at many places and has very good reviews, so I tried and went for it.

I like the graphics and the styling of the game, I also like the concept of the game inside a game, I also like the skill tree and having a party and all the different quests, I also love all the puzzles. It is overall a great game, just the fighting isn't my cup of tea. I still haven't had any serious problems with he difficulty though, I defeated all the boss enemies I encountered after a few tries. The puzzles are sometimes a bit harder, but I consider myself rather hardcore player than casual or mainstream one, so I take it as a challenge. But sometimes I just have enough of it and then - NFS Underground time

My time has been largely taken up by MapleStory: Classic World. I've clocked over 15 hours played so far and hit level 20 on a Magician.

Compared to the modern day post-Big Bang version of MapleStory which has three different flavours of adventurer classes, dozens of ridiculously overloaded hero classes and some of the most streamlined progression I've ever seen, Classic World has honestly been a breath of fresh air. It finally feels like I'm playing a MMORPG and not a shitty hack & slash game where I can deal 76 quadrillion points of damage and delete an entire room of mobs in a single button press, whilst following some incredibly contrived and poorly written story about a dark mage who once threatened Maple World. OG MapleStory was never like this, and the superior quality of the restored classic game by comparison really shows.

Things haven't been entirely smooth sailing. Nexon, for some incredibly stupid reason, decided to kick off the two week Founder's Access period by launching the game with only 1 world and 18 channels. Nearly every zone is massively overcrowded with players and competition for enemy mob spawns is rife.

And as everyone who bought in got the Founder's Pack, nearly every safe zone is full of player-run shops and obnoxious flashy effects, which would all otherwise come from limited-time rental cash shop items.

Only places I've seen that hasn't been overloaded with players are the two maps between Henesys and the Victoria Island Dungeon, and the only reason is because Iron Hogs are level 26 mobs that have incredibly high evasion stats, and are practically impossible to damage with physical attacks even if you could hit them.

If this is the state of the game for people who paid Nexon $60 for two weeks' early access, I dread to think what the servers will be like on 21st October when the game truly launches F2P.

I've been playing When the TV Decides to Murder your Girlfriend - The Game by fellow Tilderooian (?) @talesofweirdfl, It's available to play for free on itch here, talesofweirdfl was kind enough to send me a link when his post in a What creative projects have you been working on thread piqued my interest.

It's a quirky interactive fiction game where you, the titular implied boyfriend, attempt to save your girlfriend from a murderous television with the help of several other sentient home appliances. The writing is a pulpy in the best possible way and is absolutely oozing with charm. Not sure if anyone else would get this reference, but it's like The Brave Little Toaster meets Toy Story meets Fightclub, with the occasional tentacle thrown in for good measure. Devices are sentient and I can't trust myself to know what's real. It's a ride.

The puzzles scratch that classic text-adventure itch without ever feeling obtuse or frustrating, which remains a surprisingly difficult achievement decades after the genre was established. If you have a spare half-hour and this sounds like something you'd enjoy, I strongly reccomend it.

The game is based on a book by the same creator I'd be keen to read after enjoying the writing and wanting to support the author. An ebook is offered with the physical paperback which would unfortunately cost a small fortunate to ship to Australia, so if anyone else enjoys the writing, lives in the US and would like a copy please send me a DM: Just promise you'll pay it forward next time you find a small creator you want to support :)

Edit: The offer has been claimed and a book is in the mail! I just opened up the ebook and read the foreward:

"To Autumn and Brita, for inspiring me to create murderous televisions, and to the creators of The Brave Little Toaster, for scaring the absolute hell out of me so many years ago"

Called it!!

Resident Evil Requiem. It's really cool how it has a first person horror game (Grace) and a third person action game (Leon) blended into one package. I prefer Grace's first person horror experience and am playing it with limited saves. It scratches the same itch that REmake does, but I'm exploring a big hospital instead of a mansion this go around. The game is beautiful and runs well. Leon's parts are also fun and add a nice variety of gameplay. I'm still playing but am close to the end. Unsure where this will ultimately land, but I think it will probably enter spot #2 behind REmake and ahead of RE7 for me.

It's fascinating to see how Capcom fully understands what makes Resident Evil, Resident Evil. I don't know why 343 studios could never do that with Halo. This was clearly made by a team that understands RE's themes and how the world should form. It's remarkable to get that in a AAA game these days when most big games let their greed get in the way of a good game.

I've been playing Nomori, a 3D puzzle game that flew under everyone's radar. It's about 20 hours worth of content.

Nomori features self-contained levels each with a pair of portals. Like... well, Portal! But there's no psychopathic AI and no momentum-based shenanigans. Instead, the gimmick here is that portals are preset, and depending on how a portal is positioned and rotated, anything that goes through it will acquire a new referential and gravity. So for example if portal A is perpendicular to portal B, when protagonist Kiko goes through it, her gravity will rotate 90 degrees, and she can now stand on the wall (or fall to what used to be the "side" of the level).

Each regular level has a main goal of carrying a (non-companion!) cube to the exit, and a minor goal of collecting a number of nature spirits ("kodama") hiding in hard to reach places. A minority of levels have more than one cube for platforming use. In addition to being affected by portal transitions, cubes can eventually be modified in a few of other ways, and Kiko also eventually gains the ability to rotate the portals themselves or to reposition them into other pre-existing locations, which means there's a nice increase in complexity and difficulty throughout.

The aesthetic is... tolerable. Colorful, cartoonish, with fairly simplistic (and in some cases generic) assets, but it doesn't matter. The music (which only plays on occasion) is surprisingly decent.

The plot on the other hand doesn't do it for me; I find the banter annoying and unnecessary, and the localization-agnostic grunts and screeches that take the place of voice acting are overdone and get on my nerves. Yet another game that would have been better if it focused on just the gameplay! Jonathan Blow was right to remove the plot from The Witness after all.

Just as an aside, since I've been complaining about plot a bunch in recent months - I want to make it clear that I love narrative games. But the narrative has to be worthwhile - see Cairn for a recent example. Shallow, inane narrative is just a waste of time.

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Fresh of the metroidvania Silver Pines, I picked up two more: Echo Weaver and Well Dweller. Each of them is good, though in very different ways, and the ways they are bad are very similar.

Echo Weaver is a time loop game, where you have 13 minutes to save the world. Much like Tunic or Animal Well, all powers and abilities are available to you from the start, you just need to know the right actions to take to make them happen. There are a few small unlocks to expand your teleportation network, but I imagine that the speedruns are going to be insane. The movement tech feels good to use, and has a high skill ceiling. Much of the game is exploring out from the location where you start every loop, finding echos of the past that can teach you about the powers you didn't know you had, and running into people and events that change throughout the time you have.

And that's the major weakness of the game for me. Needing to be standing in a particular area 8 minutes into the run to discover that there's someone there who needs a boost onto a ledge is fine, if there was strong signposting that told you exactly where/when you need to be there. But when someone just mutters about being in a given zone, it gives you a lot of area to cover in that minute. Sure, the time loops are endless, but my time isn't. Someone who wanted to move slower and explore in more detail (or use a walkthrough) might have more fun with it.

*Well Dweller" is in some ways a simpler game, and it's designed to offer handholding if you want it. Fairly early in the game you unlock the ability to pay to get the next destination marked on your map. This seems too easy, but the map is so big and sprawling it is legitimately possible to just entirely lose track of which ledge your latest movement tech means you can now traverse. I'm confident in my map traversal, and I've still paid to find the next goal. The fact that there's no narrative or logical route through the map is a bit of a bummer; one of the things Silksong did so well was having a coherent world, and this is not that. Movement feels good, and combat is fine, though even on hard mode the combat is fairly easy. There's no touch damage, so fighting the bosses is mostly about standing in their hitbox and attacking continuously while dodging the attacks. Fighting smaller enemies is mostly dodgerolling through them to avoid the attacks. It's functional.

It feels really good to play, though. Instead of a double jump you get the ability to shoot your weapon into walls to use as a secondary platform/springboard, and so theres more technical complexity to where and when it can be used, and then you get the ability to climb walls a little bit to extend it further, and so on. They found ways to make things feel different than the standard movement tech in ways that feel good. I'm enjoying it more than Echo Weaver, though your mileage may vary.

I have finished Fire Emblem Blazing Blade, and have returned to Xenosaga Episode III. Everything was fun and games until the last map kicked.my ass, and I had to rely on the brolen unit they give you to get to the credits.

Anyway, I'm now on disc 2 of Xenosaga, and I don't think they're going to wrap up every plot point in the time they have remaining. But I gotta say, in terms of gameplay, this is the best it's ever been, so it seems it's ending on a high note.

Downloaded Aion 2 last night and played for like an hour or so. I had played the original Aion back in the day and liked it (enough that I had to drop out of college that semester...). So was curious how Aion 2 was.

I'm still in the starter area so haven't seen a whole lot. The character creator is pretty impressive. Probably one of the most advanced ones I've seen. With gameplay, the combat system seems interesting if not a bit chaotic. It's not tab targeted, but more action-based. I chose Assassin for my class, which was what I was in the original game.

At the same time, it's giving me vibes of generic Korean MMO. Which I'm not a huge fan of. So Idk. I'm not really planning to play it long-term; I have FFXIV as my long-term MMO. But I would like play enough to at least get a good baseline on it. We'll see.

I found a working crack of Resident Evil 9.

For starts, there are two gaming experiences I would consider a tie for my favorite of all time, and that is both RE7 Biohazard and Alien Isolation played and completed in VR. The fear, the pacing, the technological breakthroughs that made it happen, all insane.

While I'm not playing RE9 in VR, it's very evident this game is a distillation of all the latest brilliance in horror games. Biohazard in VR was so amazing that I found myself enamored with staring into the sink at the maggots. RE9 is so beautiful that it achieves the same thing in flat, and I'm grateful it runs so well on my RTX 2060.

I skipped re8 but not on purpose, it just happened