What are you playing this week?

More D&D. Not as much as the last time I commented in this thread, but I'll still be playing much of Saturday and preparing to run my own game on Sunday.

I lost my barbarian last weekend to hellhounds. This is significant in that my PC was the only one serving as a guide for the island the rest of the PCs crashlanded on. I'm not allowed to play a native any more, so we have to be more independent going forward and rely on the lizardfolk natives rather than my barbarian. That said, I was an awful guide (I failed several times due to abysmal rolls), and it was that awfulness that got me killed.

This time round I'm coming back as a wizard. Total opposite in both approach and in location in the PHB! I'm working on a character that focuses on battlefield control rather than nuking (we have a rogue who just joined for that, in addition to a fighter, a cleric, and a crazy rogue/wizard hybrid, plus a transmutation sorcerer who's around occasionally to buff the frontliners). I'm rolling a conjurer, though I haven't yet decided if I want to focus on summons or other methods for manipulating the battlefield. I should point out that this is 3.5, not 5e, so things are a little different. It's still a lot of fun, though!

I picked Doom (2016) back up because I can't justify buying any new games right now. When I first bought it I thought it was fantastic, but the campaign is fairly short (if you play it linearly, as I did) and with no interest in Multiplayer it faded fast from my list of "currently playing".

Having already beaten the campaign I'm now going back through and finding all the secrets that I missed in my mad dash through the campaign. Still just as fun as it was the first time.

I've never really been into online gaming, but a coworker has invited me to play Apex Legend's with him and his son. It sounds like fun so I think I'll give it a try. I'm a little intimidated by what seems like a really steep learning curve though.

I had a lot of fun doing some backlog-work and installed a bunch of indies I had for literally years and never got to play.

Currently playing Closure, a great puzzle platformer where only parts of the world illuminated by a light source are solid. It's a clever trick that leads to some interesting stuff, kinda breaks your brain in a good way. I just wished you wouldn't die so easily, there was a lot of restarting a level because I jumped 2 pixels too far in the last move. It's an older indie game, before the goldrush, but I like the rougher presentation and how it focuses on pure gameplay.

Also back to Infinifactory, maybe I'll finally beat it! It's maybe one of the most elaborate Zachtronics programming-puzzlers, with a Minecraft-style (or should I say Infiniminer-style, since Zach made the game Minecraft copied that style from!) 3D block structure but somehow it's not harder than their 2D games, maybe even the most accessible one. Basically, I told myself to finish this one before finally trying Shenzen IO and Opus Magnum.

I also bought Splatoon 2, despite absolutely hating the art style because I just had too much fun with the week-long online demo. What can I say, it's Nintendo once again taking a genre they had nothing to do with (competitive online shooter) and nailing it in their own, very Nintendo way. The paint-coverage mechanics is genius. It's the most brilliant thing, really. I also equally enjoy online vs, the coop tower-defense mode and singleplayer, even though it's still mostly a team-based online shooter with the other modes built on top of that.

I picked up Risk of Rain 2, and played co-op with some friends for about 5 or 6 hours last night. We'd been looking for something new to add to the rotation, since we're burning out on Heroes of the Storm and Borderlands, and I think RoR2 is a real winner there. It's pretty surprising how well the basic Risk of Rain formula translated into 3D, and while it's a bit barebones at the moment, I'd definitely recommend giving it a go if you liked the original. Sadly, none of my favorite characters from the original have made it in yet, but the new ones are decently fun. Also, in case you were holding out for Linux support, although it doesn't yet have an official build like the first one, it runs flawlessly (or at least not any buggier than on windows) out of the box through Proton, no tweaks required.

I bought a used PS3 with a broken HDMI port that I'm going to hook up via component to this HD CRT that I got a few weeks ago, and I am very excited. Don't know when it's going to get here, but I have Demon's Souls and Gran Turismo 5 coming along with it as well as "3 games" that they didn't label and which I'm assuming just means 3 Madden games or something.

So in preparation for that I've been playing some stuff on my PS2, which will be nicer now that my component cables appear to have just been delivered to the front desk where I live. Last night was Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3...and I'm not sure if I actually like that game or not. I forgot how tedious and difficult Tony Hawk movement was before spine transfers in THPS 4, my personal favorite.

On the more immediate side of things, I also picked up Battlefield V on sale and did a bit of the campaign (which seemed pretty great) while I had the partially complete download going. Today I'll be dipping my toes into the multiplayer, and from what I've seen of this game I fully expect to love it and be into this series again. It was a long time coming, really.

Oh and as always if anyone would like to play, hit me up!

I just returned this week from vacation and bought minecraft for the switch last night. It's just fun and relaxing. Built my first home base, somehow they always look the same though haha.

Playing two adventure games on the Nintendo Classic that I never had as a kid, so for the first time I am getting to experience The Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy.

This week has been completely filled with Rise to Ruins. I did play a bit of Stardew Valley but that was to show my partner what it is. I may try to get her to play it. If she likes it, I may buy it for her for PC if her laptop can handle it once she gets it back.

Deadlands.

Our posse consists of one seventy year old geezer pinkerton agent who looks rather like the guy who shot Buster Scruggs... one half-mad drunken irish hexslinger who has sold his soul to the coachman for dark power... one mayan-descended indian shaman with an axe of meteoric iron... one full cyborg automaton whose brain in a jar is the last piece of him left... a preacher with the demeanor of macho man randy savage and the powers of god... and the historical Tom Dooley, back from his hanging and hell-bent bent on revenge. Our games get wierd. ;)

Last session we pulled into Des Moines on a train bound from dodge city to deadwood, and it was a ghost town. Train's engine had just had a bad break down so we were stuck until the next day at least, and with a train load of innocent passengers to protect. After fending off a horde of headless zombies we traced the town-ending evil activity back to an asian vampire-thing that was raising the dead in the basement of a local church.

Dealt with that, but our metal man being low of spirit was possessed by his manitou while we were doing the hunting... so he rigs up the train with explosives while he's repairing it. Now we're barreling into cedar rapids on a runaway train mined with multiple ghost rock bombs and still trying to protect a train full of passengers though all this madness.

Hearthstone, again. The new expansion came in, and I got a pretty decent haul from the packs I could get from In Game Gold and freebies. Between that, Whizbang still being a valid way to play, and the Odd-Even decks having rotated, there is no real complaints from me.

Not sure I want to keep chipping away at Dead Cells, I was able to get the Vine Rune, but the rest of the garden and the sewer areas are too killy for me. In Rogue Legacy or Issac, I had the off chance that I got a horrifyingly OP item, and I could track my progress through a floor and had a general idea of what had to be done before I advance. Cells kind of throws you to the wolves, and like Gungeon, gives you a quick time Dodge that you HAVE TO learn to use or die lots.

A coworker convinced me to join him in a Rocket League tourney, so I picked up a multiplayer game for the first time in something like 8 months. I'm shocked that I didn't do horribly; it was actually really fun! I had been playing Rimworld in the few weeks before that, but stopped because I lost interest in all of the micromanaging. So instead, the bit of free time I have for games right now is back into Divinity original sin 2.

Our board game of the week is Splendor which is a fun little game that is simple to pick up and understand, but deep enough to be interesting. One of my daughters stomped the rest of us last night as well, so if you have kids that are relatively board-game savvy, they can play this.

I haven't played a lot of video games in the last few weeks. I have an ongoing thing with World of Warcraft (my guild is doing casual Mythic stuff). I reinstalled Civ VI and have played a few hours in one game of that, but then Queen Victoria backstabbed me and I was filled with loathing and shut it off. My younger daughter and I have been playing Super Smash Bros. Ultimate as time allows. We don't spend all that much time on screens though, especially since it was starting to warm up.

I'm in the middle of an ongoing D&D campaign, run by my brother, who is a pretty good DM. It's going pretty well; our party is poised to enter the Underdark and explore. My character is a deliciously evil warlock who is fanatically devoted to his friends. He's not a "grand plans evil villain" and will happily to the good deeds that they want to do if it enables him to do fulfill his baser desires; he's often heard saying things like, "I don't like to talk about my Patron" and "Uh, this was for the greater good." As far as game sessions go, it's hard to beat a good D&D session, although it's increasingly hard to schedule times, since I have three kids, and my brother has a 2 month old baby, and some of the other guys have kids, puppies, and shift work to think about. We actually just cancelled tonight's session, unfortunately, but with plans to reconvene on Easter Monday.

I've committed myself to completing Hollow Knight before I move on to anything else, so I've been smashing a reasonable amount of that (and making limited progress!). It's rock hard, and I don't think I'm very good at it, but it's a beautiful game, and never having played a Metroidvania before, I'm loving it. Next on the list is going to be either Doom 2016 or Breath of the Wild.
Some friends just picked up Mysterium and we've played a bunch of rounds in the past few days. This game is fantastic, a combination of Cluedo and Dixit, and it's a whole bunch of fun to play either as the ghost or as a psychic. It'll be a while before we tire of it, I think.

I was going to play Rise to Ruins, but my laptop doesn't have enough RAM for it, it appears. CPU got clogged to 90% while it was loading, too. It's a fucking Java game: how bad can it be? I can run 3D games on it, but not this?

Probably gonna play some more Dota 2 on the weekends. I don't play it often, these days. Used to have a match or two every day; now it's once or twice a week.

I've been playing Division 2 a lot. It's basically Division 1 but with quality-of-life improvements and new missions. I especially love that I don't have to craft 100 mods for my weapons anymore but that they are unlocks now. Stripping mods from guns was my least favorite task in D1.

I've also established that they didn't fix LMG's, which are, at the top end, over powered bullet rains of destruction. I've even managed to complete an entire side mission without having to reload once. I just love that.

I’m playing Earthbound for SNES. I tried the NES installment but the gameplay was too cumbersome. It’s a beautiful game if you like pixel art (I recommend disabling any smoothing... I prefer the bare pixels myself), full of nice little touches. The dialogue is short and quirky. I’m playing for the story so I fast-forward most of the combat – otherwise it would be too boring. My main reason to play Earthbound was research for my own game, but I’m really enjoying it. I put Lakka on a USB so I can boot to a distraction free environment, I can’t concentrate on videogames on my main OS.

Forza Horizon 4 mainly

As with nearly every other week: Overwatch. It's become my TF2 and I almost never get tired of playing it.