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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.
Recently, I've been trying to get back into playing Overwatch again. I used to play a lot, but due to some bad experiences with the community, I quit for several months. With the new updates with role queue and various balance changes (especially the ultimate charge change), I felt comfortable getting back into the game again. From what I've experienced so far, the changes to the queueing system have improved the overall game environment in a great way. There seems to be a lot less toxicity and hate from allies and enemies alike. I'm looking forward to a kinder, more fun environment in the future.
Other than Overwatch, I've been playing Breath of the Wild quite a bit. It's always great to turn it on and just have a calming, relaxing experience with the game.
Mostly just been playing WoW Classic, which I'm thoroughly enjoying. Don't have nearly the amount of freetime to play that I did back in the day, but I haven't let that stop me from enjoying it. Leveling is slow, but rewarding. I have to put thought into where I spend my silver/copper (Do I want a wand, or do I want to level up a spell? Can't afford both!). Getting anywhere takes forever, which was frustrating at first, but you're left with a much better understanding of your surroundings and every jog across the map feels like its own little adventure.
Hoping to run my first dungeon sometime this week. Was hoping to do it over the holiday weekend, but ended up having to put in some extra hours for a big project :(
I’ve started playing the Mega Man Zero series again, and it’s very fun. I stopped at the final stage of Zero 1, but luckily I’m playing on the DS Collection. This was spurred on by the news they are releasing a Mega Man Zero Legacy Collection (Trailer: https://youtu.be/0P3RQFWfW64). I’m definitely going to buy it at least for the remastered sound track, new graphical mode, and the ability to play ZX and ZX Advent. Those two games are very hard to come across in my experience. I’ve got to say, the Zero series is probably my favorite of all the classic style Mega Man games. Highly recommend it! I’ve also been very into the new Blair Witch Project game. It’s not exactly as scary as it is dreadful. Walking around a dark forest brings to mind the days of playing Slender Man on my sister’s old iPod Touch G4. I’m not sure exactly how far I am into the game but it’s been a very interesting experience, and going deeper into the backstory of the main character through flashbacks and hallucinations has been interesting. If you’re looking for a good horror title and have a good PC or an Xbox One I definitely suggest playing the game.
P.S. If you’re looking for something more accessible but similar to Mega Man Zero, Azure Striker Gunvolt is made by the same company (Inti Creates) and carries much of the game’s DNA.
I recently made friends with a very nice fellow who happens to be a Magic: The Gathering fanatic. He has an enormous collection of cards and constructed decks, and was more than happy to teach me the basics and get me playing. Between him and the online version (MtG: Arena), it's been a nice way to finally get into the game without actually spending any money.
I've always been sort of passively interested in MtG, but never quite made the jump to actually playing until now. CCGs just haven't been my thing in the past (I'm kind of averse to the microtransaction/collectible economy aspects), and never really had a friend group who were interested.
I've been pleasantly surprised at how many tools the game gives you to manage the seemingly inherent randomness of being a card game, mechanics like card draw, playing from the graveyard or exile, searching the library, scry/surveil, and so on. It's a lot of fun seeing how different decks can be built around various synergies, and the way a successful "engine" fits together is extremely satisfying.
Unfortunately, there's still kind of a background tinge of "pay to win" in that it's always going to be possible to straight up buy an expensive deck that is just straight up better than what most other players will have. Now that I'm actually playing the game, I can see how different game modes like draft do a lot to combat this, and even an expensive deck can still get a really bad series of draws, or run into a cheap deck that randomly just happens to be perfectly suited to counter it, so it feels like less of an issue than I'd initially feared. It helps that the matchmaker feels reasonably good, even though I haven't tried the ranked modes at all (and probably won't).
Dota 2 still absorbs all my competitive energies, and I still prefer the feeling that both sides are starting a match on completely even footing, but MtG:A has quickly become a go-to 15-20 minute casual time killer for me.
As an aside: MtG:A runs perfectly on Linux via a Lutris script, which is another nice bonus.
I tried running MtG:A with that script with Lutris about half a year ago and it was a no go. Seems I need to try again! Thanks for letting me know.
I dabble in MtG usually everytime a new set is released, but I only do draft only for the reasons you said. There's a lot of people who do draft mainly.
The only issue I had was that the Lutris script defaults to setting up with a Wine "virtual desktop" and the game running full screen inside that. This works fine, but causes the game to capture the cursor until you tab out, even though from the Linux side it's windowed. I was able to fix that by going into the games video settings and making it windowed (inside the virtual desktop), exiting the game, then using winecfg from Lutris to disable the virtual desktop mode. Doing this with any other order of operations seemed to confuse the game, but once I got it worked out everything has been fine.
Unfortunately, it looks like the new patch released just today has some kind of new updater/launcher flow that seems to have broken it again, and I haven't figured it out yet. Fortunately it looks like somebody is already working on an updated script, so here's hoping it's a fairly straightforward fix.
(Edit: I'm not sure if the Lutris scripts are updated yet, but by running the latest MSI version of the installer in the Lutris WINEPREFIX I was able to get it running again. Dunno if the next update will need the same thing again or not.)
Just finished Yakuza Kiwami 2 on PC. Fucking loved it. It has everything I want from a story-driven action, adventure game. The comedy was on point. The drama was on point. The romance was on point. The side quests and activities were on Point. Of Yakuza 0, Kiwami 1 and Kiwami 2, it's far and away the best game; the dragon engine probably helped a lot.
Trying to get into Witcher 3 again--wasn't feeling it the first time. Honestly, still not feeling it. The combat feels clunky. And I still have mixed feelings about how the game just throws sidequests, lore and world-building stuff at you before you really get into the game--too much of a good thing is still too much IMO.
Thinking about putting the brakes on Witcher again, and playing Control. I really like what I've seen so far. (And it was FREE... w/ my new 2070S)
WoW Classic will be my timesink game I play while watching YouTube and Twitch streams.
I started playing The Witcher 3 a while back because I was really excited about Cyberpunk 2077. I've got to say I have the same feelings as you. Being overwhelmed by sidequests makes it feel like everything is disconnected and unnecessary.
I really wanted to pick up Control but I dont typically buy games full price. Though I am tempted to break that rule for this game. I just bought an AMD card and of course this is the first game that actually makes nVidia's raytracing really useful beyond reflections.
i think youd be better served waiting for a price drop
I just purchased Shining Resonance Refrain on sale in the Humble store. I've had my eye on it for a while but didn't purchase it until now because even with Sega Japan's designers and resources it just seemed generic as heck. Which was especially irritating because it's technically part of the Shining meta-series.
I've got mixed feelings. It's got a pretty good combat system, but it's got a completely broken difficulty curve. The first real boss of the game can kill you in two hits, and he is in a cave with enemies so weak you can realistically expect to kill them all without taking damage.
Visually, it's an exceptionally well-crafted world, and the characters are very good representations of the concept art. The only thing that is betraying it's origins as a PS3 game is the low resolution textures on the characters' clothes and equipment, but it's barely noticeable. But on the other hand, I personally think Tony Taka's characters are kind of dull and boring.
Those negatives aren't game killing, but the writing is almost at that level. There is just so much unnecessary talking. And it's all visual novel style in presentation. I wish there was blocking in these scenes simply because I think it would have made the director realize how much unnessary yammering there is in this game.
Minecraft seems to be back in fashion, and I thought id give it a shot again. Instantly hooked. Its as great as always, these updates take some getting used to though. (I quit ~1.8)
Played and finished Episode 1 and 2 (3+ haven't been released yet) of The Long Dark's story mode "Wintermute" on the medium difficulty "Capable Survivor". Visually it was beautiful. The style, the environments, the ever changing weather. Story seems interesting so far, picking up more of the mystery in Ep2 and a bit of a twist by the end.
Gameplay is ok; crafting and starting fires and fixing clothes and searching buildings wasn't bad, but never felt particularly satisfying. I think it may be that while there's a lot going on between survival gauges and the many different possibilities, the acts themselves are just "Do thing? [wait X time or for gauge to fill]". I would have loved some sort of campfire "minigame", clearing, blocking wind, stacking the initial wood, lighting and coaxing a flame, adding larger wood, etc. Or repairing clothes with a patch stitching minigame where the better the stitch, the better the repair. A minor survival nit to pick; movement and running and how heavy your pack is while moving have no effect on your body temperature, which seems a bit odd.
The two main gripes I have are: carry capacity and the wolves. I find I'm always always over encumbered or on the edge between some of the basic tools, a small amount of food and water, and some first aid (no wood or anything "extra" that could be reasonably found). The pace is slow enough that leaving tools behind (or finding and not picking up), that it just wouldn't be enjoyable leave it and have to go back for it (even if it's a bit more realistic). The wolves though, ridiculous. Super wide detection radius, immediate aggro on detection, seemingly infinite follow distance on a map once aggro, some maps have way too many of them, and limited fighting options (gun, flare gun or stone throw to briefly scare. Once one is on you, hatchet and knife become an option, but you can't preemptively equip as an attack).
Not particularly interested in the completely open ended "just survive" mode, so I'll probably play the remaining episodes when they come out and that's it.
I started playing Warframe and I have no idea what I'm doing.
The moment-to-moment gameplay is fun, but I have no clue about lore, how my abilities work, or even if I'm using a good build (not that I have any build options right now).
I assume the game will teach me slowly and steadily, but it's all a bit disorienting.
I haven't played Warframe in a long time now so I don't know if this is still very relevant, but when I started, this guide was one of the best resources I found for actually explaining a lot of it: http://metadragon.de/warframe-beginners-guide/
CONTROL! It's very good. I love everything Remedy has made but this is like if you took out the time travel and time manipulation from Quantum Break (which is also excellent, btw, minus the TV show parts), replaced it with telekinesis, and then dunked the whole thing in a soup of SCP, Lost, and The X-Files. There's so many little bits and pieces of creepypasta. It's not a cover shooter either, and it encourages getting up close after you kill something to restore health. It's just got so much that I enjoy in it that I want to keep playing but I also don't want it to end.
I've gone back to a bad old habit and spending way too much time playing Stellaris again, to try and see the state the game is in after a few years of updates.
The latest major update has made the game almost unrecognizable from it's start, and for the better. It feels like they've finally ironed out the kinks and created a system for planetary and resource management that's interesting, allows for some roleplaying, but doesn't end up being too broken or confusing. Specifically the things I like are:
That said the game still has some issues. The Empire Sprawl system, which is good in theory and not game-breaking, but which subtly encourages an expansion speed which the AI tends to rapidly outpace. This becomes kind of annoying when you have a couple of less than friendly neighbours who keep getting all up in your business just because you're an egalitarian materialist and they're spiritualist.
Also Diplomacy in general, at least in an unmodded game, is still kind of surface level. It's often mostly determined by empire ethics and whether or not you happen to share borders or reach agreements at the opportune time. There isn't much in the way of intrigue, bargaining, or really anything that would make diplomacy feel like less of an afterthought. The Federation system has improved a lot compared to before but being built on this very unsophisticated system it's honestly not all that complex or interesting.
Every time I play Stellaris it's improved a lot since last time I played it, but every time it's still been very far off from its potential. Maybe I'll give it another chance. These latest changes sound promising.
Do you have any mods you'd like to recommend, if I were to start a new Stellaris game today? I'm a bit weary of modding Paradox games in general though, because all the major mods tend to break with every major patch.
It's been a while since I last used mods, I've gotten more heavily into doing Ironman games as of late, and some are no longer supported in the current version there are a few I've been told are really neat:
As for the rest I mostly used things which expanded color palettes or added more skyboxes, but those are much more of a personal choice.
I've been playing Super Smash Bros Ultimate. One of my kids is really into it right now, and it's pretty enjoyable to play with kids. We can turn on autohandicapping and it gets even pretty quickly if we play against each other, but our current favourite way to play is on a team, with 2 other teams (each of them get a CPU 4 and a CPU 5 player). Tons of fun, easy to pick up and get into, easy to put down. It's great casual gaming.
I recently played in a SSBU tournament with friends, but it was a bit of a mess - there were a lot of arbitrary rules and it didn't use the in-game tournament mode. It was a double elimination and after I died to random environment + getting ganged up on, I just ended my run and played slapcup instead.
Cliff Empire (Linux)
I wanted a new city builder, so I decided to try this one. The idea is that you have a very small cliff to build your city on, so you have to optimise the small area, which is an interesting contrast to Cities: Skylines and its massive sprawling cities. I played about halfway through the tutorial before losing interest though. There didn't feel like there was a whole lot of gameplay, to be honest. There's a tower defence mode, which I might try out if I feel like it some day, but the tutorial was just boring.
Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc (Linux)
I have a friend who gifts me weird games now and then, and now he's gifted me this one. The concept is fun. You're trapped in a prestigious high-school run by a psychotic teddy-bear, and to escape you have to kill one of the other students, and get away with it. Your character is however not the murdering type, so instead you spend much of the game investigating crime scenes and arguing in murder trials. The rest of the game (as far as I've played at least) you spend socialising with other students and searching for a way to escape.
There are many things I like about the game. I enjoy the first-person exploration parts, the point-and-click adventure game style crime scene investigations, and the debate style trials. But in addition to that, this game is also a visual novel, and like many other such, it has too many words for my liking. And you might say duh, of course it has many words, it's a visual novel, but the problem is that so much of the text just feels like padding to extend the length of the game, without adding very much of value to it.
Dominion (tabletop)
This happens to be my favourite board game. I played a couple two-player games with base+Intrigue+Prosperity on Saturday. I prefer the older expansions, because they don't slow down the game like the newer expansions do. I won the first game by using Mint to create a lot of copies of my gold, and the second with a Wishing Well/Talisman/Conspirator/Festival engine.
Dungeons & Dragons (tabletop)
Somehow I keep forgetting this one when making these posts, but I DM a group that plays every Tuesday. We're doing Waterdeep Dragon Heist, which is kind of a sandbox adventure. My group is a mix between experienced and new players (all of them guys from work), and this is my first time DMing an adventure on this scale. It's challenging, but it's lots of fun. The players have achieved the main objective of the adventure, but due to its sandbox nature, there are a lot of loose ends to tie up before moving on to the next adventure.
Friday the 13th (Windows)
I did a few games with friends on Sunday, which was fun! We all suck at the game, and it took us a while just to figure out what we were supposed to do to escape. And we never succeeded. But still fun.
Imperial Settlers (Tabletop Simulator, Linux)
Been playing this in Tabletop Simulator with a friend who loves it. He taught it to me by sending me a rules explanation video, and then playing the game while text chatting. Which is probably not the ideal way to learn a game, because I keep getting the rules wrong. Imperial Settlers is a solid game though, and Tabletop Simulator seems like a pretty good tool for playing with friends when you don't have an opportunity to physically meet up.
Pokémon Go (Android)
This one I also keep forgetting about when writing these posts, even though I've played it almost every day for the last several weeks. It's not exactly a deep or challenging game (you could argue it's barely a game at all really), but it's soothing fun. And a good motivation for leaving my flat now and then to go for a walk.
It's not done as well in the first game as it is in the sequels, but the point of the text in the game is to get you to understand the characters so you have a stake in them, which gives impact when they die or are uncovered as the murderer. The problem with the first game is that the characters are a bit too cartoonish, so it doesn't work as well as it is intended. The sequels do better in this regard.
You should also be aware that while the translation is no means bad, there is a lot that can't really be translated. Monokuma is such a big deal for the series largely because the voice actress is the original VA for the Doraemon anime. Monokuma is basically a bloodthirsty and perverted version of Barney.
I would strongly recommend finishing the game, though. The end has lots of twists and is very emotional. You will almost certainly enjoy it.
I'm playing a lot of Caves of Qud right now.
It's immersive, every run feels different and I just absolutely love the lore of the game and how it plays.
If you are into roguelikes, exploration, roleplaying, this game is amazing. I feel like it also is a nice intro to roguelikes for someone who is not used to the genre.
Been playing a lot of Remnant (Steam) with friends. Its a single player or multiplayer coop FPS RPG, but with some unique mechanics. Its also hard. If I wasn't playing with friends, it's really hard. With friends, we can commiserate and encourage each other, and strategize the boss fights.
The game feels really polished, the story is really interesting and we've only scratched the surface. Also reach players world is procedurally generated even though they all follow the same story. Your character retains all items/stats even if you join a friend's world, so helping out is both fun and interesting. I don't think we've fought the same boss twice. Each boss has individual mechanics.
I love this game, highly recommended.
I've recently been playing Payday 2, as I remembered that it has a story mode. I'm also a collaborator for a mod for it which changes some of the text to make it danker, and I'm also planning on changing the text for the story mode stuff when I finally get to the end of it.
Not that I'm expecting anyone else to get far enough through the story mode with that mod installed in 2019 to actually read it lol
But yeah the game is pretty good, even if some of the choices made by the developers are a bit... questionable... I guess
Dragon Quest Builders 2 on the Switch. I like it. It has the mechanics of Minecraft, but with a storyline and other characters. There's different islands to unlock with whole extended quest stories on them, in addition to your own island that you can do whatever you want with.
Hunt the Wumpus. It’s hard to get tired of this timeless dodecahedron adventure game.
Life has picked back up for me, so I've had very little time to indulge in gaming. As such, my only progress this week is that I've put about an hour and a half into The Vanishing of Ethan Carter.
I actually started it back when it was big, shortly after release, and I strongly disliked it -- mostly because I didn't understand its structure. I found everything in it to be very disconnected and inconsequential.
What I didn't know, and what I think the game would benefit from making more explicit to the player, is that each area is its own little "scene" that tells a story when completed. I found this spoiler-free explanation of how the game works which is what prompted me to dive back in, and I'm enjoying it much more this time around. I now know that my first playthrough felt disconnected because I'd found a little bit of a lot of different scenes, but I never actually saw a whole scene through to completion.
The game feels like Dear Esther meets Stephen King (both of these are great things). It's unsettling and uncomfortable in a good way, and I love that each scene has its own little individual flair, twist, or gimmick.
The game is also flat out gorgeous. There have been several times that I've stopped my current narrative line so that I can just wander around and appreciate the environment. It has some stunning vistas.
The story hasn't fully gripped me yet, but I appreciate the game less for the overall narrative it's trying to tell and more for its mood and snippets. My opinion on the story is still subject to change, however, given that I'm probably only about halfway through the game.