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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.
So on the other side of that crazy November Humble Monthly, I played through Call of Duty WWII, campaign, some zombies, and some multiplayer.
I love FPS campaigns. They're like burgers to me. I'll play a shitty shooter campaigns and have fun like I would eat an overgrilled burger in a bun with no condiments or toppings. I'll play an amazing shooter campaign and have an unparalleled experience of taste, texture, umami, and dopamine like nothing else. Sure, it may not be something to celebrate a birthday or anniversary with but when I want some Me Time, it's shooter games. I don't think it's any coincidence that the best FPS games in gaming history created some of the biggest tidal waves in the industry.
I've been sour on the CoD series overall. I play every single one, but I've been pretty down on them since Modern Warfare 2. Apart from a few exceptions like Black Ops 2 and Advanced Warfare, most of the series has ranged from aggressively mediocre (Modern Warfare 3) to astoundingly bad (Ghosts). CoD, 2, and 4 were all excellent games, especially 4, and it feels like the series dove headfirst into commercialization, taking all the wrong lessons and running with them in the pursuit of all those dollars.
I'm glad I can say that CoD WWII is one of the good entries in this series.
Firstly, it looks amazing. I wasn't expecting a CoD game to look quite so good, but I'm not sure why. Perhaps the other entries around WWII lended to modern design conventions more so they didn't stand out. But here, the WWII era is depicted with such amazing image quality and clarity, with luscious lighting and shadowing throughout. I don't even have an HDR screen, I can only imagine what it would look like on one of those. Character models look and move so realistically that it evokes memories of classic WWII media like Band of Brothers and Saving Private Ryan (with a bit of Apocalypse Now mixed in). It runs like a dream on maxed out graphics for how good it looks too, it's very impressive.
The game actually tries to be realistic. In an age where Battlefield is revising the history of weaponry by making all WWI and WWII weaponry emulate modern weapons and tactics, Call of Duty actually seems to keep what makes WWII weaponry unique. Guns don't have many bullets, the more modern ones are hard to find, and you need precise aim to counteract the long reloads and low fire rates of the rifles. Smoke grenades are needed throughout to put up visual screens, and clearing urban locations feels as frenetic as one would expect a million tight corners and hidey holes to feel like. And that velvety lighting only helps make it feel even more immersive.
The actual gameplay of the campaign is good. The levels are varied and interesting, and the shooting sections all feel rather well crafted. You'll go from trenches, to bunker clearing, to fields. You'll assault, defend, and sneak. There's no mussing or fussing about with slow-walking areas, taking control away for too long, or giant exposition dumps. Once the action starts, it doesn't stop until the end of the level. The sneaking sections are actually not bad at all. They're on the easy side so it's not too frustrating, but well crafted enough to be fun to try remaining quiet.
If there's any place that it's weak, it's the story. I guess the series' return to WWII also meant they had to be very serious and sombre about it. But Call of Duty historically mixes with good writing like nuts and gum. It feels like they write to a formula and oh boy is it present in this game. All the characters are flat, and one dimensional. Character development is dangled like a carrot on a stick for some reason, and the payoff is basically a hollow, bitter carrot when it goes happen. It's shallow, and unsatisfying. I noted that all the characters (every single one) dumps expository information about themselves in a cutscene, when it's their time to have an emotional spotlight, and then it is never addressed again. It's like whomever wrote this decided that character development follows a template of:
Step 3 seems to happen at any free moment, whether that's when the NPC makes you stop to listen to his two lines about how he gave up something to be here, or as the first dialogue of a cutscene as if it's somehow the context for the orders you receive after it.
It's trite, and kind of ridiculous. I actually wound up preferring the previous approaches of CoD1, 2, and even 3's approach to WWII where it was more based on famous movies and scenes rather than this weird, melodramatic, saccharine washing of WWII. The part that gets me is that they even had a moment earlier in the game where they go out of their way to explain the Germans did some good even though you're fighting them now, and then the rest of the game is dedicated to making them captial-E Evil. And then the ending is suddenly an acknowledgement and focus on the Holocaust... without any mention or indication of the Holocaust since it's protrayed as a work camp/gulag/diet concentration camp.
Band of Brothers this is not, but it tries very hard to be. The visuals look amazing but the story is what lets them down. The shots of characters melodramatically monologuing in gorgeous, velvety lighting conditions winds up reading more like comedy to me than drama.
Some other things I noticed:
I also picked up COD WWII via Humble this month just for the singleplayer, but just couldn't get into it. Had to change the difficulty like 4 times just to get off the starting beach on the first mission. And throughout the first mission, all I could think is I'm not having fun with this. I kept getting killed because of how little health I had, and I never seemed to have enough health packs to be comfortable. I can see it appealing to some people, but it wasn't for me.
Honestly, I think that is by design. Storming the beaches in D-Day is always portrayed like a wild, mass-casualty event where dozens of lives get snuffed out by random chance. There's even a multiplayer level in the War mode (basically, a series of objectives where one side assaults, and the other defends) that recreates this, complete with bot Allies so that the German side has a bunch of enemies to mow down on that beach. I've never, ever seen a Call of Duty game use bots before in any capacity, and they specifically did it here. Not even the other War maps seem to have something like this. They really seem to want to portray storming the beach as a really, really difficult thing with a lot of chance.
I played the entire thing on Veteran without much issue. The first level is the toughest only because it throws you into the fray and you don't get all the squad abilities yet. The first one you get, and really the most important one, is your best friend throwing you bonus medpacks. Honestly, past that first level, I never really ran low on medpacks, even on Veteran. Once you get those bonus medpacks rolling in past that first level, it's a lot easier.
I'd say this is one of the easiest CoD games I've played.
We spent the weekend at the SHUX tabletop con in Vancouver, so I played:
A LOT of Santorini:
This was actually good for me because in general I have never really enjoyed playing santorini, but the major part of that comes from the fact that everyone I've ever played it with was involved in the development, so they are all extremely good. I'm also a little bit actually bad at it - abstracts are never going to be my forte, I'm too scatterbrained.
It's a really easy game to teach to people though, and quite appealing to kids and people who like cute things, so since this was my first volunteering con, I mostly held down that station! Since it generally only takes 5-10 minutes to play a round, I opted to just play a round with lots of people rather than only a teach, so it was fun to actually play with people who aren't 1000x better than me! It turns out I probably do enjoy the game, it's just that the opponents I have access to for it are too good ;)
Betrayal at the House on the Hill:
This game isn't great? It's one of those games that has been on my list to play for a very long time, and since we came to boardgaming as a hobby a little late, it was already kind of a classic, but not something people were excited to get to the table. But people refer to its mechanics quite often, so I've been meaning to play it. The gameplay itself I found a little dull, and we played with 5 which felt very unbalanced in the betrayal phase. But, that said, I'm glad we played it, just to get it off my list, and I did find it very funny sometimes with the card draws where you're walking into the garden and the... floorboards are very creaky. You enter the bathroom - it's filled with dusty portraits whose eyes watch you everywhere you go. !!
Parks:
We only got a half game in, but this game is simple and elegant and very pretty and quite fun. The production quality is great - check out that game tray if you get a chance!
prototypes
I like playing prototypes generally! We did a speed dating event where you get a 4 minute pitch on people's prototypes which I thought was VERY FUN to see. I love to see the range of how people have done up their prototypes too - everything from "we have finished commissioned art and professionally printed cards" to "this is a lot of scribbles in crayola pens on a posterboard" but it's interesting that they could both be equally good games!
I've been trying out Destiny 2 since it came out in free-to-play on Steam last week. I had only ever tried it for a few hours a long time ago when they gave the base game away for free on Battle.net, but I never got far at all. I decided to just start over again since they re-did the start of the game as part of the F2P release.
However, the new method of starting is extremely confusing, in my opinion. They put you through an extremely basic intro, and then pretty much just toss you into what used to be "endgame" and immediately encourage you to join events that are complicated. I was glad that I had played it before, because I still remembered various things that they don't explain at all any more. I have no idea how confusing it would be now for a truly new player. The old campaign(s) (which are a gentler intro) are still available, but they're a little tricky to access and it doesn't emphasize them.
It's still pretty fun though (especially when playing with a friend or two) and I'll probably keep trying it out a little more. There's a ton to do even without buying either of the expansions, and I worked my way up to the new "soft cap" for gear score of 900 pretty quickly by just doing random things, so now I'll probably need to start deliberately trying to get better gear if I want to keep going.
Over the weekend, I finished The Sexy Brutale, which I've been meaning to do for years. I had originally started it about 2 years ago but left it half-finished, and ended up just restarting it since I didn't remember it clearly any more. It's an interesting "time loop" style game where you have to figure out how to prevent murders by observing them and then going back in time and changing things. It often takes quite a few loops to fully understand what happens and figure out what you need to do. I enjoyed the game overall, but it unfortunately never had much challenge, and it was usually pretty obvious what to do once you made the right observations. The developer has made a couple of other time-loop games after this one, and I'd definitely like to try out The Invisible Hours in VR.
I also picked up the new Humble Monthly, which is a great deal for the Spyro and Crash Bandicoot remasters, and I started on the first game in the Spyro Reignited Trilogy. I'm not as hardcore as @kfwyre with his 120% already, but I'm at about 40% complete and am enjoying it a lot. It was one of my favorite games when I was young, and this is such a great remaster of it. As far as I can tell, it feels pretty much exactly like Spyro used to, but it looks so much better while still keeping the original's flavor/style. Also, the flying levels are pretty damn hard to complete.
Let's make a Destiny 2 Tildes clan. I played with the idea, but couldn't think of a good name.
Destildes? ;)
Destilderinos! 👍
My rapid 120% was a product of three things:
I practically have the game memorized. For example: I was able to complete most of the flying levels on my first or second try because I instinctively remembered the routes.
My husband subbed to WoW Classic this weekend, so both of us had great reasons to spend Saturday parked in front of our computers together. Parallel play isn't just for toddlers!
I just really, REALLY love the first game. I'd be happy to delete my save and play it over again! I don't know why but the game is a cozy delight for me -- fun and familiar.
I am now trying to decide whether to move straight on to Spyro 2 (which I'm significantly less familiar with -- I only played it once, decades ago), or whether I want to start up Crash 1 and kind of hop back and forth between the trilogies, going one game at a time.
These have also made me strongly hope that we see a PC release of the Crash Team Racing remaster. Growing up on the PSX meant that game was my Mario Kart 64.
Completely agree. I had played for a few weeks before the Steam switch, getting through the main campaign along with Osiris and Warmind. I hadn't bought Forsaken at the time, but there was always a big icon on the galaxy map where to start it and it was also an entry in the "important" Milestones tab. Day of the steam switch, I bought Shadowkeep as well as Forsaken. Hopped on and... nothing about Forsaken, a major chapter in the canonical campaign, anywhere anymore. I thought the DLC was broken or didn't apply correctly until I happened to land on the planet where I remembered the old icon being and managed to find the starting quest. Maybe starting a new character from scratch would have triggered better indicators, who knows.
On top of that, I feel like the number of quests in the tracker exploded. Before I only ever had a page, maybe two, at a time. Now I've got three or four pages, a jumble of side-story quests and vendor requests and seasonal quests and more. There is no organization at all beyond a separation of bounties into their own section, only sort by newest and sort by rarity. I spend so much time just trying to figure out what the next quest I should be actively focused on, trying to wade through ones for different gametypes (gambit, crucible, etc.) and a number of "play normally for a while to eventually complete" ones. It's a real mess and I can't imagine what it must be like for someone who's playing for the first time.
That said, the game is a blast. The campaigns are fun and polished, the worlds where stuff is just happening around you is cool, the side quests with some story are engaging, and the weapons satisfying (I am loving this bow I got with exploding arrows)
I, also, recently started Destiny 2. As a brand new player, I've found it a bit confusing. But, as with most games (and things, in general, I suppose), I'll probably acclimate to it in a couple of days.
I've been playing Apex Legends quite a bit, so my preference for FPS feel might be skewed, but I do think the movement and shooting feel a bit clunky in Destiny 2, especially in PVP matches.
Yeah I started D2 and I've been trying to wrap my head around all the mechanics with the help of guides; and it's still difficult. It took me like two hours of gameplay to realize I had a class ability! Not that the shield would have been that useful, yet. Nowhere did it tell me how to use those or any of the keybindings. I still don't know what that middle ability is, is it the running charge? (I'm playing a Titan). I'm super confused about the skill trees and subclasses. Bounties or any of the different mission mechanics were neither explained (patrols, adventures etc.).
I found out where to do the original campaign so probably going to start doing that. ATM the game world feels pretty hollow since I was just thrown in The Tower and not explained anything. They definitely should have made some kind of tutorial for new light.
The middle ability is just your melee attack. It's weird that they display it so prominently when you probably never need to worry about how long until you can use it again.
I'm kinda sorta... finishing... Red Dead Redemption 2. It's the 2nd or 3rd time it feels like there's an "ending" and I don't trust the game to ever give me that sweet sense of completion but it's gotta be close. Honestly, I had a horrible time with this game. It's the first time in ages that I went all-in with a sprawling AAA game and I'm forcing myself to do the whole thing, as a kind of meditation on where modern gamedesign is moving. It's obviously a very, very technically impressive game and I find enough enjoyment in that to sit through it. But in every possible other way, it's all that is wrong with AAA games. It's often comically bad. I could write a small essay about it but luckily someone has already written an epic deconstruction of all the things wrong with it, so I'll just link that.
I also finally warmed up to Mario Maker 2 and I think I get what all the fuzz is about. There's something just utterly charming about the presentation, the limitations of the editor and how dedicated makers are to breaking free from its shackles. I've seen a working Pinball machine with Koopa shells, sprawling metroidvanias, cute themed levels that require you guide a goomba to safety and such things and you might have heard that someone has made a first-person level. It's just crazy. There's also a deep rabbit hole of challenges (kaizo levels, high endless runs, various multiplayer modes if you feel like it, a not-so-shabby collection of official singleplayer campaign levels and, if you dare, actually learning the editor and making your own levels) so in terms of content, it's basically endless. I was a bit skeptical at first because, you know, it's 2D Mario – I played this before, like hundreds of times, for years and decades. But by allowing very "non-traditional" designs through the level editor, it manages to stay fresh.
Been playing Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy. This isn't my first time giving this a shot, and I'm playing it with my 8 year old daughter. More and more I'm getting to introduce my kids to the hobbies that I enjoy, which is a delightful thing for me, because as cheesy as it sounds, my kids are the primary source of delight in my life, and sharing the other things that bring me joy with them is the best.
My daughter loves this game, and it is a mass of giggles every time we fall. We go back and forth with controls, and I've shown her how to adjust mouse sensitivity on the fly with buttons on the mouse, which blew her mind a bit. She's still not that good at it, but then again... neither am I. The talk through by the dev is really great, and my daughter loves it when there's a lengthy fall and he tells you not to be too sad, and then gives some kind of life advice or video game dev story.
All in all, it's a fun little game; if you haven't tried it out, I recommend picking it up if it is on sale.
Ragnarok Online, the grind and RNG drop rates are as brutal as they've ever been, but outside of something like EvE online, I haven't found a game that gives me a feeling of progression not just within the game, but in how I play the game. It's not afraid to lock content behind huge timewalls of grinding (or I guess paying for someone else to). Which to me gives a real feeling of worth to the items that you gather.
Are you playing official servers, or private? Last I played RO was for Re:Start (what a clusterfuck that was. Enjoyed my time thoroughly, though!), but I mostly spent my RO time over the years on pre-remewal private servers.
iRO or a private server?
Gotta get those Kaho Horns! (I don't even know if they're a decent tier item in the modern game, I just remember my friend having a beasty multi-slot Kaho on AnimaRO back in ye olden dayes)
Well I haven't put a bunch of time into it yet, but probably will in the coming days. Finally playing the Persona series, though I decided to start with emulating Persona 3 on pcsx2. Since it seems to be a decent starting point for the style Persona is going with now. Afterwards I guess I'll have to track down a method of playing Persona 4 Golden, maybe that Playstation TV box that lets you play vita games. But that should set me up well to play Persona 5 Royal when it comes next year.
Also depending on my mood, I want to try out a lightly modded Oblivion. Already got it set up using the Wabbajack mod pack tool and Bevilex graphics pack. Never did finish that game many years ago, and only given it glancing views since than.
The Persona games are wonderful. I've always appreciated JRPGs, though I can't say I'm anything close to a connoisseur, but the Persona games are just too good. They're long and slow games... until they're not and you're hooked, running through huge amounts of plot at a time. The quality of the writing across 3, 4, 5 have to be the best in the entire genre. Even stalwarts like Xenogears and Tales of Vesperia don't really come close enough to matching how well written these games are, even though they're also up there.
If there's one piece of advice I can give, it's that you should always take escape ropes and save when you can. I've lost dozens of hours across all three games because I got greedy in dungeons and then died in short order to combinations of bad luck and bad decisions (these are not easy games).
@Deimos did most of my work for me in his post: I took the weekend to fully complete the first game in the Spyro Reignited Trilogy. The original is one of my favorite games of all time, and the remake does a great job of staying true to the original while improving the game visually. It looks like now and plays like then.
Following this, I hopped to the first game in the Crash Bandicoot N-Sane Trilogy. Unlike Spyro, the original Crash hasn't aged nearly as well and is probably much less palatable to modern audiences. Its required frustration threshhold is much higher, with a lot more deaths, a lot more lost progress, a lot more antagonistic design, and a lot of waiting around for cycles (including waiting for cycles running at different speeds to loop through enough times until their coordinated timing works in your favor). Its worlds are also not nearly as wonderful as Spyro's, though I'm willing to cut it some slack simply because it was a product of its time. The original game is old enough that 3D worlds were still completely uncharted territory, joysticks weren't even standard on controllers, and passwords were still a save mechanism. The remaster is good for what it is, and I'm enjoying reliving the experience, but I appreciate it more as an object lesson in how game design has changed rather than a game on its own merits.
For those who read my post last week, my plan for a full random game month is on hiatus for the time being. Crash and Spyro usurped the throne of my attention, and I'll come back to my proposed experiment at a later time. I'm thinking maybe January?
I'll also mention here, for anyone interested, that Steam's Proton is seriously INCREDIBLE. Spyro was flawless, as is Crash. It feels weird to run Windows games on Linux this easily.
Got heavily back into Factorio this last week, started a new game from scratch. I love this game so much, it's easy for me to lose myself in while TNG plays on the other monitor. Its a continuous dopamine feed of building systems and making improvements to atsk the automated bits.
So, hypothetically unrelated to any news that might have come out today... Anybody got any recommendations for mobile card based games on Android with similar gameplay to Slay the Spire and/or Gwent? Trying something new today.
Have you ever tried Eternal? It feels a lot like a mix between Hearthstone and Magic: The Gathering to me.
I refunded Indivisible because I didn't really like the Valkyrie Profile-like combat system and found the platforming to be frustrating at times. That being said, it was pretty (if you're into the anime aesthetic) and the Linux version ran pretty smoothly.
Touhou Luna Nights (played via Proton v4.11-7) was a better fit for me. Basically it's Metroid but the protagonist is Sakuya and the setting is the Scarlet Devil Mansion (fake). Some catchy Touhou track remixes and the ability to timestop bosses make this good fun in my book.
My wife and I just started Final Fantasy XIV this evening and are enjoying it so far. Leaving World of Warcraft after 15-years of off and on play was a difficult choice but so far we’re glad we gave SquareEnix a shot.
With it getting into cooler weather, it’s also about time for my annual foray into Stardew Valley. There’s just nothing like sipping on something warm while kicked back and de-stressing from planting crops.
Sorry, this is a bit confusing since the previous topic in this series is only about 5 days old. I think this topic should be on Monday though, since people usually do a lot of their gaming over the weekend.
This is the first proper scheduled topic to be posted, I'm setting up the other ones today as well.