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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.
I stopped playing it after I got SkaterXL, BUT I need to get back into it and get my combos past a million. The online is a blast because when you are out on a game you can watch people absolutely tear the maps up.
So I tried a lot of Digital Card Games as of late, here is my opinions.
Eternal Card Game
It has a client for pretty much every gaming device I own, which is appreciated. Rules are kind of interesting, with having to deal with Mana, block mechanics, and multicolor blends. Gauntlet is kind of comparable to Dungeon Run, and to have that be an evergreen single player mode is kind of nice. Forge is Arena, I'm trash at Arena, and apparently I had an Event Quest take precedence over my Beginner Quest, and now I have to do it again, so that stinks. Unpacked some sort of Owl Legendary, so I guess I have to try something with that.Mythgard
I really love the idea of a community deck feature, in that the deck is yours for the week and would encourage people to try different play styles and add to the rotation of playable decks. I also like the story mode actually being coherent, and the way it deals with Mana and Board Placement with having to shuffle a card back into the deck to gain a Mana Crystal, and having your Minions only being able to attack other minions at 10 12 2 and face, as opposed to anywhere on the board is pretty interesting.Not much of a card gamer on PC, so MTG:A and Gwent are kind of out, and from what I played of the other two, it's not really enough to change my mind on either of them.
Been playing the remastered Spyro on Proton. Works pretty great out of the box (with the exception of missing cutscenes, but I can just watch them on YT). A steal at 12$ in the monthly humble bundle
There are workarounds to getting the cutscenes working again.
https://pastebin.com/cdkRqybW
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/3035#issuecomment-531402237
That seems like a lot. I was able to get the cutscenes to work very easily following these steps from someone on ProtonDB:
The only thing I had to do was tweak the path, as my Steam data was in a slightly different location than the one given. The cutscenes now work perfectly for me.
(cc: @arghdos)
Yeah I tried this my 18.04 / Vulkan / Radeon system and the game hung on launch (presumably when the intro would play). Did some digging which shows I'm not alone here:
https://github.com/z0z0z/mf-install/issues/18
Might try with the DLLs in that PR when I get home
I played through the first Spyro completely over the last week (120% completion), and started on the second one over the weekend (and am at about 40%). I can't speak for people that didn't play the originals, but I think they're still great. There are definitely some "old game" idiosyncrasies like needing to control the camera manually almost all the time, but I'm still really enjoying them.
If you're interested in it, I'd absolutely pick it up through the current Humble Monthly while it's available (not a huge hurry; almost 18 days left). That's already 70% off on Spyro alone, and you'll also get the Crash Bandicoot remakes, a CoD game, and will eventually get some other mystery ones too. You can just cancel the subscription immediately after buying it, you don't have to stay subscribed for future months or anything.
I'm at 100% in the first game and enjoyed it a bunch so far. The first world or two are pretty easy, but the difficulty ramps up towards the end (though it never is really 'challenging').
The best part thus far has absolutely been finding all the secret areas (typically via super charge or glides). Some of those have been positively fiendish (looking at you treetops dragon)!
I tried to figure everything out myself, but I had to give up on that Tree Tops jump and look it up. The ramps involved didn't line up at all, so it was really non-obvious what you had to use to make that.
I didn't realize initially that hitting multiple ramps would give you more speed (though it seems obvious in retrospect with the other Dragon's hint), so I had to look that one up in order to make any progress. It still took me a good ~10 lives to get that sequence correct even after I had seen it!
I'm not certain of this, but I believe the dragon's hint was added for the remaster. I'm pretty sure in the original they just left you in the dark, with the only hint that you could do anything out of the ordinary being that there were gems you simply couldn't glide to, no matter how hard you tried. I had no idea how to 100% that level and would keep coming back to it, looking for a way to get those gems that were tantalizingly out of reach.
I ended up figuring it out after probably hours of deliberation and attempts across weeks/months of time, and the moment I figured out the solution is one of the best "aha!" moments I've ever had in gaming. I definitely wouldn't have the patience to do that kind of thing now, but at the time it felt like my persistence had finally paid off, and in a powerful way.
I actually had a friend in college for whom this particular level became a significant moment for us. We went to get lunch one day and ended up talking about Spyro, and I mentioned that I had 120%ed the game. She immediately got incredibly serious and went, "so you were able to figure out everything on that Tree Tops level?!" I attempted to tell her about it as best as I could but found it hard to explain, especially because it had been years since either of us had played the game. On my next trip back home, I grabbed my PSX and the game and brought it back to our dorm. She was overjoyed when I talked her through how to fully complete the level, and she finally was able to fly out to that island herself, closing a gaming door in her life that had been left frustratingly open for years.
Spyro 1 holds up amazingly well, in my opinion. The game's elegant simplicity and fantastic level design shine through, and the remaster makes everything gorgeous. I loved the original, and I loved replaying this.
Crash 1, on the other hand, shows its age a lot. I played it for the nostalgia, but it's a lot rougher and harder to forgive. I had no appreciation until now for how much of the game, particularly in the later levels, involves you waiting around for cycle-based elements. It's especially egregious when things are on different cycles, so you have to wait for them to get into phase with one another.
Spyro 2 is what I'm on right now, and while the basics hold up, there are a lot of additions to the game that are frustrating at best. Whereas the first game is fluid, fun, and accessible the whole way through, Spyro 2 has a lot more pain points along the way (e.g. terrible minigames/challenges), though thankfully most are optional. It's a good game to play still, but not a good game to try to 100%, because that means you'll have to suffer through some more tedious/unfun parts.
I've been playing Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy and it's been an interesting experience. The narration is entertaining although references being angry and frustrated which isn't something I'm getting from the game.
What I am getting is that it's designed to be difficult to control and for you to regularly lose large amounts of progress. It's a game that really exemplifies learning. Each time come back to it you find you've gotten better at it. That's the main pull, but besides that you spend 90% of your time doing the same thing you've done before, and 10% of your time trying to make any real progress. That isn't a ton of fun.
I bought Descenders, by RageSquid. The last game of theirs, Action Henk, was excellent, so I figured Descenders would be, and I was right.
It's a downhill mountain bike racer, but it generally emphasizes fun over pure speed, with an arcade style trick system that is really intuitive. It's a blast to play.
I also got Superflight on Steam. It's a "procedurally generated wingsuit game" where you rack up points flying/gliding through random environments, buzzing structures for bonuses, and continuing as long as possible on a single flight without crashing. It costs less than 5 bucks, I think, and is seriously way underpriced.
I love both of these! Superflight is as chill or as stressful as you want it to be, and Descenders is fun and satisfying. Both of them are great games to listen to audiobooks/podcasts to, and I got many hours out of them this way.
I've been playing through the skirmish mode of Total Annihilation. I'm playing each map in turn on Arm, and then I'll replay each in turn on Core. I installed a patch to fix pathfinding. I haven't changed the max unit count from 250. I have not installed a different AI.
I enjoy it. It's calming and fun. It's mostly pretty easy. It's a calming therapeutic experience rather than a challenging game.
In the Halloween spirit, my friends and I have been taking a crack at The Blackout Club. I'm not quite sure what to make of it just yet, but so far I really enjoy the game getting creative with its microphone usage and pooling together soundbites from other players' games and putting them into ours (without much spoilers). It makes me wish more games got more creative with what multiplayer games are capable of.
If anyone has any (cheap-ish/non-$60) co-op horror recommendations other than Dead by Daylight and Friday the 13th, we're all ears.
Edit: I forgot to mention we also tried The Dark Pictures: Man of Medan. It was OK but super short (like ~3-4 hours) for the price, and would not recommend until it goes on sale.
I have a wooden circular Venetian solitaire board with 36 beautiful oversized marbles that go in a fat cross pattern. It's possible to solve, but I haven't gotten there yet. You can find it on youtube, but why ruin the game?
Anyway when people ask, I call it the Glass Bead Game (which is isn't), as in the novel by Hermann Hesse. But my real love is a wooden sudoku board I was gifted. There are a few books out there called beyond blackbelt sudoku with almost impossible puzzles in it. Playing on a board is better than paper, as I skip all the notation solvers use, which are no help anyway. Some of these I've worked on for weeks. It takes your brain to another place entirely.
I’ve been playing Talos Principle. The graphics are like a old voodoo graphics card demo fever dream. Its puzzles are well done, and so far I haven’t had any “rub the new item on everything and see if it does something “ problems. The story is mostly told through command terminals that take you through everything from classic philosophy to Internet forum arguments. It has a weird charm, I argued with an AI about the nature of sentience to convince it it was subjective enough it should give me root privileges.
I've been replaying Diablo 2, a game that I loved and played obsessively during middle school. Despite the hundreds or thousands of hours I've put in, there are actually a few characters I never played. I never realized how easy the Amazon is or how fun and dominant the assassin can be. The game is a bit repetitive, there isn't much story, and I still hate act three, but overall it holds up quite well for a game that's nearly 20 years old.
My husband and I did a ton of Stardew Valley IRL this weekend in that we did actual housework, yardwork, and planting. By the end of the day, our stamina bars were absolutely depleted, but our house has never looked better! As a reward to ourselves, partly for our hard work and partly because we were super sore, we took the Monday holiday as a do-nothing day which involved much gaming.
I finished with Crash 1 from the Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy remaster. I didn't actually complete the game in that I didn't beat the final boss battle, but by that time my patience for imbalanced repetition was non-existent. I 97%ed the game and will likely go no further. In fact, I went too far, playing things not because I wanted to but because I was driven to see my percent complete go higher. I know this because I spent time doing tedious things that advanced it (beating levels without dying in order to get the colored gems) and ignored ones that didn't (getting relics from doing the time trial levels).
I wish I wasn't so primed for completionism, checklisting (I literally printed out a level-order guide for the game), and extrinsic motivations of this type, but it's a bad habit I can't seem to shake. It's what made me dive into clicker/idle games, which are a zero-fun form of numeric babysitting that, for some reason, I still get the itch to come back to despite knowing how bad they are, both as games and for me personally.
Outside of my own experiences in running too far with the ball, I do think the original Crash has aged poorly. It was certainly great for its time, and even now I appreciate the different things they tried and experimented with, but ultimately the game just isn't fun for large parts. I'll be interested to see how 2 and 3 hold up for me.
After this, I hopped back to start Spyro 2 from the Spyro Reignited Trilogy. My strong nostalgia was for the first game only, so I'm able to approach this one from a less biased perspective. I did play it back in the day, but I didn't love it then, and, upon replaying it, I don't love it now either. The basics of what I like about Spyro are there, but I think they muddy this by adding a few too many things. There are small minigames in each stage, many of which are outright unfun (I just played an escort mission where your escort simply wanders around walking straight towards enemies that want to kill him).
Most of these are, thankfully, skippable, but the game has an outright awful and mandatory pain point in the Gulp boss fight. He has 10 health, you have 3. Healing items drop mid-battle to help with this, but Gulp can use them too. You can't attack him directly and instead have to wait on drops from friendly NPCs that are on a timer. Each time you successfully use a drop to attack the boss, he clears the field of all the other items, making you wait again for the next round of drops. Oh, and while you're waiting around he has area denial homing shots that increase in number as the fight goes on (by the end of the fight you'll be dodging volleys of six at a time). Your camera never gives you a full view of the playing field, so you're often running blind as you attempt to snake your way around all the shots, and one large volley can easily eat up all three of your hit points, ending an entire minutes-long fight in seconds.
It took me far too many attempts for me to beat him, and the problem with the fight is that even when I executed everything nearly perfectly and finally took him down, it still wasn't fun. Most of the fight is waiting rather than doing, and the mechanics feel as if they're designed to maximize frustration. It almost feels like a quarter-eater moment from the old arcade days of gaming, despite this game being nothing of the sort.
I also started up Grip: Combat Racing as a backlog dive, and was pleasantly surprised by how great it was. I don't have too much to say about it that I didn't already say in my other post, other than I played a little bit more and I'm worried this game's going to require skills that I don't necessarily have. It's starting to ramp up in difficulty and I, a notoriously bad gamer, might not have the chops to pick up what it's putting out.
Finally, I picked up a few games from Steam's LGBTQ+ sale because I am absolutely not above being pandered to as a gay gamer. I played through the first of these, Fragments of Him, which is the kind of game that defies the label in that there's nothing really gamey about it. Instead, it's a somber, heartfelt playable narrative.
The game focuses on the story of a man named Will and is told through four different perspectives: Will himself, his grandmother, his ex-girlfriend, and his current boyfriend. I appreciated how each character was handled, and I liked that the game felt very down-to-earth. The game has an indie intimacy to it that benefits it, and while very limited in the "game" sense, it makes that work for it. Most of the game involves static scenes where you click hotspots to progress the story, listening to narration and occasionally watching some characters/actions. It works very well, and even does some clever things with this setup as the game progresses.
It's a slow-burn that plays like an interactive attempt at literary fiction, so I can't give a recommendation unless you're the kind of person who is into that sort of thing. If you are though, I'd say it's worth a look. I thought the whole thing was a little too short for me to fully get attached to the characters, but I also can't deny that I got a little choked up at the closing scene of the game. It's not the best "walking simulator" I've ever played, but you can certainly do far worse.
I'm currently on my first playthrough. Blue Lions, Madness/Classic (I had started on Hard and got to chapter 9, but when the Madness DLC dropped, I restarted from the beginning).
I'm on chapter 11 now, I think? I'm pretty glad I restarted for Madness, because by chapter 5 or so on Hard, it honestly felt like the strategy mostly vanished; you could just place a knight, pegasus (vs magic), or Byleth pretty much anywhere and tank as many units as you want. ...at least on Madness, this didn't become the case until chapter 7 or 8.
So far, I think the overhauled class and skills systems are really cool! There are so many new knobs and dials by which you can customize the characters, now -- like Battalions and the numerous accessories. Weapons not being class-restricted allows for neat stuff, and only having five ability slots means you can't go too crazy with it. Combat Arts and Gambits are pretty neat, too. The old rock-paper-scissors stuff kinda lives on a little with the -breaker abilities. At least on Madness, I do have to plan a little around enemies who have them, since they can tank hit rates down to 30% or worse for my armoured knight.
My only real gripe with the combat changes would probably have to be that magic feels... Pretty unbalanced, lol. You're basically carrying every single book you unlock, at all times. And they refill, every battle. For free. And at no cost to inventory slots.
I think I appreciated the professor stuff and exploration at first, but honestly, it became pretty unwelcome for me after the fourth or fifth month. So much time spent running around the castle chatting, tea partying, and whatever else. I'm sick of it, but there's no way I'm going to skip all that dialogue! I can't bring myself to not talk to every single student to see what they have to say about whatever's happening this month...
I was considering not using NG+ for subsequent playthroughs , to retain the difficulty of a fresh start, but the allure of not having to sit through as many tea parties and rest through some months instead of maximizing battle point usage is strong.
Difficulty in this game seems to be very "choose your own," even beyond the initial choice. If I weren't Battling every single free weekend (other than spending one on Exploration), I'm sure combat would be much more challenging; but I'm the type to want to maximize whatever resources I do have, so that's difficult for me to do.
I don't really like how the main character is pushed so hard towards a particular build (with a unique class and all). I much preferred MU from New Mystery of the Emblem and Robin from Awakening; you can choose a strength/weakness and just build into whatever you like. I'll concede that since Byleth is just good at everything, you can still do whatever you want; but at least to me, it'd feel bad to not take advantage of the bonuses from going in the direction IS wants you to.
Anyway, I'll probably have more developed opinions by the time I finish the game... Momentum's picked up a lot as my workload decreases recently! But maybe I should go back and finish Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night sometime, too...