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

Death Stranding! It's weird, it's slower than something like MW 42: "Dudes with Nukes" and I love it! It reminds me a lot of open-world games like HZD (of course), BotW, etc. but has way more depth and small touches and feels like one of the most polished experiences I've had gaming in years.

I love it. I'm like ~10hrs in and will definitely be playing it to completion. I love these sorts of games and the clever additions to open-world-ish games like this where you lean on other real-world players are awesome.

...that said the product placement was super jarring. DRINK MONSTER ENERGY DRINK. WATCH RIDE WITH NORMA REEDUS.

EDIT: I cannot stress how weird it is. The creativity behind it makes it worth the play-through. It's like we've had a bunch of sequels and then we get this non-sequel masterpiece.

Despite saying that I wouldn't, I ended up fully completing Spyro 3 in the Spyro Reignited Trilogy, so I'm done with the trilogy now. There ended up not being as many tedious challenges as I thought, and there was a door to a new area at the end of the game that I could only open by 100%ing it, so obviously my completionism instincts wouldn't let me ignore that. I also discovered a couple of things that made completing it a lot easier, and while it's pretty embarrassing that I didn't know about them before, I'm going to confess just in case it saves anyone else from wasting time because of not noticing the same things (and I'll ping a couple other people that mentioned playing it: @kfwyre @arghdos):

• You can press the left stick down and the dragonfly will point towards un-collected treasure in the level! I fully completed Spyro 1 and 2 and about half of 3 without knowing this, and would just search through the levels for anything I missed. That usually didn't take too long for any level, but this still makes it so much simpler.
• At the end of each world in Spyro 3, there's a level where you play as Sparx the dragonfly. Whenever I checked one of these levels, they'd just say "come back later", so I figured that they probably didn't unlock until the end of the game or something. It turns out that they unlock as soon as you beat the boss from that world, but I generally completed all the levels first before fighting the boss, so I didn't realize because there wasn't much reason to come back. Completing the Sparx levels gives multiple upgrades such as making him pick up gems from further away, being able to smash chests for you, and even letting you take one more hit. I mentioned in one of my previous posts that it felt like the pickup function wasn't working very well—turns out it's because I didn't unlock the improved version (from the first world) until the end of the game.

Like I said, both of those are really embarrassing to have missed for so long, but oh well, I'm done with it all now and still really enjoyed them all overall. I haven't been playing newer "collectathon"-style games like Yooka Laylee and A Hat in Time, but this reminded me that it's a game type that I do enjoy quite a bit.

I've also been playing some more Lonely Mountains: Downhill, and I love it. Almost everything about it feels great, and I'm really enjoying figuring out different paths to try and cut a little more off my times and finish the challenges. It's also a much larger game than I was expecting, more and more stuff just keeps opening up, and I expect I'm going to end up putting a lot of time into it. I've been playing it through Xbox Game Pass for PC, but I decided that I'm going to buy it on Steam anyway to support the devs more and make sure that I continue to own it even if I don't continue with Game Pass. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, Game Pass saved-games aren't accessible or are encrypted or something, so I'm probably going to need to start over on the Steam version, but that's not too big of a deal overall for this game.

I also played a couple of hours of Sunset Overdrive last night, which is another one of the games I was intending to try out during my Game Pass trial. I'm really enjoying it so far, it's almost like a combination of Jet Grind Radio (one of my favorite games) and an open-world shooter like Saints Row. I'm not sure how long it'll be enjoyable for, but so far I'm having a great time grinding and bouncing around the city, blowing stuff up, and laughing at some of the ridiculousness of the game (the random respawn animations when you die are especially amazing).

I started with the free weekend on Steam and eventually decided to pick up American Truck Simulator since it was on sale. I'm enjoying it, it hits the right sense of doing something not too hard but not too easy and having a progression, but without any pressure. I've been looking for a game that can tick all those boxes and really be relaxing without being boring for a while now, so I'm actually really glad they had the free weekend and I got to try it out.

All board games for me:
Gorilla Marketing - I'm biased because I'm the designer, but I love this. It's the next release from Roxley and it's coming out in February. I got the final pre-press sample this week and manufacturing is now a go. Players are monkeys at an ad agency trying to name ridiculous products/movies/companies/etc based on acronyms. And then in round 2, come up with marketing tag lines for the things named in round 1.

JAWS - A surprisingly good one-vs-many game where one player plays the shark, and up to 3 other players are characters Quint, Brody, and Hooper from the movie. The game is very thematic and plays in 2 acts: Act 1, the shark is trying to eat as many swimmers from beaches as possible, while the 3 humans are trying to detect the shark and attach barrels to it. Depending on how well the shark does in Act 1 determines how powerful it is in Act 2... where the 3 players are on the boat trying to kill the shark, and the shark is trying to either kill all 3 players or destroy the boat. A lot of deduction and second-guessing and just plain fun. The 2 times I've played, the humans have beaten the shark despite the shark dominating Act 1, so I'll be curious to see what the shark's winning percentage is over time.

Welcome To... - May be my favourite game in the "roll and write" genre, even though there's no rolling involved. This one has the huge advantage of playing ANY player count in 30 minutes or less (you could play with 100 people at once if you have enough score sheets).

For Sale - This is a bit of an older game, but it's brilliant... definitely my favourite auction game. Each player starts with $14,000 to use for buying property in the first half of the game, which you will then sell in the 2nd half of the game, aiming to have the most money at the end. We played with 6 players, so in the first half of the game 6 properties are drawn each round. The properties are numbered 1 through 30 with no duplicates. When play comes to you, either outbid the latest bidder to stay in the bidding, or pass to take the lowest-numbered property remaining and pay half of any previous bid you've made this round. The last player remaining in the bidding round pays their full bid and takes the highest numbered property. So there are 5 rounds of bidding in the first half of the game and each player ends up with 5 property cards that are hopefully closer to 30-value than 1-value. In the second half of the game, draw up 6 money cards each round. Money cards have values $0 through $15,000 and there's 2 of each in the deck. Seeing what money cards are out there, players simultaneously choose one of their properties from hand to play. Flip them up, lowest-numbered property takes the lowest money card, 2nd lowest takes 2nd lowest, and so on. All those properties are discarded and new money cards are drawn for the next round. That happens 5 times until all properties are sold and players compare final money. I can't recommend For Sale enough, especially for how inexpensive it is.

Century: Golem Edition - Eastern Mountains - The 2nd game in the Century series. I'm all on board with the Golem Editions of these games, even though the theme is nonsense - it's just more attractive than trading spices. I think I like it better than the 1st game, though it has quite the same feel. We played twice, and then second time through I played a strategy based entirely on building all my outposts and crushed everyone. I don't think it's an imbalanced strategy, but I will have to play it some more. I think it's like letting a player run away with science in 7 Wonders - they're going to win if no one stops them. I'm looking forward to combining both games into one supergame!

Played some other things too but these were the new ones / standouts.

I've been playing a lot of PokeMMO recently. With all the nonsense going on with Sword and Shield, I decided to go and play through Unova for the first time through PokeMMO, and I've been having a fantastic time. The game plays flawlessly on my PC, and the widescreen HD experience of playing through Black/White for the first time is really fun. For now, I am basically ignoring the MMO aspects of the game for now in favor of a more traditional Pokemon experience, but I am also taking advantage of the numerous quality of life changes this version has made. For example, EVs and IVs are easily viewable, box and party rearranging are super easy, and programmable hotkeys make using items on the fly super convenient. In addition to all of that, there are pokemon-less HMs that can be purchased for $2 each, but I have not yet taken advantage of that benefit as of yet. Additionally, simply seeing other trainers in the world around you really makes the world feel more alive, and being challenged or offered a trade by other players makes the experience quite special. If you have the necessary game roms lying around, I would suggest anyone who likes pokemon to try it out.

I finished with Yoku's Island Express.

I didn't 100% the game, as I think that would have killed my enjoyment of it. Instead, I got to the ending, did a couple extra tasks afterwards to satisfy my own curiosity, and then stopped when my feelings toward it were still fresh and positive. It was a delight, and I would strongly recommend it to anyone who is at all interested in the idea of a pinball metroidvania.

Outside of that, I've been dipping in and out of GRIP: Combat Racing.

I can't play the game for extended periods of time -- I get a sort of visual/mental fatigue. The detailed textures and graphics, combined with the speed of the game and the cluttered/complex tracks, yield a visual demand that is more than I'm used to. The screen is just fundamentally hard to read. I compare it to something like Distance, which is similarly fast and complex, but which has a much more straightforward graphic style and much more "readable" tracks. Distance doesn't fatigue me quite like Grip does.

Outside of that, however, I'm enjoying the game. I have to remind myself that the chaos is part of the fun and that it's basically a very serious-looking Mario Kart, otherwise I start to get frustrated when a missile takes me down just before the finish line.

Also, because I now need a new game after finishing Yoku, I'm going to bring back my...

...Game Selection Gimmick!

Choose a non-genre Steam tag for me!
(e.g. "atmospheric" or "replay value" but not "racing" or "turn-based strategy")

Based on everyone's responses here, I'll pull a game from my backlog that fits all/most of the chosen tags and go with that.

I started playing Shenmue 1&2 HD since it came after the last Humble Monthly unlock.

I really, really do not recommend playing it today if you remember playing it in the past because it does not live up to your memories. It has not aged well at all; the characters all look pretty acceptable but the low-resolution of the textures around you are pretty harsh on the eyes. The worst part is the thing that I didn't even remember was a thing; the voices and music are all recorded at very low sampling rates, which is very grating on my ears.

Adding insult to injury, the game engine does not appear to work properly at resolutions over 1080p; the overlay containing the interface and color grading doesn't fill the entire screen. It also takes off the vertical letterboxing bars on the left and right side of the screen that show up whenever the game wrests it's control from you. And that actually just makes me even more upset because I can't find an option to remove the bars at 1080p when the UI is supposed to be working correctly.

I haven't really settled into anything recently, which means I've played a bunch of stuff for short amounts of time.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 - I've played a lot of Calls of Duty but they've mostly been of the Black Ops variety, or my favorite Infinite Warfare. I don't quite care for the setting of the Modern Warfare series, but I'd read positive things about this entry. It's not really my thing. It's still too close to modern day (or modern a decade ago) for my taste. The levels are short and action-packed, but that's really quite stressful. It's painful to play for long sessions.

Generation Zero - I'm finding zero fun in this game, but it has the opposite problem of Modern Warfare 3. Instead of being all action all the time, I slowly walk to a location and die from being overwhelmed with enemies when I have crappy weapons. I then get to respawn and do it all over again. I quit after I died from being pecked to death by a tiny spider robot because I missed with the shotgun, and then couldn't hit it with the pistol. I feel like I'm playing it the way I'm supposed, and it's still not fun.

Layers of Fear 2 - Barely half of an hour into it. It's very good looking and it's starting to throw slight jump scares at me. I've liked Bloober Team's previous games, so maybe I'll stick with it.

Prey (2017) - I've yet to get into this game, and it's a real damn shame because I like so many things about it. I like the setting. I like the mystery. I'm just not enjoying it. I think I've picked it up and put it down a dozen times. Maybe it's just asking too much of my attention. It feels like the kind of game I should be playing with headphones on, and I very rarely do that.

Nioh - Ah okay, a Souls-like, except faster. It's kind of fun and I like how the different stances change the attacks, but I haven't bought into its setting yet the way I did for Dark Souls 3.

Remnant: From the Ashes - Ah okay, a Souls-like, except with guns. It's not thrilling me and there's this monster in the sewers that just won't stop killing me. I can't even tell where it spawns out of. Frustrating.

Doom 64 EX - This is the game I'm actually enjoying. It's ugly, but it's mostly Doom. This is my consolation for not getting Doom Eternal.

I've been playing this game called Super Metroid. Some of you may have heard of it.

I had actually never played it before. Talk about having a backlog! For my defence though, I've always been more of a Commodore / Amstrad / Microsoft kind of a guy and only owned gaming consoles in the late 2000s. Time to time, I pop into older console and arcade games to see what I have missed.

I'm surprised how modern Super Metroid feels. Or, perhaps more accurately, I'm surprised how little recent games that I automatically compare it to, such as Axiom Verge, Shadow Complex, Guacamelee or Hollow Knight, have actually built on top of it. Not that it's a bad thing. I love the core metroidvania design.

In many ways, Super Metroid also feels more modern than its contemporaries. I suppose Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is the most typical comparison, although it came out a bit later. I love Symphony of the Night, but for me, Super Metroid, even as an older game, actually feels less dated. If someone released Super Metroid today, while I would certainly think that it is very hipstery of them to do so, I wouldn't really bat an eyelid.

Or maybe I would bat half an eyelid. While the game controls exceptionally well for the most part, I feel the controls for the advanced jumps (rolling jumps, wall-jumps and double jumps) would in today's release be more streamlined. I also think that the player avatar would be slightly less tall, not only for aesthetic but also gameplay reasons.

But other than that, the way the story is told through the gameplay, music, animations and graphics, they all work really well to create a strong and memorable atmosphere. And when the game pushes up the presentation to the next level, it is always an amazing moment as it's such a contrast to the norm that it establishes. I love some of the environmental puzzles that use the statues. The first time I activated one was a big "wow" moment. Same goes for the action sequences that are like interactive cut scenes. Amazing.

Apart from me having had to google things like how to open red doors, what exactly to press to turn into a ball, how to wall jump, etc. (all of which are probably told in the manual), the game has also been very good at teaching me its mechanics and what I'm generally supposed to be doing. Although I do get lost. Quite a bit. Or rather, it's not that I don't know where I am (the map is generally good and the equipment screen gives me an idea of how far in the game I am) but I don't always know where something else is, which is to say it's sometimes a little unclear what to do next. There is quite a bit of roaming back and forth involved, which is of course part of the metroidvania design. But my roaming is a bit more aimless than usual in these games. Especially as some of the gates that I need to pass are literally hidden, and towards the end of the game, hidden even from the tool that is supposed to show me hidden things. That doesn't feel like very good game design.

This has got me thinking about game design principles and how the core act of playing a game has changed in the past 30 years, which naturally has influenced the decisions that game designers today make as oppose what they did back in the early 90s.

We often criticise old games when they have obscure mechanisms, insane puzzles or hidden content. And we often think that, given that there was no internet back then (well, sort of), those kind of design decisions were particularly inexcusable, or just money grabs to sell hint books or phone services. But I remember differently. I remember that back then, if I was stuck in a game for an evening, I would be talking about it next day with my friends. Maybe one of them had solved the problem or heard how to solve it. Or maybe we could come up with a solution together. Sometimes, I would call a friend quite late at night asking if they had cleared something that I was struggling with.

Where did all this information come from? A lot of it must have been just word-of-mouth, passed on from one player to another. It would make an interesting study how knowledge like that got passed amongst gamers back then, from one clique to another, from one town to the next, and beyond. In a sense, games were a pretty social medium back then. It was often a collective group effort to complete a game.

That said, I'm playing this in 2019 and through an emulator, and I'm not ashamed to say that I'm save scumming my way through. And not only that, but I'm also boss scumming. I'm not particularly fond of boss battles in any game -- I can certainly understand why many love them, but I just don't have the patience and/or the skills to pull through many of them. For people like me, Super Metroid's bosses are for the most part quite ingeniously designed, or so it seems. Just about every boss appears to have an exploit that you can use to fairly easily beat the boss, if you just happen to know where to stand and what to do. And so, I give a boss three to five tries, and then google for a solution, unless I have already spotted it myself.

Addendum: I actually typed this up a couple of days ago. I have since finished the game. It felt a little too long and repetitive towards the end, but I think that's at least partly due to the different playing rhythm that I have available today with emulator state saves, rather than being confined to the game's original save system, which naturally gives the game a very different rhythm and a different type of repetitiveness. All in all, I really enjoyed Super Metroid and I remain amazed how modern it felt. The final parts in particular were pretty genius.

Just picked up the remaining map packs (France & the Baltics) for Euro Truck Sim 2 so I'm currently busy exploring those areas. So far so good.

I might go back to finishing The Outer Worlds if I feel like it.

Well haven't reached the point in any of my games to do any write ups about them. But have still been playing some stuff off and on.

Mostly been Civ 6, while I don't enjoy it as much as Civ 5. I can get some decent enjoyment out of it, but just not the same amount. Every game seems to play out rather similar, with me having to play King difficulty to get any type of challenge. But with it I have to go science or never win. The various gameplay mechanics now and still bad AI just make it really hard for me to win in any other way. Staying with high science necessary for good troops to survive the insanely aggressive AI makes it hard to built anything but science and troops and settlers. IDK, maybe I'm just completely shit at the game but I kinda sorta doubt it is all that.

Still playing Digimon Cyber Sleuth, and actually enjoying it. Sure it is a pretty cheap port, with very few options and poor graphics. But it is enjoyable enough just collecting digimon and going through the story, which I'm currently on Ch 5 of. But wish I had more ability to explore new higher level areas to train and collect new digimon, the only decently difficult area I've found went away after the quest. Also the difficultly scaling is rather terrible, you will go from never having a challenge to team wiping in 3 hits that forces you to go train a custom team to fight the boss. It wouldn't be so bad if the boss's types and attributes were hinted at so you could train your team as you reached him, but it doesn't seem that way.

I just fired up Forza Horizon 4 after a bit of a break, since I was longing to play a racing game again. I just love everything about this game, and it has pretty good longevity. I've been blasting around the Lego world too, as I wasn't even aware of it until recently. The one thing I'd like is some kind of incentive/mechanism to dig into my giant catalogue of cars that I've never driven, instead of picking my few favourites.

I've fallen off The Outer Worlds a little bit. I like the writing, but the gameplay just feels quite shallow. I started Divinity: Original Sin again instead, a game I didn't get very far through the first time but seems like a much deeper RPG that I might enjoy.

Haven't been gaming much, but I occasionally jump into Skyrim VR and go wander around for a few hours via the Natural Locomotion VR add-on, and I've been eyeballing getting back into Kerbal Space Program.