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

My girlfriend started Pokemon Sword and I'm watching and played a few rounds. We're like 17 hours in or so. Honestly, it's a solid game. A solid 3DS game, with a higher resolution. The disappointing part is the huge gap between potential and what GameFreak actually delivered. Everything in the game is so stiff and uninspired. Even the set pieces seem to be put together out of the same 3 or 5 prefab elements, with huge, empty walls, blurry transitions and repeating textures everywhere. Considering half the screen is covered in ground for about 80% of the game, it's baffling that it's essentially a flat surface with a blurry texture everywhere. Everything looks the PS2 era kind of "plastic". The movement animations don't have the slightest momentum or physics to them, even during semi-important cut scenes. A character might just walk 5 meters in one direction, stop, turn 90° and move 3 meters and suddenly stop, like a robot. Speaking of cut scenes, there is zero voice acting.

While the "wild area" – which is pushed as some kind of daring innovation rather than catching up with a decade of AAA open world games – is a step in the right direction, half the game is still spent in towns and underground sections which have a fixed camera. I think it took us an hour until we could first rotate the camera.

The amount of Pokemon available is the only thing about the game that could be considered "content" in a AAA-worthy sense. I don't care if it's 800 or 400 pokemon, I didn't even know they traditionally kept all the previous gen pokemon around (haven't played any recent game in the series). But looking at the quality (or lack thereof) of the animations, I'm scratching my head where this game took 1000 people working on it. That's GTA V numbers. Even creating and animating 400 pokemon (with most of them already having had finished designs) doesn't sound like such a big deal for a AAA studio. And they still mostly aren't animated. There's a walk animation (you can actually see them run around in the wild, which, apparently, is another huge innovation worth seeking praise for), there's a default animation for attacking, maybe 3 or 4 more for various reaction shots but they're mostly like a split second long and rather simple.

So what else? Dynamxing, despite being maybe the stupidest word I have ever head, is basically just scaling the model and slowing down animations by a factor for the Godzilla effect. It's restricted to a few places in the game and in terms of gameplay, nothing more than a 3-round stat boost. The camp/cooking minigames get old after about 5 minutes, it's mostly a chore. The "pokejobs" are essentially taken from F2P gatcha mechanics with real-world timers that are about as boring as it gets (even in the Smash Ultimate singleplayer, which had something similar, they managed to give it more personality through animations and themes and whatnot). And 17 hours in, we haven't encountered a fight that was even remotely challenging. This is with someone playing who hasn't touched a pokemon game in like 15 years.

I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed. It seems Nintendo took this generation to really push for depth and content and bring back a lot of goodwill from fans who felt alienated by the simplistic, hand-holdy games of the Wii/Wii U days. But GameFreak, here, delivers a game that feels 2 generations behind. In terms of tech, in terms of mechanics. There's just such an utter lack of ambition. I know this game will sell like crazy and, ultimately, I will benefit just from the amount of Switch consoles this game will move as it creates a bigger market for first party games that actually bother. Heck, we bought the damn game ourselves, just out of curiosity. I believe this is, in game review numbers, a 6/10 game. I also believe you can enjoy a 6/10 game, it's okay to enjoy flawed things. But holy hell, this game is creatively dead.

I've been craving playing more Death Stranding all week but it hasn't be available to me, so I've been putting some time into some other titles.

Spyro Reignited is a great time. I think @Deimos covered it pretty well last time. There's just something about this era of collectathon platformers that is a timeless fun, and something that's sort of lost these days (but might be coming back!). I really enjoy the very simple mechanics, worlds, and gameplay juxtaposed with stylish, well-done modern graphics. Only issue is that I'm experiencing a frequent crash when loading between worlds and can't seem to find any info on it. When I load up the game, I'm in that world I was travelling to, so it's not like I'm stuck but it is very inconvenient.

Dragon Age Origins, I finished the main campaign. I might give it some time before I go back to do any of the DLCs. The ending of the game was a big combat gauntlet with very little narrative to cover it, which I think ended up being the inverse of where I was deriving enjoyment from the game. Still, it's classic Bioware and I forgot how much I missed their format. The system they introduced with companions and liking was an interesting idea, but a little frustrating. I ended up not being able to befriend Stenn at all, no matter how many gifts or conversations I had, so I missed out on his entire storyline. But considering he was being such a mercurial, uptight jackass to me all game long, I'm nonplussed. Leliana ended up being the surprising standout (all I ever heard about going into the game was Morrigan Morrigan Morrigan). It seems there's a certain order to play the DLC so I'll line them up and get them going at some point.

Tales of Vesperia Definitive Edition is fantastic. I played the original version back on the X360 and loved it. I picked up the DE very quick since it added in all the extra content from the JP PS3 release that never came out in English or in NA. If you've never played a Tales game or are curious about the series, this is probably the one to go with. Symphonia and Abyss have more legendary reputations but they're also much older than ToV, so they're missing some quality of life features that you may expect. ToV also has a stellar cast and fantastic writing. The first 1/3 of the game may seem stereotypical anime stuff, but then the game starts tearing it all down and it becomes surprisingly subversive, all thanks to its clever, self-aware, almost genre-parody writing. These games are not turn-based JRPGs either, they're action games with various combos you have to create—they're even co-op! All the characters play very differently from each other too, and there's nothing holding you from choosing one of the other characters in the party from being the one you play as throughout the game. It's also a very long game, minimum 100 hours without even being a completionist.

I've actually been playing Disco Elysium. (Did you know that it was called No Truce With The Furies? What a badass name.)

I'm rarely compelled to follow through on a long RPG like that: it takes involvement into the story and the characters that I don't have for traditional fantasy (which is what the majority of long western RPGs are, in my experience).

So far, the journey has been nothing but exciting. I love how the RPG system in directly tied to the gameplay. In most RPGs, the system only provides you with attribute checks and, sometimes, morality checks: it's either you pass or you fail. In Disco Elysium, the skills you develop are active – and quite talkative, with high-enough skill level – parts of your character's psyche.

Whenever you're interacting with something, the skills relevant to the course of the action pop up mid-dialogue to suggest, warn, encourage, or simply express themselves. If the internal dialogue takes long enough, one of the skills will note that it's been a few seconds without response to whomever you're holding the conversation with.

And considering your psyche is involved into the plot (you may miss something without a high-enough skill level), things get fascinating fast. One time, my entire skillset was compromised because the person I was talking to was a skilled liar. It took high Volition to wake the rest of the skills up and set them to work again – over the course of two in-game days.

I love how in-the-mind this whole game is. I've seen things like it before, but nowhere near to the same extent.

Also: if you like the game from the sound of it, don't go to the dev blog. I found it much more exciting to learn about the game's inner works from playing it. The dev blog may come in handy if you're getting confused or lost in systems, though: it highlights some of the development process – and its results along the way.

1. Jedi: Fallen Order

-FINALLY. A legit Star Wars single player action RPG with some open world elements to it. I haven't gotten overly far but I'm loving everything about it so far. Except for the Dark Souls-esque save system. The combat system takes a bit to get used to and I consistently forget about my Force powers but I'm genuinely enjoying this. And I enjoyed both Battlefronts, minus the microtransactions of BF2, but I craved something like this.

Now if we could just get a next gen Rogue Squadron game, I might be in Star Wars game heaven

2. Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition

Haven't really been done much more than dabble with this but as a long time fan/player, its not exactly different from what I'm used to. That being said, the visual improvements are much nicer on the eyes and the quality of life changes are welcome. I have a long way to go with getting through the campaigns but the overall changes are nice and welcome

I played a little bit of Life is Strange recently. Actually I finished the first episode today. I’ve seen playthroughs of Life is Strange 2, but I’ve never played the first one. Since the first episode was free on Steam (and probably everywhere else too), I decided to play it. I have no words. The mechanics, while a little janky, play really well with the story and, as always, the music is phenomenal. Hopefully I can but the rest of the season someday and play the entire game.

I don't play many video games, it's mainly all board games, but I've been playing a lot of Into the Breach for the past year. On Saturday I finished it... like, finished every possible thing you can do in it. Beat every mission length on hard difficulty with every squad, earned every achievement, and unlocked every secret pilot and squad. It's one of my few impressive gaming achievements because it's not an easy game. I had so much fun with it!
Squads: https://imgur.com/trrgZyY
Achievements: https://imgur.com/42nMBa7
Stats: https://imgur.com/913UB1i

Learning that Relic is developing Age of Empires 4 has gotten me on a Company of Heroes kick lately (the first, not the second). Good grief is that game fun as hell, and it holds up so well. Still feels innovative and fresh even now.

I want to take a moment to gush about the music for Project Zomboid. It reacts appropriately to the tension of the situation, so as you're exploring dangerous places it'll ramp up the tension some, and when you're actively fighting it's at the heights. This is great in its own right for keeping you in the feel of surviving by the skin of your teeth. But what makes it even better is that sometimes, just sometimes, it'll start ramping up even when you're in your base doing something innocuous. Yes, you're just grilling a piece of rat on the fire to survive another day, but suddenly you feel tense. Is there something out there? Maybe it would be a good idea to just do a quick round to make sure there's nothing out there. On top of that, some of the music has just the slightest resemblance to the sounds the zombies make. Is that a rattle in the background of the song, or is it the breathing of a corpse coming closer? Is that a drum, or the rhythmic sound of dead flesh thumping against your door? Can you afford to not check?

I picked up Hearthstone again after a fairly long hiatus (since the Witchwood expansion). I was at BlizzCon recently, and watched the opening ceremony and remembered how much I used to enjoy it, and then I tried the new battleground mode while I was there and thought it was fun.

Overall, I've been pretty happy with Hearthstone again. I remember why I quit, and I'm not spending money, but the new modes and the PvE stuff make it pretty enjoyable to play without having to go too much into competitive mode, and I did enjoy breaking out my fully golden Paladin deck in Wild and smashing holy wrath into people's faces.

In retrospect, it made me realize that the "no bad press" is kind of true. I've had my face rubbed in Hearthstone for the last month, to the point that I actually felt like picking it up again. /shrugs

I've been playing GTA V.

Honestly, I don't have much to say about it. It's the same as GTA IV except it's got prettier graphics. I don't particularly care much about the ability to switch between characters, but perhaps things will change later in the game. The only thing that really sticks out is how much they have really improved their use of humor. Every GTA game has had it, but this one really seems to go the extra mile to make sure that every cutscene has at least a chuckle in it. I can't help but wonder if it's a response to the popularity of the Saints Row franchise.

I haven't been playing games too much lately. I've been working pretty hard and have been a bit depressed partly because of it.

On a barely-related tangent, my gaming PC is hooked up for a TV and I have finally found a perfect solution to not wanting to have a full-sized keyboard and mouse to control it outside of Steam Big Picture mode. It ended up being a $12 remote-sized wireless keyboard with an integrated air mouse. It's super convenient, especially because a good number of my games aren't on Steam (and even then, there's a few games that have issues when run from Big Picture mode for some strange reason). But at the same time I kind of wish that I looked a bit longer to find one that had a scroll wheel on it.

I've been doing parallel playthroughs of The Outer Worlds. Just completed my badass melee lone-wolf Board lackey run...

Meanwhile I'd guess I'm about 65% done with my speech-and-leadership "unifier" run...

I adore how completely different the two experiences are. The storylines have diverged wildly, but both are compelling and fun. I love the attention Obsidian gave to the unifier angle. I assumed the conflicts would be zero-sum, but there are a ton of options for satisfying all parties which is very cool.

For me, the beauty of this game is the replayability. I still have four other companions to join with (and their side quests to explore) in future playthroughs, and I haven't even spoken to any of them yet. I need to do a complete anti-Board liberation run, a roguish smuggler/pirate run, and maybe a kill-everyone run for good measure. Probably some other angles I haven't considered yet. Also need to see if I can master the art of stealth assassination (previous attempts have been less than successful), and play around with science weapons, lying and double-crossing, and the defense and tech skills.

Others have criticized the shortness of TOW... but for the way I like to play, it's the perfect length. If it were longer I'd never get the opportunity to see all the different paths through it. I'm actually really enjoying the "story" (easiest) difficulty mode that brings that part of gameplay to the forefront. Though at some point I'll try the hardest mode too, which introduces some survival aspects like food, drink, and sleep. Should be interesting in its own way.

Afterparty: It was released on Game Pass, and its about two friends who died and have to booze cruise their way out of Hell. It's from the same devs who made Oxenfree, and while I came across a few gating errors, I liked where I ended up and it was pretty fun, and it gave the heavy bits appropriate weight.

Something that came into my radar was Superluminal, a first person platformer that plays with perspective that pretty much cheats it's notes from Portal, but it plays with perspective in that you can make items bigger by holding them closer to you, and smaller when further away, or only being able to pick up a skewed item by viewing it from a perspective where it looks normal. It's curious and I want to see more of it.

Remnant from the ashes is fucking amazing and this is coming from a person who cant stand dark souls but loves to watch other people play it. Also, the load times. Oh my god, with how quickly you load back into the game it makes you not want to quit and just keep pushing forward.

Geometry Dash: The impossible game, but it has a few separate 'gamemodes' to separate it from the former. I actually like it, been spending time trying to beat some hard levels.

Soul knight: an 8-bit shoot the enemies dungeon crawler game but the game aims for you changing the focus from aiming (which is either hard or annoying in mobile) to dodging the bullets, which changes the gameplay quite a bit. It has plenty of weapons, enemies, bosses, and characters to play as, and a rpg system to differentiate those characters. It's a pretty fun game.

I've actually got a bit back into Runescape. They're hosting a "Twisted League" contest where you are confined to Ironman mode on an ingame island. I'm kind of enjoying it because it's content I haven't explored otherwise and the experience rates are five times normal so you can see more and grind less.