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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.
Lately I've been playing some Stardew Valley now that patch 1.4 is out. It's a lot of fun and super chill. And the new patch adds a ton of quality of life improvements including some new features for multiplayer. If you're not familiar, it's a super chill farming game where you grow crops, raise animals, fight off monsters while mining and chill with the townsfolk.
There's a Warframe update that recently came out with a bunch of new content. I haven't quite qualified for the new content yet because I have some more crafting to do, but that should be available for me soon. Warframe is an online third-person co-op shooter about being space ninja and fighting the evils of space capitalism.
Star Wars: Fallen Order was a ton of fun. IMO it's the best Star Wars game in a long time and doesn't have any microtransactions. I'm told it's got very darksouls like gameplay, but I didn't really enjoy Dark Souls. You get to run around with a lightsaber and feel like a badass, but the enemies are still very real threats and will kick your ass if you get overwhelmed. Bosses are fun, but some of them get really difficult. I made it all the way to the end boss on the 2nd to highest difficulty, and now I don't want to lower it because I'm so far along.
I've also been playing Dungeons & Dragons 5e I've been DMing a game with some friends, but later this week one of my players is guest DMing, so I get to take a turn as a player. Which I'm really excited for, but now I have to decide on a character. I'm thinking monk, but it's moderately difficult to make a viable monk without going full-on cheese.
Stardew Valley is one of my favorites as well, and the latest patch was incredible. A lot of qualms I had with the game (not that there were many) were all addressed and this patch, I introduced it to my sister who is playing it right now.
Would you recommend playing Star Wars: Fallen Order for someone with no Star Wars knowledge? Never played a Star Wars game but an extended vacation is coming up and I wanted to stockpile on new games while the sales are out.
I don't feel like you need to know a lot about Star Wars to enjoy Fallen Order, beyond jedi are wizards with glowing swords and telekinesis. But it's really hard to say what you 'need' to know to make the game enjoyable.
I think you would be fine, but that's just a guess
I suppose what I meant by need to know is that if I will coherently understand the plot, game logic, and be able to finish the game without what seems to be more than a decade's worth of star wars lore behind me.
That said, if the minimum knowledge is jedi are neon light wizards, excellent news for me. Thanks!
Oh yeah, you should be more or less fine.
Quick recap of other important things to know for just a little bit more context: A few years before the game takes place most of the Jedi were betrayed and killed during something called "Order 66" which basically meant they were declared criminals and shot by their own troops. The ones that survived are in hiding. And the Sith (red lightsabers) are basically evil Jedi that are hunting them down to murder them or turn them evil.
That should cover everything critical to know, but it might explain that in game, I forget if it does.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy it!
If you enjoy souls-like games, you'll enjoy it. If you're not sure, it's a 3rd person action RPG. You absolutely don't need to know anything about Star Wars knowledge to enjoy it.
It was a very good game, but a little on the short side (~26 hours to 100% the game for me). I personally would wait for a sale that justifies the length of the game to you.
That's good to know, thank you for the reply! I do like soul games but I also take an infinitely long amount of time to finish them. I'll stay posted for a sale that makes it worth it.
Are there people playing? I picked it up a few months ago and loved it but felt like the world felt really empty. Me and a buddy won a bunch of times without trying very hard because I don't think there were many people playing.
Sayonara Wild Hearts was suddenly released on Steam without any warning, after previously being exclusive to Switch, PS4, and Apple Arcade. I've been really looking forward to the PC release but there hadn't been any news about it, so that was a great surprise and I bought and played through it immediately. I was fully expecting to love it, and it lived up to my expectations. I'm planning to spend quite a bit more time with it, between trying to get higher ranks on all the songs and trying to figure out the "Zodiac Mysteries" objectives it includes.
Something I found striking about it compared to other games is that it does a lot of interesting things, but just does them once and keeps moving forward. So many other games will find a neat mechanic and then repeat it over and over until it's lost all novelty, but that didn't happen here at all. I can (and plan to) replay a lot of the songs to see those neat sections again, but it's all on my own terms. Because of that, the game isn't very long (only about an hour and a half to get through everything once), but the whole thing was an enjoyable and varied experience.
I also picked up Jamestown+, which is an expanded and updated version of the original Jamestown that came out in 2011. I never got around to playing the original, but I've been enjoying the new version so far. It's a very approachable shmup with a lot to unlock and work through. It's supposed to be really good in co-op as well, so hopefully I'll give that a shot eventually.
Oh nice, I remember you cluing me in to Sayonara Wild Hearts and at the time I was sleeping on it. How long did it take you to beat the game? What was your favorite part?
I think it probably took about an hour and a half to play through initially. I've spent about another hour so far trying to figure out some of the mysteries (I don't want to look them up—I've only got 5/24 so far) and getting Gold ranks on different songs, but there's still quite a bit left to do.
Picking a favorite part is hard, and I'll probably change my mind as I play through it more and see some of the sections multiple times. But I really enjoy the Begin Again song, where you switch between motorcycling and flying down some chasms. The transitions match up so well with the music, they did a great job of everything with it.
Outer Wildes, not Outer Worlds.... It's so so fun. It's basically an open world mystery about a solar system trapped in an endless time loop.
Don't read too much (any, personally) or watch any videos as you'll spoil the surprise for yourself but it's the most fun I've had in a while.
Also, Superliminal. A really good mind bender.
I tried disco elysium after it winning GOTY at the game awards. A very cool game, like being back in a shadowrun or d&d pen and paper setting with a GM that knows wtf. I refunded it for the time being, i'll get it when it inevitably goes cheaper and get a better deal in a month or two.
Decided to get back into Dragon Age Origins, and I’m having some mixed opinions on the game. I remember I enjoyed it a bunch when I first played it, but not enjoying it as much this time. While I’m still enjoying the story and characters a bunch, but the combat is letting me down. It just feels like unless I set up a specific build to deal with certain situations you just get wrecked. But also, the system that has you switching between being paused and live action doesn’t work all that well for me. The paused mode works well as a turn-based combat system, but the live action feels really clunky. Trying to move your character into the right place to get that backstab bonus or avoid an AOE attack just gets frustrating.
Still planning on finishing the game though, because I want to keep playing the series. Only ever finished Origins many years back and put a couple hours into DA2 and never did get to Inquisition. And with the trailer for the 4th game coming from earlier in the year, decided to get around to catching up with the series finally.
The TV show is out today and I have always been sitting on the game even when I purchased it on steam sale, so I've popped in my steam controller to start playing The Witcher on pc. It's downloading now. I'm not a hardcore gamer per se but it made a lot of buzz some years back and I escaped amazingly spoiler free so here's to being hopeful.
A couple of weeks ago I also recently found out about Sunless Seas, and its sister browser game Fallen London (10 years late to the party). I had some downtime between studying and was "just gonna try it out" when I glance at the time and more then 10 hours had passed. Text-heavy, graphics-lite, and slow paced, I expected to hate it. Instead I keep coming back to play it in between breaks or when I can't fall asleep. It plays like a choose-your-own-adventure novel but to make the choices you want, you have to build up your character or move around and discover the lore of the game.
Sunless Sea and Sunless Skies are both great games, IMO. I absolutely love the Lovecraftian atmosphere, interesting characters, incredibly deep lore, strange universe, and overall writing/story of both. The captain death mechanic is really unique and interesting too.
My only complaint with them is how slow your ships move. At first it makes exploration into the unknown feel tense and truly dangerous... but once you have gotten comfortable with navigating the environment it just winds up making the games feel incredibly tedious, and it drags them out waaaaaaay too much. IIRC it took me over 80 hours to complete Sunless Sea because of that, and by the end I was honestly pretty damn bored, and only persisted in playing purely because I wanted to know how to story wrapped up. And because of that, for Sunless Skies I wound up using a speedhack to increase my ship movement speed whenever I hit a hotkey, and as a result I wound up finishing it after ~25 hours, which felt much more reasonable.
edit: Oh, I didn't realize Fallen London was a purely text based adventure set in the same universe. I will have to check that out!
edit2: Sadly Fallen London is a highly restricted F2P game with incredibly slow action refreshing to "encourage" you to pay for more. Not my cup of tea, unfortunately. :(
First of all, I did not know speed hacks for this game even existed! I completely understand your ship speed stress. Everytime I made a round trip to Irem, I would have notes on my desk to study or I play fallen London until my ship bumps into something. This is crazy good news. I'm now planning on retiring this captain and starting fresh with a new one on speedhack.
Secondly, yes Fallen London is unfortunately cursed with a premium currency feature. Its not necessary except to speed things up. I mostly play it since I enjoyed the little hints and characters in Sunless seas and wanted to learn more about them. For example, you can find out more about the Smuggler's employer and the Isle of Cats. Havent spent a single cent on Fallen London, but its definitely an in between game to do during commute or something.
Unfortunately, I have a terrible habit of spending way too much money in games with those F2P models that artificially restrict how much you can actually play (e.g. every Zynga game ever), so I avoid them like the plague these days. I was considering paying the monthly membership fee for Fallen London to avoid that aspect and because the universe interests me so much... but apparently even with membership the game still has restrictions on how much you can do as well, which is pretty lame IMO. :(
p.s. In case you're wondering, I used Cheat Engine for Sunless Skies, although it works on virtually any singleplayer game. It is primarily for hex editing games, but it also has a really convenient built in speedhack function that is easily configurable and you can set to a hotkey to trigger.
I've mostly played two games:
Forza Horizon 4: ever since I've watched Ford v Ferrari, I've been wanting to play a realistic racing game. I watched some (a lot) of YouTube videos about simracing, wondered whether I should buy a wheel, etc... I saw those racing games and those peripherals costing a lot of money so I thought sod it. I went back to Forza but I disabled all assists and switched on manual transmission. I also lowered the AI difficulty to make the challenge manageable. It's now a very different game, each race now feels like a real challenge! And it really scratches that sim racing itch with something much more approachable for a casual player.
Transport Fever 2: well I've waited a month for this game and it's basically OpenTTD with 3D graphics, less complex UI and a campaign. I've found this game to be enjoyable so far. However sometimes the campaign missions are really badly explained and just lead me to restart the whole chapter to get it right once I've figured out what the game expects of me. But sometimes I just get frustrated and quit. Not really a spotless recommendation but hey.
I got a racing wheel (G920, for ~$180) a few months ago. It's a complete game-changer. You can feel the grip of the tires around a corner, you can feel when a tire goes up a curb, you can feel when a tire hits a puddle and starts hydroplaning. Plus, you get precise control that's unmatched by a controller. On the same track and with the same car, my best lap was 1:27 with the Steam Controller (using gyro steering), and 1:24 with a steering wheel. (And I'd consider the Steam Controller with gyro steering to be superior to steering with an Xbox thumbstick.)
I did end up returning it because it developed a mechanical issue a few weeks in; but for those few weeks, racing in VR was *absolutely amazing*.Horizon: Zero Dawn was half-off during the last sale, so picked it up on PS4 per Internet recommendations. Currently 80% of the way through the game. It's a cool game but a bit overhyped or maybe I'm not that into open-world games. I love discovering and fighting new enemy types, and some of the ways the game mixes up the fights in the main quests: some stealth, some "tower defense," some brute force massacres. I know a lot of people would love the huge map with sidequests and collectables everywhere, but I'm finding it overwhelming with a lot of empty stretches between fast-travel points.
Some of the platforming parts are cool, very similar to Tomb Raider. A lot of frustrating platforming that I wish they'd left out though. Especially with the day-night cycle that completely obscures visibility at night and I found obnoxious at times.
The sidequests are not very compelling and I'm finding myself skipping a lot of them due to repetition, and skipping a lot of dialogue due to boring writing and voice acting direction (everyone sounds... unsure... of themselves almost... every sentence). Sylens is great though!--Voiced by the guy from The Wire.
I'd recommend it on sale, especially to open world game lovers. Doesn't quite hit my games of all time list, but pretty unique experience with good nuggets of fun to be found within.
What a shame. I personally really enjoyed it, but I'll be the first to admit that a big part of that enjoyment was because of the post-apocalyptic / steampunk aesthetics. Honestly I'm hoping for Guerilla Games to make at least a spiritual sequel since I really enjoyed the combat system and how it really required you to come up with a strategy before you engaged in battle.
I've been having a good time playing Baldur's Gate on my Nintendo Switch. I have it on PC as well but always found it difficult to get into. For some reason being able to move my character with a joystick and laying in bed after a hard day at work just feel rights. I can lose myself in the game like I haven't been able to in the past.
With Game Pass, I got a free month of EA Access and decided to start on A Way Out with my brother. It's super forgiving, but that's a good thing with a co-op story mission. Fun, and I'll report back once we're through with the campaign.
Oh nice, where are you playing online? I always have at least a few correspondence games in progress on https://online-go.com.
Are you playing on the full 19x19 board, or are you still new enough that you're playing on the smaller ones?
I recently got Surviving Mars in a bundle and have been playing that during the last week. It's exactly what I expected, that is: What if Paradox made Anno and Like Cities: Skyline, but on Mars, with rival colonies, and instead of trying to keep you traffic in check you're managing human resources. There's plenty of content available, so I guess I'll be playing it for a while