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

I'm back to Skyrim again. I haven't played any other game as much as this one since I picked it up on launch day eight years ago. No idea how many hours I've put into it at this point since I've had it for multiple systems, but I know the number's well over 1,000. And I still manage to find content I've never seen before. Case in point, I just discovered the unmarked quest where you help the drunk in the Winterhold inn learn what happened to his old sweetheart. So many nooks and crannies in that game, and everything's brimming with secrets.

I've played through all the DLC before but only completed Dawnguard as a vampire hunter, never as a vampire. It's been my biggest Skyrim blind spot for years... So this time around I'm an evil vampire mage. I knew this unlocked a few new abilities but I never realized how many. The sheer number of cool new tricks I picked up actually gave me a nice surprise. As a vampire, you can turn invisible, breathe underwater, see NPCs through walls, and a bunch of other stuff. You're also immune to all poisons and disease. There are some drawbacks too, like weakness in sunlight and vulnerability to fire. There's also a cool 4-stage progression that will magnify both your abilities and weaknesses if you don't periodically feed on blood.

So here we have one of the richest, most lovingly crafted virtual worlds I've ever encountered, and it still holds up well today. The Elder Scrolls VI is in development and I'm in trepidation. Bethesda is a different company today! We've seen what they did to Fallout. I haven't seen any indication that TES will fare any better. Which is a shame, because I love Skyrim dearly and would love to see an earnest follow-up.

I spent most of my gaming time this last week modding The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. I didn't really play it much this time. But it's Oblivion, you know how it goes.

Modding the game in 2020 is a good time, though. Thanks to tools like Wrye Bash, BOSS, xLODgen, and xEdit, modding any Bethesda game is mostly simple, and stable. It beats the days of manually dragging and dropping files into the Data folder and then having to troubleshoot by enabling and disabling different combinations until it works.

I started with this guide for the graphics and then added a few gameplay ones on top, things like making the guards less psychic, rebalancing the vanilla combat a bit, putting the Fallout 4 style chest looting into Oblivion, and a levelling overhaul.

There's a lot to say about how, despite it all, TES really capture that feel like of exploring and discovering a new, unknown world. It may be why I keep going back to TES every couple of years. There's a magic to them that has yet to be capture by any other open world game, including the Fallout titles (though they do come close).

Stopped astral chain about 2-3 weeks back to pick up Sekiro when it went on sale in the humble store because I had a few $ left over of old credit that was expiring in January.

I'm on the last boss of the game now, having collected & done basically everything needed in the first run. I've really enjoyed this souls game, perhaps even more than previous ones? I greatly enjoy the combat and have been finding it a good challenge.

I'll probably beat the final boss today, I've gotten him down to the last health bar several times now. Not sure if I'm going to bother with NG+... I'll probably just hop back to astral chain as I was greatly enjoying that and I'm not sure NG+ is going to offer much different.

I'm on Beat Saber hiatus on account of some recent medical procedures, which is a shame, because I want nothing more than to keep playing it! It remains the most fun I've had with a game in a long, LONG time and is pretty much the single best ambassador VR gaming could ask for. Assuming all goes well I should be able to pick it back up this weekend.

With regards to non-VR gaming, I'm on a cleanup to finish what I'd started before I had to pause my plays to have my laptop serviced. I finished Tesla vs. Lovecraft which was an ideal game for zoning out and listening to audiobooks. I also finished Spyro 3 from the Spyro Reignited Trilogy. I took the time to 100% the first two entries in the series but will not be doing so with the 3rd, as all I have left are tedious minigames.

The last remaining game to wrap-up is my playthrough of the Shenmue 1 remaster. I don't plan on playing 2 any time soon, possibly ever, but I want to finish 1 so that I can have a fresh perspective on the whole game to sit alongside my decades-old nostalgia of my first playthrough on the Dreamcast.

Once I complete that, I plan to excitedly dive head first into The Witcher 3, which was a Christmas gift from a fellow Tildes user. I've been wanting to play it pretty much since it came out, so I'm looking forward to scratching a years-old itch with it.

Picked up Rust recently. It's very hard to get started, there's not a lot of detail of the game mechanics so you have to do a fair amount of offline research or have a friendly veteran show you the ropes. There is a lot of toxicity from other players, you can turn off in game comms if it's really bad but there is a huge sense of satisfaction in making those players eat some humble pie. I don't have a lot of time to play these days so I can't really dedicate the amount of time that is needed to actually do a lot of the stuff in the game so I usually just group with more dedicate friends or find a friendly clan to hang around and help out where I can.

I weaned myself off Hearthstone early last year, and I don't miss Hearthstone itself (it really felt like Rock-Paper-Scissors + Gambling after playing it for ~2 years), but I miss being able to play a multiplayer board game-equivalent with randos at the drop of a hat.

I've circled back to Words with Friends, but I forgot how much I really hate the (optionally-utilized) mechanic of "...this word is OK, but you could be playing something waaaaaay better." But whatever, it's scratching the itch for now.

As for non-mobile games... played A Plague Tale and my god what a gut-punch of a game. It is a GREAT game so far but... the sadness/darkness just doesn't let up. I knew what to expect, but it doesn't change its impact.

Outside of that, my wife and I have tried getting into Outward? Seems OK so far, a little bland. Gonna try to get her into Portal Knights -- we like crafting and building houses around ourselves together.

On game nights we play The Forest with our friend and, after 2 months of this and some modifications, I can say that it is the most fun, multiplayer, story-based experience I've ever had. None of us know where the story is going, have never played this game before, and it's just intensely fun to all gear up, get ready to go in a cave together, map it out, and come out somewhere else on the map. We've got bases on all the corners of the map and turned on vegetarian mode (the monsters after 40+ nights just get more annoying than scary), and I think we're almost done. It's just been a wonderful journey to get where we're at.

I finished the last act of Kentucky Route Zero. And then I went back and replayed all of the previous acts and the interludes. I didn't Kickstart it, but I've owned it since 2013 and I've been looking forward to seeing the conclusion. It's really a beautiful, incomparable experience.

And then I tried to play Syndicate (2012) and found out it doesn't run well on modern PCs without constantly crashing.

I'm not sure which of those two events made me more sad.

I recently came back to Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy and I beat it twice in the last couple of days. The reason I came back to it was this video, which contains content on the subject matter of things like "reject art" and, in a more broad sense linking back to Getting Over It, "digital trash". The video itself contains a segment relating to this game on itch.io, which I played for myself and found it to be an intense and alienating experience that I could only find in the hands of an indie developer who is just making something to express a feeling or an experience. No quotas or profits or deadlines to worry about. Just the experience and what you can make out of it. I loved it.

Getting Over It struck a chord with me because..... I am someone who grew up in the digital trash. I spent a notable amount of my childhood on the internet. Viewing image boards and forum posts and shitty image macros and having conversations with other lonely nerds on Skype about food and music and the guy who works at the Burger King and fucks up my order every time. I made many of my closest friends in the trash, I still talk to them all the time and I still contribute to the trash on a regular basis because it makes me feel more complete as a person. When I first played this, the way Foddy talked about this trash culture made me think that this game was going to be some kind of vicious takedown of it by the end, but the higher I got, the more welcoming the narration became. The moment that the narration spat out the line:

Click to expand spoiler.

"We have the same taste, you and I."

I felt convinced that Foddy was someone who had either grown up in or grown to love the trash in a way similar to myself. Getting Over It being a homage to Sexy Hiking was in a love letter type way instead of gross slap in the face at the idea of B-tier media. Trash may only beget trash, but that's okay. There is still value in trash. Trash can result in things that high budgets and long production times could never achieve, and vice versa. And there's nothing wrong with that. Being a purveyor of trash doesn't make you a trash person. That's something you'll have to label yourself as, if you want.

That earlier game, 2:22AM is something else I brought up because I felt like it would fit into the sphere of digital trash. It's a low budget unity game that many people will see and dismiss as "not a game" or "pointless" but it's something that could only exist because of its circumstances. I love digital trash.

Note: When I say trash in this post, I say it lovingly and for consistency with the way that Foddy in this game refers to it so much as "trash". I am not trashing on forum posts, image boards, or anything I've mentioned here.

While waiting with breathless anticipation for Kerbal Space Program 2, I've given the various Real Solar System overhaul mods for the original KSP a shot. And man, let me tell you it is a night and day difference.

When it comes to the 'map', everything is scaled up by a factor of at least ten, you're not operating out of an equatorial launch site, and the inclinations are all over the place. If you try to get to the Moon as you'd try to get to the Mun, you're looking at as much as a 56 degree difference in inclinations.

As for parts, it adds different fuel types to match up to the real world ones; instead of just generic Liquid Fuel and Oxidizer, you get Hydrogen, Kerosene, UDMH, etc, and you have to deal with their different densities, boil-off rates, specific impulses, and so on, as well as only being able to use them with specific engines. Engines, while they generally have better specific impulse, thrust, and TWR than in stock, to match up with real numbers, have limited numbers of ignitions, limited throttle ranges, failure rates, and are subject to ullage (basically in 0g environments, you need to settle your fuel before igniting the engines). You also have to pack along supplies for your kerbonauts, like food and water and stuff, but frankly that's the least of your worries, compared to how finicky real world rocket engines are.

All of this is to say that the game is monstrously more difficult than stock ksp. I've played hundreds, if not thousands of hours of that, and essentially mastered it, but it took me four hours just to get into Earth orbit in RSS. And today, after probably ten to fifteen hours of RSS gameplay, I finally managed my first lunar landing and return! First flight of the launch vehicle, too! I was pretty giddy about it, definitely one of my proudest kerbal accomplishments to date.

I basically built a direct ascent lander using a Mercury capsule, and launched it with something like a scaled down (2500 ton) Saturn V. First stage had 4 F1s, second had 4 LR87-LH2 engines (which are similar to the J2s that the real life Saturn V stage 2 used), and the lander/return capsule used a single RL10. The first stage did most of the work of getting to orbit, the second provided the final 1.5km/s or so, then re-ignited four times. First, for the final inclination correction to match with the Moon, second, for the trans lunar injection, third for lunar orbit insertion, and finally the remaining 500m/s or so is used for the beginning of the landing burn, before it's completed by the third stage/lander's RL10, which can actually throttle. Truth be told, the whole stack was ridiculously overbuilt, and made it back to Earth with a spare 1.5km/s in the tanks. Probably going to hop back on later today and see how far down I can trim it.

Overall, I'd definitely recommend trying it out for any KSP veterans, but I absolutely hate how cluttered the parts list is, and I would much prefer it if everything could be made procedurally, especially engines. Sometimes the included historical engines just don't come in the appropriate configuration for what you're trying to do; certainly not looking forward to designing a Mars lander entirely out of RL10s. Also I'm pretty sure there's ways to improve it, but the failure rates on engines can be absolutely absurd. In previous moonshot designs, I've had as many as four out of five engines on an upper stage fail.

I made a comment about missing out on Olivier Derivier's music because he has mostly been composing for European RPGs for the past few years, a genre I have a hard time getting into. So it turns out there are two games that are outside of that scope and one was not only on sale but apparently pretty well acclaimed, so I bought A Plague Tale: Innocence.

I have only finished the first 3 chapters but I have already become enamored. The strong focus on storytelling and emotional connections makes it feel like a distant cousin to D2, which, coming from me, is high praise. The visuals are also excellent, but Derivier's soundtrack is once again utterly perfectly matched to any and every scene.

And that is literally all the time I have had to play video games this week.

I picked up Slay the Spire back during the Steam Winter Sale, but it took a few weeks before I actually put any time into it. Now, three more later, I don't think I've played anything else since. 55 hours so far, and it's almost approaching a tetris effect degree of impact on my thought processes. What a great game. Every run is satisfying whether you win or lose, and if you do lose, you can usually look back and identify what mistakes put you in that predicament. 10/10 would play again.

And again, and again, and again.

Looked into AFK arena on a recommendation, seems like a game I could sink a lot of time into if I really wanted to, but I don't so I didn't.

Also trying Children of Morta, but on Xcloud beta. With one of the controller grips on my phone, (Daqi M1) it's pretty awesome playing all the things.