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

I finally finished with the Spyro Reignited Trilogy. I originally said I wasn't going to 100% Spyro 3, but I kept going back to chip away at checklist items until it was nearly done. I have all the gems and only one egg left, but the literal whack-a-mole mini-game it requires is so frustrating and ill-balanced that I doubt I'll ever finish it and get to see the bonus level. It's a shame that the game culminated in a single pain point like that for me. It's not a fair conclusion to a relatively wonderful and fundamentally solid series. Spyro is great when it's about level design, collecting, and gliding. It is not great when it's about mini-games or gimmicks.

I have some time off work coming up soon in which I finally plan to dive fully into The Witcher 3, but to tide me over until then I got into Supraland on the recommendation of a friend. It's a 3D metroidvania-esque, Zelda-esque, first-person puzzler/collectathon. That sounds like a lot, and it is, but everything works really well in the game. I'm two hours in and am delighted so far. I'm eager to keep playing, which is something flighty me doesn't say about most games after two hours.

Finally, I should be able to start Beat Saber back up this week, which I am very excited about. If anyone has any must-play custom beat maps, let me know. I'm on the market for ones that are simply fun to move/dance to, rather than the kind that are impressively technical.

Been checking out Dishonored 2 this past weekend.

It's been sitting around in my inventory for close to, or over, a year now. I've played it here and there but this was the first time I sat down to play it, and sank a good 10 hours in over the weekend. I don't know, it's not pulling me in like games like it used to. I don't think it's the game's fault, this seems to be across the board for all games like it to me, from Thief to System Shock 2 to Bioshock to Prey to Dishonored. The sit down really seems to have helped, maybe that's what it is. I don't have the time I used to be able to dedicate to getting over the immersion hump and then finally feeling the world. Now I feel like I can jump back in a lot quicker.

I've decided to go with the Corvo version of the game to start with, since I'm still familiar with him and his powers from the first game. The first thing that struck me is that this game is a lot more difficult than the first. It seems like they opened up the guards' vision cones a lot and they can see very far in well-lit areas... which the entire first few missions of the game take place during. This was definitely one of the reasons I didn't jump into the game immediately and had to wait for a full sit-down session. The level design is a bit more constrictive but no less open—it seems they learned how OP the Blink (teleport) ability could really be and tuned the levels to accommodate.

On the flipside, it seems like that means there are now areas where you have to deal with guards. That's not necessarily a bad thing. XCOM 2 purposefully tried to speed up the game because the devs thought too many played the original too slowly, and it seems to have worked well for them to offer a slightly different way to interact with the same mechanics. It feels like Dishonored 2 is doing the same in how it's guiding players to use their abilities. It's not any more or less clear about its attitude on killing though, and that was a big question mark for many playing the first game, so perhaps they could have paid a little more attention there.

In terms of the overall experience, it's basically in line with the first game with no big changes in quality one way or the other. I don't like Corvo's new voice-acted lines, they feel like they're an order of magnitude worse acted and written than literally everyone else's in the game, including nameless NPCs on the streets. The updated graphics are gorgeous and really tie into the art style very well. Dishonored always aimed for a grimy pseudo-steampunk tone and I was wondering if a higher-fidelity version could capture it without many sacrifices, but it seems the art design at Arkane is excellent.

If there are any two things I'd like to see improvements on, it's the Jessamine's heart contraption and the audio design. In terms of the heart, using it in the first game in different places or when looking at different people would give you all kinds of bonus dialogue and content, similar to the MGS series' optional Codec calls. A lot of the lore and background of the game was found in this dialogue and even if some of it was randomly assigned, it really gave you a sense of humanity for the nameless NPC you were eyeing removing from your path. In Dishonored 2, it seems to be mostly canned dialogue about how much the now long-dead Jessamine really misses Corvo. I'm not sure why they reduced the heart's interesting dialogue to play up an aspect that the first game specifically heavily downplayed but here we are. It's a big downgrade for me, though it's overall a very minor part of the game.

As far as the audio design, it's just not good enough for a stealth game. It's perfectly passable for any average game but when I'm playing with headphones and trying to hear where guards are around me, I should not have to be guessing based only on "left or right ear". Sounds don't travel realistically like you would expect so a guard can sound like they're outside of the window behind you, only to be coming up the stairs in front of you. Rather annoying.

So far, though, I'd say it's more Dishonored. If you're into it, or any game like it, you'll get what you expect out of it.

Some of my friends and I have been spending a lot of time in the last couple of weeks playing Team Fortress 2 again. First time I've picked this game back up since about 2012 or 2013, and it's still shockingly just as fun as I remembered it being. I loved this when I was a tween/early teen and I still get the same rush that I did then when I get a slick backstab as Spy or a Medic pops a kritzkrieg Uber on me when I'm playing soldier and I wipe 3-5 people trying to push the capture point. There's been some weapons added since that I've been having to learn what they do, but honestly they seem to be largely inferior to most of the weapons that were already in the game and I run into many people running different kinds of stock weapons more than anything, aside from your classics like Demoknight getups and market gardener Soldiers.

The TF2 Economy tanked at some point and discovering that was a bizarre feeling. backpack.tf now lists the refined metal price as 4 cents, compared to my memory placing it at at least a dollar or two way back when. Buds now cost ~3 keys instead of the 15-20 that they routinely went for before. Just a weird experience, but it makes sense considering all the money in skins is now in games like CSGO.

I finally built a new computer last month, upgrading from the venerable i7-2600k to an R5 3600X. Thanks to the step up in processor power, I've been able to up my emulation game, so I've finally gotten around to playing Breath of the Wild.

I've just got to say, damn. Breath of the Wild is probably the best open world, sandbox style game that I've played. I thought I was burned out of the genre back when Skyrim came out, never mind the recent proliferation of such games, but this one just sucked me in.

It's kind of hard to put my thoughts into words, but I feel like it's the first game I've played that was really designed from the ground up around the whole sandbox paradigm, with the story progression being seamlessly integrated with exploration. The only other game I've seen that came close was Subnautica. The setting is also just something else. Aside from being beautifully designed and packed with details in a way often lacking in games with huge, open maps, post-apocalyptic hyrule crawling with high tech relics and medieval ruins? It's just weird and experimental for the series in the best sort of way.

The various patches and mods for use with the emulator are also very nice. After playing the game at 1080p and 60fps, I can't imagine playing it on the original hardware, it's most definitely a game that benefits from higher framerates.

Didn't really feel like playing anything else after beating Sekiro, so I went on to NG+ to play shura ending and played the whole way through with kuro's charm. Man that final fight was annoying.

I guess I'll jump back into astral chain when I recover from this annoying cold. I forget where I am, I think it was right after getting the axe. Maybe one mission in after.

Been expanding my library with Windows games now that Proton's a thing. Lately been playing My Time at Portia. Fun little game. Reminds me a bit of Stardew Valley, but with a little bit of something else mixed in. Very large world, love exploring it and gathering materials and finding new things. Pretty relaxing and laid back. Like Stardew Valley, there are a lot of activities. Farming, building, mining, combat, fishing. Although in this game building is the "primary" activity.

Still playing "Fire Emblem: Three Houses." Now that I've gotten to know the characters and gotten a feel for the game mechanics I've come to really enjoy it. My prior complaint about the uninspired environments still stands, and the writing is a little sophomoric, but I'm mostly okay with it. The story itself is interesting and has a lot of twists and turns.

One gameplay complaint though, (SPOILERS) The game has a recruitment mechanic where you can recruit people from other houses. This seems to be a workaround for the perma-death aspect of the game (more on that in a second) where you can replace characters who fit certain roles by recruiting new ones. Older Fire Emblem games would just steadily introduce new characters who fit certain roles over the course of the narrative.

BUT, the recruitment process isn't reflect very well by the narrative. After Act I, the 3 houses go from being friends to enemies and a lot of the drama of the story is that you are now fighting these other students that you liked and cared about. But because of the recruitment mechanic, I mostly ended up recruiting all the characters I actually like, so I'm not really faced with killing anyone. And at one point, there are dialogue options that claim we had to kill someone at a certain battle, but that person actually died before the schism because I borrowed them for a practice mission and accidentally got them killed.

So my advice is, play a run where you don't bother recruiting anyone (except maybe Dorothea because she's awesome). **(/SPOILER)**??

They also kind of blunted any tension in the "perma-death" by introducing this "divine pulse" mechanic, which actually just lets you roll back the clock and replay battles. You can actually rewind turn by turn all the way to the beginning. I understand that this is to basically make it easier to save scum, but it's actually just too easy. It has a finite number of charges, but I'm not even sure why because you get SO MANY uses that it lets you play completely recklessly.

Sea Salt - I can accept pixel/low graphics if there's a great story and/or engaging gameplay. This has neither of the last two aspects.

Enter the Gungeon - Cute, but not enough to keep me playing past an hour or so.

Felix the Reaper - Very cute puzzle game, if you like that sort of thing give it a whirl.

My Friend Pedro - Fun little side scrolling shooter, good enough to get me to finish it, not good enough for me to achievement chase.

I am floundering after finishing Kentucky Route Zero so please excuse me if this is a bit scatterbrained.

I probably spent the most time last week playing Blade Runner. I also rewatched Blade Runner: The Final Cut and it's a bit hilarious how parallel they are. Regardless, it's really interesting playing an adventure game where I'm not choosing dialog options and there's no particular positive feedback loop. Maybe I'm on the right course, maybe I'm not. At one point, I died and had to re-do a large chunk of act 2 with knowledge of some time-sensitive events. I tried to short circuit it and got the same results as I did the first time. So maybe it's less open than I was led to believe.

I also spent some more time with Chasm, which is an okay Metroidvania. I had previously gotten stuck at a boss, went back to town to get a magical weapon because I thought it'd help, but then I beat the boss with just a bit more caution and my regular sword. It pushes checkpoints a bit too far out for my enjoyment and I've had to re-do some runs just skating past enemies because I want to get progress more than XP.

I started The Red Strings Club, because that's a game I've owned for a while and I can finish it for my backlog completion goal. I never got much into Gods Will Be Watching but I'm already enjoying Red Strings Club more. The mini games are fairly interesting and the conversation quizzes mean I'm actually paying attention to the dialog bits.

And finally, I saw some Dirt Rally 2.0 gameplay and that looked cool but I realized I own and already have installed Forza Horizon 4. That's a fun racing game. I never want to get into the tuning parts, but it seems to be fine with me just picking a car and racing. I'm not exactly a huge fan of driving to far off events just to race in another direction, but I also haven't mucked with the fast travel options much.

This past week I started and finished Horace, having gotten it for free during one of the Epic Store giveaways. Steam lists reception as "very positive" and the opening screen of the trailer has all of these 9+/10 scores. Talk of great platforming, well written and funny, interesting and refreshing plot, gorgeous art style, metroidvania gameplay, earthbound-level quirky plot and characters, and more. I had high hopes.

It was awful.

First, the gameplay. Metroidvania accumulation and upgrade of new powers to get into new places, fine. The main power is the ability to walk on most surfaces and have the camera rotate to make it the new "ground". In concept, a neat mechanic. In practice, frustrating, as it's done entirely automatically. Want to walk off a ledge? Nope, world rotates. Jump a little too close to a ceiling or a wall? World rotates, often putting you in a trap. There were plenty of buttons unused even on a controller that making one a "hold to activate" would have been fine. The movement itself was ok, but since you have to hold "run" to move above a snail's pace or to get over an obstacle bigger than a grain of sand, the forward momentum on landing becomes frustrating. Hollow Knight, this is not. Hitboxes on enemies and obstacles were also unpredictable. It all made it feel like deaths and difficulty were from fighting the mechanics, particularly during the boss battles (ugh, the giant robot ones are the worst), rather than lack of skill.

The art wasn't great, both in style and design(?). "Pixel" backgrounds and sprites that looked maybe generated from higher res assets (not as crisp and intentional pixel color/placement as one would expect), mixed with some pixelated 3D things, mixed with some I-found-the-radial-gradient-tool looking 3D assets, mixed with some realistic fire, and then zooming in on most of these things for a good portion of the game due to cutscenes. Significant reuse and in-your-face copy/paste of assets. A bunch of mini-games that absolutely sucked (bad implementations based on real games) but were necessary to progress.

The story and writing, which everyone said was the best part, was probably the worst. Everything is written as Horace (main character, you, a robot) recounting his life over cutscenes. Everything is narrated by Horace, so it's all "and then Bill said 'blah blah blah' and sandy explained 'blah blah' and then Bob lit a cigarette and went outside" during the cutscenes with horace's voice and other lips moving and people are doing exactly what is stated. Because you're a robot, of course it's read excruciatingly slowly and monotone, along with equally bad paced cutscenes. Most of the "jokes" are people making a pop culture reference or exhibiting an emotion, since you're a robot, you saying "but I didn't get it". The plot itself was predictable with random things thrown in for no good reason. The whole thing felt like some early elementary school kid's creative writing short story being read aloud for the class.

I'm just glad it was only ~10-15h.

I started playing Atone one night when I couldn't sleep. It's set in Nordic mythology. It's not the type of thing I would normally play, but I was looking for something different.

It was... odd. It starts out sort of like an Atari adventure game. It's in this weird semi-top-down/semi-orthographic projection. You play Estra who has to journey through Midgard to protect the sacred Elder Tree. You periodically meet mythical characters that you must fight. These fights are musical challenges sort of like Guitar Hero or Dance Dance Revolution.

If this is starting to sound like it's all over the place, that's because it is. I liked the artwork. The story is interesting if Nordic mythology is your thing. The game play is just odd. Overall, I liked what I played of it. (I'm stuck trying to battle a skeleton and my Guitar Hero skills are off recently.) But I'm not sure I could give an unequivocal thumbs-up. It's definitely something worth checking out if you want something different. Otherwise, stick with what you've got.

Monster Hunter: World, which is a nice mix of boss battles, world exploration, resource farming and character & equipment building. The combat in MHW hits a sweet spot on the spectrum of too easy vs. too difficult.

Also: Angband, which is a very polished and mature (in terms of software age) offering in the classic Roguelike genre. Happily building up my character slowly there, playing every once in a while when I have some free moments. Good for times when wifi is not available.

I'm almost done with my Winter class and managed to get some of the late-stage assignments done early, leaving me with almost a full day to do some minor cleaning and major relaxation. So I checked this month's Humble Choice and got some new games.

I decided to play The Hex, and I managed to finish the game. I'm sure there are some secrets I missed out on, but at least I played enough to get the general point.

From a mechanical perspective, the game is pretty fun. I'd argue that overall, it's a visual novel, but it's chocked full of gameplay that is constantly changing. Some of them perhaps last a bit too long; the RPG section in particular seems to stretch on mostly because the characters you play as are constantly complaining about it. Even so, it's a very short game, so it's something that's very easy to recommend.

Honestly, I'll probably find myself playing again. I know there is more to the story that I missed - there is a lot of hinting about a character named Reginald who didn't really come up in my playthrough, and I'm kind of dying to know more.

Decided to finally really get started with Persona 3 emulated via pcsx2. And man I feel like this game has not aged very well at all. And I don't mean in the graphics territory but just general gameplay. I don't have a clue how I would ever play this game without using a guide to help tell me what events are available when, or what items to give to people. Not super far into the game thus far, only 7ish hours so not much more to say. But will keep giving it some time and see what I think of it.

I picked Dwarf Fortress up again. There was a big update released recently, and I've been dying to try it out, but I've been waiting on the modders to release a Lazy Newb Pack. Even if I'm not a newb, I am indeed lazy. Some progress has been made on that, but mostly only on Windows. So, I finally decided to say fuck it, we'll do it live. I've installed it without a tileset, without DFHack, or any other niceties. Normally I'm big on tinkering with things, and I'd be the kind of person to get all this stuff set up by hand, install my own tilesets, etc, but when I want to play a video game is precisely the time I don't want to tinker, configure, and troubleshoot.

It's not as difficult as I anticipated, but I really do miss some things. I can get used to using the K and Q keys instead of clicking on things, no big deal, but I never realized shift+arrows moving 10 squares at a time was a dfhack feature, or how completely and utterly difficult it is to manage labours in the vanilla game. I grabbed an alpha copy of Dwarf Therapist, and all is well.

I'm actually really digging the ASCII. It's surprisingly beautiful. I'm running it in real text mode, in a terminal, using an IBM VGA font. That gives it a huge nostalgia boost for me because it looks very much like Rogue and Nethack and other roguelikes I played on DOS back in the day. The caveat is that rectangular tiles make my designs look stretched, and it's hard to remember that rectangle is actually a square room.

I also received a copy of Hollow Knight today in the Tildes Valentines Blind Date event, and I'm anxious to try it out. Being a platformer, I wanted to use my PS4 controller to play it, but that didn't work no matter what I tried. Wireless, wired, steam support off and on, the game just says no controller detected. This is sorta par for the course for me these days with my controller on steam on linux. I've decided to put it on the back burner while I play DF, since the last thing I want to do when I'm in the mood to play a game is tinker, configure, or troubleshoot.

Played my first session of The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners. So far, my impression of the game can be summed up as "brilliant VR mechanics hampered by awful game design".

I'll give it a few more sessions, but I'm pretty disappointed by it so far.

I tried out Slay The Spire and while it was an interesting idea, I found the concept of starting with a bare deck every time you started to be a rather major deterrent. I feel like I'm being punished for playing the game.

So I refunded it.