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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.
I believe I'm nearly finished with Children of Morta and it remains as one of the most beautiful (when at your house, not necessarily playing) pixel art games I've come across. It has a story that goes well beyond it's graphic limitations and is something that AAA titles could take a note from and has true WTF moments in the story that really illustrate the evilness of the enemies you are facing which is refreshing in a world where the story of your adversaries generally is limited to "them bad, kill them".
Oh, I remember hearing about this on a podcast and didn't remember to bookmark it. Thank you for the reminder!
I've recently been playing an absurd amount of Monster Hunter: World. it's very fun, it scratches the specific gameplay itch that I enjoy but find difficult to articulate (the Dark Souls comparison is the best I have, unfortunately). I do wish the female armor sets weren't so laughably bad, though :P.
After picking up The Division 2 for $3 the other day, been putting in 20 hours already into it. I'm enjoying it a decent amount, and is just pretty fun to run around and shoot people. But I am worried about how much longer I can keep enjoying it, outside of just playing it with friends. Looter shooters without much story like The Division 2 just run out of steam for me pretty quickly, like what am I gaining besides more loot and levels. I'm not gaining more lore about the world or interesting stories. IDK, without story or lore I just kinda end up loosing interest after awhile. Will have to see how much more this game can carry me on.
Also, UPlay has annoyed me today with the Title Update 8 and new DLC. For some reason it didn't auto download for me during the day, so I have to wait for it to download. And for some reason, even though I don't currently have the DLC, I still have to download the full 42Gb download with the DLC even though I can't access that content. Also for some reason just allocating space for the download took a full 20min, don't know what it was doing to take so long at all.
Oof, yeah. Had the same experience with Divison 2 and Uplay, on top of a 16GB update last week too. The game's now a total of 120GB now and I really can't figure out why. I'm hoping there's just that much content.
Maybe it's the game world, it's surprisingly dense. I'm used to open world games using a lot of shortcuts in citites, like having a relatively small amount of accessible indoor areas. But this game has quite a lot. It actually feels like a post-apocalyptic city. Between that and the fairly satisfying gunplay, I can see this game holding my interest longer than Destiny 2.
dang missed that sale. I would've totally bought it.
"Played" a decent chunk of Persona 5 over the weekend (I'm at one of the in-between sections — Summer, specifically — where there's a lot of the setup for the next act and not really doing a lot other than scrolling through the text... which I enjoy a lot, don't get me wrong. I just have limited time to play games these days, which leads me to my real question....
Has anyone had any luck with using the onscreen controller option for the PS4 remote play app on Android? I figured Persona 5 would be a good candidate to play a lot of on that due to the turn based nature, but walking around in the world is miserable due to the camera settings. I haven't really looked too much further into it other than "oh well, that would have been nice", so I may have missed a setting somewhere, but it seems like there isn't really a way to change the controller settings (or even use a third party controller that's paired with the device.
You can use a regular PS4 controller with Bluetooth I believe
That's what I figured, but I don't want to go through the hassle of unpairing/repairing to my phone every time I need to switch, I'd rather just have the controller I use with my phone work with it =\
Maybe get a second PS4 controller and use it exclusively with the phone?
That's probably what I'll end up doing. Just wish it used third party controllers 🤷♂️
Mostly Style Savvy. It's one I've mentioned before, but I didn't realize that I was playing it so often these past few months.
It's a casual fashion game for the 3DS that has actually helped me learn more about fashion and has contributed to me finding my own personal sense of style.
I've been playing a lot of Forza Horizon 4 because of the 3mon for $1 xbox game pass deal a couple weeks ago. Very fun game if you're into cars and all that, graphics are very nice of course, and it gives me the same feeling I had when I would boot up need for speed underground 2 on the PS2(still haven't found a game that matches that feeling but this one comes close). Although it does get repetitive, I really only play it to drive around fun dream cars so it doesn't bother me too much.
If anyone has a racing game they've played recently and would recommend please let me know, they're my favorite :)
I love a good racing game too. I'm not good at them but when you get into that flow, oh boy. I'm still waiting for true Burnout 3 successor myself, but a NFSU2 is a definite second.
Have you checked out the Dirt series? The Rally version is a pretty realistic simulator and the regular series is a more arcade. They're a bit harder to learn than Forza Horizon, and not really about dream cars so much as fun rally cars, but I felt pretty similar about the two series.
Burnout Paradise Remasered is also around now. It was a bit quiet of a launch but it's exactly the Burnout Paradise experience, modernized cleanly. I like it well enough but Burnout 3 was just it for me.
This one might sound strange, but have you ever played Driver San Francisco? It's not a racing game, not really, but it plays exactly like one. The game is 100% driving. The premise is that you play as a detective in a coma who basically possesses people driving cars in San Francisco, and can swap between them on the fly. You solve crimes. It's ridiculous and it knows it. If you're interested in racing gameplay but an actual singleplayer campaign, this is worth looking into.
I expect you already know about it, but just in case you've missed it: keep an eye on Three Fields Entertainment. It's made up of a lot of ex-Criterion devs who left in 2013.
They still seem to be finding their footing again and their releases so far have gotten pretty middling reception, but they're clearly trying to work their way back to making old-school Burnout-like games. Dangerous Driving is definitely the closest so far, and they recently announced a sequel that should be out by the end of the year.
Oh wow, I didn't even realize Dangerous Driving was out. Seems it's an EGS Exclusive, and I ended up just not hearing that it was out at all as a result. I'll definitely keep my eye out, thanks!
I feel the same way about NFSU2, I tried to play the new one where they tried to replicate it but like you said the old one just feels right.
And I have, Dirt is a fun game I enjoy to just mess around with, their mobile port is actually pretty fun too surprisingly even though I don't play mobile games.
I'll check that out it sounds interesting, it reminds me of a game I heard of on reddit. It's called My Summer Car, you just build your own old finnish shitbox car and just drive it around. Never played it but it looks pretty unique.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/516750/My_Summer_Car/
Ah, I have a mechanic friend who is really into My Summer Car. He's not a big racing game fan, but he enjoys this because it's more about the sim experience of building/maintaining/fixing a car than it is driving.
I'm not into cars, but I found Horizon an incredibly chill experience. I just enjoyed driving around, searching for rare cars and occasionally entering a race
I just played "When The Darkness Comes". The creator of the game calls it an "experience" rather than a game since it's basically a walking sim with minimal interactivity.
It was amazing. The game is an artistic expression of the authors struggle with mental health issues such as depression and anxiety. It was beautiful and dark at the same time, and just really well done. Experience really is the best way to describe it, as it doesn't have much of a concrete story or game play mechanics, but still kept my attention with ease.
It was deeply impactful and I would encourage anyone who can handle these kind of themes to pick up this free and short game on Steam. The game has a trigger warning that should be taken seriously as it deals with themes of suicide.
After Mandalore's Warhammer 40K Mechanicus review I absolutely had to pick it up even though I never got into 40K games previously. OST and Mechanicus's voices did the trick for me, and I also love turn-based games.
So far it's really great, it's got enough of a twist to it to not feel X-Com'y and random events during explorations are interesting as well.
Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 - Yuri's Revenge is one of my favorite games of all time. I still fire it up every now and then and I'm in another stint now. I love the gorgeous hand-drawn art and the voice/sound design, the factions and the outlandish weapons. Seriously, what other game lets you deploy nukes, weather control, mind control, robot spiders, trained dolphins, jetpack soldiers, mini-nukes on trucks, electro-shock troops, enormous cannons, tanks disguised as trees, and giant squids? The variety and the B-movie cheese that delivers it just make me giggle.
I play with the CnCNet client but just single-player skirmishes. I love the game but I'm not great at it. I typically set up a 1v1 game against a medium or hard AI. I'd like to play against someone of my skill level but I think most of the people online are pretty heavily competitive.
I'm back up and running with Beat Saber after a short health-related hiatus. Good exercise; great fun.
Team Sonic Racing continues to be a decent distraction from an otherwise difficult and busy real-life. It's mindless and enjoyable: a chill de-stresser.
I also started up Shadow Complex Remastered last weekend. @SunSpotter kindly gifted it to me months ago and I'm only just now getting around to playing it. I played (and loved) the original years ago, and I'm happy to report that it holds up well. I love a solid metroidvania, and this one has particularly good pacing.
The Witcher 3 has been on hiatus as I've been both busy and a bit demotivated recently. I also ran into a glitch with a quest, and I'm not sure if it's native to the game or because I'm running it in Proton. I didn't have the throughput at the time to diagnose it, so I think that's another thing that caused me to move the game to the back burner. I will return to it sometime soon, just probably not yet.
I'm trying to up my DOOM game on all versions before Eternal comes out, so no lower than Ultra Violence, and I'm taking something of an ambient approach: Just playing Doom-engine games, mods, TCs, whatever when I feel like it, but keeping them in mind. I was trying to play Duke3D, but could never quite get into it the same way.
I found a surprisingly good one, though: Doom64 Retribution. It's a GZDoom mod. I've played Doom64EX, and it just didn't feel right, and the engine was a little janky (as KEXEngine stuff can be if you check NightDive's other, later, buggy releases I buy for the game data to use on open-source ports), but this feels like a solid DOOM experience, and being in ZDoom doesn't have the bugs I bumped into, which were mostly interface and config issues. I'm curious because apparently Doom64 is available as a pre-order bonus for Doom Eternal, which I can't wait for.
I'm actually enjoying the more difficult Doom experience (64R is tough, and legitimately scary), and even the 2016 version is better on a harder difficulty. I feel a little bad for playing it on easy mode, as I feel like I cheated myself. However, that was four years ago.
I've been playing Trackmania Canyon after years, after stumbling across Accursed Farms's review, but it keeps dropping frames on my hardware that should support it. I'm tempted to try it in Arch with Proton, which should have far less overhead in the background.
As a tangent, I found Slayer's Testaments, a Quake mod that sorta backports DOOM 4. It's fun, and you can play the vanilla Quake missions with the monsters as an option.
EDIT: I forgot to mention there's apparently a pretty kickass doom64 vanilla-compatible mod, Doom64 for Doom 2. Just tried it in Chocolate doom, and it's just as good as the other d64 clone I'm playing in GZDoom.
I've been playing Kingdom Come: Deliverance recently. You play the son of a blacksmith in feudal Bohemia. Your village gets ransacked, eventually a sword your father made for the local lord gets stolen, and you have to go get it back along with vengeance.
The setting is the strongest aspect. There's no magic or fantasy, only medieval life, politics, conflict, and the passage of time. When you discover new things, you'll get entries in your codex with real-world information and history. The world is alive and doesn't revolve around you. NPCs go about their business and events happen over time regardless whether you're around or not. Chance encounters are plenty. The quests are interesting, generally historically appropriate, and varied. It can be a little stressful, but fun to plan out how you'll tackle quests based on time, travel distance, nearby quests, etc.
Characters and interactions are pretty well done. Every line is voice acted, from the main characters to the peasants, and there's a quite a bit of dialogue. Dialogue often has several options with different skill checks against different aspects of your character versus the NPC's priorities and your reputation with them.
You start out terrible at everything, as would be historically accurate, and get better through use/practice and occasionally books/trainers/etc. For instance, you can't read and book text appears as gibberish until you learn how, and then you have to practice to read harder texts. Or how you are absolute garbage in combat and slowly get better. It's frustrating and a bit wonky, probably my least favorite part (similar to how I feel about The Witcher series).
The save system is a bit annoying; you can only save by a) sleeping in certain beds b) reaching certain story/quest checkpoints and c) drinking a special in-game item. It's possible to be venturing home across the land after a bunch of more minor activities only to get ambushed on the road and killed, losing an hour of work.
My real gripe is that it, at least what's available through the Epic Store, is a janky, bug-ridden mess and has been for years. There are so many loading screens, including every time you open the map. Every time I quit the game, it's a full system hard-crash (no other game does this). It often doesn't save graphics/window settings between launches. Sometimes the in-game save item doesn't work. Sometimes a save entry gets corrupted. Sometimes you get stuck in the ground and have to fast-travel to get out. Sometimes it stops responding to any of the menu-opening keys (including for the save/exit menu) while the movement keys are fine until a restart with task manager. Sometimes it completely hangs when opening a mode like the alchemy table. Sometimes a cursor icon shows up around the normal first-person recital icon and it moves as you look around. Then there's a bunch of more specific quest and item related bugs. Combine all of these with the weird save system and you can have some infuriating times.
I haven't been able to find any games recently to get hooked on. My go-to these days is League of Legends. I'm picking up the "newish" Halo for pc. I've heard pretty fantastic things about it, so I'm really hoping it doesn't disappoint!
I picked up Halo:CE:Anniversary on PC the other day. I haven't played a massive amount of it so far thanks to work and other life commitments but it feels like a pretty good port. At the moment the Halo series is the only thing holding me back from putting Debian back on my main PC. I've been so psyched for halo on pc for so many years that it seems silly to have to subsist with Proton
Played Doom for the first time in years and finally made some progress. Had no idea what the hell to do to progress but finally found the spot on the map. My last save was back when the game was released. Trying to beat it before eternal comes out. The game is truly a masterpiece, they really nailed the old school feel of doom 1