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

I've been playing a ton of Animal Crossing: New Horizons because it's a great way to feel community with my friends while we can't see each other in person, but my feelings are really mixed.

Plus: Slowly growing the community and molding the island to be your ideal is wonderful. I really do enjoy wandering around, catching bugs and fish, and visiting friends.

Minus: It feels like the UI team had either a deep nostalgia for the UI of the first game and decided to ignore the last 20 years of UI/UX development, or they hated the other teams with a burning passion and wanted their work to be seen as rarely as possible. For Example:

• Inventory management is limited to dropping the full stack or pulling one single item off, even though you might need a half-stack.
• Despite dozens of crafting recipes and hundreds of storage slots in your house, you can't craft from storage.
• They have an outfit quick-select tool, but if you're using it, you have to return home and modify an outfit to try something else on. You can't just dig up a pair of trousers and try them on for size. It needlessly reduces the joy of finding something new.
• Conversations are long, and cannot be significantly sped up or skipped, even if it's the same dialogue over and over again. There was a fishing tourney yesterday where the gold medal involved playing the fishing minigame 40-50 times. Between each round there was two minutes of unskippable dialogue. I burned out 15 rounds in and had already wasted half an hour of my time button mashing to move through the numerous text boxes.
• Tying in with the previous problem: Frequently used conversational options are sometimes 3 or 4 layers deep in a conversation tree. If you want to visit another player's island you have to talk to the flight attendant and 1. Say you want to fly. 2. Say you want to visit another player. 3. Say you want to visit an online player. 4. Agree to connect to the internet. 5. Search for the players you can visit. 6. Select the player. This is the most egregious, but it's representative of the general problem with the nested conversational trees. Combined with the slow pace of conversation, it can take a couple minutes just to navigate a conversation, and god help you if you misclick.

It's so, so fun, and the core gameplay loop is great, but the UI hasn't kept up with the times.

Tildes recently recommended to me (among many other things) Endless Sky, and I've been playing that. It's a nice diversion. It's a space trading & combat game, and FLOSS, too.

In the way of video games I've gone back to some of my old favorites.

Minecraft - I run a server with some of my friends and we played pretty obsessively for a bit although recently I think we are all pretty burned out. Its one of those games thats fun to just sit in someone's dorm and talk shit while you build a library.

Planetside 2- Planetside overall has been on a pretty great upswing in the past year. Performance has improved quite a bit which has made it loads more accessible and recently they had a massive update adding outfit (player group) resources and Bastion Fleet Carriers, which are some big fuck off pilotable airships that seem to cause some fun chaos around them. I think they've fixed it by now but when they were released they could fire into spawn rooms and kill the people in there. People have been complaining that they are "cheesy", but I think they make things interesting and add some spice. Sure, if you're a space Bushido following, medkit chugging heavy assault they wont be supporting your playstyle, but thats not what the game is about, its about big stupid chaos and explosions and anything that prevents honorable 1v1s between heavy assaults (or farms) seems to have been nerfed, so this is a breath of fresh air.

Titanfall 2 - A dead game with over 2,000 people currently online. Any time Titanfall is brought up there are two things people say - that it was a critically underrated game screwed by EA because they put its release between Battlefield and COD, or that its a dead game that nobody plays. Both of those are false but thats not the point. The point is that its a super fun game held back by one of two things:

1. A complete lack of skill based team balancing (or any team balancing). The majority of matches are complete stomps with 0 chance of one side winning. Its not fun to be on the stomping side, its not fun to be on the side getting stomped. People on the side getting fucked over tend to leave, making the game 6v3 for half the match which means things are even worse.
2. Absence of any server browser or player run servers. Servers tend to have their own culture and skill level as people gravitate towards each other. It also helps to form actual communities in game rather than relying on reddit. Respawn stopped updating the game some time ago and as a result the meta has obviously gotten stagnant with some weapons being objectively worse versions of others. Custom servers allow for continual balancing by the players, keeping things fresh and fun for longer and you might actually see some variety in the weapons used.

Balanced matches are rare, but when they happen its a stupid amount of fun, even if I'm doing objectively horrible. I hope that if there is a Titanfall 3 there will either be some form of team balancing or actual player run servers (the preferred option), but I know that wont happen because apparently server browsers are too much control to give to give us.

Also ive been playing COD Warzone and its a resounding meh made better by playing with friends, but hitting yourself in the head with a rock is more fun with friends so that doesnt mean much. The money mode is what convinced me to clear the hard drive space for it and really the thing that makes it better than all the other battle royales out there.

I played a good bit of Mount & Blade: Bannerlord. If you liked Warband and want to relive the experience... just play Warband again. The graphics are prettier, but the game is just the same. You'll need to install the same mods to deal with the same UI and balance issues... it feels like basically nothing at all has changed in the ten years since Warband. Literally. I don't know what they were doing with their time, but it wasn't working on Mount & Blade.

It's kind of baffling. Wikipedia says the developer has 100+ employees and has been theoretically working on M&B:Bannerlord for 8 years. What happened during those years? Why are there so few changes? What were all those people doing?

Edit: Ah. TalesWorld has ongoing funding from the Turkish government to develop the games industry in Turkey. That might explain a lower than usual need to ship games or show productivity.

Blacksad: Under the Skin (Switch)

It's pretty rare that I manage to finish a story-based game, but this one held my attention until the end. I wanted to learn the truth behind the murder, and I wanted to know how it all turned out for the characters I cared about. The story took a couple of turns I didn't like much, and a few characters who were important in the early parts of the game kinda just faded away towards the end, but overall I'm happy with how it turned out.

I've mentioned before the technical issues, which only got worse later in the game. Several times I had to restart the application to get rid of stuck images that were blocking my view of the game. I still recommend the game for adventure game fans, but not on Switch.

Evolution: The Beginning (tabletop)

A neat little card game, where you evolve species of animals to compete with the other players. Easy to learn and fun to play, though we only played it for a couple hours, and it's possible it gets old after a while.

Fire Emblem: Three Houses (Switch)

This game is great. Battles are challenging, but a lot less frustrating than for example Xcom. And in-between battles I get to socialise with my team members and get to know them, and thus care about them. I'm now in the second part of the game, where war is raging between the three factions, and sometimes I meet characters I care about on the opposing side, which is always emotional. The developers did a really good job fleshing out these characters, and letting me mingle with and get to know all of them all during the first part of the game was brilliant. I only wish it would have given me more time to get to know them before picking which house to align myself with.

Nier: Automata (PS4)

I finished this game; beat the final boss, watched the tear-jerking ending cinematic, and watched the end-game credits roll. And I was a little disappointed. I'd enjoyed the game greatly, but it was a bit on the short side (especially for a Japanese game), and the story felt confusing and disjointed. I was wondering if I'd somehow skipped parts of the game, due to decisions I'd made while playing. Anyway, I decided to do some more side quests before shelving it, so I clicked continue. And then the game started over at the very beginning, but from the viewpoint of a different character!

So that was neat. Well, except I spent all my healing items on the final boss and the first part of the game is a 20-minute section with no save points, with a really difficult bit at the end. After 4 or so failed attempts I swallowed my pride and turned down the difficulty to easy, so I could get to a save point and a store where I could buy new healing items.

That second playthrough turned out to be my favourite part of the game. I got the ability to hack enemies (as an alternative to fighting them), and the story fell more into place. I learned more about this second character, and there were some interesting twists to the story. Also I'm a sucker for this type of storytelling, where we see the same story from multiple viewpoints.

After finishing this second playthrough, I got to play a third character, who turned out to be my faovurite character in the game. She's so cool, and I love how the English voice actor delivers her lines. But this part of the game ended with taking the plot in a direction I didn't like very much.

Anyway, after all that, I'd been told the entire story, or at least I think so. And while there were some good parts and some interesting twists, the whole thing doesn't really make a lot of sense to me. But it does tie in with the main theme of the game, so let's talk about that for a bit.

There's a lot of philosophy in this game, mostly regarding the subjects of what makes us human, what's the difference between sentient machines and humans, and what's the meaning of life. Most named characters in the game are named after famous philosophers, and both the main quest and many side quests deal with these questions. However, I don't feel like the game has a whole lot to add to the debate, instead rehashing old arguments and thus serving more as an introductory class to philosophy.

Radio General (Linux)

A WW2 strategy game, where you control one side (Canada) in historic battles. All you have is a radio and a map with figurines on it, that you manually have to move around when your units radio in their updated positions and status. (And a pipe you can smoke, a glass of booze you can sip from, and some pencils for drawing on the map.) You command your troops by giving them orders over the radio. It's all so very very cool. And to me it feels more realistic than any other strategy game I've played.

Sadly you can't control the game with voice commands on other platforms than Windows, but it probably wouldn't have recognised my Norwegian accent anyway.

So far I've only played co-op, which works very well. I don't think it has a versus mode, which is odd, but it does have a single-player campaign.

My wife and I have been playing Animal Crossing New Horizons pretty regularly. I've played previous Animal Crossing games and love the gameplay loop of just kind of wandering about and collecting things. (It's especially exciting for me because she's never been interested in games so it's like a gateway drug!)

On the RPG front I caved and bought Bannerlord. I put an ungodly amount of time in to Warband years ago in high school so I couldn't resist. It's pretty similar to how I remember Warband to be honest.

Finally @Whom suggested Xonotic over on the Recommend FLOSS games thread. It's a free, open source arena shooter based on a Quake 1 engine port and it nails that classic arena shooter feel. I can see myself playing a lot of this game long term!

Most of my time has been spent playing Risk of Rain 2. I have had the game since release but haven't played it much until they had the latest update and free weekend. Needless to say, I'm hooked. Right now I am pretty much just playing single player and using the engineer class. The furthest I have gotten is Stage 10 and have only unlocked 1 artifact so far.

I can easily see myself sinking 100 hours into the game if all the different classes hook me like engineer does.

I just started playing Get Even. It's weird. It's constantly switching between gameplay mechanics that do not really mesh together. Sometimes it wants to be a horror game, sometimes it wants to be a shooter, and sometimes it throws you a puzzle. It's got Condemned style forensics tools but there is no feeling of separation between when you should be using that and when you should have your gun out.

That being said, I bought it because it's got Olivier Derivier working on the music. His strongest skill is dynamic music that changes with the context of the game. And with a game that relies on tension like this game does, it's really really effective.

Stardew Valley. It's extremely relaxing and cathartic.

I've played through about 90% of Skyfish 2. It was not the type of game I usually play, but it turned out to be pretty fun. It's a combat adventure game. Overall, I give it a thumbs-up.

I've been playing Doom Eternal on Stadia. My laptop is just shy of the minimum specs requirements for DE and the free giveaway for Stadia was just the ticket I needed. Stadia is actually pretty good. I've been playing on Chrome (haven't bought a Stadia controller yet) and I've been pleasantly surprised. The only real issue with Stadia right now is that there's really not many games out for it.

final fantasy 7 remake: It's like playing a live action movie. The cutscenes are seamless and I cant wait for the pc release. I'm a huge fanboi of final fantasy and the expanding of midgar is excellent so far.

zelda breath of the wild: the game is absolutely amazing on cemu with a rock solid 60 fps at 1440p. I played it to death on my wiiU but never played the dlc so I'm doing that now.

I've spent a lot of time in the last week playing Ghost Recon Breakpoint.

This game feels very familiar and I think I've pinned down why. This is Assassin's Creed Odyssey with guns. It's nailing all the Ubi formulas. Giant map full of question marks. Flying eye to scout and mark enemy positions. Every piece of gear has a power score. Every enemy has a threat level, which matches your power score because everything levels with you. Vehicles you can drive between points. Fast travel. An enemy detection system that can call in reinforcements and requires some time after breaking contact to cool down.

The biggest difference between this and Ghost Recon Wildlands is that there are no AI companions in Breakpoint. So it's really Odyssey. I liked Odyssey, but it felt like it went a bit long, and I know I'm going to run out of gas on Breakpoint. It's easily a 50 hour game. Every now and then, I run into a difficult area, and it makes me want to put the game down, but there's just so many tasks, even multiple "main missions", that I can just fuck off and do something else for a while.

But I don't know if this is fun or just time filling. There's a degree of satisfaction to emptying out an enemy location one person at a time, silently, and without notice. But it loses some appeal after I've done it a couple dozen times. I had the same issues with Odyssey too. This is giving me something to do, but the sprawling open world and "do what you want" nature means the things that normally keep me going, like a story, aren't always there. I'm trying to follow one plot thread at a time, but it doesn't work when I've got to jet all over the island to get to missions, and then I sometimes find a mission too difficult and go do something else. It's giving me a lot of off-ramps and it feels like I'm sticking with it solely because I've already dumped a bunch of hours in.

Partly to learn how to set up GBA games on my modded 3DS, but also because I've been wanting to play some sort of emulator-friendly Pokemon game (all pokemon from that gen, but minimal other changes), I've finally started playing Pokemon Ultra Violet. It adds the roaming legendaries, and tweaks them if you catch a wild pokemon in the beginning rather than take the traditional starters. I decided Pichu was the way to go, to hopefully get a Pikachu and get a Pokemon Yellow kinda playthrough (I was going to use Pokemon Thunder, a yellow hack, but it changed status attacks to do damage). It turns out it's harder than I expected, I would've probably been able to clear Pewter City already.

I've been playing Titanfall 2 on pc for a few weeks now and it has actually ruined all other fps games for me. That game is so much fun (even when you are getting killed every 10 seconds lol) that I couldn't recommend it more to other fellow gamers out there. In-game mechanics are incredible and I get the dopamine rush every time I chain the movements before killing a pilot. The flow of the gameplay is great. I can't say I have played games that had the flow so on point like Titanfall.

Some weapons are more suited for different playstyles than others so I wouldn't go with the "some weapons are OP" route because veteran players are crushing with the "underpowered" guns regularly.

PS - You can get Titanfall2 on Origin for $5 now so go on and try the game because I'm not going back to COD's and similar titles. Also, it takes me 2mins to get into a game on PC even though I've seen some streamers waiting 10mins to get in on Xbox or PS.

Sea of Thieves recently got my interest been playing it the last couple of days really like the game overall but think it’s really lacking some features and probably won’t be playing it for much longer, seems like a lot of wasted potential

Got a bit into Animal Crossing: New Horizons like everyone else my age who has a switch. It's a really lovely game and ifut does the Animal Crossing series justice, though maybe I'm just saying that because it fulfills the impossible millenial dream of home ownership.

I've also been playing a lot of Hollow Knight, and I have to say it's one of the most genuinely challenging and well designed games I've played in years.