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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 picked up Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2019. I really have been enjoying the Warzone game mode, and the multiplayer preview was the most fun I've had with CoD since MW2 back in 2009.
Perhaps I've been out of CoD multiplayer long enough that it's fun again, but I think this game has all the right polish in the right places for me. Also, the sweeping unpopularity of skill-based matchmaking across its usual community and fanbase is actually a big draw for me since I prefer facing off against people around my own skill-level rather than having an easy stomp all the time.
But I haven't actually played it yet with the full game, so that's all moot for now.
Instead I beat the campaign. I've always enjoyed playing CoD campaigns because FPS campaigns are my video game trash. I'll play them all, from masterpieces to garbage, because I enjoy FPS mechanics and am always willing to go through a story with them. Some CoD games are bad, some are good. I'd say this one is good, but in the disappointing side of things.
My main problem is that it's too short. This felt like the shortest CoD campaign I've ever played. I should look at the time a bit more closely but it feels like I breezed through it in 5 hours, and barely got anything out of it except a setup for future titles. It's a shame because, as far as "soft" reboots go, I was really enjoying what this game's story was bringing out. Captain Price is now a more fully fleshed out character rather than whatever weird infallible sort of superhero previous CoD games treated their characters like. Otherwise it's basically all completely new characters (no Soap in this one) that are fairly one or two dimensional, depending on their proximity to whatever Captain Price cares about. It winds up not being so bad since this story aims less for the "super cool spec ops team saves the world yet again!" that MW2 and 3 turned into, and ends up being an even more constrained version of the first CoD4 Modern Warfare. The limited scope really helps keep this feeling like a Hollywood movie one-shot adventure rather than a belaboured bucket of stereotypes and inconsistent, nonsensical world power conflicts.
Quickly, I want to give a shout out to the FMV/cutscenes in this game. They almost feel exactly like a high-quality Hollywood special forces movie (if that's your kind of thing) and the facial animations in them are excellent. I really like who they cast for Captain Price, his expressions and facial features are great to look at. Despite the mediocre writing and story (and barely there plot points), I ended up feeling enamoured by the story by the visual quality of these cutscenes alone.
But it's over and done with so quickly, and so unsatisfyingly. I've made fun of CoD games for always ending on some overdramatic ending sequence but now I miss that. Instead this one just... ended. Anecdote: I decided against finishing the game on Sunday night because I didn't want to stay up too late and it felt like there was going to be a bit more. When I loaded it up the next night to spend an hour or two finishing it, it turns out I was all of five minutes away from the end credits.
So the ending came out of nowhere and I'm still not sure what that ending sequence was supposed to be. It really feels like they ran out of time making this game, which is weird considering this whole meta-narrative structure they're trying to get going by having story-based cutscenes in their Spec Ops (co-op) and Warzone (Battle Royale) modes to set up a world where special forces teams are fighting around the world. In the end, this game's campaign feels like a good, but disappointing setup for some meta nonsense, which ruins it for me. I've never seen something like this go well, and CoD's writing in general is nowhere near up to snuff to give me hope that they can pull it off.
But let's dive into the writing for a bit, because that's always something notable with CoD campaigns. Usually negatively. This won't really be much of an exception, mostly due to the reasons above, but there are a couple of other odd aspects about this campaign that make it stand out from the other CoD games. First of all, this is the first non-Black Ops story since CoD4 that doesn't abuse cheap plot twists or ridiculous character motivations to tug at heartstrings but even that feels wrong since it manifests as no stakes to worry about in the plot. Everything goes off fine and without a hitch. There's no blindside moment that made CoD4's otherwise boilerplate story so compelling, and no character growth or plot arc to follow to keep you invested. The one time they try, it's so predictable and boring with a character you don't really care about that it comes off hollow and I'm almost certain that it will be "not as it seems" by the next title.
I do like one of the new characters they add: Farah. She's the leader of a freedom fighter outfit who are wobbling over the line into terrorism, depending on who is asking. This is a really, really interesting dynamic in a story that's all about operating in the murky grey zone, where right and wrong are often conflated, as Captain Price states plainly at an emotional crux: "Getting dirty so others stay clean." I think it works out net positively here because this game's story isn't approaching the "rah rah 'MERCA!!!! USA! USA!! USA!!!" feeling of previous titles. In fact, I'm pretty sure there isn't any US military at all in this game. It's British SAS, a pseudo-Middle Eastern freedom fighter outfit, and the CIA involved. This winds up being a more character-driven story that is placed firmly in world affairs so it doesn't feel as stupidly overdramatic as something like Ghosts but also a far cry from the ridiculous MW2 and MW3 stories.
But, at the same time, it's not like this game has fully dropped the usual CoD exploitative storypoints. They're more restrained than before but they're still around since it seems that CoD writers just can't help but look towards terrible writing tropes as their way of moving the plot along instead of, you know, having plot or character arcs.
There's copious use of flashbacks to provide necessary background information in between present day storypoints that serve to do nothing but give you a different campaign mission situation between othewise same-y shooting gallery levels, and nothing quite so interesting as what some previous titles have done such as the surprisingly good undercover mission from CoD WW2.
One thing that stood out to me is that this game actively tries to restrain itself from being too shocking while at the same time trying to be shocking. It's a strange contradiction but let me explain: previous CoD games often have overplayed melodrama and bad plot twists to deliver some shocking moments, from player characters getting executed out of nowhere, to characters suddenly being mortally wounded so they could die, to bad guys doing some heinous shit on-screen for the sake of doing heinous shit. One of the more recent games involved you getting your limbs ripped off right in front of you. MW2019 does not do this nearly as much but CoD writers don't really have any other tricks in the book so you still get these moments and sometimes with strange results.
Annoyingly, it feels like they overstuffed all these moments into just a couple of levels so it winds up feeling only less by volume but not that much more restrained. At one point, there's a plot point where all the women and children are rounded up when Russia invades this stand-in for Afghanistan, and then it culminates in a mission where Farah breaks out of prison and then frees a bunch of other imprisoned ladies, and they stage a bit of an armed breakout. This is mostly fine but given the situation, it feels relatively Disneyfied payoff to justify why a missions where you fight alongside a group of women but absolutely no mention of what the roundup of women and children was about beyond this discrete result. There's also a level where you play as a child that just feels like a Coles Notes' version of why a military invasion is bad from the side of the civilians and local populace. It's not exactly groundbreaking thought but at least this has a decent payoff in what little story there is as it explores the line between terrorism and freedom fighters a bit better.
Gameplay-wise, there's not much I can say or add. The graphics are gorgeous and the nightvision is especially more improved. The campaign missions have generally more interesting gameplay situations and far less open-field shooting galleries like the previous ones, but that's also part of what lend to making this game feel especially short for a CoD game.
In the end, I suppose all I can say is that this Call of Duty campaign may be good to play for background info on the next one in this story series.
If you haven't already watched it, I highly recommend this video about the game's campaign: Does Call of Duty Believe in Anything?
Oh! Thanks for this, I really enjoyed his Games, Schools, and Worlds of Violence video but lost track of him.
I had no idea about any of this approach behind the story to the game's campaign but now it seems silly on the writers' parts. I don't understand how they could make a story about international warfare and proxy wars, a story where the US engages with freedom fighters to fight against a Russian general, without any politics. It explains a lot about the final result and how weirdly conflicting it ends up feeling.
His conclusion is on point, this approach of giving all the trust and agency to the individual soldier and saying "You can't possibly understand, so don't question it" is extremely shortsighted and irresponsible. It's fine if they want to have a popcorn spec ops story but their approach of shirking the accountability of who and what they glamorize is asinine. It doesn't end up saying anything in the end.
If anything, I somehow think even less of CoD writers after seeing their intent here, it was fundamentally flawed from the start in a way even a high school civics education would have revealed to them.
For some reason I have had such an itch to play RTS games here lately. This last week, I ended up putting some hours into StarCraft Remastered. Just finished the Terran campaign and about halfway through the Zerg one.
The "limitations" of this game make it feel super fresh to me. Only selecting up to 12 units at a time, weird path finding, not having workers automatically start collecting resources, etc make the game much more challenging but I am enjoying it a lot.
A Short Hike is such a charming game. It's like a hot chocolate on a Sunday morning with a cat purring on your lap. It's conceptually something like a cross between Zelda Breath of the Wild and Celeste, but with an everlasting welcoming feeling. If you ever feel down for any reason, do play this game. It's soothing like a warm blanket.
Yeah, I'm old fashioned, but I've been able to spend hours and hours playing Dwarf Fortress again.
I honestly love getting to know the individual dwarves and giving them nicknames based on the situations they get themselves into. For example, I had a vampire problem for several years before I realized I could launch an inquisition, and then I had my captain of the guard interrogate every dwarf until she found the vampire. After that, she earned the nickname "Buffy." It's just fun getting deep into the little stories like that.
This comment just pretty much sold the game to me, I want to play this so bad right now lol. Do you use any mods or do you recommend the vanilla experience for a first timer?
Right now, I'm just playing with a graphics pack, but for a new player I'd recommend the LNP, which helps configure mods and graphics. I definitely recommend a graphics pack and DFhack.
When I started out, I followed this tutorial series, which goes through setting up the game and most of the things you'd want to do in the game. It's a little bit dated, but 99% of it is still applicable, and the rest is experimentation :). And for inspiration I mainly look to Kruggsmash.
I hope you have a ton of FUN with the game!
*Edit: clarity and elaboration
Oh wow I had completely forgot about Phantasy Star. When I was a kid I only knew one person that had a genesis, my friend's older brother, and looking up this game it reminded me of when we used to watch him play this game for hours. I never actually play it, I wanted to though because it looked so friggin awesome. I might have to pick myself up a mini.
The Phantasy Star series makes a large portion of my top 10 "classic" style RPGs. The art and music on PS IV is so good I really wish they had finished making the CD version just so I could have more of it. I wish they made more of it for the Saturn or Dreamcast (online doesn't count).
I play two (2) computer games: Counter Strike Global Offensive and Minecraft.
I also play Roleplaying Games (the Pen and Paper variety)
My argument for Counter Strike is that its insanely hard and you can only get better through constant practice in a slow arch. You meet ever increasingly better opponents as you rise in the ranks and you're ranked against better and better teams. Every little detail needs to be trained and thought about while you play the higher up you get in the ranks.
I also play it with my brother who lives abroad in the UK, and three other friends, making a five person team that need to train tactics, figure out why we mess up and how we can improve etc. We're all older (40) so we need an edge against these speedy youngsters with great aim, and thats where tactics and communication comes in. It is one of the few actually rewarding games I have ever played and we play two times a week for a couple of matches as kids are tucked in / spouses watch TV / work done / or whatever other adulting needs to happen.
If you want something desperately frustrating, that need absolute attention and focus at all times. Counter Strike is your thing (it also has a Linux port which helps me) its also free to play now.
Minecraft is the opposite. I play it with friends and their kids. Constructing things, building, etc is so rewarding. A slow process in a survival world but insanely nice as you try to create the nicest structures available (which is my thing in Minecraft) I like to listen to some music and just build if I can.
Roleplaying Games ... they made me. For better and for worse. My husband and I talked about respective youth years a while back. At about the very same day (when we where both 17) he and his best friend snuck in to a club in town through a back door aided by a friend, got really high on stolen/bought-kinda pills, drunk and made out with people and crawled home with someone - I on the other hand remember it as the day I managed to roll up a Holy Avenger on the scavenger table in AD&D 3rd ed then walked home through town after gaming night as it was slowly waking up feeling awesome about it.
But I also got a sense of empathy, an ability to adlib and improvise at the drop of a hat. I can spit out ideas faster than I can think them - and know how good I am being not just creative but creative in a group. It was one of the key factors for me drawing almost daily my entire childhood (which basically is my day job now), writing the rest of the time. I have designed systems to make realism available in a fantasy game. I have talked about the issues with systems in comparison with reality and the lack of benefits in them. I learned almost all my most critical skills from them.
That said, I remember when I was younger (in my late 20's) I kinda blamed them for being a late bloomer (finally could get out of "le closet" in my late 20's) and felt kinda miffed at "missing out". Later in life I kinda realized that I didn't. I would be a late bloomer no matter what, and le closet was not a factor of RPG's but... well "society".
Even though I sort of wish at times I had met my husband when we where both in our late teens, he would probably have thought I was the biggest nerd in the world and ignored me and I would have just crushed hard on him and pretended not to as if that ever helped anyone :D . Plus it worked out great for this nerd in the end anyway - I got the cool hot guy, suckers! [Does a little dance waving hand with wedding band on one finger]
Now RPG's is my main way of hanging out with friends, be creative without demands of being productive. Love em.
I "finished" Hollow Knight, after 23 hours, 59 minutes, and 20 seconds. After the ending cutscene, the save file told me that I had completed 66% of the game, which I investigated on the wiki. Apparently, there are five different endings to the game, and there's also an achievement for 112% of the game, so I'll definitely be working towards that. I am having a pretty difficult time racking up essence to get the awoken dream nail though, so it might be awhile.
I also replayed the campaign of Battletech. It's similar to XCOM (or so I've heard; I haven't played it yet) as a turn-based strategy game. It's not that difficult, so it's kind of relaxing to play without having to think too much about what I'm doing. I did slip up and get one of my starter pilots killed though.
I managed to order a copy of Ring Fit Adventure and... I'm doing it. It's actually a really intense workout (and I think there's enough options to adjust it to just about any level of fitness). It generally feels very smartly paced and carefully designed, they explain important details in ways that do not go on your nerves and while there is a proper RPG-ish story mode (which is kinda amazing!) it just stops and breaks the 4th wall wherever necessary, it knows its a fitness game first. I hope this will get me through the rest of the corona lockdown.
Also playing some Animal Crossing. I'm at the point where the credits play (which I did not expect to happen) and I guess it's one of those games that are only just starting there. It's gotta be said that, on paper, this game is the antithesis of what I like to play, structurally similar to F2P grind-games only without the grind and the microtransaction and... that sleazy shittiness these kinds of games usually go for. It's just nice. Like, if the game pretends that I will enjoy it more if I have to wait a day for something to happen, I believe it and don't look for how that's supposed to sell me a time-accelerator crystal for only $4.99. It's a game to talk to with your friends about, discussing the funny little details, just random moments of prettiness and bliss (the museum must be one of the most lovingly crafted spaces in videogame history). I say this, while having nookazon.com open in another tab, so let's see if I can avoid unhealthy levels of obsession.
I've been playing Sea of Thieves with my Discord server. It's been a ton of fun, but it hasn't been without frustration. Since there are no PVE servers, everyone is against each other, and we were trying to do a tall tale (SoT's main story campaign) and after two hours of work, we were sunk and lost our story items by another player character and we weren't going to start it over again, we had lost 2 hours of progress because someone wanted to be a troll. Regardless, the game is so much fun now with so much to do it's insane.
Finished Darksiders, which was pretty great - the story was more engrossing then I anticipated, and I'm looking forward to the second game (whenever I get around to it). I also finally decided to give Transistor a go after owning it for years and it definitely lives up to my expectations (even though I remember hearing around release it wasn't as good as Bastion). The soundtrack is also fantastic and I'll probably see if I can buy it somewhere when I'm done with the game.
I started playing Ori and the Will of the Wisps on Xbox.
It’s a metroidvania style game with nice graphics and satisfying combat, movement, and animations. I’ve been able to get into this more than Hollow Knight, which may just be due to it being more forgiving/easier. There are some weird audio bugs and sometimes it seems to be taxing my Xbox One S to the point of dropped frame rates. Also, some of the graphics look like they are being anti-aliased with depth of field effects at the wrong resolution. Despite the weird hiccups and graphics issues, it’s very well polished and I’m looking forward to getting back to it.
Steam has been recommending this game to me like crazy, it looks fascinating and genuinely beautiful but ultimately it is a genre I have never really delved into.
Would you recommend it to someone that normally plays FPS or survival games?
I don’t know. It’s very different from FPS games. Have you ever played any 2d platformers like Yoshi’s Story or the old Donkey Kong Country games like that? You can probably find some free metroidvania style game to try to see if the genre is your cup of tea.
Yea I grew up on 2d Scrollers. Only one that I own right now is Yoshi's Crafted World and I love it. I just don't play them very often.
In that case I think you’ll enjoy it.
I had a bit of a Victoria 2 relapse last week. Best grand strategy game ever made in my opinion, even with its shortfalls in a number of systems (mostly the mess of nearly incomprehensible kludge that is the world market and the insufferable tedium of the sphere of influence system).
Did a few games as Latin American countries, Argentina, Brazil, and the Federal Republic of Central America, which the game starts just in time to save. Those went pretty well, managed to take Argentina and the FRCA up to the #3 global powers and Brazil up to #2 behind only the British Empire. The first game was pretty standard, but I had some insane luck in the latter two, in the FRCA game Germany and Russia fought to the death and mutually collapsed, securing both my strategic immigrant supply and my #3 positioning. In the Brazil game, the United States lost the civil war and splintered into about ten countries, some of them dictatorships, which made Brazil an absolute magnet for immigrants, getting my population to over 120 million by 1936, more than the combined populations of all of the US successor states, and giving me an industrial base to match.
After that, I played an absolutely batshit crazy game as Texas. I got the United States as an ally and suckered them into a war against Mexico before the historic Mexican-American war to get me the Mexican session instead (they're still colonies and not states in the 1840s, so you can add them as wargoals for full infamy and stay under the cap). Afterwards, I slowly built my population and industrial base using, you guessed it, immigration; I intentionally bankrupted myself to drive militancy to a level where I could force through tons of political reforms, just in time to scoop up most of the refugees from the Irish potato famine.
As Texas, the United States ask you to join around 1850, but if you refuse, relations stay cordial until you become a great power (one of the 8 most powerful nations). At that point, they gain the cultural unification CB, and relations go from cordial to total war. But as long as you invent chemical weapons before they do, you'll be fine.
The AI is honestly terrible at war, both conducting it and deciding when to declare it; it'll march conscripts directly into fully entrenched professional armies, and it bases war declaration on military score. Now your military score is based on two main things, number of professional soldiers, and military funding. But military funding only really effects how many potential soldiers there are to recruit (which itself is not usually the limiting factor), not how effective your military actually is, and I had an anti-war socialist government that limited potential military funding, so in spite of a massive, highly trained professional army, with a highly fortified border, I looked like an easy target in terms of military score.
So basically what that comes to is the US Zapp Brannaganing me every 5 years, until my military score, population, and even economy were bigger than theirs, and Texas stretched from the pacific to the left bank of the Mississippi (I also have the cultural unification CB, which is infamy free, real limiter was warscore), with, I wanna emphasize this here, a 2000 mile Texan-Canadian border. I think I ended up as #3 that game though since Germany and the UK didn't have the decency to collapse, and I was rather preoccupied and didn't build much of a navy anyway. Oh, and this game also saw the Fascist party win an election in the US, and outraged Republican rebels, not generic republicans, I'm talking the actual GOP, rose up and marched on DC to drive out the fascists, preserving democracy. So yeah, who says reality is stranger than fiction?
I'm probably going to stop soon though. Even with HPM, I have played pretty much every country that you don't need to release to play, and even a good few of those. If Victoria 3 ever does happen, my hopes would be semi-automated Sphere mechanics, better combat (Darkest Hour style combat would be great), and a global economy that makes a bit more sense; being able to change RGOs and actually being able to buy things on the global market without being the #1 great power would be practically sufficient on its own. But if it ever does come out (I have my doubts), I'd expect it to be a streamlined map painter, that maybe just starts to approach worthy successor status after 7 years and $200 of DLC.
I am currently 80 hours into my first playthrough of Assassin's Creed Odyssey and I am very pleased with the game.
I have seen a lot of complaints about how large it is and how much it has incorporated an RPG style of gameplay, but I love it for those reasons. I have played the AC series since the first game in 2007 and I have always loved them. The only real issue is the older style, format and strict linear narrative had gotten very stale. With Origins being the franchise's first true dive into full open word I feel like Odyssey does a great job of cementing the shift from linear storytelling to full on Open World RPG (and I love it).
There are some things I miss about the older games and wish were more available in Odyssey, like being able to play full on stealth and being able to hide in crowds. But other than that I think a lot of what I find frustrating can be fixed in the next game with better balancing to the skill tree (and a much bigger skill tree in general).
Most of the complaints I have found about the game were that the world felt to empty and repetitive and I very much so disagree. As I said I am about 80 hours into the game and I would estimate only about 40% done with the main questline. Shoot, I have only explored about half the map at this point. There is so much to do, so many interesting things to see and so many side quests to explore (especially with the DLC adding tons) that I have not once felt bored or felt the need to power through the main questline. I spent about 25 hours alone just in the first two starting regions of the game.
Having played the Elder Scrolls, Fallout and Witcher games in the past I can definitely say that I love this game more than all of them (even W3). It's so satisfyingly large, with so much to do and its so good looking (if you can manage to run it on ultra) that I cannot recommend it enough.
That's an absolutely stunning number of hours! I'm someone who starts to get bored in games, even ones I like, after only a few hours, so I admire anyone that can stick with something for dozens, much less hundreds of hours. What makes Kingmaker still have a pull for you after that much time with it?
This is a fantastic writeup. I installed the game based on it (I had it in my library, but haven't played it yet).
I just finished playing Red Faction Guerilla Re-Mars-tered. I'm not entirely sure where I got itm I think I got it for free for owning the original on Steam, but I may have picked it up in a bundle or somewhere.
It's so much better than the original version, mainly because this version is not aggressively optimized for an early Xbox 360 release. While they haven't entirely gone away, this version severely reduces the severe terrain pop-in and the disappearing rubble.
While I enjoyed the game, it is flawed by nature. The selling point of this game is that all structures are destructable, and that is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it's a really fun mechanic, and the game makes good use of it and makes destruction part of the gameplay and plot. On the other hand, the gameplay is built on cover shooting. Not only is your cover constantly disappearing, the AI opponents are very effective at fighting. If you fly over a large enough collection of them, they can completely annihilate you midair even if you have full health. The thing about this game is that it seems like it should play like a whole lot of other third-person shooters, but it needs you to consider the environment so much more than the others, and because it's changing, the actual gameplay is adapting to it. So in effect, it's a change to the core gameplay. I think that's saying something positive.
On the other hand, the visuals are very uninspired. The faces in particular look pretty bad, and the main character's face specifically looks like something from one or two generations behind. The story is so generic and dull I wonder if a bot wrote it (though thankfully most of it is completely skippable or missable). This game has a few FMV cutscenes which have not been touched from the original, and the original was compressed to an extreme, so they do not look good at all. The music is a bit of a mixed bag; most of it just kind of languished in the background, but it occasionally comes through to the forefront with some brilliantly affective composition.
I'm not sure I would actually recommend this game. If you were a fan of Volition before they turned into the Saints Row factory, it's definitely worth playing. But if you already like cover shooters like Gears of War this will probably feel like a complete mess to you. And since there isn't much more to this game other than the gameplay, I know it will not be palatible for many tastes.
What I thought was most interesting about this game is that even though the basic shooting gameplay is set up as a cover shooter, it's one of the worst things you can do. Similar to a couple of other games like Max Payne 3. Instead, blowing up the environment is the way to go. Eventually I started throwing around grenades and satchel charges like they were candy, or using my hammer to smash a direct path through bases to get at enemies and the gameplay really opened up and became a lot more interesting and fun and really let the unique mechanics and features of this game world come alive.
I'm so disappointed the followup to this game went in a much more linear and constrained direction, playing more to the weakness of Guerilla rather than the strengths. Guerilla was one of the most interesting games of that generation and had, for my money, the single most underrated multiplayer mode of the entire generation.
Oh yeah. After getting the nanoforge and being able to shoot away obstacles at a distance the gameplay really fell into place.
I was about to say that I didn't know there was a sequel, but after looking it up I remembered it. I don't think I ever bought it, and honestly it was almost entirely because of that SyFy Network branding.
I have been playing a lot of The Division 2 on PC via Google Stadia. Fantastic game. Super fun to play with friends online, and the Warlords of New York expansion has a ton of great extra content.
Just bought Red Dead Redemption 2 on Stadia. Looking forward to playing that.
I've been playing puzzle games. Mainly Recursed which is an incredibly difficult game about jumping inside chests and jars that contain other levels. You can also pick them up and jump inside other ones.
Firstly, I ended up getting the RimWorld Royalty DLC and I really enjoy it. I like the quests system and I think the title system is fun, too - right now I'm going all in on being a royalist, starting as a New Tribe (in a custom scenario that's kind of a tribal start spin on "Rich Explorer"). I've been enjoying the new animals as well, especially the donkeys.
Secondly, been doing a ton of Picross S on the Nintendo Switch. I'm getting a real intuition for the regular puzzles so I like trying to solve them as fast as possible - there are a few patterns that I have memorized for sure. I like the Mega Picross variation rules, but I'm not as good at those.
I got Regions Of Ruin for free on Steam the other day. It's a really fun simple game. It's cool talk to all the AIs. You can upgrade the village and once you get the tavern, it starts to feel like a game based on Goblin Slayer. I thought that was really cool.
Still playing Compact Conflict now and then. I'd love to find 15-minute versions of other strategy games.
While I'm waiting for my copy of Fallout 76 to get delivered to me on Steam. I've been continuing to play Persona 3 Fes. And yes, I have been playing this game for months now and not really made much progress at all. Only really 30 hours into the game. And man does this game really show how poor some older games have aged in the gameplay and story telling experience. Hours of grinding in a single dungeon that rewards very little experience while also dealing with a mechanic to stop grinding. But being required to grind to deal with the various bosses. RND in battles due to knockdown and poor AI is incredibly frustrating, and would have led to me quit dozens of times now if not for me using save states on each floor, after dying and loosing an hour of progress. The story is very much a visual novel, with 30min stretches having no actual gameplay and just cutscenes or dialogue with your only input being moving between them.
I kinda end up comparing it to Witcher 1. Another game that had some decent things going for it. But along the way I had to endure some really horrible gameplay mechanics, and frustrating story mechanics. They feel like games I will always say to play in order to see where the series has come from, but not really enjoy my experience with them. And more playing them to say I did it.
I'm a big fan of the Persona games but I didn't finish 3 either. I hung it up after some bad luck resulted in a sudden game over during a basic enemy fight, 5 hours into a dungeon run. Between the ruthless game over situation, not being able to control party members, and it being my first Persona game so I wasn't sure what to really aim for, it wasn't the easiest thing to play through. But the story was very good and I got pretty far in.
The later games improve on everything quite a bit. Persona 4 starts letting you control the party members and it becomes a much better game to play as a result.
But yeah, otherwise the whole deal with the Persona sub-brand is that it's part VN. It's very well written if you allow it to get far enough for the personality and plot to really get going. The twists and turns keep going even very late into the game.
Played some Mass Effect Andromeda last week. It’s quite beautiful and the loading times bearable for an RPG. I’m ceasing all opportunities for romance role play — the closest I’ll get to sex in these pandemic times.
Final Fantasy XIV (or FFXIV), an MMORPG that you have to purchase and then there is a monthly subscription. I've now played the game over a period of 3,5 months. 1,5 months last year, and the last 2 months. Long story-short: it is a mixed bag with fun group content. It seems to be managed by amateurs.
Let's start with the story. The game has probably thousands of quests. Many of those and main story quests. The story starts with the 2.0 version of the game (1.0 was a flop and they shut down the game after a while) and continues up to the latest 5.25 patch. Every integer numbered version is an expansion that you have to purchase separately. Ok so the story of 2.0 up to 2.55 is mostly terrible with a few nice surprises. I am now doing the story of 3.x and although it's better, some of the main problems are still there:
Crafting and gathering is fun, but pointless as far as I can tell. Dungeons and such give you better loot. You can even level up crafting and gathering without actually doing any of it. Another huge blow to immersion. You barely feel like you are part of this virtual economy producing goods that consumers want.
Combat is fun when in groups of other people and mostly boring when playing with NPCs. It is mostly what get's me excited in the game. There is even extremely hard content if you are into that. Unfortunately, they don't explain you shit so after trying twice I just gave up. I don't want to do research before playing am instance. I'm doing enough research on my Master's thesis thank you.
That is all for now but I'm sure I have more to say about this game. It's just not coming up to me right now. My game's subscription run out today and I'm contemplating not renewing. It makes me feel stupid to be contributing to something that I feel should be way better.