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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'm playing Minecraft again, after putting it aside for at least five years. I loaded some old games to see the sights. It reminds me of the trope in some games where you have amnesia and are investigating an abandoned setting, trying to figure out who you are and what you did. It's not quite that bad, since I remember the highlights. But the details are fuzzy, and that makes finding my way around a bit of a challenge.
It's easy to get lost in Minecraft even if it hasn't been years since you played, so I have a habit of leaving torches as waypoints. In one game, I was pretty minimalist about this, making roughly-indicated trails between hideouts that were often on top of mountains, usually with a picture window for looking at the sunset as I go to sleep. (This was back before I learned that you could plop a bed down in the open at sunset, without building any shelter at all, to fast-forward until morning. I try not to do that since it feels like an exploit. Shouldn't you get attacked?)
Getting around in an old Minecraft game is a dream-like experience. On a hunch, I swim along a winding canyon river and see a torch indicating the start of a forest path that I didn't remember until just now. I follow the barely-there forest path and climb some steps over a small rise, leading to a path indicated with occasional contrasting stones that gradually turn into an obvious road, leading down a barren hillside to the diagonal bridge, torches on its twin towers to attract the eyes towards shelter, taking me across a river canyon to a mine entrance in the side of a big snowy mountain by the ocean. Oh, that was here? Now I remember building it, and taking this path so many times before. But I didn't remember that it was in the same game as the railroad.
It took me a while to figure out the railroad even though it's linear and there are only 3 1/2 stations. (On one end, the line just stops and becomes a path.) The stations are quite some distance apart, with bridges and tunnels and right-angle turns to weave around mountains and over canyons. After sleeping at a station, I couldn't remember which way I came. I think what confused me was old memories of building the railroad in the opposite direction. Eventually I remembered that I built the railroad back towards the starting point from a setting that I particularly liked that was far away. (The railroad never quite made it back, despite digging up enormous amounts of iron trying to get there. I don't recommend building a railroad in survival mode.)
In another game called "Hilltop", I started out in the middle of what I vaguely remembered was an enormous desert, having little idea where to go. But I remembered how the compass works, that it points back to the original starting point, so I tried going that way. After a few days of desert travel, sleeping out in the open, I found the post that I had built to indicate the Origin, and a basic hideout that I had built into a nearby hill when I started this game. But how to find the hilltop? I had a map, and remembered making maps, but it seemed a lot greener than the desert area I was in, and I didn't know where it was compared to the Origin. (Maps in Minecraft are less helpful than you might think. You have to already know what you're looking at to make sense of them.)
After sleeping at the hideout, I set off without much of a plan, towards some short hills. After a while, a jungle biome started appearing off to the right, which seemed promising. Should I go that way? I saw torches on a post, indicating that I'd been here. From there I could see a simple bridge, just a single row of cobblestone, between two cliffs. But what was the bridge for? After crossing it and looking around, finding nothing, I had almost given up, when suddenly I remembered: a treehouse. After climbing the vines up a huge jungle tree, it wasn't really a house, just a platform. But there was a pretty good view. And from there, in the distance, I could see the extremely high mountain standing off by itself, reaching above the clouds, where I'd built something before.
I found my way from there with no issues, though I didn't make it early enough to climb the mountain before sunset. The path to the top is easy once you find it, though the gate in the fence that I put up to keep most critters off the top of the mountain. And then I went out for a look, bumping view distance to maximum and waiting for it to render. It's quite the view and compares well with the map. But I remembered why I had abandoned this hilltop residence. There are some mountains in Minecraft that are just too high, where the ground is so far down that even with view distance set to maximum, the horizon is very close. Taller isn't better.
I think other people play Minecraft differently, but for me it's always been about the beautiful generated scenery and its interaction with whatever structures you make. The monsters are there to give you a reason to build defensively, to make it necessary to modify your environment so that it's safe, which is why I always play in survival mode. Keeping safe isn't much of a challenge anymore, but otherwise it seems like it would just be making virtual buildings without a purpose.
I started playing Satisfactory this weekend, it is incredibly addictive. Essentially it is a 3D version of Factorio with a slightly different tech tree, a much more engaging world with tons of variety, and a lot of flexibility, I think I played over 20 hours in the last two days. Definitely worth every penny.
My issue with that game is that, unlike Factorio, you don't have a good view of what's going on. That's obviously why Factorio isn't in 3D, since you can always see entire chunks of your factory.
In Satisfactory you have to build a lookout tower, which is always slightly too short for a good view. And if you can see your factory properly, you can't build while standing on the tower as it's too far away.
Both are automation games, but that's pretty much the only similarity.
I don't disagree with the lack of a good view. There are times were having a better view and being able to build from a tower would drastically improve layout. I think it makes up for it by the amount of exploration and world variety, then again I tend towards exploration over optimization in Factorio as well.
Glad to hear! I tried it back when they had an open alpha weekend and was slightly underwhelmed. It might've been just me trying to play it too much like Factorio though (and automate absolutely everything as soon as possible) which didn't work out very well. I'll need to give it another shot some day
It's actually remarkably tolerant of hand-crafting, which is good because some times you want to make a little secondary base to mine something different, and you don't have all the stuff, but there's some iron right over there, and if you could do a little bit of handcrafting you could get it going... it's a more distributed experience, where exploration and discovery has a higher priority than it does in Factorio. It's not random-gen, and there are secrets spread through the world to reward you for going out and finding them.
Thanks! What put me initially off was manually feeding the biomass generator all the time and automating that turned out to be... rather cumbersome in the alpha. But that was a while ago so I really need to check it out again
The biomass generator is still manually fed, probably to push people to coal power quickly. Once you reach coal the world is pretty much your oyster, though. Especially in the new update, you can run your base for a long, long time on coal if you explore to find more seams.
Now that Magic the Gathering Arena has a Mac client I started playing that.
So the game itself is just Magic, and they've done a good job at making a very faithful recreation of what makes Magic fun. Despite all that, though, it still feels a bit thin. In particular, I honestly don't understand why the client seems so resource hungry and unstable. I think it has crashed on either me or my opponent (leading to a timeout) in about 60% of our games. Conceptually I feel like the gameplay itself should be hard in terms of how to structure things and the order in which to parse arguments and logic. But that part doesn't seem to be what's hogging the RAM. I hope they work on improving this soon.
The Free2Play mechanics are a bit pay-to-win, but that's true of Magic in general and the game is still fun at lower levels (with the exemption of Planeswalkers, which--aside from in War of the Spark--I still maintain are anti-fun and dumb). The packs seem just a tad on the expensive side to me too. Real life M:tG I think of as a social gathering so I'm willing to spend a bit more. If it's just the game with the socializing element removed my willingness to drop a lot of money goes down fast. It's just not as fun when you can't stunt on them fools. Plus you can't sell or trade your collection, meaning there's no value in the cards.
I've got lots of nitpicks about the UI too:
Hovering over cards pops up a large image of the card to read. But that image lays right on top of the board so you can't read the card and check the board state at the same time. I might have preferred it if there was a card viewing area of the screen that was off to the side to read in peace.
There's lots of extraneous animation. Like, does my hand need to be perpetually kind of floating? On the other hand, some of the creature animations are fun. Like a big creature will make stompy noises and shake the screen when you play it. And lots of individual spells or abilities have unique animations that play when they activate.
There are UI elements that aren't very important that take up an undue chunk of the screen. Like my player name and the button to bring up my friends list is fairly large and hovers over my library. I don't see the point. I already know my name, does it need this much real estate? Even if this was meant for streamers, I feel like they can put custom overlays anyway.
Something feels a little bit off about the turn progression, particularly when you're moving into the attack phase. You press a button at the bottom corner of the screen to progress from one phase of your turn to the next or you can hit the space bar to pass priority. (Which, itself, I don't like. I wish they could just put the button in the middle of the screen where your mouse already is to let you resolve effects.) I can't quite put my finger on why this feels a bit clunky, I think it's because the game decides to automatically pass priority if you have nothing left to do. So what ends up happening is I'm never quite building up muscle memory to keep track of when I need to relinquish priority or when the game will do it for me.
Would love to see some sort of indicator on a creature whenever an activated ability can be played. You have to actually click on the creature to bring up the "activate ability" prompt but a little symbol would be nice.
When cards are in your hand you can only see the top half and only the main casting cost. But it would be nice if cards with cycling, delve, morph, alternative casting costs, etc. were somehow represented as well. This might end up making things look cluttered though.
I mentioned performance before, but this application is sloooooow. It's both slow as it runs and also just slow to navigate. It's got lost of little navigation animations that seem to be needlessly slow. Or transitional black screens between menus that take a long time to load. I don't get it. Menus should be zippy and lightweight.
Overall a good game with terrible UI and, what I suspect, is some seriously bad code under the hood.
I played a lot of MTGA on Windows and Wine in beta. The UI was never exactly snappy, but it might be the Mac port. It is a .NET app and it wasn't that bad on integrated AMD graphics under Wine for me. Definitely has some horrendous code under the hood...I had a lot of alt-tab issues no matter my settings.
I think overall they did a pretty good job trying to convey maximal information without being too cluttered. A lot of the wasted space is to add 'the hearthstone factor,' to facilitate making it interesting for stream watchers to enjoy.
At least in beta, their freebie model was a lot less exploitive than Hearthstone ever was. You could get packs at a fairly reasonable rate for free, although the daily quest thing did turn me off a bit and sucked some enjoyment out of it for me. I recall that every once in a while they have like an 'intro starter pack' which provided a lot of cards for the price.
Just mentioning - while it is not multiplayer, I also enjoy Magic The Gathering (1997). This feels a far superior game to MTG Online or any subsequent iteration of the game. MTG 1997 includes every card up to 1997, which is far more cards than is included in any subsequent iteration. The game is about cards, so MTG 1997 is about 1,000x more fun than all subsequent iterations. Another example of why the neweest and shinest is not that great.
The best version of Magic would probably be to just create your own decks in Tabletop Simulator.
This has the advantage of letting you do house rules and even make up your own cards if you want.
I've been playing a good bit of Hardspace: Shipbreaker, and I'm liking it quite well. You spend your time in zero-G breaking down spaceships for parts and sorting them into bins. It seems like a really dumb concept at first, but it's beautifully calming (until you cut an active fuel line) and the music is great. Check out some videos of it if it sounds interesting. I'm not sure works can do justice to why it's nice.
It's in very early access, so there's only two major hull types with some minor variations internally for right now, so if you wanted to wait for a little while for there to be more content it wouldn't be crazy. It's worth the price already, IMO.
For the state of development (early access) it's a pretty polished game already. That intro cutscene was pretty good. Voice-over, cool visuals, neat music.
It seems the core gameplay is in place and any additions from now on will just be comparatively small additions, according to the roadmap.
Yeah. I'd love more ship sizes, more layouts, more variation... maybe some damaged ships with extra dangers from damaged subsystems? But it's a good game right as it is.
I've tried playing one of the large ships in freeplay and uh, those are fairly difficult for a new player. Maybe you get guidance on that if you play career, but in freeplay you have no idea what you're doing. I got the fuel line disabled just fine, then had the coolant line disabled as well and then discovered that the reactor....needs coolant to not blow up. So it did, taking out pretty much everything else. Oops.
Career doesn't give much more guidance, but it does stack the difficulties on you bit by bit. You're never really told that taking out the batteries or fuel is something you should do before messing around with those systems, but you get the chance to mess up while the system is smaller and less totally lethal. You also learn things like the value of removing as much of the outer shell as possible to start with, so that if you have to chop the reactor out in a hurry you don't have as much stuff between it and the barge. But also, new ships are free, and clones are, if not cheap, at least readily available.
l'm mostly considering value vs time, aka "is whatever is left on the ship worth another shift?", considering a shift also means paying the daily fees of $350k - 550k.
So barge stuff, hell yes, processing, maybe & scrap metal probably not unless it's easy to detach in bulk.
I've found that for a large ship I can clear it in 3 days, making roughly 2.5M a day, where day one is taking off the exterior for processing, day 2 is all of the subsystems but cooling/reactor, and day 3 is those and the aluminum inner frame (whatever I didn't cut away to get to the subsystems.) The aluminum isn't super valuable per pound, but there's a lot of it. I've found that the furnace can easily take a 2x3 segment of aluminum frame, so even a large ship's interior can be fed in only 3 segments.
It's incredible. The story is super ambitious, and the way they structured it is one of the more original narrative experiences I can remember. It's not without the odd pacing issues here and there, but the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. There's an attention to detail and a level of craftsmanship in this game that you just don't find in the vast majority of AAA titles, and I think people are taking that for granted.
It really irks me that so many people watched a cut-scene compilation just to validate their opinions on the quality of the story, or watched a biased streamer constantly hate on the game while playing through it. They'll never realize how much of their own agency in forming a genuine opinion on the game has been robbed from them.
Can you play this game without having played the first one? Or is that just a bad idea?
It's heavily story driven. Play the first one first.
The game builds empathy toward the characters by making you share their experiences as the player. So much of the relationship building between Joel and Ellie in the first game happens between cut-scenes as you traverse the levels. Can't recommend playing it enough to get the full experience.
Just grabbed Firewatch in the Steam sale... I haven't gotten far, but I'm such a scaredy cat when it comes to suspense in movies or games. Especially since I'm about to go on a longer camping trip, I may need to hold off playing more! It's such a beautiful game though so far, and the voice acting is top notch.
If it helps: I'm super easily scared in these types of games as well, and I managed Firewatch just fine. It's an ecellent game too!
Three Kingdoms Total War. I'm playing Yuan Shao. I'm part Coalition leader and part food dealer. I control practically everything north of the yellow river with the exception of a few faction commanderies that i am allied with. South of the yellow river i am best friends with Liu Bei and his friends (part of our coalition), i'm also buddies with Cao Cao and Yuan Shu. I'm at peace with Han and Dong Min but Dong's faction is massive and controls nearly everything in the west . I dont know what is south of the Yangze but i assume its one of the Suns controlling nearly everything. My first two full commanderies were food based so i've been rocking 20+ food the entire game and using it as a sweetener and money maker
The campaign is close to being a Paradox game. I spend more time planning and building my coalition than i do warring. My main dislike in the campaign is settlement building. Its very simple, whatever is in the minor province you build the same colour things in the major province. Battles are the games main weak point which is a shame for a TW game. Heroes are just boring, i know you can play Records mode but the game is clearly built around Heroes and not "Bodyguard" units. Have one of the starting Heroes? Great you win all duels unless you are facing another Hero. Don't have a gold Hero? Tough shit, you lose. I do like how units move in 3k, it looks very organic.
The game is also very visually impressive but TW have had that nailed for a while now.
Too many games to count.
I just replaced my graphics card with a brand new RTX 2080 Super and somehow I am still getting crashes. I'm considering selling the computer for scrap and buying one of those crazy expensive prebuilt ones.
So I picked up Minecraft for a short while just to play the RTX demo version. Raytracing is definitely the future, but the most impressive thing was DLSS, and how it managed to upscale from 1080p to 4K and still look so sharp. That being said, I wonder if the reason if works so well is because the aesthetic relies on clean and straight lines. I'm not actually a fan of the game, though, and the changes of late to the interface and push for monitization has become annoying.
I got Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice as part of Humble Choice and I am loving it so far. The atmosphere is so we'll crafted and basically every aspect is a work of art on its own. I really enjoyed the combat, though it was a bit annoying how they just suddenly appear and I have to fight a bunch of them in a row. It ran without a hitch for the first two or three areas and then it started crashing because of computer problems.
The last standout was 2063: Read Only Memories. As a VN, it lives and dies by it's writing, and thankfully it is pretty good so far. As is the art and the voice acting. There are many many references to retro gaming and old Japanese cultural artifacts like Yellow Magic Orchestra, and there is a liberal sprinkling of jokes and humour everywhere.
There is way too little info in your post to provide any advice, but consider asking for help on an appropriate subreddit like /r/buildapc or /r/techsupport. There may be a much cheaper solution than buying a new computer.
Seconding the suggestion to post about this elsewhere, @Akir. Though even just doing so in ~tech or ~comp might be sufficient, since quite a few of us here come from IT backgrounds and have PC building and troubleshooting experience, myself included, so we might be able to help you with just a few more details and some investigating.
You are in for a great ride!
I played P4G on Vita and I actually like the P4 vibe more than P5, even though P5 is probably a better game.
The characters, music and enviroment in P4 is just so good.
I just started Persona 3 FES on PS2, but then I got interrupted by The Last of Us 2.
Right, yes. When I said it was a "very good PC port", this was the one big thing left over. It seems P4G's cutscenes are very strangely encoded and pose problems with HDDs or lower-end PCs when it shouldn't. Hopefully this will be addressed in a potential update but otherwise, as usual, I recommend consulting the PC Gaming Wiki to start with any troubleshooting.
But that aside, enjoy the ride!
I just started playing Persona 4 too and am really digging the presentation. The music is so fun and the cutscenes are great as well. I just finished the first dungeon, trying to speed to get through the third so I don't have to listen to Teddy during battles.
Snakeybus
I can't remember who (@Bauke, maybe?), but someone recommended this a long time ago in one of these threads and it's been on my wishlist ever since. I picked it up in the Steam sale, and it's a delight. Crazy Taxi meets Snake. The best part of the game isn't even getting a high score; it's weaving your long bus chain in and out of the level and seeing all the parts of it moving simultaneously in a wonderful kinetic 3D knot.
TrackMania 2: Lagoon
I'm still waiting for the TrackMania reboot to come out (two days left!), and I'd never got around to buying this TM2 environment (I played it when it was included in Turbo but never bought the standalone). I picked it up in the Steam summer sale to tide me over until the new game and to complete my TM2 collection.
Fan response is more negative than I expected, TBH. I think it's a great environment once you get used to the controls. It's definitely better than Valley. That said, it suffers from what everyone has always said about TM2: nobody's playing it. I was able to find people online once, and every other time I've checked in it's been dead. I'm still enjoying the solo play, but online TM is really where it's at for me. Here's hoping the new one, with its free-to-play option, is able to maintain a playerbase. ALSO EVERYONE HERE SHOULD TRY OUT THE NEW TRACKMANIA IN TWO DAYS. IT'S FREE.
INFERNIUM
So, this is an interesting one. It's very much an auteur-type gaming experience, quite unlike anything else I've played. The game is billed as a "survival horror approach to Pac-Man" which is certainly attention-getting but isn't very satisfying as an explanation. Basically, it's a first-person exploration game in which you harvest light balls while escaping ghostly enemies, but it bears very little resemblance to Pac-Man and much more to Amnesia.
You can only harvest so much light (and there's only so much available in the world), and when you die, the light you were carrying is left where you died, and you're sent to an underworld with a limited number of lives that allow you to return to the overworld where, if you play your cards right, you can recoup the light that you lost. Light is used to restore lives, but you'll also need it to unlock barriers in the overworld. Basically the game is about you exploring, spending resources and gaining powerups to access new areas, all while avoiding deadly creepy things.
If that were the only way to play the game, I would have stopped long ago. I don't enjoy horror games much, especially not ones of the "you can only run"-type. Thankfully, the developer has included an option, much like that of Soma, to deactivate enemies. This makes the game an atmospheric, non-threatening, exploration-based walking simulator.
Playing it like this is far more enjoyable to me. I'm honestly a bit blown away by how much there is to the game. I thought it was going to be a quick 1-2 hours to finish, but I'm 3 hours in and I feel like I'm still just beginning. Plus, the environmental design is very compelling, with unusual geometry and aesthetics. In places I was reminded of The Witness, only with a much more gritty and surreal spin. I generally have a good sense of direction but I've gotten legitimately lost multiple times, which has been enjoyable rather than frustrating. The levels are labyrinthine and overwhelming by design.
I can't give a blanket recommendation for the game as it's definitely not for everyone. It's very slow-paced, and is deliberately antagonistic to the player with its design (the developer actually prefers players play the game without knowing what's going on so that they can learn the game's systems as they go, so I've already said way too much with my post here). On the other hand, if you want an unusual experience with compelling environmental design and you've got a good amount of patience, consider this a hidden gem.
Snakeybus looks amazing! Are you playing multiplayer or solo?
I've been playing a bit Trackmania 2: Stadium lately. I think I like it more than Valley (the only other environment I've played, which I also liked). It's actually more lively in multiplayer than I expected, with lots of populated servers. I didn't know the upcoming game was free, so I'll definitely check it out. :-)
I've just been playing Snakeybus single-player, but I might try out multiplayer now that I've got the basics under my belt.
As for TrackMania, Stadium and Canyon are my two favorite environments, and the new one is basically a Stadium remake (again). In true TrackMania fashion, the new release is a bit confusing. Essentially, it's free with limited features and you can pay up for higher tiers. This is what they did back with TrackMania Nations and that was their big breakthrough, so I'm hoping they see similar success with this release. I'm just happy it's a pay-once kind of model and not filled with microtransactions, which I was worried about.
Also, it releases in less than half an hour! Not that I'm anxiously awaiting it or anything... :)
Been a while since I commented on one of these, so:
Raise of the Tomb Raider and Shadow of the Tomb Raider: I really enjoyed the 2013 Tomb Raider many years ago, but never got to play the successor games. I enjoyed both, however the crafting system and skill points in Shadow annoyed the crap out of me and were so much better in Raise. I also had a number of permormance issues with Shadow. Other than that I liked both, but was sad to see that pretty much all of my annoyances with the first were still present in the others.
Oxygen Not Included: Had it on my wishlist for a while, so I picked it up during the Steam sale. I had hoped it would be the kind of game to be on GOG as well, but it sadly wasn't. Started a shortish session, and it's been super fun! I'm pretty overwhelmed as of now and got lost a bit, but that seems fine. I also just realized that I've been enjoying some of their other games as well, didn't realize that it was done by the same folk as Mark of the Ninja and Don't Starve!
I've been exploring itch.io's Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality.
So far I've played through A Short Hike, which is adorable, and which I will play again.
And now I'm playing through A Night In The Woods, which is also adorable, but (hinting at being) dark. There's an impressive amount of variety in game play with the minigames including rhythm "play the bass guitar" game and Demontower, the game-within-a-game that I found myself getting super distracted by after I discovered it. "I gotta beat this level!"
It's kind of interesting to engage with in that regard, because I've definitely found myself just wanting to play bass instead of exploring the story. It's linear, but leaves a lot of room for how you want to play it.
A Short Hike is phenomenal! Love that game. Such a nice atmosphere and relaxing game.
If you liked A Short Hike and NITW, you might want to check out Celeste, which is also in the bundle. It’s similarly gorgeous with a truly fantastic soundtrack, and is also an old-school-inspired platformer with a story to tell. Definitely a higher-pressure, less chill vibe than those other games but I still recommend it. It has really good difficulty/accessibility options - if you don’t like difficult platforming, you can make it easier for yourself at any time.
Yeah, that bundle was a steal. A short hike is really awesome. Other games I loved playing so far are Quadrilateral Cowboy, Serre, A snake's tale, A New Life, Overland Celeste (already had it from Epic)
I’ve been replaying The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker (the original, for GameCube) and loving every minute. It’s a serious contender for “my favorite Zelda game,” and even though I’ve already beaten it 3 or 4 times over the years, I always have a blast whenever I revisit it.
This time, I’m doing a 100% run, which I’ve never done before. I was inspired by watching a 100% run which used a randomizer to shuffle the items in the game around. It changed the game into a sort of item-dependency puzzle, since most items/dungeons can only be obtained if you already have a different item. So planning your route becomes a much bigger part of the game than it would be normally. I’m just playing the normal “vanilla” game right now but maybe someday I’ll try out a randomized version.
ahhh I wish my parents hadn't thrown away my Gamecube... I only got 50% through the game before life got in the way. You playing on Gamecube or an emulator? If the latter, any recommendations?
I’m playing it on a modded Wii. Ripped the game off my original disc and now running it off a harddrive. My original Wii broke a few years ago but I was able to get a refurb from GameStop for $50. Looks like it’s gone up in price since then. It was a super popular console so you can probably find a cheap one somewhere.
The only emulator for GameCube that I know of is Dolphin, and from what I can tell, it’s quite good. I know they have a wiki with game-specific settings recommendations and such. I don’t have any other tips besides that. Not much experience with it. I used it to play Smash Bros in college and it worked okay, and that was off my 2012 laptop. I’m sure any half decent desktop PC would run it just fine these days.
I've been playing Detroit:become human now that it's on steam. It looks really nice, especially for a 2 year old game.
It's basically one big quick time cutscene, but the QuickTime events mostly feel related to the action the character is doing and some of the later bits are actually pretty hard. It has a good mix of how quickly you have to respond to actions, from actions that test your reaction times to 10s countdowns, to some multi-minute scenarios and a fair number of actions with no time constraints. It feels like they let the narrative dictate the mechanics rather than the other way round which I appreciate.
The story feels deep and it looks like there are a lot of branches (although I'm still on my first playthrough, so I'm not sure how substantial of a difference they make).
I think this is the best way forward for interactive media rather than stuff like what Netflix is trying with the black mirror and Kimmy experiments. I am really enjoying it and have been playing it alongside my SO. Quite relavent to today's political climate too.
I tend to skip around a fair bit, but some of the games I'm currently playing include:
I was getting back into Prismata a bit, as it's one of the few multiplayer games that I enjoy playing-to-win. Sadly it's a game that's largely dead (rarely more than 20 concurrent) and those that are still playing have many thousands of hours of experience and odds of winning as a newcomer are very low. Still, if you're a play-to-win person, the bots are very good, and the game is quite worth checking out given that it's free on steam (skip the single-player, it's kinda bleh). There isn't likely going to be a game quite like it in a long time. It's kind of like a RTS themed chess match.
So instead I'm mostly playing Outer Wilds since it came to Steam. Solid game, my wife describes as 'Myst in space'.
Been playing the witcher 3. The game is really good. My only problem that isn't really a problem is that there's just SO MUCH CONTENT. It really feels like I could be playing this game for a long time.
It took me 1.5 years of on and off playing to get through it all. Don't rush yourself! The game's at its best if you can turn off the minimap and simply explore on your own.
I keep trying to play the game, but as soon as I finish the tutorial and open the map I just get decision paralysis and drop it.
It actually took me like 3 or 4 attempts to get past the Tutorial. Once you're past it though, the game REALLY opens up. Choice paralysis never goes away though lol.
Champions of Regnum. It is in the genre of mmorpgs specialising in RvR open PvP. For me, it seems to be an emerging genre, with only 2-3 others in this click-to-target high-fantasy category. I like it because mmos like this are casual, fun and entertaining. I can drop in anytime i like, and the war may be happening, or it may not. In which case, I go out hunting and invariably find localised battles at bridges and forts or just hunt among the trees. I can also just chill at a fort or central save and listen to the birdsong or snowfall, and watch the war unfold on the map. It's a very relaxing game for me.
Been poking around with Observation on Xbox Game Pass, it's similar to a point and click game in that until you are a space station AI, and until you get a probe online, you interaction is limited to viewing security footage, diagnostics, and telling your handler what's going on. Things get weird as things are want to do in space, and suddenly you're making your way though a sci-fi horror adventure game as an AI unit, which is something that always stuck me as a curious idea, interacting with NPCs as a robot, since from a character's perspective, players are kind of robotic with limited interactions, always running everywhere full tilt, superhuman abilities, so to see a game make it explicit is kind of interesting.
Prey
I tried to play this back when I had my old PC and it was struggling so I installed it again. It's overall a really enjoyable single-player experience, very similar to Bioshock or System Shock 2. I love games that are set in a single, immersive map such as Bioshock or Half Life 1 and this delivers.
The story doesn't seem too interesting though it's interesting enough to keep me hooked, the difficulty is alright (I'm playing in Normal) more learning towards the "challenging" side since there's little ammo/materials and some enemies are tough.
I guess my biggest complains are that weapon and enemy variety is very low; I haven't played for THAT long but I've just seen maybe 2 different types of enemies and used 3 different weapons including the starting wrench, this would get boring very quickly if it weren't for the scenarios.
The game has a sort of metroidvania-feeling where you can improve your abilities such as "hacking" which lets you get into more places that were before locked; sometimes you have to find a separate path or way to get into if you don't have the right ability, that's fun I guess.
Need for Speed: Underground 2
I'm not huge into racing games but I wanted to play something for a change, since I've a very bad internet connection atm I didn't want to have to download a 60Gb racing game, and given that I really enjoyed Need for Speed Most Wanted (2005) I decided to try Underground 2 since it was super popular back in the day.
I'm actually really happy with the game, it took some parching and setup specially with the PS4 controller, but overall it plays really nicely and I could get it to run in 1080p; the game is really fun and it's not frustrating at all so it makes for a good time sink.
If I had one complaint it would be that the soundtrack seems to be a bit lacking in variety, I'm under the impression that it's just like 15 songs in loop, but it might be that I unlock more later? I don't know.
Been playing Sleeping Dogs (Definitive Edition) on PC. I played the game years ago on the Xbox 360 but wanted to try it again.
Already completed the main story, rushed through it quite quickly as I was really enjoying it. Much nicer playing the game at 60fps now. Thought the combat was fun though it took me some time to get used to it. Definitely going to try and work my way through the side quests as well. I think that there are some seperate 'mini campaigns' in the definitive edition too.
I started playing Valorant and I don't really like it. it's fine I guess but I feel they should change the name to "Hide Around Corners".
In this quarantine days,I started to play Minecraft and Terraria.
Terraria is a 2D game and has got very much details/items/bosses.
You can hear some toxic people saying Terraria ''Copy of Minecraft'' but it isn't.In short time ago Terraria released game's last update; Journey's End.
This update gave game more detail,items(1000+ more items),bosses and etc.And this means we are going to play more Terraria. (For players who playing or gonna play)
Minecraft; There is another update ''Nether update 1.16'' is released.That means more fun and more play.
You know, Minecraft everytime can playable. It has nostalgia too.
Terraria seemed much more like a Minecraft clone when it was first available, but it's really found its own voice over the years.
And then Starbound came out, and people complained it was a Terraria clone.
So it goes.
thats right too, i just said it for The people who still saying Terraria is Minecraft clone.
A few of my friends and I picked up Elite Dangerous on the Steam sale since it's only $15 with all DLC (and apparently the Horizons DLC is well worth it), and we're really enjoying it so far.
It's definitely a weird game in terms of progression, but the amount of freedom you have to figure your own thing out and have fun however you want to is great. The fact that we're exploring the Milky Way is also super cool for us since we're a bunch of space nerds.
As usual I am playing World of Warcraft off and on.
There is so much about WoW that I enjoy but it has an odd effect on me. I find that I want to play WoW but when I load up the game there is nothing in game that I want to do. I like adventures, story, gearing up, becoming proficient in my class, PvP. All the things that WoW generally has a finite amount of.
The end game of WoW is generally raiding and mythic+ dungeons. Both of which delve into a multiplayer aspect of the game that I find very off-putting.
For raiding: I dislike the idea that my time is seemingly wasted in an effort to potentially obtain loot. Additionally, the personalities of raiding groups is incredibly hit or miss with many more misses than hits. Playing with other players is often insufferable in this sphere. Then there is the possibility of continued failure towards an objective with only very minimal rewards. I find that I never do raids except for the easiest and most accessible way "LFR" (looking for raid). This is often pointed to as one of the prime examples of the ways that WoW has fallen off the deep-end of gameplay and community. I have never once found LFR as anything except what it was made for: a way for players to work through raiding content and story without being too difficult.
Mythic+ dungeons touch on one of my most hated game developers tools: timed content. I hate time limits. Otherwise Mythic+ dungeons seem liked a form of content that I would otherwise enjoy as I played a lot of Diablo and they have a similar approach.
The next expansion for WoW will have a piece of content called Torghast which is similar to Mythic+ but without the time limits and I'm very much looking forward to it.
Also, I can never settle on a single class to play. I wish there was a way for WoW to incorporate the FFXIV method of having a single character and the ability to switch classes. It won't happen, but I'd love it if it did.