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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 took a leap of faith and got Persona 4 Golden on Steam. It is one of friend group's favorite games, and while I don't favor jRPGs, this game is fantastic. The presentation is just. so. good. I found myself getting consumed with the game over the weekend, putting in 15+ hours total. There is just something about the battle system that is simple enough to understand while difficult enough to make me want to do the occasional grind. One thing that does bother me is the dialog options that require courage aren't able to be selected in the first round of the game. Apparently these are for NG+.
This game also has that "1 more turn" element that is reminiscent of Civilization games, since the game is broken out into days. Sometimes days are long and busy, and sometimes they are short.
This game is just amazing and I am so glad that I decided to give it a try. It is very rare for me to really enjoy a game this much but here I am enjoying it. I know now that I need to give both Persona 3 and 5 a shot.
Remnant From the Ashes: Not terrible, not great, uninspired story looter shooter. Unnecessarily vague at times making you backtrack for no reason. Has a replayability score of exactly 1. You play through once, reset the world (without losing anything) and play again to get the other set of bosses. This is "random" so you may have to reset a few times if you really want to face them all. Overall meh.
Gunpoint: Intriguing crime noir puzzle platformer. Quick little enjoyable game.
First Strike - Final Hour: It's the same "be the last to survive nuclear war" game you've played a thousand times, just prettier.
Dicey Dungeons: Cute game, simple yet effective artwork, funny enough story, varied enough characters that each is worth 3 play throughs for the different "episodes" and play as one character for all 6 in order to get the full storyline after that it's not worth it as episodes 4-6 are the same for each.
Octopath Traveler: There's two ways to sum this game up in a few words, choose your adventure on which you'd like to read:
Nice, wordsmithy way
This is a fitting homage to the JRPG style for both newcomers and fans.My typical bluntness way
A very predictable JRPG in both style, story, and substance.The foreground/background blurring to create depth when traversing the world is a nice touch, the game isn't bad, but I wouldn't put it in a top 10 list either. The unskippable credits is really annoying and the fact that whichever main character you choose of the 8 you start with cannot be removed from the party until their story is over is as well since I chose the wrong starting character. I've now completed all four "chapters" of two characters while ignoring those of the ones I don't want to play and I'm not sure if there's a collective endgame or if it'll just be done when I'm done with the main characters I'm playing.
I've been playing dicey dungeons. I've found it quite frustrating, the game has a huge amount of potential, the core gameplay loop is great, but it doesn't explore the mechanics properly. I've put the game down for now, I will pick it back up in a year or two when the game is more refined.
When I hit the final boss I start to feel powerful, just on the cusp of getting nice combos going, but then the game just ends. Compare this to binding of Isaac, you play the first few bosses and your character gets linearly better over time, then you find a synergy and suddenly you are exponentially more powerful and crushing the enemies, but the game is getting harder too and suddenly your struggling again (on most runs, sometimes you get lucky and become literally invincible which is fun in its own way so long as it's not too common), this makes the game have a satisfying difficulty curve where you sometimes get to feel powerful and good and sometimes feel tense and weak. Dicey dungeons, in it's current state, only has that linear phase and ends right before you start getting op synergies, I constantly feel just strong enough and I never see an item and realize that it will make my medicore run into a god-tier run. I feel like the dev is very good at balancing the game, but perfectly balanced isn't neccesarily interesting.
Overall I don't regret buying the game, but I think I will regret buying the game so soon.
The Outer Wilds. Loving my time with this game, I'll just link my post in the other thread.
Picked up Hyper Light Drifter in a recent humble bundle and it's been super fun. Fun and fluid combat, great soundtrack, tons of secrets to explore, interesting artstyle, compelling atmosphere, etc. I particularly like the storytelling so far, it's all visual with no real dialogue and introduces you to new concepts in the game almost entirely through exploration and gameplay. The game definitely isn't hand-holding, so it's easy to feel a bit lost at times, but the mechanics are simple enough that most of the time there's enough context to figure out where you need to go. If you like games like Hollow Knight or Ori and the Blind Forest, this is a lot like a topdown version of one of those.
Over the last few months, in rough order of recency:
Hitman 2 (2018): I've had this for well over a year taking up my entire SSD, so I decided to finally finish it and free up that space for something else. And then I did so. And then the DLC went massively on sale on Steam, so I bought those and had to reinstall the whole thing, which was a ginormous pain.
…The game? It's pretty good. If you've played a prior Hitman game (other than Absolution), you'll know whether or not you'll like it—it's more of the same, nothing really new. I prefer the maps from the 2016 entry (it has a lot more stealthy routes; getting the suit-only achievements in 2018 is often obnoxiously difficult or fiddly and excessively timing-based), but I had plenty of fun with it.
Terraria: journey mode is pretty much exactly what I wanted for this game. It neatly excises a lot of the annoying or time-consuming stuff (grinding for gear/supplies, and then doing it again if you fail a boss fight) without completely removing the gameplay like Minecraft's creative mode does. At this point, I've completed most of the content; we'll see if base building is engaging enough to keep my attention.
Minecraft: Minecraft is Minecraft. I have a server I've been running with a few friends since late 2011 that got a resurgence in activity from the quarantine, which is nice.
I played through Little Orpheus. The art direction of the game is quite spectacular. The story is that your character launched a drilling vehicle from Soviet Russia to drill to the center of the Earth and find what was there. Along the way he found many fantastic subterranean worlds (that somehow have lots of natural light?). The various worlds are beautifully done.
The gameplay is mediocre to infuriating. It's similar in play style to Inside or Limbo where you're running to the right towards or away from ...something? Oh, and have various puzzles to solve along the way. Unfortunately, the puzzles are more like tasks, and the game periodically stops responding to inputs at just the wrong moment. For example, at one point I was climbing a rope and needed to jump off before something fell on me. I tap to jump. Nothing. I tap to jump again. Nothing. I sit there furiously tapping on the screen 10-20 times, and I die because it simply stopped responding. And now I have to do whatever task it was all over again. Great. Thanks.
Trackmania (2020)
This released five days ago and I've probably put in 20+ hours already. I simply love it. It's still buggy at the moment, but they're patching it up. I love that there's a free-to-play option because that keeps the multiplayer servers full and healthy, so no matter when I log on there are plenty of people to play with. Also, I love that the game isn't big in the Americas, as that means I can wait until Europe goes to sleep and place way higher since I'm competing with a lot less people. :)
Supraland - Crash DLC
This released two days ago, and I've already put ~10 hours in (as you can tell, I've been busy gaming!). I'm almost finished with it (I think). If you played Supraland this is more of it, which is undoubtedly a good thing. I don't love it as much as the main game, and it's more limited in scope than the main game as well, which was a bit of a disappointment as the dev basically called it a standalone campaign that was essentially Supraland 2. Nevertheless, it's enjoyable. If the original game was a 10, this is a 7 or an 8.
Horizon Chase Turbo
This is a really great modern interpretation of an old school 8- or 16-bit racing game (it reminds me a lot of Rad Racer on the NES, for example). While it's very good at what it does, it's also limited by that, and it gets very samey very quickly. I'd already had my fill of the game back when it released, but there was a special event this week to unlock a Pride skin for one of the cars, and I am absolutely not above being pandered to, so I got the skin and have been rainbow racing my way through the campaign again. I doubt I'll play much more, as once you've played a few tracks, you've essentially seen all that the game has to offer.
Finished two more short games, which many people here might already have if they picked up the legendary racial justice bundle on itch.io.
A Short Hike
This one is already pretty well-known. It's very reminiscent of the exploration parts of Animal Crossing. I enjoyed my time with it and completed it in two sittings. Light, easy, casual fun. Gaming comfort food.
Backspace Bouken
This is a fantastic hidden gem! It's a first-person dungeon crawler (think Ultima Underworld or Legend of Grimrock) as a typing game (think The Typing of the Dead). You navigate maze-like corridors and type to fight enemies along the way. Your health is measured in the number of spaces (literally spacebar presses) you have, and you recover more spaces by stealing them from signs posted around the dungeons. Furthermore, you can save spaces by creating contractions in the dialogue that you type to fight enemies. So, if an enemy says "I will have you arrested!" you can shorten it to "I'll have you arrested!" in order to save a space. It's a really clever way of getting you to actually pay attention to the text of what you're typing, rather than just mindlessly parroting back the sentences as fast as possible.
The concept is fun, the writing is entertaining, and I thoroughly enjoyed my 2+ hours with it to see it through to the end. I will warn you that the first skeleton you fight is actually what triggers the game's difficulty setting, so the better you do with him, the harder the time pressure will be when you're typing for the rest of the game. I didn't realize this and, in my eagerness to type-fight, rushed and posted about 90 WPM on him (which is super fast for me). While my playthrough was alright, the final boss was very difficult. You do have a dodge ability, but even with that I had to attempt the final boss multiple times before I was able to finish.
Another minor complaint is that the game only has manual savepoints and these aren't visible to the player until they happen (and, even worse, aren't triggerable after they happen). Your companion will just pop up letting you know they saved the game, but you as a player have no agency over this, and you can't go back to a previous spot to re-save -- you have to just advance to the next one. I had to wander around for a good 10+ minutes before signing out of the game last night trying to trigger one before I could turn it off. It's not anything awful, but it does seem like a quality-of-life feature that could have been better implemented.
Regardless of a few minor complaints though, I thoroughly enjoyed the game and definitely think it deserves more attention than it's gotten (only 25 reviews on the Steam release so far). Also, native Linux support! That alone deserves praise!
Rock Band 4 - I've spent a lot of time this last week playing RB4. It took some work to get all of my DLC songs loaded into it, ultimately deleting all of my DLC and reinstalling everything, but it worked and it's magnificent. I'm switching between all of the instruments, but I've probably spent the most time on drums. This game is still fun.
Mega Man Legacy Collection 2, Mega Man Zero/ZX Legacy Collection, Castlevania Anniversary Collection - I'm just fucking around here. I've played all of these games, but I've spent far less time in the SNES/PSX Mega Man games than any of the others. I think I might be too old for Mega Man Zero. That game is hard.
These games did make me recognize that I've got a handful of these "old game" collections, between these, the other Mega Man collections, Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection, Sega Mega Drive & Genesis Classics, Samurai Shodown Neogeo Collection, and others. I made a little Steam collection for them. Wild how I've got these things for less than $20 each and I've got a stack of these old carts on a shelf right next to me.
GUN GODZ - Here's something weird. It's a Wolfenstein 3D spin off from Nuclear Throne. It's very basic, but fast and fun, with a bit of a challenge.
edit: whoops one more
Beyond: Two Souls - I've owned this on PS3 for ages, and I finally spun it up. Yep, that's Ellen Page. Yep, that's Willem Dafoe. It's a Quantic Dream game, which means it's a playable movie. It's not particularly interactive, but I did just complete the "training" level, and that was almost a video game so maybe it'll pick up a bit. If it can keep my attention, it'll probably be okay. It's not the story I was expecting though.
Satisfactory is incredible.
I bought this game about two weeks ago, and nearly all of my free time since has gone into it.
Base building: It's a lot of fun figuring out how you want to lay out your factory(ies) and then executing on it. It's similar to Minecraft in that you can spend a bunch of time making something look nice or just spaghetti your shit all over. Destroying things you've made fully refunds the cost of building, so you can tinker as much as you like.
Efficiency: Each of the buildings you create in the game works on input and output parts per minute. It's very rewarding to hook this up correctly and achieve 100% efficiency across each of your buildings.
Depth: There's a lot to the game. The world is large, you're forced to explore for various different ores, and the game requires a lot of building to automate everything. Once you've done that, you can work towards creating more of the end game parts per minute by making larger factories and using alternative recipes that you unlock as you progress. Also, the game's still in early access - more's coming.
I cannot recommend this enough if you like logistics games.
I really enjoyed the "Let's Game It Out" videos where they sort of test the limits of the game:
I Built a 600 Meter Human Cannon That Ends All Existence - Satisfactory
I Produced so Much Nuclear Waste the World Is Ruined Forever - Satisfactory
I can just imagine the setup needed to even get to the point where they start the video.
These were hilarious, thanks for sharing!
I went way back. I've mentioned collecting a few backlit GameBoys from various generations. I'm working through Pokemon Red Emu Version, a hack that makes all 151 Pokemon catchable. It's a mostly vanilla experience, with blue version Pokemon being quite rare.
I forgot how tough the first generation was to start with. I'm 8 hours in and haven't gotten the second badge. Mt. Moon wasn't as hard as I remember it, but I've also cleared it three times recently (once on a Yellow hack, once in UltraVIolet, a Fire Red hack, and again on my GameBoy Color).
American Truck Simulator. I've always liked these games, but am now semi-seriously playing ATS to actually build a company. I've gotten as far as unlocking longer jobs that run 1000 miles, but pay around $55,000. I also got the all the new region DLC in the Steam Summer Sale (I also got all the areas for ETS2, but haven't played them yet), and my just get Colorado and Idaho when they come out.
I actually like how SCS handles their DLC system. You can't expect them to assmeble a whole continent in a game at launch (you could, I guess), but they reasonably price the DLC for people who want it immediately ($10, typically), and go on sale all the time (I haven't paid full price for a single module for ATS or ETS2). Most of their DLC is cosmetics you can overlook, but they do a great job on the regions, at least as far as ATS2 goes.
Got Sekiro in the steam sale - really liking it so far. It's pretty different from Dark Souls. But also pretty similar. It really feels like From Software can't make a bad souls-like game!
watching my BF play hylics 2, its a wild ride lol https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yo8I1-kZ6U