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

Death Stranding - Wow, this thing is wild. I don't have a lot to say that hasn't already been said, but it's a weird game that takes "walking simulator" to an extreme level. Not like QWOP, but making walking a game nonetheless. It makes gameplay out of keeping your balance. It makes gameplay out of carrying a load of cargo. It makes gameplay out of finding a level path. And I'm enjoying this, so far. I'm 12 hours in. Howlongtobeat says this is a 40 hour game.

What I find a bit funny is that I'm getting bombarded by emails from people I've helped, and I'm mostly ignoring those. I'd rather just get back out on the road and hauling cargo. I'm paying attention to cutscenes and unique dialogs, but there's a lot of just "wow, you carried that fast, you're the best deliverator" that I'm just skipping over now.

I've been playing Hell Let Loose thanks to the free weekend. It's really fun but also very frustrating. It's my first "realistic" FPS, the only experience i have with the FPS genre is COD and BF back around Bad Company and COD 4 through to BLOPs 1 on console. It took a while to get the "not moving for 30 seconds is camping" out of my system but when i did i had a lot of fun. At the start though i nearly gave up in my first game. I was getting killed "randomly", i couldn't hit a barn door, i couldn't tell which way we supposed to be going or which way the enemy was coming from. Playing medic was the most fun as i could run around like the COD player i was without caring about anything else except getting to the downed person.

Not going to buy the game but i'll keep an eye out for other "realistic" shooters going on sale/free weekends.

I've been playing Ooblets since it released last week. It's kind of this weird mashing of Animal Crossing, Pokemon, and Stardew Valley all with an artstyle somewhat similar to Adventure Time. You collect these little plant/animal guys called Ooblets and have dance battles with them against other Ooblets. When you win a battle against an Ooblet, you can get a seed from it which you can use to plant/grow your own Ooblet of that species. You can then either add them to your dance crew or put them to work on your farm where you can also grow crops that can be used to help craft items, food, and drinks. There's also a relationship aspect where you can collect friendship stickers from the townsfolk by befriending them.

I tried explaining it to my wife and she just said it sounded "like a clusterfuck", which is pretty accurate, but not in a particularly bad way. It's a fun little game and somehow all of the above works really well together. The art style is wonderful, the writing is super playful, and the music is fantastic.

My only real complaint is that it's early access, which means not all of the games content is complete. It also suffers from the same problem that Stardew Valley does where you eventually reach a point where you've seen/done pretty much everything and it's up to you to make your own fun in the game. Because it's early access, you hit that point fairly quickly. It's also a little buggy...some unfinished dialogue, lots of glitches allowing you to access places you're not supposed ot (often entirely by accident), etc.

Because of the bugs and the lack of long-term content, I've decided to set it aside for a bit and see what updates come down the pipeline. I'd still recommend it because it's $20 and the game is so incredibly charming.

I played through Night in the Woods recently. It is a pretty good narrative game about being lost in life. Pretty relatable to myself. It feels like there is like 80% of a really good game there but it wasn't quite fleshed out all the way. The first 4 hours or so are almost perfect. They get across the feeling of drifting pretty well. There are a couple of groups of people in the town that you can just observe having a conversation and their lives change day to day as you go and I really liked it. Makes it feel as if the world is moving on around you.

I've been playing through Disco Elysium now that it's on MacOS and man, it is as good as all the hype made it out to be. At first I thought people were overhyping it a bit as I played the beginning, but the depth of the game and world building really puts it over the top. I'm not huge on point and click adventure games, they feel too directionless most of the time. And DE definitely has some of that, but overall I do feel a good push toward a main narrative that's really fleshed out instead of just clicking and combining every item I've picked up because I have no idea how to advance.

The world building was solid from the start, but once you start drilling down into what the world truly is like by getting history and physics lessons from one of the optional characters (Joyce), it really starts to get holy shit and helps explain the sort of ambient cosmic horror background hum. Very well set up.

Aside from writing and game play, the art is just gorgeous. I love the style from the environment to the skill cards. Very moody. And music is also fantastic. From the background stuff that just plays when you're wandering to the very specific pieces that play say when the MC sings karaoke or when you meet the young musicians and hear what they're putting together.

Cannot recommend it enough. Even if this type of game isn't usually your thing (it's not mine), it's very good.

Destiny 2 - I've been playing the game since 2017 when it came out on PC and I enjoyed myself a lot but the changes they made, the steam migration, the F2P, the high amount of cheaters, the fact they say play the way you want but in the end you're forced to use specific loadouts to complete specific activities and specific bounties to gain exp and increase your season pass level is annoying, so annoying to the point I load in, look at the screen and log off. This whole endless light level increase is not the game I want to play, I won't probably get the next DLC.

I've been trying to learn Dragonball FighterZ. It's my first time really trying to learn a tag-team fighting game, and it's honestly been pretty rough. I forget about assists during my offensive phases all the time, and it's still tough trying to remember all three different characters on the team.

But it's fun! And mercifully, inputs in this game are lenient as heck. With universal combo routes, the characters I haven't really put time into aren't just dead weight, too.

I downloaded Beyond a Steel Sky. I tend to like adventure games, and this one looked like it had decent graphics on top of being a potentially interesting story. I'm only a little ways in, but I'm fairly disappointed so far. There are a number of really bad glitches that nearly made the game unplayable at first. Things like pausing the game and coming back in the middle of a character having a conversation with another character would end up causing your character to just stare at the camera, and not respond to any controls. You'd have to kill the game and restart it to get out of this state.

Several times while playing characters are either facing away from your character while talking to them, or they're meshing with the geometry around them. And I don't mean that like a hand or arm passes through a wall. I mean like they become entirely enveloped in a piece of scenery. AT one point my character was having a conversation with a merry-go-round that had human arms coming out of it. It was pretty hilarious, but also really annoying.

It has the usual problems that adventure games have. Things like "I've talked with everyone, and they now only repeat the things they said before, and I can't see any way to move forward at this point!" Then it turns out there was one thing you didn't notice somewhere that you didn't do, or some clue you missed. I guess I'm a glutton for punishment because I actually enjoy these types of games, even if I'm apparently not very good at them.

Glitches aside, it seems interesting. I'll keep playing for now and see where it goes, but I'm not expecting too much.

Watch Dogs 2

I haven't finished it yet.

I saw a good analogy online: If Watch Dogs 1 is GTA, then Watch Dogs 2 is Saints Row. WD1 had a serious clear central thread of personal revenge, a gruff mostly-slient lone-wolf vigilante protagonist, a shady mysterious hacker organization Dedsec. WD2 follows a lively young protag and a very public Dedsec full of young hipsters wanting to Stick it to the Man(tm) with zainy stunts and graffiti to gain social media traction. I would add that it does not pull it off like Saints Row does, though.

Gameplay wise, it's an improvement over WD1. The spin-the-pipe hacking is now done in the world, where for example you might have to fly a drone around a structure to get it all working, which is pretty cool. Driving feels a bit better, though still not great. There's a lot more options at your disposal (multiple hacking options per target, more hackable things like cars, a drone, a little jumping rc car, no longer needing direct sight to hack cameras, etc.). The upgrades seem a little more realistic in that you need to find and collect certain bits of knowledge in the world to unlock higher tier upgrade options (while still using points to actually gain them) instead of just spending points on whatever. More verticality with raising platforms, forklifts, and cranes available.

The environment is pretty great. Set in SF, they crammed a lot of detail in. There's many recognizable places, it's full of NPCs interacting spontaneously (gang fights, angry lovers smashing up a car, buskers in the parks, etc.). and the hilly, twisty roads of SF makes driving less monotonous. Missions and people to talk to as you drive around.

Beyond the technical aspects is where it falls really flat for me. Dedsec feels really lame compared to the mysterious, powerful WD1 Dedsec. This one is full of young, grating characters spouting memes and idealisms and graphic designs that feels like it was written by an older out-of-touch and few-years-too-late committee. Much of the story world is ripped-from-the-headlines (e.g. tech giant Nudle (google), there's an action start who gets caught up in a cult (Scientology and Tom Cruise), etc.) but without any new commentary or nuance. There's (so far) no real driving story or motivations beyond all of it beyond "The Man = Bad", though i hear it gets a little more focused later.

I'm going to keep playing for the gameplay, but keep rolling my eyes unless the story really comes together later.

FFXIV

I've been playing it off an on since the 1.0 beta way way back. It has a lot to offer for an MMO. I've somehow managed to wrangle my spouse and several of my friends to play it with me and it has been even more fun because of it.

You aren't locked into a 'class' like in other MMOs. You can switch from a tank to a healer to a crafter or to a gatherer all by changing your main 'weapon' (Of course you can't do so in dungeons or other instanced areas). I recommend it for anyone looking to try something new in the MMO scene.

I've been playing The Outer Wilds. I like the idea of it so far and I'm experimenting a lot now that I have more of an idea of what it's all about. I like the aesthetic, I like that it doesn't hold your hand, and I've taken a couple small notes. But I'm still pretty bad at navigating the ship... I don't know if it's the way gravity is tuned or the controls to roll the ship or what but trying to land it can feel very chaotic! I definitely felt a little dizzy when I stood up after playing it yesterday, too.

EDIT: I just shot my spaceship into space without me on it, entirely by accident. This game is great.

I'm switching between Death Stranding and Deadly Premonition 2.

The first I find to be a very meditative experience. You just load your stuff and go. Slowly, methodically, soaking in the atmosphere around you. Now, I wouldn't call a bike slow and methodical, but driving it is still a very... determined action.

Storywise... I don't know, I'm loving the world, loving the theme, but the plot itself is weird. The dialogue feels clunky as do motivations, even though I love MGS series. Some things are deliberately vague and are only hinted at, while others are so heavy handed and are repeated so much and so awkwardly that it almost makes me cringe. The whole "American patriotism" vibe falls completely flat for me and feels very much out of place. Though I am feeling the connectedness that is the theme of the game, I love seeing that other people use my structures and my paths, and delivering lost cargo also feels like I'm genuinely helping someone (a person that lost it, not the in-game NPC that needs it).

I am also very pleased with how it runs on my RTX 2060, DLSS is a godsend. Other than that, from the technical side of things the only issue I found was a weird glitch when movement of the right stick sometimes gets interpreted as some random button press.

As for Deadly Premonition 2, well... The second chapter is much blander than the first one. Side quests are a horrible repetitive grind, and to get to the main quest you need to skip about half a week, and I'm not doing that, I'm doing side quests, so for me it feels like that game just suddenly stopped and left me with a bunch of bullshit to deal with. I hope once I get back to the main story it's gonna get better.

Been playing through the MCC currently working through Halo 2 and just finished Halo CE. Halo CE was kinda a disappointment for me, I remember the game being better than it ended up being. Probably some rose-tinted glasses going on. Overall, the game just felt really super dated and I got frustrated at the combat and driving mostly but the difficulty progression was also just frustrating. The combat is fun when it is working properly, but I kept shooting or throwing grenades at invisible walls.

The enemy difficulty throughout the game got rather terrible, and by the end it was just waves of flood that somehow always had rocket launchers to shoot the ground and kill me. Level design was kinda semi-open world, but without much direction on where to go. So I would fight dozens of enemies to find it was the wrong path, but now I don't have any health or ammo and end up just dying quickly in the next area. Or wander around the map for awhile trying to figure out what the right path was because it isn't very obvious.

Biggest frustration I had was the final level with the driving. I never noticed how terrible the driving actually was till a full level that I had to use the car for. The warthog feels like you are driving on ice, and you have no control over the car in the air. So you have a timed run that I spent half of which on foot flipping the car over again, the final level also has the worst rng style gap ever. You have to jump over a gap and are told to do it at full speed, but I had to look up if I was doing something wrong or missing a button because the car would just instantly nose dive and kill me. Took a couple runs to get good rng to make the car land correctly and finish the level.

The story I loved, but also kinda hated it. I loved the story because I have read all the books based around this trilogy of games multiple times, and could easily place the characters and enemies and plot in how they fit into the larger world. But as a stand alone story without the books, this was terrible. At first it isn't too bad, you kinda just need to know your supposed to be a badass space marine and kill stuff. But near the end of the game you start getting introduced to more forerunner technology and history and it just gets sloppy. The story mentions things that only exist in the books, and you get thrown along this story path with no explanation. It feels like you were supposed to have the Halo CE book open while you played the game and between story mission read the book up to your current point.

Halo 2 I'm still only half-way through. But at the moment it seems to have aged much better than CE. The story seems much better constructed, and doesn't rely so heavily on outside material to understand. The combat and driving is much improved, and I'm enjoying it overall much more. The CGI cutscenes are also just amazing, the quality and detail is just outstanding and makes me wish we could get that Halo movie or tv-show already.

Something I did notice about both Halo CE and Halo 2, playing on normal is a terrible idea. I normally do a normal difficulty play-through the first time, and replay on harder difficulties if it is a game I know I will replay. But for both these games normal just feels way too easy. I know I said I was frustrated with difficulty and enemies in CE, but many encounters were just way too easy and didn't pose any challenge still. I keep having issues were I actually clear all the enemies before Cortana is finished talking or a door is ready to open, so I'm wandering around trying to figure out where I'm meant to be because nothing is changing. Only to realize I need to wait another minute for things to progress. Or a boss battle that I kill the boss in 3 hits before the monologue is truly done, and it just hurts the immersion and feels that anything is actually dangerous.

I've been playing Persona 5. First of all I'm confused if the plot behind the main character is to be taken seriously or not. I don't want to say it specifically because it may count as a spoiler but the reason he goes to Shujin Academy instead of another school seems ridiculous.

I started playing the game on normal difficulty because I never played a Persona game before. But a few hours in I decided to up the difficulty. It made the game annoying at first because when you die you basically go back to your last safe spot, which could have been almost an hour in the past. I hate that in videogames. After that happened twice I learned my lesson and started playing more cautiously. Everything was going alright until I get to the first boss of the game. I had to give up on hard mode because after 10 attempts I got to a stage where the boss, out of the blue, damaged my character for ~120 dmg and it was game over. If that kind of thing is possible it means I have to always have my characters at full health and honestly I just got frustrated with the whole thing. So, once again, I ruin the experience of a beautiful game because I feel like I need to prove myself. Great.

Anyway, I'm now ~13h in and I'm enjoying the game, even though there are some things I don't understand which I presume has to do with Japanese culture. OR the story is dumb, I don't know. I think on hard mode the days go by way too quick so I will see how the game flow on normal mode. The game does feel a bit overwhelming with so many things you can do everyday. But as other people have said in this thread when talking about P4, I guess one has to play this game in a more relaxed manner, like you would do in real life: if you are constantly optimizing everything, it takes a toll on you.

I also have a few nitpicks about the game: I don't like that the map doesn't rotate as your character rotates, I would like for the battle rewards exposition to be faster, the hiding mechanic feels very very clunky.

I've been playing Stardew Valley with my BF and enjoying it quite a bit, but boy oh boy do the days need to be longer. It's ironically a genuine source of stress in an otherwise rather stress-relieving game. I feel that it needs to be a bit easier to improve your base stamina too, without having to resort to lots of salads or buying the upgrade during the big yearly festival.

I've been playing Morrowiiiiiiiiind! It's been great to get back down to the Dixie of Tamriel. Actually been weighing up whether to start referring to friends as "my n'wah", but pretty hesitant to. Also thinking of joining House Redoran, both temples and the Imperial Legion.

If someone produced licensed Elder Scrolls drinks, like greef, mazte, shein, sujamma, flin and Cyrodiilic brandy, I think I'd be up for trying them. Assuming that Bethesda bucked their current trend of gross incompetence.

428 Shibuya Scramble

This game was a lot longer than I was originally expecting it to be. I'm 20 hours in and have just now hit the final act of the game (which is presumably going to take a few hours on its own). While I can't give a final opinion on the game yet because I haven't yet seen its ending(s), I can say at this point that the game is exceptionally good at doing what it sets out to do. The interwoven plotlines are compelling, and it has an overall charm and character to it that's unparalleled. The use of actual actors does a lot to connect you with the characters all while pulling you into its (quite convoluted) narrative.

The story of the game apparently continues in a follow-up anime (spoiler warning!) which I might watch after I finish with the VN. I also learned, after consulting a guide for the game at a point where I got stuck, that it was originally a Wii release. I had no idea!

Persona 4 Golden

This is one of my husband's favorite games (he bought a Vita back in the day just for this game alone). I've been playing it while he's around and he gives me lots of useful pointers explaining the game's mechanics and whatnot.

It's hopelessly addicting but also sort of a nightmare? At first I found myself getting really overwhelmed by everything the game has you juggle, but then I realized I was stressing out simply because I was trying to play the game optimally rather than just letting myself enjoy the experience. Things got a lot better when I stopped trying to min-max everything and just started going with the flow. Despite the games I've named here, it's actually rare that I play a game longer than about 4 hours, and I'm 16 into this one. That sounds like a lot, but apparently I'm looking at a 70+ hour playtime to complete it which feels like a lot? I don't know if I'll make it that far. That has nothing to do with the game itself though, and more my personal stamina and attention span for games.