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

Yesterday evening, I finished and promptly uninstalled Need for Speed: Undercover. I was a huge fan of the series as a kid, and never got a chance to play Undercover, but it probably should have just stayed in my head as "the one that got away." It's not very good at all. It's the only open world game I've ever played where there is nothing to do in the open world. It's completely empty. You can't find events, garages, other racers, anything.

Yakuza 0, on the other hand, is not only tons of fun to play, but the story keeps unfolding and drawing me in. Its environments are excellent, too; sometimes I like to just stand in the middle of a crowded Tokyo street and look at the neon, watch people go about their day, listen to the sounds.

EDIT: I just finished Tacoma as well, which I was excited to try because i thought Gone Home was amazing. Fullbright has a talent for making you care about characters you never get a chance to meet, and that talent shines again in Tacoma. I thought the way that it implements entire conversations into voice recordings (if you could call them voice recordings) was really interesting, and it really allows you to get maximum character development out of as little space as possible - fitting, given the space station setting. I think the grounded setting of Gone Home helped resonate with me more strongly, but I'm glad I played Tacoma.

I spent basically the whole weekend playing Factorio. I've played it before, too, but it seems to have advanced way beyond what it was the last time I played it.

It's unique in terms of optimization games in that it seems to me that most of the things that you can do in that game are discoverable through the in-game UI. I have had to look up very few things on the wiki, so as a result instead of looking for guides and tutorials I have been exploring the game on my own; making mistakes and fixing them. It's not the usual way I would approach a game like this but so far it has been a lot of fun!

Anyway after about 16 hours or so of playing it this weekend I had some really strange dreams mixing Factorio with real life!

So a bit of a throwback but I dug out my old N64 and dove into Zelda: Majora's Mask.

I had a couple of thoughts after playing for about 8 hours.

1. I can't believe it's for kids, there is some much to solve in the game. I couldn't figure it out without an online guide.
2. I can't believe how complex and open the world is for that era. There are items and masks that you pick up early on that only come up waaaaaaay later with the only suggestion being a vague hint from your fairy or standing stone. Good on those designers.
3. Considering the few options during NPC interactions they still do a great job at character development.

All in all, blown away at the quality.

I just dusted off Fallout: New Vegas after not touching it for probably 5 years or so. When it first came out, I played it incessantly and knew all of its nooks and crannies. It's really fun to dive back into again after all this time, and my fading memory is keeping much of it fresh. Lots of delightful surprises that I'd forgotten about. It's the first "truly" big open-world game I ever played and it still feels enormous today. I fully expect to sink a ton of hours into it all over again.

That said, it's really showing its age visually. I mean, it never looked great even in its heyday, but it's downright rough to look at now. Lots of low-res, washed-out brown textures spread over sharply angular polygonal landscapes. Human NPCs are stiff and uninteresting. So many objects and building assets just copy-pasted ad nauseum.

A decade after its release, F:NV is still an important must-play game for fans of open-world RPGs. It may be the pinnacle of the Fallout franchise. It's also a reminder of how far the game industry has come in the past 10 years.

The lady and I just finished The Outer Wilds and found it to be an extraordinarily enjoyable and memorable experience. The entire game is a story told in a non-linear fashion with progression paced by discovery and puzzle-solving. The mechanics are simple, you are the latest in a series of astronauts exploring a solar system that mysteriously ‘resets’ every twenty-two minutes. You’ve got a ship, a space suit, a camera drone, and your desire to explore and constantly learn more about the universe. To say much more would be giving away potential spoilers, since nearly any portion of the story can be discovered at any time, depending on where your curiosity takes you.

• Eternal Card Game: Still grinding for gold and cards, still PVPing, still having fun.
• Fantasy Strike: A relative newcomer to the fighting game genre. It has some really neat, innovative features (see http://www.sirlin.net/posts/fantasy-strikes-features ) that I think make it stand out in a good way. Low initial learning curve, and pretty fun. Oh, and they recently went free-to-play, so that removes that barrier to entry.
• Tannenberg: Historical WWI FPS. It's pretty good! You're not gonna get the same frenzied game play as from your usual suspects in the FPS genre, but the game's designed that way on purpose, I suspect. They recently released a new map, so there has been an influx of new players, and servers have been fuller than usual, which is nice.
• Cities: Skylines: Something I turn to from time to time to have a relaxing gaming session (as opposed to something filled with tension, thrills and anxiety). Low stress, low effort.
• Deus Ex: Mankind Divided: I keep coming back to this to advance the main storyline and to try to build my character. It's a little bit too arcadey for my liking, but still okay. I like sneaking games, and this has that (though you can elect to take a more guns-blazing approach if you prefer.)

I mentioned previously that I had been playing Beyond a Steel Sky and was seeing a lot of glitches. It's gotten worse. I'm to the point where I'm now trying to see how many weird issues I can find. The latest is when an NPC wants to get somewhere and I'm blocking them, instead of going around to the left or right as you'd expect and thousands of other games have implemented, they will go over me. They just step right up onto my head and keep on truckin'!

I finally finished up the Talos Principal DLC "Road to Gehenna". The final puzzles were quite tricky. I definitely recommend this to anyone who likes puzzle games.

I also finished up Creaks. It also had some really good puzzles. It's a more casual game, but definitely worth checking out.

I just started playing The Turing Test. It's a puzzle game that reminds me a lot of Portal. So far I like it. The character development and story is pretty interesting and the voice acting is well done. The puzzles really haven't been challenging yet, but I'm not sure if that's because I haven't gotten far enough yet.

It's on sale on Steam for 2.99

I recently got a persona 5 royal on a sale for like 20 bucks. I really enjoyed persona 4 golden 7 years ago. I played some of p5 but I never got to finish it, so now I’m slowly catching up to where I was in the story.
It’s a cool game, I really enjoy the time managing. I also lowered the difficulty to normal which is way more fun for me, because I really got disheartened when I died and I had to replay the same section for an hour multiple times... lesson learned

I also played valorant again, since I took a break because of my tendonitis and deranking so I couldn’t play with my friends anymore..

And now for the best game purchase I have made in a while: Ring fit adventure. I used to be very fit a long time ago, and I was starting to get back in shape last year when personal circumstances kept me from working out as well as the coronavirus keeping me away from my boulder hall.
So I decided to give ring fit a try and I have hit my exercise goal every day this week. I played it 3 times so far and it’s seriously challenging when you up the difficulty. 22 overhead presses in a row with this ring are seriously killing.

Finished up with Halo 2, and this was a much better game than Halo CE. Well, mostly. The combat felt much better and I really liked the health system, driving was so much improved, the maps were smaller and more linear but felt better to play with, and I never really felt like they were making the game harder by throwing more enemies at me. The story for most of the game also felt better, adding the Arbiter and all the story around the Covenant was much needed. The story does end in the most disappointing manner possible, all this build up and it just pulls a cliffhanger ending. I'll get around to Halo 3 soon I figure to see how that holds up. Along with going through all the games available thus far to grab some skulls and terminals and various random achievements.

But before Halo 3 I'm trying out Watch Dogs 2 that I got for free from that Ubisoft E3 Event. Thus far being around 1 hour in, I'm enjoying it a decent amount. Do have some initial issues though. The game seems to have a more momentum based running and walking system, and when you stop after running you keep moving for like an extra step or two. Sure it is more realistic, but it gets annoying whenever I try to be precise but keep taking an extra step I wasn't expecting. The AI of random citizens is way too aggressively reactive, they react to me driving by on the street like I'm running them over. Or trying to jump and dive out of the way when I stopped 10ft away for no reason. The game feels empty as well, I'm exploring a California city and yet I only see a dozen people walking around and a couple cars total. Doesn't seem to be many things to do in the world yet as well, lots of empty buildings and roads with no real reason to stop. I'm hoping that changes once I'm a bit more in the world and new events open up. It is interesting that they put coffee shops and restaurants in that you can stop at, but I can't just kinda stop and do anything in it besides 1 button press to drink coffee/soda and than leave.

Non-gameplay comment about the game, it is just killing my computer at current settings. My 6600k@4.5 and 980ti both on water is being pegged at a near constant 90%+ and I can't keep a steady 60fps. I need to work on the settings a bit more and see if I can get that solid 60fps, should be able to. Am worried that by turning town the settings I will notice the aliasing more, tried messing with them some the other night and immediately noticed that everything was so much worse looking and it was just crazy. Most games at like high settings will leave the game still looking good, but when I put it at high it just didn't look good at all.

Playthroughs of my "big" games, 428 Shibuya Scramble and Persona 4 Golden, are on hold at the moment. Haven't felt the urge to pick them up recently.

Instead, I've spent nearly all of my gaming time on TrackMania. It's great, and now that it's been out for a month there are a lot of fun custom maps, so I can take a break from playing the same seasonal ones on repeat (I've got golds/author medals on 23/25 tracks!). Plus, I got a beautiful skin from a user over at /r/trackmania that I find very aesthetically pleasing.

The game is still on the buggy side though -- surprisingly so for almost a month out from release. There's not anything that makes it unplayable, but it does give the game some rough edges. The big one right now is an update yesterday that introduced a regression that causes some times to post as negative. This completely messes up leaderboards and splits during multiplayer play. I'm assuming they'll have it fixed soon, but it does take much of the fun out of the game when you can't rely on checkpoint times to tell you how you're doing. As soon as the game gives you a negative time, you'll always show up as being slower than your previous run no matter how well you're actually driving.

Despite the bugs though, I still think the game is great. It's not just that the racing itself is fun, it's that each track is also an optimization problem, and you're continually trying to figure out ways to shave time off your records, whether that's through better execution or routing or both. With a lot of the seasonal tracks I've hit my skill limit and have posted times that are approximately the best I can do with my current habits, so the only way to beat them is through taking risks and trying new strategies -- nothing ventured, nothing gained. When I do push myself and I'm on track to beat my personal best time, the rush is simply exhilarating. I know I'm operating at a level better than I ever have before on that given track. This makes the victory of a success feel incredible, but it also makes the defeat of a mistake crushing. The game plays out like a complex intrapersonal drama, and I love every moment of it -- even the defeats.

Dusting off kerbal space program again. As usual, it took me about 2 days to set up all the mods jus the way I like it, but now the planets wait to be explored once again!