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

Sneaking back in here to talk about a game I'm watching, as I'm not playing anything.

As I mentioned a couple weeks back, I'm making my way through a let's play of Nier: Automata. I'm now at about 29 hours in out of 45, maybe a third into the first New Game+ run. I spent about the first 20 hours seeing potentially interesting tidbits here and there but wondering what the hype really is about this game. It doesn't look especially fun to play, and while I could get on board with the premise, the story seemed vague and barely functional. It's just started to open up to me in the past 5 hours with the second route. I like the storytelling conceit with the different perspectives, but I keep wondering if I'll actually find out what's the point to all of this at the end. The streamer I'm watching is a fan of the series so he's gonna be completionist, but it still feels like I'll have a bunch of unanswered questions.

I should say I came into this pretty much blind, having no knowledge of the franchise or the creator beforehand. Does anyone who's played it have any spoiler-free tips?

I finally finished Outer Wilds. Absolutely loved it, a fairly unique game. It's kind of sad that I won't be able to replay it years later, because of it's nature: it can be finished in ~30 minutes when you know what you're doing and the rest of the 17 hours of playthrough are finding out what you need to do.

I also started Danganronpa. I saw the anime adaptation long time ago, but don't remember much about it. I remember who the main villain was, but it seems to be changed? Maybe? The port seems lacking (it just upscales the image, it clearly supports gamepad but there's no way to show tooltips for it, etc), but I don't mind.

And finally, I'm at the epilogue of Deadly Premonition 2. I'm kind of disappointed so far, but I'll wait to see the final reveal. But I'm glad they keep improving the technical bits, the framerate is much more tolerable now (it's still not a solid 30 fps by any stretch)

Just picked up Doom Eternal in the quakecon sale.

I I just played through Doom a few months ago after buying it at release and getting to frustrated with it. Doom Eternal seems to be a lot more forgiving but still challenging. It's mostly run and gun but they give enough story to keep you interested. It's also mostly linear which I find more enjoyable over the recent trend in open world games.

Ballistic NG - A while ago, I thought Redshiftout was the spiritual successor to WipeOut. I was wrong. Yeah, it was fast and anti grav, but it had too much polish. Too much shine. Ballistic NG is the real successor. The shapes of the vehicles are right. The tracks are right. The weapon selection is right. It'll even do wobbly polygons, if you want that. This is WipeOut with the serial numbers filed off and it's great. I love it.

I haven’t written anything here in a long long time, so there’s loads I missed, but there’s a few I want to mention today:

ARMS – I still love this game and regularly play it (also online with the Casual ARMS community, when I can).

Asphalt 9: Legends – I’m very positively surprised about this free to play racing game. It’s an arcade-like car racer, but pretty good. The money-grabbing is ignorable as well, you can actually enjoy it quite a bit without spending a cent.

Cris Tales – I tried the demo on Switch and while the game sounds like I should love it, something’s not right for me. The time-shifting gameplay mechanic, I love; the story and characters are fine, the art style and music are great. But something bugs me about it, and I can’t be sure yet if the actual release will be for me or not.

Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – finally tamed the last divine beast (stupid Yiga hideout) and with 108 shrines (and about 200 hours) I feel finally confident in tackling the boss monsters, even some Lynels. I’m currently gathering materials to max out my Ancient Armour, and planning to explore Hyrule Castle again.

Ring Fit Adventure – by now my regular workout routine, but also the RPG element are much more pronounced than one would think. I have played worse RPGs before, and the story, while nothing ground-breaking, is engaging. You can read my blog posts about it.

Warlock of the Firetop Mountain (currently at a laughably low price on Switch) – I got this one almost on a whim and it’s a great homage to the follow your adventure books and pen&paper RPG. The story – as should be considering its origin is one of the best books of this genre – is amazing, and the pacing is great. No faffing about here. It’s got permadeath though, albeit with some healing and resurrection options. I managed to finally die with my first character, but am having a tonne of fun and can see this one be at my side for a long long time.

I started Outer Wilds earlier this week, expecting it to be a nice, chill game I put a few hours into every night. Boy, was I wrong. This game consumed me. I haven't been this into a game since my teenage years (I'm well into my 30s now). I pretty much dropped everything else I wanted to do in order to play through this. The whole experience was profound and unique. I would highly, highly recommend the game to anyone else if the premise even slightly interests you. Don't read too much about the game though. Part of what makes the game special is the discovery process, and it's rather easy to spoil this by reading about it on the net.

I did manage to finish Beyond a Steel Sky despite the huge number of bugs I found. I ended up writing to the developer to let them know, though I can't imagine they don't already know. It was mediocre.

I started playing Where Cards Fall. The puzzles are great! The in-between scenes seem depressing and are fairly inscrutable on my phone. I'm old and wear glasses, and on a phone, the cut scenes take up only the middle third of the screen, so it could just be that I can't see what's going on. Anyway, the puzzle are fun, so I mostly ignore the cut scenes.

I started it a couple months ago, and chipped away at it, but I just finished Lenna's Inception. My last comment about it was a glowing review about this cheeky Zelda parody, but it's so much better than that. There are good and bad endings, and I got one of the bad ones, so I opted to figure out how to get a better ending, without giving away the game. For an extra level of challenge, I opted for starting a new town (your seed is the name of the town the game takes place around). I wound up buying it on Steam to give the devs their well-earned money and get cloud saving as well.

Separate paragraph to mention: Start to finish for a bad ending took me a total of like 8-10 hours. If you're going for a perfect end, it'll be longer, and a more concerted effort, I think. I'm working on a "good" run right now, as I know the criteria for it.

The developers of Absolute Drift have a demo for their next game: The Art of Rally, which I played for a bit and am looking forward to. It's using the same engine, so it has a really nice feel to it, but the demo was a bit old by the time I got to it. They claim a release date this year, so hopefully that happens.

Super Mario Land 2: I always have a hard time with platformers. I don't know why. I get good when I play them for a bit, though. I went on a Gameboy buying spree recently, got backlit versions of all of them, and am whittling away at SML2. It's weird and quirky, but a lot of fun.

Wreckfest recently went on sale, and I've had a great deal of fun doing demolition derbies! The multiplayer aspect leaves a lot to be desired (I can't seem to join up with friends, only random lobbies), but I'm sure I'll figure it out.

I went out on a limb this weekend, browsing through my Humble Monthly bundles for unused keys and came across a download only game called Divinoids. This is a game inspired by the old arcade/console game, Rampage. This game is technically un-released and slated for a real release sometime this year. But it is incredibly fun for the 5 hours or so I played over the weekend.

The premise of the game is that you are this mech monster that can be in humanoid or animal form, with the goal of taking over planets through sheer force. There are three character selections, each with their own set of abilities. You begin by starting off in the easiest world, where you are presented with a 2D overview map that responds when you move. You can encounter enemies or cities, with the goal of reducing the planet's resistance so you can destroy it. Replete the resistance completely and you are awarded with an extra heart container and replenished health. The challenging part of this map is there is a barrier that moves from left to right that will prevent you from back tracking if you didn't find a city.

On a planet, you can encounter different enemies and cities, with a priority towards taking cities:

1. Destroy all the buildings in a city while facing off against planes, tanks, and later on in the game, other mechs.
2. Destroy a convoy
3. Destroy a city's shield generator
4. Destroy all enemies
5. Destroy the mech-boss.

Destroying a city will prevent the barrier from progressing temporarily, buying you more time to find and engage with the planet's enemies.

There are different power ups that you can accumulate in the game that will assist you in your battles. The humanoid and animal form are able to hold two active power ups each, while they can also hold three passive power-ups. Active power ups include mobility and damage enhancers, while passive includes mobility, and map powers. You get one free power up on each planet by defeating a number of the planet's enemies. You can also acquire power ups between planets by purchasing them with currency that you earn by defeating enemies. You also earn a currency that is translated between game modes that allows you to unlock more content in the games, whether it is costumes or power ups you can purchase, or starting at a later planet.

I have only managed to get 5 worlds in to the game before succumbing but it seems like each game session lasts 25-30 minutes. For an unreleased game, it provided me a ton of joy! So much that I reached out to the sole developer to tell them how much I enjoy this game. If you are Humble Choice subscriber, you can find this game under the April 2020 bundle.

We Were Here

This is a free, two-person co-op escape room-style adventure. The idea is that the two of you are trapped in a castle in separate locations, and you have to communicate with your partner via voice chat (supported in-game via two-way radios that your characters find) to solve puzzles together, but without being able to see what the other person is seeing.

My husband and I played through it without the voice chat (since we were in the same room), setting up our laptops so we couldn't see each other's screens. Took us about two hours, and was a good at-home escape-room experience. Some of it is clunky and a little rough around the edges, but it's nonetheless enjoyable, and I have a hard time critiquing something I played for free.

The game is the first in a series, so we'll likely play the remaining games at some point in the future.

TrackMania

I know I said I wouldn't spam this every week, but I want to point out that now that the game has been out for over a month, it has a good amount of custom content, so there is so much more to enjoy than just the default season tracks put out by Nadeo. Take a look at this toy car-inspired track, for example. It looks so cool!

Minecraft, actually just vantablack-rp* server. It kinda old game but we has a society on turkish role play server. At the medieval county and baronies, we has interesting stories and deep politic-stretegic wars againts players or puppets controlled by game masters. And we has a in-game and out-game forum for post every single characters life path with images and good stories. I suggest our little server for turkish speaking role players.
(*: http://vantablack-roleplay.com/ pics: https://imgur.com/a/Q56CVZX)

i search for a english roleplay server but i couldnt find good one. If you know, please message me.

I've been playing Minion Masters. It's free to play on Steam. It's a really relaxing game. The 2v2 mode is really fun. Games usually end within 6 minutes. Most of my games end in 2 minutes.

I reached the master rank recently which is right before grandmaster. I got there without paying so the game is nice for free players. Even the best minions can be taken down by common cards if you have the right timing.

The matchmaking queue times are short, usually within 20 seconds.

Overall I'd recommend it. It's a nice game to play once in a while with a friend.

I'm playing Commandos: Behind the Enemy Lines this is a great favorite of mine since it was one if not the first game I've ever played thanks to my grandpa, never finished it but this time I'm advancing real fast so hopefully I get to finish the game once and for all before I get bored (I get bored of stuff very quickly).

Commandos 2 is much more well known (it got an HD remake not so long ago) but honestly I like the original one the best, I feel like it plays much faster and it's simpler, Commandos 2 has a lot of noise and additions that for me made things worse.

Gloomhaven (tabletop)

I finally got the chance to play this, and yes, my first impressions is that it really is that good. A friend of mine bought it years ago, but even he hadn't had a chance to play it yet. We had to do a lot of reading in the rule book, so we didn't get further than the first scenario. The mechanics feel very good, and what little I've seen of the story and world-building seems promising. After getting burnt out on D&D, I enjoyed that this game has no dice at all. Randomness mostly comes from drawing cards from various decks, including the actions you get to perform on your turn. When your actions deck grows low, you have to sacrifice a card from your discard pile to add the rest of your spent cards to the deck, which gives you some control over what cards are in your deck, but means you eventually run out of cards, leaving your character exhausted and unable to continue the scenario.

I'm really looking forward to playing the next scenario.

Into the Breach (Linux)

When this game was released it didn't have a Linux version, so I kind of forgot about it, despite my love for FTL: Faster Than Light. ItB is turn-based, which gives it more of a puzzle-game feel than FTL has. Instead of travelling through the galaxy in a spaceship fighting rebels, I'm travelling through time with robots fighting giant insects. The graphics and music reminds me a lot of FTL, but the gameplay is very different, and overall I don't like this game as much as FTL.

The Last of Us Remastered (PS4)

Another game where I'm late to the party. This game never really appealed to me. From what I've seen of the gameplay there's a lot of stealth elements, which I'm awful at, and a lot of zombies, which I've been burnt out on since around 2009. Now that the sequel has been released though, I've been reminded of the enormous amount of praise the first game got, so I decided to give it a chance.

The opening scene was great, where you get to know the protagonists, and see the events of the zombie outbreak unfold. Then there is a 20-year time skip, before we get to explore a dystopian city ruled by martial law. This scene reminded me a bit of the beginning of Half-Life 2, where we get to explore the dystopian City 17 ruled by martial law.

I'm still early in the game, not even through the tutorial stage yet. So far it hasn't really gripped me, but I'll keep playing until I get to the meat of the game, so I can form a proper opinion. If large parts of the game as fleshed out and polished as the opening sequence, then I can understand all the praise it got.

Motorsport Manager (Linux)

Over the last several years I've fallen out of love with Football Manager. I no longer seem to have the ability to actually lead a football team to success, maybe because the games have become more complex and realistic over the years. The team management itch is still there though, and I think I've finally found the game to scratch it.

In this game you have to build improved parts for your two cars, manage the team of drivers/engineers/pit-crew, expand your HQ, handle sponsorship deals, fine-tune your cars during practice, give instructions to your drivers during races, and handle pit stops. Somehow it's both more hands-on and less overwhelming than Football Manager. I finished my first season of 10 races last night, and I think I've learned most of the basics, while still a long way off mastering the game. In the between-seasons break I lost both my drivers (one I replaced with a better one, but after the other left me for a different team, I had to promote my backup driver because the one I fired refuses to speak to me), spent too much money on the chassis of next season's car, and expanded the factory at my HQ. Next season should be interesting.

Honestly, so many it's hard to keep track. I decided to do both July and August humble choices at the same time and it was a mistake. So I will go over some of the games I played through in approximate order of how much I played them in descending order.

Yuppie Psycho: I loved this one so much. It plays like a slightly nicer revival of the old RPG Maker horror genre. I absolutely loved the setting and the scenario (though the plot admittedly falls apart towards the end). The humour is blended in perfectly and actually provides a subtle boost to the horror elements. I also really loved all of the animated sequences, which are also done in pixel art - they are all very well produced. And best of all, it's fairly short. I actually finished this game with all of the endings.

Verlant Swing: it's extremely simple but very addicting. Basically, you launch these bungee cords to things in the environment in order to swing around, and touching anything makes you instantly lose. There's lots of room for improvement for skilled players and there are quite a lot of levels. It's pretty addictive, and the vaporwave aesthetic works really really well.

Hello Neighbor: for a game so heavily advertised and with so many spinoffs and ripoffs, I expected much more of this game. I don't know if I played enough to "get it", but as things are now I am tempted to say it's just plain bad. You get thrown into the scenario with no hint what to do except that you need to get into a locked room in your neighbor's house. The problem is that the game gives you no indication how to play it. It looks like it's supposed to be a stealth game, but the neighbor is basically omniscient and unavoidable. It has some visual hints on what to do but I can't figure out how to actually do anything. The whole game looks painfully low budget - the stylized graphics look pretty aweful at times, and I even found a few stickers telling me about missing unreal scripts, so I wonder if the game is just plain broken.

WarGroove: I did not have enough time to get into this game, but I love everything I have seen. It's basically a clone of earlier Fire Emblem games. The visuals look excellent and it seems to be incredibly well polished. There is really not a lot more to say.

Earthlock: I knew from the start that I couldn't give this game the love it deserves. I can't tell if I think it's good or bad. It feels like there is a lot of potential in it, but right now it seems a little thin in some etherial way - like it's missing some flourish or seasoning.

Don't Escape: I didn't want to play a mouse driven game to begin with, but this adventure game just kind of rubbed me the wrong way. The pixel art style is irritatingly chunky and there are a bunch of tiny annoyances that really start to add up.