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

I blazed through The Outer Wilds last week (not to be confused with Outer Worlds).

Absolutely loved it. True exploration and wonder abounds, great atmospheric story telling, decent puzzles. I highly recommend it to just about anyone.

I would not look up too much about it in advance.

My SO and I got the platinum edition of CIV 6 for pretty cheap so we played a lot of that this weekend. I love the CIV franchise and am enjoying 6 so far. There are certainly things to be desired. Namely the fucking barbarians. They're insane, why the fuck are there barbarians in the modern Era, why the hell are they so fucking advanced!? Ive seen barbarians with like a metal ship, what the hell is this shit? I think in past games, at some point they would disappear. I think they should just like rename the barbarians depending on the Era (outlaws, gangs, etc) instead of calling them barbarians throughout if they're going to be there the whole time. Also why do they get to be so advanced? They're not super duper common but I'm just like what the hell...

CIV 6 can be mad hard for me because I'm partially dumb and bad at strategic stuff. When I play by myself I usually just strong arm everyone and destroy all in my path but I also play on an easier setting. My SO and I are on our second game and while fun, I don't understand how The AI gets so far so fast? During our first play through, Gilgamesh had like 6 cities compared to my 3 on top of absolutely pummeling through the tech tee!? Idk, I don't get it. I need a good source on how to play more in depth so I feel less stupid. I don't necessarily play to win so maybe that's my problem.

Either way, I still love the game and have a lot of fun playing it even if I get my ass handed to me 90% of the time.

I'm playing Polytopia, a turn based strategy game. It launched on Steam recently, was already available on mobile. Already have 40+ hours on Steam lol.

Really love the game. I haven't played the singleplayer modes that much, it is good but the real fun is in multiplayer mode with upto 15 players in a match. There are variety of map sizes to chose from. Another feature I like is mirror matches which allows all players to chose same tribe in a match. It's fun seeing who can play a tribe better than others. Twelve tribes come with game, and we can buy DLC for additional three. There are plans for more tribes in future but who knows. The community is very awesome, mainly concentrated in Discord but most platforms have official groups. Finding multiplayer players is no problem. I've made some cool friends in the community.

It's free on mobile, worth checking out.

Apparently im the guy who only plays one game now. Slay the Spire.. I think im going to have to uninstall it because of how addicted i am. It's not that i am spending a lot of time playing, it's that whenever i hit a dull moment in a book or get bored while browsing, i play it for 5-10 minutes until my boredom goes away or i get frustrated and then go back to whatever i was doing. It has become a crutch.

I'm on Ascension 20/18/10/2. I have mostly been trying to get Silent to 20. I nearly beat 18 yesterday but i got silly when i bought a tonne of cards before the last boss. They would have worked well with my deck but i couldnt get to my defence cards because of how much power cards i had to play.

Halo: MCC on PC with the Ecksborks Game Pass. Wow, I'd forgotten how much bullshit Halo: Combat Evolved had in it. Thankfully, Halo 2 has aged considerably better. Let me list some sins:

• Bland, repetitive and deadly corridors - with a lot of backtracking, and directional arrows that become misleading. This game has some really, really ugly walls on the original graphics setting, and that's not something I normally notice.
• Enemies placed in front of you and behind you in the corridors to box you in so you can't just run ahead to skip them.
• Insta-kill rocket Flood, sometimes also placed in the corridors.
• Boring story full of plot contrivances and impenetrably dull lore. I cannot imagine filling a single wiki page with this crap without being paid overtime rates for the resulting mental fatigue.
• Soapy warthog handling.
• Final mission that forces you to deal with the soapy warthog handling (and exploding enemies, and exploding walls and floors, both of which can flip your warthog and wipe your shields).
• Jumping that does not lend itself well to jumping puzzles.
• Final mission that forces you to use the jumping (and grenade) mechanics.
• Bugged grenade mechanics (turns out that's why it was impossible - the game wasn't recognizing any of the grenade explosions the first time around, so I wasted all of those grenades over and over for nothing. Go back down to the ground floor and run down the corridor to the armoury for more grenades? How about instead, I give you the finger and you give me a checkpoint restart?
• Oh, that reminds me: painfully infrequent checkpoints at times, particularly on the final mission. Also, you lose if you take the left path to the top floor and you win if you take the right path. The only way this is communicated to you is with an inexplicable, comical wall of Flood.
• I just noticed that on the penultimate mission, the corridor you get teleported into is right beside your objective. Hey, Cortana, mind hacking into the Covenant battle net like you do and unlocking that door? No? ...Cortana?

On the plus side, the multiple grenade cook-offs and Mr Cheef's legs subsequently turning into linguine are almost always highly amusing.

Like I said, Halo 2 thankfully improves on all this in almost every area. The Jackal snipers insta-killed me a couple of times, but only on low health. They didn't even really annoy me as much. Only the insta-kill Flood shotgunners did that. And the single (so far) rocket Flood that I couldn't see before he blew up my tank, due to the camera. The Arbiter's mission in which you first encounter the Flood driving vehicles is pretty savage. Playing on Heroic, so far the casualty rate of both Arby and Mr Cheef's squadmates is about 95%.

Death Stranding - I finished it. This game has three parts; there's the first 10 hours which is introduction. Then there's the last 10 hours, which is a series of boss fights and cutscenes. And then everything in the middle is the game. The game is delivering packages, and I genuinely enjoyed that. It was a lot of fun to find and build new routes between destinations. The last 10 hours were not so much fun. The boss fights are just slogs, and the cutscenes are mostly anime nonsense and metaphors explained over and over again. I still recommend this game because the delivery parts are more fun than they should be.

After I spend a lot of time with a game and finish it, I get a bit of a depression. So I usually turn to something completely mindless to fill time.

Phantasy Star Online 2 - This is mindless. I have no prior PSO history beyond just firing up the original on Dreamcast and playing it solo/offline for a bit. PSO2 feels like an old MMO. It's all menus everywhere. I'm doing way too much inventory management. I've got a ton of items from my Xbox Game Pass perks that I have no idea what to do with. I consumed a lot of XP boosts so now I'm a 30ish level character but haven't much actual time playing it. I'm starting learn the game a bit and what to do.

What's really weird to me is that the "story missions" aren't really missions. It's just a bunch of 1-2 minute in-game cutscenes. Every once in a while, it's a boss fight. I just figured out that these are gated by routine non-story missions, so I'm going to go on a "Tundra Expedition" mission (which is mostly open map wandering with a boss fight at the end) and that's going to unlock the next block of story missions/cutscenes. The story isn't really doing much for me, but I am only in episode 1 of 4.

Phantasy Star Online 2.

I have never seen a game bend over so far backward to please a player before. Everything - literally everything - is a skinner box. There are quests that turn every aspect of gameplay into a tutorial and gives you rewards at the end. You get rewards just for changing your equipment or learning a skill.

So I chose to be a Summoner and it turns out that that class is just completely broken levels of overpowered. You attack with Pets and they level up by giving them eggs, which have very high drop rates. At one point my pet's level was 2.5x more than my characters. The default one, Wanda, can instantly warp to any in-range enemy (and it's a pretty big range) and instantly start wailing on them. And because it can float, it can sometimes attack above the area that the enemy can attack. So basically battles are just me sticking around in the background waving a stick that's telling my OP pet to destroy everything. They don't die either; just swap them out for another pet for a little bit and they'll be up and running in a few short minutes. When it came time for raid missions where I was teamed up with 11 other random people, I thought that they were carrying me because the screen gets so busy it's hard to even track where your pet is hitting, but once I got a different type of raid - one that actually tracks individual contributions - it turns out that I was the one carrying everyone else.

The good thing is that Summoners can still use direct weapons, so you can switch things up when you get tired of winning all the time. And of course you do have the option to switch classes.

This game gives you Diablo levels of loot. You will constantly be showered in gifts, which is somewhat of a pain since you have limited space in your inventory. To balance this off, you can send anything to a larger storage area any time, but you will still not be able to pick up anything until you empty some space in your inventory. And that's where the game is kind of genius. The game is completely free to play, and I have not seen any sort of need to pay anything; the extras really are extra. But this game gets you into such a collecting mood that it makes those extras very tempting.

So yeah, it's incredibly addicting. It basically made me abandon every other game. Now I'm even more upset that Sega took so long to bring it to the US.

There are some bad things, too. It has some weird bug that causes it to freeze and crash on my computer. Also it uses an anti-cheating program that makes it impossible to run in Linux. It also doesn't support any nicer graphics tricks like antialiasing - I'm not even sure if it can be run at anything over 1080p. And even more unusual is the fact that the story seems to progress completely outside of gameplay - it's just a bunch of cutscenes that play independent of any other mission or action I take. You go to the quest counter and start a story mission, which just does the cutscene and typically just ends right after that. It even tells you what characters will be featured, but if you go out and talk to the NPCs directly it will not trigger anything.

I've been playing A Plague Tale: Innocence.

I thought I'd love it, because I should; it's linear, it has a minimal UI, some stealth & combat elements, beautiful setting and production value, super dark, but...

...I don't know what it is, it's just not great to me. The puzzles are too easy and I'm a little over halfway through the game. The story is fine, but the characters are a little too... one-dimensional? I'm not even sure if that's the problem. But like, there's a LOT of death and destruction all around, and the little brother (no spoilers) is just kinda like, whiny through the whole thing, but not that affected by it? I think it's just the combination of the voice acting and the writing just feeling like more of a husk than a fleshed out story.

Anyways, it's not bad. I think I'm just too jaded to enjoy it, and it probably doesn't help that I'm playing it after TLOU2, which I loved.

I think covid is starting to exhaust my supply of games I'm interested in. That said I tried out 2 interesting games this week.

Treachery in Beatdown City: this game is an American leftwing political piece set in ~2012 in which president orama gets abducted by ninjas. The story is over the top, funny but somewhat long winded and very preachy.

The look and feel are obviously inspired by retro beat 'em ups like River city ransom, but the gameplay is sort of like a rpg. You string together moves that use up "action points" and "fp" and then inbetween move around like your in a beat 'em up as you wait for your points to regenerate. The way the mechanics work incentivise you to string together different combos depending on how early in the fight it is. There are also 3 different playable characters with different strengths and weaknesses. The result is fairly deep and novel gameplay.

The game is incomplete however, I beat what it had to offer in about 7 hours and it ends on a cliffhanger. the game seems to still be getting updates (abeit minor ones) so I have hope it'll be expanded. Overall the game is definitely unique, and the music and aesthetic is awesome so I feel like the $15CAD I paid for it was worth it.

I also played katana zero. I've heard a lot of positive things about this game but felt a little underwhelmed. It's a twitchy game with OHKOs and a time rewind mechanic to explain redoing the short levels over and over until you get it right. The games controls feel really slick, although personally I found it more fun to ignore the slow down time mechanic and try to do everything in real time. It feels a bit like hotline Miami as a side scroller.

The game has an interesting chat dialogue mechanic where you can cut people off for different effects or wait a little and make a less impassioned response.The level design was nice but I felt the game left me wanting to see things explored more, there's a new game+ mode that I might try later and while it's not my thing I liked that there is a speedrunning option. The final boss was really fun to fight.

I found the story really predictable, and the extreme violence unnecessary (even if it's pixel art). It's a very grim piece. I'm unsure if the game has multiple endings but the one I got seemed rather pointlessly sad. The game really goes for shock factor. Perhaps I just missed it but I felt major parts of the plot were left unexplained, although it looks like they plan a sequel. It's fairly short, I beat it in 5.5 hours.

It's still a solid game and I can see why some really like it but I would give it a 5/10 at best.

I started playing DayZ again. It's been a year or two since I last played, but I've been keeping up with Twitch streams. The game will never be the polished work that many players hope for, but it's much better than it used to be. Most importantly, I've found a couple of great servers that are filled with more mature people. It's so frustrating to play on a random server with nothing but kids trying to kill everyone they see on sight. But Smoke (from Twitch) runs a couple of servers with a nice mod set and in general a more varied player interaction experience.

Overall I'm very happy with where the game is now. Mods mean there's more content than before, and thanks to improvements in the base game the performance and controls are much better than before.

So I don't game much, never really have. The last game I really played was Halo, up through Halo 4, I think. But I saw a post on Lifehacker or some such that said Borderlands 2 was free on Epic, so I thought, "what the heck?" I've lost a lot of productivity to that one decision.......

Actually, that productivity loss would have just been lost to some other distraction, because I rather dislike what I do at the moment, so I can't really blame the game.

The game is fun! I've only played as the Commando so far, and I love being able to throw out turrets to do my dirty work, and I enjoy the looting aspect of the game. If anybody knows of another game that is like Borderlands 2, but even better, I'd be grateful for the tip!

I finally got to play Betrayal at Baldur's Gate. Last week we were away at a cottage, and my daughters and I had a three player game. The set up was moderately quick; pick your character, set up the two starting tiles, set up a couple of draw piles, and you're ready to go. Gameplay is mostly pretty simple; you can move a certain amount, and part of your movement is "discovering" the town of Baldur's Gate cooperatively - turning over tiles and placing them to create the city. The tiles can trigger events or omens. At a certain point in the game, "The Haunt" occurs. At this point, the game take a fundamental turn, and the game gets a twist. Often what happens is one player becomes the Betrayer and plays against the other players in a fight to the death. That didn't happen during our game; we ended up with a cooperative haunt. The way things worked out, we were actually able to deal with the repurcussions of the haunt in two rounds and we won very handily. Total game time was about 25 minutes.

My girls were both a bit disappointed - they were enjoying the exploration / RPG aspects of the game quite a bit, and the fact that our position and particular haunt made it really easy to win made them feel like the game was a bit pointless. I explained that it wouldn't normally be like that, and I showed them the charts and booklets about all the different haunts that could occur. We're looking to play again some time in the near future!

Overall, I give this game a solid 7 out of 10. It's probably not ever going to be in the standard rotation for board games for us, but it was fun and the pieces are cool, and the discovery mechanic is pretty cool.

So, still making my way through watching a Nier: Automata let's play. I'm about an hour into Route C, and this part has made the game exponentially more interesting to me, not just in story but also gameplay, as compared to what felt almost underwhelming up to that point. One of my main gripes with a lot of science fiction set in the future is how the tech often isn't anywhere near advanced enough, and one of my first impressions when I started watching was "These little rusty buckets of bolts are the foot soldier enemies in the year 11 thousand and a lot?" Given the story so far, the designs still look too primitive but I guess it makes some small kind of sense. Overall, I'm looking forward to seeing how this all wraps up but I wonder if it was really necessary to gate what seems like this good stuff behind 30 hours of... meh?

Another I'm-not-playing-this post (sorry), but FYI: Enter The Gungeon is free on the Epic Games Store for the next seven days. If you never bought/played it and have EGS, there's no reason not to grab it. It's great fun for newbies and pros alike, chock full of references, synergies, and more or less endlessly replayable. I've got about 550 hours on it on Steam and still have a couple things left to complete. Highly recommend.

I started playing Next Stop: Nowhere. It looks interesting, but as with Beyond a Steel Sky, it's full of bugs. These ones, however, are showstoppers. At one point I quit and when I tried to restart, it just gave me a black screen. I ended up starting a new game, and haven't hit that problem again, but I have hit several other issues, like trying to interact with an interactable item, only to have it do nothing and indicate that I didn't interact with it. Um, thanks? I don't think I can continue playing because the game simply doesn't work.

Not a game, but I wanted to plug the GOG Galaxy 2.0 beta with third-party integrations (official and community-developed) is amazing now. I've got it set up with Battle.net, Origin, Steam, Epic (officially added recently), and Uplay. All of the games listed under one roof, able to group by custom tags (and import existing ones from, e.g., Steam), basic game info and links to trailers, some integration with achievements, and more. Not only is it easier than opening almost half a dozen libraries to find something, but it is so much faster than scrolling through my library in the Epic app (almost unusable).

I'm still trying to beat The Last of Us 2. I absolutely loved the first game and have been anticipating this game for years. I binged it when it first came out but lately I seem to have lost the energy for video games in general. I really like some of the gameplay changes they made. Sneaking in grass feels natural and smooth, combat is more polished than the first. I'll hold off on any judgments of the story until I've beaten it.

Been bouncing back and forth between Ghost of Tsushima and Destiny 2. As much as I don't like some of the things like sunsetting of armor in particular, the game play of D2 is always fun and snappy overall. I really wish they would relax the amount of materials needed for masterworking armor and weapons. I think more players would be engaged overall if they relaxed.some of the grinding in the game and made it more rewarding. I'm very cautious about this next expansion, but I'll keep my eyes on it before I decide to pick it up.

Ghost has been such an awesome experience, improbably about a 1/3 to 1/2 of Act 2 and it's been very engaging. A pretty fluid combat system, and a stealth system that's more designed it feels around being fast and brutal, rather than slow and plodding. Voice acting has been great in English and Japanese. I rarely buy many games anymore, with having a kid, work, and marriage. I do not regret one bit picking this up and working my way through it.

I do have Gran Turismo Sport lined up to play next, because I haven't played one since the original PlayStation, so I'm looking forward to that soon!