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

Still Wind Waker. I'm burning out after having to pay 3,120 rupees for freakin' maps to be read to me., plus 210 to be able to find the Triforce Charts. You could do it on your own, the locations are kinda obvious, but you'd need to explore every square of the map. I just need to sprint to the finish at this point. The game us much different than I remember with only four "proper" Zelda dungeons, two intro (for the pearls), and two main dungeons (getting sages to their places).

I caved and bought THPS 1+2. I played HD near its end of life, and it was alright, better on PC than PS3. THPS 1+2, however, is the real deal. I'll leave it to each person to judge if it's worth $40. It plays a bit different, the physics and minor mechanics, like spin positioning and landing, are even different from the newest entries, but it's all consistent. Once you adjust to it, you're set.

The only complaint I could see is online play. There are a lot of people who have been playing these games for 20+ years, it feels like, or a bunch of young people who honed their skills on THUG:PRO. I can't complain too much because the scores are just impressive, and in any lobby, I'm usually no lower than 4th (I'm no slouch, but I'm not the best). It's been a blast playing online if the tour mode (what they changed Career to) gets boring. At least you can't do boostplants or buttslaps or any of the other stuff in this game, and they actually cap online overtime to 30 seconds.

Still Sonic (1991/the original/Sega Genesis edition).

I finished Scrap Brain Zone. One of the funny things about the music is that the hammering/construction sounds seem to be part of the music instead of some element in the level.

As for the zone itself, it doesn't seem too hard, but not easy.

After getting through the last level of the zone, apparently there is a unique water level with some white or other colored reskins from Labyrinth Zone and it's a decent bit harder than any of the other levels in the game, which seems pretty normal.

After passing that and getting to the final battle, I passed that after a lot of "continues" and there was an endscreen showing Eggman with the chaos emeralds with "try again?" written in the bottom. I think I had managed to get one of those before that battle so I wasn't entirely surprised but it was still a nice heads-up that I didn't actually beat the game. I really like how Eggman is just there in the dark with all the emeralds in his hand and there is nothing else in the screen other than "Try again?". I would have loved something eerie playing in the background but I'm not sure that would be doable in 8/16-bit.

Anyway, putting the chaos emeralds in the special stages does seem a bit bullshitty, I mean, why are the most important items on the game gotten by finding them in a spinning pinball-looking arena/stage? That doesn't make sense other than those stages are locked behind the requirement of getting to the end with more than 50 rings and technical limitations.

Either way, I'm getting better at the game in general, I can get 120+ rings on the first act, I managed to get past Marble Zone with 9 and 10 lives once, I've found a decent amount of the hidden things around the levels, I can get "continues" and even extra lives from the bonus stages etc.

One of the weird things I've noted is that Sonic can jump from slopes in really steep angles in the bonus stages, almost like a wall jump.

So far I've managed to get to 3 special levels and 2 chaos emeralds. I'm not exactly sure if the best way to go about this is to just try again if you don't get the chaos emerald available in the zone or just go through the whole game anyway to get better used to the levels. The problem with the latter is that the run in which I beat the game was a full hour so repeating that a lot isn't really the best option, even with my free time.

I've played quite a few more linear games over the past few weeks, which is something of a digression from the strategy/4X games I usually play. Without further ado:

I played Rise of the Tomb Raider a few weeks back. It was fun to play, I enjoyed running around a bit, and the story was somewhat interesting, although I don't remember much of it. I played on normal difficulty, although looking back on it now, I wonder if playing on a harder difficulty would have been more interesting, since it seemed like I never ran out of crafting materials (except for the rare ones).

Minor early-game spoilers

Early on in the game, you run around an area gathering supplies like sticks, deer pelts, etc. Later on, the same area gets flooded with enemies, and you have to kill them all, using some of the knowledge of the area from collecting supplies to get around and stay out of sight. I thought more of the game would be this same kind of asymmetrical/guerrilla warfare, but it never really comes up again, which is a bit of a shame, because I really did like that early bit. Although maybe its on me for just run-and-gunning my way through the rest of the game.

Overall a pretty fun game, although I don't know if I would have bought it myself (I received it as part of a bundle).

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I quite enjoyed Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. I found all of the stealth to be really exciting, even though I'm pretty terrible at it. Story-wise, I thought that Human Revolution was a bit better, as it was longer and more self-contained, while MD's story seems to be setting up for another game, and seemed (to me, at least) to be somewhat incomplete.

Minor late-game spoilers

There is only one boss in the game, compared to the previous game's 4, which is a relief. I thought the challenge before the final boss, which involves knocking out a bunch of security guards then hiding the bodies so as not to freak out party attendees, was fun, although I felt was simplified somewhat with my solution of stuffing a dozen of the bodies into the ventilation system. I do think the final bossfight was ruined for me though. In a decision before the final boss, you must choose between saving a UN delegate from poisoning or an apartment complex from blowing up. However, if you do a side quest about halfway through the game, you get an item which defuses the bombs, making the decision somewhat pointless. However, I also lucked into an item which made the final boss transform from somewhat disappointing to really disappointing. In two locations in the game, you can pick up an item which will insta-kill the final boss. They are fairly well hidden, but I still managed to find one during my playthrough. I didn't know at the time that it would just end the bossfight as soon as you pressed the button, for whatever reason I had it in my head that it would just make it easier. Nope! With one click of a button, the game ends. I enjoyed the rest of the game though, the city of Prague was really compelling, and I liked moving through it, and the upgrade tree had so many interesting paths to take.

I have access to the original Deus Ex game, and was wondering if it's worth playing.

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Frostpunk is a city-building survival game. You try and keep your city warm as the temperature gets colder and colder, while trying not to become terrible human beings in the process (I failed). It's a fairly difficult game, and while I did manage to survive, I got the ending that condemns me and my unethical actions in keeping the city alive (which, to my recollection, are the following: become an authoritarian dictator, imprisoning political enemies, throwing a child into the big furnace/heater thing keeping us all alive to keep it running, working people until they drop, 24 hour shifts, and spiking everyone's soup with alcohol to keep them happy. But hey, I accepted every refugee I could, so that has to count for something right?). It is a difficult game, and I definitely could have organized things way better, but I thought the game was a little too short. I beat my first run in about five hours, and, while the game is definitely very replayable, it felt like I wouldn't have minded it being a little longer. A game I really enjoyed, and will probably replay to see the other ideology play through.

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Finally, I enjoyed the shit out of Sleeping Dogs. I have no idea why, it's definitely not the kind of game I'd usually play, but I had a lot of fun with it. The camera was a bit jank at times, but other than that, I found it a blast to play.

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Edit:
I also played a bunch of Europa Universalis IV. I'm still pretty terrible at the game, but I managed to form "The Kingdom of GOD" which is a great name to see painted on the map. I'm thinking of try to do a run to form Germany, but I really don't have the skill or patience to pull it off

Marvel's Avengers

This purchase was 100% a spur-of-the-moment decision. I completely forgot about this game coming out and have only watched pre-release footage that I can recall from zome fuzzy memories of an E3 long ago. The push for purchasing it came after reading Patrick Klepek's piece: 'Marvel's Avengers' Is a Good Game Buried Under Bad Marketing.

My interest was piqued. I purchased on PC via Steam, believing that I would likely refund the game within an hour if it didn't grab me. Suffice to say, 8+ hours in the game after a six-hour session today and I am now hooked. At least with the campaign. I'm finding myself really enjoying the story of the campaign and the way different characters play. The set pieces are fun, the brawler aspects simple but rewarding, and the loot grind minimal (for now).

I am curious how post-game will play out. If the GaaS part of this holds up, I can easily see myself sinking in loads of time over the course of a year or two. Especially if I can get my friends or find some people to play with over time. For now, I am going to let the game reveal itself to me and avoid reading any more marketing or content on it from gaming sites. Its been nice to appreciate a game in a vacuum and have the outcome be enjoyable.

THPS 1+2
I poured a bunch of time into this over the long weekend. Managed to pull off a million point combo after some effort. Thankfully the muscle-memory from my teens didn't atrophy :) I need to find a good consistent line to skate though so I can get back to my THUG2-era best of 15million or so. The game controls exactly like I remember it controlling when I last played the series (THUG2), although the lack of being able to hop off your board for a few seconds per combo has messed me up a few times.

WoW
After months of refusing to do it, I decided to try to unlock flying in Battle for Azeroth. It wouldn't be much use to my current characters since we're so close to Shadowlands, but I figured it'd be useful for speeding up leveling for future alts.

For those that don't know, you need to complete the expansion's storyline and gain "Revered" reputation with a bunch of factions by doing quests for them everyday for a few weeks. There are a few other ways to get reputation, but grinding World Quests is the only consistent way. So I spent this entire 3 day weekend of mine finishing up missing quests, doing world quests, and doing everything I could to unlock flying. I signed off lastnight only a few quests shy of the necessary reputation to unlock flying.

Then completely by chance I read a comment on /r/wow that made me realize that I was actually short 2 factions. Because of bad UI I had misread the flight achievement in-game and didn't realize I also needed to grind reputation with two factions I haven't put any effort into at all. So I decided to say "fuck it" and I will not be bothering to get flight for this expansion pack :|

I played through The Last Campfire. It was really good. The puzzles were fun and just challenging enough. The story is that you're an "Ember" (a cartoony, human-like character with cat-like ears), traveling through a land to free the Forlorn - other embers who have lost their way and their will. The ending, to me, was a positive atheistic take on death, which I really appreciated.

I have noticed an odd trend with games on Apple Arcade, though. A very large number of them involve plots or characters that are dealing with depression or being overwhelmed by life. While I think that's a great theme to have from time-to-time, it's a little odd how frequently it comes up on Apple Arcade games. (Well, I tend towards Adventure games. Maybe there's less of that with other genres?) I've played through several games with that theme, some of which were so depressing I stopped playing them (Mosaic, for example). I would like to see some games with other themes.

To that end, I also played through a few levels of Sayonara Wild Hearts. It's a music game that I would classify as a lesbian fantasy. Lots of women dancing on motorcycles racing down the street at 200 mph. It's fast-paced and a lot of fun. Great visuals. The sound track is a like an upbeat Julee Cruse piece.

Finally got around to playing Monument Valley, it's absolutely fantastic. Best use of isometric perspective I've seen in a long time, and the art / music / atmosphere in general is incredibly well done.

It's also about time I admit to myself that I'm fully switched over from Hearthstone to Legends of Runeterra; haven't even opened the HS client in the newest expansion. LoR just does so many things better; I really thought I'd just try it out while playing both but my HS playtime dropped drastically as soon as I got into it.

I haven't played in a bit but Slay the Spire has also been fantastic; worked my way up to Ascension 10-11 on all characters so far and enjoying it greatly. It's the perfect blend of card strategy and rogue-like, I'd summarize it as "Dominion meets FTL".

Beat the campaign for Streets of Rage 4 co-op with my SO, brilliant retro throwback. It really felt like playing the originals on Genesis. I probably need to pick up THPS1+2 to keep the nostalgia train going.

Also got all the way through Return of the Obra Dinn, definitely one of the most unique gaming experiences I've had in a while. If you've ever wanted to play an Agatha Christie novel this is probably the closest you can get.

Middle-Earth: Shadow of War - I finished this. This game is on a long timeline for me. I played and loved Shadow of Mordor. I call it the best Assassin's Creed game. And then Shadow of War is released and it's riddled with loot boxes, so I pass. Then, 9 months later, they removed the loot boxes and microtransactions, so I'm back in again. And it's fine. It's more of Shadow of Mordor, which I loved, but there's so much of it. I played about half of it and then put it down for two years because I was worn out on it.

IIRC, the first game had two large maps and two trees full of orcs, and now this one has something like 8 large maps and 8 trees full of orcs. At least four of the maps need to be conquered, which means killing or dominating a bunch of those orcs and going on siege missions. These aren't really thrilling things. Your dominated orcs follow you into a territory where you sit on a point and fight grunts and then move on to the next point. It culminates in a "boss fight" where you take on another orc and his bodyguards. I didn't find any of this part particularly fun. It takes away some of the best parts of the game, which are scouting your enemy, stalking them, and then ambushing them when you have a direct advantage. With siege missions, you just walk into a room and fight them.

But I get through those and I get through the large number of story and side story quests and I get to the end of the game. Except it's not the end, there's an epilogue. In the epilogue, you have to defend your fortresses, which sort of works in reverse of a siege. A handful of named orcs and their army are going to run at your points and you have to kill or dominate them. Again, not particularly fun and completely removing the thing I enjoy out of this game. This is also where the loot box grind comes in. My first defense was at a fort that was half of the strength of the invading army.

I have two choices. I can spend more time doing the thing that is fun, stalking and recruiting stronger orcs, or I can spend in-game currency to just level up and enhance the orcs I already have. I think the clear intention here is that some people will keep playing to see the real ending, but they can also shortcut it by buying more in-game currency and loot boxes to skip the grind. And that's real slimy. And all of this is in service to doing something that's not really fun to begin with, the reverse siege missions, which you need to complete to get the real ending. It takes 5 of these defenses to win, down from the original 20 before loot boxes were removed.

I'm left with complicated feelings about this game. I love the Middle-Earth world, though I think the original game served it better. I love the thing that it does right, which is the nemesis system and the hunting of enemy orcs, but I dread the boring sieges and defenses. I like playing the game, but it's so obviously compromised by microtransactions and loot boxes. Last night I was definitely going to Youtube the real ending, but now I'm talking myself into just playing it. It's only five defenses. I've picked up enough in-game currency that I might not even need to do much army building. I don't know if it'll be worth it though, and it might just lower my opinion of the game further.

edit: I started doing the defenses. I got through three pretty handily but I was killed on the fourth. Now I have to retake that fort again, defend it again, and do yet another defense. I'm donezo. I watched the ending on Youtube. It was a 3 minute cutscene that wrapped up some loose ends but totally not worth the effort they wanted, especially pre-de-lootboxing.

TrackMania

Approaching 100 hours in this release. Still loving it.

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Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair

I'm in a bit of a weird position. I played and loved the first Yooka-Laylee despite not having played Banjo-Kazooie (the clear inspiration for the game). Now I'm playing Impossible Lair despite not having played Donkey Kong Country (the clear inspiration for this game). As such, my opinions of the games are pretty much how I feel about them on their own, rather than how I feel about them relative to their inspirations, which is how a lot of other reviewers look at them (and rightfully so).

I'm loving this one too. It's richly made and robust. The standard levels are nice, but the game also has a fully-featured overworld that is its own sort of Zelda-esque adventure, and it's my favorite part of the game so far.

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There Is No Game : Wrong Dimension

A friend bought me this game after they saw it played and figured I might like it. It's a point-and-click puzzle adventure game based around lateral thinking (there's probably a word for this genre that I'm not aware of). Lots of tricks, lots of meta references and jokes and puzzle solutions. It feels like a lot of those old Flash games that would play with your expectations and require outside-the-box thinking to solve, but this one has considerably higher polish and production values. Entertaining so far.

I played CK3 for a couple of hours and returned it. It is almost too similar to CK2 and i wasnt in the mood to play CK2 so i returned it with the intention of buying it after they worked out all the release kinks and maybe the first DLC. I had a lot of doubts about the game pre-release but im happy to see i was wrong.

Now im mostly achievement hunting in Slay the Spire. I only have the complete the ending as the Watcher, Win with no rares or uncommon and the all achievement achievement. I nearly got the no rares but i realised at the last boss one of my colourless cards was uncommon, doh! I have never really paid attention to steam achievements but i want to get over slay the spire and this is the best way i hope.

EDIT: After 2 and a half years and 363 hours i have 100% achievements on a Slay the Spire. First game ever on steam and first since Red Dead Redemption (1) that i completed 100%. Phenomenal game.

Octopath Traveler

I've been playing a fair amount of Octopath Traveler this past week. I've just wrapped up the main storylines, and am almost done with the post-game content. You play as four of eight characters at a time (with one main protagonist) and explore the continent of Orsterra, a remarkably environmentally-diverse world filled with monsters, magic, and plenty of side quests.

While the game is clearly a love letter to the traditional JRPGs of the SNES / PS1 era, the turn-based battles and random encounters don't suffer because of it - in fact, Octopath Traveler has probably one of the most engaging and fun turn-based battle system in any game I've ever played. This, combined with an open world only restricted by enemy levels and lore-spouting NPCs, serve to immerse you fully into Octopath's world.

The meat and potatoes of the combat system revolve around a "break" and "boost" system - each enemy you fight is protected by some number of shields, which you have to "break" by exploiting their hidden weapon / elemental weaknesses. The "boost" system is pretty typical of a JRPG, letting characters power up their attacks or increase the number of hits more and more the longer they wait to use it.

Being a JRPG, jobs are of course a fundamental part of the game, but unlike many classic JRPGs, your characters aren't really locked into a job early-on. The natural leveling and progression of the game make it such that if you stick with one job per character, you'll max out job benefits at the end of the third Chapters, or about 3/4 of the way through a character's main quest. Late-game you're subtly encouraged to experiment with more jobs, with four slightly more powerful jobs being unlockable and your characters receiving more and more JP (used to unlock job attributes). Octopath Traveler is also flexible enough that there's really no such thing as a "bad" character / job combo - there's clearly some overlap between certain characters and certain jobs, but nothing that will detrimentally affect your gameplay experience.

Overall, I've had a blast with this game. Not only does the gameplay loop keep you constantly engaged, but the music and graphics are phenomenal - Octopath Traveler's usage of pixel art for main characters and enemies, combined with a diorama-style background, and realistic water, sand, and snow effects makes for a completely unique graphical style. Individual character stories are fairly engaging, but the one thing Octopath Traveler lacks is a truly cohesive plot - I spent the whole game expecting for these multiple plot threads to wind themselves together, but they never really ended up doing so. Character stories intertwine only as much as is expected of these travelers sharing the same world. Despite this, the previously mentioned gameplay loop more than makes up for a somewhat sub-standard plot. I would highly recommend to anyone who's a fan of the JRPG genre giving this game (or the free three-hour demo) a try.

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Celeste

Picked it back up for the first time since April-ish, and was pleasantly surprised when I managed to finish the third and clear the fourth chapter in one sitting. I've been now going back to previous levels to get a few last missing strawberries. I'm consistently impressed at how Celeste manages to keep such a nice, leveling sense of challenge while never crossing (but sometimes toeing :-D) the line of frustration. Platformers have always been one of my least favorite genres, but Celeste might turn out to be an exception. I'm just at Chapter Five, though - nowhere near the end - so I don't have a lot else to say about Celeste right now. It's fun.

Over the weekend my SO and I played Azul for the first time, and we loved it. Azul had been on my to-play list for ages, and I'm glad to have finally gotten it. We must have played at least 10 rounds in quick succession, and each time we both took to the strategy and the solution to the puzzle a little more. There were some great snooker moments where one of us left the other with a stack of 6 tiles they couldn't place, so they had to go onto the "floor" (the negative points zone). For a simple game it has a remarkable amount of depth! Really looking forward to trying it with 4 players rather than just 2! The game is wonderfully tactile, and I really like the quality of the pieces. It's a fun game to just handle which I think is going to keep it in rotation for a long time.

On Friday night I played Escape From Aliens in Outer Space which I had slightly more mixed feelings on. I wasn't too great at the game itself, as I'm not a particularly strong bluffer, but one of the main disappointments of the game was that it just discourages talking between players. Another is that while it's pretty simple to play, there is the option for a lot of complexity, which has the potential to break the secrecy of the game somewhat (people unsure of what their particular character can do, unsure of which items do what, etc). On the other hand, the game had some top-notch moments of revelation, and in particular one shouted exchange as a human player was one turn away from winning and got killed by an alien. The game itself is gorgeous and minimalistic. The cards are all black and feel very high-quality, as do the map books. I would definitely recommend it to anyone looking for a different kind of large-group board game experience.

I've been playing Nexomon: Extinction which is a turn based rpg monster collection game inspired by Pokemon. I've been having a ton of fun with it. It's much more challenging than Pokemon and has a much better story with some truly fun, memorable, and sometimes hilarious characters. It has some flaws that I find acceptable for a $20 game, but even so the developer is continuously patching the game to address those concerns and is very active on Discord.