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

THPS 1+2. After progressing, and exploring it, I'm still having fun with it. The online is interesting because I'll occasionally get skunked by somebody pulling a multi-million point combo, but it doesn't happen often.

I got Into the Breach on Epic for free, and tried it out. It's an interesting concept, solid turn-based strategy, I'll have to see where it goes.

I also started playing Ocarina of Time, via Mupen64 in RetroArch. I found an OoT 3D texture pack that made it look better, plus 4x native resolution so it scales to my 1080P monitor properly. I mostly want to play the game with everything in its original place, because the 3DS remakes of OoT and MM tend to move things around for easier play. I'm amazed at how similar Wind Waker is to it, as it feels like the same game in terms of control. I think that's just how good the N64 Zelda engine was.

I finally finished Wind Waker, and it was nice to have done it on one solid run. Not much to say about the game, but the part with collecting the triforce charts, then getting the money up to decipher them, and then finally collecting the pieces was tedious as hell, I only worked through it for pride points. I finally finished it.

Despite my reservations, I've been playing Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead recently.

It's an exciting game for a systems nerd like myself. Lacking in places, but that's forgivable. My reservations come from the fact that it's difficult to mod, which I found myself prone to doing with this game, and the developers are less than friendly, which has so far made debugging and suggestions akin to grinding the palm of my hand on asphalt.

But it is a fantastic game for me. I love it.

What it lacks is purpose, goals. You can run quests, but that's not appealing to me: it's artifical agency trying to hide the fact of game being ultimately pointless. What I do now is start games with characters with externally-defined goals.

My latest character, who died gruesomely to a .50 cal turret due to my negligence, was a black operative paradropped into the infected area in order to secure the latest research into mutagens. The goal was to get one copy of each text of interest (all the lab journal-titled books, plus a handful of related materials), with the secondary objective of securing mutagens themselves if possible. The end stage of the plan was then to get to the roof of a tall, broad building where a helicopter could land and pick the character up. I'd launch a signal flare, and illuminate the roof with a handful of land flares and glowsticks.

Like I said, that didn't go according to plan.

My next mission is to replicate a previous experience – a weak (zombie-survival-wise) character with great potential for growth – with a specific goal in mind so playing him doesn't stall out like it did the last time I played such a character. This time, he's an engineer at a bionics startup that began shortly before the Cataclysm. His goal is to get his hands on the military-tier bionics not available on the market, so he could use their construction to design better bionics, in order to ensure human survival.

This ties into a mod I want to make at some point, something that adds a new tier of bionics (lore-wise derived from the engineer's research) and fixes the existing ones (balance and deconstrutability).

I started playing Mooorrrdooorrr: Shadow of War, and I have to say that the Nemesis system is more persistant and annoying than I remember. It's tough at the beginning, when you have less abilities, and not even executions, and the movement system is like trying to control Ezio Auditore on acid. I hope it becomes easier to get used to, and more fun. I don't care about the story, beyond occasionally ooh-ing at how nice some of the cutscene shots look.

Still playing Marvel's Avengers on and off throughout the week. It is fun but I doubt I will pick up the multiplayer after the campaign. I was hoping this game would become my new Overwatch where I would play it for an hour or so every day but I just don't see this game having the staying power as OW did back in its heyday.

With that said, has any former OW player found a good modern-day replacement shooter that has both casual and hardcore elements to it?

Other games I have touched but not really sunk any real time into:

I broke my Foot so have been looking for some time sinks.

Played Celeste all the way through Chapter 9 including B sides but not golden strawberries. I think the game really nailed the difficulty. At one end is assist mode, on the other is collecting every single strawberry and doing every single B side. Chapter 9 in particular is a beast mode. This game is a gateway to speed running, in later levels and bonus levels it teaches you how to do some of the more basic speed running techniques. The story was also a lot more than I was expecting. Really stellar game.

Unfortunately Celeste gave me blisters so there are still a few loose ends to tie up. At this point I could move to a seated position at by desk, and decided to give Crusader Kings III a try. I don't play a lot of this sort of grand strategy game but I'm enjoying myself so far. I was worried that it would be too complex to just jump in, but it seems like ignoring certain parts of the game isn't so catastrophic that it ruins the game and eventually I fully committed to the RP aspect which helps get rid of some of the complexity. My current run is a little bit stunted however, I have Unified Ireland and have some tendrils in the Isle of Man and Scotland but England and the Holy Roman Empire are starting to cramp my style and there is no way I am winning that war! I feel like I still have barely scratched the surface and I'm 22Hours in! The game almost feels like a rogue like at times with the rise and fall of kings, and I love setting stuff up for my descendants to take advantage of. It was quite a cool moment to have my "Benovlant" King die with +100's on all his major allies, court and council members and have him replaced with a +22Intrigue, known adulterer and sadist of an hier take over, immediately kill his brother to take immense power and proceed to rule entirely through fear.

I'm playing Prince of Persia 2008. Purchased it in the Sands of Time Remake announcement sale. Years ago when I played it I hated the changes from previous trilogy and the repetitive gameplay. Playing it now I appreciate the game for the simple non-linear gameplay and no dying. The art design is very beautiful specially the early game temple level. Game is basically going through platforms and activating portals. There isn't much enemy variation and the combat is mostly same for all enemies, Elika, the female protagonist, gives hints for attacks if it's getting difficult to fight. If you are lost Elika will show the path to follow. It isn't for everyone, good if you like simple combat and gameplay.

From itch.io Racial and Equality bundle I found another old gem And Yet It Moves. It's physics based game where we have to rotate the map to move on the solid structures There are some challenging levels. It's a nice game.

osu! ... and just osu! I don't play many games at the moment but I keep coming back to osu just because of how you only have to play a song or two, there's 0 commitment to a long play session. I love that I can just play along with the songs I like while also doing something. Also there's no RNG or anything, just me and my muscle memory.

I've finally found a little time to roll into some of the stuff that came with itch.io's Bundle for Racial Justice. Really enjoying Astrologaster, which is a visual novel type game based on true events and real people (loosely) during the 16th century in London. You basically watch conversations between the main character, a real astrologist/doctor from the time period, and various patients and then choose how you will read the stars to "help" them. It's very silly.

The voice acting is well done. The music is a funny sort of period appropriate stuff with silly lyrics. The visual aesthetic is a very well realized pop-up book style. It's a relaxing game where you make a lot of decisions that you honestly don't know how they will even turn out until later on down the line.

Haven't been around here for awhile, still playing various games though.

Dragon Age Origins: Might have mentioned this before, but anyhow. I played through this in the past a couple years back, but the other year at E3 we got that Dragon Age 4 trailer and it made me want to replay some of the series. Played most of the game a couple months ago, but got burnt out and stopped. But last weekend I decided to jump back in and finally finish the game. Though to keep up with it I've had to turn the difficulty down to easy and will occasionally cheat. I have found I really don't enjoy the combat any more at all, and just want to finish the story because I really enjoy that. I would describe the combat as a strange mix of real time strategy and turn based strategy game, and I just wish they would have stuck with just a single side. Because as it is to properly play the game you have to master the tactics and figure out the best way to essentially build the AI of your companions. So at this point, I'm just going to wrap up the story and move onto the rest of the series, and hope the gameplay changes enough for me to enjoy it.

Persona 4 Golden: Making decent progress with this, though like with P3Fes I can't sit down and just play forever. I can put a couple hours in, but I do have to put it down at times and just relax. The story is just amazing and I love it. But the gameplay itself just drags a bit, the dungeons are still pretty boring and uninteresting. Don't have enough time to make any final decisions of course yet, so will see me again later at some point.

Final Fantasy 14: Well and MMO, haven't played one of those in a long time. Slowly working through this game after many requests by my friends and hearing that the story is pretty good. I am almost finally finished with the ARR storyline and this is pretty decent, but I wouldn't call ARR anything amazing. Overall the ARR story feels rather generic and filled with various tropes. Now unfortunately I still don't really love MMO gameplay, it just doesn't do much for me. I think part of the issue is that I'm playing through this story long after everyone else, and therefore I don't really benefit from the MMO part at all and it feels more like a bad jrpg. This is really an issue I always have with MMO's, if I'm not in spending all my time rushing through the content with everyone else I wonder why this is even an MMO. If I've seen a total of 5 other people doing the same quests as me for over 50 hours, is it really an MMO? I'll probably have more to say later on after I start the next storyline.

Craftopia: Another one I've grabbed due to friends, they all wanted to play so decided why not. At the moment it seems rather enjoyable if really barebones. But it has a massive issue for me at the moment. I can't get a decent fps at all, nothing I did could get me a decent playable fps, normally get 30fps and sometimes 50fps at max. Which the low fps and inconsistent fps started to give me a pretty bad headache so I had to stop early. It seems to be an issue with multiplayer because I can get 60fps in singleplayer. But at the moment multiplayer makes me cpu hit 100%, uses 6Gb of GPU vram, and 70% GPU usage. Don't know what is wrong, but this game defiantly needs some optimization.

I have gotten back into Elite Dangerous, mostly just light exploration. I'm about 12000LY out of the bubble, and wandering around looking at stuff. It's pretty relaxing.

I've been playing a ton of dark souls 3 lately, trying to wrap up the last half of the story and the DLCs. Frankly I think they made the game way too easy compared to the other two games. The only boss that even really sticks in my head is the curse rotted greatwood, everything else I pretty much breezed through.

My peak disappointment definitely came in the form of the moment when you kill the third lord (in my case aldritch), and you are instantly warped in to get ganked by the dancer. I've heard so much about the dancer, just via cultural osmosis, about how it's one of the most mechanically interesting and challenging bosses in the entire series... I killed this homie no problem by mashing r1 under its legs, even though I used most of my estus in the Aldritch fight.

All that said though, it's still a pretty good game, but I think the difficulty is really underwhelming. I probably died over 100 times on the fume knight in DS2 (and I never beat the two cats at the end of the raindeer hellhouse), DS3 doesn't have a single boss that comes within a mile of that level of challenge.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning - I spent ~30 hours in the original release without finishing it. It has a huge world and everyone has a fetch quest for you. But eventually I got tired of the run around.

This rerelease is functionally identical, at least on PC. It's really quite easy, but mashing out the same three hit combo over and over isn't great. I also hate the inventory limits, and I've yet to spend a single gold coin on any piece of gear.

It's easy to get into and it's got a mountain of lore, if you're into that. When I played the original, I didn't find the lore compelling but that was only because the studio behind the game was dead. I presumed all that lore was a waste of time to invest in because it'd never result in anything beyond this one mediocre game. However, this new release is getting a new DLC chapter, and it's owned by a living studio that saw fit to revive Amalur so maybe more is coming.

If anyone does pick this up, I have one vital tip: don't go out if your way to do anything but the faction quests. You'll wear yourself out trying to complete every quest and most of them aren't worth the effort. The main quest is okay and unavoidable, but the faction quests are generally pretty enjoyable.

Prey is one of the best games I've played in a while. It combines exploration, horror, survival, and role play in a way that I haven't quite experienced. (I've tried to start System Shock a couple times, but that felt like playing an oscilloscope. Bioshock didn't grab me either when I played it several years ago, not sure why.) The level of detail in this game continues to astound me.

Finally gave GRID 2 a try. Holy god I didn't know racing games could be so fun. I love the rewind mechanic, and solves a ton of frustrations I've had with other games. It was the first to break me out of my SUPERHOT/Outer Wilds loop.

Shame I can't seem to buy DLC anymore. If anyone knows a way to unlock it (or hide it so I'm not frustrated by it) I would be eternally grateful.

Something new I started playing recently (about 16 hours of play at this point) is Battletech.

The cut scenes seem to be hand-drawn 2D parallax-ish animation (as opposed to 3D rendered polygon shapes), and they struck me as having some pretty nice background music. The story lines are actually kind of interesting, and have me wanting to find out what happens next. There's a fair bit of detail to the whole game world and its history. That all said, it seems that the core of the game revolves around outfitting mechs and sending them into battle. And, of course, both those parts are fun.

There is considerable freedom in how to configure your mech loadouts. Every mech model has slots of varying number and type, and you drag and drop your components in. You choose from a fairly wide array of weapon types and strengths, armour thickness, and augmentations like heat sinks, jump jets and enhancements for increased melee damage. I'm sure I'll find more tech available as I progress through the game. You can choose to go with a "stock" configuration (which every mech model has), or deviate as much or as little as you want. Your only restrictions are the slots and the total tonnage of the mech. You also can think about the makeup of your team, and there are some synergies you can try to have. For example, have one mech be very fast and mobile, and outfit another mech with a lot of long range, computer-guided firepower, where line of sight is not required. Then you have the agile one do overwatch and spotting from a far, safe spot, and the other one shoot guided missiles over mountaintops or from behind cover. Or you can outfit one with lots of armour and improved defense systems, to tank and attract enemy fire.

The pilots (called mechwarriors) are also customizable, insofar as they gain XP, and you choose how to train them, and which special skills they do or don't get.

The game seems to hit a sweet spot in terms of difficulty level. The early missions were very doable, but I've now reached a point where I am occasionally struggling, and have actually had to abort mission a couple times just to save the tech and the pilots. Repairs are not cheap, and your budget is small enough to be uncomfortable, and you have to make tradeoffs on how you'll spend your money. Repairs are expensive enough that I actually actively think about not taking severe damage in a battle because of how much it'll eat into the bank account, preventing me from taking care of other important costs, like pilot salaries. Plus, if you do poorly in a given mission, there will be heavy repairs needed, which take time to conduct, and pilots will be incapacitated for some time in order to heal. But not being able to field a full team for weeks means no income for weeks -- but monthly salaries and maintenance costs still need to be paid. So, there are these sorts of concerns that need to be managed, but I find it fun to do so.

Death is permanent. It's not something I thought about until it happened, but, and it's kind of silly to say, but once my first pilot death happened, it kind of hit me emotionally a bit. There are occasional voiceover lines spoken during battle, and you start the game and progress with a team, so you just kind of get a bit attached to them over time. After a pilot dies, once you get back to your HQ/ship and debrief, there is an extra memorial screen that shows the details and stats of the pilot's career. And, as mentioned, there's no bringing them back. You can, however, hire new pilots.

Overall, a good game worth getting on sale.