14
votes
What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them?
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
So much Crazy Eights. My son loves it, so me, him, and my middle kid have been playing a bunch. I'm trying to get him to branch out to Uno and Crazy Eights Countdown. It's fun that he's starting to play more "real" games, and not bad boardgames for kids. Crazy Eights is a great intro to cards style game for kids; the ruleset is simple and easy to follow, and it gets you used to thinking about your hand of cards.
I've been playing Cribbage and backgammon with my middle daughter. She's pretty good at math, so we've been trying to play games that take advantage of that. She has beaten me a few times.
Our oldest daughter is still on a Catan kick; we've played several games of Cities and Knights, and I am on a losing streak. The last time we played, both girls kind of took me and my wife both to the grinder; we did not do well, and the the girls ended up duking it out, with the older one eventually winning. Catan is one of my favourite games, but I'd really like it if my family got into one of the other hundreds of games and played just about anything else for a while. Unfortunately, my wife and oldest daughter both detest learning new games, though they enjoy having gone through the process of learning.
Not much in the way of video games happening right now. I've played a bit of Elite Dangerous, but mostly just doing some exploration and trade; I'm trying to get my empire rank up to buy a nice multi crew ship. I'm a few levels short of Duke, but I think I'll get there... some time.
Homeworld Remastered is now somewhat usable on Linux through Proton (see the newest update on https://www.protondb.com/app/244160). The graphics are great but IMO the remastered HW1 is too easy compared to the original - in the original game you had to do your best to keep every ship alive because resources are scarce, in HWRM you can just rebuild them.
Looking forward to HW3, hopefully they will try something new story-wise (HW2 felt... forced, I found the side-story of Cataclysm more compelling).
(BTW, the old HW1/HWSDL source is still around, and can be compiled to play on Linux natively)
Thanks for the resources. Love the username.
I recently tried to play remastered with a few of the protontricks stuff (even got the custom written launcher to at least launch each title.) I get about as far as loading the actual game before I get some "Access Denied" error (I'm assuming some overflow bug.) I can tolerate having Windows AME on a side system for a few things, most everything else in the house is Pop!_OS or Ubuntu Server.
Cataclysm always felt a bit over the top for me, it seems almost like an intense, fan made sequel that's more a mod of Homeworld Classic. Still loved the gameplay immensely (the seige cannon was OP regardless of difficulty though.)
The only issue plot wise I had with HW2 was the whole hyperspace core/Sajuuk thing.
My Valve Index arrived so I have been working my way through the recommended VR titles.
AltspaceVR: after watching a YouTube video about a guy who wore VR headsets for a week straight, this stood out to me, being in quarantine and all. This one is hard to peg down, but I so far enjoyed the events the most. I attended an improv comedy event that I hope to participate in later this week. Also hopped into a party and busted out some dance moves. Attended a session where the premise surrounded talking about things you believe in and why. And I also attended a stand up comedy event. The events are fun but the hub worlds where you just walk around and talk to people are underwhelming. Half the time it's just kids hanging out while other times it feels a bit cliquey. It's worth a shot, and anyone here also play, hmu. Would love to meet some other Tildes members.
Beat Saber: probably my favorite so far. I proceeded to download 200+ songs that I am working my way through. I can play some on expert but for the most part I play on hard. I'm looking forward to creating some songs on my own since my tastes are under represented in the available downloads. The craziest part of this is how many calories I burn playing. A 90 minute session burned 550 calories! The bad part of this game is the amount that I sweat. My extra gaskets need to get here soon.
SuperHot: I really enjoyed this one, souch that I got the achievement for beating it in one session the first time I played.
Half Life:Alyx- this is the most impressive out of all that I played. I'm planning to really dive deep into it this week. So far I have only gotten to the point where I have the gravity gloves.
Gorn: this was fun up until I started getting that motion sickness feeling. You know the feeling of jumping on a trampoline and then walking on the hard ground after? I felt like that for a full hour after playing. Likely won't continue with this game.
After you play a few other games, come back to gorn. Once you get your vr legs, it’s a very fun and therapeutic game. It was one of my first games after getting my rift. The first few weeks, I could only play a round or two before putting it down. Still worth it. Enjoy the index!
In case you are unaware the motion sickness feeling fades for most people after using it for a few weeks. Some people have to specifically train the sickness away, play until you get sick then stop for at least an hour or two, playing through the sickness makes things worse for most people. VR still doesn't have many (good) games, so you really want to be able to play as many as you can.
Be very careful with gorn it is nortorious for causing VR accidents.
For beat saber I'd recommend a headband and armbands. They are super dorky but they really stop moisture getting into the headset, which makes you feel less sweaty and probably protects the headset., a lot of people suggest taking off the plastic front cover as well, although I didn't find it made much difference.
Star Wars Squadrons in VR is a child's dream come true.
It's surprisingly nausea-free despite heavy dog-fighting in 0G.
Gameplay-wise, it takes heavy inspiration from the Totally Games games, with some 2020 streamlining/simplification (i.e. radial selector for targeting instead of a dozen of button). The energy juggling between engine, weapons and shield is still present and kicking, and you even have to scan some cargo in the first mission like in TIE Fighters.
The visuals are fantastic despite my 1660Ti hiccuping from time to time. Being an Ace Combat aficionados, I lament the lack of visibility inside of the cockpit of the various ships. It certainly help immersing yourself though (and certainly more when you pilot with no extraneous HUD and only the on-board instruments.
Resident Evil Revelations - I finished this. The final boss was an annoyance, and the story was just a side story at the end of the day. Totally skippable.
Resident Evil Revelations 2 - This one is a lot closer to the horror side of the RE series. It reminded me in a lot of ways of a mash up of The Evil Within and Resident Evil 0. It's doing a two-player coop thing, and the enemies aren't mutants, but also not entirely human. Didn't spend a whole lot of time with it. Could get annoying as one of the two players is more or less unarmed.
Wrath: Aeon of Ruin - I loves me some Quake engine games, and this is one of those. It's in early access, and the release date isn't until February, but I got a bit bored and wanted some action. So far, I'm enjoying it. The UI is a bit rough, and I like the world design better than the enemy design. The action feels right, but there's quite a bit of overlap between Quake weapons and Wrath weapons, to the point that they feel a bit like a reskin. The one level I've spent time in though is huge. I might be near the end of it but I've put 52 minutes into the game and almost all of those are from one level without many deaths/restarts.
Doom Eternal - This just hit Xbox Game Pass, so I'm giving it another run on console. I started on ultra-violence difficulty and made it further on console than I did on PC before dialing it back down to Hurt Me Plenty. Most of this is familiarity with the game's systems. This game is still hella fun.
The Gardens Between - In between deaths in Doom Eternal, I played some The Gardens Between, also on Xbox Game pass. This is the opposite of Doom Eternal. It's a relaxing game with some light puzzles and soft music.
My SO and I have been playing Wasteland 3! It's pretty enjoyable, though we've ran into some bugs several times. Thankfully, none have been gma breaking, though a lot of them seem to be UI based. I personally love that you can customize your person in terms of looks! I made my first chick fuggin huge and jacked and she towers over everyone in the game and I love it.
I'm very much enjoying the naming conventions and humor Wasteland has. Though there is a truck ton of reading and listening and getting anywhere can take a bit, there's a lot of funny stuff. I'm enjoying the world and my SO has filled me in on some of the deets as this is the first Wasteland game I've played and he's played the other two. I'm less inclined to play the previous ones as 3 is more my speed.
I finished Mirror's Edge Catalyst, a first-person platforming game. It was fun enough, and I spent the time to run around the world and find all of the collectibles. Combat felt okay, but real simple after getting the stun ability, at which point I'd just kick the enemy off the nearest ledge. Movement was really fun, although it feels like I move slower than I should. Music was pretty nice as well. Despite lower ratings, I think I prefer Catalyst to the original Mirror's Edge.
I am currently playing through Persona 4 Golden, a social sim/JRPG/dungeon crawler. I'm having a lot of fun with it, the story is interesting, the interactions you have with your social links each have little stories which are all fairly interesting, the music is pretty good, and there's just enough low-level strategy in combat to make grinding tolerable (or more tolerable than I found the Pokemon games). I am playing on a PC with the keyboard, however, which makes camera controls in the TV-universe a little janky, but that's probably down to it being designed for a controller. I'm really looking forward to see how everything goes down. I'm currently going through the strip club dungeon, which I think is either the 3rd or 4th one.
So, I finally got roped into playing Among Us, that game that has been trending all over the Internet lately. For me, it's just "meh", but probably because it's targetted at casual gamers, which I pretty much am not. So, I won't play this by myself with strangers, but I'll join when friends want to play. It seems relatively easy to cheat (against strangers in the game) if you join a lobby as a group, and then tell each other (via discord, zoom, or some other communication tool) which one is the impostor after you are killed.
I’m playing Hades on Switch and Horizon Zero Dawn on the PS4.
Hades is stupidly fun. One round is enough for me, but I always enjoy coming back to it every time.
Horizon Zero Dawn is a funny one. Started off really good, but now I’m stuck in this place where there’s tons of those little robot things and I’m trying to stealth it since there is this big bad circular robot with a shield, but I just keep dying at that part. I’ve even put the difficulty down one notch and still failed. After coming from the last of us 2, it makes me appreciate that games checkpointing system so, so much.
My strategy for defeating the bosses at the end of cauldrons is to make heavy, heavy use of traps. You have all the time in the world to lay down your traps before you deactivate the shield, so do that. Then, during battle, lay out even more traps as the previous ones get triggered. Use both tripwire traps and regular ones. I usually lay them out in a sort of spider web layout, to maximize trigger chance. Also, you can plan ahead to trap the spots where the lesser bots spawn during the boss battle. Also, in case you didn't know, there are usually multiple object caches laying around the battleground, so plunder as many of those as you can before the fight, and sometimes during the fight (there are heals and other powerups).
Other than that, you want to use the usual tactics that you use in non-boss battles, like matching your weaponry with the weaknesses of the machines you're facing. Also, match your outfit/armour to the threats you're facing. It can reduce damage taken significantly, which improves your survivability.
If by "robot with a shield" you mean the crab machine (Shell Walker), I often soften them up first using Tear damage weapons, to remove their main equipment. In fact, that's a strat I use on most machines that have powerful tech on them.
Hope this helps. Feel free to ask me any more questions.
This is an awesome comment and I'm very grateful for it, but sadly I literally got past this about an hour ago, and I did so by essentially lowering the difficulty.
I had some idea that enemies had weaknesses (I think the bright orange things when you scan them?) but I didn't quite realise they were connected to the weapons I had? Also, for some reason, I completely missed the whole different armour does different things. I guess I need to buy more armour (goodness knows I've got plenty of metal shards to hand out).
And yes, I meant the shell walker! I think I need to buy different weapons as I had googled tear damage weapons and my immediate thought was "huh, I saw those weapons, never thought of buying them". In fact, except for one minigun like weapon I'm still using the weapons I got since the start of the game. I should probably change that...
Ah, every enemy not only has weakpoints but they also have different elemental weaknesses dependent on what part of their body is taking the hit. You have to not only be careful what kind of weapon you use, but also what elemental damage, and which part of the enemy you're hitting. It's a lot to manage but that's part of what sets this game apart from others like it.
The next closest thing is RDR2's stupidly abstract "you have to kill a boar with a carbine rifle not a long-range rifle to get a three star pelt!" so, honestly, I like HZD's more logical approach much better.
Yes, it definitely helps to have a wide range of armour and weapons in your inventory, so you can swap to the most appropriate equipment for the current threat(s). Having the wrong/opposite equipment equipped makes battles a lot harder, or take a lot longer. For the most part, determining the right equipment is simply a matter of reading the machine compendium info in the game, and buying whatever you need. If you're not playing on the very hardest difficulty level, then grinding for shards and other trading resources shouldn't take too long.
One more thing: using stealth and high ground goes a long way. There are a lot of machines that I wouldn't try to face (at least not in numbers) head to head. You can weaken them a fair bit by perching up on a hillside or clifftop and taking pot shots from that safe location. It's easy to hide out of view and take time to recraft ammo.
It also helps to plan an escape route to a place where you can hide when a battle goes south. That could be somewhere around a corner (mountainside) or some nearby tall grass to hide/stealth in.
Trackmania just started up its fall season -- 25 new official tracks to learn, earn medals for, and compete on. Plus, the game has finally reached what I would consider a "stable" state (the Summer season was essentially a playable beta and was quite buggy).
Also, now that it's been out for a couple of months, enough time has passed that content creators have made a plethora of amazing community tracks. So if you tire of the official courses you can always try out the thousands of fan-made ones of all shapes, sizes, flavors, and genres. It's the perfect time to jump in if anyone's ever wondered what the series is like, and it's free to try!
Yes, this reads like an ad, and no, they're not paying me (I wish!). I just really love Trackmania.
I played Trackmania Sunrise as a kid, probably logged near a thousand hours on that game. I played a bit of Trackmania Nations, but haven't heard much about TM since.
What actual game are you referring to? TM United?
The Trackmania series has continued its now long-standing legacy of having not great names by releasing a new entry in July 2020 simply called Trackmania. It makes talking about the game super ambiguous, as you identified. I should probably start calling it Trackmania (2020).
It's got the familiar stadium environment and cars of Nations Forever, and it's free to try, with subscriptions to access the full game. If you loved the old ones, I highly recommend checking this one out. The gameplay is the same addictive time-trial system it's always been, just with a fresh coat of paint and new blocks for track building.
Fallout 3 Recently bought the GOTY edition for the x360 and started to play through that yesterday. Fallout 4 was my first game in the series, so I've been wanting to check out 3 and NV. Stability on PC is a joke, so x360 it is. Sadly, I'm awful with controller shooters, so I've set the difficulty way down so I can still enjoy the story and explore. Last night I reached the metro stop before you meet Three Dog, so I'll be receiving his wisdom this evening, I'm sure.
WoW There is fuck-all to do in the game right now. Pre-patch for Shadowlands drops next week, so I'm just showing up for my fraction-of-a-percent dropchance mounts and blowing off steam.
I replayed the first two stages of Universal Paperclips.
Great game, and great code.
Kirby's Dream Land 2 - I've been watching a bunch of Twitch streamers in my ample downtime, and figure i can also occupy my mind. I've played the hell out of the first two games in the series (Kirby's Dreamland and Kirby's Adventure), so figured I'd work on 2. KDL was the first game, but didn't have a lot of what you think of when you think "Kirby," in terms of powers. The best move you have is bodyslamming. In KDL2, you play through the game similarly to Adventure, where you progress through hub worlds three levels at a time, with mounts, and powers. I'm having a good time with this one.
Heretic - I got into Doom, and doom-engine games, in 2005 after watching a thing about video games, and didn't know this series had existed. I'd played Quake, but didn't know anything had happened before that series. In my stumbling around the internet, I found these other games, but never understood them. I'm something of a late-coming Doom-obsessive, but couldn't wrap my head around these games, mostly because even having purchased them, I don't have easy access to manuals (I should check Archive.org).
Then Civvie 11 released his video about Heretic, which blew the game wide open. It's pretty spoiler heavy, but honestly these games can be played if you know everything, they're still fun (and I'm typically one who is broken by spoilers). Since I already had Chocolate-Heretic installed, I tweaked the controls to match similar function in Hedon. It feels great, like these idtech1 games tend to, and I'm having a blast progressing through the game. I have absolutely no clue about how I'm going to bind the flying controls.
Speaking of: I'm back into playing Hedon. I got stuck, kept meaning to come back to it, and didn't for like two weeks. I was double the par for the level I was on, and keep missing little details. Still digging it, keep finding new weapons to play with (read: kill myself learning to use in heavy combat).
It's nostalgia week at the balooga house!
I just beat Donkey Kong Country (for the nth time) on Nintendo Switch Online. That game's a hoot. By using prerendered 3D assets as 2D sprites it manages to look great without succumbing to the clunky gameplay/control/visual issues a lot of other titles in the early 3D era had. It's not particularly hard but it's silly fun and plays like a dream. I enjoy the sequels too, will be giving those another spin soon, probably.
I've also been playing through Hydro Thunder on the Dreamcast. I had so much more patience for this game when it came out 20 years ago than I do today, but I'm trying. The harder tracks are fiendish and unforgiving. The worst thing about this particular arcade port is that there's no "retry" in the pause menu. You have to exit out to the main title screen, re-choose your game mode, vehicle, and track, and sit through the lengthy load screen. Every. Time. Honestly though, I still love this game despite its rough edges. It's a feast for the senses and over-the-top in quintessential '90s fashion.
Lastly, I've been yearning to return to the galaxies of Ambrosia Software's Escape Velocity series for the classic Macintosh. How to describe these games? Top-down 2D space trading / combat sims, I guess. Plenty of ship upgrading, cargo carrying, pirate slaying, empire overthrowing, and planet dominating, set against a narratively rich backdrop full of factions to ally with and mysteries to uncover. I still have EV Nova (the last, and best of the trilogy) but haven't found a way to make the text legible on modern HiDPI displays. As I was looking for a way to fix this, I remembered that I downloaded Endless Sky years ago and never gave it a proper play. As it turns out, it continues to be updated (as recently as May) and is every ounce a worthy successor to the Escape Velocity throne. I wish I had dived into it sooner, it's lovingly crafted and beautiful to look at. It's basically the same game, modernized, and with specific small UX improvements that fans of EV will appreciate. And it's free and open-source, so what've you got to lose?
Oh hell yes! Hydro Thunder is absolutely amazing (or at least it was for its time). Admittedly the console release(s) were pretty weak ports (Dreamcast got the least bad version, though), and they didn't change the fact that the game is very much trying to eat your quarters -- even on a home console. I come back to it every few years and don't worry myself with winning (the computer racers are very far from a fair fight) and instead try to just have fun jumping, hitting shortcuts, and boost chaining. I love the levels, and it really highlights the need that exists in gaming for more water-based arcade racers. I've played a handful of others that fit that mold, but nothing with the satisfying scope and spectacle of Hydro Thunder.
Are you emulating or playing on original hardware?
Emulating it for the first time since my VGA box is failing on me. Poor old Dreamcast has been through a lot over the years! I recently picked up a Raspberry Pi 4b and found overclocking it to 2GHz is stable. I've had mixed results with other games in my collection, but Hydro Thunder plays perfectly on it. Better than perfectly, actually, since it's running in HD. The thing that really made me squeal with glee was when I traversed a particular part of the "Ship Graveyard" course. The part where you come flying out of a shortcut towards a lighthouse in the middle of a heavy storm. My DC could never get through that bit without dropping frames, but on the Pi? Smooth as butter.