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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.
I've replayed the entire Max Payne series recently. It's been a long, long time since I last replayed the first two games and I was in the mood for an immersive single player shooter story, so why not a trilogy that comes in as a total 30 hours of gaming that spans over 12 years of gaming history.
The original games have aged very well. Max Payne is pretty barebones in terms of modern gaming, with its sparse 2001 era 3D modelling and level design. Max Payne 2 is a 2003 sequel which is notable for being one of the first games to really show off Havok physics, a year before Half-Life 2 showed everyone what could truly be done with in-game physics. May Payne 3 is not made by Remedy, but by Rockstar Games in 2013 and given their full attention and detailing for what may be the best third-person shooter in terms of raw gameplay to this day. It's been a real trip to go through this series but it's been a great journey between the series' excellent gameplay, unique film noire approach, and generally great design.
The entire series was based on John Woo's Hong Kong action movies like Hard Boiled, with bullet time from the Matrix thrown in for good measure. The result is a third-person shooter that's as much about freedom of movement as it is about precise and quick gunplay. Where other games had you avoiding projectiles or divining the best firing positions in new arenas, Max Payne instead feels more about reacting and responding to new situations with quick thinking and reflexes, helped along by its famous bullet-time dodging. The result is a series of shooters that feels cinematic in gameplay, probably moreso than all other shooters.
What has been interesting to experience is how this approach changed over the course of the series when applied back-to-back-to-back. Max Payne 1 and 2 are a wonderful time capsule of the massive improvements in video games in the early 2000s. Max Payne was a phenomenal release for 2001, when it was possible for a small studio to put out an industry-leading game with clever technology and a great art style. Bullet-time was a game changer for many shooters, allowing players to slow down time and respond to situations quickly, referencing and delivering what the Matrix had shown in film two years before. It was a bit rough around the edges with canned animations and a limited graphical fidelity that led to simple but effective level design, in an era where the difference between a bookshelf and a wall was what texture was applied onto the surface.
Levels in Max Payne are effectively hallways and rooms with a few crates and assets placed throughout for flavour. Whether its a snowy street with cars, multiple rooftops with bridges, or a warehouse with cargo, they're all effectively hallways and blocks, dressed up to reflect what the setting should be. It's not bad at all, and has actually aged better than most other games from that era thanks to an impressive attempt at low-poly realistic art styles, mixing stylization with realism. It looks goofy to see Sam Lake's face plastered on a rectangle head in a screenshot, but in motion among other low-poly assets painted up similarly, it's cohesive enough in motion to still feel immersive now in 2020. With such simple assets, of course, it was possible for the game to have a surprisingly large variety of environments and settings between all the levels, enabling it to tell quite an extensive story. The limitation to this is in how enemy placement works: they're always hiding around corners!
There's little to no in-game scripting of events, so you usually have enemies doing things in small cutscenes, or standing there with dialogue lines playing. Most of the actual playing of the first Max Payne involves some trial and error with learning where enemies are in levels in hopes of minimizing any incoming damage so you can get by with the limited amount of painkillers you'll have to heal throughout the level. As a result, Max Payne felt like a bit of a chore by the end to complete in terms of gameplay but it never got boring or uninteresting because of the story and the settings.
Max Payne 2, released just two years later, feels like a whole new era of shooter. With the introduction of Havok physics, a bigger budget, and the experience of making the first game, Max Payne 2 is a fully refined timeless classic. Levels are filled with all kinds of small decorative assets. Barrels, pieces of wood, small containers, desk lamps, coffee cups, and more, the levels of Max Payne 2 are filled to the brim with assets all over. When you get into a firefight and the bullets start flying, everything around is impacted. It's no longer a matter of exchanging gunfire in costumed hallways, it feels closer to what you saw in those John Woo movies as the bullets tear up the environment around you.
Additionally, Remedy worked harder on the various situations so that the various gunfights throughout the game are far more dynamic and varied than before. There are moments where you return gunfire through windows of an apartment complex, other times where you fight between rubbled, decaying buildings, and other still where you fight through multiple floors of a mansion. Something else they did with Max Payne 2 that I've never really noticed other game do is environmental foreshadowing. There are moments of the game that feel like bonus detail or setups that have a payoff later on in the game. A creak in a catwalk foreshadows a total collapse later on. Even some of the enemy counters are setting up for a true version later on.
Max Payne 2 also has a few more necessary improvements to the bullet time mechanics, as the first game was a little sparse and unforgiving with it, along with better balanced weaponry with tweaked precision values. Overall the game feels much better to play than the first.
In terms of story, the Max Payne games were famous for being campy film noire stories, with the first always heralded is a magnificent sendup of them. On replaying them, I'm not sure how well that held up. The first game starts with something akin to a film noire revenge story with plenty of Norse mythology references and some trippy pseudo-horror content thrown in for good measure. Max in this game is effectively extremely depressed and out to see how far he can go before fate does him in—I had forgotten how many times he basically says he doesn't care about collecting evidence more, and then goes on to shoot more bad guys before the police catch up with him. Eventually the story goes into conspiracy territory before its end.
Max Payne 2 takes a step back a bit. It keeps the film noire approach but turns it away from revenge and into a love story between Max, Mona Sax, and greater powers at work throughout the city and the police. Mona Sax returns from the first game but I had forgotten how little she's in it—she really feels like an entirely cut plotline in that one. Here, she's a main character to the point of being a playable one for two or three levels. And as a more focused story, Max Payne 2 seems to have aged a lot better.
Both games feature heavily melodramatic language and imagery to match their sombre, dark tones. Max in both these games is a man lost to what reads as the throes of depression, perpetually in a state of existential crisis. He's never defeatist, but he is snarky in his resignation to fate. In the first game, he's lost into the flow of seeking revenge. In the second, he's lost in love and emotional stability. In both, he knows something bigger than him is going on and he's going to have to get to the bottom of it even though he doesn't particularly want to be involved.
Max Payne 3 is a fairly odd game. Graphically, it's great. Everything is brought to life with high quality textures, lighting, animation, and all. Rockstar spared none of their famous attention to detail with this game. As Rockstar's smallest game, by volume, it benefits from being a densely populated with all kinds of high quality assets, textures, models, and more. This game is gorgeous and there is more variety of levels and shootouts than even Max Payne 2 had.
Gameplay-wise, it's a step up from Max Payne 2 and then some because it introduces some of the absolute best animation-work I've ever seen in a video game, and still perhaps the single best shooting in any game since each bullet is not only physically rendered but so is armour on enemies. It's possible to get a shot placed exactly between armour pads on enemies, such as in armpits or that sliver between helmet and chestpiece when they flex a certain way. It's unbelievable, I've never seen a shooter with such precise hitboxes like this.
Max Payne 3 also features the most advanced use of Rockstar's Euphoria physics-based animation engine. Enemies respond realistically when they get hit and fall, and even Max himself is not immune from the physical consequences of, say, jumping into a wall. Max reaches out and touches walls as he brushes by them, and when he crashes into a counter, he winces and recoils into the hit. Most games would simply ignore such collisions, completing the animation up against the wall. Max Payne 3 instead dynamically accounts for the collision and animates it live. As a result, the gameplay of Max Payne 3 is incredible.
Where the game is massively let down is, well, in the Rockstarisms of its design: shoddy coding, purposefully inconvenient design choices, and an inability to be subtle in its story.
The most glaring issue is an overabundance of cutscenes. The original games had a few here and there but they mostly were at the beginning and end of levels. Otherwise, most things played out live in the world and you could respond to them as you felt like. In Max Payne 3, there can be a cutscene literally to open a door and walk into the next room. This wouldn't be so bad if they weren't also completely unskippable. The game even teases you with a Still Loading... message when you try to skip, and will let you skip after a while in certain cutscenes... but not all of them. It's insanely inconsistent. It can't be for loading times either. The game will let you skip a 10 minute cutscene when loading a new level a few seconds in, but then won't let you skip another ten minute cutscene even though you are in the same room as when the cutscene started and there was nothing to load! After many years, someone eventually made a cutscene skip mod to address this glaring issue and it seems to have revealed the real reason: this game's coding looks like a mess. It seems Rockstar chose to enforce these unskippable cutscenes to address texture pop-in issues, and scripting errors with NPCs, but then chose to release the game as-is with unskippable cutscenes instead of fixing these issues.
They also chose to try a whole new approach to Max Payne's film noire roots by uprooting it entirely and transplanting it into sunny Rio de Janeiro, and making it a character study all about Max being an alcoholic, self-defeatist sadsack. It's certainly a bold choice but not one I'm certain had to happen. It lends to fascinating new levels and environments, but the few missions that take place in New York City show a promise that another NYC-based Max Payne could have gone just fine too thanks to the 10 year improvement in technology and Rockstar's own attention to detail and level design.
The focus on Max I feel is a misstep. While the first two games didn't exactly put him in the best light, they also didn't focus on him being a sadsack addict. They focused on, effectively, a single bad night in which his life is upturned and he meets fate head-on. An entire story about him being a depressed sadsack and a slow journey to not be one isn't nearly as endearing as a revenge story or a love story, honestly, because that type of growth in character through an action-packed shooter just doesn't really come together convincingly. Like, he just goes from shooting people with manically depressed dialogue of defeatism to shooting people with manically depressed dialogue of resignment. Big whoop.
The story, despite its bright and sunny dressing, is also much more dark and gruesome than the first two games, which followed some pretty general film noire principles. Max Payne 3 feels more influenced by the sort of shocking drug cartel stories of works like Breaking Bad and Sicario. After about ten playthroughs of the game, I still can't tell if Rockstar were trying to do film noire in an unconvential setting or if they thought they could do their own unique sort of noire. The end sentiments of the story just feel kind of... odd? Like somewhere between Max Payne and, of all fucking things, Call of Duty.
And not that I mind that they replaced the original games' comic book panel cutscenes with fully animated cutscenes, but it really does change the overall feel.
I can't help but feel like a lot of Max Payne 3's design was reused for Red Dead Redemption 2. It certainly didn't show up in GTAV, which had toned down physics and Euphoria engine interactions than even GTAIV, but RDR2's gunplay and enemy reactions work a lot like they do in Max Payne 3. Even that "floaty" aiming control complaint about the console versions. Another similarity, one that feels more like a problem that wasn't fixed, was the insistence on changing what gun the player has equipped. It's already aggravating enough in RDR2 that Arthur would simply unequip a gun if he was on his horse too long, Max Payne 3 feels worse about this because it's a game entirely about going through shooting galleries! If I walk into a shooting gallery with an assault rifle, why would Rockstar insist on switching me over to a pistol? I have an assault rifle! I was using an assault rifle! I don't want to use a pistol against these heavily armoured enemies they just put me into a cutscene to watch walk into the room, I want to use this rifle that fires armour piercing bullets. And then I have to waste precious few seconds switching back to that rifle.
Why is this even a thing? Why is this a thing that's survived over two games? Which idiot at Rockstar things making the player fight for control over the player character is a good thing? This is probably the worst of the Rockstarisms: the propensity to fight the player for control. There are moments in Max Payne 3 where I'll just lose all control of Max to a cutscene, to a slow-walking scene, or to a forced camera perspective. None of these were present in the original games, where their gameplay design refused to compromise on making it feel like a John Woo movie by giving players full control as much as possible. Max Payne 3 can capture this feel wonderfully, but then it can also feel like I'm being ushered through a still-under-construction hallway that they ask me not to pay attention to because the next room is going to be really cool.
It's a shame because, as I replayed through this series, I couldn't help but replay the games individually during the playthrough to get my fill of the sheer enjoyment of actually playing them. These games feel great. When I finished playing Max Payne 2, I immediately played it again. I beat the game twice in a day (it's a 5 hour game). I've played Max Payne 3 about three times through since I played it this latest time (only because the cutscene skip mod exists). I replayed Max Payne 2 many times back in the day. I've played Max Payne 3 on every difficulty across two platforms before (X360 and PC) and then swore it off because I couldn't deal with the cutscenes anymore, especially the insanely long one that is mandated at the start of Chapter III. Thanks to the cutscene mod's existence, I couldn't help but replay the game two more times on progressively harder and harder difficulties.
Again: I couldn't help myself. It's just so much fun. These games are an absolute blast to just play because they nail the feel of a gunfight-laden action movie so well. Nothing comes close. Max Payne 2 feels more satisfying than many games today, and Max Payne 3 still feels like the peak of third-person shooters.
There are moments of Max Payne 3 that I don't think any game will match, honestly. The airport fight scene near the end, with TEARS by HEALTH is simply one of the most cathartic, gripping, and satisfying encounters I've ever played in 25 years of shooter games. Diving in and out of bullets, glass flying, responding to enemies in every direction, with top tier graphics and animations with a musical backing like that... jeez.
If you consider yourself a fan of shooters, I highly recommend playing through the series. Overall, they all hold up very well together in 2020.
I have very fond memories of playing Max Payne 1 over and over again with the mod Kung-Fu 3.0 enabled. It even had a level/progression system built-in !
Here's what it looks like
Fantastic write-up, you really made me want to go back and play through these again. I'd also recommend the F.E.A.R. series as a follow-up and would love to hear your take on that. In my mind it's sort of a natural successor both in terms of gameplay style and also "action movie" visual / narrative elements, just in the horror genre rather than noire. Adding good squad AI to the enemies also really amped up the combat experience.
Oh, that's a good idea. I was a huge fan of FEAR back in the day, and I didn't mind FEAR 2 at all. FEAR 3.... woof. But it's been years since I've played all those, and I did enjoy their unique blend of horror/action FPS. I might just throw those on next and see if they take me.
♩EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeenter the gungeon ♬
♪ Enter the gungeon ♫
Currently mostly just coaching the wife through rainbow runs and attempts to kill her past. Once she finishes I figure we can do bullet hell runs together.
One of the greatest, tightest gaming experiences in a long time. Pretty much the defining rogue-lite for me.
Also playing E.Y.E Divine cybermancy. I've already beat it once, years ago, but I'm going back and trying to actually follow the story this time.
My legs are OK.
I love EtG so much. Rogue-lites are hit or miss for me, and I don't normally like bullet hell/twin-stick shooters, but for whatever reason I love Enter the Gungeon. I've been playing on and off since not long after it came out, and every couple of months I'll get back into it for a while. Such a great game.
Yeah, couldn't agree more. We plan on playing binding of isaac after enter the gungeon gets boring, but from what little I've played of isaac, I don't see how it can compare. I think the Binding of Isaac makes a couple of game decisions that are superior to EtG, like having exactly two secret rooms per floor, no more, no less, and having smaller maps and quicker runs, but overall the gungeon has such an interesting design and gameplay loop.
I tried to play Binding of Isaac after EtG and couldn't get into it. EtG just has such smooth controls and tight gameplay that I bounced off of BoI.
I did the opposite a few times before sticking with etg. BOI has, imo far more impactful items and upgrades, they change the way the game is played much more dramatically than etg. Boi is a game about playing the odds and strategizing with a vaneer of bullet hell over top. You have to grow your build in sync with the dramatic increase in difficulty (if you never beat mom then you didn't really get far enough to see the exponential growth), sure your skill at the game provides a baseline to play against, but it's your decisions about what rooms to explore, which treasure rooms to explore and which items to leave behind that really make the difference. Etg is much more of a bullet hell, it has a much more linear difficulty curve and power curve, and much more about individual skill and reaction time.
Tomb Raider (2013)
I have attempted to play this game twice before, and each time I've had to stop because of motion sickness. It has an unbearably shaky camera. This time I've made it farther than I have before, though there are times where I have to kind of watch what's going on via my peripheral vision rather than directly. If I weren't so interested in the game, then I'd just skip it, but I'm really liking what they did to reboot the series. I'm someone who loved the original games (I am probably one of a few people in the world who has played Tomb Raider II fully through more than once), and this has all the feel of the original games without the dated jankiness of the originals.
The Jackbox Party Pack 7
This just came out, and it's the best pack they've put out in a while, IMO. Quiplash 3 fixes the last round (which was easily the worst part of Quiplash 2) and lets you put in three answers in response to a prompt, allowing for lots of cleverness or a good ("serious / serious / punchline" setup). Meanwhile, Blather 'Round is sort of like verbal charades, and is my new favorite game across all of Jackbox. You get predetermined phrases that you construct (think magnetic poetry) in order to get people to guess your target word.
There's not a stinker in the bunch, save for The Devil and the Details which isn't a bad game but simply doesn't work via distance since audio chat platforms can't support the chaotic cross-talk that's needed to enjoy the game. I think it would be tons of fun in-person, but it's unfortunately going to be quite a while before we meet up with friends to play this.
Road to Ballhalla
This was a random play from my Steam backlog. It's a ball-rolling collectathon. It's well-made, polished, and has a sort of snarky aloofness to it that I liked, but ended up being a bit too on the frustrating and repetitive side for me to enjoy. I liked the hour I spent with it but didn't feel compelled to stick with it past that.
I've been playing a little bit of the Tony Hawks Pro Skater 1+2 remake and it's... exactly what it used to be, just with slightly shinier graphics. That's not a bad thing by any means. I quite enjoy the challenge modes but what I end up doing most is just free skating around the levels, pulling off the kind of tricks I could never do in real life (aka, standing on a moving skateboard and everything trickier than that). It's just nice and relaxing. That the environments have been hugely prettified makes a difference too, especially the levels which are in perma-sunset lighting.
Two weeks ago I said I was playing Fallout 3, last week I said I gave up and was watching a playthrough, and this week I'm playing Fallout New Vegas! I've just got the itch to play a Fallout game, but I've played 4 and 76 to death and I finished my FO3 playthrough watch (1 and 2 are not my idea of fun, gameplay-wise).
I've tried to get into NV a few times, but stability issues caused me to quit. This time I kept the mods to an absolute minimum and saved often :) Happy to report I sank the bulk of my yesterday into it and the game didn't crash once.
I'm pretty hooked on the game. I've made contact with most of the factions and I'm leaning toward siding with the NCR, House, or just stealing power for myself. Legion was never an option...I know it's all fantasy and roleplaying, but I've never been able to lean that hard into being an evil character in RPGs. Although I certainly did enjoy returning Benny's favor with a "kick in the head". So maybe just a little evil, but only because I couldn't be bothered to find that ass hole a stealthboy.
It's an excellent game. I've only played through it once, but I imagine I will again. I'm about to start playing Fallout 4.
I'm getting into more old-school console puzzle games. Puzzle League (the best generic game for it, aka Panel De Pon, or Tetris Attack as it was first introduced to us not in Japan) and I'm going to try my hand at more Puyo Puyo (via Puyo Puyo Tetris, and probably going to see about the SNES variant, unless I can find some definitive version to emulate).
I've been looking for a more recent PdP-type game, but it turns out there have only been six in twenty-five years, most of which were franchised some other way (Tetris Attack, Pokemon Puzzle Challenge/League, the Animal Crossing one most recently), or as a Japan-only re-release.
Enter Flipon, a PdP-style game for Steam (all 3 OSes) and Switch, for $4. It starts you out on a 4-wide board, but as you progress it adds more as needed for difficulty, and it gets pretty difficult pretty quick. It's sort of like PPT, in terms of story, but lacks a lot of the polish (there were literally only 5 people on the project).
Playing Flipon and going back to Tetris Attack is like playing The Tetris Effect (or maybe JSTris or Tetr.io for those familiar) and going back to NES Tetris. It feels so clean and modern, smooth, and good. Both are great, but they're radically different, even if the core of the game (and the fun) is the same.
I bought Witch It, and then refunded it, because the online was tough to get into. I kept getting stuck on servers with just myself and decided if I really wanted to play prop hunt, I'd just jump on Garry's Mod.
I'm also still playing Factorio. Did a full base overhaul, and am now WTFing at my science disparity. I'm making military at 1/4 the rate of my other two (red & green), and I'm bottlenecking against my fully efficient iron plate production. I'm getting tempted to start a peaceful world just to see what I can do when I can spread uncontrolled across the map without having to worry about biters.
I finished my CK3 Jimena game. I went all the way to 1453 with ~12 characters. I ended up getting basically the the non-character/start specific achievements.
I'd say my 2 favourite characters are at opposite ends of the spectrum.
One was a Emperor who reigned for nearly 60 years, who had 13-ish kids and made all his sons kings and married his daughters to kings. He spent his life warring. He conquered much of north western africa. He enforced his claim to the Holy Roman Empire, which he then destroyed bringing those vassals into the Empire of Hispania. He secured the Christian kingdoms in Outremer for his distant kin. He made his sons kings of the land he conquered. Loved by all Christians, feared by all non-Christians, he lived hard and lived well, dying due to complications from obesity in his mid 60s.
My other favourite character was Queen Catalina. Who inherited a much reduced Empire after her Father and younger brother died within 5 months of each other. Her reign was a rough one. Her father expecting trouble near the end of his life, released most of his surrounding kings vassals trying to ensure the continuation of the empire. Alas it wasnt enough, the quick death of his heir after his ascension to the throne meant that a lazy paranoid Catalina inherited and was surrounded by enemies. Losing the Empire to a vassal she became a Vassal-Queen but that wasnt enough, the enemies in her kingdom tried for her life, they killed her youngest Child and one of her friends and then she fell into a drunken spiral dying of stress after 10 unhappy years on the throne at age 27.
Its one of my favourite things about the CK games, losing doesnt hurt the game and often the stories you get from losing are as interesting as those you get from map painting characters.
Er uh, not much lately. But I'd feel weird if I didn't share anyway.
I've been firing up a couple old PS1 games to mess with trying to run these through my capture card. Namely, I've played a little Jumping Flash 2, Epidemic, and Codename Tenka. A real spectrum of PS1 FPSes. JF2 is one of my favorite PS1 games, and the others are alright. I'll put more time into them when my PS1 SCART cable shows up.
Jumping Flash! 2 is great, and was even more incredible in its time!
It was the PSOne's Katamari Damacy, in my opinion: eminently playable, unabashedly odd, and unpretentiously significant.
Started playing Grand Ages: Medieval, which I bought like in June, but had down in the backlog somewhere.
So... This game feels alright so far, I guess, 38 hours in. I've gotten to the highest title/rank (Emperor), but I have only spread around the Balkans, which is just one region out of like 8 or 9. There's an in-game leaderboard which shows other rulers (all CPU for now), and I'm something like 4th in terms of population and overall empire greatness. There has been zero combat with any other empire so far -- just a few skirmishes with local bandits or wild animals. So, literally, it's been 38 hours of expansion, building and trading. The trading has some AI or UX quirks which make it fall just short of satisfactory. One town could have a massive surplus of some commodity (generally bad, because it drives local prices down, which is bad for your income), and the next town over could have a dearth of that commodity, and could need it for production of some other commodity. Yet, the AI trader does not pick up from the surplus to give to the town in need. Or, at least, if it does, it's only coincidental with some other AI algorithm reason, and it's never a large amount (so as to relieve the surplus). So, I often have to manually direct traders to specific towns, manually click to select commodities to move, direct to the target town, manually click to drop off the goods. Not so bad when you just have 3 or 4 towns, but too much micromanagement when you are over 20 towns/cities in your empire. Thankfully, the need for this isn't constantly there, but it's still bad UX.
Anyway, I'm still playing this, and still having some fun, for now, but I wonder how long that will last. There don't seem to be ways to group troop units (can only drag a box to select), so I wonder how frustrating combat is going to be when I get to that point.
Outer World. It really has a Fallout: New Vegas vibe.
I would hope so, since it was made by a number of the same people.
Crosscode: Stopped playing for a while. I'm at the "point of no return" before the engdame, completing quests and the arena. Still fun but leaving the main story to the side I have kind of lost steam on it. I'm also very bad at finishing rpgs.
Factorio: Has been absorbing me since the 1.0 release. Launched a rocket in vanilla (in a 50-60 science per minute factory) and I'm currently doing the same but using the krastorio2 mod. It's fun but I'm getting a bit too much design debt, so now i would need to rework the bus to automate more machines to rework the train network to rework other stuff and i don't think there is enough time till the endgame to make it worth it. It is still fun but I can only play in small bursts and if I take too long to design something then I get into a lot of arguments with future me regarding implementation, specifications and resources and it's software engineering all over again and oh god someone help me.
Katawa Shoujo: This is what future me plays instead of working on the damn factory. I've done all routes for Emi and I'm currently doing Rin's. I'm liking the game a lot. It's about a kid that almost dies of a heart condition and is sent to a private high school for disabled people. The frame of the story is pretty standard romantic slice-of-school-life but there is a lot of character exploration instead of anime tropes.
Just finished AM2R (PC) on Hard Mode. I thought it was an excellent and much needed reimagining of Metroid II in the style of the GBA-era Metroid games (Zero Mission, Fusion). As a fangame, it near perfectly matches the official Nintendo titles in level design, bosses, and audio/visual production values.
Currently playing through Kirby's Adventure (NES) and think it's good casual fun. A bit too easy, but seems like a perfect game for kids or first-time gamers. The graphics are fantastic.
I've started Vampyr by Dontnod. I really liked their game Life is Strange so I thought I'd give this a try.
So far I really like it. The story is engaging and the game play is pretty cool. So far it's been challenging without being frustrating. What I really like about it is fact that you have the choice to kill innocent people in exchange for a massive XP boost. It makes the game easier, but has consequences for the entire community if you do it.
The game is still playable if you choose not to kill innocent people, just more difficult. I feel like that reflects real life because sometimes life is harder when you choose to do the right thing.
I've been really enjoying Vampyr. I'm about 25 hours in and it feels like what an alternate universe Bioware would have made, if they had kept with their tight-but-dense RPG, small-scale open worldish design instead of pivoting to massive open world action-RPG designs.
I'm only 3-4 hours in, it's nice to know I could get 25 hours out of it potentially. I almost always play the "good" path in games so this time I've decided to mix it up and actually embrace innocent citizens.
I've been dabbling in some CRPGs, playing through BGII for the first time as well as replaying Pillars of Eternity. Have thought about picking up BG3 but kind of want to wait for the whole thing.
Other than that mostly just playing MTG: Arena which is fine. It could be a lot more, but at least we have a digital version of Magic that isn't a relic of 20 years ago.
I'm back to Shores of Hazeron, which is like "What if you crossed EVE Online with Simcity, Minecraft, and Fusion 360".
It's not always exactly fun, and it's buggy as heck for something that's been in development for like 20 years, but it's oddly compelling for its complexity and it's simulationist approach. Pretty much anything the AI crew/citizens can do on a ship or in a city, you can do too.
You can also drive a motorcycle out of a starship and down into a gas giant so...
Wow, I thought I'd heard the SoH was shutting down years ago, nice to know it's still around.
I spent a few days messing around in it with some friends and had a lot of fun just exploring how much it had to offer. It's one of those ridiculously huge games filled with jank and big ideas that are often more fun to hear about other people playing than to wade through yourself.
I might have to take another stab at it sometime.
I have been playing the F2P game Minion Masters.
It's like Clash Royale with a good monetization model (they give out DLCs for free every time they come out and are pretty generous with in-game resources). It also has no leveling for cards, so everyone plays with the same powerlevel. Common cards are good enough to use even at higher tiers and the game is decently balanced. It has been my main casual game for a month by now and I really recommend it.
Regardless of not having much free time or being finished with the other games I'm already in the middle of, I started playing Aardwolf MUD.
Of course, it has been ages since I've played a MUD and Aardwolf seems to be more complex than any of the ones I have played before, so I have spent the vast majority of my time in the Academy finishing classes.
And in a twist of ironic fate, those games that I mentioned having already started are currently unplayable because my gaming PC is currently in my trunk ready to flee wildfires.