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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.
Hades, generally not a fan of "rougelike" games but I'm a fan of Supergiant Games (the developer) and I think this is their best game so far. Most impressed I've been by a game in a while and I find thats more difficult the longer you've been playing games.
I'm with you on this, in all ways. I'm not a big roguelike person either but this is the kind of game that transcends its format and has massive wide appeal. On top of that, an excellent approach to story that I have not seen come out of any roguelike/lite. But, most importantly, the gameplay is just so much fun. I feel like I never know what kind of ridiculous combination of weapons/boons I'll have each run but I almost always enjoy what I get by the end.
Something I do find remarkable about the game is how it slowly trains you to get over any difficulty humps to the point that once you pass them, you can fly through it with less and less issue on each subsequent run. One of my issues with many roguelikes is that it feels like a crapshoot and if RNG isn't on your side, you may as well tank a run unless you have really studied the mechanics. But with Hades, it feels more like it's a matter of learning what the nature of the challenge is and then figuring out how to meet it with that run's combination of weapons/boons.
How is it supporting timed exclusivity to buy it it now that it's no longer exclusive? I can understand why it'd be supporting it to have bought it from Epic, but now that you can get it a variety of places does it actually say anything to Supergiant or anyone else about your opinion on timed exclusivity?
Interesting. Can I ask a couple more questions? I haven't had a chance to talk to someone who feels strongly about it. Do you also avoid games that were originally only on a console and eventually come to PC or to other consoles? If a game is only released on Steam, do you refuse to buy it because there's not a second distribution channel?
Thank you. I really appreciate you providing nuanced answers. In retrospect my questions could have looked like the setup to some "gotcha", and I appreciate you explaining your thinking in a bit more depth. I hadn't previously thought in depth about the issue, and appreciate the context you've provided.
OSRS will always have a special place in my heart. I sank many many hours in to it when I was in middle/high school before I sadly got banned for no reason.
I still have another account that I'll sometimes pick up every now and then, but it's never really gripped me like it did the first time.
This is exactly what reignited my interest in the game as well. All of the different self-imposed restrictions people place on themselves to make the game more difficult and interesting. I feel like with such an old game there's already too much theory already established on what is the most optimal playstyle for maximising gains, but I believe that few things kill enjoyment as much as feeling like you need to tick in a bunch of boxes.
With stuff like Tileman Mode, area restricted accounts, one-skill-at-a-time, removing the ability to bank, you're forced to engage with the content that often gets taken for granted.
I personally don't have the stamina for some of the more restrictive playstyles, but I really enjoy watching others progress in these novel ways. I do have an ironman account that I hop on every once in a while. It's a nice way of doing something relaxing, like chopping trees, progressing slowly towards some overarching goal while chatting with people or watching something else.
The RNG factor is also a real dopamine casino. It's easy to see why so many are hooked!
Me too! Except I have been drawn in again by the Leagues stuff. If group ironman ever comes out, I think that's what'll really get me back into the main game.
I'm burning through the single player campaign of Torchlight 2. It's Diablo 3 lite (which was already Uncaffinated Diet Diablo 2) and is honestly something I'd suggest to a child or someone brand new to gaming that was interested in playing something like D3.
Loved D2, played it for way too long and it's still installed on my computer for that just-in-case-I-want-to-play scenario. I haven't heard of that project or followed D2 in awhile though. Is it dead/servers finally gone or they just preparing in case Blizzard stops resetting the ladder?
I guess my question wasn't clear. Does the mod exist purely for the sake of creating on top of an amazing game and keep it going after Blizzard stops supporting it or has Blizzard already killed the D2 servers?
I started playing All of You on Apple Arcade. The premise is simple: A hen has lost her chicks and you have to help her retrieve them. The gameplay is different than you'd expect, though. Each level has a few bubbles that show some sort of scene. Your hen is in the bubble on the left and the chick is in the bubble on the right. You start time in one bubble by tapping it, then stop time by tapping again. You don't have to run time in the order of the bubbles, and in fact, it's in your interest not to. You can only control a single bubble at a time. If you start time in one bubble, time in the previously running bubble stops. When you tap on a bubble with the hen in it, she walks from left to right. There may or may not be obstacles in the way. When she reaches the edge of the bubble, time stops. If you press the next bubble, she walks into it, and so on.
It's a really cool game! I wouldn't have been sold on the premise alone, but the mechanics of starting and stopping time make for some really interesting gameplay. There are a few other tricks it has, too. Some bubbles can be flipped left-to-right. Some sets of bubbles can be exchanged in spatial order. Some bubbles run time constantly and can't be started or stopped.
My only complaint is that a few of the levels have too little information. It can sometimes be difficult to discern which objects in the scene are things you have to interact with and which aren't. Some objects are very small. One level (and after playing 50+ levels, only a single level) requires the sound to be on. I generally play around other people and turn the sound off to avoid annoying them. I happened to notice a very very difficult to see treble clef sign in some of the artwork and that clued me in to the need to turn the sound on. (And if you're deaf? Well, good luck! It's possible to do the puzzle without sounds, so long as you're not also colorblind, but I don't give people good odds for getting it that way.)
Having a great time playing Pikmin 3 in coop. Never played a Pikmin game before but it's easily been my most anticipated release of the year. It's the nintendoest RTS imaginable and I love it for that. I'm surprised just how well they pull off the atmosphere, the nature scenes look really vivid and "alive" and there's a strange melancholy to the music and overall presentation, despite the cute character designs. The gyro pointer controls also work really, really well, I just want this to become the default for console gaming in general, it's so good. If there's one thing that bothers me, it's the general "messiness" of it, sometimes. Like, you're basically doing crowd control 100% of the time, at best switching between different kinds of Pikmin to throw into the action, but it almost always gets to a point where it's near impossible to keep track of all your Pikmin. I guess that's by design, but it kinda makes most actions feel like "send ALL your Pikmin to point A", most strategy is only meta stuff like making sure you have enough of a certain species. But that's nitpicking. I love my time with the game and hope it's successful enough for a Pikmin 4! Considering this is a port, I actually think they added enough to not make it feel lazy. For example, I couldn't imagine playing it solo, coop feels like the way it always was meant to be played and that's a huge addition.
I also got hooked on Mario's Super Picross (Japanese-only, it's part of the NSO SNES collection). It's like a Sudoku but more fun. I can't stop.
Maybe I haven't kept up with the times, but I kinda let go of emulation, especially for 3D games. Somehow, it still seems slow for Gamecube+ generations, there's always bits that are broken and input/output issues (I kinda want to use the original controls, which would require purchasing the original hardware and I dislike pixely textures and fonts being stretched into FOUR KAYYYYY monstrosities). I once was this close to buying a used Wii for basically 5 games (Pikmin being one of them) but the Switch got announced right then and overshadowed my excitement for retro gaming.
I mean... maybe I'll try, though! I definitely want to play the first one, eventually. I was a bit disappointed they didn't do a "Pikmin Trilogy" release like with Metroid Prime, that would have been perfect.
Not a lot of actual game time for me for the last week, but I have played a little bit of World of Warcraft - the new patch has some great features, and I'm excited for the pre-expansion event that's coming up, and the expansion to follow. I mostly just went to the barbershop with every single character. I'll probably do some levelling since it's so painless now.
I have occasionally snuck a game of Holedown which I think was suggested by @Deimos at some point in a similar post lost in the depths of time. It's just about perfect for a mobile game that you might want to play for 2 minutes and then come back to later.
A friend of mine recently got a job at a large board and video game suppliers which is very near my house (literally ten minutes walk, I had no idea it was there!), and I found out he's happy to (a) buy me stuff using his staff discount and (b) deliver said stuff to my house on his way home. 10% off AND same-day delivery? Hell yeah!
So I'm playing The Outer Worlds on PS4. It's everything I thought it would be, which is essentially Space Fallout (Fallout New Vegas, not the considerably crappier Fallout 4) in a slightly nicer game engine. I only get maybe an hour every day or so to play so it ought to last me a while.
Been playing a lot of 7d2d with a buddy. What started out as a server with 4-5 people became just he & I. We have been having a blast making our base decked out, getting all the goodies. This weekend we added a few mods, one for UI, one for farming, and one for new vehicles. Now we have so many more things to do/get. Plus we went through a horde night and noticed it was destroying our base so we have started designing a new horde base out in the middle of nowhere on the edges of the town. That led to us needing more concrete, which is what we will have to focus on before the next horde night. I also finally got Age of Wonders: Planetfall from a group I am a part of on Discord. Just started playing it, seems pretty nifty, but I am a sucker for 4x games.
G-Police: Weapons of Justice - I thought G-Police was pretty cool, but I got hung up on a rather difficult mission. The sequel is better. It's the same game, mostly, except the default forward/backward movement is no longer a throttle by default. Press X, accelerate forward. Let go of X, decelerate. It makes the dogfights a bit easier as I can stop and shoot without fiddling with the throttle. Also, the game recognizes that stop and shoot results in taking more hits, so health regenerates slowly. There's still a ton of draw-in and a very limited range of view, but at least this time they draw big wireframes for building in the distance, so I'm not running smack into them as I navigate the city. Overall, better looking, more fun, but I wish this made the leap to PS2 or beyond. I like the concept and the look of the game but it's severely hampered by the lack of power in the PS1.
Daemon X Machina - I very badly wanted this to be Armored Core. It's not Armored Core. Yeah, it plays a lot like AC but I'm finding the start extremely slow. I've done something like a dozen missions with the same loadout, because I'm not getting a lot of options for my mech build. Between missions, there's just a deluge of chatter between rival mercenaries. It may be really reductive, but this is more or less tweens arguing about who's cooler. Over and over. HLTB says this is something around a 20 hour game, so I guess they're establishing a cast up front but I cannot tell any of these people apart. I don't care about them. I'm really disappointed.
Minecraft Dungeons - I started playing this strictly on xCloud. It's an alright Diablo clone in a Minecraft skin, but it lacks a Minecraftness. I can't craft. I can't destroy the environment. I can't build. Even tossing TNT doesn't do anything but kill enemies. It's cute and it looks like Minecraft but that's about it.
Gears of War 4 - It took me three years of starts and stops, but I finally finished this game. I played and loved the first trilogy. Gears of War was my first Xbox 360 game. This one plays almost identical to those games, and I've gotten a wee bit tired of it. I started it on Xbox One, and finished it after I played it on PC and took the difficulty down to "normal".
I've sorta been metagaming the past few days. I saw someone reviewing a Powkiddy V90 on YouTube. I've been kind of waiting for Chinese emulation consoles to become "good enough" for quite a while, and apparently the fact that they have a GBA SP style design was enough to push me over the edge. Besides that, I saw a reseller on Amazon and had enough credits through them to buy it so it was essentially free and came next-day.
Of course, being Chinese, it came with a bunch of ROMs preinstalled. This particular one had all of the Chinese titles translated to English so they didn't make any sense, so I played through all of them briefly. It even had emulators for some more obscure consoles like the wonderswan and Neo Geo Pocket. Weirdly a lot of the wonderswan titles were visual novels.
I got it mainly to play handheld games, and it doesn't disappoint in that area. There was always a lot of Gameboy games I never bothered with just because playing them on a big screen makes them ugly. On this system it's nice; the system comes with an IPS display so it is very sharp.
Surprisingly enough, it can also play playstation games, though it is nowhere near a perfect experience. Vagrant Story performs surprisingly well on it, and that is a challenging game to emulate. Sadly, the SNES and NGP emulators also run slowly (though it isn't as noticible for the SNES emulator on most games because it has frameskipping), and a number of emulators have the buttons mismatched.
From there I flashed the open-source Miyoo firmware to a 256GB microsd card I had originally had planned for another project and popped it into the machine. That honestly fixed a number of my gripes, though I have yet to try out the NGP or Wonderswan emulators yet. Plus it came with a number of additional direct software ports which I found to be engaging.
I am still playing Star Wars: The Old Republic with a group of friends. We started up when the pandemic started since we couldn't hang out IRL anymore. We just finished the class stories form the original vanilla release. Sadly, the multiplayer content after this point is mostly focused on gear grinding and less on story. While there still is a great story, it's mostly solo, as all classes are silo'd into one size fits all story.
But since some in the group have already played the story, like me, we'll just watch as others in the group play through it, which is also fun. And there's still plenty of dungeons and what not to go through. It's still a shame this game that mostly engages subscriptions by having more story content rather than the ways other MMOs do it never really got adopted by a super large player base. It would have been really special to see them continue this game the way it was at release.
I'm still running the gungeon. Not much more to say about it, except I think I've played the game out. I think I'll beat the advanced dragon once and then retire it. It's a damn good game that I've played to near death at this point
Hades - Seriously good game. Yes, I know everyone is raving about it. It's deserved. I haven't enjoyed any of Supergiant's games prior, but I've respected their talent greatly. Hades sucked me right in and is such a delightful blend of gameplay and narrative. Sometimes I caught myself wanting to purposefully bungle runs so that I could talk to NPCs! Great characters, and such amazing renditions of the classic Greek gods and goddesses. Them actually having some varied Greek (Mediterranean? I'm not sure) skin tones was a fantastic choice. The voices are great as well. Exuberant gods, edgy gods, reserved gods, party gods, all the voices fit. Also the music. Fantastic basslines. I love how the music is dynamic, and I love how when the fighting is finished in any room, that dirty bass is left almost all alone to do it's thing. It's a damn shame those bass tracks aren't included in the game's official OST, because they're killer.
Disco Elysium - This game is pretty far outside my comfort zone. I tend to avoid slow, isometric CRPGs. I have very little patience, so I tend to get bored quickly. Disco Elysium has blown me away. It is such a lovingly and meticulously crafted game that it's hard to not just be in awe of the game's scope. The map isn't enormous, but all the stuff packed into it is nothing short of impressive. Great voice acting, amazing writing, and consistent humor. Such a stylish game, and it certainly captures a vaguely familiar time period, despite none of the locations or happenings actually being real. I highly recommend this game. It truly does transcend its genres.
Halo: Master Chief Collection - A classic. Or rather, several of them. Halo 3: ODST is my favorite in the series, and so I ran through the campaign on legendary with some friends. It is wayyyy easier than I recall. But the music and atmosphere are still so delightfully lonely and insidious. I then tried Halo 1 on legendary, and deeply regretted it. No thank you lol. Fiesta slayer is still a delightful clusterfuck
I've been replaying Ori and the Will of the Wisps after the latest update. I didn't encounter some of the bugs I found on the first playthrough. (Though I found a new one. There's an enemy that I can knock into a cutscene zone. When the cutscene starts the enemy keeps attacking.)
Great game with great music and great graphics. I think games like that are better on the second playthrough. On my first one, I beat the whole game without finding the healing ability. This time I found it right away.