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

Now that I have more free time, I have been playing some new games!

• Hades: This game easily beat the two-hour smell test. I was hesitant since it has an aesthetic that reminds me of Bastion (from the same devs) and I didn't care for Bastion. However, it is like if you mixed Bastion with Dead Cells, and the result is incredible. I can see there is a ton of replay value here figuring out the ideal boons to select based on your weapon and previous boons. This game has that "one more run" itch that I am always seeking from games.

• Pinball FX2 VR - Got this on sale along with the Season 1 pack. It is an awfully good experience in VR, not without its own hiccups. Very rarely will my controllers get stuck in-game. Other than that though, this is so much fun. I have enjoyed all the boards that I have played so far, with Epic Quest being my favorite. I played enough Epic Quest over the past two weeks to get into the top 100 leaderboards.

• Apex Legends- I haven't played this since it launched and I am not really all that impressed with it today. For some reason, these FTP games really lean into that overwhelming UI that is reminiscent of loud boxart from the PS3/360 era. I was hoping to get into Apex since one of my good friends is playing it again, but I think I will pass at this time.

• Retro Bowl- As a quick edit, I thought I would give a shout out to a little mobile game that has consumed me during pointless work meetings. This is an American football game on phone, with graphics reminiscent of the NES era. You only play on offense, but you manage the team's coordinators, roster, and training/rehab/stadium renovations. It has a lot of charm and if you enjoy American football, I recommend giving this a try!

For some reason, I went back to Baba Is You after already having "finished" it to try and go for 100% solved. This game is hard. And amazing. It's honestly a small miracle that it actually became somewhat of a well known game, this is absolutely hardcore Stephen's Sausage Roll-level puzzling, no graphics or story gimmicks. I'm having a great time with it.

Playing through Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire right now. It's a really good game so far, it's disappointing that it didn't sell well and there probably won't be a sequel. Some thoughts:

• Having an exotic setting that is grounded with more traditional fantasy tropes is really fun to explore. I love the pirate theme and combined with the Pillars renaissance-inspired setting with arquebuses and matchlock pistols it is really great thematically.

• The game is much tighter mechanically this time around. Most notably it has shed the borrowed D&D mechanics for priest/druid/wizard classes and moved every class to a per-encounter resource system that either ticks up (do actions to generate resources) or ticks down from a finite pool. Combined with the move away from the camping supplies/rest system of Pillars I, it leads fights being balanced around each encounter rather than managing your resources across an entire dungeon (a virtual limit anyways as you were always able to backtrack back to town for more camping supplies in the first game). This makes encounters a lot more fun as you don't just spam the same 2 or 3 per-encounter spells every time before turning to your larger spell repertoire.

• Everything is fully voiced for people who don't like reading and so far I've been really impressed by the voice-acting. The cast of Critical Role voice the game's main companions and they do a phenomenal job. I've been having a hard time determining who I'd like to keep in my party -- even the 'annoying' characters like Xoti have a charm to them.

• It seems to lean a lot on Pillars I for the player to really get a handle on what's going on -- knowing the nature of the god pantheon in Eora really adds some understanding to the main plot line.

• A common complaint is the pacing of the game and while it's too early for me to say how much of an issue it is I did turn on upwards-only level scaling to prevent myself from over-leveling as I like to complete side content as it comes up before continuing the main story.

• I'm playing the RTwP version of the game rather than the added-on turn-based mode. I tried the turn-based mode and it felt a bit bolted-on with the design not quite being right. For one, there is no option to toggle between the two -- which seems like a trivial thing to let the player do outside of combat. Thus, the trash mobs that occupy some of the maps can really extend the game in a not-fun way, as each fight is way longer. I would love the ability to toggle on turn-based for large and complicated fights and toggle off for the rest but alas that is not an option. Secondly, they didn't get the balance quite right. Dexterity is one of the most useful attributes in the base game as it determines your action speed while in turn-based mode it just determines your initiative in the first round of combat -- something most classes other than crowd control can safely dump. Heavy armor, which also negatively affects action speed in the base game, can safely be worn by all classes in turn-based as everyone gets one action per turn and it just negatively affects your initiative. For these reasons, I would recommend the RTwP version of the game.

Overall I've been quite impressed and I would say it is a step up from Pillars of Eternity which surprisingly sold much better. I think part of the reason is people really like there standard high-fantasy over something a bit different and another would the overall poor advertisement -- I can't remember hearing much about the release but I am really glad to be playing it a couple years later.

I've been playing Among Us a lot lately with my young nieces and my in-laws. It would be fun, but for some reason I'm the imposter literally 80+% of the time, which is frustrating for everyone but especially the kids.

I think the only game I'm ever playing these days is a Fallout title. But whatever! I decided to give Fallout 4's Survival Mode a shot. I actually really like it and it's breathing some fresh air into a game I've poured countless hours into. The mode makes a few changes:

• You can only save by sleeping in a bed, so you have to play the game very cautiously and strategically. For example, I don't do any quests in an area until I find either a nearby Settlement to claim or a spare bed to drop a save in. Because if I die mid-quest, all progress since my last sleep/save is gone and I have to run allll the way back and do it alll over again.
• You have to deal with hunger/thirst, so you develop strategies for making sure you've got unradiated food/water on you at all times. But this mode also cuts your carry capacity, so there's a lot of priority juggling now.
• You hit enemies a little harder, but they hit you way harder in turn. So it's pretty easy to get wiped out if even the most easy of encounters go wrong. It's also really easy to be one-shot killed by mines, grenades, and heavy weapons. Using VATS has never been so important.
• No fast-travel. You have to manually hoof it to everywhere across the map, which makes Settlements really important because they allow you to create a network of safe locations you can stop out mid-trip. The one big downside I ran into is that Preston sent me to a settlement halfway across the map, and I was expected to return to him to turn it in. Quest's only worth like 300xp and you get the settlement even if you don't turn the quest in, so I'm just leaving that quest unfinished until I make it across the map (although there's literally no reason to return there as far as the storyline goes)

I picked up Harmonix's new game Fuser, since I'm a big fan of theirs (and rhythm games in general) and will buy pretty much anything they put out. I think it's a great mixing tool, but it's not a very good game.

The campaign mode seems to mostly be more like an extended tutorial that introduces you to all the different capabilities slowly. The way of getting high scores and better rankings seems to mostly depend on changing up the pieces of your mix constantly and satisfying the game's random "requests", but a lot of that just hurts the actual sound of the mix you're making. I don't want to suddenly need to throw in a drum solo when my sweet Call Me Maybe remix is in the middle of the chorus.

Anyway, mostly looking forward to finishing up the campaign and having everything available, and then just being able to mess around with it in the more free-play-ish modes. It's got some really neat tech involved to be able to mix elements from different songs together (that they originally built for their mostly-kinda-failed board game DropMix). It's unfortunate that it's a full-price ($60 USD / $80 CAD) game because I think that's steep for "neat mixing tool to tinker with" for most people, but that's probably also the only way they can afford to license all the big-name music that's in the game.

I'm especially interested to see if anything ends up happening with custom songs being added to the PC version. There's some incredible potential there if it's not too complex to add new songs and have the game be able to handle them.

After many failed attempts I discovered a minecraft modpack that is awesome, SevTech. You get a progression tree and lots of low tech extra things to do - you can't just punch a tree to get wood anymore, you have chop flint to sharpen it and build primitive tools first.

Halo 4 - This came to PC via the Master Chief Collection so I took the opportunity to play it for a second time. It's fine. I remember not particularly loving it the first time around, and I still don't love it. But I also more fondly remember the deviations from the Halo series, Reach and ODST, more than the mainline series, and this one is no worse than the mainline. I've recently played Reach and I'm working on ODST, and I stand by that. Those two games are better than the rest of the series by a country mile, and Halo 4 fits within the mainline just fine.

Halo 5: Guardians - Here's where the mainline really deviates. I appreciate that they had to do something different with Halo 5, but they went too hard into adding more verbs, namely dash, hover, shoulder tackle, and ground pound. I play Halo almost entirely single player nowadays, so maybe these make more sense in MP, but I never use them. They're just things that exist to hide intel.

Speaking of intel, woof. I love a good lore hunt. I sought out all the terminals in 4. I'm using a map to find all 30 audio logs in ODST. I don't mind a collectible hunt. But Halo 5 has too much. This is still a FPS. It'd be terribly inconsiderate of me to spend so much time hunting for and listening to these intel pieces if I were to play this coop, and it was built for four player coop. 15 levels, with 6 - 12(!) pieces of intel each, is just a lot of collecting for a game of this nature.

5 is a very pretty game though, and with the rest of the MCC complete now, I hope it gets some love and a PC port. MCC got some unspecified Xbox Series X|S enhancements, maybe 5 will too. But also Halo Infinite isn't done yet, doesn't have a firm release date, and it's probably all hands on deck for that game.

The Long Dark has come a long way since it's early access days. I'm still just tooling around in survival, but intend to do story mode soon. It's one of my favorite survival games to date.

Also started through Lifeless Planet, and while unremarkable so far, with some some seriously wonky controls and obvious invisible walls, I'm curious to see where the story goes.

Edit:
Oh also played through 'The Suicide of Rachel Foster'. That game was such a disappointment. Some decent level design and some fantastic soundacaping marred by an absolutely horrible script.

I'm usually a retro/Indie gamer, but I picked up a PS5 to play The Last of Us Part 2. If you liked the first game, you'll definitely like the second one. It's kind of a mix of stealth and third person shooter. The most significant thing though is very good storytelling with great voice acting. The characters and the world are filled-out in great detail.

I played a bit of World of Warcraft this week (about 90 minutes or so) and will probably be playing some this week, as it is the start of a new expansion.

The pre-patch event was okay; I wasn't blown away, and I didn't play much, but I did get the feat of strength for completing it, and enjoyed the story well enough. My excitement level for the expansion is fairly minimal, as it has been for most expansions starting with Warlords and onward, though unlike many, I found BfA to be better than Legion and WoD. I will play and will raid with my guild, but I'm not really "into it" the same way I used to be. More and more I'm feeling disconnected from PC gaming; I have hundreds / thousands of games available, but it's a struggle to find some that I want to play, and harder still to find them that I want to play to "completion", if that's even an option.

I think that part of this is my involvement in the WoW community specifically, and the gamer community in general. It's exhausting, and the more I ignore both communities, the better I feel about games in general. Tildes is the exception - this community feels very wholesome about games, generally.

Still playing Eternal Card Game nearly 500 hours clocked, and this thing still draws me. Hit Master rank in Throne mode (one of the 3 PVP modes) for the third time (ranks reset monthly), and am hoping to hit Master rank in Expedition mode. That seems harder, but I'm getting a bit higher than I usually have gotten in the past.

Playing my way through Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun, hoping to at least complete it at Normal difficulty. Not sure whether I'll continue beyond that (e.g. to play on Hard difficulty).

Have dusted off and come back to Fantasy Strike, a good F2P fighting game. I commented on it earlier this year:

A relative newcomer to the fighting game genre. It has some really neat, innovative features (see http://www.sirlin.net/posts/fantasy-strikes-features ) that I think make it stand out in a good way. Low initial learning curve, and pretty fun. Oh, and they recently went free-to-play, so that removes that barrier to entry.

I also recently purchased the Core Pack when it went 50% off on Steam. Not because I per se wanted what the Core Pack provides, but because I wanted to support the developers, because I think they're doing a lot of right things with the design of this game compared to the more popular titles in the fighting game genre.

PvP is very challenging, but just the right amount of challenge. I'm not getting stomped to the tune of 30% win rate or anything. I feel like I have a win rate just a shade under 50%, so actually winning a (mini) tournament (consisting of 3 consecutive PvP matches) is rare and satisfying.

Sadly, it does seem that the playerbase seems to be dwindling a bit, as waiting for a matchup can sometimes take a few minutes. I'm okay with that, as I just switch windows and go do something else in the mean time.

I’m on the Genshin Impact train with that anime waifu gatcha needle straight in my veins.

Do not recommend if you can’t stay free2play, or reasonably put in only a few bucks. Pretty sick game though.

If you're a fan of horror/creepy stuff, you should seriously check out World of Horror. Very Junji Ito-inspired, with nice splash of Lovecraftian mythos. It has wonderful 2bit art (or 1bit if you enable it) that you can customize with preset color schemes. The music is amazing, I love the soundfont. The visuals are superbly unsettling at times, but are always impressive. It is early access, but it's so obviously a product of passion that I'm confident it's only going to get better. I highly recommend checking it out, and if you're not sure from the screenshots, Vinesauce (Vinny more specifically) has a few VODs of it on his Youtube channel.