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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'm a huge board game buff, my partner and I are actually working to open a board game store in Detroit. But the pandemic keeps messing with our plans. We'll get there eventually!
We played Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy last night and it was a ton of fun. It's a big-ass 4X board game where each of the players manages a competing space empire vying for control of the galaxy.
It's big and complicated, but well designed. All the rules fit together elegantly to minimize 'fiddliness'. You can customize your fleet, research technologies, expand your empire, and figure out your unique strategy to outmaneuver your opponents. If you have 4 or more players you can add diplomacy and backstabbing for an extra layer of strategy. And the whole thing 'only' lasts 8 rounds, so there's a limit on how long it will last.
If you're INTO BOARDGAMES™ then I would recommend it, but it's not for the faint of heart. We played a 2 person game last night from about 10pm to 3am (RIP Advent of Code) and were on the edge of our seats for most of it. The time estimate on the side of the box was a PACK OF LIES that estimated 25 minutes per player
This is the sort of game that you really want to be careful about who you play with. I wouldn't play with players who are new to the hobby, unless I was somehow sure they would enjoy something like this and could handle both the duration and complexity. And if you have an asshole in your group it'll make the whole experience miserable. When you play games that require this much of a commitment, someone who isn't having fun or is just a jerk can bring down the whole mood and sour the experience for everyone.
Control - I've already played Control. I love Control. I'm playing it again because I played it first on PC and now it's on Xbox Game Pass. It's still great on Xbox. And maybe I'm better at it on a controller or they've patched it since I played it, but I haven't really hit any of the difficulty spikes that I remember from my first run through. I got hung up a bit on the first boss, but it was no worse than my first time through.
Borderlands 3 - Somewhere, at some point in time, I lost my enthusiasm for Borderlands. I truly loved the first game. I think I played through it three times, across Xbox and PC. When I played through Borderlands 2, I felt it drag on. I couldn't wait for it to be over, and it just kept going. Eventually, I went through the DLC, but I can't fathom playing that game from scratch again. Maybe I hated the berserker character, but I just felt like I was slogging through it. I never finished Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel. But there was a lot of time between Borderlands 3 and those previous games, so I thought maybe some distance would spark something. I was wrong. It's the same exact game it was in BL2. I put about 17 hours into it when it came out on Steam and put it down until now. It's filling my PC time before Cyberpunk 2077 releases.
Here's the rollercoaster of Borderlands 3 solo enjoyment:
Repeat forever. Despite not really enjoying my character build, and being on the rollercoaster, I sincerely enjoyed a lot of Borderlands 2's writing. There are some legit laughs and some real pathos in there. In Borderlands. Borderlands 3 doesn't have any of that. It's not funny when it's meant to be funny, and it's not compelling so much as grating. Borderlands 3 is a game that eats time. That's about it. It's a depression game.
Thanks for sharing. If you wouldn't mind, could you cross-post your opinion here? I'm trying to aggregate people's thoughts on the game.
I just wrapped up Half-Life: Alyx from Steam's Black Friday sale...and it's just phenomenal. It's hard to justify a "system seller" for VR since it's more a lifestyle question than otherwise, but...this is pretty close.
It's not often in the PC space that you need to do dramatic rendering tricks, and performance in VR is so demanding that most (if not all) titles in VR today end up with a seriously lackluster environment. Alyx has it all--rich baked animations and environments with smartly occluded set pieces on top of a AAA sheen. The first hour of gameplay had me yelling and jumping like it was the first time I had been in a headset, all over again.
Gameplay-wise, Alyx peers into the heart at what VR games can look like and pulls out a bunch of mechanics that are just fantastic.
Story-wise, without any spoilers this game is just more of what you want as a Half-Life fan. Admittedly, I played each of the games for the first time recently in anticipation of HL:A, so I'm not someone who has been waiting a decade for the follow-up. I can say that I was immediately drawn into the universe after HL2 and Alyx feels like another episode.
If you have a headset, dust it off and play this game! If not--the Quest 2 is a great time to get in :D
Now finish it again with the developper commentary! (or wait for six months so you can forget some of the part and then rediscover it along with the dev commentary)
Yes, that's a great idea! I'll probably err towards waiting since Cyberpunk is releasing soon, and what better way to revisit Alyx when the time comes than to check out the commentary~
As mentioned in a few previous threads in this series, I've been doing my first playthrough of Fallout 4's Survival Mode. I've made my way through the story to the point where I've visited the Pridwyn, done a few missions for the railroad, and am level 20-something. The challenge and novelty of the mode has been reduced considerably, unfortunately. The first 10 or so levels required a lot of sneaking around, carefully picking my fights, and lots and lots of planning out my in-game day. But once I got established, setup a few settlements, and had a solid collection of necessities, I pretty much reverted to playing the game like I would on any other difficulty. Which isn't all that interesting to me, really. I've done that 3 or 4 times now.
So I think I'm going to take a break from it and focus on some other games.
I've been playing Diretide, it's a Halloween themed minigame/event in Dota 2, it's a lot of fun. The gameplay is a bit like Dota (5 heroes on each team) but the goal is to collect more candies than the other team rather than destroy the ancient. You can kill other people to get their candies or even attack their stash and steal them, which often results in nail-biters endings. These Dota arcade games are sometimes more fun and more polished than real games...
I've also been enjoying Diretide. I wasn't playing Dota 2 when the first version came around, but I've certainly been aware of how much the community loved the mode and was clamoring for its return, and it really seems like the team outdid themselves with this take on it. Being able to throw your held stack of candy to a teammate right before you die is always quite exciting.
It's a great mix of Dota's generally "serious" style and the silliness of seeing mighty Roshan stomp around with an outstretched bucket demanding candy.
Ubisoft has taken most of my game time lately. Watchdogs Legion, AC Valhalla, and now Immortals Fenyx Rising.
The first 2 are basically more of what you'd expect from those series, and the third is a new series in the same lines. Combat is a little more arcade-y and there's a lot of puzzles. They're pretty standard open-world fare, all 3.
I've been meaning to try Control and now that it's on XBGP, I might get to it. Wish they had it for PC on there. Might wait for that.
Cyberpunk 2077 came out today, too, and I'm eyeing that carefully. I didn't really like the Witcher series, so I'm a little leery.
Astroneer is good if you're into open world sandbox games with no stated goals. There's stuff to do, it's just not at all obvious at first and you have to be inquisitive I think. I had a ton of fun exploring and finding things and building up my blueprints.