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

I continue to wade through Cyberpunk 2077. Again, I'm playing on PC.

I'm not experiencing any of the big problems other people have come across. No random crashes, no corrupt save file. I have come across floating items. I've found missing lines of dialogue from quest givers, which is annoying. I've found sometimes I come across people who should be hostile to me but they're flagging as friendly, so I can't shoot or hack them.

The vehicle physics are extremely questionable. I've pinned down a lot of what I hate about them, and it's that they don't make a lot of sense. If I'm starting from a dead stop, the turning radius of a motorcycle is huge, and it's bigger than the turning radius of a car. But if I'm moving at max speed and I tap the brakes just a bit, I can turn on a dime. I can ramp a motorcycle by riding it up a stairwell. I can ramp a car by riding it into another wedge shaped car, and this is a good way of bypassing some traffic because I've never not landed on all four wheels and vehicle damage is meaningless. I'm getting used to it, but it's baffling.

I am pleased by the improvements the hotfixes have made. 1.05 has cut my load times down dramatically. I never saw a loading screen news report to completion, but I used to have to wait until I got to the second screen. Now my load is often done before the reporter can finish their first line.

World of Warcraft: Shadowlands for the most part. This is a very good expansion; the dungeons and raid are good, the leveling is delightful, the story is ok, the art direction is amazing. The Warcraft team is doing a good job keeping their attention on the community and knowing how the community is feeling and have pivoted on some key game concepts quickly, which feels good. Torghast is a new system and the easiest way to explain it is that it is kind of roguelike minigame within the overall game. It has had its and downs, and is the place most of the aforementioned attention from the devs seem to have been. Overall I don't think I've felt this good about an expansion since Mists of Pandaria.

Terraria is the other game I have devoted a bit of time to. Two of my kids have discovered the game and I have gotten to spend a bit of time playing with them. There is something truly wonderful about playing a game with your kids for the first time; it really helps you remember the feelings that you first had experiencing the game, but even more pure and joy filled. We have built spaceships, bridges, traps, explosion caves, towers, and more.

Cyberpunk 2077: (Trying to avoid plot spoilers, but there may be minor things.) Some of this is me being grumpy about the game, so if you want to skip it to preserve your own enjoyment, I don't blame you.

I'm on my second playthrough, and I'm impressed by the combination of depth and shallowness. For instance: there's little unmarked stories littered around, just waiting for you to climb a fire escape and discover a story of a police bust gone wrong. But there's also plenty of fire escapes that just lead to the tops of buildings with nothing going on but a nice view. But they actually made geometry for all of those areas, so you really can just climb a building to get a nice view.

You get movement cybernetics that let you jump further, so you can explore more stuff and with them you can avoid the lockdown of the starting district. But when you make it past the police officers and drones and mechs and make it on the bridge to freedom you literally get a HUD warning saying "There's nothing for you out there yet." and are teleported back into the area. And it's better that way, because all the enemies over there are overlevelled for you anyway, to the point where instead of taking two clips of ammo to kill a bulletsponge, it takes ten.

AI and difficulty: The AI is atrocious. No sugarcoating. There's a quickhack ability called Cyberpsychosis you can use if you really focus on Intelligence, and it promises that it forces an enemy to rampage, attacking friend and foe alike until it has killed all around it until it's the only thing left, whereupon it'll end its own life in a rage. This sounds amazing and brutal. It's not. It's so sad. If you use this from hiding, you'll get several minutes of NPCs shooting guns at each other from behind shoulder-high walls and using the same two lines of combat dialog over and over. I finally put them all out of their misery because I couldn't stand it anymore. And really, that's how bad the AI is most of the time, but when you're shooting at them directly you're distracted by the mechanics of shooting them in the head when they pop out of cover.

Reputation, murder vs. incapacitate, et. al.: It doesn't matter. There's no difference. You can get a chip for your bionic eye very early on that makes all of your regular bullets "non-lethal", with the only change being that headshots no longer get a base multiplier to damage. So you can go through the game guns a'blazin secure in the knowledge that the enemies will roll around on the ground after you defeat them instead of lying still. It doesn't change anything in the world. You may have played super careful, killing almost no one, but you'll still be called a murderer in the plot. It's only very specific targets or plot-relevant killings that change anything. All the mooks... no change.

It's also not any harder to play the game non-lethally. The quickhacks that are "non-lethal" like catching your enemies on fire or running enough electricity through them to short out all their cybernetics are equally or more effective than the ones described as lethal. In addition to the Cyberpsychosis hack mentioned above, there's one just called Suicide. It's one of the most expensive hacks in the game, and when used it does make the enemy put its gun to its head and pull the trigger... but it only did a quarter of a health bar. By comparison there's a cheaper non-lethal alternative that just knocks them out and can spread to other targets. It feels like at some point a command came down from on high that there needed to be a way to not be a mass murderer, but it was really late in development, far too late to make any mechanical changes, so you get these surface-level things that make no real difference.

Playing through the second time, the railroading is really clear. The story needs you to be blindsided by people repeatedly, and so you are. You do get choices, but they're very constrained. There's no option to be ready for an ambush when it's so clear it's going to happen. You're stuck doing what you're supposed to do to move the plot forward, and that's that. It's a single plotline, and almost nothing you do until almost the end will do much to change the outcome. Only a few of the sidequests cause any change to the world or even have followup interactions with the people. You do the thing, you get your money, and you're gone. It may be how a merc operates, but nothing you do actually changes how you're treated in the world. Street Cred is just a number.

And it is. Yes, you get Street Cred for defeating people and completing missions, but the only change is that it unlocks new things in shops. It doesn't matter if you've absolutely maxed out Street Cred, people still say you're only a scrub with one failed mission under your belt.

This all plays into the reality that the world is deep, but only within the path you're supposed to be taking. It's not a lake, it's a canal: deep as long as you only go where you're supposed to and don't look around. For something that's theoretically open world, it's frustrating.

I tried out Mini Motorways. It's a lot of fun. It's a city simulator where the focus is on getting people to their jobs. The game will randomly plant offices (manufacturing plants? It's vague), and houses of matching colors in different places on the map. You have to build streets for people to drive from their home to their office of the same color. My only complaint is that the AI will often place one of the items in a ridiculously bad position. Like it's right next to a road you need to connect it to, but the entrance is on the far side, so you have to build a road around the entire building. One could argue this isn't too different from actual cities, I guess. Anyway, other than that, the game is a lot of fun, though I admittedly haven't gotten very far in it yet.

Dangerous Driving

This is a Burnout game without the name, made by ex-Burnout devs. I thought I was going to immediately love it, but it actually took me a good bit of time to warm up to the game. There's something off about the vehicle physics that I haven't quite figured out yet, but I'm starting to get used to the game's "feel" and it's getting better.

In terms of actual game, it's exactly what I wanted -- a throwback to the old-school Burnouts where your goal is to Always Be Boosting by driving recklessly and knocking other cars off the road. Only thing missing is the crash mode, which I haven't seen yet but might be an unlockable?

I appreciate that the game is selective about its use of rubberbanding. In head-to-heads, where your goal is to post a better time than the other car, it doesn't seem to use it at all (which is great). In pack races, where your goal is to win but also to have fun by smashing other cars off the road, it seems to incorporate it more as a way of keeping others close and the race itself lively.