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

Valheim. So much Valheim, all solo thus far. I just love this game, and I've been trying to put my finger on what the magic ratio of ingredients is that makes it so enjoyable when so many other games in the same crowded space seem to fall entirely flat.

There's this massive world that, while smaller than something like Minecraft, I find so much more interesting and enjoyable to explore. The lack of pressure to progress through the game only serves to enable a sense of curiosity and urge to see what's across the shore, and I find that I play differently depending on my mood - sometimes I want to delve into sunken crypts and amass my spoils of resources, sometimes I want to build, farm, and tend to my pigs, and other times I'm just so content to sail into the unknown.

I'm in my forties, and I've been playing games non-stop since my grandmother bought a brand new Atari 2600. It's hard for me to find a game that I can really let myself get absorbed into anymore. The more 'real' most modern games get, the harder they have to work to pull me in, as if their realism only serves to make their shortcomings more obvious - the uncanny valley of gaming I suppose. There's something in the Valheim recipe that just works for me, and I'm really enjoying it. I hope it continues to develop.

Nexomon: Extiction [2020, Nintendo Switch]

After finally finishing Cyberpunk, I decided I wanted to play something totally different (ie, not another open world action RPG in my backlog). I decided to give Nexomon a go, which is an unabashed Pokemon knockoff.

Pros

• Monsters use mana rather PP, presumably to discourage you from spamming your strongest attack every turn
• Similarly, attack speed is particular to the Monster and move. Of course, Pokemon does this to some extent with its priority system, but most moves in Pokemon have normal priority. In contrast, strong moves tend to be slower in Nexomon, which adds a layer of complexity to battles
• Combat is more streamlined (see below)

Cons

• Battles are just too time-consuming.
• Not enough healing.
• Dialog is perhaps too self-aware. That was funny enough the first few times, but most of the humor in the game comes from pointing out RPG/pokemon/anime tropes.
• The story failed to pull me in.

Other thoughts

As I wrote above, the combat in Nexomon is more streamlined, and if there's anything that the mainstream Pokemon games could learn from Nexomon, it's this. Consider a typical encounter in a Pokemon game:

"[Trainer] wants to fight!"

"[Trainer] sent out [Trainer's Pokemon]!"

[Player chooses a move.]

"[Player's Pokemon] uses [move]!"

[Drawn-out move animation.]

"It's a critical hit!"

"[Move] is super effective!"

"[Trainer's Pokemon] fainted!"

"[Player] defeated [Trainer]!"

In that entire encounter, which could easily be thirty seconds or longer (not including loading screen transitions), the player only had a single moment of autonomy. No matter how preordained the battle might be (eg, a lvl 100 Charizard vs a lvl 5 rattata), the fights are still boggled down by unnecessary text boxes. If I had to guess, this is probably what people least enjoy about turn-based RPGs: they're slow, even when the outcome in the encounter has already been decided. Interrupting exploration to mindlessly mash the "A" button disrupts the flow of the game and is, worse yet, simply not fun.

Nexomon improves over Pokemon by incorporating those unneeded dialog into the UI. So, for example, the above battle in Nexomon would be more like

"[Trainer] sent out [Trainer's Nexomon]!"

[Player chooses a move.]

[Short animation. If critical, display "Critical!" above opponent's Nexomon. If supereffective, display "Effective!" above opponent's Nexomon. If afflicted by a status ailment, display ailment over Nexomon.]

[Enemy Nexomon attacks. Same as above except with reversed roles.]

[Player chooses a move.]

[etc]

"[Trainer's Pokemon] fainted!"

Combat in Nexomon becomes more immediate. You perform your action, your opponent performs their actions, and you read the UI to determine the game state.

Contrast that with a Pokemon game, in which the game will (for example) explicitly tell you when your Pokemon's been afflicted with the burn ailment. But that's redundant information -- you can already tell you've been afflicted by looking at the UI. That additional dialog box unnecessarily slows down the pacing of the battle.

"But wait," you ask, "if the battles are more streamlined, then how can they be too time-consuming?"

And here's where we hit the fundamental flaw in the Nexomon formula. Perhaps to encourage strategy, Nexomon don't hit as hard as Pokemon. Strong supereffective attacks are unlikely to reduce the opponent's HP by less than half. Therefore players are encouraged to constantly swap Nexomon during battles (opponents will do the same). Every battle becomes a drawn-out game of rock-paper-scissors.

Moreover, grinding is not an escape. Encounters with wild Nexomon and trainers level-scale based on the level of the Nexomon in your party. Thus, your weakest Nexomon becomes a liability. Leveling-up doesn't make you stronger so much as (maybe) less-weak.

Finally, due to the level-scaling, all encounters tend to deplete a significant amount of HP and mana. Therefore you might only be able to fight through a couple encounters before having to decide whether you should run back to the previous healing station. Effectively, compared to Pokemon, the game devs reduced the UI sluggishness, kept the battle lengths the same, and added mandatory backtracking.

I'd say I played roughly a third of it before I decided to drop the game. I'd consider revisiting the game if the following revisions were made:

• Cap the level-scaling.
• Automatically heal all Nexomon after combat encounters.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance : This is a really good game. The graphics and sound are really good, and so the immersion is great. Walking through the countryside or a forest, with sun shining, birds chirping, brooks gurgling, you feel like you're there in the game world. There's a good balance between quests that keep you on a narrow, linear pipeline, and free world roaming, to escape the linearity. There are design elements that prevent you from behaving too much like you know you're in a video game. Some examples: If you just run and jump willy nilly all over, if you jump from too high a height, you can hurt your foot/ankle, and that impacts your run speed. If you randomly punch NPCs, you will get a negative reputation in the village, which affects how people interact with you. With some quests, you can't just dawdle and do whatever you want, whenever you want. For example, if you're supposed to meet up with an NPC somewhere, in order to travel together, if you take too long, the NPC will go on ahead without you. It's also possible to fail a quest by taking too long. e.g. if you're supposed to do something "today", it might go to a failed state at sundown.

You can't just abuse a save-and-reload playstyle. The game saves automatically at key points, and also when you go to sleep for the night, but otherwise, you have a limited number of saves available. I kind of like this design, because it makes your choices matter more, and makes danger more dangerous. You have to decide more carefully whether or not you're going to take a risk, instead of just relying on the safety net of being able to save and reload any time.

It's clear to me that the developers put a lot of effort into this game. The game art, character design, clothing, architecture, behaviour and animation modelling, the historical references, and game lore -- it's all very good.

Bug-wise, it's not without the occasional glitch, but they're not game breaking. They just break immersion, and are relatively minor.

I highly recommend this game to anyone who likes adventure games, or medieval stuff.

Thanks to @spit-evil-olive-tips' thread about Factorio, I'm playing Factorio! KatherineOfTheSky's tutorial videos were suggested and I've been spending all my free time playing this week.

I've owned Factorio for years now and every once in a while I get really into it until I hit green science, and then my bad planning and refusal to learn how to play the game correctly bites me in the ass and I lose interest. But between the huge QoL improvements made over the years and Katherine's videos, I've just reached gray science and I'm really enjoying myself.

My only issue is that she played with enemies enabled, and I regret doing the same. The enemy component of the game doesn't really interest me, especially since it doesn't seem like you get anything out of it. It is pretty satisfying having a swarm of mobs get gunned down by a line of turrets, but I'd rather be focusing on designing/building stuff.

I picked up XCOM 2 since it was on sale for $20 including the DLCs. I noticed Long War 2 was out and I have fond memories of the original XCOM+LW. The base game for X2 isn't that great, even with LW2 loaded - not much of a sequel imo. Luckily I found a solid mod collection built with LWotC in mind that solved the interface/UI issues and greatly enriched the game. With 74 mods loaded I'm loving it as much as the original XCOM now.

In my latest attempt to get into the game, I’ve recently started yet another playthrough of Final Fantasy 7. I first bought the game back in like 2016 after I finished FF 10 and I just could not get past the graphics. Back then the only really pre-2000s games I played were Gameboy games, but since those had 2D graphics it wasn’t an issue. But it was literally painful trying to get into PSone era games that were in 3D.

Last year however, I’ve played and beaten FF 8 and 9, so I think I can handle the visuals better now.

Breathedge just left early access, so I figured I'd give it a shot. It's a weird one, with gameplay that feels somewhat like Subnautica but with a much more joking tone. The gameplay is familiar survival game stuff: get resources to get tools to get more resources, all while trying to conserve air (you're in outer space) and find enough food and water.

This seems like it would be very much my cup of tea, and it's reasonably fun, but the humor doesn't mesh well with the gameplay. Like for instance: in between scavenging floating ice crystals for precious water, you use your immortal chicken on a stick to ground short-circuiting electronics. The reality of your time in space is grim and every moment outside the few scraps of spacecraft that still have oxygen is a tense prioritization of needed resources, but the tone is so jokey. Maybe for some it would lighten the experience, but for me the humor falls flat. It's like if you put a laugh track on The Martian. This may be an intentional emotional dichotomy, or maybe I'm just not in a place to laugh right now and the humor might hit better some other time. Either way, I play a little bit of it, and then I put it down. But I do keep picking it up.

I've been playing The Sinking City. Everything I've read about the game is true. The action feels bad. I can never tell if I'm hitting things with my bullets or not. I can't even tell if I'm hitting them with melee. I never seem to have enough bullets. I get into my inventory, spend all my crafting mats on making new ones, and I still don't have enough. Everyone in the game looks sickly, especially my character, but I think that's on purpose, given the setting.

But the investigation parts are a lot of fun and it's what makes up the bulk of the game. It's a bit of item hunting, and a bit of sequencing events, and a bit of research. I feel real good when I go to a library or city hall and piece together a couple bits of information to pull out another lead. There's a lot of running across town, but it's not a huge place and everything looks like it's about to fall back into the ocean. Barnacles and sea detritus is everywhere.

About a year ago, my fiancé bought a copy of Ys Origin for the Switch. I have played it before but never finished it. So I played through again and... didn’t finish it again. It got far too difficult to beat the bosses nearing the end.

And then last week, the fiancé began to play, and he finishes the game in just two or three days in easy mode.

I’m flabbergasted. Is easy mode that much easier than normal? So he starts playing on my save and finds out that I had somehow missed on finding one or two pieces of Cleria Ore, the item you need to find in order to increase your attack strength. After that, I clear the last three bosses and finally finish the game.

Falcon has a history of using difficulty spikes as a warning that you are unprepared, but the fact that it was because of easily missable items was rather frustrating.

Anyways, this game actually has three parts to it where you climb Darm Tower as three different characters, so I quickly complete the next two playthroughs. And it turns out that the first character just absolutely sucks. Her story is boring, she is weak, and you are likely to miss items and ruin your game since it’s your first time playing. The second character is much better, mostly because he is a complete asshole. It’s amusing when he ruffles the feathers of some of the early bosses. And he’s also legitimately one of the best “dark hero” archetypes I’ve seen in a video game in terms of writing.

But to be Frank, the only story that matters is the final playthrough. It’s the only one that fully explains why everyone is there in the first place. And it’s the only one where you fight against the true final boss, who simultaneously comes out of nowhere yet makes complete sense. Finishing this one is much more satisfying.

But all in all, Ys Origin is far too repetitive. It has excellent action gameplay that flows so well it’s almost addictive (especially because each character has a unique fighting style), but travelling down the same halls fighting the same monsters and solving the same puzzles multiple times is just plain monotonous. This game has always been something of a black sheep to the series; although it doesn’t change things too dramatically in terms of gameplay, it is lacking in variety and in how it relates to the rest of the series. Though I must say the quality of the writing is superb; it really gets you into the mindset of the people you are playing and their relationships with the other characters. And of course, the actual gameplay mechanics (hide-and-seek exempted) are A++. I might even say this is a good entry point for people new to the series.

Valheim.

I'm really enjoying the restrictions on building in this game; worrying at least a little bit about structural integrity, ventilation, and the onerous sourcing of materials (and replanting of trees) helps for that big, rewarding feeling when a build is complete. I've just gotten to the Mountain biome with some friends, and hopefully we'll be geared up to bully the boss by the weekend.

Granblue Fantasy Versus

I've been playing this off-and-on since its release. I love fighting games, but it's difficult to stick to a game like GBVS, where online play is honestly painful to sit through. I'm more than happy to play long sets, even if the connection isn't the best; but most of my friends have moved on from this game, so I've been stuck in ranked queues and waiting for games on Discord. It's unfortunate. If anyone here would like to play sometime, I'd love to oblige! But I think maybe the move is to just wait for Guilty Gear -Strive- to release next month, and go all-in on that. I truly enjoyed its beta, and was able to get some playable games from US-West to Finland!

Foundation. It's a medieval-style city builder in early access on Steam. Reminds me a bit of Banished.

One of the cool mechanic about Foundation is that you don't build roads or houses; villagers create the roads by basically wearing paths from frequent travel into the ground. And they build their own houses (preferably close to where they work). This definitely gives the cities a much more natural, organic feel.

Another thing I've been enjoying about the game is that a lot of the monuments and public buildings (e.g., taverns, churches) are customizable. They're kinda like Legos, in that there are a bunch of parts that you can use, and they snap together at different places, but you can change stuff like the height and position and stuff. It's a fun little mechanic that keeps things from looking too cookie-cutter. And it's not all just cosmetic, either. Most building parts have functions or add to capacity, and the decorations add prestige which unlock other things in the game.

The villagers are also divided into classes (Newcomer, Serf, Commoner, Citizen), and they move up the social ladder when/if you promote them. Higher class villagers require more amenities to stay happy (and not leave), but you actually want to promote them because you make your money by selling them the goods they want/need.

Really looking forward to seeing the game improve more, given how good it is already.

I've been playing through the Digital Devil Saga series lately, finished DDS1 yesterday and playing DDS2 now.

DDS1 was pretty good overall but had a bunch of issues, DDS2 seems a little better so far, but seeing as how I despise buddhism I've heard that this game is going to throw me for a loop in a bad way eventually. Ah well.

Warframe is one of those games I go back to every so often. To be fair, I got some exp (affinity) boosters and a credit (currency) booster so it helped incentivize me to keep going. I finally reached master rank 27. Took the time to reacquaint myself with some of the warframes I've levelled and forgot about.

Valheim, but solo. I used to play with my partner but life circumstances has made that practically impossibile 😞 I doubt I'll progress as far as we did together. I'm still wary about clearing out delves by myself. I really enjoy the structural stability mechanics so I've spent more of my time building and chopping down trees (and running away from falling logs) than hunting.

Outriders (Demo) and hopefully, the full game after I graduate! I know the story's gotten mixed reception but I really want to see how it progresses and concludes. Plus, the devs have been forthcoming and actively worked to make the demo fun and less cheesy (dev update here). That earned a little bit of my trust that they'll care enough about the full game to keep up that kind of effort. I'll be keeping an eye on them between the game's release and when I graduate, which is about a month after release.

I started playing Super Impossible Road. It's sort of a racing game/marble roller in one. I usually suck at racing games, being unable to control my vehicle no matter how I set the sensitivity of the controller and go flying into walls or off the track pretty quickly. (There are a few exceptions, though.) However, flying off the track is sort of the point in this game. (I also usually suck at marble roller games. But this somehow hits the sweet spot where it's fun to me.)

So you're in space and your ship is a sphere with a tread around it. You have to roll down the track and either beat the clock, beat the other players, jump through the rings (which are not on the track), and (usually) get to the end. The twist is that you're supposed to cheat. You can jump off the track and hop back on at a later spot. There are checkpoints that are regularly spaced, but you don't need to hit them all. In fact, on some levels you're required to skip some number of them to pass the level!

The physics are really bizarre, but make a lot of sense somehow. If you go too far off the track, you won't be able to get back onto it and you'll fall into whatever planet/star/wormhole is in the background. But when you do fall off or bounce off of it, you're sort of naturally attracted back to it.

On some levels you can reset back to the last gate you did touch, on other levels there is no reset. You can change various things about your ship, such as how much it bounces when you hit the track, how well it turns both on the track and when in the "air".

It's got a lot of variety and is a lot of fun. I was expecting all the frustration of roller games like Super Monkey Ball, with all the poor control of racing games, and somehow, it has neither of those! I'm shocked, but grateful.