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

I finished The Quiet Man.

I knew going into this game that it was not a good game. The Steam reviews are hard to ignore. The Giant Bomb crew had a lot of laughs at it, and I had a lot of laughs watching them play it. But I have some sick compulsion to play bad high budget and high profile games sometimes, so I played The Quiet Man myself.

This game is truly awful. The best thing I can say about it is that it looks pretty good. But it's a playable movie, and it fails in being a good movie and fails in being a fun video game. The playable parts amount to a shoddy beat-em-up. The movie parts are completely undermined by the fact that the whole movie is silent. The premise is that the protagonist is deaf and we're experiencing this movie from his perspective, but nothing, not even the protagonists' own words, is communicated back to the viewer. You can piece together a story just watching it, but so many of the long cutscenes are dialog with nothing to listen to.

It's not just painful, it's boring. Don't play The Quiet Man.

I started Days Gone. I'm less than a couple hours into it. I did not expect to beat a zombie kindergartner to death with a baseball bat within the first 30 minutes. Few things in video games surprise me nowadays; this surprised me.

I've been replaying Diablo II modded to have 45 times as many monsters (inspired by MrLlamaSC doing a handful of such runs a few months ago). It's… something. It's actually fascinating to see how the game's balance copes with such a drastic shift in the gameplay. AoE immediately becomes absolutely mandatory, but given that, the game is arguably easier modded like this than vanilla; you almost immediately become extremely overleveled, and the number of monsters is effectively negated by the ability of AoE attacks to hit arbitrarily many of them.

(It's also somewhat impressive to see the engine cope with the extreme number of entities. Areas that are dense in vanilla often have so many monsters crammed into them they literally can't walk past each other and are sitting ducks until you clear out some room.)

Hollow Knight. If you're into side scrolling Metroid style games, this one lives up to the hype. It's unique and fun and frustrating. I played it on the heels of Ori and have enjoyed all 3 games tremendously.

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I had tried out Star Trek: Legends and didn't really like it. Well I watched a bunch of Let's Game It Out videos and got inspired. So I'm back to playing it, but this time I'm trying to get a single Borg Maintenance Drone to level 50 and with a power over 2,000 so I can send him alone on missions while the rest of the crew sits back and gets fat, leveling up only using money that the drone generated on its missions. Leveling up the drone involves sending him on various shuttle missions with a few other crew who are already reasonably powerful. You can send characters on these shuttle missions over and over, and you can arrange it so they always have a 100% chance of success. So that's what I do now all day long. Just send them on shuttle missions. But soon... soon the real work will begin.

I have been playing a handful of games for the past month in rotation:

• Battlefield 4: Battlefield 4 was one of the first Battlefield games I really got into. I have probably 200 hours across all systems but have been playing lately on PC. There are still a good number of active servers for 64 person Conquest which is my preferred mode. After being disappointed by both BF1 and BFV, BF4 really feels fun to play as a sandbox FPS. My only caveat is the fact that weapon upgrades are locked behind the crate system so it can take forever to get a good build for a gun you end up liking. It's getting me hyped for Battlefield 6 news and release later this year.

• Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot: I have been going through Dragon Ball Super which had me longing to play a Dragon Ball game alongside it. This game though is just...meh? On one hand, the battles can be fun and I enjoy levelling up my characters. On the other hand, the RPG system in this game feels like a generic PS2-era RPG where you have like 3-4 other systems to manage that don't really feel like they belong in the Dragon Ball world. I feel that I spend too much of my time collecting various orbs, ingredients, building materials, and gifts for my community board, and it just feels like too much. It is open-world sure, in the sense that you have many disjointed areas that you have to travel between via a world map. It's not like I can be at Goku's house and decide I will travel south to Master Roshi's island and be able to get there. In many ways, it feels like Bandai Namco created a template RPG game and then hamfisted the Dragon Ball IP to sell copies. I think this type of set up would have worked for the original Dragon Ball series but this game has too many characters you play as with no clear indication of when you can upgrade them. I will keep playing but after 5 hours, I'm already skipping cut scenes and dialog to get to the next big battle.

• Monster Train: Still on this one though not as much as I have been since the previous update. It is fun and I still really enjoy runs and combos that seem to work amazingly. Can't count how many times I get to the last boss though only for my entire strategy to fall apart when I get 10x3 hits each time. I'm imagining higher-level covenants to be exercises in frustration.

Honorable mentions: Victoria II and Yakuza 0. I haven't played enough of these games to quantify an opinion other than Victoria II is dense and Yakuza 0 has a lot of cut scenes. I will try to play one of these games more over time.

I beat the main story quest in Skyrim. The final fight was easy, but it also made sense, because the hard part was getting to the final fight. I added the DLC back since I got what I wanted out of the base game, and am almost done with Dawnguard, which is pretty fun. I'll be going back to a bunch of un-finished Vanilla stuff, like the civil war questline. I'm already planning a second run that will follow the opposite of the major decisions I've made, but I'm not sure when I'll start that.

I decided to give Bridge Constructor a shot after I finished the first 4 worlds of Polybridge. I've had all of its expansions for years (got them dirt cheap) and it's a radically different sort of game. Polybridge is about weird, fun designs with funky mechanics, like building elevators, lever systems, and whatnot, and Bridge Constructor is just bridges. It's not boring, at least if you like these sorts of games, but it's not as exciting.

I also gave The Elder Scrolls Online a shot after I re-downloaded it. It's interesting, and feels okay, and it's pretty weird playing the Morrowind expansion, seeing that region in full 1080. I'll probably play more to see how the world feels, but I don't have a lot of content for it, so I'll also see if it gets boring quick. The hardest part about it is honestly adapting to the new interface, which is surprisingly well done, but feels more like an Oblivion/Morrowind hybrid than something that followed Skyrim.

I started playing WoW Classic again in preparation for Burning Crusade and I've begun thinking a lot about how far modern WoW has deviated from Vanilla/TBC/WotLK. Particularly when it comes to finding dungeons in Classic/BC vs modern WoW.

Finding groups for dungeons in Classic/BC is a pain in the ass. You can waste 30-60 minutes trying to get a group together and if you wipe and someone rage quits, you have to hoof it all the way to your body, and then hoof it all the way to a city to start finding people to fill their slot. It's not fun and it doesn't add anything positive to the game. So Blizzard's solution was the LFG system. You queue up, and all that group formation crap takes place quietly in the background while you're free to continue questing. Un-fun thing happens automatically so you can continue to have fun. Honestly that's a fantastic solution! But where Blizz went wrong, imo, is that they also dumbed down dungeons and they added heirlooms so everyone gets super overpowered at lower levels. So these fun little group challenges turn into some braindead quick/dirty chore you do once or twice a day. So much so that you don't converse with your group at all aside from a few "hellos". So it's not really LFG's fault. In fact I'd argue LFG was a massive QoL improvement over the old system. It's all of these other dungeon/character changes combined with LFG's convenience that completely ruined the dungeon-running experience.

Honestly as much as I was personally against adding LFG to classic when there were rumors about it a few years back, I now would kind of enjoy seeing a better version of that. Keep the dungeon difficulty, keep everyone under-geared, keep having to hoof it to the dungeon to enter it. Just make it less of a chore to put groups together.

Yoku's Island Express

After a tipsy endorsement on Friday (the offer still stands, by the way -- let me know if you'd like a copy of it or anything else listed there!), I decided that if I was going to be singing the praises of a game so heartily, I'd better re-acquaint myself with the game's joy.

So I replayed Yoku.

And then I ended up 100%ing it.

It is absolutely worth playing, but I don't think it's worth 100%ing. The joy of the game started to wane as I checklisted my way to the very end, and I started to lose sight of what makes the game so wonderful in the first place. It's not the note I should have ended on -- a somewhat sour sense of obligation -- because I really do think the opening hours of the game are a pure delight. The game is charming, whimsical, novel, and just altogether fun.

I'm terrible at pinball, and despite 100%ing the game, I'm still bad at it, but that doesn't dim the shine of the game in the slightest. In fact, the game is so wonderfully permissive with its difficulty that you can be awful at it and still have a great time -- it just might take you a bit longer to get through it. I don't replay games that often, but it's something I can see myself coming back to every couple of years. It has a "comfort food" quality to it that helped me enjoy it as much the second time around as I did the first.

I've been playing MTG Arena and played a few rounds in-person with friends last night. I'm absolutely awful at playing against blue and/or white opponents, whoops. I'm not a serious player by any means, but it's a decent way to pass the time.

I also played my first-ever game of D&D last weekend! It was pretty rad, and I'm a little bummed I'll be out of town for the next round. I think the DM is going to trap my character in a closet for that session, haha.

I finished Ori and the Blind Forest: Definitive Addition on easy mode, and 100%ed it. I'm glad I easy moded it because I just relaxed and played the game. I loved the atmosphere and the combat, and I liked that the each world event was a gauntlet. If I were to change anything about the game it would be not allowing saves so often. I picked the game up for under $5 and it was worth every penny. I'm hoping to pick up the sequel during the summer sale.

I just started playing Hades. OMG I absolutely love the game. Sitting here trying to think about why I like the game, I can only think, "I LIKE IT BECAUSE IT'S FUN." I enjoy that dying is part of the game, that it's expected and needed to progress. I like talking to folks in the game, I like that I have no idea what the heck is going on, and never know if I'm doing the right thing. It feels super fresh to me, but then I haven't really gamed in a long time so maybe it isn't. Soon I'll do some read throughs to better understand what the heck I am doing and think of it more as a "let's beat this" instead of an exploratory fun-ness like I am now.

@kfwyre gave me Yooka-Laylee, and I was super excited to play it since it's been on my wish list for a while. Unfortunately, it made my desktop crash every time I tried to play it. The only other game that has caused me problems is Crash Babdicoot and I'm wondering if they have something in common that my computer doesn't like. They both use the Unity engine in 3d mode, so I'm wondering if that's it. I have a Radeon R290 graphics card that though older, holds up to everything else I have thrown at it. If anyone has any ideas on why these games won't work for me, I'd love to hear them.

I've been really hooked on Boundless. It's as if Minecraft had a baby with Everquest, and the resulting kid went to Trove and Creativerse's house to play. It's an MMO with skills that you level and gear to craft, but its big draw is the portal system. There are dozens of official worlds, and an effectively unlimited number of player-owned worlds, all interconnected by player made portals which tend to congregate in hubs, often with malls springing up around them with dozens, or even hundreds of shops, each player run. (The economy is 99.99% player-driven... it's possible to get loose change for your random crap without player interaction.)

I'm 230 hours in, and I've only been playing since April 10. It's honestly the most engaging game I've played in a good long time, and I feel like I'm barely scratching the mid-game at this point.

I finished Virtue's Last Reward yesterday, great game. Will take a break for a while now but I'm already looking forward to Zero Time Dilemma.

In the meanwhile I'm continuing my Mega Man Zero/ZX replay (at Zero 3 atm), and I've replaced VLR with Valkyrie Profile, which... is an interesting JRPG but a bit hard to get into so far.

Started playing Solasta yesterday. It is basically DnD 5e on a computer. They have limited the classes to rogue, ranger, wizard, cleric and fighter, the amount of spells etc and there's no multiclassing (so no paladin+sorcerer/warlock). Haven't made it that far into the game yet, but seems like a decent game so far.

I tried out Running with Rifles . It's a different take on multiplayer army shooter. It's semi 3D, with a casual, almost cute drawing style. You play using a bird's eye view, giving the impression that it's a 2D game, but it becomes clear after a little play time that the game space is still mostly 3D. There is modest ground elevation and slope, and basic walls, fences, buildings and ladders. A few drivable vehicles, ranging from jeep to ATV.

RWR takes into account line of sight, obstacles and cover. You can't see beyond walls or rocks, or over the crest of a slope. Gameplay is affected by this because even though the map and terrain are shown at all times, soldiers, items, and vehicles are completely hidden from view until you turn to face them and have a clear line of sight. From what I can tell, cover reduces the probability of being shot by a bullet which, in 2D space, is on a direct path to hit you. You can also crouch or go prone to make use of cover strategically, e.g. to duck behind it, then pop up to open fire, then duck behind again to reload.

The game had a little bit of immediate appeal to me, but I'm not sure I'll dedicate a lot of time to it. I haven't tried PVP yet, just PVE and multiplayer PVE. I think the main thing I'm not sure I like about it is that the respawn timer is quite short compared to every other shooter I've played, and, on top of that, your respawn point is very close to the action where you died. You can literally die, wait a few seconds for respawn, and then run back to your exact point of death in under 10 seconds. This opens the door for immediate revenge actions, like taking your freshly-issued-from-respawn anti-tank weapon to the vehicle that just killed you 25 seconds ago. This aspect of the game design provides for quite a casual feel to the game, and I'm not sure I prefer that. I'm used to shooters where dying is a significant disadvantage to your team.

Anyway, let's see how I feel after another week.

The bae and I have bee working through It Takes Two! We've gotten through a few levels and we're enjoying it very much. The puzzles and boss fights are pretty intuitive but still can make you pause. The game is pretty good about leading you through mechanics and showing how to solve puzzles.

I think the style is fun and there's neat mini games, and overall it is very, very forgiving which is excellent for a casual couch co-op. We haven't run into anything frustrated and it feels rewarding to get through the puzzles. I would definitely recommend it for people interested!