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

Got my old Super Nintendo working (just bought some replacement cables on a whim and it started right up like it wasn't older than me) and I've been playing through some classics I've never played on the original hardware.

I bought The Lost Vikings as a joke for a friend who plays them a lot on Heroes of the Storm, and we played it one evening in varying states of inebriation. It was a blast, I'm young enough to have missed out on lemmings and its spinoffs, but I can see why they were such a big thing for a while. They also spent a lot of time making losing funny enough to not be irritating, which is good since the game's difficulty went up as sobriety went down. Definitely recommend.

Earthbound and Chrono Trigger I bought as third party cartridges since I'm not rich enough to pay hundreds of dollars for a secondhand game. I know they're classics, but they made millions of them, and I hate how everybody now thinks their slightly old mass produced stuff is valuable because it's nostalgic. Anyway.

Earthbound is strange enough that I'm surprised it was a first party Nintendo title. I haven't finished it yet, though I'm further along than I've ever been on an emulator. I love the originality and that it's not just yet another fantasy JRPG, and it has unique mechanics like hitpoint rolling that I've never seen anywhere else.

Chrono Trigger I've played before, it's one of the few JRPGs I've ever finished because it's just that good. The multiple endings thing is a little overrated because most of them are basically the same, and it's based entirely on when you choose to fight the end boss (which can be done at any time) rather than any decisions you make.

But I just love some of the plot elements, like the (spoilers) time traveling magical civilization from the ice age, Zeal, and the fact that they're fully aware of the meta plot, serving as the true antagonists as opposed to Lavos, who's more a force of nature that they unleash. And how they know they're ending the world, but they don't care, because it's in their distant future, and because, living in an ice age, they consider the world pretty much already over, over ten thousand years in your subjective past! I just love the fact that they got a self consistent worldview with such a different perspective. Also gives the game quite a nice climate change allegory.

I'm still nowhere near out of things to do in Skyrim, even if stuff is getting repetitive. I'm finding the stories to be pretty interesting, at least.

I've gone into a slightly deep dive in setting up OpenMW to be comfortable and non-distracting for when I decide to play it over Skyrim for a change of pace. The first thing I wanted to fix was the mottled textures, a huge issue for older 3D games. Here's a screenshot looking out over Caldera with the following settings to correct it:

[camera]
texture mag filter = nearest
texture min filter = nearest
texture mipmap = none

[Terrain]
distant terrain = false

I also disabled the "distant terrain" feature because I'd rather have the OG fog effect than a low framerate. Surprisingly, the newer water shader looks totally fine with the old textures. The Vivec canalworks even look great with it on, but I'm not going back there just for a screenshot right now. I also have this UI overhaul simply because I'm not a fan of all the gold, especially if I'm using the map as an overlay while I run around the world. A nice touch is you can see behind it with the extra transparent area.

I also liked Intelligent Textures, which uses an ESRGAN network to upscale the images, and they look crisp, but just making the default textures crisp reached my visual goal. I initially used the above configuration to "troubleshoot" the texture pack, as the Dunmer characters' eyes don't seem to have black pupils, but they sort of don't in the original textures anyway.

Getting into the game: The game starts out incredibly difficult if you aren't careful, but if you're cool spoiling some early stuff, or even just looking up how to get started so you can get some gold to buy some decent armor, it levels off really quickly. I'm already running around with a steel longsword and full bonemould, and really the only thing I've "cheesed" was the theft mechanic where you can steal a thing, drop it (not put it in your inventory) and pick it up after paying off the fine, which is typically the value of what you stole. I did that to get a spear to deal with cliff racers.

EDIT: For a hoot, I (re)started Oblivion on my PC because I'm playing both of them. I'd cleared a few gates on PS3, and stopped playing for whatever reason, but I've got GOTY on Steam. It feels like this weird almost perfect, if heavily HDR'd middle ground between the two, like Skyrim in a temperate region, but still using old Morrowind rules (and, a new lockpick system that isn't an invisible dice roll).

Horizon: Zero Dawn. Damn, this is a great game! It's a shame they had to compete with Breath of the Wild back in 2017, otherwise this would have gotten so many more GotYs. Zero Dawn is a perfect open world game but it doesn't reinvent much about the basic formula, so its appeal is mostly setting (the most videogame-y setting I've come across in years but it works!). I also like how detailed the robot dinosaur armor and weak points are, how you can shoot off specific parts and whatnot.

I'm pretty heavily into Fire Emblem: Three Houses right now. I just finished my first playthrough (with the Blue Lions house), and I'm starting a NG+ with the Black Eagles.

The game is really fun! I like a good turn-based strategy game, and this is definitely one. I'm more into the tactics than the storylines, but the story is really good too.

My wife is really into the story and characters. She was shoulder-surfing my playthrough, but she wanted to uncover more of the overall story at a faster pace than I was playing. Then she found a 14-hour YouTube series showing all of the support conversations and overall plotlines... So I guess I'm playing at my own pace now, with no obligation to deliver more story faster. Yay?

I recently beat Heavy Rain a couple of days ago and I thought it was fantastic. Probably the most depressing game I’ve ever played, and a very interesting story with compelling characters. The score was really good too, a lot of the songs made me feel genuine dread during certain scenes. Would definitely recommend to anyone who like thriller “interactive movie” types of games.

Based on a drunken recommendation from a tildes-friend, I installed and started playing Yoku's Island Express.

What a delightful game! It's a sidescrolling pinball game, where the whole world is a pinball machine, with some areas being more pinball-y than others. The pinball is not particularly difficult, but it is fun - some of the pinball puzzles are harder than others, but none of them (so far) are unmanageable. I accidentally deleted my save game at about 18% complete, and I wasn't even particularly upset, other than for the unskippable introductory cut scene. If you have it and are waiting to play it because you got it in a humble bundle, then I definitely recommend installing it and giving it a shot. I filed it as somewhat similar to "A Short Hike" even though gameplay and looks are not remotely similar - it is a game that delights in itself, and is fun and happy to play. It's deep enough to keep your attention for a while, and it's fun enough to replay. What a joy.

THE CORRIDOR

@Omnicrola recommended this game in a previous iteration of this thread a while back, and I bought it based off of that recommendation. Then, like I do with every game I ever buy, I didn't play it at all and just let it sit in my library, untouched.

Anyway, months later, I finally got around to playing it and thoroughly enjoyed it. It's the kind of game that's definitely better the less you know about it going in, so I'll simply say that it's worth its $2 price tag.

Murder by Numbers

@Deimos recommended this one, and it actually didn't sit in my library forever! I bought it recently because it was on sale because I was in the mood for a synthesis of narrative and puzzles. The game is a murder-mystery visual novel mixed with picross. I'm several hours in, well into the second case, and I'm simultaneously happy with the game (it's very well done) and also feeling the urge to just play regular picross. The plot and characters aren't bad by any means, I just don't know that VNs have that much of a pull for me. I tend to like them in theory a lot more than I like them in practice. I'll probably keep going though, simply because it's Pride month and I stan KC.

DiRT Rally

@scrambo recommended this one. It has been in my library for quite a long time now, and I've been simultaneously interested and intimidated by it ever since I first got it.

The game is very good. Very, very good. I don't think it's the game for me though. I'm much more of a casual player -- someone who wants to feel good without effort. This game, instead, very much demands that you put in the effort. I played it for several hours and very much enjoyed what I played, but during that time I could see the time horizon of dozens and hundreds of hours stretching out in front of me -- time that it would take me to get to the level of satisfying mastery I would want to achieve with the game. I don't know that I'm ready for that sort of investment though.

Warhammer: Chaosbane

Nobody recommended this one. Nobody seems to like the game. It has a 54% average on Steam.

A lot of the complaints seem to be that the game is very dumbed-down for an ARPG. As a previously-mentioned casual gamer, I consider that a feature rather than a fault. This game is the opposite of DiRT Rally, where it expects nothing of me and gives me constant feelings of prowess, success, and achievement. I've played this as background activity while listening to audiobooks, and it's been fine as a mindless, hit-things-with-numbers-and-slowly-the-numbers-go-higher game.

I got a Series X this weekend so I have been playing quite a few games this weekend on it!

• Metal Gear Solid 2: Many years ago, I bought the MGS HD collection for the Xbox 360 and completely forgot I owned it. Thanks to Microsoft's backwards compatibility, I am now playing this on the Series X. I've only beaten this game once but have been itching to replay it for several years now. Now that I have the HD collection available again, I will try to get through this again. My partner will likely not want to watch me play this though, she flat out says the story is dumb. I concur on the surface level, but it's Kojima so I'm used to it.

• NHL 21: This game series hasn't made its way to PC unfortunately so hockey is a long missed sports game that I haven't had the chance to play until this weekend. So far, it's the one I have enjoyed the most since I'm a sucker for sports games. I will start by saying I know fairly little about hockey except what I pieced together watching The Mighty Ducks. I'm learning though. Like, you aren't allowed to trip your opponent. And, if you cross the blue line on the opponent's side before your teammate with the puck has, you draw an offsides penalty. I'm unsure about the purpose of different positions so I'm winging it. To learn, I'm playing the "Be A Pro" mode which is like the career/story mode of the game. I'm not doing terribly but I consistently get poor team grades due to the number of penalties I draw. Still haven't lost a game yet though!

• Fable 2: This is another game that never made its way to PC and I never got the opportunity to play. I absolutely loved Fable 1 so Fable 2 has been a desire for quite some time. It has a lot of charm and the 2 hours I have invested so far has me itching for more.

So I've continued my work on the not-very-good Star Trek: Legends game. I've gotten Gary, my Borg Maintenance Drone up to level 62 with a power of 1788. Unfortunately, when it comes to battle, while he's the strongest, he still isn't very good. His attacks are weak-ish and he doesn't have much protection. I'm not the best at strategy games, and there are about a half a million stats you can level up, but it's super confusing figuring out how each one works. Plus the game makers have done a pretty good job of making the (boring) game balanced, so it's kind of hard to beef this character up at the expense of all the others as I hoped to do. You have to take him on missions, and if the other characters aren't at a similar level, they usually die quickly, and since Gary's kind of a weakling, it doesn't usually end well. So there's more work to do!

Sp!ng also released something like 25 new levels, so I'm running through those. It's a very fun casual swinging game, and I'm always excited when they release new levels. This is the second update in like a month or 2, which is a pleasant surprise.

Installed Planetary Annihilation Titans (big fan of the Total Annihilation series) and have been playing it a bit. Time utterly disappears while playing it, so much that I think the match timer at the end of each round may be slow. I don't to RTS multi-player so just doing the single-player war scenarios and honestly need to adjust (or install mods?) how I play. The "normal" mode is practically a no-way-to-lose tutorial level difficulty, "hard" is actually easy mode, so when I finish the current campaign today I'll either bump the difficulty to the highest and turn on hardcore.

...or I'll just uninstall it as I've achieved all the various win conditions possible already so there's nothing new to see. I've built every titan and won a round with those, I've done the planetary annihilation win conditions (both death ray and launching a moon), and won via air, bot, vehicle, and naval only approaches. Last night before bed I built a couple dozen repair bots, some orbital sentries, assigned them to protect, and just curbstomped with only my commander. Won't be possible with it on the highest difficulty, but at this point it's not offering new gameplay, just less resources and more grind.

Played a little bit more Running With Rifles. Still not sure if I like it enough to continue -- yet still not sure if I dislike it enough to stop. xD

Randomly fired up Fantasy Strike (an innovative, F2P 2D fighting game), and played here and there through the week. Still fun, and I still like this game and want to support it and its development studio. I randomly came across a really good player. Saw that they were level 250 (!), and their name was printed in a different colour than usual, so I looked them up, and found out that they're a top-10 player! Ranked in the top 10 in most of the seasons. Wow. So I sent a friend request, hoping to be able to practice against them, in order to get better. (I got steamrolled in our match. I think I won maybe 1 out of 9 rounds. Or maybe it was won 0, which is more likely.) They did accept the friend request, but I haven't sent a challenge yet (need to catch them online).

Started going through Aragami, which I had parked in my to-play queue. Kind of fun. It's maybe a little too arcadey for my tastes, but I'm gonna stick with it a while more and give it a chance to win me over. I'm playing on hard(est) difficulty, and am trying to max out each chapter (mission) with S Rank (rankings are D to A, with S being above A). What's neat about this game is that there are common achievements you can get for the missions, but some are mutually exclusive. For example, you can achieve "kill no one" or "kill all enemies" -- but obviously you can't achieve both of those in the same playthrough. I'm going to try to finish each chapter with these achievements: kill no one; never seen; no suspicion. There are earnable skills you can gain for your character, with some offensive, some defensive. I'm tailoring my picks to help me with the stealth achievements (i.e. not spending on offensive skills). Getting all those achievements is easier than it sounds, because the redo system is good: You can quickly restart from the nearest checkpoint that you passed, and the reload is very, very fast. Probably under 3 seconds. You also get even more bonus points for completing a mission without using any checkpoint respawns. I've done this for the first two missions, but I'm not sure I want to bother doing it going forward as the missions get lengthier or more difficult.