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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 hooked my Wii U up to my bedroom projector and sound system this past weekend. It has been a nice dose of early '10s nostalgia. I'm going to try to finish off my playthrough of Twilight Princess since... 2016? I'm lucky because I didn't save and quit in the middle of a dungeon, but rather at a point right before cutscenes. Now I am playing through the Lakebed Temple and will continue at a pace of one hour a day until completed.
I have a couple of games I want to play on the system before boxing it up. I think I will play Wind Waker next if I am not too burnt out on Zelda. I also have Pikmin 3 and Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate teed up. I know Pikmin 3 has a save from 6-7 years ago that I could finish off. And I never got into Monster Hunter until World so it might be fun to hop into it after all these years.
Otherwise, I have for some reason got hooked into playing Overwatch again. I expect I will continue playing until matchmaking wisens up and starts placing me in matches at higher levels where the toxicity is higher. I have tried to keep the toxic feelings down and have had a few matches where I received 8 endorsements from people.
Looking ahead, I was able to buy a copy of Cyberpunk 2077 for a whopping $5.00 from Best Buy. I read through the included game manual (which was actually pretty nice and something I haven't done in 10 years). I got it for Xbox Series X and am looking forward to sitting down and finally seeing if the internet overreacted as a result of overhyping or if the game really is bad.
For $5, you'll have a great time for your money with Cyberpunk 2077.
That's what I'm thinking too. I spent more on my dirty chai tea latte this morning than I did on the game, so I'm sure to get some enjoyment out of it.
Lightmatter
Finished this. Solid first-person puzzler game. Doesn't outstay its welcome.
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night
Put 40+ hours into this, the last ~25 of which were essentially just grinding. I nearly 100%ed the game but can't be bothered to finish out the item list. I did get all the shards, enemies, quests, recipes, rooms, and secrets though. Normally I wouldn't put that kind of time into grinding, but I was finishing up my summer break, and the mindless play made a great background activity for listening to audiobooks.
I've gone through and almost 100%'d art of rally. The only achievement left for me is to finish 1000 separate stages. I'm currently sitting at 305 completed stages, and 45-ish hours of gameplay, so if I REALLY want that last achievement (only .6% of the playerbase has it apparently), I'd want to cheese it rather than get it "honestly".
Other than that, I've gotten really into Battlefield 4. I like it a lot more than CoD franchise at this point, and there are a ton of server that are still very very active which is nice. Heli's and planes are hard as fuck to pilot properly, so I'm just focusing on the "boots in the dirt" aspect for now
The cool thing about Art of Rally is if you just dig the gameplay you can just play it a bit at a time. Heck, an hour a week will get it done by this time next year.
I'm still playing chess!
Some updates...
Lichess is great :).
You'll definitely get better at puzzles over time. At first you won't understand why the solution is the solution, but if you try to really think about what makes it better than your initial guess the puzzles will really start clicking. Not that I'm great at them either, mind you.
Been playing Amid Evil, a so called "boomer shooter". It's great, gameplay has fluid movement, the weapons are fun to use and more importantly, it has amazing atmosphere. Each episode executes its theme perfectly and some of the environments left me in awe.
In the same wave, I also played Quake for the first time in the form of the recently released remaster and I can see why it's a classic. It aged really well.
Greedfall
Got to level 16 and uninstalled. This may be the most boring game I've played in recent memory. Combat is lackluster and repetitive. Story is lackluster and uninspiring. World attempts to be expansive, but ends up just being empty. Map is next to useless. Inventory system is annoying. Mid-travel merchant/camp is seemingly useful at the start, ends up being tedious. The party gather/loading when you go through every-freaking-door makes gameplay in town atrocious, which ends up making the entire game a chore to play.
You got further than I could have. I barely got 20 minutes past the character creator before I realized I had no interest in playing a 2006 Bioware game in 2021.
Yeah that may have been the peak of Bioware's powers, but that sort of gameplay just has a lot of seams that show to modern eyes. It's not that fun anymore.
A lot of games start slow, so I try to give them the benefit of the doubt. Late nights drove mindless progression, which says a lot about the game since it's not meant to be a grind-y MMO, but I could play it without remembering doing so.
Yesterday I started it up to play a bit before I cooked dinner and it just hit me "Why the hell am I playing this?" - Geek uninstaller launched, gone in a few seconds.
I absolutely adore playing GreedFall, but I am a major fan of Spiders games. The weighted combat, the story lines, lore, world building, the "openish" world with real level design. This is a classic RPG in the purest sense in the modern world.
This isn't going to be for everyone, it's rough around the edges, and the storyline isn't full of action as it is for diplomacy. But, I really do think this game will be a classic. If you had never played a Spiders game (Technomancer being one of my all time favorites) and are expecting something akin to Elder Scrolls, Dragon Age, or Final Fantasy then yes you are likely not going to enjoy it. Your actions in this game have very real consequences that affect every village, every person, and every ending.
While I will say the ending is a bit rushed, I still very much enjoy it.
Started playing The Ascent with a friend yesterday. We immediately ran into some problem with the graphics settings. The game out of the box seem to have raytracing enabled! Neither of us comps with graphics cards that support that. So the game was super janky and unplayable. We finally figures out that if we set the DIrectX version used to 12. It enabled the raytracing settings (the settings could not be changed in DX11, but defaulted to raytracing being enabled) so we could disable them... Phew... After that it was pretty smooth sailing and seems like a really enjoyable game... Don't think a lot of people will have our patience with fiddling with the settings though.
I started up Starcraft 2 yesterday. I loved SC back in the day, and when SC2 came out, I tried getting into it, but for some reason couldn't. So I never really played SC2. Idk if I was just in a different headspace, or hadn't really played RTSs in a while, or because it was just too different from SC. Either way, I kinda just skipped over SC2.
But I'm having fun so far. I'm playing the campaign and I'm like 6 missions in. I'm playing on Normal difficulty which might be a little too easy for me, but I'm honestly just here for the story. For a game that's 11yo, it looks pretty good still. We'll see how I feel towards the end; if I get the expansions or not.
Also been playing Last Oasis on PC. This is the 4th "Season" that I've played, even though it's still technically Pre-Alpha/Early Access. This game, more so than any other, evokes such a strong love/hate feeling. I love the concept - it's basically Eve Online in the desert, in a way. The politics, the relationships, the grudges, even spycraft and subterfuge. All amazing meta. And the PVP on walkers ("landships") or even on the ground is stellar, even if I am terribad at PVP.
Unfortunately, the devs are garbage and have no clue what they want to do. I could go on, but I do enough bitching about this game with my friends. Anyway, we're at the point in the game where the game meta itself starts weeding groups out, since Iron (a resource used to craft armor, weapons, ships, etc) has been introduced. Anyone or any group that doesn't yet have Iron is going to get screwed by those groups that do have it. Because the power differential is just too great. Think like caveman going up against medieval soldiers. That's what it's like. And once again, I'm in a group that doesn't have great access to Iron. Probably won't be playing this for more than a week or two more.
Still playing Great Ace Attorney Chronicles. Making slow, but steady progress. Long dialog is annoying, but I am definitely liking the the new mechanics like Jury Examinations and the Pursue system.
I played through the first episode of Quake 64, thanks to the Quake re-release. Having watched the excellent DF Retro on Quake, I knew this port hacked up and simplified some of the level geometry, but woof. Some times they replace some good looking rooms with plain boxes. It's been a while since I played base Quake but it seems they've also sprinkled a lot more ogres into the maps too.
What I really appreciate about this is the effort they put into making it look muddy and blocky, when the rest of this re-release looks so damned good. There's a visual filter over the picture, the textures are all low res, and there are splashes of colored lighting everywhere, in addition to using the N64 maps. They went for a faithful rendition of Quake 64 and (having not played Quake 64) it certainly looks the part.
I'm playing this on Switch and I sort of love how they've integrated gyro controls into it. I can right stick aim broadly, and finely tune the aim with the gyro, and that works great.
I'm also playing the (relatively) new Dimensions of the Past episode that was included in this re-release. It's got some fun maps but it sure is mean in some places. It's very Quake to sandwich me between a trap and a couple tough enemies.
Finally, I reached the end of the playable campaign levels in Prodeus. I'm loving everything this game is doing. It's like a pretty, bloodier Doom with weapon reload and alt fire. It's working for me. Looking forward to the 1.0 release, hoping I don't lose my progress in the campaign but I won't be too terribly mad if I did.
After a long, long time trying to grapple with the dated controls long enough to get interested in the game, I'm having a lot of fun with System Shock thanks to Nightdive's Enhanced Edition. Despite its old age, its challenges feel worth overcoming, even if the maps can be a little too maze-like. Mandalore's video does a good job talking about what it's like to play and why it's such an important game. I'm really excited for the remake, and I'm strongly considering breaking my no preorder rule to get the System Shock 2 remake for free.
EDIT: I just got to the area with the invisible mutants and now I hate this game
I bought the Cottage Living, Knitting, and Tiny Living expansions for The Sims 4, and I’ve been living my best homesteading life. I’ve been playing the same lineage since I started a new game several years ago, though I don’t play terribly often. My third generation just aged up into a child, and I think she’s going to skip college and go straight to living off grid in a tiny house being self-sufficient. The cottage expansion is easily the best addition since Cats and Dogs.
Oh yes, Prey is effectively a System Shock 3. Excellent sci-fi immersive sim, one of the only games in recent years to actually let a player approach every aspect of the game in any which way they choose.
More Fallout: New Vegas. Big thanks to everybody who offered some advice in my thread about being unable to actually play it. More about the game, I didn't expect it to be so... RPG, I guess. It's harcore about all of its traditional mechanics. I'm still tripping out about how FNV is both a solid RPG, and a solid shooter.
I'd expected something closer to Oblivion, even knowing Fallout's history (at least 1&2 being hex CRPGs, and Obsidian rising out of Black Isle's ashes to be an RPG-oriented studio), but it feels more like I would expect an RPG to. It's so dedicated to how you develop your character and providing consequences for every NPC-related decision, and the ways you develop your character (skill levels, SPECIAL attributes, even details how much money is in your wallet, quests you've completed or hostiles killed) have huge effects on how you interact with the world. The reason I wanted to play despite how much the game seemed to be the opposite of anything I should play was that I found these mechanics as fascinating as the world you're interacting with them in.
I started Fallout 4, but wasn't a big fan of the opening (straight to power armor and an escort quest, but the opening sequence was a trip).
I finished Portal Reloaded. I had to look up some solutions to find something I don't think I was ever going to get. The puzzles seemed to either be difficult and easy to logic through, or so simple that you overlook the obvious. I see this as a good thing, because it's intended to require a lot of out of the box thinking. I also found the endings to be somewhere between satisfyingly boring, and quite fascinating, they just felt right, whatever you did.
Quake. I'm doing some speedruns on Easy on the first mission just because I find it fun. I've actually never beaten the other missions. It was partly to compare my preferred sourceport Quakespasm-spiked) to Bethesda's port. They both feel great, like they could be the other with slightly different settings, I guess.
Someone in one of my discord servers has been replaying Morrowind, and them talking about it motivated me to finally give it a try.
Luckily, there is a summer bundle deal on steam for Morrowind GOTY, Oblivion GOTY Deluxe, and Skyrim Special Edition.
I had bought Skyrim on launch, but never really got around to doing a full playthrough.
I didn't have any of the DLC, and it seemed like every time I started to think about just buying it, another re-release would come out, and the price would be bumped up again.
So it's nice to finally have a copy of the game with all the content in my library.
I know there's a ton of room to mod Morrowind, but I wanted my first playthrough to be as vanilla as possible, so the only thing I've downloaded for it is OpenMW because I had heard it helped a ton with performance, stability, and support for newer hardware.
The only technical issues I ran into were tiny text and broken vsync.
The first was fixed by changing a scaling option in the config file, and the second by forcing vsync on in Nvidia Control Panel.
I've been playing as an Orc Warrior for about six hours now and so far I'm really enjoying this game.
I'm liking the way you have to talk to people to find out information about a location/thing and then use their directions, the map, and road signs to get there.
Maybe I'll get tired of it in a hundred hours, but right now it feels more immersive and enjoyable to me.
If that holds up, I might see about finding a mod to disable waypoints when I get around to installing Tale of Two Wastelands (imports Fallout 3 content into Fallout: New Vegas so that both games are playable in one playthrough) in a few weeks.
I've had a bit of trouble with fatigue, magicka, and training a few of my misc skills.
For fatigue, I didn't realize for about four hours that it only seems to affect how you do in combat and your chances of a successful cast, and that you can run forever with no fatigue, so I kept walking around to keep my fatigue from running out.
For magicka, I'm not liking how it only regenerates from resting.
I guess it was done because there was a lot of influence on the game from tabletop rpgs, and I'm generally fine with that, but this is one aspect that is really annoying to me.
I'm considering going against my "vanilla first" choice and finding a mod to enable magicka regen.
For the misc skills, I knew that the ones that started at five would take a while to get started on training them because it only goes up on a success, and they have a low chance of success, but it so far it seems like some of them will simply never succeed at five.
The two that have stood out the most to me are sneak and mercantile.
I've never had a trade get accepted, even when changing the trade offer by just one gold.
I get the sneak icon to appear all the time, but I've apparently never had a success on sneaking because it hasn't gone up at all.
Psychonauts 2. Very much the same feelings I got when playing the original, down to the obnoxiously long loading times when playing on outdated hardware. Loving every moment of it.