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

I blazed through DELTARUNE: Chapter 2, which got surprise-dropped last week.

I went in with high expectations that were all completely met. The only disappointment is having to wait for the rest of the story to be developed.

Pokemon crystal clear. It's a crystal romhack that makes it into an open world, non-linear experience, with the ability to start in any town, take on the gyms in any order, and a selection of over a dozen starters. That's in addition to restoring cut content like the safari zone, the celibi quest, reworking the map to make it traversable without entering dungeons or requiring HMs (for the main towns anyway), the addition of entirely new areas and content like quests to get mew and Mewtwo, quality of life things like the tradeback trainer... it's a lot. I'd definitely recommend it for scratching that pokemon itch in an entirely new way. Gotten all 16 badges, defeated the E4, and I'm currently in training and exploration mode, there's so much to uncover.

I'm really looking forward to playing the next Halo Infinite flight, which starts this Friday.

The last flight was a lot of fun. I really liked the movement and thought it struck a good balance between those who like the older games and more modern movement. Though most of the last flight was player vs bots, and while I think the bots were really impressive its just not the same as PVP. We only got PVP slayer on the last day of the flight and I had a blast but had to work early the next day so didn't get to play it much.

This flight is supposed to be more focused on PVP and specifically big team battle. I got a few friends to sign up for Halo Insider so I'm really looking forward to playing it with them. I'm sure there will be some annoying technical issues, but that's the whole point of the flight (I have to remind myself of that).

I'm a big fan of Halo and it's been a long time since we've had anything new. We're nearing the end of a year delay so I couldn't be more pumped.

Completely out of character, I bought myself an Xbox Series S last week and I've been playing a bunch of games in my free time ever since. Since I blew all my disposable income on the console itself, I've yet to buy a game, but Game Pass Ultimate (GPU) is so good that I don't think I'll ever have to? The only downside is, Xbox is deeply unpopular in my country so I don't have anyone to play with. It hasn't been a big issue so far since I'm still learning the ropes, but I may need to find myself some internet friends to have fun with down the road. As for the games I've been playing:

Ori and the Blind Forest: This game really came out of nowhere. I downloaded it completely by accident, and it wasn't the first game I tried out, but I'm completely hooked on it. At first some of the more challenging parts were annoying, but I told myself to keep going as I thought my annoyance was due to not being used to playing any, if at all challenging games and I'm so glad I stuck with it. I don't know how far I've progressed (I'm in Misty Woods now) but I love the journey so far. I'm so glad there's another game after this.

Minecraft Dungeons: Savvy and strategic person that I am (only when it doesn't matter), I first installed Minecraft on my console, since it doesn't take a long time to download it, and I can download other games while playing Minecraft itself. I was also curious about how the controls would work because until a week ago, I've literally never played a first person game with a console controller. Since I'm used to playing Minecraft on my PC with the precision of a keyboard and a mouse, I didn't have much patience for the controller. So I installed the next best thing, Minecraft Dungeons. Now this, I liked. Most of the mobs and items in the game are very familiar to anyone who's ever played Minecraft and that's why it felt welcoming. I didn't need to worry too much about controls either because it's not a first person game. It felt so familiar and intuitive that I realized I was playing in hard mode about two hours in.

Flight Simulator: I don't think I'd be exaggerating if I say that I bought Xbox because of this. I was a huge FSX player, it got me through college, and I was very excited to play this. However, as I'd expected, it's a really subpar experience with a game controller. I still played it for an hour or two, just to soak all the beautiful scenery, but currently it's occupying my external drive, waiting to be paired up with a controller that it deserves.

Psychonauts 2: I heard about this game's release but I was not aware that it was a classic. While its first version was available through GPU, I opted not to play it. Maybe that was a mistake? (If so, do tell.) In the limited amount of time I played, I had a lot of fun. I really liked its witty story telling. I'll probably finish this after finishing Ori.

Forza 4: I downloaded this because I was very curious about its graphics and it's a racing game. They're fun! I think! Well, this one is. I'm currently in the winter season, but I'm intentionally not playing the game a lot because Forza 5 is around the corner and I don't want to make a lot of progress when that progress won't matter in a month or two. (Maybe you can carry your Forza 4 progress to Forza 5, I don't know, but still.)

FIFA 21: This is available because EA Play is included in GPU. I've played on a game console only a handful of times before, but when I did, it was against my brother who were either playing a FIFA or an NBA game. So when I first loaded it, it was immediately familiar to me. I think the last FIFA game I played was FIFA 15, needless to say, a lot seemed to have changed since then.

That's all! I also have other games in my drive right now waiting to be played, but there's only so many hours in a day. Honestly, GPU is such a great deal. So many seemingly good games to choose from.

Gran Turismo 3
I decided to take my PS2 out of the drawer and see what it could do software wise in 2021. Well now you can play DVDs ripped at home without any modchip or play games via Ethernet, HDD or USB. I own GT3 but I'm playing in via USB just for the fun of it and to save the PS2's laser.

I am not a driving game kind of person at all but in my limited knowledge this game aged really well. The driving is fun and there are ton's of different objectives you can go for. Also dozens and dozens of cars or variants. I'm playing the Gran Turismo mode where you start with 18k cash and the objective is to clear leagues, championships, races, etc. You have to buy a starting car and you need money for car upgrades. I only bought 1 or 2 cars and sold 1. I have been progressing the game just with prize money and car rewards. There is something holistic about it haha.

I'm now in the "last" league, the professional league, and I need a faster car for the championships. So I'm going to have to do other challenges to get said fast car.

I have to admit I am starting to get a bit tired of the game because the races becoming longer and longer which I don't like. Also, to participate in certain competitions you need licenses which are boring as hell to get.

Skyrim
Did the same thing to my PS3 as I did to my PS2. Now I'm running my Skyrim of the HDD just for kicks. Started the game today and honestly what I wanted to play was Elder Scrolls Online but I'm on a tight budget so will play what I already have.

The game runs kind of choppy on the PS3, but I don't think it's going to be a big issue. I'm a forgiving gamer haha. I only played around 1h so don't have much of an opinion yet. I will say I was going to create a dark elf but it was so ugly I just gave up. I always play as myself in games and I didn't want to be an ugly beast loool.

Deathloop: A fun game from Arkane, whose prior games I've greatly enjoyed, with a great combination of gunplay and puzzles. I could talk for ages about the enjoyable combination of combat and puzzle solving, but others have done so at length. It's not a 10/10 game IMO, but it's good.

The Long Dark: It's really satisfying, but so grim. The limited food means you have to keep moving, and the cold and the dark means you never have enough time outdoors to take care of your needs. That's before you start dealing with the hostile wildlife. Struggling against an uncaring world can be satisfying in small doses, but I have to take breaks to relax after playing it.

Eastward on Switch:

I've been waiting for like 3 years for this game. The reason I was attracted to the game -- painstakingly rendered pixel art scenes of vibrantly imagined environments that remind one of the best games from the 90s -- definitely holds up. I'm not that far into it, but right now it's looking like it will take a place beside Spiritfarer as a "beautiful experience wrapped up in mostly forgettable game mechanics". The story is good, but the dialog is a little off in places. The core game mechanics are "zelda-like", but they don't really exceed the source material. Still a Zelda/Earthbound mashup has its appeal and the game is pretty fun, overall.

chess.com. My rating has fluctuated wildly since I adopted the stonewall attack. It does bring some much needed novelty to my game, at the cost of efficiency in the short term. To my surprise, lots of players respond to it aptly even in my very low bracket. I'm in doubt if I should keep studying this opening for a bit or just jump into Logical Chess Move by Move, which is more generalistic.

Correspondence chess is particularly enjoyable, one move per day. It's a really chill experience.

I purchased a new, much larger physical set. Much easier to visualize, and it comes with the coordinates. It is a shame that I only have my girlfriend to play with -- she barely knows how to move the pieces yet.

But I wanna study on it (along with the old board for variations). It's surprisingly hard to translate online play to competence over the board. When covid subsides I wanna hit the local scene, maybe get an actual FIDE rating. It'd be nice.

The Hearth and Home update for Valheim dropped, and I picked it up again with a friend of mine. It's been fun, although I thought there would be a bit more substance to it in terms of additional building set pieces. Oh well! My friend and I never beat it the first go around anyway so still having a great time.

Been on a bit of a casual game kick lately after Lost Ark was delayed. So have been playing...

Morphblade - fun little hex based mini-strategy upgrade game. Can play a round in under a minute if I just want a quick distraction.

Heat Signature - Loved Gunpoint, so I picked this one up during the last sale. Just started, nice and challenging, haven't completely gotten the hang of it just yet, but picking up the finer points quickly.

I tried out Castelvania: Grimoire of Souls. I've not played many games of this type, and now I know why. There's a ton of back story that's hard to follow and probably irrelevant. There are a million and one items you can use in any given battle, but since I don't play these sorts of games regularly, I don't have any idea which one would be appropriate at any given time. There's also a million and one controls. Swipe this way to do X. Swipe that way to do Y. Makes this gesture on the right of the screen while standing on your head and doing this other gesture on the left half of the screen to do Z. It was too overwhelming. I'm sure it's a fun game if you already know the mechanics, but as a beginner in the genre, it was too much, so I gave up before finishing the first level.

Side rant: If, during the first level, you have to stop the game play and explain how to perform a necessary action more than 2-3 times, your game is too hard for normal users and you should rethink its UI. You have to show them how to move, how to jump, and how to fire a weapon or interact with items, usually. Beyond that, you're basically teaching them how to rebuild a transmission from scratch as far as the player is concerned. It's no longer fun. Rant over.

The Outer Worlds: it went on a flash sale on GoG today with both expansions for a total $40. I'm enjoying it so far, the gun play is great (better than FNV), the story starts out absolutely intense, and it's scratching the same itch that FNV gave me. Unlike FNV, I can actually relax into this game (I initially ignored the unease FNV gave me thinking it would go away, but I'm not getting it with TOW). It's also just funny.

Morrowind: I'm still plugging away at it. It's fun, but I just want to finish the story so I can make a better character (I'm determined to finish with my wonky Redguard build and go for some sort of a monk). I didn't know magic factored so heavily into the game, and wound up hoarding levitation potions for the Telvanni Hortator questline and optimizing my line through it to minimize the use of potions. I used some difficulty cheats (turned it down) because I'm mostly in it for the story (which is great, I love this sort of intrigue).

No Man's Sky: I want to go on record and say this is the most polite game I've ever played. It walks you through the major mechanics in such a way that you still have to explore and do them, but you learn enough as you go to keep doing things. It also saves danger for when you've created a way to negate it. I also can't help but compare it to Astroneer, but on a much larger scale with radically different goals. The gameplay is still strikingly similar, but because both teams happened to have the same great ideas. I also can't stop playing with the "restore" function on the mining laser.

I played Daemon X Machina on the Switch since it was free for a week for European (?) NSO subscribers. Hmmm. It's a mission-based, first-person, anime mech-fighting game. It's probably exactly what you'd expect from that description which is probably its biggest weakness: It's rather generic. The most unique thing about it is probably the strong environmental art direction which results in some striking colors and beautiful, sharply outlined landscapes (post-apocalyptic landscapes, of course). This is impressive for the Switch but also clearly an effort in working with the ridiculous hardware restrictions, it's rather low-poly.

You start in a small hub area from where you can buy/upgrade mech equipment and start missions. There's also a rudimentary multiplayer which plays like a barebones MMO/looter type thing, I tried it for about an hour. Mechs have more or less unlimited rocket boosters which means you're more flying than walking, which makes you wonder why it's so important that you're piloting giant robot suits with limbs. There is thus a lot of fast movement which in return means long distances covered and most of your time being spent shooting various projectiles as 3-pixel-sized enemies on the horizon. The only resource that's scarce is ammunition, so, you sometimes run out of ammo. Then you have to restart the mission or foolishly look for ammo for 10 minutes before realizing it. You can also exit your mech during battle. It's completely and utterly useless. Like a proof-of-concept mechanic they spent a lot of time working on and decided to leave in.

There's a story. Tons of dialogue, a lot of it delivered through a (fully voice-acted) chat that looks like this. There's your usual anime stereotypes, the girls with the squeaky voice wielding the biggest weapons, grumpy ARGH-yelling guys, arrogant aristocrats, nerdy scientist types. I didn't finish the campaign but got close to the end. The moon fell on earth (yikes!), AIs took over, mysterious "energy" artifacts, competing factions, someone who wants to wipe out humanity... It's very dramatic, cutely philosophical and in all honesty, as good as any videogame story of that type. They made an effort.

I find it interesting that there's a "Japanese way" of doing these types of games that seems to be so universally followed. Hub area, missions, people with different color hair yelling at each other.

I guess it's about a 7.5/10 game for me. I considered actually buying it on sale to play the last few missions but... meh. There's some nice moments where you're just raining hellfire on your opponents with all your carefully min-maxed missiles and lasers. There's even more moments where you're cursing the fiddly, over-styled interface. I guess for some people, this could be a rather interesting niche title. I just can't recommend it in general.

Also, side-note: This is I think the third NSO free game week where I played enough of a game to feel like I'm done with it. I also bought a few, though. So I guess these are more useful than I ever expected.

Played a set of asymmetric 2-player coop puzzle games these past few days. The idea of all of them was that you play without seeing your partner's screen, so only voice chat. Usually, you'll need to talk about what you can see to give your partner enough clues to progress.

Operation: Tango was rather simple puzzles, but they were hurrying you on a few times. Mostly about communicating clearly while in a hurry. 3.5h to completion, probably the weakest of the bunch.

Tick Tock: A Tale for Two is interesting on a technical level as the game itself isn't networked. The coop part comes from the fact that your clues allow your partner to progress and vice versa. You can play it with offline computers and a landline phone. Some interesting puzzles, actually deserving of the genre "puzzle". At no point (iirc) are you hurried on by the game, just a chill experience of observing, communicating and solving. 2h play time. Recommended.

We Were Here Together is super cool. Starts out with you two navigating the same space and slowly gets you used to spltting up to collaborate (one player adjusting the radio antenna while the other person adjusts the receiving station) and gets you more and more used to being in separate spaces. For the late game it splits you up completely, such that communicating what exactly you see becomes absolutely key, as the other player has not the faintest clue what you're looking at. The grand finale is great, with lots of little ways in which you can mess up your communication, so you have your head busy with that already, while simultaneously having to crack a logic puzzle on top. Strong recommendation, 4.5h play time.

Sadly, all of these were rather short. Maybe that makes them better adapted to being played with a non-gamer SO. We Were Here Together in particular left me wanting more though.

In view of Battlefield 2042 's release coming up in about a month, I decided to get some FPS practice in to sharpen my skills in preparation for it. Towards that end, I started playing ("playing")

Aim Lab

which is an FPS skills training app ("game" -- term loosely used). It puts you through quick (usually 1-minute long) training exercises, and records lots of metrics about your performance, such as accuracy, TTK, whether you overshoot or undershoot when flicking, and splits like whether you are better at shooting to your left than your right, or up vs. down. It also keeps a history of your performance so you know if you're improving from the practice. There are many different exercises and drills available, from flicking to tracking to strafing, entry fragging, and lots more. There are even a few game-specific drills for Rainbow Six: Siege and Valorant, where some scenarios or map rooms are recreated, for you to practice doing common room entries and killing enemies in common camping spots, etc.

So far, I've learned that I'm apparently very good at flicking onto targets, but I'm absolutely abysmal at tracking targets (keeping the crosshairs on a moving target). Like worst 10th percentile in the world levels of abysmal. This explains why I do so poorly in FPSes when using certain weapons in certain situations e.g. sub machine guns in CQC, and much better with slow ROF high damage weapons like sniper rifles and shotguns. The former need tracking skills, the latter need point and click accuracy (like clay pigeon shooting -- one hit kill).

Overall, it seems like a fairly nice app for what it is trying to be, and it's even free (for now?). They're still labelling it Early Access, but there's a lot in it already, as far as I can tell. Presumably, they will be adding even more game-specific content for all the popular FPSes.

I've only been doing this for about a day (yesterday and today), so it's too early to tell if this is improving my skills in any way, but I do seem to be improving my scores in the app at least. That could just be me getting better at the given exercises by figuring out ways to score higher, as opposed to actually being a better FPS player. But then, maybe that's the point -- that becoming better at these drills is supposed to translate into better performance in the real FPS games. We'll see.

I tried Cyberpunk 2077 for about an hour and a half and hated the gun play, I could not hit anything. The hacking minigame is terrible too, almost as bad as hacking in the 3D fallout games.

Asphalt 8 is now a part of apple arcade. Totally addicted, after not playing many games at all for a while.

SkateBIRD.

Was awaiting this with some optimism. Now I'm thankful that the game was even released on Game Pass, because it's by far the worst skateboarding game I've ever played. Your character controls with the finesse and precision of a drunk driver, the physics are incredibly jank and the game is far more frustrating than it otherwise should be.

I think Glass Bottom Games genuinely dethroned Robomodo for the title of releasing the shittiest skateboarding game. When you create something that is genuinely worse than Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5, that deserves an award. If there was a video game equivalent of the Razzies, they would've picked up multiple awards this year.

Slap City

As I'm looking forward to Nickeodeon All-Star Brawl, I thought I'd buy & play the other Smash Bros clone that Ludosity developed.

This game is pretty much Swedish Bootleg Smash Bros, from the character designs, which are mostly Nintendo character parodies from Ludosity's other game series, to how unpolished the overall presentation is. Originally considered refunding it because I initially couldn't get my PS4 controller to work. Actually had to play through the tutorial with keyboard, go deep into the options menus, scroll through the list of compatible devices and select "Allow" on Dualshock 4 controls, and I only knew to do this because I performed some Google-fu to find others had similar problems.

And even with DS4 support enabled, Ludosity didn't even have the decency to change the button prompts to match the gamepad I used either. It's still using the numbered buttons that you'd expect from generic cheap USB PC gamepads. It's fine if I'm using one such gamepad, but most people use DS4 or Xbox gamepads which don't have generic numbered buttons.

Something about the controls feel sluggish too. Jumping feels delayed. I think I was able to successfully land a wavedash 5% of the time. A lot of characters have very weird movesets and with the exception of Ittle Dew, I can't actually pull off combos on any character.

I really wanted to like this game but I've seen browser based Flash games from hobbyists with more overall polish than this. Doesn't give me high hopes for NASB. Hoping they'll put more effort into that before it drops...

Mini Motorways

I have a love/hate relationship with this game.

On one hand, the gameplay is better than Mini Metro and it feels far more intuitive to build roadways to help commuters across.

My problem with MM though is that it's quite barebones compared to its predecessor (Mini Metro) and lacks some of the modes that made the original less stressful, like Endless Mode. The game also feels like one where you need to abuse spawn mechanics and temporarily place throwaway roads to control how new homes and destinations spawn.

Last week's weekly challenge was also some utter bullshit. IIRC it was Rio de Janeiro (a map with loads of mountains), unlimited roads, no tunnels (making about half the map impassable), one bridge and no upgrades. Effectively lost that challenge because house spawns entirely blocked my ability to connect blue houses with a destination, so I timed out.