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

I feel like every time I post in this thread it's about Battlefield, and here we go again: Battlefield 1

I started playing a bit of the campaign as a mindless thing to pass the time while listening to a podcast. I was decently impressed by the intro mission, and then the British tank campaign after that. The intro mission has this cool thing where (and this barely counts as a spoiler):

The tank campaign was pretty good too, a decent story and some nice writing, the cutscenes were well directed and acted and I didn't groan once. The ambience and atmosphere of the game is incredible, and it's clear a lot of work and love was put in to making it. I enjoyed my time and think they did a great job.

Now the problems: I don't like singleplayer FPS games, this game suffers from the same things I don't like about almost all singleplayer FPS games. Very few singleplayer FPS games move past that style of gameplay where the only thing you can do is:

• hide behind cover
• wait until enemy soldiers pop out of cover, shoot them
• reload, rinse, repeat until the giant horde of enemies with no personality have been sufficiently slaughtered, and you move on

That was what I started feeling when playing through that tank mission. You're moving a tank forward, you shoot vaguely in the direction of enemies (you have a big cannon and a high calibre machine gun on top, you don't have to be precise), you get out of the tank, you run towards soldiers, you shoot them, you get back in the tank, you drive and shoot until plot happens and then you have to get out and sneak in to a town on foot at night armed only with your pistol (for some reason a German Mauser despite you being British) to get some sparkplugs for your tank. The sneaking in to town on foot was a nice gameplay twist where you can approach it in different ways and play it all stealthily, until I realized that it really was just easier and quicker to run at or past enemies and pick up the 3 objective things you needed to complete the mission without a care in the world in to how professional it was.

There was a point where you have to defend singlehandedly against a wave of incoming tanks and soldiers with only the tank you're driving. For the bulk of that experience I was just waiting for my cannon to cooldown so I could shoot at the other tanks again. I was playing on medium difficulty, I was not doing anything skillful, I destroyed what must be 10-20 tanks and 50+ soldiers in that time, I was just sitting there hammering down on the left mouse button waiting for the cannon to reload so another tank can be destroyed. The only reason I beat that mission was because the game had to be balanced where you could take down 10-20 tanks and 50+ soldiers without having to think about it -- other tanks had less HP and did less damage than I did, those soldiers had no effect on my tank, we weren't playing the same game.

For about 20 years I've been playing multiplayer FPS games and loving them, and I love them because you have to be good to win, you have to think and play smart against other capable intelligent (well not always 👀) people, people who have access to the same abilities and weapons and level playing field as yourself. If you're doing well in the game it's because you're better at playing the game than them, it's a dynamic and challenging experience. The bulk of singleplayer FPS games can't achieve that and don't try, they can't capture the nature of having to be good at FPS games so they reduce the game down to your character, a superhuman, facing off against a ludicrous number of dumb robots that can barely fight back.

The other thing that left a weird taste in my mouth was looking at the other campaign choices in the game to see what was coming up: there were no missions where you played as one of the central powers. I'm not a particular fan of any of the central power empires or their objectives, but it feels weirdly incomplete to have a comprehensive game about the first world war with incredible ambience and (in multiplayer at least) a pretty immersive experience of trench warfare (although much faster paced than in reality) and leave out all the trench warfare and 4.3 million dead people on the side that wasn't British. There's a tank campaign, an airplane campaign, a Gallipoli campaign, a middle eastern campaign, and one campaign in Italy where you storm a fortress. Nothing about the most distinguishable and horrific part of the war.

That combined with the gameplay made me realize this isn't quite (singleplaye story-wise) a game about World War 1, it's a game where you play as supermen mowing down waves of faceless enemies. The tank campaign I played has you play as a character who was literally a chauffeur driving cars before being put on this tank crew, this is his first time on a tank crew. By the end of the campaign he's killed at least 100 soldiers by himself and singlehandedly repelled an enemy offensive with his single tank. 68,176,000 soldiers participated in the war total, how many of their stories were like that?

Age of Empires IV

This game is so good! I was too young to really understand AoE II when it was out, but I played a lot of AoE III and I am ecstatic to be here for this fourth installment. I looked forward to it ever since it was announced and it is just amazing. I am aware that I'm fangirling a bit much, but I really do feel that it is that good.

It is taking up a lot of the time I would previously spend on New World, which I really thought was great initially. But the longer I played and the higher level I reached, the more its faults became obvious. Anyway, if you have ever liked RTS type games, I would say that AoE IV is the game of the year.

Some friends came over this past weekend (which feels AMAZING to be able to do again) and we hit up some local co-op games that were sitting in my Steam library:

Broforce

I was expecting to bounce off this one QUICK given its hyper-masculine, hyper-jingoistic framing (I can think of few things more offputting to me), but the gameplay itself is pretty damn great. It's an over-the-top parody of already over-the-top action movies, so the game is essentially ridiculous, non-stop chaos. Play sessions happen in the form of seconds, with so much going on in them that they feel like minutes. We stopped playing it after 2 clock hours and were honestly surprised that so little time had gone by -- it felt like we'd been in it for 4 or 5. Before playing it, I didn't understand why this was so highly reviewed, but I get it now.

Boomerang Fu

This is a well-polished local deathmatch game where cute little characters one-hit kill each other with boomerangs. My friends and I set it up originally as us playing as a team against a team of computer players and then, after beating them handily at all difficulty levels, we turned on each other and played some free-for-all matches among ourselves. The game was a big hit -- easy to pick up and play, but with a high skill ceiling and enough changes in the forms of powerups and different stages to keep things interesting. It doesn't have enough in it to have a lot of staying power, and there's no real campaign to play through, but it's definitely fun enough for the occasional match.

N++

I played through the beginnings of the co-op campaign with one of my friends, as this one supports only two-players instead of four. I put hundreds if not thousands of hours into the original N and never did give N++ that same love, but it deserves it. The co-op campaign is really great and is a testament to how much can be done within the game's minimalist, one-screen levels. They are thoughtful, well-designed, interesting, and never run out of ideas. We still have hundreds of levels left and will likely chip away at them over time until the game demands more skill from us than we're able to give. I will say that co-op in the game does take patience and a positive relationship though, as there are a LOT of restarts due to mistakes and many of the levels are designed to be patently unforgiving.

I recently got a library card and noticed they have a ton of PS4 and Switch games! That's pretty cool. To test it out, I got Spider-Man on the PS4 (always heard good things about it) and I'm having a good time with it. The web-swinging is just perfect, the combat is fast-paced and fun (not playing a lot of games like that, it reminded me of God of War?) and you can just feel the love for the source material in all the details. This game's New York is probably also one of the best "videogame cities" I've ever come across. It feels like almost 1:1 scale (although it probably isn't) without feeling too empty because you can move so fast with the web swinging.

I've been playing the GTA Trilogy Definitive Edition. I'm sure you all have your own thoughts on it!

I'm not going to lie. It's pretty bad considering this came from Rockstar Games - the game studio absolutely famous for their attention to detail. So imagine my surprise when I fell through the map in GTA 3 while trying to look for drug packages. Or when I tried to climb up a boat via a wooden plank in Vice City only to fall into water.

There's all sorts of weird issues as well that aren't entirely "how did this make it through QA?" but people who have played the original three will definitely spot. Like how cars blow up stupidly quickly. How sometimes missions succeed earlier than expected. How sometimes in missions the AI doesn't quite act like how you remember, but glitch and spend a while path-finding. Or when I was playing the dreaded "Learning to Fly" missions in San Andreas and I pressed the exit button, I didn't exit - I actually exited out of the plane and fell to my death. Reloading the autosave had it saving me from the point after I left the airplane so I was constantly dying over and over until I learned how to parachute. It's all so incredibly weird how broken these games are but in really "GTA"-esque ways.

But at the same time, I've actually completed Vice City. This is the first time in a while that I was actually able to breeze through a GTA game. The new camera system definitely helps, as well as the new aiming system (even if it's really wonky on GTA3/VC). The killer feature being the autosave functionality. I never truly realised how much time was wasted going back to the safehouse to save the game, then going back to the mission to continue. Now I can just go from mission to mission if I want to or spend time collecting other stuff like drug packages (sadly the game does not autosave when you collect these. Have no idea why).

I'm still making my way through 3 and SA. Unfortunately I find 3 a bit too brutal in its mission structure to immediately hop from one to the other, and since I fell through the map I'm going to put that game to one side. SA I'm persevering since I managed to luckily complete Learning to Fly and move on with some of the missions last night.

Am I having fun? Actually, yes. These games, even in their broken state, are incredible amounts of fun that has got me glued to my console like I was a teenager again (I'm a man in his thirties). Would I recommend anyone go out and buy it? Absolutely not. Quite possibly on sale, but even then I'd say wait for it to go down to $20 to get it rather than the $60 it is right now.

Oh, and do what I didn't do this time and really do wait until reviews come out for the next R* game, even if it is developed entirely in-house.

EDIT: I didn't even get to talk about the jarring art style or the mangled faces, or the fact that the source code was leaked in both PC and Switch versions! There's just so much to unpick from these games. I'd rather wait for a YouTube video that dissected what went on behind the scenes rather than the speculation that's going on now.

Team Fight Tactics. I don't think I've been so addicted to a game in the last 5+ years. I had a 10 hour session last night and I have not done that since I was a Freshman in high-school. (I'm in my mid-20s). It seriously is fantastic because you are scrambling to have a strategy work every second of the game and no two games are the same. It is in the best shape it ever has been in and I am loving it!

Last week I mentioned the Artful Escape; Can confirm that it was a very charming experience (short though).

I'm now playing Lifeslide, a game about flying paper planes through vast landscapes. This is not an easy game but it's incredibly addictive, beautiful and well balanced. I wish it was more popular so the devs would add the several QoL things fans have requested in the forum. It certainly deserves it.

Doom Eternal
It's an FPS, which isn't a genre I have much experience with. Overall I think it's pretty good. The level design I found occasionally confusing, the exploration aspects tedious, the story meh, and environments slathered in gore just an unpleasant space to exist in. But the combat is a lot of fun, which is most of the draw of this sort of game anyways.

You don't hide behind cover and take potshots; you zoom around the map blasting everything. You've got a few utility options to use and a fair few guns, but ammo is plentiful enough that you can pretty freely choose between swapping between everything or just a couple favorites. While health and ammo pickups do exist, you can also get everything you need from killing enemies, which is a nice way to keep the action focused. Most demons have weak points which I like, which are bits you can target or weapons you can use that are particularly effective, though it gets kind of boring with later iterations. There's only one really annoying enemy type I've found so far, which doesn't show up too often.

Overall, if you like fast-paced fps games and blood and such isn't a deal breaker, I'd say Doom Eternal is worth a try. (It's on Xbox Live)

That Flipping Mountain: It's a simple game, in a similar vein to "Getting Over It," the challenge is literally you against this mountain, but you're flipping and need to land on your feet, at the right angle for the landing surface. Jeff Weber, the developer, also made Just Ski, which is beautifully simple and challenging in a similar way. He's also extremely responsive to bugs, given I reported one, and there was a patch out within a few hours to fix it. Even if the game messes up and sends you to the beginning or something else, just drop him a note on the game's Discussion board.

Graveyard Keeper: I'd been talking to my brother about it, and he had a spare Humble Bundle key for it that he hooked me up with. I've played about six hours of it, but I'm genuinely enjoying it. It's tutorials are pretty rough, but things start to click quickly. I also may not be paying enough attention to dialog. I appreciate the way time works, as it's a seven day cycle that steadily progresses, and you only rest to replenish energy to complete tasks (you can eat and never sleep, theoretically).

Still playing Skyrim. My sword board magic Nord character fell through because the Bound Battleaxe caps at 22 damage, and is shifting towards a barbarian: 2h weapon (leaning towards hammers), light armor, but I like having a magic component, so likely bound bow and, obviously, shouts (Elemental Fury is nice). I'm working on sneak because I like using sneak-archer tactics to knock out otherwise boring caves. I'm using Simply No Fast Travel on a specific Mod Organizer 2 profile to ensure I can't fast travel if tempted, and A Quality World Map and Solsteim Map aid in finding roads, as mentioned, and it has completely transformed my Skyrim experience. I have to see so much of the world and, even forgetting the few things added by the free Anniversary Update CC content (I'm not buying the $20 upgrade), it feels like a completely different game that is even more fun.

PySolFC: I swear I stumbled into this one in my early days of Linux, and later leaned towards GNOME's Aisleriot, but PySolFC is the ultimate open source, cross platform solitaire game app. From western card games to Mahjong to Indian games I've never heard of, this is scratching an itch I never knew I had. I've been really into various Tower of Hanoi variants, Golf, Freecell and Yukon through PySolFC. You can get it on Android via F-Droid even.

I’ve been on a long cruise for the past two weeks and so any games I have been playing have been retro games on my emulation handheld. The game I had been playing the most was Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow. Don’t really have much to say about it except that there is a lot of the DNA for Bloodstained in it.

After I came back I wanted to start playing through Shining Force III again with the goal of playing through the more recently translated 2nd and 3rd scenarios afterwords. The game was already one of my favorites but playing it again after such a long time made me realize just how good the game was. The effects don’t look as amazing as they did when I was young but they are pretty impressive for the time and the art style shines through very well. The game is so wonderfully polished that it feels easy without the game having to hold your hand through everything. There are systems in it that don’t make too much sense outside the context of the series but are pretty easy to grasp the very first time you run into them. And after all this time it’s still the only strategy RPG I have ever played that incentivized exploration particularly well.

I've been playing a fair bit of rimworld recently. There's some good stuff there still, even after quite a lot of hours played. Mods keep it fresh. Currently, my young-ish colony is confronted with a crashed nearby defoliator ship. (Kills all vegetation in an ever-increasing radius around it) Not exactly a terrible prospect, as I've got plentiful food supplies. But I obviously can't put off destroying it forever. Guarded by a moderately dangerous robotic force (3 scythers, weapons currently unknown). I'm kind of contemplating to wait for a raid to come in and set the guards off then, see if I can't make them fight each other. Certainly a risky strategy, as whoever is out there doing the poking will die horribly if it goes wrong. OTOH, I can expect about 3 wounded if I fight the guards myself. I guess the right play here is to produce some more guns before I make a move. I've got some severely under-equipped colonists (archers) and I could fix that (riflemen) before the ship threatens my harvest. If an opportunity arises, I'll see if I can't have a incoming raid fight the guards for me.

Is anyone in the loop regarding BF2042? I vaguely remember we talked about it here before. I also have heard in passing that it might be quite overhyped.

Since its release on Nov 17th, I have logged 128 hours into playing Ruined King: A League of Legends story. Its a turn-based RPG that expands on the Ruination story they've (Riot) been telling in lore for a while and had an entire event around recently (I think it was this year but my sense of time is so fucked I can't remember anymore). As sinking 127 hours into a game suggests, I like it a lot. I never really played any tbrpg's, and in general I'm not really interested in RPG's in general. I find I spend most of my time being overwhelmed by all the numbers (character stats, item stats, enchanting items edits their stats, upgrading item rarity changes stats, etc) that I just quit. The game has done a really good job of not making me feel that way. They limited the cast of characters pretty limited so you're not juggling stats for a ton of different people and agonizing over who should be in your party. The runes and abilities of characters give you ideas of what stats the character utilizes best and how to play them, while still giving a lot of freedom to find unique ways to play them. The combat system has some neat twists on tbrpg play patterns (this I cannot speak to personally. I have not played many tbrpgs so I am taking that off of the feedback of some friends and articles of people who play that style of game more often than me). I still really enjoy the combat though.

The art for the game is great. I don't have too much more to say on the visuals. The world is very expansive and fun to explore. Its one of the few RPG's I've played where I am doing all the side quests and not hyperfocused on the main plot. Which isn't a knock on the main plot, its great. The side quests are also fun which I don't always find to be the case.

Finally, the story is really good. To get into some maybe controversial territory, I thought Riot's execution of their Ruination event was abysmal. The story they put out was absolute garbage. It ignored characters who's lore is completely based on the Ruination, they completely changed the personality of characters to make it fit the story they wanted to tell rather than think about how characters would act in a situation, and the ending was immensely unsatisfying, made no sense from a character motivation perspective, and left no sense of completion or closure on the story, which means that we returned to a rune terra that had just gone through a world-ending event and the status quo for most the world ended unchanged. This is probably at least partially because the Ruined King game was supposed to be released as part of the event but then got delayed due to development issues caused by COVID. That said, the understandable delays are unfortunate and explain HOW we got to where we did, but that doesn't change that what they put out into cannon was... not very good. To a point where they had to come out and say that the major beats of the story were true, but the dialog and character interactions were not cannon and that you could discount basically all the writing and only focus on the plot timeline. The Ruined King plot is not perfect, though how much of the plot that I don't like being the fault of the Ruination event painting them into a corner is unknown. The story in the Ruined King is really good. I think most people who are unfamiliar with League Of Legends or Runeterra would still find it compelling, but it is definitely a game that is better enjoyed if you (a) know the lore of the universe going in or (b) have universe.leagueoflegends.com open to read about characters as you meet them. Which I would say is also how I felt playing Witcher III so I'm going to say that's just always the case in an RPG that is based on an established universe.

I am many years late to the party but I played Moss (a VR game) last week. It was absolutely fantastic. A really beautiful game, Quill (the mouse) is very cute... reminded me of Ori. It tends to lean more on the puzzle side than the action side of games I usually like, but it was perfect. 10/10 would recommend :)

I've been playing Gordian Quest, a deck-building roguelite game. It's pretty good! I feel like it'd be fun to do challenge runs once I get more used to it.

I've been brewing up a new EDH deck. Don't have all the cards yet, but I've been playtesting with proxies and forge-mtg and I think I'm getting close to being happy with it.

It's an esper reanimator deck with Sefris of the Hidden Ways at the helm. Esper has always been my favourite of the shards (or wedges) and reanimator is always fun so I'm quite happy to have had this turn out. Plus the art on her is amazing, Ryan Pancoast is so good.

Decklist

Primer

I'm not going to claim it's the most powerful deck but it's certainly fun and will win games at middling power levels. It could definitely be pushed further but I don't want to spend a fortune on the manabase and I have a few pet cards in there like Archon of Cruelty over better synergistic alternatives.

I'm currently playing Pokémon Volt White with a randomizer. I've never played the B/W series of games and with the Switch remakes out, I wanted to try a more difficult Pokémon game where some of my expectations on progression were thrown out. Pokémon Volt White is a romhack by drayano in which it makes all (at the time) 649 Pokémon obtainable in the game, adjusts some stats/movesets, and enhances the trainer AI. I started out with Turtwig among a selection of Sharkpedo and the Foongus .There was an initial scare at the beginning of the game when facing against a trainer who had a Lvl 7 Reshiram that knew dragon rage. Dragon rage is a move that always does 40 HP of damage, regardless of Pokémon type advantages. So I thought I was going to have to grind for a long time but luckily I caught a ditto and was able to RNG the move sequence enough to where I could transform and use their dragon rage against them.

The awesome part about this playthrough for me, is that I never know what to expect when I walk in grass or jump into a trainer battle. I won't necessarily see the low-level bug and normal types early on nor will any gym use highly-specialized types. Fighting against trainers has improved AI so they won't be a cakewalk that just spam random moves. I'm finding that this gameplay style is making me think more about party synergy and actually using non-DPS moves to overcome challenges. It isn't too difficult though where I am not enjoying my time (looking at you Renegade Platinum). The randomizer has led to some severe over-leveling due to the XP given out when facing more advanced Pokémon in trainer battles. For example, I beat a Lvl 15 Blissey and was given nearly 3000 XP which was enough to gain 3 levels. A lot of my trainer battles have featured legendary Pokémon too. My rival has a Celebi and there have been two Shaymins, one Entei, and the aforementioned Reshiram. All before the second badge. The benefit though is that I have been swapping out more of my party and building my diversity of choices for later game.

If you are interested in romhacks, I would recommend giving /r/pokemonromhacks a look. There are a ton out there!

Edit: Also playing Halo Infinite! If you want to join me, feel free to PM me and we can sync up a time to party up. Playing on PC.