I got maybe a half an hour into rdr2 before all the cutscenes drove me away. Back in the day I played one MSG game, and I ended up suffering through all the cutscenes just because I could not believe how many and how long they are. Never again.
By contrast, Starcraft cutscenes range from good to awesome. I didn’t even really play Starcraft 2 (though I do have it and could if I wanted) but I’ve watched that cutscene with the words half a dozen times at least on YouTube.
Just started playing Factorio today. The first tutorial mission was fine, didn’t really grab me. The second one, just now, as I started connecting mining equipment to collection devices via conveyor belts…oh my! Oh my oh my oh my. This game could potentially hook me bad.
One of the worst possible games to pick to showcase my brand new fancy video card, but oh well.
I’ve been on a huge Factorio kick for the last month. One of my favorites, but if you want something with the same basic gameplay, but amazing graphics, check out Satisfactory. It’s Factorio in a first person view, with a ton of verticality - you can make multi story factories and have to solve engineering problems like routing your conveyor belts down cliff faces.
It’s currently still in Early Access, but 1.0 is coming out sometime this year.
I do have Satisfactory. Had some initial trouble trying to figure out how to get started when I first tried it, but you’re right, that’s a first-person 3D game as opposed to an isometric top-down view. That would be a better graphical showcase.
Factorio is pretty freaking fun. Overall I like the machines in Satisfactory better; but the fighting element of Factorio is so much better than Satisfactory’s. And I appreciate how the game has an end-goal.
I’ve been replaying the Arkham games just for the heck of it. I love the atmosphere, that creeping strangeness and unsettling touches.
Tried Gloomhaven by the recommendation of a friend. I like it in general, but I’m not usually a card-game player and the tutorial was frustrating. Also, the rule that"use up all of your cards and you’re dead" makes the strategy part much less fun.
There’s definitely a learning curve to Gloomhaven and it can be frustrating as well to make a minor mistake and have little recourse for correction (aside from restarting the whole round) when, at the table, it’d be trivial to say “Oh, shit, I meant…” I wouldn’t say that I like the “use all cards and you’re dead” mechanic but I’ve come to deal with it as the basis of the game. Didn’t help that I went Scoundrel which has either the smallest deck or close to it. When I found out that some other people were starting with four or five more cards than me, I was outraged
I was playing it weekly online with three friends for a while and it was fun. I think it really benefits from playing it with others – dunno if you’ve been going solo or what.
I’d say different. They’re more armored and can zap you from further away but you don’t find yourself getting swarmed in a mass of them as often and, unlike Bug Breeches, you can hit a bot dropship in the engine with a rocket and send it crashing down.
Satisfactory does have an end-goal: launch all the space elevator payloads. Which is, functionally, pretty much the same as Factorio’s end-goal of “launch a rocket.” Plus, they’re adding an actual plot to Satisfactory with the 1.0 release.
I do which it had more of Factorio’s tower defense element, though. The more varied and 3D terrain would be amazing for stuff like defending choke points.
I never launched the final payloads, as it just seemed like I’d launch them and…then what? At least with Factorio you get that cool graphic for the rocket launch. But I take your point. In any case, I’m definitely looking forward to the plot with the 1.0 release.
And yeah–a Satisfactory mod with tower defense elements would hit ALL my buttons.
I haven’t gotten to try Robots yet, but last night on a Bug mission, I had a Shrieker Nest spawn.
These are newly added flying bug enemies, and they’re pretty nuts. They swarm the sky as soon as you get close to their nest and repeatedly dive bomb you.
We slowly fought our way to the nest, taking heavy losses. Called in airstrikes and blew it off the map.
Unfortunately this meant we had wasted a lot of reinforcements right at the start of the mission. So we ran out of reinforcements partway through and soldiered on, with only pne Helldiver on the field at a time for a significant part of the mission while we waited for reinforcements to come off the 2 minute cooldown.
Eventually though we completed the objective and just barely made it to Evac.
Picked up a cool rock climbing game called New Heights. Plays well, controls are good, feels like real climbing. Controller probably necessary. Technical, and difficult, but not as much as that other climbing game. It’s challenging, but not in a rage-game kind of way. Early Access but there seems to be a fair amount of content.
I have FINALLY been able to play Helldivers II. Turns out I had to unplug one of my monitors for the game to work; a very odd bug.
This is my idea of a perfect sequel; take a great game, and improve the technical aspects, but essentially leave the core of the original unchanged. Enjoying the hell out of it!
Speaking of “Take a great game, improve aspects but leave core the same”, I’ve been playing Dragon’s Dogma 2 this past week and having a good time of it.
For anyone not familiar, Dragon’s Dogma is a 3rd player action RPG by Capcom with two major distinctive bits: the amount of time you’ll spend climbing on minotaurs, chimeras and dragons to stab them as they thrash around and the “Pawn” system where your party is made up of you and three NPCs. You design one of them (looks & class/skills) and the other two you hire from other players via “the Rift”. You decide you need an archer so you hit up the Rift stone, check out a selection of archers around your level who are all other players’ main pawns, pick one and adventure with it until you get bored or outlevel them, them send them off (maybe with a gift) and get another. Meanwhile your pawn is also (invisibly to you) adventuring with other people. They come back with information gained from their travels, so you’ll be out running around and have a pawn say “In a previous trip, we found a chest nearby; shall I lead you to it?”. Or, “This is a surprising find! I’ll have to inform my own master when I return”.
Anyway, describing Dragon’s Dogma is about the same as describing Dragon’s Dogma 2 because it’s the same game aside from the plot, better graphics and some tweaks to the classes and skills. It’s fairly grindy as you’ll spend hours traveling roads with very limited fast travel and getting jumped by goblins and wolves but, if you enjoy the combat, it’s a mindlessly enjoyable way to pass the time. The plot/story is middling and NPC interactions limited. Either you like the combat/pawn systems or won’t have much use for it.
There was a launch kerfluffle about microtransactions that was both overblown and a self-own on Capcom’s part, putting a wall of irrelevant MTX purchases on the store page. And the game is hard on the CPU in towns due to the NPCs chewing up cycles. My i7-13700k runs it without complaint from me but the minimum spec is an i5-10600 and even CPUs in that range struggle a bit.
I loved this game. A JRPG designed mainly by one person as a throw back to the 16-bit era, but with a lot of improvements and modern updates. The story was great, the characters were great, and the gameplay was also great. I have almost no complaints when I look back on it. I mean, it isn’t in my upper echelon of great games of all time, but it didn’t strive to be. It’s just a really solid great little game that took about 25 hours to beat.
I am hoping the creator of this game makes another, even bigger and better, JRPG style game.
If you like JRPG’s at all, this is a huge recommendation. It was a lot of fun to play and reminds me of why I liked the genre on the SNES era of games.
It’s a total genre shift isn’t it? Top down shooter to first person shooter? But it does sound like they basically tried to take everything and translate it?
I haven’t been back to bots yet since getting my butt kicked on a bot mission with some RL friends and just barely squeaking by to extract. Need to revisit bots now that the Major Order has us fighting them.
It sounds like the bots are making a big push towards Cyberstan, which I guess was the cyborg HQ last game. If they get there, I’m sure that won’t turn out well for us.
Yeah, the bots are ROUGH. Evem the Anti-Materiel Rifle is hard-pressed to take them out quickly and reliably. We’ve been having a lot of luck with energy weapons; the laser cannon and Scythe or Sickle main weapon works great, and if anybody has the Punisher plasma shotgun, it’s great for stunning or breaking the defenses of the larger enemies so teammates can take them out.
