Over Thanksgiving weekend, I visited fam and we played RV There Yet together. It’s a silly, kinda hilarious, cartoonish RV road trip simulator.
You start out at a campsite and try to make it back home, supposedly by working together. One guy jumped in the driver’s seat immediately while his wife worked to stash all the camping supplies into random nooks and crannies.
Not a few feet away, there was a small hill with a few tiny rocks. The driver started going, but couldn’t for the life of him figure out why he kept “getting stuck on the pebbles”. His wife got out and tried to clear the debris. Then she placed down wooden planks in front of the tires and had him try and try again. Still no go, even with the engine almost burning out. Eventually she tied the front winch to another tree and used it to hoist the RV forward… didn’t take long for it to get super tangled in the woods…
They spent a good 15 minutes trying to extricate, all while the RV was violently thrashing about and rocking to and fro, with camp supplies flying out the open windows.
Unbeknownst to them, I’d secretly attached the rear winch cable to a tree before we ever started driving…
By the time they finally figured out what was wrong, we’d already lost the RV’s roof, and was dangling over a gully suspended by the front and rear winch cables…
I had resisted chuckling this whole time, but couldn’t hold it in any longer once he started howling in annoyance at me.
Recently dove back into the Final Fantasy series. Knocked out III and X, having beaten those long ago, then started X-2. Still don’t like it, so picked up XIII. I remember it from years ago, but never got terribly far, so I’m giving it another chance. I don’t know if I’m a fan of the real-time combat system, but the various “paradigm shifts” have made it interesting so far. It feels a bit like a dungeon crawler with pauses for exposition.
Have you tried 7, either the original or the three-part remakes? It was the only one of the series I ever played, and one of maybe only 5-6 games (out of thousands) I played through to completion for the story alone. The combat is whatever, but it’s a traditional turn-based JRPG and not real-time.
I finished the main story of Arkham Knight and I really enjoyed the game, more than Asylum or City. The only Batmobile segment that really annoyed me was the penultimate challenge in the Catwoman quest line, where you have to do a timed race driving along walls while weaving between mechanical crushers; I just gave up on it. There were some boss fights that I thought were pretty tough, but in general the autosave frequency is pretty generous so I rarely had to go all the way back to the beginning if I died partway through.
I thought the open world quests (e.g. militia roadblocks, militia watchtowers, etc.) compared favourably to the Shadow of Mordor/Shadow of War series, which is one of my favourites.
Been playing Octopath Traveler II. It is a JRPG fix but it is not as good as some of the oldies like earlier FF.
Even though you can do the characters’ stories in any order, the stories themselves are very linear. There really aren’t any choices of consequences to be made at all, as far as I can tell. Not yet anyway.
The stories are good and the sprites are cute. The graphics are good. Not listening to the music. It isn’t very humorous.
Somehow, I am not bored by it. Probably because I have not played a JRPG in ages.
I’m playing Tales of Graces f Remastered. I Iike the “Tales” JRPG series and think it remains criminally underrated. I’m only 4-5 hours into this one, but it is pretty good.
It was a Nintendo Wii game exclusive to Japan originally. It’s been remastered fully and it is solid so far.
I tried a budget force feedback wheel with Roadcraft and that was already quite the novel experience (they’ve come a long way since the 90s). It’s awesome that they have special ones for trucks (and farming sims too)… maybe they’ll eventually make them for tanks and civil construction equipment. Boys and their toys…
The large majority of people playing games play the same 3-4 forever games. On Steam think; CS2, DotA 2, or TF2.
My Steam recap isn’t impressive (it was a very idler/cozy game year for me) but here is my PlayStation recap.
I was checking out your steam recap, and then when I closed it I wasn’t sure where I was. I do enjoy doomscrolling both Reddit and YouTube, and this screen I was left in seemed similar so I just started doomscrolling there as well. Finally the question “but where the hell am I?!” got to me so I went to slowly close the window to see what showed up.
It was imgur. I didn’t realize that was effectively a social media site. I thought it was only image hosting. Today I learned.
