I finished playing Witcher 2 as Vernon Roche’s ally and it made me want to play it through again on the other side. That’s a sign of a good game in my book. Some of the mechanics were really clunky, though.
Yes. Lots of educated guessing. And because it only confirms three at a time, you could have any one of the three wrong. And a bit about it that felt genuinely unfair, because of the visual style you could be staring at someone in the instant of death and still not understand what was happening. “Is this guy getting blown up? Or is that a tentacle?”
Still, well worth those frustrations.
I knew nothing about British naval traditions so I really had to figure it out myself. Google wasn’t particularly helpful, either.
I started playing Saints Row IV which I recently bought at a discount. The gameplay kind of reminds me of a much clunkier, open-world version of Control, what with the super-jumping and telekinesis. I definitely would not have paid full price for it, but I suspect I’ll get my $7 worth of fun.
I’ve been playing Persona 5 Royal and enjoying it a lot.
How would you describe that game?
It’s a JRPG, but not a standard one like Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy. You have to work on your friendships and so forth to build relationships, which strengthens your powers. You also go with your allies into areas where you fight standard turn based battles against monsters.
It has a great story, great characters, and is a rare IGN and Gamespot 10/10 ranking. It is from 2017, but was only recently re-released for Switch, PC, and a few other systems.
I’m loving every minute of it.
Right on. I’ll probably check it out.
I loved Persona 3 and 4 on the PS2, as well. It is a spinoff series of Shin Megami Tensei, but is actually more popular than its main series, at least here in the US.
I would highly recommend Persona 3 and 4 as well, which I think were remastered and are head to PC and other modern consoles if not already out. When I finished Persona 4, I remember thinking, “That is the greatest JRPG of all time.”
I believe that many think Persona 5 is even better, but I am only 30 hours in. Each game is 90-100 hours.
I’m currently addicted to Autonauts (half-price on PS store). I do a bit of SQL coding in my job and find this provides the same rudimentary programming satisfaction. It’s a garish, peaceful colony-builder which revolves around building and programming robots to scale up mundane production tasks.
I don’t expect the sequel/DLC ‘Autonauts Vs Piratebots’ to come to console, but am not sure I’d enjoy the introduction of ‘peril’ to the game, anyway.
I am considering putting a month on my WOW account now, I realised last expansion that the bit I love the best is the 2 week loot hoovering events before the latest expansion releases.
Only got about 4 of my 12 chars to max level last time around, I couldn’t bear doing that on rails selection of quests again, worst expansion out of all of them for that reason alone. Never got to Covenants at all because it involved me running the questlines to the end (I tend to stop at max level, the mobs become a lot more difficult after that for a low geared non raider). Perhaps will take the usual 4 alts up to max level, which might take two months (I used the rested bit a lot): Warrior, hunter, warlock and one other (usually a healer class, usually the one with the least shit dps spec, was shamen last time).
So the game Shadows Over Loathing just came out. It’s a sequel to West of Loathing, which itself is a spinoff from Kingdom of Loathing.
Anyway, it’s a humorous RPG with a Lovecraftian setting. But stick figures can only be so scary.
I’m a bit of a wimp, so that’s a plus in my book! I’ll check it out.
It’s a really good story about a real sad sack of a protagonist. And as a middle-aged middle-class white dude, there are few protagonist types I want to read about less. As little as I want to read sad-sack novels, playing a sad sack gave me the hives. I did my best to stick with it, because it’s so brilliantly made, but God I loathed the protagonist and had to give it up.
I finished playing Saints Row IV. I quite liked it, more than Saints Row 3; there was more variety of minigames and it felt less like a GTA clone. I was surprised by all of the aspects that were clearly a wink to Mass Effect 2, though! (Not to mention the winks to The Matrix, Metal Gear, They Live, etc.)
I was a bit less enamored with the Gat Out of Hell stand-alone DLC which focused too heavily on airplane-style flying mechanics for my tastes.
Now I have started Pathfinder: Kingmaker. As a long-time player of the pencil-&-paper version of the RPG, I’m simultaneously impressed and slightly critical of the way over all of the fiddly details they ported over from the original game. So far so good, though.
This might not be the right thread for this, but I’ve been “playing” a lot of FitXR on the Oculus Quest. It’s a fitness program that has three different kinds of guided workouts. I’ve been playing the “boxing” workouts, which is pretty much like a rhythm music/Beat Saber kind of thing where different objects come at you and you have to punch them in a certain way (jab/uppercut/cross) or dodge/block them in a certain way, all set to music. I am amazed at how much of a real workout these sessions can be - at the end of 20 minutes my arms are lead and I am breathing hard.
I also tried the HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training), but did not like it at all. They also have a Dance mode, which I have not checked out yet.
But as I have to put my bike away for the winter, this will hopefully keep me a little active in an entertaining way. We’ll see how long I keep coming back to it.
Picked up a cool indie game called We Who Are About To Die, a roguelite gladiator game. Still in Early Access, and being developed entirely by one guy, but it’s great to be able to live out your gladiator fantasy. 3rd-person real-time combat, but also has a lot of RPG, management, and sim-like elements. Combat has a Mount & Blade kind of feel, where you point and drag to swing your weapon; it’s pretty difficult at first, but once you figure it out, it’s quite fun.
Runs are generally pretty short, but that’s intentional. And you can pass things down to your next character so you don’t have to totally start over every time, and you can build up resources even if you get killed or you hit your run goal and retire.
Picked up Raft on sale from steam. A pretty straightforward survival / base building game. I’ve heard it spoken highly of and had added it to my wishlist months ago. This is the first decent sale I’ve seen, and at $14 it was just cheap enough to take a flyer.
It’s sort of Subnautica-like in that it’s set in water and you build a base, and there might even be a story to unravel but I haven’t bothered with any of that as of yet. The difference is that you can’t travel in the water; a giant shark will eat you within around 30 seconds of getting off the raft. (In a pinch you can, but get back quick!) The shark also eats pieces off your raft, but you can rebuild those.
Designed as a multiplayer coop experience, I’m playing it solo and can’t really tell that I’m missing out on anything. But even solo it plays very much like a persistent online multiplayer game. The game never pauses (even in the settings menu!) and autosaves on exit.
I’m finding it very difficult, almost daunting, right out of the gate. The controls make no sense to me, even beyond the annoyance of not supporting controllers. (M+KB only.)
So you start off on a tiny raft in what appears to be the giant trash pile in the ocean, and you use a little hook thing to grab garbage out of the water as it floats by, sort of like fishing. Then you build stuff with the garbage you collect.
Except you’re thirsty and hungry, and the inscrutable menu system buries the basics. Very quickly I died from dehydration, and then was able to revive losing 2/3ds of my stuff. Fine, no problem, but I’m still thirsty, and don’t know how to drink. Dying again, can’t pause, trying to google “Raft how to drink water.” Finally I quit out, delete the world, learn how to make water and start again. This time goes great, not thirsty at all, until the exact same thing happens from food, starving to death with no idea how to eat food.
Now that I figured out how to eat and drink I think I can survive long enough to make a go of it. Will likely start over again, but let me tell you how complicated it is:
You have one hotbar you can use. The only actions you can perform are via the hotbar, so there’s a lot of juggling later on I’m guessing. Anyway, to make water you have to open inventory, choose “build cup” and then slot the cup somewhere on your hotbar. Then choose “build water purifier” and put the built water purifier from your inventory onto the hotbar somewhere else. Then use the purifier via the hotbar, which lets you place it on your raft for use. Now select the cup in your hotbar and use it (press E) at the water to fill it with saltwater, aim it at the purifier and press E again to fill it. Now wait around 1 minute of real time, then aim cup at the purifier again and press E to get the fresh water. Now click the mouse to drink. (Because, remember, the cup is your active “weapon.”) It took me multiple deaths to figure this out.
Not to mention the fact that in order to build just about anything you need rope, but you need to first find and craft rope from the menu system using the garbage you collect. You can find rope from the garbage but more likely you will need to make rope from leaves.
The lack of hand-holding is maddening.
Food ended up being similar, where it turns out you build a fishing rod, catch a fish, build a grill and cook the fish on the grill by adding the fish to the hotbar and aiming your “fish weapon” at the grill. Note that all these items are fairly expensive in terms of the garbage you collect, plus they all run on burning wood which you also have to supply from your garbage.
So, anyway, I am friggin’ loving this game, so far now three hours in. I cannot wait to build a cool raft. I’ve got two small grills, two water purifiers, a little garden, and a research table. The main problem I’m having now is that seagulls keep flying down and stealing food from my garden. Bastards!
Saw Ace Combat 7 is just $8.99 in the Steam Autumn Sale. Bought it packaged with the Top Gun extras and the Season Pass for twenty bucks. Having a good time with it. The DLC planes are clearly way overpowered for the early missions, but I’m not playing it for realism or a challenge, I just want to zoom around and blow stuff up.
yeah, that one’s a hoot to watch the gamers play on youtube … if you don’t mind language and dirty jokes occasionally look up where markplier and jacksepticeye there’s a series where they play with a couple of other people with whom they eventually build a floating neighborhood …
oh and a hint try to get to the various islands as soon as you can …
by the way a warning to anyone with a sims 4 game … you might wanna play something else for a while cause ea messed something up with the “loyalty” trait last update to where out of the blue they’ll get mean and start squabbling with each other , they tried a fix that didn’t do much so you’re supposed to use something in the game to turn off “mean” interactions