The RAM I put in my PC now almost 2 years ago has more than tripled in value. The older RAM I took out of my PC and saved has also increased in value by 250%!
I considered selling said old RAM on ebay, but decided to keep it. Because if this set dies, I wouldn’t be willing to pay to replace it!
Actually if my tower dies, I’ll likely just plug my mid-range gaming laptop (bought right at the start of the trade war with China) into my monitor and run everything off it.
You were not wrong. Wild!
Yep, it changes even more the more you play! The final section was probably my favorite.
One of the things I liked about Bioshock Infinite is that other than Elizabeth, not one major character is a paragon of virtue. Pretty much everybody is in their own way a horrible person. Even you despite your attempted redemption arc.
Even the Lutece twins aren’t good. Everything they do is more about scientific experimentation then any real moral or ethical code. They help you because they want to see what’ll happen, and they seem to have a soft spot for the underdog, but they don’t really seem to care much about the ultimate outcome from a moral standpoint.
New Grim Dawn DLC, Fangs of Asterkarn, is out with a new class. The Berserker has shape-shifting mechanics into a werewolf or wereraven and supporting skills for bleed, chaos or cold builds. Time to blow another few hundred hours.
Well that was trippy.
I recommend Keeper to everyone else, It’s wackadoo fun.
It is and I think that they only advertised it as “walking lighthouse” to keep the rest of the game secret. Nice, but people need to know that it evolves from that into something(s) completely different.
Holy crap, they still make content for this game? It’s over a decade old, that is awesome. Might have to dip my toes in again, but that game has a way of sucking you in for months.
Palworld hit 1.0 this month, and I’ve played nearly 100 hours of it with friends over the last few weeks (yikes, lol)
It’s basically Pokemon (what I understand of pokemon, anyway, never actually having watched or played it) plus exploration, survival resource gathering, base building, etc. Think Ark: Survival Evolved or Valheim or Enshrouded, but with a heavy focus on capturing, raising, breeding, and utilizing a big army of pets (up to 50 per base).
I first played it upon Early Access release, when it was still pretty rough. 1.0 adds polish and a lot of new features and a big “pal” revamp — pals are the Nintendo-lawyer-baiting pets you can capture & enslave.
The pals are the real highlight of the game… there are hundreds of them, each with unique skills for both combat and base-building. The chicken-style pals, for example, can lay eggs for baking at your base, or shoot them in an egg launcher during combat. Similarly, the electric pals can shock and stun enemies or simply act as a generator at your base to keep the lights on.
The open-world exploration is fantastic too — probably the best I’ve ever seen in a game. The world is HUGE, relatively seamless (no loading zones except for instanced dungeons), and traversal is a lot of fun, with climbing, swimming, gliding, grappling hooks, double jumps, air jumps, and eventually flight. There’s a ton of treasures hidden all over the map (which was hand-crafted) from treasure chests to collectibles to, of course, rare pals living in wildlife sanctuaries guarded by angry drones.
It’s one of those very few games that can take me away from the Dope for a few weeks at a stretch 
And the difficulty is almost infinitely adjustable, so if you want to focus on pal-gathering or base decoration, you can. Those who want to be challenged by assaults on their base can ramp up those elements.
I think Bioshock Infinite is the only game I’ve ever played (and completed) on the hardest level. I remember stalling at a fight in the middle of the game, but I really don’t remember anything about the last boss of note, so not sure what that was. Must have been easier the way I did it. Or something.
South of Midnight
Been playing this a few days. A very well made 3rd-person platformer/action-adventure. You run on walls like Prince of Persia and climb around, but you also fight enemies at specific areas.
Well made, good story, controls are excellent…but not as good as the best platformers.
Did you ever play a Prince of Persia games from the PS2-PS3 era? Like those.
The setting is really cool too, the Deep South right after a hurricane, in a mix of hoodoo, Creole, Cajun, and other southern traditions. It’s not a setting you see in games very often, and the storytelling and acting are both fantastic.
I don’t care much for platformers (and gave up on the game because of it), but the first couple hours really drew me in. It’s such a visual, cultural, and narrative feast. Wish I could just watch it as a movie instead!
In fact it reminds me a lot of the movie Sinners.
I finished South of Midnight today. Good game, even great in some sections. My only issue is that it does the “run away while platforming” trope that means you have to rapidly make decisions while running. Unfortunately, those sections are just not good enough. Multiple replays due to simply not being able to see what is coming quick enough.
Still, good game. Hope they make a sequel.
I just started:
Eternal Strands
Same here (re: Bioshock Infinite). I loved the game except for a couple of the set-piece boss stages which were a mix of “base defense” and bullet-sponge enemies that were simply tedious and frustrating with the limited ammo and weapon selections.
Unlikely any time soon, the studio was cut loose by Microsoft in its recent clear-cutting spree. Better than being shut down but I believe they’re currently looking for contracting work.
Yeah, my friends and I just finished palworld. It was fun enough to just dick around with my friends, but it’s not something I’d play on my own. I generally dislike hunting/fishing/capturing/riding critters in games for some reason. So instead of riding/flying around on pals, I just ran/jumped/glided everywhere which annoyed my friends. I also didn’t care to do any breeding, so my pal team was kinda meh, which also annoyed them. But I also wasn’t a huge fan of using pals in combat because either they died right away, or they killed the pal right away that I was trying to capture. Or if it was a main boss/raid, it was just boring as there was just a shit show of pal’s doing shit and all you could really do is stay out of their way and wait for it to be over. But I’ve played worse games, so whatever. Like I said, it was something cheap to do with friends.
That’s all fair enough criticism. The game actually has quite a bit of depth, like a crapton of pal active/passive/partner skills that you can carefully strategize, synergize, and breed them with. But the game itself does a shit job of explaining any of that to you — I had to play the whole time with a Claude window next to the game, asking it how the mechanics worked. It’s not quite as complex as something like Path of Exile, but it’s up there, especially compared to other survival games with much simpler mechanics. By the time you get to level 40 (halfway to the max), you’ve only been exposed to maybe like 20% of the actual game systems.
For example, it turns out there is a passive “Mercy Hit” skill that makes your pals not kill enemies, just bring them down to 1 hp so you can more easily capture them (like the “Mercy Ring” for PC players). Except you don’t see that passive until pretty late in the game, there’s no tutorial about it, and it doesn’t always work… some pals have primary attacks with their own DoTs, which bypass that mercy hit skill altogether. Whether that’s a bug, or just part of the general jank of the game, I don’t know. And there’s a LOT of jank in the game. I guess that’s what you get with a small indie studio turned overnight global sensation. A lot of breadth, quite a bit of depth, minimal polish.
Then it gets much more numbers-dense later on, as you basically start running multiple factory bases to optimize a statistics-based genetics breeding program to create your pal super-soldiers… it’s quite the tonal shift in the game, from happy-go-lucky Zelda-esque exploration and adventure into Satisfactory-lite + spreadsheets. And if all that is too much math and you don’t want to engage with those subsystems at all… then you’re left with a rather shallow, below-average run-and-gun survival-platformer. The pals are really the meat of the gameplay, and without them, the rest of the systems are mediocre at best.
Still, Palworld was the #1 Steam top seller for a while after its release, sold 30+ million copies, and hit 2 million concurrent players. It’s still the #4 global top-seller. It has to be doing something right, I guess. Maybe it finally scratched that Pokemon itch for Millennials and Gen Z? Everyone I know who actually played pokemon says this is how they wish the real pokemon games would’ve been. I dunno, since I never cared about those things.
It’s not a game for everyone, that’s for sure. It takes dozens of hours (and many external websites and AI references) to really get familiar with the game systems, and if you don’t like complex ARPG-survival games with low polish and hi jank, it will just be confusing and frustrating, kinda like how Ark and Valheim were upon their initial release. Shrug. Comes with the genre, I guess?
I just finished Bioshock Infinite. As I mentioned earlier in this thread, I’ve been really enjoying this game a lot. But it did get sillier and sillier plot-wise as it went on. And that’s saying a lot, since, as snfaulkner said so well, it’s:
…right from the get-go.
I did enjoy the steampunky vibe, for the most part. And I thought the set-battles were pretty good.
But, I didn’t really even notice at first… the game is super on rails. It never really gives you any choices at all. It’s a rollercoaster ride, both literally and metaphorically. I enjoyed the ride, but would have liked a meaningful sidetrack or two. I think the original Bioshock was about the same, but Bioshock 2 had a couple choices to make and a few different endings, at least.
I only failed once at the final battle. I’m still not great with games of these types reflex-wise, I think, but I’m getting smarter about focusing on just the leveling up qualities I like best, and spending my limited resources on building up a couple of those instead of spreading it out too thinly on too many choices. In this case, Fire, shock and possession for my vigors and the shotgun and the machine gun for my weapons, mostly.
And truth be told, it’s been a weird stressful week, and I freakin’ went to town on that last battle!
Impressive. I hated it and failed more times than I’d like to admit. Like, began reconsidering if I could even do it.
It’s why I can never play a Souls-like. You kill me 15 times…I’m out!