I like to think that the designer of beautiful adventure-puzzler “Carto” read this famous quote, said to themselves “Says who?”, and went on to design the game.
Well, probably not, but it could have happened. The player character walks around in a hand-painted 2D world. Press TAB and the map appears, no surprise. But you can rearrange the map, and when you return to the “real” world, it has changed to reflect the new map. You will regularly find new map pieces, and people, signs and environmental clues telling you how to continue. Early on you will meet a man who can’t find his house. He claims it is east of this other house we just saw, except there’s only empty coastline there, and no other house anywhere else at all. But move the coast one tile more to the east, put a land tile in between, and TADAA the house appears on the land tile.
It’s on the game pass and can be completed in a few days of casual playing.
(not worth starting a new thread, so I’ll continue in this one…)
For kicks, I just replayed through the single-player campaign for Halo 3. My thoughts:
It still looks pretty good!
There were a number of sequences where you’re just walking through an empty corridor, which felt kind of weird. Is that in order to avoid loading screens?
I started playing “Heroic” difficulty (one step up from “Normal”) but I got frustrated after being constantly sniped in the head by concealed enemies from across the map. I think I managed to finish it on “Heroic” back in the day, but it probably wasn’t fun for me.
Next up: I’ll try replaying Gladius, a tactics game from 2003 that used golf-game-style swing meters to time attacks. I remember playing it a lot on the original Xbox and it has been added to the compatibility list for the Xbox One.
I’ve also been playing Legends of Runeterra: Path of Champions. I enjoyed playing the MicroProse video game version of Magic: The Gathering years ago and this scratches the same itch. And it’s free!
I really enjoyed Carrion and was sad when I finished it. It’s a 2d, retro16bit style “reverse horror” game. Instead of trying to kill the big bad monster, you ARE the monster! An amorphous blob with teeth and tentacles kind of like the thing from The Thing. It’s free on game pass.
I started playing Rocket League a few years back and it quickly became my favorite game. I now bounce between ranks Plat 3 and Diamond 1, mostly.
In late January or early February 2021 I discovered Conqueror’s Blade, an MMORPG about medieval siege warfare. I was a part of the winning Alliance for Season 7 on our server but I just moved on to a new server for Season 10 (which began today).
I just don’t find it all that compelling. Technically it’s a very nicely made game. It just doesn’t drive me to play it though; it is, at its heart, “Subnautica” on land, but whereas “Subnautica” made me want to keep playing to see something else super cool, this game just doesn’t.
Then recently my sister got me to get What The Golf? for my phone, and I play it every day.
I re-played Counterfeit Monkey on hard mode. I guess I really love that game, though at some point it is, or at least certainly seems, hard in that you soon have dozens of words and a resulting combinatorial explosion. For example, at one point I had, let’s see,
Summary
some ale, a ball, a ban, a bent twig, a broken clock, a camembert, a char, a cross, a crumpled cocktail napkin, a dove, an eel, a gimlet, a honey pastry triangle, some ink, a jigsaw, a jotter, a key, a leaflet, a May, a nib, a pass, pi, a pic, a pineapple, a pocket-bread, Poe, a poppy, a prickly pair, a rash, a ring, a rusty nail, a shopping bag, a shred, a shrimp tail, a shuttle, a silver platter, two sins, a stuffed octopus, a swatch, a sword, some tar, a toe, a twisty fossil, and some yogurt. Among other things.
It’s honestly hard to explain. The game is, according to its makers, a golf game by and for people who hate golf and don’t understand it; it’s a seemingless endless number of levels where you play something that is kind of like minigolf. But sometimes you hit a ball towards a hole, and sometimes you pull back and instead of the ball going anywhere the golfer is flung down the course, or sometimes the ball must go through a Super Mario Bros. level, or sometimes you are driving a monster truck down the course racing a sheep and there’s explosions, or your ball sticks to surfaces like a blob, or it’s a soccer ball and children are trying to kick you into a ravine. It’s hilarious, bizarre, and profoundly addictive.
Follow-up: I forgot how repetitive it got after a while. You get ~30 different gladiator classes to choose from and each one has ~30 different moves to invest in, but in practice I only really used 3-4 classes and 3-4 moves.
I’ve been playing the Avernum games by Spiderweb software.
These are isometric RPGs, popular in the 90s and 2000s, and (very slightly) updated a couple of years ago.
I’m embarrassed by how much time I’ve spent playing them; the graphics and engine are extremely crude.
But the story is well written and the level progression really well worked out.
I’d recommend Avernum 1 over 2. Although everything I said above is true of both games, the second has a couple of gameplay flaws (e.g. if you go into certain places before you’re strong enough, you can spend half an hour or more fighting your way through before realizing you have no hope and need to go back to an earlier save. This wasn’t the case with Avernum 1 where you always had the option of retreat).
I just got Warhammer: Space Marine (Steam sale), mostly to experience the lore. The game is not really my cuppa, but it looks like I expect 40k to look, so that’s cool. My biggest gripe is that even on Easy, I’m still having to work to watch what would otherwise be a fairly short movie.
I also grabbed Wreckfest. I love racing games and I love demolition derby-style race games and I had long wanted to check this out. I’m glad I checked it out but I got a refund after about 90 minutes of playtime. As a racing game, it’s not very good IMO. And there’s no servers active that I saw to race online with other people, so all that’s left is the solo experience (which I found severely lacking).
Lately I’ve been playing a fair bit of Deep Rock Galactic and Hardspace Shipbreaker. The first is a multiplayer co-op game about dwarves sent to various planets/asteroids/whatever to locate and mine specific minerals while getting attacked by space bugs. The second is about working a deep space salvage operation and slicing up derelict spacecraft while avoiding setting off fuel tanks or depressurizing areas prematurely.
It’s funny because I’ve always been a tough sell for space sci-fi. Mass Effect didn’t stick with me when I tried (though I intend to try again), I got bored with Outer Worlds, was never a big Star Wars/Trek fan. Just the space opera genre was meh to me. But space blue collar labor? Apparently that’s my jam. Go figure.
I used to really like FPS games when most of them were available for PC. When games started going to other platforms, I stopped playing rather than buy a bunch of gear I didn’t want. I don’t even know if there are still PC platform FPS games available. Anyone?
I just played Titanfall 2, which has a single-player mode. I also played the new DOOM game from 2016. Both were on PC and played like the kind of games I played in the past.
Doom 2016. Doom Eternal. Borderlands 1-3 + Prequel. Crysis 1-3. Far Cry 1-6, New Dawn + Primal. Bioshock 1, 2 Infinite. Metro last light, 2033 and Exodus. Deathloop. Prey. Serious Sams. Wolfenstein New Order, Old Blood, New Collosus. Rage 1+2.