I started playing Stray on the weekend and it’s beautiful. First time playing it. Excellent gameplay and story so far.
I loved Stray. I played it before I got cats, and now I want to replay it. I feel like I’d be able to relate to it a bit more now.
Only problem is its short and isn’t as amazing on replay. My cat likes to watch me play.
I haven’t finished it but I hear you should steel yourself for the ending.
I gave up on Stray. It’s good, except for the stupid action parts which are completely different to the other 90% of the gameplay and frustratingly difficult. I got through the first few, but one level just stumped me. Must have tried a hundred times, but I’m just not that kind of player and it ruined it - I can’t progress past that point in the game, and all the internet has to say is “git gud”.
They Are Billions
This game is awesome, really bring us back to the RTS era but now with pause. I wonder if the dev is working on anything else, couldn’t find any news on their next project.
As a big fan of the genre I’m sad to say that there’s not much else that looks like it.
Darfall is decent but lacks depth and variety. Having a hero Is nice, but the item drops can make or break your run.
I’ve yet to play age of darkness: final stand. But from what I gather there is not alot of variety in the endgame that can lead to a lot of wasted time if you’re not doing the 1 thing that works 100% of the time.
Final Fantasy 2.
Still working my way through Crosscode.
Still in the Warframe mines, though now that I’ve reached the standings I wished with the new syndicates and have the frames I had been missing on, I’m feeling its grip letting go of me slowly. Though there is going to be a major update later this year, so who knows.
With the latest Momodora finished (good game, I still liked Reverie better), I’ve started Virgo Versus The Zodiac. Cute looking turn-based RPG starring a protagonist filled with bloodlust and with a merciless combat system. If you miss the timed hits, you will die, even to the most common enemies. I’ve cleared up the first Zodiac realm/introduction to the game and am now trying around an optional grinding area before heading into Taurus.
I’ve been playing Virgo too. Surprisingly enjoyable for a game where literally all of the enemies are more likeable than the main character, but it’s also one of the few games that made me want to follow through on a second playthrough to get a different ending. Also I like the music.
Finally got a taste of what It Takes Two was like, I understand why it was Game of the Year !
Split Fiction from the same team is also good. At least as far as I’ve gotten playing with my daughter.
Been playing a bit of Hollow Knight again. The world is so incredibly vast and beautiful. Got to the distant village and found one of the dreamers, Herrah.
One of those games that I can tell is a 9.5/10 or more but will never even attempt to play. I know my limits and I know what type of gameplay frustrates me and the combination of near-impossible difficulty, lots of challenging platforming and the corpse recovery mechanic I’ve heard about means I don’t think I’ll have much fun playing it.
I wish it was for me, though. Looks fantastic. I’ll watch a Let’s Play of it one of these days.
For what it’s worth, I haven’t found anything in it super difficult and I’m by no means “a good gamer”, the “souls”* recovery mechanic is not bad; but if platforming is not for you I guess that’s enough to stay away from it,… (I also haven’t found it terrible, and I’m prone to mistakes , ha.)
I’m not sure how far along I’m in it, so perhaps I haven’t reached the turbo hard stuff yet? maybe it gets insane later… I went blind and know nothing apart from what I’ve seen. So far it’s been an excellent experience, the game checks all the boxes for me.
*there is a different mechanic in the game tied to the term soul but I’m refering to the corpse thing here
Yeah from what I’ve heard 90% or so of HK is fine, and it’s the remaining 10% that’s a true ball buster. Though some of it is probably optional if you’re fine with skipping “good endings” and whatnot.
I don’t know why I can’t vibe with platforming, but for me it just doesn’t give me any dopamine at all. Which is a problem as an ADHD sufferer. Combine that with me being pretty bad at it and platforming games just lead to me being angry and frustrated.
90% or so of HK is fine, and it’s the remaining 10% that’s a true ball buster.
That makes sense. I do like my trophies and good endings so I’ll give it a solid try. But yeah, not everything is for everyone, I’m no stranger to enjoying a game I know I’ll never play watching someone else go through it; all fine and dandy in my book.
Love that game. Can’t wait for the sequel, whenever it actually comes out.
The great thing about being a patient gamer, (hopefully)there’ll be just a short wait for me!
Shadow Labyrinth might be a good filler in the meantime.
I finished Ninja Gaiden Black on Normal. All in all it wasn’t as hard as I had feared. Having access to save states definitely did make it a much more tolerable experience though as some of the checkpoint placements are diabolical. I didn’t really abuse it in any way, but just being able to for example instantly retry a boss instead of having to reset the console and do a runback just avoids a huge time waster that adds nothing to the difficulty.
Overall the game was absolutely brilliant - though not perfect. A couple of the bosses were outright bad, the ghost fish are not fun gameplay designs and Chapter 9 is atrocious. Whoever thought it was a good idea for the game to suddenly become Call of Duty and force you to take on tanks, helicopters and a radio tower full of bazookas armed with only a longbow and using horrific controller first person aiming hopefully got fired.
But even having said all that, when the game is good it’s damn good. The combat is just perfectly satisfying, the weapons at your disposal are very well balanced and all have their uses and the ultra aggressive AI demands your full attention constantly. This game has no trash mobs; slip up once and any encounter can kill you. There is something singularly thrilling about that. It’s also fast, proactive and positioning-based - there are tons of almost instant grabs that you can only avoid by correct positioning and use of your nimble movement. Posting up in front of an enemy while holding Block and hoping to dodge roll when you see the animation like you would in a Souls game won’t work here.
Overall a fantastic experience and well worth playing. If I can beat it on Normal then anyone can - don’t be afraid to check it out. Especially with Ninja Gaiden 4 on the horizon. Hell, I’m even considering jumping back in for a go at Hard at some point.
Your first paragraph is how I feel about the SoulsBorne games. Elden Ring introducing the Stakes of Marika was an excellent decision. Boss run-backs can be brutal in Dark Souls sometimes, and it doesn’t really make it harder, just more tedious. Most games would do well to have a checkpoint just before a big boss for that reason.
Yeah, it’s kind of just misery for the sake of misery. I suppose conceptually it’s supposed to test your patience and hearken back to the olden days of gaming, but as you say it’s just tedious and unfun.
Ninja Gaiden has some absolutely wild ones where you fight a boss, then the next level starts, then there is a fight in the next level before the next save point. If you die in that fight, where do you think you respawn? That’s right, before that boss you beat. There is no auto saving at the start of a level here! Team Ninja seemed to concede that this wasn’t optimal though as supposedly Ninja Gaiden 2 has both more generous save points and a “retry boss” function.
But again, playing on emulator with save states eliminates this frustration so please anyone reading this, so don’t get discouraged by it!
Oh man, that’s rough. Having to re-fight a boss you already beat would suck. Thankfully Dark Souls never had that.
I haven’t played it yet, but I’ve loaded it up on my steam deck and got too the title screen… Far Cry 2 with redux mod
I really loved far cry 3, so I hoped this will be a good time. But some stuff going on with my daughter and I didn’t have time for this.
You’ll have to update us next post or the one after with how you’re liking it. I loved FC3 but it’s the only one I played. I’d like to know if FC2 is a good predecessor.
im not sure if this counts because its still in early access, but this game is one of those that is perpetually in early access without plans to legit release (like project zombiid, etc).
i picked up Turing Complete and have been learning(painfully slowly) how to make cpu’s : D
I just started playing the original Star Fox. Having a lot more fun with it than I thought I would.
Do a barrel roll! Solid game!
Started Diablo 1 last week, picked Sorcerer. It was a tough but a fun ride until the very end when I discovered… that I bricked my character! Apparently you can’t be a mage and focus on magic exclusively since there are monsters in the very late-game (Blood Knights) who are fully resistant to anything you cast, and my points in non-magic talents were so low I could only equip starter weapons! Decided to re-roll a rogue (actually an amazon idk why they called her rogue). It’s been a blast, almost too easy for the first 5-6 dungeon floors. But from there difficulty picked up, and stayed on consistently challenging level till the very end. Killed Diablo himself by stashing full belt of greater mana potions and simply shooting him in point blank range while drinking potions under mana shield (book luckily bought from Adria in the very last moments). The game is great fun, atmosphere is extraordinary and music is god-tier (or should I say, diablo-tier).
The rogue group is different to the amazons. That’s why in D2 you start in the rogues camp, and if you’ve picked Amazon then Kashya will say something like “I didn’t expect to see an Amazon come here”.
To me d1 rogue looks almost the same as d2 amazon, and d2 rogues in the camp are a bit different and less wild.
In d2 rogues do seem to have either some cloth or plates on their hips. If you compare the color of their hips and hands, it’s different enough to consider that’s not skin and their hips ain’t naked.
But think about the Diablo lore instead. It’s stated that she is a rogue, and in fact she becomes corrupted and is the rogue boss Blood Raven that you fight in the cemetery in Diablo 2.
Nice to know lore is consistent and connected between games. I should have written something like “idk why she looks like amazon from d2 though”, because I’m not deep into the lore of both games (don’t remember anything lorewise about d2, which I last played maybe 16 years ago). So my initial remark was purely about looks, which I still remember (maybe because screenshots or videos of d2 still pop in media quite often).
Also the sorcerer boss you fight towards the end of Act 2 in D2 is the sorcerer from D1.
The lore was really nicely done between these two games.
Grounded 2 released into early access recently so that sounded like a perfect time to play through Grounded 1. Can report, this game slaps. For people who like narrative open world survival games (like subnahtica and abiotic factor) this game is probably the best among them in my opinion. The writing is probably a very love it or hate it thing though, since the entire game is riding on 90’s nostalgia there.
mmmmm sales of the original game when a sequel comes out is regularly :chefkiss:
Traded in my Series S and scooped up some discs/carts (also a couple of GOG sales). Socom 3 (PS2), Quake 2 (GOG), Nano Assault (EX & original, 2DSXL), Nano Stray 1&2 (2DSXL), and Dead Cells (GOG)… I still don’t know where the line between patient and retro is.
The single player in socom was so brutally difficult. I didnt make it far in socom 3. I wonder if there’s still servers up for any of that. Ive heard some people still play socom 2 on private servers of some sort.
i started playing 3 because i heard the single player campaign has checkpoints. i don’t have much interest in multiplayer but it looks like lan support is still available. i have heard on some videos that people still play it in multiplayer by bridging the lan support across the internet.
I saw that ps rewired has a “socom 3 / combined assault” section. i do wonder if just vanilla socom 3 would be playable there because i think combined assault has different maps? at any rate, there were only two people online when i looked at that. it’s possible that it picks up on nights/weekends as opposed to 0800 CDT on a thursday.
EDIT: i also bumped into this list, so maybe there are other ways to play: https://ps2online.com/
Project Wingman
I’m almost done with the second playthrough, still having a ton of fun even if it’s not perfect. While I really like Prez, limiting your plane choices to two-seaters can feel really rough in certain missions and I probably won’t be doing that again in the future. It’s unfortunate that all the late-game planes are solo only as stat and load-out differences can make things way easier (or at least more fun).
I also took the time to read through all the lore documents available in the game and it only made me more interested in a direct sequel. We have new conflicts against the Federation flaring up around the world, a bunch of global players we haven’t seen yet (Periphery countries, West African Concordat, the European alliance). We could have Federation megacities as mission backdrops in contrast to the more natural and modern environments from this game.
There are some many interesting things they could do with all this world building, it would be a waste to stop here.Persona 3 Dancing in Moonlight / Persona 4 Dancing All-Night
I’ve decided to finally set up PS Vita emulation on my Steam Deck and what’s better for that than Persona dancing games? Not like I have many other Vita games but still.
I had to change the graphics API to OpenGL as for some reason both games crashed with Vulkan (didn’t have such problems when testing on desktop), other than that they work great.It’s been years since I last played one of those and boy am I rusty - even basic songs on normal feel overwhelming at times! I just started and should be able to get back into the rhythm soon enough but man, seeing how much I suck now was a bit of a surprise.
Umurangi Generation - Macro DLC
Finally got to it and after all this time I feel a bit mixed - both on the DLC and the game overall. I’m still mulling things over so here are the highlights:
- DLC keeps the atmosphere of the base game nicely. It’s cool to see how things were before the original stages.
- Music is once again pretty great if a little too bombastic compared to what’s happening on the screen. I don’t particularly care for the edgy dolphin in the club stage though.
- At times things feel like they were done in an afternoon (not literally but still):
- There are once again objects without collisions and plenty of places where you can randomly phase through when walking.
- I found a few spots where you can get stuck, sometimes in the open.
- Lighting in the club stage feels messed up (everything is super dark except for blown out “lights” that don’t give any… well, light).
- The skybox of the first stage looks completely misaligned (maybe this one was intentional, I don’t know - still doesn’t look great).
As much as I like this title it kinda depresses me. I’m someone who takes pride in their work and spends a lot of time on even the smallest details so seeing something with this many simple and easily fixable issues being released as a finished product (and a paid one at that!) pains me on a personal level.
I realise this game is intended to exude the grungy “I don’t care” and “everything is screwed” energy but that should not spill into the technical aspects in my opinion. There should be SOME bar of quality there.I’m still glad it was created and had fun with both base game and DLC but man…
<< Project Wingman? Now we’re talking! >>
Yup! Started playing about two weeks ago, became an instant favourite and now I crave more.
![[2]](https://gamepedia.cursecdn.com/diablo_gamepedia/thumb/8/8b/Rogue_light.png/300px-Rogue_light.png?version=52bde68569e179629e66e33b2cfac4b1){kind=link}