Hello everyone. Sorry I did not post this last Sunday, my friends got engaged last weekend so I was celebrating with them and my mind was elsewhere. Anyway, I have been playing The Outer Worlds 2. I picked the “Gambler” background and some characters in the game have made very hurtful remarks about it. I dont have a problem, I can quit any time I want. Hope you all have a good week
Ghost of Tsushima
Started again after two long hiatuses. When I first started it, I was impressed but only played a bit. Returning a couple of years later, I had no clue how to play any more, died a bunch of times, gave up. Now, I’ve taken 15 minutes to deliberately reacquire myself with the mechanics, reading through the skill tree, quest log etc, and now it clicked!
Some thoughts (no spoilers, I’m just in act 1 anyway)
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When the shine wears off it’s a fairly standard open world game at its core and I don’t like those. Samey quests, repetitive events. For a bit I considered just playing the main quest but then thought better of it, instead I’m just embracing it how it is. I’ll follow the birds, climb all the little mountains, trace the footsteps, and just enjoy the moment-to moment mechanics, and then the story at its own pace.
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The ludonarrative dissonance is real with this one. Some lady going hungry? Let’s grab the stack of 8 supplies behind her. 95% of the island population are bandits or Mongols. Following questlines simultaneously where one person is in two places at the same time. Oh no, healer late by minutes, after me putting off the quest for hours. Places I’ve cleared out moments ago are suddenly a bandit hideout.
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Picking of enemies one by one or in small groups is encouraged by the combat mechanics, which falls flat when dealing with larger groups. But at the same time, the game narrative keeps reinforcing that it is wrong and bad of you to play so. This is similar to the criticism that can be aimed at games like Spec Ops: The Line, which try to confront you with the consequences of a choice you didn’t have (other than not playing).
Ni No Kuni: Also picked up again after a long while, and also the sort of game where you simply have to accept it’s gonna take a while. Enjoying it, but I found that encounters are either super easy, or they start going downhill (e.g. a character dies) and then there’s no saving it. There’s no goldilocks zone to it.
Resogun: Just one trophy to go, to finish the arcade mode on experienced difficulty without continues. Not in sight yet.
Astro Bot: Cleaning up the recently added challenge levels, now at the final one with the different powerups. No checkpoints!
The Settlers DS: How does this even exist! I love these kind of oddball handheld/console ports, which why I’m collecting them a bit, also e.g. Age of Empires on PS2 and DS, Civilization II on PS1, etc. For Settlers, I’ll probably just finish a campaign mission or two and call it quits.
Ghost of War: Chains of Olympus: got a 20 euro deal for the 2 PSP games so finally getting back on my God of War journey. Plays great so far. The sex minigame was something.
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playing shattered pixel dungeon a ton recently, actually crazy this game (and all the other derivatives) are open source based off the original from 10 years ago. i think it’s a cool little insight into what the future of gaming under socialism could be like once IP is destroyed
I have been restarting Baldur’s Gate 3 over and over again like a sicko trying to get a perfect run in the prologue to get 300 extra XP before starting act 1 so I can get a nice head start but I keep fucking it up slightly and I can’t even savescum because there’s an XP glitch so if I reload a save in the prolog it fucks up my leveling for the rest of the game
Still love the game
Played 1941 Counter Attack, trying to cut down how many credits I need to complete. I can do stage 1 (out of 7) on a single credit and like half of stage 2. But I still need about 10 credits total to beat it (down from like 15 though). I can definitely get it lower but no idea how much lower and since I don’t play arcade shmups (or if I do it’s home ports with set difficulties) I’m not really sure where I wanna’ set my goal for it.
If I play more arcade shmups I might just set some limit of like 6 playthroughs of going all the way through, credit-feeding as needed, and seeing how much I can lower it by the end of the 6 plays. Most are 20-30 minutes long so that’s like almost 3 hours of playtime and it’d be interesting to keep track of it all kinda’ like how Jrose11 does his Pokemon solo speedruns.
That’s a pretty fun method, I’ll have to try that some time! I usually just see how many it takes to clear once and then set my limit to be one below that until it isn’t fun any more.
Im chasing the map game dragon
I have my issues with eu 5 (namely ai) but this is the best mapslop yet
Congrats to your friends!
I just finished Wind Waker last night. It was not my first time playing it, but it has been a long time and I wanted to revisit it. Pretty fun! Everyone complains about collecting the Triforce Shards, but I didn’t have a problem with it. It’s way better than the beginning of the game, I was honestly wondering if I actually liked this game at first lol. I originally was replaying it so I could have the game fresh in my mind for a Phantom Hourglass playthrough since I’ve never played the DS Zelda games, but somewhere along the way I got a desire to play Zelda II instead, so Phantom Hourglass will have to wait until after that.
Did you play the GameCube version or the Wii U remaster? And good luck with Zelda II, I fear that game!
Went back to replay Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War again. The game is quite fun as an arcade flight game, and the narrative is quite interesting from a certain standpoint, it can be seen as an alternate history WW2 on a fictional version of earth with modern and science fiction weaponry, and nuclear weapons.
spoiler
The in game stand in for Nazi Germany, Belka, nukes themselves (by the border regions) to prevent a land invasion, yes the story really is that out there.
Gameplay is extremely unrealistic (your plane has 100+ missiles and can pull constant 30G turns), as a plane nerd it breaks my brain a bit, but it is very fun. Definitely the peak of series.
If they ever remake it they should never get rid of the cutscenes
I don’t know if it was on purpose or not, but if you follow Sailor Malan’s ten rules of air fighting, the final boss fight where this song plays gets a lot easier. Hold your shot until it’s a guaranteed hit, stay high, turn and face the attack head on (the game explicitly tells you to do this at some stage of the boss fight, like knights jousting), make decisions quickly (don’t hesitate) then hit hard and then evade, avoid flying straight and level. All very helpful in the final boss fight.
Also Google Sailor Malan, very interesting character.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
More KSP and FF7R. Got my Minmus space station and first comm relay deployed, and added a reusable lander to the station since Minmus landings are so cheap in dV terms so the station can be constantly running its lab. I have uncrewed orbital probes on the way to Moho, Sarnus, Urlum, and Neidon, and the Duna transfer window is coming up so I’ll be sending a crewed mission there. The Neidon probe is gonna take so long to get there by Hohmann transfer that there’s a decent chance I beat it out there with a constant burn torchship.
My controller is now paired correctly and working with Lutris so I don’t have to run my high seas copy of FF7R through Steam for the steam input anymore.
After years of suggesting that people play Rogue Galaxy, I realized I’d never finished it myself. Whoops.
Continuing my game of Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic. I grabbed a map of Cuba from the Steam workshop a couple weeks ago and have been chipping away at it. Playing on “Realistic Mode” with all systems enabled, but medium money / happiness / fire / disaster / world events difficulty settings.
The population has reached 5000 and is growing faster than I can put buildings up. I’m long overdue for starting a second city, but overcoming problems with the first continues to be a priority. These problems have included a fire at the main power transformer causing a total power outage, a lack of pressure at the water treatment plant threatening the supply of drinking water, and a looming financial crisis as imports continued to exceed exports into the eighth year of the republic. The financial crisis was solved moments before being forced to take out loans by the completion of a coal mine, ore processing facility, and the rail infrastructure necessary to export it at volume - a project several years in the making.
While this put the republic’s finances on a sustainable trajectory, the facilities generated so much waste that a new crisis emerged. While a waste processing facility, incinerator, and construction waste recycling plant had been built along the way, the volume of waste was so great that the logistics of trucking it several kilometers were tremendously strained. With multiple technical offices, distribution offices, and waste transfer facilities set up in strategic locations, it is barely enough to keep the trash moving. Over 1000 tons of ash have been produced at the incinerator already (there’s a Steam acheivement for this). Then, the “carpocolypse” struck, as a large portion of the original fleet of vehicles began reaching levels of wear that could not be managed by a vehicle repair station. A bunch of old buses needed to be moved into storage, but it was a good opportunity to replace them with newer, faster models and consolidate a bunch of redundant lines into higher capacity buses - reflecting the large increase in population. There are still a bunch of incredibly rusty trucks driving around though.
Anyway, with the finances sorted out, railroad tracks are gradually being laid down to allow construction materials to be carried many kilometers away to a less mountainous part of the island suitable for a second city, port, and agricultural industries.
This right here. Thats the shit. This is was gaming was made for.
Citizen sleeper. A bit disco elisum sci fi rpg, with an interesting dice mechanic. I’m enjoying it so far
Oh I love that game. They came out with a sequel recently, I don’t quite like it as much as the first but it’s was still good, takes place in a much more expansive world than the first.
Good to hear. I am playing 1 with the intent of playing 2 later.
Been on a Valheim kick lately. Despite them being one of humanity’s oldest weapons, spears/polearms are disturbingly under-represented in video game pre-modern combat.
Every time I play this game I just do some silly time consulting project like dig a moat and fill it with boars, or build a deck road that stretches from the meadows to forest and into the nearest water source. Then I get too scared playing by myself 😩
Spear is real fun tho (except when I lose it)
The throw and strike buttons are just so close together! 😩 Polearm solved that issue for me though, I get to run around swinging it all over the placewheeeeeeee
I’ve been an axe-shield main on that game, proper Viking shit.
I’ve hit a bit of a wall though, every enemy outside of the meadows and black forest biomes seems to utterly destroy me no matter how smart I play.
I found parrying with the shield carried me basically up through the Mistlands, having a lot of time in Sekiro helps lol. Edit: I forgot to mention a successful parry will stagger your attacker, making any attack you hit them with do critical damage
Everything in the swamps is weak to Blunt damage, so a mace is recommended. At this point I think the game wants you to figure out making Mead, as the poison resist mead makes things a lot easier, almost trivializing the boss. Likewise in the Mountains, your frost resist mead is gonna be required till you can kill some wolves and make a pelt cloak. I found a kinda cheese way to fight the dragon boss: placed objects and buildings will take damage, but if you hoe a pillar of earth up it’s indestructable, making for a comfy spot to have a reprieve. In fact ‘earthworks’ like that are basically the most reliable static defences you can really use, a favorite trick being to settle a small island off the coast and slowly expand it. I can’t really recall any particular tips for the Plains or Mistlands really, they were just a severe pain in my ass til I got the hang of parrying everything.
And that’s about as far as I got, since I only just managed to get to the Ashlands just to get wiped out by some beastie there before having set up a camp, so I just lost a ton of stuff I wasn’t super willing to go get.
Mistlands was such a garbage zone, aggressive los breaks that don’t impact enemy ranged units and awful vertical terrrain to constantly drain your stam. Just an utterly miserable experience
The boss was also a bunch of garbage I haven’t a clue how you’d beat with like, stock gameplay and no cheese. I literally corpse ran it down even when it was super inefficient lol.
we couldn’t keep up with ads and deal with the boss so my group ended up bailing on the game cause I refused to keep farming food*
*I actually really liked how they did their design around food buffs for the early game but as you progress it is so much work it’s unbearable. I found myself logging on multiple times through the week to do harvests and cull herds just to have food for the group runs once a week.
They actually made food somewhat more bearable a few updates ago: now you can craft “feasts” which are like a few themed food dishes combined into one big placable shared plate that anyone could take from and it had 10/10 charges, slightly better food buffs for like an hour.
I forgot to mention a successful parry will stagger your attacker
This is extremely funny to see happen when you parry an arrow
Bear armor with a bronze/iron/root helm, and poison resist mead if you don’t have the root helm. [Edit: also shield]
Spear/Buckler gang reporting in. At least until the swamp; that always puts a stop to my epic phalanx arc.
Yeah, pierce doesn’t do shit there. Good place for a mace/hammer or sword and shield switchup, at least until that biome is finished
Yep, early game I usually swap between spear and club a lot so that I’m ready to roll through the swamp with a mace/buckler setup. The club is also a good backup for mowing down skeletons in the black forest.
How are bucklers in comparison to banded iron shield? The bonus is in the parrying right?
Yes! The parry bonus is enough to stagger trolls with Meadows-tier food buffs.
I downloaded Niota again and I’m spending a bit more tine trying to understand this chaotic puzzle of a game
Pokémon Zed Eh, still. I’m having a blast finding off-meta teams for Link Play. Galarian Stunfisk party rocks way harder than it has any right to.
Update: my flat fuck son continues to wipe the floor in the Xerneas - Metagross - Garchomp rock paper scissors meta. He has a great answer for all three, and he’s so small and unassuming nobody ever notices him until I start running up the scoreboard.
That also leaves my other two battle slots open for counter-picks against the current counter-meta (fire and ice types). I feel very flexible right now.
Im trying to get into Europa Universalis 5 and man this is complicated. I like it so far and it feels very ambitious but Crusader Kings 3 and Stellaris feel MUCH easier. Even Vicky kind of feels easier since Vicky 3 is just economy manipulation with a lil bit of politics on top. Probably will need like 30h just to get a general idea of the game and then I will still be bad at it.
