Hey all! Whatcha been playing. I am recovering from surgery and have been playing a ton of Mario wonder. Loving it so far 😊
Mass Effect Legendary Edition (ME1), just got Liara & did the DLC mission as well as a bit of uncharted worlds & rogue VI on Earth’s moon.
The game looks a lot better and most controls are nicer. Although somehow the Mako is even worse to control in LE than the original ME and I get some stutter/loading while running around in presidium.
Being able to skip while in the elevator is nice, but I would’ve liked to see the option to be moved directly into normandy added to the rapid transits like in ME2 & ME3. Having to go to C-Sec, take the elevator, and wait for the decontamination process every time is really tedious, and it’s why I rarely visited the Citadel in the original ME1 as well.
Honestly ME1 LE is looking pretty nice and I would recommend it to anyone who hasn’t played it yet, but it was always the story that was the highlight of ME1, the gameplay isn’t actually that great and I’ve already replayed the original several times so I think I’m just going to go ahead and play ME2.
I played through Far: Lone Sails and really enjoyed the light puzzle and management of the machine. It was super atmospheric and I really loved the game overall. It was a perfect casual game that really absorbed me into it. Going to play the sequel as well soon.
I should try out the sequel! I played the first when it originally released and it felt just right for what I was looking to get out of it.
It’s on sale right now on switch (which is where I played the first as well) but not on steam.
taking a break from Baulders Gate 3 due to a bad DMing event, and picked CP2077 back up for the Phantom Liberty DLC
My Ghost Recon team in my second playthrough of Baldur’s Gate 3 got past level 8, and they may as well have ascended to godhood then and there. There are several achievements for killing some boss or another before they get to do some kind of attack, but this team just bursts them down before they get the chance to take a second turn. I’m in Act 3 now and just checking out a few remaining plot threads that I missed in my first playthrough.
I’m also trying to finish a run of 30XX. It’s good, and the level generation is slightly less repetitive than its predecessor, but it’s mostly just more of the same. New bosses and such, and the game is still good, but I was hoping for more of an iterative improvement over the first game.
I’ve been playing some Mario Wonder too (both co-op and single player). I’m not the biggest 2D platformer fan, but I think it does a pretty good job. I’m surprised at how difficult some of the levels have gotten so far (4 and 5 star difficulty levels ain’t no joke). I’m not sure if I’ll finish it, but there’s fun to be had for sure.
I’m also closing in on finishing Chrono Trigger for the first time. I’m enjoying it, though I think the PS1 and PS2 era JRPGs are more up my alley. This game definitely oozes charm though, and I can see why many consider it a classic. After I beat it I’ll probably try Chrono Cross again, though last time I tried playing it the game froze twice early on just talking to people…
Could kids play Wonder?
I think so, though there are some optional levels they may struggle with. If they play as Yoshi they won’t take any damage, which might help. Alternatively, someone more experienced could play as Yoshi and the kid could ride the Yoshi through some of the more challenging spots.
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Playing this week:
- DMC4: Still great
- Vampire Survivors: still really addicting, my save files was deleted, so I started all over. As soon as I reach library level, then it’s all about farming / grinding.
I played several games last week,
- The Secret of Monkey Island: is still a really funny game
- Call of the Sea: dropped it after first hour, the first person camera is making me nauseous. I had the same issue while playing Maquette, weirdly I don’t have much issue when playing FPS (but I don’t play them often)
- TMNT Shredder’s Revenge: it’s an okay game, playing it solo is kinda annoying, since enemies tend to knock you back, and there’s a recovery time.
Hi-Fi Rush had me going back to play through the Devil May Cry series earlier this year, and I didn’t finish them before 2023 releases started popping off, but I left off at DMC4. I seem to remember the impressions of it back in the day being so-so, but I really enjoyed what I’ve played of it so far, and it feels the most like what Hi-Fi Rush became out of the series thus far. 1 and 3 were great, but 4 seemingly keeps what made those good without as many rough edges.
I’ve finished 1 - 3 recently, and I wanted to finish the entire DMC series including DmC.
I’m not a good DMC player, tend to mash buttons bit too often. After all the DMC games, I wanna start with Ninja Gaiden, properly learning the blocking based on a YT guide I’ve seen.
Laika: Aged Through Blood
I almost never buy metroidvanias before they go on sale pretty heavily because there are just so many good choices, but I played the absolute hell out of that first flash bike game that you controlled balance front and back. This is that, but with a big map to explore and combat I’m really enjoying. You block bullets with your bike, reload ammo with a backflip and a bullet parry with a front flip, and aiming your gun is bullet time, but because you’re aiming in the air a lot, you still have to pay attention to your rotation, so there’s a nice tension to it. I’m two bosses in, and both are decent takes on the unique flavor of their mechanics. I’m hooked hard.
Steam has a demo so you don’t have to buy it without knowing if it clicks for you.
Diablo 4’s Season 2 started this week, and I’m having a lot more fun playing with my rogue this round than I did with my druid in Season 1. They made it a lot easier to level up, which is nice. I could have done without the story though. It was super short and the new character Erys was not likeable at all.
I’m currently going through Pathfinder: Kingmaker, which is my first experience with the Pathfinder system.
While I do enjoy it right now, the beginning was kinda rough (super long rant incoming). Right after the short tutorial, I went to pick up some berries in a spider-infested cave, which wasn’t too bad, just that the spiders have poison that reduce your stats. In hindsight, this wasn’t that bad, just some missing information on my part and maybe bad tooltips, because the poison was supposed to go away after resting, but it didn’t. What the tooltip fails to mention, the stat penalty can stack and every 8 hours of rest removes one stack, so you might have to wait around for a day or so, before you’re back to normal.
Then, while I was still recovering from that (mentally and in-game) I stumbled on a text-only event, where you’re going through some marshes and find a seemingly evil idol. Me, being the Lawful Good monk that I am, of course decide to destroy it, but get cursed in return (-2 constitution). Curses are of course permanent, until you can start to remove them at level 5. I was level 2 at the time. Consumable items to remove them exist, but for some reason, drinking a potion can fail. I guess your character just spills everything over the floor. These potions are also super expensive and the vendor had just two of them, while I had four or five people in my party. Thank god my character is also a time wizard, so I cast Quick Load, and was good as new.
After those two experiences, like an hour into the prologue or act 1, I was ready to get fucked at every turn, but that was basically it. No idea why the devs chose to put these quests and events super close to your starting base.
My only other gripe with the game is the Kingdom Management. After you become a baron, you have to start managing your lands, which is fine in general, but I don’t think the devs have found a good balance, because there are just so many events that are constantly popping up, and I felt like I was making no progress with the actual CRPG part of the game. Regularly I’d leave my capital, just to get a notification that something happened, after like five seconds. So I go back to check it out, and it’s always some unimportant stuff. Experienced players might know that you can ignore these things for a bit, but as a new player, this was just super annoying. Then you also have some projects that force you to skip 14 days of in-game time, while your character is busy, and a few times, when I did that, I got notifications for like eight new things that happened. That’s when I called it, pulled out the mods and basically nerfed the shit out of that mechanic. Events now take only a fraction of their normal time, I can’t fail, and most importantly, I can manage most things, while out on the road. I’ll probably have to skip a ton more days manually, but I take that over the default implementation. FYI, you can turn down the difficulty of the management stuff in-game or even completely automate it (that way you lose some throne room events and interactions I think), I just had the mod installed already, because of a different reason, so I just used that.
Anyway, I still enjoy the CRPG part of the game. The combat is fun, although for a complete beginner to Pathfinder (and little experience with DnD) some tooltips are really lacking information. There are tons of keywords and mechanics getting thrown around, that I have no idea what they do. On your character sheet you’re presented with tons of different scores, and for half of them I don’t know how they got there (the others list a neat breakdown for each bonus you get). I think there are also some bonuses that only apply in certain cases, but aren’t reflected on your character sheet, but I wouldn’t know, because it’s not explained. I’m playing on normal or whatever is the recommended difficulty for newcomers to Pathfinder, and it’s not that difficult, so you can get by.
Other than that, I did “finish” Wolfenstein 3D and killed Hitler. There are more episodes and an expansion, but I’ll skip them. Like I said last week, I found the game kinda boring, it’s just too basic for me nowadays. Just a handful of different enemies, just three weapons, and the levels look all the same.
Now I’m deciding on the next retro shooter, that I want to tackle. Right now I’m thinking either Ion Fury or Doom 64, but something else might catch my eye.
Ohhh, one of my favorite all-time games, only surpassed by the successor.
So first off: Wrath of the Righteous is far more approachable. Better tooltips, better tutorial (including a dynamic one that pops up when relevant), better interface. Just in case you feel like more pathfinder. Note that the powerlevel is far higher in WotR because of mythic powers.
Right after the short tutorial, I went to pick up some berries in a spider-infested cave, which wasn’t too bad, just that the spiders have poison that reduce your stats. I
Fun story: This encounter was heavily nerfed (twice actually, once shortly after release, and then overhauled a few months later). It used to be mandatory and much more brutal :D It literally made some people stop playing :D
Consumable items to remove them exist, but for some reason, drinking a potion can fail. I guess your character just spills everything over the floor.
Hah :D So essentially the potion is a spell in a bottle. Wait, not essentially. That’s what it is. It has a caster level that depends on the creator of the potion. So with that caster level when drinking it, the spell casts Remove Curse against the DC of the curse. And that is what can fail.
After those two experiences, like an hour into the prologue or act 1, I was ready to get fucked at every turn
Sounds like you didn’t encounter the overleveled undead random encounter on the western side ;) Owlcat generally overhauled quite a lot of the encounters to remove difficulty spikes.
My only other gripe with the game is the Kingdom Management.
That is a very common complaint. I liked it, and the time pressure it added. Though only for the first few hundreds of hours (1283h played in total, and without beta testing), later I did what you did.
Wrath of the Righteous is far more approachable
I’ve read that, but I was planning on playing both anyway, so I decided to start with Kingmaker. Depending on the game, it can be hit-or-miss to go back to an older release by a developer. I just played Divinity 2 after BG3, and missing a lot of the changes and QoL additions that Larian has made, was a bit of a pain at times.
Sounds like you didn’t encounter the overleveled undead random encounter on the western side
I might have gotten it today (two undead, level 14 and 17 or something), but I was already level 9, so it wasn’t a huge deal. Actually, I’m surprised at how much higher level enemies the game throws at you, but you can pretty comfortably win against, as long as you’re prepared (I’m playing on the recommended difficulty for someone new to the Pathfinder system). A few times I had to reload and get a different weapon to actually kill an enemy or change and refresh my spells, because I wandered into an unexpected fight, but did manage to get them down.
decided to start with Kingmaker
Yeah, it was a good idea, as usual, for the reasons you mentioned. I just wanted to shill the successor a bit just so you won’t skip it because some things with PF:KM irked you ;)
(I’m playing on the recommended difficulty for someone new to the Pathfinder system)
You are smarter than 90% of people playing the game ;) It’s crazy, their games have super detailed difficulty settings, and presets with explanations. And yet people go, play on the brutal because they like Dark Souls and then complain it’s too hard. It’s like there’s some mental health pandemic with gamers. /rant
but you can pretty comfortably win against
Besides the difficulty, TB vs RTwP also influence this. I play on Core (actual setting in WotR, requires manual changes for KM, essentially as close to tabletop as possible; then some mods to bring it even closer to TT), but a lot of fights I could not do with RTwP, but they become far easier once I play the game in the way the system was designed.
I’m definitely not a RTwP kinda guy. If the Pathfinder games didn’t have a turn-based mode, either mod or official, I’d probably have skipped them.
It was painful ;) TB actually started as a mod, that was later with permission taken by Owlcat and improved for the enhanced edition. During the development, there was almost an even split between devs preferring TB and RTwP, and RTwP barely won. So with the mod having laid some groundwork and it being extremely popular, it was easier to pitch the addition.
And yeah, I’m an old school RPG fan, I love TB. I actually stopped playing RPGs just before RTwP became popular with the Infinity Engine games, and only returned to them with NWN2.
Currently emulating the old Crash Team Racing as I make my way through most of the Crash Bandicoot games. The racing game is pretty hard as racing games go.
Still working on Divinity Original Sin 2. Game is fun and it’s a lot better than #1 in that series. It’s a large time investment but I do love the game.
Started Kingdom Come: Deliverance yesterday and it’s pretty good. I only just got out of the tutorial phase of the story and I’m impressed by the realism in the game. It’s like a non-magical recreation of TES 4 Oblivion, and the Bohemia open world feels very alive.
NPCs have schedules. You can see them through the windows as they sit down, do the sign of the cross, then eat their meals. Although a lot of them are generic NPCs, the unique named characters can have speech skill checks (your character vs theirs) to determine outcomes as well as to haggle on prices.
I like the freedom it gives your character when it comes to making money like through thievery. That gameplay loop is pretty well developed, with noise and visibility playing a role in your success. Playing as a thief is almost as satisfying as in the Thief games, which is impressive considering that you don’t have any of the cool gadgets in those games and only have lockpicks.
The one thing I haven’t gotten the hang of yet is combat. I’m flailing around slashing and stabbing but my character isn’t strong enough yet to really hold his own against anything more than one or two bandits. Maybe I’m too used to the simplistic hack and slash style in Oblivion or Skyrim, but I feel like the combat system could be polished a little better (like let me switch focus between enemies a little easier so I won’t as easily get flanked.)
I’ve been trying to progress in Forza Motorsport, but the infinite loading screen bug is stopping me from playing. After almost every second race it doesn’t save my progress and I have to kill the game and lose all the progress because it refuses to save.
Also I got a new controller for PC, can anyone recommend good controller games that are on PC Gamepass?
I’ve been playing a bunch of Street Fighter 6. I just started getting back into fighting games after dropping them early in university. It’s been a lot of fun, and I’ve managed to climb to p platinum playing as Cammy
I’m on a continuing multiplayer campaign in Baldur’s Gate 3 and I’m also playing Atelier Totori.
It’s amazing how much new stuff I’m still seeing in BG3, and I’ve gotta be in hour 350 or something like that. I’m playing with a long-time video gaming partner and I’m just letting her run with it because I’ve already played through the game.
I really started to get into Atelier Totori once it started rolling, but I’m beginning to run out of steam. I’m really missing some of the UI/UX improvements that were in Atelier Rorona DX, and I also feel like the combat isn’t quite as sharp for some reason. I’m genuinely interested in the story at this point, however. If it wasn’t for that, I probably would have just jumped to Meruru.
