I'm gonna start a weekly Sunday evening thread where we all talk about what we've been playing the past week.
I have been doing a replay of Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice this week. It's one of my favorite games and I was surprised how much muscle memory Ive retained for most of the major boss fights.
I'm playing stardew. Apparently the 1.6 update is a big deal but it's like my 2nd time playing it and I never got past the second year so I know fuck all about the game. It's at once a fun chill relaxing game and also very hectic getting all my farm chores done in a day. I have a friend who actually knows what they're doing and it's very fun to insist on having them help around the farm but not be allowed to teach me the deep lore.
Hell yeah, I'm back on my Stardew Valley bullshit. If you ever need guidance, check the wiki, it's very comprehensive (although it might be missing some of the 1.6 stuff still). I haven't played it in a couple years, so it's nice!
I'm taking a break after old world blues made me face the wall (of text).
It's been a good 7/8 years since I did a "full" playthrough of the game and it's nice to have a reflection of my improved understanding, to know why Caesar is a big dialectic dumb dumb rather than just nodding my head like umm yeah, I guess it really is inevitable the NCR be destroyed.
I went through Mega Man X and was probably going to go through them up to 4, from what I hear the series took a nose dive after that and they even made a 3D one? Gotta pace them a little bit because it's brutal on my hands.
I was like "What, you're doing a Buster only run? The Argon Buster sucks!" and then I realized you were talking about Megaman, not the X4 space 4x game.
Helldivers II: Just picked this up to play with some friends from a former job. It's a ton of fun with a good group, and the hit-you-over-the-head-with-a-hammer Western imperialist satire adds a lot.
Soulstone Survivors: Vampire Survivors with more active combat and build variety.
Dead Rock Galactic Survivor: Vampire Survivors with mining and aiming.
Splatoon 3: Tracking down the final uncollected palette chips in Side Order. Team Baby Chicks will win this weekend, mark it down.
DRGS is very polished already! It's at the state where all it really needs is More Stuff. Mining materials gets you currency for both in-run upgrades and overall stat upgrades, plus you can carve out paths to escape danger or funnel enemies. Weapons have decent variety and are satisfying, and the levels give you just enough time to explore before it's time to beat the boss and escape.
Once they add some more levels and objective variety, it'll really shine, but even now it's one of the best examples of the genre.
Still mucking around with my old mmorpgs, I have Everquest, Ultima Online, and Final Fantasy XI in rotation. I tried to play some MGS Peace Walker but either I suck or the controls are wonky and I ended up not really liking it. Feel like as I get older RPGs like mmos or JRPGs are more my speed now.
It's usually bosses or mini bosses that you aren't prepared for that will get most of your deaths. I've never actually beaten DD because I get burnt out and then always start a new campaign when I come back to it, but it's a lot of fun.
Been playing some modded Minecraft. Working on my rail network . I automated iron production but need far more gravel supply to keep up with the amount of iron for rail and machinery for more factories. The productive forces must grow
I'm playing Create Astral. I've been on that pack for a year, haven't gotten too far because I've put some restrictions on myself and not played super actively. I really wanna get back to Forge packs to try Hex and some other mods, though.
Im still playing pokerogue, my current run started with a clodsire, cinderbunny and a turtwig all with good stat and natures thanks to eggs and catching them.
I think this week im going to do a endless to see how far i get, with a meowstick with good ivs i got from an egg
I've been playing Stationeers. It's interesting but also frustrating. It's a space survival crafting game which focuses hard on realism, especially gas handling. So you need to make an atmosphere with the right proportions of nitrogen and oxygen to breathe in your base, and you need a breathable atmosphere to open your spacesuit helmet to eat and drink, and you also need to add some carbon dioxide to the atmosphere to grow plants, and you also need to keep the atmosphere at the right temperature range for both the plants and yourself.
I replayed Psychonauts so I could finally play Psychonauts 2 without any hang-ups about not completing it. I had never actually beaten the Meat Circus as a kid, and this was the first time I cleared it. I think the difficulty was largely a product of being much younger and worse at games, but it was still the hardest and imo the worst part of the game (for being annoying and a bit clunky to play through). Either way, the game holds up very well all these years later.
Psychonauts 2 was fantastic. Just fantastic. Absolutely great game, and humorously it runs better for me than the first game, which freezes constantly (GOG versions for both). Gameplay feels better in basically every regard, story is excellent, combat is excellent (particularly for a platformer), voices and characters are excellent. 100%-ing levels seems less daunting than it was in psychonauts 1 as well, so I'm slowly pursuing that.
I've also been playing Dawn of War: Soulstorm with the Unification mod, which has finally been finished (I think?). That mod is like 3 or 4x bigger than the base game files because it adds so much fucking content. New maps, new factions, new gameplay modes, etc. Soulstorm is finally better than Dark Crusade (except the story, I still like DC more for that).
I'm not who you're replying to, but absolutely I'd say you have to play 1 before 2 - there's a lot of plot points in 2 directly related to the events of 1
that said, it's absolutely worth it
edit: that said, thinking back on it I'm fairly sure there's a whole recap section at the start of 2 - maybe if you're satisfied with that it'll be ok? but either way i'd still say it's a good idea to go back to 1, and tbh a playthrough of it isn't tooooo long
Elden Ring, Darkest Dungeon pvp, Patron, and might dip into Hinterland for a bit. My attention span isn't quite there and I'm just lazing about on my day off. My issue is wanting to play a little of everything at once, despite not being into games that much. Anyway, off to hop into Kingdom: New Lands.
I just bought a PS5 and playstation plus yesterday so I'm going between the FF7 remake for when I want to pay attention, rocket league when I feel like getting angry, and Far Cry 6 for while listening to a podcast.
Tangentially related, I learned today that the seemingly chill guy next to my stall at the Farmer's market that sells homemade fudge streams COD and gambling on kick almost daily. He also sells basically embezzled golf balls under the table for dirt cheap lmao.
yeah, I didn't touch 3 whatsoever, hadn't played 2 for about 15+ years but smashed the hell out of LoD when got a computer and Diablo 1 at my cousin's place as a kid.
D4 is honestly not bad. I'm not sure what state it released in, but the story is enough to keep me hooked, it's just below the level of grimdark where the whole thing would be cringe, and i like obliterating skellies.
I just loaded 450 mods in to Kenshi. Bought a wreck in The Hub, repaired it, plopped a couple of straw beds and a chest down. Currently breaking rocks and stealing stuff to get some cats and get my starting characters strength up.
I found this game on GGN searching for point-and-click games. For me, it hits just right. I'm not to far in, but it's extrmely well done from the prospective of someone who grew up on 90's adventure games.
Murder by Numbers:
Playing through the extras. It's just picross. I think it's pretty fun.
Clannad Side Stories:
Trash, as expected. We also have some fun new reactionary opinions that didn't get covered in base Clannad: "not graduating high school means you're going to be a failure in life" and "your wife, who you admit you verbally abused, and were too busy with work to be with on her deathbed, actually always loved you and says she had a good life with you". Reading/watching Clannad is an impressive look at how much of a boomer it's possible for a guy in his late 20's/early 30's to be.
Journey
When I finished, a friend of mine I was in call with remarked that I never ran into another player, which is the one thing that really makes this game so special. I certainly didn't feel the hype, but I obviously didn't have the intended experience.
Fatal Twelve:
I think it's a good premise hampered by uninteresting prose. I played this company's most recent game, UsoNatsu, a few weeks ago, and that shows some significant improvement from Fatal Twelve.
Flowers: Le Volume sur Ete:
I picked this up because it is the absolute favorite series (the first 2 games, at least) of one of my friends, and I'm honestly a bit concerned for them after having played it. I feel like this game is pretty obviously depicting sexual harassment while not really understanding that's the territory it's in. It makes for an extremely uncomfortable read.
Helldivers II- Get on for a few matches and have fun. Thankfully no overtly cringe teammates on random yet. Got to play with a friend from an old job and it was a blast.
Rimworld- Base game was on sale on steam and its been fun so far.
Baldur's Gate 3- Been sitting in my backlog for a while. Opened up the game two or three times and never got past the character creator. Finally started a week ago and its been good. Feels a bit intimidating with the amount of information available, but I also haven't had any trouble in the battles I've had so far.
Doing another Rimworld dip with the new DLC out. Naturally, haven't touched that at all yet, but I finally realized how absolutely piss-easy it is to pirate the DLCs and still use the workshop, so I'm enjoying an even more streamlined process of modding it until it takes ten minutes to boot.
My current run is a monastery of pantheistic star-worshippers and I'm just taking it real easy and focusing on the architecture. Monasteries are actually a great pattern for a rimworld base, because they're already kind of defensible compounds with lots of different rooms next to each other.
Been playing Rimworld for the last week too. Yeah, given how rediculous the pricing is and how easy it is to pirate DLCs, I'm also rocking the base game + pirated DLC combo.
(For those who don't know, download a pirated copy of the latest version, copy over the DLCs in the data folder, edit out the line with SteamID in each of the DLC's about.xml)
Thoughts on the new DLC? I'm not too interested in the theme so I haven't bothered to pirate it yet. Watched a playthrough, seems like something you either commit a run into it or not touch it at all. It's like a story DLC instead of a gameplay mechanics focused one.
My main thoughts on the DLC so far are that having another large object spawn on the map is kinda annoying and that the title screen lady looks nice. I haven't really messed with it at all or looked at what it does beyond a glance at the steam page. I'm kinda hoping that I can kind of experience all that stuff organically or not. Had some weird zombies show up once who didn't do much Also there are books now, not sure if that's part of the update or the dlc, but it's neat. It's hard to tell what's mods and not, but I think the UI got a bit of an upgrade too.
Waiting for Dwarf Fortress adventure mode for Steam on Wednesday (beta version), plus Galactic Civilization 4 getting an expansion on Thursday that I will check out.
Humble had a bundle of boomer shooters and idk why but I tried super hard all week to not buy it until I caved on Friday.
So first up is Prodeus. Prodeus is a game that teenage me would have adored. It's what I feel like Doom 3 should have been. It's like one of the Doom wad mods like Brutal Doom cranked up to 11. It doesn't throw any movement tech at you like modern games so you can focus on the dumb "mowing down hordes of enemies" with your over the top guns and over the top gore/gib animations. Everything explodes. Blood and guts go flying and paints the floors, walls, and ceilings with red. It even has blood squish sound effects when mobs blow up. I will say it does get a bit monotinous after a while. I was hoping I was on the last level but just checked and I have 7 more to go.
I also wanna check out Turbo Overkill after. TO is sort of like if you take modern movement shooters with slide and jump tech and plop it into a retro shooter. But also when you slide, your legs turn into chainsaws. Idk, it's fast, crazy fun. It's dumb and I have enjoyed what I've played so far.
Ultrakill is finally in my library too. I played a bit and like it so far. Donno if I love it yet though. Gonna try and get through it though and see what the hype is about.
Other than that, I am still trucking along in Dyson Sphere Program. I have 2 spheres made now and am trying to ramp up my white science. I am stuck on a bottleneck issue so my max potential production is about twice what I am actually making. I think it's tied to my proliferator, but my prolifs need nanotubes that need graphene, and it's just been a mess. I've been working on it for a few days and donno what to do. I wanna get it fixed for when I ramp up to my goal of 5,000 science per minute. Then once I can get that going I wanna dump a sphere around a O type star and probably call it done.
Dragon's Dogma 2. I'm annoyed that they've made it arbitrarily difficult to make back up saves (probably for pawn economy reasons, I guess) because there are many things I need to experiment with, and experimentation is difficult when I can only do some things once, and other things require waiting for monsters to respawn or what have you.
I could just look up the answers, but that doesn't sound like fun.
Doing different playthroughs of Total Warhammer 2. So far I've done:
Repanse de Lyonnesse: I still hate Bretonnia, cavalry is bad
Heinrich Kemmler: A tricky start due to everyone nearby hating him, but he gets unstoppable once you get some more ghost units with the buffs he gives them. Also there's just nothing like lining up a Winds of Death to get 200+ kills in one cast.
Thorek Ironbrow: EZ auto-resolve to victory. Got lucky with some settlements meaning I didn't ever have to go to war with the Lizardmen and avoided the worst parts of Thunderdome. Honestly really liked his campaign of getting the artifacts.
Grom The Paunch: Fun campaign mechanic with the cooking pot but the DLC units (pump wagons) seemed to just... suck? Ended up cheesing the late game with an "oops all Arachnoroks" doomstack. The campaign's final battle being to take Tor Yvresse (I think?) fell a little flat because I'd already taken it in the game world like 5 turns earlier lol.
Wulfrik the Wanderer: Had to drop this one after every elf in the world declared war on me. Don't really know how to play Norsca, their units are pretty good but the economy sucks shit and I'm constantly rushing to put out fires which means I can't afford to send a stack to just raid Couronne or Marienberg or whatever.
Count Noctilus: The special achievement for growing the Galleon's Graveyard takes way too long, but otherwise this campaign has been pretty neat. You're pushed to go straight into the High Elves and I did so, eventually getting the Sword of Khaine on the Count himself leading to some real shenanigans. Lustria seems weirdly stable, with no major players knocked out by turn 100, which is surprising.
I'm playing with some mods that generally make the game easier:
Remove penalties to Public Order etc from difficulty (I want to play on Very Hard so there are more enemy armies but the modifiers to the player are tedious)
Build minor settlements to T4 (just makes it easier to consolidate everything in one province so I don't have to shuffle things around as much)
When a subfaction of your faction is eliminated you can recruit their lords, including LLs (just nice to be able to get more LLs because they're fun!)
Double skill points (kind of makes the game herohammer but the AI gets it to so w/e)
Project Wingman. It's a spiritual successor to Ace Combat and I have no idea what's going on because I play it music blaring (the politics are probably incoherent) but it plays extremely well.
I'm just finishing Tax Paperwork Hell, U.S. Edition. Whoever made this game and obfuscated the equations for stat progression is a real fucker, TBH. Do not recommend.
Dragons Dogma 2, I'm just slowing exploring places and occasionally doing a side quest. Have refused to start the main quest at all. Found the Sphinx and that was cool.
Stardew Valley, the new update is very impressive and I only really did a farm once way back in 1.0 so getting all the changes is very fun. My girlfriend also plays it so we can chat about our farms.
Helldivers 2. It's fun to do a mission or two a day, I wish it was not locking all the new stuff behind battle passes or releasing them slower. Because keeping up seems like they expect 5 hours of gameplay a day rather than the 40 minutes I put in.
Balatro, just do a run or two a day, I'm up to gold stake on yellow deck and it's very hard so I'm switching to some of the fun decks I unlocked to see what they are like.
I finished Romancing SaGa 2 a bit ago. I was nervous to fight the last boss as I had read about how it was supposed to be one of the most difficult last bosses in the series and then I did it one attempt without any major problems. Maybe I just got lucky with attacks because mechanically I can see how it's supposed to be a hard boss. Overall I enjoyed the game but it's a hard one to recommend to people due to how unconventional it is.
I skipped RS3 for now and moved on to the SaGa Frontier remaster. It's fun but also a step back in complexity from the RS games and so it feels a little too easy sometimes. Also the limited rehashed quests gets old fast (ugh runes). Anyway I'm hoping to be done with this one before Emerald Beyond comes out. I'm abusing NG+ so I don't have to grind out every single scenario so I don't think it'll take too long.
Visual novels on itch.io. Lookouts is the best gay cowboy story I've read, highly recommend! It's free and you can play it in your browser right now (took me about 5 hours)
Ys was very good, even if they upped the anime cringe compared to 2003-2007 Falcom games, it still had the best gameplay loop in the series. Searching for castaways and seeing your village grow in a deserted island while spamming your flashy animu skills and swapping between characters is just so fun.
The bosses are easy and the game allows you to pause and heal similarly to BOTW but I needed to relax this week so it was fitting. The music is also great as well.
Katana Zero is the most cinematic game I have ever played thanks to the great mechanics and level design, with a ton of action movie-like setpieces the one after the other. Too bad it's unfinished because I was hooked by the story but it's still worth it.
Last week I played the single player campaign in Warcraft III Reforged. It's still a great game. I played it a long time ago and have nostalgia for it. Feels good to revisit something that you played as a kid
What is the same if I've played C&C Generals or Dawn of War: So, there is some base building and real time unit command with health, armour, ranged units/buffs etc. This part is not super deep on its own. After that, it deviates from the standard RTS fare. Timeframe is roughly Supreme Commander medium maps (slower than starcraft or C&C, faster than HoI or Stellaris). Rushing is almost impossible (if units are just moving somewhere, they run out of supply if they're not close to a friendly village). I'm slowly doing one mission per night while my meds kick in. Just setting expectations.
Multiple paths to victory!
You can get "Hegemony", which is basically map control to win. It's quite a lot and is the "default" way of winning.
Last man standing, which can be done through conquering the heavily armoured main base or using spies to "assassinate" the enemy general. As the tech faction, I use assassinate a bunch.
CHOAM shares victory. Very hard to do at the best of times, but if you have half of all available CHOAM shares you win. There are some bonuses and stuff that work of CHOAM shares, but they're just a way of storing money that grows over the course of a match if you can't think of anything else to do. CHOAM doesn't pay dividends.
Landsraad Victory. There's a particular chair on the council that if you hold for 30 days, you win. Haven't done this one, but there's a bunch of things you can also do with the Landsraad.
Each path to victory comes with a bunch of shenanigans with its associated mechanic. With CHOAM shares you can do a pump and dump, with Landsraad you can get subsidies or hand out penalties etc.
You kinda have to spec into one or two depending on your comfort levels and sometimes the mission will bar you from some or give you a different one.
Multiple factions!
So, each faction has roughly similar buildings, roughly similar techs, and different military units. Each faction plays pretty differently. Haven't explored too much, and I chose the weird DLC faction first (Ixians, the ones rejecting the butlerian jihad, but in secret)
Diplomacy is every match!
You want to win, so allying long term usually means your one AI ally will become your major rival. So pretty much every game involves some diplomancy. There's some treaties and stuff. Not as fleshed out.
Dawn of War: Dark Crusade style campaign. Each full map game comes with different little bonuses that you can invest in. Also, losing one game doesn't knock you out of the campaign. (I lost 3 games in my current campaign and am looking at victory). There's a bit of positive feedback here, but I think the AI faction does too.
You have to capture towns, which will usually have a couple of units defending. This has a 4X-but-real-time feel. To get to another faction militarily, you generally have to have friendly villages all the way up to their territory. You need to generate "Authority" resource
Playing Syrian Warfare https://store.steampowered.com/app/485980/Syrian_Warfare/ I love RTS games and this is one is right up my alley brutally difficult I am playing on realistic and I got through the first 2 missions without reloading much but mission 03 is kicking my ass.