Just downloaded Fornite: Battle Royale after weeks of scoffing at it. It’s… fun. The building mechanics have been interesting and as someone who liked PUBG but never got good at it, this feels more approachable and comforting to play.
Even thinking about paying up for the PvE portion and giving it a shot.
Other than Monster Hunter World, which everyone is playing, I’m playing through Regency Solitaire finally. It’s fairly derivative of those types of like “puzzle solitaire” games that came before it, but I still wanted another one of those to mindlessly go through.
Other than that, I’m replaying Burnout: Paradise on PC. I didn’t have any of the DLC on 360, so it’ll be my first time heading to Big Surf Island. The thought of having more of that game that I haven’t touched before is so exciting.
I’m back to playing Injustice 2. The TMNT are so dumb but also pretty awesome. They look super out of place but also kinda fit. It’s very strange.
I also have a feeling Netherrealm is getting ready to try another MK vs DC. Subby/Raiden reference the events from that game so many times in their intros so they can easily crossover MK and DC again through Injusticeverse. A lot of the finishers in Injustice 2 are brutal enough to satisfy most of MK’s more bloodthirsty fans so if they do those and maybe crank them up a bit for a MK vs DC 2 it would go over a bit better than last time. I want Dark Kahn again! HE WAS DUMB AND COOL.
Effect & Cause and The Beacon are probably my two favorite first person shooter levels this gen. I’ve recently grown to appreciate The Beacon because of the moments in that mission where it’s just an adrenaline rush and how well designed it is. It’s everything good about Titanfall 2’s campaign rolled into one 45 minute mission.
Finally getting around to Monument Valley 2 and uhhhhhhhhhhhh it’s really fuckin’ good.
I just finished Dying Light, which was okay. Not sure if I actually enjoyed playing it, but it kept my mind busy, which was nice. I haven’t started The Following yet, but I’ll get to that in a bit. I need a break from zombies first.
As for what I’m playing now, I started Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet, which came out yesterday. I’ve only put about two hours in so far, but I’m liking what I’m seeing, even though it’s mostly been tutorial and setup. GGO is my favorite part of SAO, so it has that going for me, but I think there’s a good game in here too.
And against better financial judgement, I bought the rest of the Stellaris DLC after watching that Waypoint stream, even though I still haven’t played that game once yet lol. The narrative Austin and crew were crafting is very much my kind of thing, so I wanna have my own go at that.
I played through Regency Solitaire. I was surprised by how addicting it was. I need to find another similar game, or maybe a decent hidden object game to play.
When I got my PS4, I downloaded the demo for The Evil Within 2, which lets you play up to the end of chapter 3. I played up to the start of chapter 3 and stopped, thinking the ending was just around the corner, and resolved to one day go back and finish it off
With the First Person Mode patch, I finally booted it back up again only to discover Chapter 3 is enormous. There’s a quest that will obviously end the demo – follow the signal of the crying girl. But you can ignore that and have this huge town environment (Union) to explore.
At this point, I’ve gotten more enjoyment out of The Evil Within 2 demo than I did all of Uncharted 1. I’ve spent over six hours poking around Union, and seen some legitimately brilliant stuff.
I’m glad my save data from the demo will carry over to the full game, because I’m definitely onboard.
First Person Mode is… okay. A friend that’s watched me play says he can’t stand how you feel like a weightless floating camera, but it doesn’t seem to bother me that much. First person does heighten just how slow Sebastian moves, though (especially when you run), and you can tell they didn’t exactly design the game with first person in mind – you’ll occasionally run across scenarios where you’ll see things you weren’t supposed to.
Usually that means seeing through doors. Most of them have windows of some kind, which in third person, you can’t really use effectively. In first person, however, you can angle yourself to get full views of what’s on the other side, which sometimes are things like trees floating in empty space, or enemies that haven’t triggered yet. In one instance, I saw a cutscene model spawn in out of thin air when I got close enough. Textures were also obviously not created with first person in mind – this game looks great when Sebastian can’t get any closer than five feet from any given object, but now that you can rub your face all over everything it looks REALLY blurry.
Minor complaints, obviously. I’d still default to first person, because the loss of peripheral vision really does heighten your anxiety.
I took some short videos of first person mode, if anyone’s interested in watching them. I’ll link them so they don’t embed:
“First Person Clip” (1:30) - What I figured was going to be the only video I took of TEW2, showing basic movement/look controls in first person as a zombie “The Lost” stalks me from afar.
“You Startled The Witch” (2:00) - I never thought I’d like the idea of an open world horror game, but when it sets up things like this, I am SUPER DOWN.
“Spook’em Up” (9:16) - A longer segment where I clumsily stumble around trying and failing to be stealthy.
“And Now For Something Completely Different” (9:18) - The segment that really sold me on The Evil Within 2. Its willingness to turn the world upside down is incredible. The idea that I went from an open world city to what happens here is super rad. And what isn’t even conveyed here is how the game plays with your perception of being able to control Sebastian; during a lot of what looks like cutscenes, you still have at least camera control, but it’ll suddenly forcibly wrestle that control away to show you something.
What a smart, cool game.
The pve should be going free to play sometime this year, so I’m honestly just going to wait for that.
I recommend Faerie Solitaire. Not as (ahem) tolerable of a story as Regency, but I find the layouts were a lot more fun and challenging.
In RPG Land right now. Felt that now was a good time to get stuck into Skyrim on Switch, which remains, as always, Skyrim. Amazing that the switch seems to have nullified the Bethesda curse that drops all their games to 20 quid after a month.
Also playing Pandora’s Tower, the middle child of Project Rainfall. Didn’t catch on like Xenoblade did, but did get at least a WiiU Eshop release, unlike The Last Story(Which I’m definately checking out after Pandora’s). I’m kinda loving it, the story is unfolding at an unusual pace, jumping back every now and again to add more detail to the very sparce introduction. It’s just you, your girlfriend who turns into a monster if she doesn’t eat the flesh of beasts from the tower that keeps the world from splitting in two, and your friendly old merchant lady friend who carries a skeleton pal on her back everywhere. Good Shit.
I finished Celeste’s main game about a month ago and figured I probably wouldn’t try the B-sides, since I’d found the main game very fun, but sometimes a bit frustratingly hard.
But for some reason, I’m actually enjoying the B-sides more than I enjoyed the main game. There’s something very… centering, almost, about the type of painstaking, incremental progress that I get from going through a couple of screens at a time, chipping slowly away. Also, (between these and Chapter 6), I realized that I prefer the levels without strawberries. Not that they were a bad design, but sometimes the main game’s difficulty felt very erratic because of all the optional challenges, and the B-sides feel more consistent. I’m through 6 of 8 now (Summit and Core to go), and I don’t know if I’ll attempt the C-sides, but these have been really surprisingly fun.
I’ve been engrossed with Stellaris since the latest update dropped, and also picked up Anodyne again after Austin and Danielle mentioned really liking that one. I’d played a bit of the game a few years ago but for whatever reason, it just didn’t hold my interest at the time. Regardless, it’s been very enjoyable now and I look forward to getting through more of it!
After being very meh on both Celeste and Dandara, I picked up Iconoclasts and man is it good. I’m not a huge fan of 16-bit aesthetics, but the game is just so fun. Not very difficult, but the boss fights are very interesting and I really like the character and monster designs. I’m still not that far into it - 3-4 bosses in, just finished the fight with Chrome - but so far it’s a really good time.
Also, I ended Overwatch Season 8 by getting a win, a loss due to a player leaving, and a loss due to my internet crashing, which sums up the season nicely.
Interesting. Did you like TEW 1? So far I’ve heard people recommend the first or the second but never both, and I’m curious about the series.
I’ve only played a demo for TEW1 on PC, and I’ve watched a full LP of the game.
It’s… I guess not a great game. It has great parts, sometimes, occasionally, but from the murmurs I’ve heard here and there, it was a project Bethesda brought Shinji Mikami in to “save” and there were disagreements on which direction to take the game in (Bethesda apparently wanted something more scifi, Mikami wanted more classic horror).
So it’s kind of a mess. A big mess. It doesn’t always control super well, it has weird performance problems on console, the PC version can crash a lot, the difficulty balancing is all out of whack, it’s kind of repetitive, and I seem to remember the story being kind of nonsense.
It can have some really strong atmosphere sometimes, there are a few really cool monster designs, and it does some really interesting stuff with spacial warping/gravity, but in general it kind of sucks to play.
Basically, imagine a slower, harder, less fun Resident Evil 4, where ammo is so scarce you never have more than four or five bullets in a gun at any given time. That last part about ammo scarcity is also true in The Evil Within 2, but the rest of the game is a lot better balanced, because instead of feeling annoying, it works in its favor.
Unless you pick up TEW1 on a Steam sale for like $5, I would not recommend it, even though TEW2 constantly references TEW1 (to the point where it even has an in joke or two)
I am playing mostly Sword Art Online Fatal Bullet, which turns to be a much better game that I would expected and a very fun game, along with Stellaris (by the way, the I am loving the new patch) and Skyrim (with tons of mods, mostly pose mod, clothes and places).
Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steal and Rainbow 6 Siege. Had to stop Monster Hunter 'cause I gave my dad my PS4 so he could play Fortnite.
Dipped my toes back into Flinthook, and that game is still great. I only just discovered the “pro” control option, and it’s a whole new world.
I also downloaded this mobile game called Dice Brawl, which has more thought and care put into its mechanics than I actually expected. It plays like a cross between Monopoly and Talisman, crammed into matches that take less than 5 minutes. You pick a captain, a ship, and 5 crew to take with you into a match that each have special abilities. Unfortunately, you have to either pay a couple bucks for a starter pack or stick with the game for a bit to unlock enough cards to have meaningful choices when it comes to team-building (it operates on a clash-royale card/lootbox monetization scheme), but it does get there.
I’m slow on gaming, so I’m just now getting around to Horizon Zero Dawn, it’s on its way to me now. I just finished Breath of the Wild, and tbh while I loved that game, it did burn out open world games for me a little bit. My compulsion to see everything there is, regardless of how insignificant, made exploring new areas so molasses-slow that towards the end I just gave up on exploring. Opened the last two towers I had left, found the memories in those areas, and abandoned the areas to go beat the game. I thought I would revisit it after the endgame to clean up, but my brain automatically started looking for something new, so I’ve picked up once since I beat it a week ago.
Anyway, HZD is in the mail and I’m kind of dreading another enormous open world experience. I’ve become acutely aware of my backlog lately, and I kind of don’t want to spend another 4+ months on a single game. We’ll see.
