I played through the two Batman Telltale games over the last week. They were really good (minus the gripes I have with Telltale’s engine and quicktime combat getting kind of stale) and refreshed the Batman mythos in interesting ways.
Since that apparently sparked a Batman craving in me I went back to Arkham Knight with a new game and am playing through it again. Most of this reminds me that I really want to play Blades in the Dark more.
I finally booted up Dawn of War 3 over the weekend and have come to the realization that I just don’t enjoy RTS that mix generic units and hero characters. It’s too much micromanagement.
One hero with lots of fun powers like Diablo? Cool. Multiple heroes with unique powers that work together like Dawn of War 2? Still neat and manageable. A combination of multiple heroes with unique powers and an army of different kinds of units with their own specialties and abilities? No, too much.
And DoW3 adds base building on top of all of that, so… ugh. It’s just completely draining to play and I constantly feel like I’m doing poorly, even though I’m not losing. I just know that my actions could be optimized better and it keeps me from really enjoying the WH40K flavor that makes me want to play in the first place. It’s not surprising to me that this game was unable to find an audience. I hope Relic moves on from Dawn of War and makes another shooter like Space Marine. People still talk about that game, and for good reason.
I’m going to take one last dive into Breath of the Wild before I finally admit to myself that I don’t like it and that whatever everyone else in the entire world is getting out of it just isn’t there for me. Wish me luck!
I love BotW but it definitely isn’t for everyone. I can see it being a little too freeform for people who really like the structure of traditional Zelda games, and the story isn’t particularly compelling.
Had some solid stretches of free time, and finished up Titanfall 2, AC: Brotherhood and Revelations.
Titanfall 2 single player is every bit as good as people say it is. I was very pleasantly surprised.
AC binge was due to looking at my backlog and saying “What half finished games do I have that could I sprint through”. I found I liked (heresy?) Revelations more than Brotherhood, playing them back to back. Istanbul is just too wonderful, and the open world pacing was just better.
Not as much free time now, but I’m playing Into the Breach, and Marvel Puzzle Quest when I get a break. Into the Breach is really good, but matching gems for no good reason is pretty satisfying when my brain is tired.
No Man’s Sky its been pretty fun so far I just love going around and photographing stuff.
I have been messing with Fortnite PS4 on and off for a couple weeks now
Jeeze-o-peets that game is unfriendly. And it baffles me when people say “oh I played fortnite and it seems way more polished than pubg”
I would like this game a lot more if:
Epic did something to stop people from bunny hopping all the time. I understand it has the Counter-Strike system where bunny hopping will slow you down, SUPPOSEDLY, but people still do it CONSTANTLY with what appears to be no penalty and it sucks. I feel like I need to be bunny hopping in order to be successful, and I don’t want to be.
They got rid of building. I know, I know, “Then just play PUBG.” But seriously, the building stuff in Fortnite BR sucks tremendous ass. The only way to be remotely competent at the game is to memorize a string of a dozen or so button presses and practice executing them as quickly as possible so you can build a dumb fuckin wizard tower in less than a second. It’s like the video game version of those jarheads who can disassemble and reassemble an assault rifle in 2 seconds. The skill gap between those sorts of people and me is astronomical and the only way to beat that is to grit your teeth and bow to the system.
The F2P reward system was even just slightly more generous. You are ranked based on tiers in Fortnite. To move to the next tier, you have to complete a set of challenges, some of which are genuinely difficult, like winning a solo match. Paid premium players get bonus goodies every time they ascend to the next tier. Freebie players only get bonus goodies on every 4th tier. What this means is that if you are f2p in Fortnite, even if you play every day, it could be weeks or maybe even months before your next reward. It is OFFENSIVELY shrewd.
Despite this, despite basically feeling like I hate Fortnite, I still keep coming back to it. Which I’m also starting to hate. Yet I keep doing it.
Just finished the last episode of Telltale’s Batman : Enemy Within.
I have to say this is the most interested I’ve been in a Batman story in like a decade. I am shocked that the Joker is actually a fascinating character. I’m trying to decide if Enemy Within is better than Wolf Among Us which would place it at #3 under Tales from the Borderlands and Walking Dead S01 on my “Best Telltale Game” list.
Finished up Dragon’s Dogma the other day, and that was a pretty cool way to end a very very fun game. Bitterblack Isle had been a really fun mega-dungeon, but the end boss of that pulled some serious bullshit moves on me that instead of making me excited to learn how to counter them i just felt tired, so I bailed and wrapped up the main game. Usually I am a bit of a completionist, but skipping that particular boss felt like the right call. I did not expect to put 90 hours into that game in just under a month but it was a ton of fun and I’m glad I played it.
I also started new characters in Dark Souls 2:SOTFS and Bloodborne, to try out some builds I haven’t done before (power stance in DS2, Bloodtinge in BB) and that has been fun. It’s a bit hard to go back to DS2’s wonky stat setup and janky, unresponsive animations after playing so much Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3, but DS2 still has a lot of weird unique levels and ideas, so it has still been pretty fun, if a bit more frustrating than when I first played it.
I have also started playing Rain World, and wow that is a hell of a game. I want to play more of it before I really write down my thoughts, but the way it simulates ecology with your position toward the middle-bottom of the food chain is really incredible. Unbelievable music and atmosphere too. I sort of get why this game didn’t get the attention it deserves, since it is not the most friendly game to get into, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since I started playing.
Far Cry 5 - this game sucks. I wish I didn’t buy it. here are a bunch of random reasons it sucks:
It’s just absolutely non-stop chaos, with enemies of all kinds spawning in all around you pretty much always. Turn around and oops: a bear is charging from like 3 feet away. Kill it and turn around and suddenly a puma has my entire ass in its mouth. Turn around and there are fucking four bison on a hill, already aggro for some unknown reason. Also they killed the shopkeep as they spawned in. I really needed my silenced rifle, too
The parachute/wingsuit launch controls are basically broken. I’ve died so many times from accidentally trying to pull my parachute while jumping over a fuckin creek, or from the parachute prompt failing to show up and just falling to my death.
The lady’s drug area is awful - she pops in and repeats the same shit all the time, she’s got like 5 things to say. It feels thoughtlessly assembled. Also, drugged-out zombie bad guys literally just appear out of nowhere directly in front of you. It’s basically an arcade game. All the animals behave the same way: they just charge you. In the drug region, an animal will sometimes transform into a different animal, which is just totally fuckin pointless because they are all completely interchangeable so it’s never like “oh fuck it’s a wolf now!!” None of the drug stuff is provocative, surprising, or in the least bit interesting. It’s just flat-out annoying and a complete nuisance.
The kidnap/proselytize sequences are juuuuuuuuust awful. They have absolutely nothing interesting to say. It’s just the same trite, regurgitated cult bullshit we’ve heard in media for decades. “he wants to save us! will you let him? I was no one and no i am someone! we are all happy here!” ad infinitum. The annoying characters are supposed to be funny but god damn they are just annoying and god DAMN do they talk for a LONG time. The Tweak character (come on, really??? fucking TWEAK??) is horrible. yo Ubisoft dont ever write mission gatekeepers like Tweak again. I have tried to walk away from this idiot but the game actually forces me to let him finish talking about how pigs are stupid before i’m finally given the mission “go here”. Just shut the fuck up Tweak. If I was the protagonist, I would say, “Tweak, just shut the fuck up.” Silent protagonists are enablers. There, I said it
Using the new DLC as an opportunity to finally try out The Signal From Tölva.
I’m enjoying it so far – it’s a little light on gameplay variety, but it’s an interesting sci-fi world to roam around in. At times it feels a bit like a Far Cry game, if Far Cry were 1000x more chill and subtle and full of robots. Interested to see where it goes from here, and what the new expansion is all about.
Playing Minit, and boy is it a bunch of fun. It has that Super Meat Boy / Hotline Miami way of keeping you playing purely on the basis of how fluid it is, but it mixes in all these micro elements of an adventure game, sort of like (I’ve heard) One Minute Hero did with RPGs. I’m not that deep into it, but so far it’s a blast (and an ideal game to play on the Switch when the port comes out).
Red Faction Guerilla: because fuck fascists, also the Geomod2 engine features the finest simulation in gaming of smashing security structures into shards, a satisfying sport for our times.
I’m finally getting around to giving Orcs Must Die: Unchained another shot. I’m having fun overall, but there are some real rough edges. It seems like controller support for the PC version is still incomplete (several key functions, such as “start next wave” are unmapped by default), and the recent news of layoffs at Robot Entertainment don’t fill me with hope that those issues will ever get fully resolved. But I’ll take whatever OMD I can get.
Started playing XCOM 2: War of the Chosen after seeing Austin and Rob’s streams.
It’s a really good game.
I’m really bad at it.
It’s so good! Personally for a first playthrough I would say don’t worry about save scumming because you are learning mechanics and some stuff isn’t explained well which leads to moments where you feel cheated.
I would also recommend grabbing some UI improvement mods. There’s one that adds back the ability to press F1 so you can see everything about a unit which comes in real handy when health ticks become hard to read as well as telling you things like how much crit damage a weapon can do.
Well, I’m still playing Dead Cells because the new Castle area is still destroying me every time and the blueprint loop still has me wanting to do “just one more run.” Outside of beating the new final boss I really want to reach the point of having the second level of item upgrades available. Honestly, I’ve played about 55 hours now and I can easily see myself doubling that time investment in the future, but spread out over slightly more time.
I also just picked up Volume, which I’ve wanted to play since it launched back in 2015. So far I’ve only played the first six levels, but I’m already enjoying it’s variety of stealth, as well as its look, so I’m excited to keep playing a few missions at a time in-between runs of Dead Cells.
Right now I am playing Stranger of Sword City, a jrpg dungeon crawler with some interesting ideas, such battle with unique encounters, the “Lineage Types” which often require something you must do to them show up, the ambush system (in certain spots in the map you can hide to ambush enemies which might be carrying some treasure), the blood crystals (defeating the Lineage type wield this blood crystals which are could be given to npcs to unlock unique abilities).
Hitting up Res Evil 4 for the first time. Loving it so far.
I haven’t heard anybody talking about this game, but my partner and I are loving it. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s from The Behemoth (makers of Alien Hominid, Castle Crashers and BattleBlock Theater). It’s a turn-based tactics game played on a hex board and—like all Behemoth games—has a strong leaning towards local co-op. Also like all Behemoth games, it has a hand-drawn art style, a healthy dose of bathroom humour, and hilarious voice acting by Will Stamper (well, I don’t think Stamper worked on Alien Hominid).
I don’t think The Behemoth get enough props for how good their games are at local co-op. Personally, that’s my favorite way to play a game—it’s the closest video games get to recreating the fun I had playing D&D as a kid. The local co-op experience is so well designed in Pit People.
Take Diablo 3, which had great moment-to-moment co-op, but was not able to carry that through to the inventory management side of the game. After every run, each of us would take our turn for five or so minutes to sort through our loot and level up. The menu for each person takes up the whole screen, so you spend a lot of time twiddling your thumbs while you wait. In contrast, Pit People does a great job of streamlining this by giving each player a half of the screen during the moments in town. By the time you’ve chosen your loadout, so has your couch buddy.
Pit People also hits that Pokemon-like, collecting endless party members feeling. Pit People has a much smaller roster (standard humans, and a dozen or so special units, like huge momma trolls that spawn furry babies, rainbow-farting, artillery-horn unicorns, and the always necessary cupcake, who heals your other units by feeding them his own frosting), but achieves a lot of variety through the inventive gear and customization. Most importantly, the names. The random name pool in Pit People is deep, and a name can’t be changed, so if you see a bandit with the name Skelontonius or a troll named Thorp McBlasto, it’s pretty enticing to try to recruit them to your squad. My personal favorites are my twin Kobolds, Tree Lawn and Chad.
Danielle was talking about her burgeoning interest in strategy and Pit People is a really great but approachable tactics game. If anybody out there is looking for solid co-op experience, or a single-player grind fest (there are so many unlockable hats), I highly recommend this.
