Gaming

I played a bit more Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice ahead of the sequel in a few months. There are a few major components to the game's core loop, and the one I'm not thrilled with is its hidden object puzzles, but the rest of it is working for me.

When I've got some podcasts to get through, Palworld has proven to be a great second screen game. There are some things I'd like to see them tweak about the progression, but they're very small complaints thus far. Ultimately, this game is working for me in a way that Pokemon hasn't in about 20 years.

I thought I would take a break from Pillars of Eternity after finishing the first game, because it did become quite exhausting late in the game, but after a discussion with some friends, I ended up excited to jump right into Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire, and so far, it's answering nearly all of my issues with the first game. For one, more quests can be resolved by being clever and avoiding combat, plus when the combat does happen, it's far more readable. As a blessing from the gods themselves, the quest log also lets you know if a quest is too high level for you, so you know which content is intended for your current level without checking it out early and dying to an enemy mob in a few seconds.

Ahead of Combo Breaker, I'm also back on the Skullgirls grind. My Black Dahlia mix and setplay are weak, and I'm giving my opponents too many opportunities to take their turn back, so I need to tighten that up.

This week I have discovered the joys of Slime Rancher. There is something about an adorable slime with a face bouncing past me going "whee!" that makes life worth living. They're just so happy. Except when they're scared of something. I don't like it when they're scared, and this must be prevented at all costs.

Alan Wake 2 is an amazing game, I'm glad you're enjoying it. There's nothing that I've played from Remedy that hasn't been great.

I finally finished Vampyr, and I actually managed to get an ending that I hadn't before, so that was pretty nice.

Diablo 4: Season 3 - Nightmare dungeons/vaults for days. But I'm on the verge of getting sick of it, so I'm going to take a little step back and switch my focus back to D3 (which I've been neglecting) for a few days.

My next game outside of Diablo is going to be the Dead Space remake. I've put it off long enough, and I'm ready to visit the Ishimura again.

More RDR2 this week, still haven't finished Chapter 2 as there is just an unbelievable amount of stuff to be distracted by. Apart from further fiddling with some mods I've just been enjoying my time hunting and fishing and completing challenges, events and side missions.

I might need to lay off the pursuit of the challenges as they seem extremely grindy and I don't want to burn out before I finish the story, but so far it's not started to wear me down and I've been enjoying just playing poker with the boys and whatnot.

My last game was exhausting. Years of cryptic lore, mediocre tie-in properties we pretended were good, pvp you could opt out of midstream by switching off your router, a sandbox that one player characterized as "as wide as the universe and one inch deep."

So, I thought I'd try something completely different, and that different thing, god help me, is Evony.

Slay the Princess, it is a pretty awesome game and Lies of P which just got cracked,I pirated it out of spite cause I felt betrayed when they added denuvo just before release (I don't buy denuvo games)

I beat Final Fantasy 2. It's good, definitely one of the better JRPG stories for me, although some parts could definitely be improved if they were a bit more fleshed out. The main characters are really lame, but the supporting cast makes up for it somewhat. The magic system is pretty bad, since there are a gazillion different spells, most of them useless, but even if you wanted to use them, you'd have to level up each one separately for every character. Even the auto battle can't really save that.

Then Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor made it to Early Access, but right now it's pretty disappointing. I've done a dozen or so runs, but all four classes feel just really weak, even on the lowest difficulty. There is some meta progression, but they improve your character so little, and get really expensive, really quickly, that I don't think it'll make that much of a difference. I'll give it some a bit more time, maybe unlock a few more things, since I like the DRG Theme, but will probably shelve it soon and go back to Soulstone Survivors, Vampire Survivors or the dozen other games like this I haven't played yet.

Next, after like a 10-month break, I'm back to Stranger of Paradise Final Fantasy Origin. Playing through FF1 really made me play this again. Back when it was released on Steam, I made it through the base game and started on the first DLC, but the then new Bahamut difficulty was a bit too much for me at the time. By that point you can't just overpower everything with better gear anymore, but need to pay attention to your build and stats. I still need to wrap my head around things more, although it kinda sucks, since there are very little guides on the internet to help with that. Most information is for the endgame on the highest difficulty, which doesn't help me that much. There is a kind of "easy mode" called Extra Mode, which (in combination with certain gear that you get) will make you basically permanently invincible, and everyone and their mom recommends to just use that to get to the endgame (where the real game begins hurr durr). I don't want to do that, so I have to crawl through Discord channels, which really sucks, so I can get the basics.

I also tried Helldivers 2, but it's kinda unplayable on Steam, unless you have a group of friends to make a private lobby with, or are willing to manually add random people to your friends list, both of which is a no for me dawg. Matchmaking in this game is broken and doesn't work, if you can even make it into the game. I have no idea how this isn't talked about more, considering other games get clowned on for far less. I'll give it a more few days, but I'm not very hopeful, since it's already been over a week, and will probably refund it.

@chloyster I've been playing Last Epoch... far too much... definitely, absolutely too much of Last Epoch - please send help! 😆

Recently finished my very first play through of all 3 Mass Effect (Legendary Edition) games. Started Mass Effect: Andromeda, but for some reason it triggers horrible motion sickness after 30 minutes of playing. As in, "I need to have a barf bucket nearly, and then lie down for the rest of the day" kind of bad.

Jumped into the newest patch and expedition of No Man's Sky. Always good fun but after finishing the tasks of the expedition I always get bored very quickly. :D

In Baldur's Gate 3 I'm stuck in a fight against a boss in act 3, always getting absolutely smashed even though I'm highest level and have (I think) decent equipment and spells. Haven't found any guide that explains a way to deal with the fight in the intended way, everyone just says to cheese the fight which I'd like to honestly avoid. :/

Tetris for GB. Kirby's dreamland 1 got GB

Main problem and tying preventing pokemon is my emuaktor not supporting any form of savinf

first skyrim run in like a decade, really makes it obvious how technically shitty the game is. so many immersion-ruining moments all the time, like people talking over each other. also the world map screen might be the most ugly and least useful of its kind. if i was on pc i’d install the mod that displays roads on the map.

but the atmosphere is nice :)

I decided to just randomly try Overwatch again.

So many changes since I last played.

It really does seem like they're just throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks.

Zero direction. Benefit of that? Pure chaos. As a Junk main (when I DPS, which isn't as often as it used to be), the lack of direction and wildly inconsistent game design speaks to me on an emotional level.

As usual, it's more enjoyable when you don't take it even remotely seriously and just fuck around. Turns out you can ironically accomplish more when you're not putting yourself and/or everyone else under pressure. Gives you incentive to experiment and pull off some weirdly effective shit that usually only works once, but still feels great anyway.

Win? Laugh. Lose? Laugh. It's not that serious.

I'll get sick of it soon and the toxicity will rear its head at some point, but right now I'm enjoying it for what it is, even if the game is an absolute shell of what it used to be.

Edit: Lol, already got sick of it again, so ditching that now.

Still grinding away at Legend of Zelda for NES. First few dungeons lulled me into a false sense of security, because, damn, some of the later ones have hands.