UFC 5, at least for another few days. I got all of the offline trophies in about a week (my main objective) and learned, once again, that while I can do just fine against a CPU opponent, playing against an allegedly human opponent online, I totally suck.
I’m likely going to switch back to Spider-Man 2 sooner than I expected.
Mad Max - Played for a couple days this week, taking down camps and gathering scrap, and I think I got it out of my system. For now. Metro: Last Light - Finally got around to finishing the playthrough that I started a few weeks ago, plus ran through all the DLCs. I had a lot of fun with them, except for Heavy Squad and The Tower. Haven't quite got the hang of those two yet. The Developer pack was pretty cool with the 'museum' and shooting range/arena. I liked the little challenges. Diablo 3: Season 29 - Working on the conquests for this season. Completing one will finish the Destroyer chapter for me, but it's taking a little time.
Still Pathfinder: Kingmaker, but I should be able to finish it this coming week.
It feels like I’m always complaining about the game, but it just does have a lot of issues. The gameplay (meaning combat and exploring) is still good enough for me to put up with it though.
The story kinda picks up now, a shame it only happens after I’m already 100h into the game. Even then, there are a bunch of things that don’t make sense. Some parts that your character should know about, but you can ask about it again and again at different points, as if you’re hearing it for the first time. The DLC I did after the third act was ok. The pacing for the quests continues to baffle me. After a cool 200-day gap between Act 3 and 4, now you don’t get any downtime at all. Everything is happening at once, with new notifications for events popping up constantly.
So, the game was originally just RTwP, and turn-based combat was added later via a mod, which was then officially implemented by the devs (I think). Because of this, I’ve been giving the game a pass for minor issues in combat, but this week was just bad at times. The game loves to eat parts of your turn constantly. I think it happens when you’re right at the limit between a normal move action and a double move. The game shows you’ll be able to attack, but then you’re just one pixel too far away and your attack just gets skipped. You can’t even use it for something else, like cast a spell. There are also some other small things, that wouldn’t matter by themselves, but when something small happens all the time, it starts to get annoying.
I'm still working on my second run of Baldur's Gate 3 with the Ghost Recon team in Act 3. The two big bads of the chapter before the final boss went down like chumps. For one of them, without spoilers (you know the one), I didn't even need to stop the chant, because I just had so many actions with each member of my team. I've been playing less of BG3 now though, because I already did a pretty thorough run of Act 3 the first time around, as opposed to Acts 1 and 2 where I left a lot of content behind with my first character.
I beat 30XX. It's very good. I don't think it's as good as 20XX. The upgrade system is significantly more complicated to understand for basically no discernible benefit. There was also one major problem with 20XX, which was that, as a roguelike, you could see the seams in the level generation and easily identify the same pieces of the levels way too quickly, as opposed to something like Streets of Rogue or Vagante where you could play for over a hundred hours before it feels like you've seen these exact levels too many times. 30XX did not address this problem. So in the end, it's more 20XX, but it's not better 20XX. It's a shame, because I know the developers spent a lot of time trying to make this a substantial sequel, and the art style is improved at least, but this feels like a lateral move. Play it if you liked 20XX and wanted more.
I've also been playing Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew. Similar to that 30XX review, I think this is a step back from Mimimi's predecessor games, Shadow Tactics and Desperados III. It's still great; it's just that those games did it better. I'm in Act 3 (of 3), and this game's got ideas, but only some of them seem to work, and most of them feel like they're worse than the more linear design of the other games. It's also a bummer that this is Mimimi's swan song, as the developer is dissolving after this. Play it if you liked their other games and wanted more.
I just got into act 3 of Balder’s gate and took a break because I don’t want the game to end. Instead, I have fallen back on my old favorite on the steam deck, Dave the Diver.
The great thing about Baldur's Gate coming to an end is that there's no reason you can't just start it over again with a totally different type of character and play it entirely differently. I'm coming up on finishing the game a second time.
Townscaper. I find it so soothing to play because it has no expectations of me and no people. Just lots of lovely, inoffensive buildings that sometimes take unexpected forms. It’s been fun experimenting with different configurations to see if I can find any blocks I haven’t seen yet.
I’m also chipping away at my koi collection in Zen Koi. Another game that does not expect much of me and has no people in it. The Pro edition on Play Pass doesn’t have cooldowns or microtransactions either, so I can just swim around eating things and breeding new colours of fish.
Suffice to say, there’s a theme in the games I’m enjoying right now: “humans not welcome, just let me relax”.
En Garde! Nice indie game, with a combat system simmiliar to sekiro, but very lighthearted presentation. Also started paradise killer. Definitely interesting, but not sure if it’s a game for me
Yes. The bottleneck with games consoles has basically always been how fast you can get into data into memory and optical media has become a limiting factor in the last few hardware generations. I would say games started recommending installation to reduce load times in the late 360/PS3 era and have slowly started requiring it as the latest games are targeted at systems with SSDs and no optical drive at all.
I never thought I would say that but if remote/streamed gaming is a thing and it works fast, I might consider this option. Pretty sad how the media evolved.
There is basically no other choice now as optical drive speeds haven’t kept up with hard drive and SSD speeds. The PS5 for example can read blu ray discs at around 35 MB/s, compared to its internal SSD speed of 7100 MB/s. Doing the math that makes reading the disc over 200 times slower. Imagine the loading screens.
I can't imagine there's any way to make optical drives that much faster. The spin rate is already very high and the media size has been standardized. (You'd get a lot more data throughput with a laserdisc-sized drive spinning at the same speed as a CD/DVD.)
Optical drives were a major bottleneck in every gaming system that used them. They were convenient because they offered a lot of data storage for cheap, but the trade off was that games performed worse than they could. The fact that consoles have moved off of optical storage and onto fast internal storage is a boon to people that care about performance. That may be a sad situation for you, but a lot of people find it to be a good thing.
I once installed a 540MB hard drive in my 486/33, dumped the Wing Commander Privateer CD onto it, and was amazed at how fast it ran, the lack of loading wait, and just how much more smooth it was than my 4x speed CDROM. It was great for a few days until I needed the space (I didn’t buy it just for gaming).
Old farts unite! I’m right there with you, although I think my first wing commander game was 4. I think I did something similar with Myst to escape constant “hunting” on the disc drive. The noise of the cd drive revving up and down 2ft from my head is seared into my brain.
Good news: steamlink can stream your pc games to your tv and you can play with a ds4 or xbox controller. It’s the more environmentally friendly way anyway and it works well.
I don’t mind downloading stuff (ie from steam) on PC as this device is multitasking but for a gaming console aka “appliance”, I expect a plug n play approach. and when i speak about streaming, I mean, plug n play, no downloading time and minimized loading (between 5 to 10sec max).
spoiler for the base gameThe sun station. After way too much time figuring out how to get there, the music, and the story stuff to read there? Such a good moment.
spoilerIt’s a shocking revelation when you discover the sun station doesn’t even do anything, when up to that point you might think to yourself that it’s the sun station that causes the supernova.
I enjoyed the first game very much but never finished it because I was distracted by some other shiny object. How much does 2 spoil the first game’s plot?
In the first moments of the game they give you a full summary of the plot of the first game. If you want to play the first game for the story I recommend you hold out on this one until afterwards.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne