I built a pc tower for the first time since '01 or '02, and the first game i played was Cyberpunk 2077. A lovely game with some genuinley great characters. I really love Judy.
But that doesn’t hold a candle to Deus Ex, which i completed for the first time. What a great title. I must have played the first and part of the second level when it first came out, but the story was new to me.
Also shout out to Drova, a really fun game with tons of nods to the Gothic series. Difficult, but not punishing.
Cruelty Squad was so different. Looks like vaporware created in Duke3d engine, but plays like a modern shooter (kinda).
Cruelty squad lives rent free in my head it is such a weird trip and surprisingly deep in the end. I like this odd “make a high effort to make it look low effort aesthetic”.
If @blomvik hadn’t already sold me on Cruelty Squad, you certainly have now. In terms of vibes, it sounds right up my alley.
And I do love a bonkers community. I find that when I get into a piece of media (whether that be a game, TV series or something else), I really enjoy participating in what I call “fandom tourism”. I enjoy dipping my toe into the community after I’ve engaged with the media itself, and it feels like bonus content. I don’t tend to stick around in any fandoms, so that means that even if a community is bonkers in a bad way (e.g. lots of drama), I even sort of enjoy being able to understand and spectate those dynamics, as a quasi-outsider
I’ve never heard of Drova or Cruelty Squad, so thanks for the recommendations. This thread has given me so many interesting games to check out, thanks for replying
Expedition 33, The game came out on my birthday. I never had the time to get around to playing it. I just downloaded it on PlayStation for their black Friday sale. I am currently only six hours into the game, but I fully get behind the hype and the enjoyment of this game. It does have a high level of skill when it comes to combat but slowly, but surely I’m getting it down and I am enjoying it so far.
Despite the high skill level required, I actually found that it was quite forgiving for people who were learning. I barely did any parrying until I was well into Act 3, for example. I like the way that the feedback for dodges work — I started trying to parry more when I realised that I was consistently getting perfect dodges, which meant that if I had parried, it would have been successful.
I also like the way the difficulty works in the open world. It reminds me of games like Fallout: New Vegas, where the enemies aren’t scaled to player level, so you can be dumb/brave and wade into encounters that are way beyond your power level. Sometimes that works out surprisingly well, but often you try fighting a difficult enemy and get pwned so thoroughly that you accept that you’ll have to come back later. In Expedition 33 especially, it is super viable to just go and explore elsewhere and come back with more levels, better weapons and better pictos. The beautiful world also means that exploring is fun even without the mechanical perks.
I personally think that interacting with anything related to Harry Potter continues to give it cultural dominance and longevity, so even if you aren’t personally spending money to support the giant piece of shit that is JK Rowling, you’re helping it stay relevant enough to keep making that bigot of a bitch money.
It can also be argued that since Epic made a deal for giving the game away, that the money has already been paid to Rowling, whether you grab the game for free or not. The fewer people who grab the free copy, the less wise of an investment it will be seen as by Epic’s beancounters. This also ties back into the first point of the more people taking the free copy is giving Harry Potter more cultural dominance and longevity.
I pirated this game when it came out specifically I could play it and write about how bad it was in terms of gameplay, story, and game design. I don’t feel like re-writing a full on review here, but I’ll just say it: It’s a bad fucking game and the only reason people have given it as much attention as it has gotten is the association with Harry Potter. If this had been an original property with no connection to the HP series with similar gameplay and story it would have been a clusterfuck of a failure on release.
Anyway I’ll shut up now but fuck Harry Potter, the only thing Harry Potter related I’ll accept anymore is Wizard People, Dear Reader, because it’s a parody.
Re: 3, unfortunately, pirating the game won’t let you avoid supporting transphobic lunatics. The person who cracked the game is even worse than Rowling - as in, “makes Rowling look like a paragon of progressiveness in comparison” worse - and uses the download numbers for her cracks (and the fact she’s usually the only one willing to crack Denuvo) to justify asking for donations.
That’s a fair take. I deleted it promptly after playing, but anyone who is willing to fund empress’s insanity is a fool anyway. Yet, sadly, a whole lot of fools out there.
How’s the action? It looked like you can launch people in the trailer and perform some kind of air combo. I doubt it leads to anything truly fun, but I’m curious.
You can, and I find it fun. Some other reviewers don’t like it, and it can be clunky, but it is still fun for me to levitate someone and then slam them into a wall.
Emulation seems neat to me, but I know behind every comment on it there’s a whispered implication: Piracy. Very few people are imaging their own game discs. That unfortunately makes it less appealing to me, especially as trustworthiness shifts at many of those sites.
Most of those games are no longer being sold outside secondary markets (used games, collectibles, that sort). Neither the publisher nor the developers will ever profit from a “legitimate” sale.
For other games that are still being sold on first-party marketplaces, which is more or less limited to Switch 1 games, you tell me why Nintendo deserves to be treated charitably.
I mean, if you can find and afford the games, yeah, buy them. Problem is most of the games people need to emulate are unavailable or astronomically expensive, and that’s even if you live in the west/Japan… if you live in the rest of the world, forget it.
Yup, Nintendo in particular has a bad habit of just sitting on a bunch of old games, keeping them unavailable on modern system despite the fact that there’s clearly a market for it. And occasionally they’ll reach into their great big bag of classics, pull something out and say “we’ve done the bare minimum so you can run this on our current gen system (Switch), that will be 50 dollars for a 20 year old game”.
Depending on the system it can be really easy to dump/rip your own discs. Hacking a Wii for homebrew requires jumping through a few hoops but then you can dump Wii, GameCube, and even Gameboy games. You can dump WiiU games by inserting an SD card and going to a single web page in the browser!
Did you ever play them back in the day? I emulated old games for years before I realized how much some of them were designed to be viewed on a CRT. CRT shaders have gotten to be pretty good these days, and it does a lot for the experience for me.
I played mostly Rocket League (again, 10 consecutive wins for time played lol).
But my computer was down done Christmas Eve last year and just got out working again on Halloween. So most of my games this year were solely on the Deck. So the Deck gets an MVP award for being there when I needed it.
That said, the only game I own that doesn’t really work on the Deck is Helldivers 2.
I cannot drop down and play literally anything in 30fps. I already have to deal with the 60Hz screen on the Deck, I cannot use anything less (that hasn’t been literally designed for it- anything that can run at a higher fps should be. 60 is the absolute rock bottom I will tolerate.
Anyway, I also played a lot of Balatro, Slay the Spire, and REPO. Getting it working satisfactorily would have been impossible on some handhelds, but the grip buttons made it just enough to have access to all inventory slots, sprinting and tumbling. Had to use voice activation without an easy way to use push to talk, but that didn’t really bother me.
Tried PEAK, but it doesn’t really grab me personally. I still wanna try it on PC tho now that I have it running again, to give it a fair shake. I feel really off balance trying controllers with games meant to be kb/m. Repo felt awkward but playable. And I liked the choir game design enough anyway. But playing Peak while being awkward didn’t feel as rewarding. But I wanna give it a go with kb/m.
I played some Hades as well. Still haven’t beaten it yet (I’ve only gotten to the Hades fight twice). That game I actually like better on the Deck or on controller better. Which is kinda what I expected, but it definitely belongs on a controller.
I played through It Takes Two, which was beautiful. Haven’t finished Split Fiction yet because my brother keeps being unavailable. I try to tell him to “come be a lesbian with me”. Haven’t quite finished it yet, but there’s no way those 2 don’t hook up, right?
Didn’t play a lot of anything else, haven’t gotten back to work after my last couple years of surgeries so my budget was basically zero.(Supplemented by Steam gifties from real ones) Soon to change this coming year I hope, but given my disability, the depression of being stuck for medical reasons back in a house I had escaped from, the general everything, being poor, and not even having access to my main platform to game on at all, I think I did ok.
If you’ll pardon me I gotta go grind some more Rocket League.
Dispatch - I’ve been having a blast playing this. It’s my first time playing a game thats more of an interactive TV show but I love the writing and the characters.
I’ve been trying to get into a bunch of games this year but I keep losing motivation super quickly. The only other game I’ve managed to finish is Pico Park 2 in coop.
Haven’t played Silksong yet, but its release did get me to play Hollow Knight which had been sitting in my library forever.
I’ve gotten partway through Expedition 33, but decided to take a break after spending ~20 hours on act 1 alone (speaking of, I think it’s about time to get back on that soon).
As much as I like single player games, I imagine the most significant amount of my time by far has probably been spent on multiplayer games like cod
I don’t wanna hype you up too much - but I’d been looking forward to playing Silksong almost since it was announced and had very high expectations, and it did not disappoint!
Abiotic Factor, has been a pearl. Survival in a 90’s science center complex in the middle of Australia. Good mechanics once you get past the water hump. The story has the right amounts of dread and humor, and the stakes /difficulty / rewards ramp up just right for me.
Oh and still playing noita… Finally cleared it this year
I’ve played Abiotic twice and have enjoyed it, but both times I’ve stopping before finishing it. I’ve been playing solo and know that playing with friends is a much better experience but sadly none of my friends want to buy it. Would you say it’s worth finishing? I’ve gotten to third third lab area
I left gaming. That’s the highlight. I’m yearning to get back tho. But my laptop is kinda struggling to play games so yeah I might be away from them for a long time ig.
Drag would like Arkham Origins please and thank you. Drag already played Knight and is curious if the rest of the series is good. It’s one of the few games drag 100%ed
There were many but the one I wanna mention is Dredge - a horror fishing game that is creepy fun. Wasn’t on my radar but popped up on gamepass and I love it.
I‘ve sorted my library by release date, and there are five games which have released this year in it that aren‘t just remastered or early access which finally hit 1.0. Of those five I‘ve played three. Also of those five, three are indie games.
Monster Hunter Wilds
Poorly received across „enthusiasts“ as too easy of a MH game. I personally liked it a lot. The wounds mechanic is fun, focus mode is good but too much, performance is absolutely horrendous. One of the things I’ve always hated with MH are those stiff ass animations that made you miss combos by a cm, focus mode helps with that but now you can just 180 during a swing which is overkill IMO. I miss tracking monsters - which made me feel more like I‘m actually hunting game - as well as wallbanging them. The current mounting feels less interesting overall. 150 hrs played and they were a lot of fun with friends.
PEAK
Probably my GOTY (cause I didn‘t play much from this year anyway, see above lol). There‘s only one thing that bums me out: The game should have DLSS/FSR cause it‘s really heavy God knows why and the internal upscaler is meh. Otherwise, the most fun I had in a multiplayer game in a long time. Did ascension 7, unlocked all the stuff, gobble up every update, great fun with friends (also if solo but less so). 110 hrs, amazing game for less than ten bucks. Fuck those sencient tornados.
Mario Kart World
Idk, as the successor to MK8 it‘s kinda mid in comparisson. The feeling of speed, the racing flow, they‘re kinda missing. Lots of uninteresting filler tracks. Idk why this had to be an open world game. Some of its soul died for that. I got gold on all the cups but haven‘t touched it since. Pro tip: If you have trouble at max diff, stop drifting. The game ups the difficulty (read: rubberbanding) PER DRIFT, and it stacks up across the whole cup!
bin.pol.social
Aktywne