This week I finished Trails in the Sky SC which was good, although I enjoyed FC’s story’s smaller scope more.
Tried playing Sea of Stars, but I felt like the writing was so bad I couldn’t play more than like 3 hours. So I started and finished Chrono Trigger over the weekend which was great and I’m surprised it exists on SNES.
Continuing with Solasta: Crown of the Magister. As far as I know, it’s based on 5e and level 1-4 were pretty boring, since you can’t do a lot. I’m currently level 7, and it’s better, although still not a lot to do with only one action and sometimes a bonus action. The story is pretty basic, but the characters aren’t very interesting. You don’t have a lot of freedom, at least where I am right now. You can move between specific points on a map, sometimes get into random encounters, and that’s it. Very light on the RP, with almost no choices during dialog, when you can even speak with an NPC at all (only those relevant to your current quest will talk to you). Some parts are also kinda clunky, but I still have a good enough time with the game.
Then I started leveling a new character in World of Warcraft. Expansion pre-patch will drop in a few days, so I’ll check that out.
Also, more Powerwash Simulator. I’m not really a fan of how the later levels are basically just made as annoying as possible, since you often need to stand in very specific spots to blast away some of the dirt, but the crappy movement and aiming really aren’t made for that.
Been playing The Ascent, a 3/4 looter shooter. Not a particularly deep story, and you are kind of a nameless nobody (so not much of a character arc), but they nail the atmosphere. Each zone has that cyberpunk dystopian feel with lots of NPCs loitering around, so the world feels alive.
The combat is kinda okay. The enemies aren’t particularly unique: the guys with guns try to maintain a distance, and the melee guys zerg rush you. Additionally, there’s a high-low aiming system that doesn’t feel good to work with, but is a necessary part of combat. You upgrade your guns via a finite currency, and as far as I can tell, each gun type acts as your “class.”
Overall, I’m having fun, and I will be playing with friends later on, but it’s not going to be for everyone. Its Mixed and Mostly Positive reviews on Steam are justified.
Tried The Ascent because of just how slick it looked in the previews I saw. And you’re right, the atmosphere is great. But I have a low tolerance for the looter shooter format and I don’t play much online coop, so I got real bored of it real fast.
I’m going forward just to see more of the environment, but I nearly gave up in the beginning for that reason. The gameplay itself is a bit stale, and it reminds me a lot of mobile games with how simple the combat and AI is. There’s also no explicit “Exit Game” option, so when playing on Steam Deck, you have to open the menu and force exit.
If not for the highly detailed environments, I’d think it was a mobile port.
Teamed up with a couple friends this week and finally finished out Diablo 4: Season 4 by taking on Tormented Duriel. I love Diablo, but it is such a relief to be able to focus on something else for a little bit.
Like Diablo 3: Season 32, lol. I am now worried about the progress I'm making. Yes, it's only been a week, but I forgot how... not good I am in working with the Necromancer's Trag'Oul set. I feel clunky and underpowered, but I don't have the full set yet, so maybe once I finished chapter 4 I'll be able to utilize it better.
Had no idea you could watch whole movies in The Darkness. I learned that when I got way too nostalgic and then invested watching To Kill A Mockingbird. Right now I'm pretty close to the end of the game, but I've been taking my sweet time combing over areas for collectibles. Even then, I'm still missing some, and they can be pretty well hidden. I'm having a lot of fun, but I am ready to pick up the sequel, if for nothing else but less stiff controls.
I just finished running Sleeping Dogs, and I’m trying to find something new (to me, not necessarily “new release”). If I don’t find anything that catches my eye, I’ll probably try Middle Earth: Shadow of War again.
Thanks for putting this together, I got to watch a decent amount on Saturday but missed pretty much all of yesterday. Skullgirls is such an awesome game it’s too bad it doesn’t get more love.
They made Aloy worse in the sequel. She literally gives away puzzles and ruins things and won’t shut up. I swear she wasn’t as bad in the first game. I lost interest quickly in the sequel.
A friend of mine was an avid online poker player. He says the AI systems beat humans all the time, and that the platforms countered with AI AI detection systems which allow for a maximum tolerance of winning hands that is considered human level. As a response, players using AI systems added deliberate error rates to hide from the detection.
If they’re worthless then, why play at all? If they are scarce, convey any kind of status on the platform or unlock anything at all, then i assure you there will be someone gaming the system.
Poker requires gambling something with at least symbolic value, or else people don’t care about winning or losing hands and just go all in recklessly all the time.
Just bought Forza Horizons 4 on Steam, which meant none of my 100+ hours of progress on the Windows Store version carried over. Apparently in those many hours I forgot how absolutely grueling the beginning of the game is.
I’m two hours in, and after basically everything I do, down to even opening the menu, I get the controls yanked away from me, and a plucky zoomer talks at me for 30 seconds about shit I absolutely don’t need explained. One of those was literally, not even joking, to explain to me how to buy items, and that adding multiple items to my cart would equal a higher total price.
It’s like they expect their players to have absolutely no agency or intuition. All I want is to boot a game up, customize a car, and chuck it around. At most I’d be fine with a quick blurb saying “here are the different types of events, here’s your home base. Now go explore.”
If you thought Forza Horizon 4 was bad, don’t even bother with NFS Unbound.
The gameplay is literally:
Be subjected to the worst soundtrack imaginable, with so much cursing even I, who is an auto mechanic in real life, was looking for a way to turn it off
Click “Play” in a safehouse, and click an item on the map
Suffer as your character makes the most cringe inducing, horrible attempts at dialogue readoffs imagineable (seriously, I hate literally every character in the game, cept the old black mechanic guy, he’s alright)
Get trapped in your car the entire drive to whatever you clicked on with the other characters in your car so they can virtue signal and talk about how evil tech corps and evil politicians are ruining the city (which is hilarious because all these characters are illegal street racers that regularly cause millions of damage in the city and multiple fatalities each race)
Then when you finally get to actually race, the physics feel like they were designed for touchscreen controls, same feeling of every NFS game since NFS 2015
All of this in the first hour.
The game is really not enjoyable. Whoever is at EA that keeps approving that physics model and forcing their virtue signalling into the game, stop it. Please. Its tone deaf, and nobody cares because it is a racing game. Racing has nothing to do with all that garbage.
The customization options aren’t even good. The only good thing about the game is the graphics and the fidelity of the sound effects. Thats it.
Yeah I only got into NFS since the 2015 entry. I have some nostalgia for that game even though it was pretty bad, but every game since has just been painful in every way except for car customization.
That’s why I love Forza Horizons. It’s got everything I want in a racing game, it just doesn’t subscribe to the idea of “show don’t tell”.
I’m actually enjoying Unbound rn, but I like rap and Latin music with explicit language. I do agree the story dialogue is trash though. Rydell is definitely the most tolerable character. I thought the Lake being named Lake Virgil was a nice memorial to Virgil Abloh.
I may be in the minority, but I kinda enjoy hearing Aloy muttering to herself throughout the game. Partly because I catch myself doing it all the time, so I don’t feel alone in the practice.
But also because I know the voice actress for Aloy (Ashly Burch) as Ash in the YouTube series, Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin’? and to this day, it’s still amazing to me to hear her speaking so deadpan seriously. I’m used to her Ash character basically being an animated, loudmouthed wildcard, not this dramatic, serious character. And I kind of enjoy knowing that Ashly has a bit of range to her acting; she’s not some kid who repeats the same YouTube personality she became famous for; she can actually act.
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