Found all the collectables and filled out the ability tree in Control! I'm a little sad to put this game away, but there's not much more I can do in it. I could try maxing out the weapon mods, but there really is no reason to do so, so I'm moving on.
I was holding off on restarting Alan Wake 2 until after the Thanksgiving holiday, so I've been back at it again with Subnautica. I've got three bases so far, and now I'm working on building out a bunch of ion batteries and power cells for my equipment and Cyclops sub. I really wish you could get the ion stuff earlier in the game, since it's fairly close to the end, but I'm going to see what more I can do before finishing this out.
We’re reaching the end of the current season of THE FINALS, so I’ve been grinding for the last seasonal reward skin tier.
I’ve been kind of down on myself for getting sucked in to the seasonal cycle of modern FPS games and letting my single player stuff lay neglected, but the finals is such a phenomenal shooter I can’t help myself. I alternate between wanting more people to play and experience it because of how good it is, to being happy it’s small and not inundated with people. While the community can be a bit toxic, I get matched with a lot more just generally chill people than not, and more people on mic communicating about the game than I can remember in a really long time.
I need to get around to finishing bg3, and cp2077 now that I have a new gpu.
I got psychonauts on a steam sale a few years ago and still need to get around to it also, thanks for the reminder.
Hogwarts Legacy, RDR2, Elite Dangerous, Sea of Thieves, and Spider-man.
Grabbed Hogwarts on sale, and damn I don’t get where all the (non-political) hate came from. It’s pretty solid, as far as open world adventure games go. I’m not even an HP fan, but it’s a blast.
What, and I can’t state this clearly enough, the FUCK did I just play?
I wasn’t prepared to have the history of punching explained to me on Mars in a frog platformer.
Playing Another Crab’s Treasure - a Soulslike with a humorous tone. I had the game on Xbox, but abandoned that and replaying on Steam. I think having a calmer, more analytical mood to the difficulty is helping me make progress faster.
There’s a region where you need to stick to the path lest you awaken a gigantic and threatening enemy bearing an instant-kill attack. I just returned to that area and killed it.
TYRANNY! It’s an RPG from Obsidian that shares the Pillars of Eternity engine, very cool premise and story, main campaign is short so it shouldn’t keep you occupied long, unless you decide to replay of course, the storyline changes A LOT depending on your actions (and even upon choices you make before even playing), so replayability is very high.
It’s a little janky, and the blocky aesthetic may or may not be your thing, but it handles the idea of detective work better than any other game I’ve ever played. It’s not just “Walk around in detective vision until you assemble enough clues for the character to tell you the solution.” You have to actually think about things, examine the evidence, assemble a theory of the crime. Which is doubly impressive given that every crime is procedurally generated.
I’ve had that one in my library since it originally came out and I’ve been wanting to play it ever since, but haven’t found time. I understand they’ve added quite a bit since the early days!
I have been thinking about some old survival game that I used to play that doesn’t exist anymore recently, maybe it’s time I give The Long Dark some real playtime!
I want to take a second to tell a story though, about the graphics in this game. I hope to explain why this game actually has the best graphics ever.
Context for some folks: the game is entirely rendered using ASCII characters (for the purpose of this story. I know, I’m leaving out detail, it’s okay). So the goblins in Dwarf Fortress look roughly like this
g
A dog looks like this
d
And a dragon looks like this
D
Learning to play Dwarf Fortress can be tough at first because there’s a soup of letters and other typing characters on the screen and your brain needs to convert that into a scene that makes sense. But here’s the thing … eventually that’s exactly what your brain does! You stop seeing the semicolons and hyphens, the letters and the strange formatting characters like “╥”. You start to see rivers and grass, tiny people working hard, a bustling metropolis, an invading horde.
And the creator of this game hasn’t simply cut corners on making the game look good by using ASCII tilesets. The grass (made of commas or single quotes) sways in the breeze. Running water shimmers. Cherry trees gently rain cherry blossom petals during certain seasons. There’s actually a ton of little details there for your brain to pick up and immediately upscale into high def for you. It’s delightful. And sometimes terrifying.
Sometimes something new will happen. A creature you’ve never seen before will approach your little community. It will be represented by some letter and your brain will render that for you in the way it has been taught to do. Your eyes see a d and you see a dog. Your eyes see a D and you see a dragon. It’s bigger than a dog. Most things are, no big deal. But you’ve been deceived.
You watch as a band of dwarfs approach the dragon. The creature is quite still, right next to the round trunk of a tree that looks like this O. The brave warriors are still far from the creature. You’ve built whole dinning halls, with wooden chairs and stone mugs and carvings decorating the walls, that could fit within the space separating the warriors from the capital D dragon. One canny dwarf let’s loose an arrow at the beast. It zips through the air like this -
As it approaches the Dragon, which is surely just to Iike a dog but a bit larger and green right, time begins the slow. It ticks. And ticks. And hell is unleashed. Flames jet from the Dragon. Unending flames pouring like red ink in billows that quickly fill the vast space and enrobe the dwarven warriors in a superheated death that pushes in and flows past and even through the band until flickering flames fill virtually all space to one side of a capital D that you will never, ever, mistake the size of again.
My scalp tingled and it felt like my skull was over heating when my brain spontaneously supplied all the extra graphical details for that particular scene. I’ll never forget it.
Can you share screenshots of what you’re describing? It’s send awesome and I’m very curious about it, but I can’t find anything similar on search engines.
Took me ages to find anything, but here’s a dragon encounter in adventure mode. It’s a bit slow because it’s turn based, but at least it has dragon fire in it, albeit not as great as described above:
The video above has the ASCII style graphics I was talking about. This video shows a dragon attack using a different tileset. (This video begins with some loud music).
You can see in this one how the flames billow and spread.
So you’ll have to imagine what the combination is like. You’re already in a headspace where your brain is filling in details not supplied by the ASCII and then the world just explode into flames.
These other tilesets have their advantages. But I’ll never give up the text-based rendering of the world - I’ve had too many great experiences to give that up.
My understanding is that the steam version released with no ASCII tileset, but there is one now after an update. I bought the steam version but haven’t played it much at all, so I haven’t confirmed this myself.
Yup, you can play the ‘post steam’ version via steam or free download and get the ASCII characters, however you are still forced to use the mouse to play it, which doesn’t work for me, so I stick with the old 47 release and just play that forever I guess!
Yep. In addition, there is now a free build of version 50.xx on the official website, which uses the same code as the Steam version, but does not include the tileset and the soundtrack.
I tried that free build on the weekend (because I didn’t want to bother with installing Steam on my ARM64 laptop), and it still looks as amazing as always. Now I just need to learn the keybindings for the Steam version - because using a mouse with ASCII graphics feels just wrong 😉.
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Aktywne