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.
This game rocks! The first game holds such a special place in my heart so understandably I was both excited and a little nervous to get my hands on the second. Thankfully we have a Portal 2 situation happening here. They took all of the best parts of the first game (mind-bending puzzles, thought provoking philosophical ideas, beautiful music) and expanded on it all without losing any of the core identity.
I rarely buy games upon release but gladly purchased this one to support these guys.
my “review” of it so far after 15 hours: marked as spoilers, but it’s not really a spoiler in terms of the story. I guess just don’t read if you don’t want to already know the game’s structure and difficulty (from my experience).
spoilerI’ve got 15 hours in it so far. I haven’t unlocked everything yet and maybe the story opens up more but it certainly seems like there’s less content. It’s just difficult to compare because there’s a bit more puzzle variety but also a bit more repetition. The game’s divided into chunks so that you experience a bit of puzzles then a bit of story, then you repeat it all, so it’s harder to parse for me how much of my content has been engaging with story vs how much of it was puzzles, whereas the first game was almost entirely divorced from the story. The amount of new mechanics is staggering but as I near the last two worlds I’ve been disappointed with what feels like a developer obsession with lasers. I know the lasers were a huge part of the first game’s story but they weren’t the only feature… I know mines frustrated a lot of people in the first game but honestly? I miss those. And I miss the fizzler thingies that didn’t kill you but still acted like mines. However I think with most mechanics being segregated between the 12 worlds, that opens up a lot more options when you get stuck. For example I hated recording in the first game. Took me ages to work out how it worked and I hated every bit of it, so when I got sick of it it was harder to try other things because in C world and most of B world, most puzzles had recorders. If you don’t like the gravity (“gun”?) mechanic in this you can just go to the 11 other worlds where 99% of the puzzles don’t have it. I don’t really know how to write what I think of it though because it’s so incredibly different from the first game. The story has also been vastly improved in my opinion, but I do think it would be nice to have a little less cutscenes. In general though I think this is one of the better games I’ve played in a very long time. Some people online seem to be saying that it’s “easy” compared to the first game but honestly I’ve been struggling so much with the latter puzzles. Early in the game I was spending maybe 10 minutes tops on a few puzzles but now I’m spending upwards of 30 - 45 minutes (maybe even an hour) on just one puzzle. I also am disappointed with the lack of easter eggs and unmarked secrets. (there’s no minimap but there’s a HUD with a compass that shows you were “?” locations are. I have yet to find more than a handful of interesting items that aren’t marked on the compass and aren’t part of collectible achievements). Maybe I’m just really bad at searching through them, but I remember loving how the first game was so full of secrets. You’d thought you found a way to break out of bounds but then there’s a star or a hidden QR code or pictures of cats… That’s also what made the first game so replayable. The developers didn’t bother with invisible walls or boundaries that pushed you out so you could break the puzzles in very ingenious ways. In this one I have yet to find a way to do that, sadly.
Fair criticism. It does feel more “on rails” to me, both story-wise and gameplay-wise, but at the same time the first one was a bit too broken (which made it very enjoyable but in a different way).
Yeah, I was rerunning the old game and now in the dlc part, almost done and still like all the more challenging puzzles.
Many of the terminal questions and interaction though is what make you stuck the longest. I know you can save scum if you want to see what other path from you choice, but you can also do that online by checking the wiki for example.
They don’t really have real consequences game wise, but make you still think about those questions when you lie on the bed.
Been playing Foxhole with a buddy of mine. The game is pretty cool. An mmo with a persistent war that lasts until one side takes the entire map, which is pretty large. All the guns, ammo, vehicles, respawns, etc. are player made and need to be transported to fronts. It’s a lot to take in but it’s engaging even while you’re learning.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne