I tried a couple of demos from Steam Next fest. Without writing up an essay:
Aden: Quirky game with reasonably difficult combat (when played in hard), cool music, and a story I ended up being surprisingly interested in. I was in it for the unique aesthetics and vibes and ended up being invested in whatever was happening.
Until Then: Lovely little visual novel set in the Phillipines (which I love, as most games centered around Asian culture tend to be Japanese or Chinese focused). The dialogue is fun, the pixel art presentation is incredibly good and even has some beautiful animated scenes, and there's enough intrigue and curiosity that really piques my interest in terms of the setting. It's modern day, set about a decade ago, but with a twist of paranormal worldwide happenings in an otherwise normal world.
I’ve been really enjoying racing in Automobilista 2 with several friends recently. A bunch of us went from using a controller to having a wheel and often a wheel stand in a short period of time, because we all got so into it.
I think there is a lot going for AMS2 (as it is commonly abbreviated): lots of variety in the cars and tracks, it is easy to set up casual races with friends, it is very dynamic (like in varying track and weather conditions), works well with a controller or a wheel, looks good and performs well, etc.
SNES Street Fighter had some impossible moves. OK, most of them were extremely challenging, because they tried to emulate joystick moves with thumb buttons.
I did, I played all the borderlands until the third (which I just couldn’t put up with) multiple times and he just annoyed the piss out of me constantly xD
I agree, but I do think that is kind of the point with him.
I do not get every other character’s willingness to overlook it and treat him like just another quirky member of the gang. I mean, Tanisha has no social skills but she’s at least clever and has some clear utility to the Raiders.
Just started up Cyberpunk 2077, which I’m really enjoying so far! I’m playing it on Steam Deck, so some of the UI elements are really teeny-tiny, which is probably my biggest complaint.
I finally finished Pillars of Eternity. I've got lots of criticisms for it, but mostly I really enjoyed it. I do wish there was less combat and that there were more opportunities to talk your way out of combat, for instance. The combat is very good, but there's so much of it that you can easily get decision fatigue. I'm going to take a slight break from Pillars of Eternity before I start the sequel.
So I moved on to replaying Planescape: Torment instead. I last played it about 12 years ago, and there's a good amount of it I've forgotten since then, but at the time I felt it was the best writing I'd seen in games to date. As poorly aged as it was then, even on the enhanced edition now, it's perhaps aged even worse now, so I'm not sure if I'll finish replaying it this time, but we'll see. At least it's not particularly long.
My friends and I are continuing our co-op playthrough of Quake II since we don't live in a timeline where we've got a plethora of modern FPS games to play instead; not the traditional campaign variety, at the very least. The indie scene is mostly replicating Doom/Quake 1 sorts of games, and Quake II is surprisingly much more modern in its design...at least when you use the compass built in to the remaster.
EDIT: Changed my mind. Moved on to Pillars 2. There are already a lot of great improvements.
I had to start Pillars 1 multiple times until it clicked for me and I was able to finish it. It’s a good foundation that Pillars 2 very much improved on. A feature in 2 I absolutely love and wish more party-based games would include is the (albeit rudimentary) editor for the party behavior.
I often struggle controlling multiple units at once so that editor was a godsend for me! Too bad it’s the only game I can think of that has something like this. :(
It exists in at least the enhanced editions of Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, and I'm told the first Dragon Age had this too. Though to be honest, even with the ability to script AI behavior, I'll likely end up just setting tons of conditions for auto-pausing like I usually do in RTWP games so that I can decide what to do for each character whenever some condition in the battle changes.
I know the Enhanced Editions of BG1 and 2 allow you to choose from different scripts and there’s a few On/Off buttons, but nothing like the PoE editor where you could do things like “If 3 enemies stand around you, use this spell” or “If enemy is threatening an ally, use this ability on ally, but only if $resource is higher than x and only once every 30 seconds.”
I gave some attention to World of Warcraft Classic - Season of Discovery. It is certainly enjoyable to have a lively world with plenty of people interacting everywhere, but the nuts and bolts of Vanilla are largely the same. The slow leveling, the 1-hour cooldown for my Hearthstone (the item that takes me back to the Innkeeper I set), the fact that I must be physically at the dungeon location to enter an instance, and the demands for being highly social for a bunch of basic stuff feel exhausting. A lot of time I need people for group quests and runes, and the mere thought of talking to strangers is discouraging. I realized that, while I enjoy social interaction, that is not necessarily true for the majority of my playtime. Classic Wrath always feels like a good compromise for me – it is still Classic and the open world is still relevant, but it has a lot of QOL that makes it manageable for me. The Hearthstone cooldown is 30 minutes, I get my first mount at level 20 instead of 40, and the Random Dungeon Finder puts me in an instance automatically. Granted, there’s not a lot of people on Wrath right now, but I still enjoy leveling my character, leveling mining, getting ready for Cataclysm, and making money on the auction house. I found a nice wholesome guild, but it seems that most people are just playing SoD.
Short, but fun. Sometimes a little frustrating, but I’ve played too many games recently which either take themselves too seriously or randomly try to hit “poignant” emotional beats.
This is just straight up swashbuckling cartoony fun that I totally need right now.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne