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.
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.
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 had a similar experience of first finishing the DLC and then going into God of War (2018). While not open world, it’s the same type of AAA soup you get from most big studios. There are so many baffling design decisions, I cannot fathom why people love the game so much - the constant barrage of stories and small talk is the most engaging thing in there.
The combat is utterly boring. Increasing the difficulty only results in spongy enemies. Their move sets are boring at best and annoying at worst. They are all but helpless if you just keep them at a distance and throw your axe.
Even worse, your godly powers are cutscene only. If you don’t want to make your game challanging, at least make a fun power fantasy and Kratos is perfect for that. He kills giant enemies, tears the very ground asunder and moves the heaviest objects imaginable. He even has super healing. None of which are tied to actual combat mechanics.
Upgrades are meaningless. Early on, you unlock a smith. I got my axe from 5 to 40 damage. Guess what? The very next enemy took the same amount of hits as the same type of enemy did before.
Traversing is mechanically boring. Climbing just means you gotta follow the yellow markings - press in the right direction or do the indicated button press. You literally cannot fall. Everything else is just walking from combat area to combat area.
The game throws an endless barrage of puzzles at you, none of which are engaging. They are so watered down, there’s barely much more thinking involved than in climbing.
Even worse, major upgrades are placed in “puzzle” chests. The puzzle? Well, just walk around and rotate your camera for several minutes until you’ve found all three runes.
The game basically just feels like a very long cutscene with a lot of padding so you can press some buttons. You can play it just fine, but they removed everything that could make any one system interesting in favor of having nothing in there a player could be stuck at. I like the characters, but I’m better served just watching a cutscene compilation for the second one.
I’ve not played Forbidden West, but I’ve played all of Zero Dawn. I’ll just say, as much as I like the game (I do, quite a bit), it’s bad at being open-world.
Most narrow paths are only related to quests, and if you try exploring them before you need to go there the game punishes you by making it a chore to go and to leave for no gain. Also, the terrible message “you’re out of bound, turn back now or we reset to your last save” is one of the worst failure at world design ever. It pops up constantly if you’re just trying to explore.
And yes, I tried playing HUD-free for a bit (I had a great experience doing that on Breath of the Wild). As you said it’s almost impossible, the environment, while looking good, is way too messy to spot the small details you’re supposed to… Unless you turn on the magic compass and GPS.
In other games, paths and important items are highlighted with lighting and clear and functional visual cues. Beside the infamous yellow paint, HZD does almost none of that efficiently.
I recently started learning and playing poker, and I mostly play with fake money. Here’s what I’ve used so far:
Pokerstars and GGPoker both have fake money options that you can play without depositing money. I used Pokerstars for a while as it was the only client I could get working on Linux (using bottles). They both have good mobile apps. I prefer GGPoker’s interface so I’ve been using my Windows dual boot to play that when I want to on my computer.
Poker Brawl is a phone app where you can play correspondence heads-up poker with an ELO rating system. It’s correspondence , so you only have to make a move once every three days. It’s heads-up only, though.
I’ve found playing on real poker platforms with fake money to be best in terms of somewhat emulating real poker in terms of player behavior.
Feel free to comment with any questions and I’ll try to help
bin.pol.social
Aktywne