Got back into Yooka Laylee after a fairly long hiatus. Still on the first 2 levels because of the high amount of exploration and things to do, so I’m not far at all, but definitely having fun.
Working on a last hurrah for Diablo 4: Season 5, just finishing up max leveling glyphs for my Scorcerer before I completely set it aside for next season.
Right when I was getting bored playing Sims 3 in my current save, my eldest... disappears. I mean, I saw her die, the Grim Reaper showed up and got her, but that means nothing to this buggy mess of a game. She left no tombstone or anything. So, my current save now is now at four generations, due to an adoption. But, I'm at a point where I want to play other stuff, so this game's going back on the shelf for a while until I need another reset.
Finished Amnesia: The Bunker and managed to get a couple achievements out of it. I might do some serious achievement hunting, but I also kind of want to play a new game, so we'll see how this week goes.
Finished Deus Ex: Human Revolution last week, and I while i enjoyed it I didn’t want to jump into Mankind Divided right away. It was a fine game but I felt like going back for more straight away might make me burn out.
Decided instead to finally get through Metro: Last Light. I really enjoyed 2033, but when I started LL right after I just couldn’t get into it. This time it’s going better and I’m having a good time playing it - very immersive on Ranger Hardcore. I still prefer the first game so far though, I think. Still not thrilled about the way checkpoint saving interacts with the moral points system (you sometimes have to sit for minutes on end rewatching the same conversation), but it’s not enough to completely sour me on it. Looking forward to eventually getting to Exodus.
Also playing some Deadlock games, though despite loving the game I’m already noticing it’s not always great for my mood.
I finished Doom II and some levels were an absolute pain. I gotta say though, this re-release (Doom + Doom II) is a bit disappointing. There are a bunch of glitches, although pretty minor, that are just annoying. The most frustrating one for me was, when you have the Pistol Start option activated (to automatically start all levels with just the Pistol), the Backpack is bugged and doesn’t give double ammo capacity. Once you die and restart the level it’s fixed, until the next level. I don’t know if it ever made the difference with me dying or not, but it just sucks.
Today I started Final Doom, specifically TNT:Evilution, which I’ve never played before. Just like before I’m trying UV, Pistol Start, no mid-level saves, but depending on how it goes I might start using saves. I’ll probably try a different source port though, since this KEX engine port isn’t the best.
I also played through Horizon Forbidden West: The Burning Shores DLC, although only the main quests and almost nothing else. It was kinda meh. The story was fine, but the final boss fight was complete garbage. The romance part also felt really rushed, especially since I went through everything over just two days/seven hours in total.
Then, I’m also kinda in-between games right now, since I’m waiting for the Diablo 4 expansion release in a bit over a week. There are a bunch of games I want to play, but probably won’t finish in time, so they have to wait. I tried Ace Combat 7, played through the first mission, but it didn’t really grab me (KB+M is definitely more playable than the Steam forums made it seem). I’ll probably play through one of the dozens of metroidvanias I bought, but never played.
The new Kex port is great for it’s accessibility for new players not used to the Doom sourceports scene, but I guess there’s still a few kinks to solve. I still end up preferring to play on my other sourceports (Woof! Is my favorite) but I gotta get back to it to actually finish Legacy of Rust later. At least this new port is MUCH better on the console versions now, if only the Switch version had proper access to the player uploaded addons…
In the meantime Ive been going through Freedoom 2, and I hear people are adapting the assets of the new mapping format into an open sourced version. Looking forward to that.
True, how easy it is to get into the games with this port, along with the mod browser, definitely outweighs the few minor issues.
I’ve actually downloaded Woof myself for my Final Doom playthrough. It takes a few minutes to read up on how to create a batch file to make launching the game more user friendly, but once you’re in, it’s has everything you’d want.
There’s even launchers that do the work of the batch files for you! I like using Doom Explorer or Doom Runner for that. You set it up with your ports, point it at your wads folder and then you can save preset combinations of mods, it’s so practical.
Been playing lots of The Finals Lately, and recently jumped back into Titanfall 2. Really enjoying the creative gameplay of the Finals, and Titanfall is just so damn good.
Yeah always around 2k online. There was a jump to 5k lately because it was super on sale on steam. I can usually always find a match (anecdotally for me on steam anyways)
Started Horizon Zero Dawn. I usually don’t like open world games, but this one has an interesting setting and the gameplay seems fun, so I’m giving it a try.
Finally finished Trails of Cold Steel which was meh. It felt needlessly padded (it could have been shortened to like 30 hours instead of 60 IMO) and there were too many uninteresting characters (I actually can’t think of an interesting one). Hopefully the following games are better, as now the setting should be more interesting.
Lots of Skyrim!
Also this game for Playdate called Spilled Mushrooms, I’d been waiting for it to come out a while. It’s a nice blend of simple card game and puzzle, each round only takes a few minutes. The goal is to pick animals to help collect your mushrooms from different areas, animals have different abilities and each biome can have modifiers. It’s pretty much endlessly replayable and very satisfying once you get into a groove! I’m glad it’s not on more platforms because I’d lose so much more time to it
(Made by the same folks behind Severed Steel) A short and sweet, low-fi yet beautiful co-op (and optionally PVP) movement shooter with extremely satisfying projectile mechanics, destructible environments and a gorgeous soundtrack by Floating Door. Zip through at ridiculous speeds across a series of mysterious floating islands with your hoverboard and grapple beam. Inch closer to god-like power as you progress.
Definitely not for everybody but there’s a demo (which can also be played in co-op) available on the store page.
I have been playing Evoland Legendary Edition. The 2 games bundled are surprisingly dissimilar, with the first being almost a parody game of extremely short length, and the second being a fairly fleshed-out, 20 hour RPG-lite, with a story of real stakes (highly inspired by Chrono Trigger).
Very worth it if picked up on sale, just be prepared for the tone-whiplash between games.
Released in March of the is year (and in August for non switch consoles) Pepper Grinder is a traditional 2D platformer with a world map, levels, and a gimmick of using a drill to travel underground like a dolphin through water.
Its platforming has a good rhythm to it, with a nice momentum when you go in and out of the dirt. The best way I can describe the game is that it feels like a Mario Gimmick level that’s been expanded to its own game.
If I had any complaints about this game, is that the boss fights are a bit too tedious. Not impossible as I’ve been able to beat them. But requires a bit more precise movement than the levels which preceded it.
Overall though, I haven’t played a 2d platformed in ages which I’ve actually wanted to go through in ages. And it is a welcomed addition to my gaming library.
Pretty sure, historically, they were also pretty powerful. I remember at one point reading about several nations that had serious issues with horse archers. A ranged unit of constant mobility, of course they’d be difficult to deal with.
How effective they are does depend on what kind of game you’re playing, however.
In Age of Empires II horse archers are only really good in those civilisations that have adequate research for them. And then it requires a good deal of player skill to micro the units to make use of their enhanced mobility.
In Mount and Blade Bannerlord it all depends on terrain. Horse archers are deadly on any sort of open terrain, but introduce trees or even a mild amount of rockiness and those horse archers are in a serious disadvantage.
They were also rare. To effectively pull off horse archery, you needed good horses, good riders that also happened to be good archers (both of which weren’t trivial on their own, let alone combined) and good coordination. Bows are more effective the closer you are, so to get the most out of your arrows, you’ll want to close in, but then you also need to wheel off again without your riders getting in each other’s way, so you needed to drill maneuvers for that.
So you either need to have a sufficiently large body of soldiers with the leisure to train both archery and riding instead of working the fields, or you needed a society that treats them as basic skills anyway and only needed training in the military application. Nomadic peoples like the Scythians or Mongols often had the former, so they were notable sources of dangerous mounted archery, particularly where the raising and support of a professional army wasn’t feasible. Rome had the Equites Sagitarii, but they were part of the distinct social class we would call Knights, so not your rank-and-file soldier (and those were already more professional than later levy- or retinue-based militaries).
So if we were concerned about accuracy*, these units should be expensive and require good management to make the most of them, but be very dangerous too. The point about open / closed terrain certainly fits as well.
What’s a bit more foggy is how games usually handle bow effectiveness at range, but that’s its own topic.
*I do care about accuracy, but not at any cost - games need to be fun too, and that’s worth sacrificing some accuracy for.
Yeah, in Age of Empires II they’re more expensive than Skirmishers, who are archer-countering units. They’re also more expensive than regular archers, and that’s not going into the research that a good cavalry archer needs, as they’re also subject to some of the most expensive research options.
In Bannerlord you can get good horse archers only be recruiting young nobles. Then you have to spend time on levelling them up, because at the lower tiers they’re just not that good, and you risk a number of the dying before they reach a high enough level.
So between the two games I play that prominently feature horse archers, I’d say they’re managed pretty well, with the increased costs, slower training times, player skill, or levelling requirements.
Skirmishers as in “Light Cavalry”, designed to catch closing archery and ride them down? I’m not big on RTS (I suck at multitasking), but I’m always fascinated by gamified implementations of historical dynamics.
I don’t suppose they also support “recruit auxiliary specialists” as option?
So the skirmisher is a spear-throwing foot soldier with a shield. Historically a foot soldier would have a shield, a few throwing spears, and then a melee weapon. But in Age of Empires II the spear throwing and the melee are divided into two separate units.
Age of Empires II does have a light cavelry line, though, and they’re pretty quick. But only civs historically known for their good cavelry have bonuses towards them that make the viable (i.e. There are various steppe-civs in AoEII, as well as Mongols and Huns, and I’m sure Turks and Saracens have some benefit to light cav as well).
In this regard Age of Empires IV is more historically accurate, as that game can have completely unsymmetrical civs, whereas Age of Empires II has far more symmetrical gameplay.
An alternate universe corpo city filled with generated crimes to solve. You get a case board, scan for fingerprints/footprints, talk to witnesses, look up sales records, check out cctv cameras among loads of other stuff. All of it is happening live in the city - everyone has schedules, an apartment, a workplace, an inventory, an email account, a blood type, a shoe size… - so that murder/kidnapping/robbery literally happened in the game while you were crawling through vents looking for an envelope with sensitive documents that someone asked you to steal. Just yesterday I got to a crime scene super quickly and caught a murderer leaving the scene of the crime with the murder weapon on their person. There are deus ex style body augmentations too.
One of my favourite cases was a woman who got murdered. I had the husband pegged for it but couldn’t pin it on him. His fingerprints were all over the place and he was on the cctv but they lived together so that wasn’t really evidence. The case went cold. A couple of days later the HUSBAND is murdered and I’m stumped. Just go looking for anything related to the guy and hope I stumble across something useful by accident. So eventually I break into the husband’s boss’ apartment and find a bouquet of flowers with a note for the boss from the husband. It turns out the husband is having a secret gay affair with his boss. The boss kills the wife so he can be with the husband. Husband doesn’t want to be with a murderer I guess so the boss kills him too!
It’s occasionally a little buggy still. I was supposed to follow someone, take a photo of a briefcase handoff, follow the recipient and get the briefcase back and have done this type of case before. Yesterday though the handoff never happened and I waited with the original owner for a few in game hours. My guess is the recipient is dead or was someone I knocked out earlier while I was solving another case and I messed up their schedule.
I second Shadows of doubt. I haven’t played the release version yet (I’m still building factories in Satisfactory) but I can give my most memorable detective work from early access. I was doing side jobs because my murder case had gone cold. I had a gig where I needed to find proof that the clients partner is having an affair. The information I got about the potential lover were some vague physical traits like eye color and shoe size. But the key information was that the lover’s partner worked as Wait staff. So I
went through every restaurant, bar, diner etc in the city.
Got a list of every wait staff member.
Found out where they live.
Broke into their house.
Found their partner information.
Found the potential lover.
Started looking for key evidence to tie them to the affair.
The last step is where my gig ended up in a roadblock. I’m not 100% sure but I think it was bugged because I did everything I could come up with. I went through the clients partner personal stuff and found nothing. I went to their work and found nothing. I went through the lovers personal stuff and found nothing. I went to lovers work and found nothing. I even planted a tracker on both of them and followed them around to see if I missed something and I still found nothing. I even checked the mailboxes. So the key evidence was probably bugged and I couldn’t find it.
Despite that I haven’t had such a unique experience in any other game. It’s up there in my backlog waiting for me to return, but first the factory must grow.
A fantastic metroidvania that’s almost flawless. It has great combat, a great story, great soundtrack, and beautiful art. Highly recommended to anyone into these games.
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