My wife, two friends, and I all played Diablo IV online together. We beat the main campaign together and had a lot of fun with it. We’re trying to beat the expansion campaign too, but my wife and one friend dropped out, so it’s just been me and a buddy powering through it.
That’s a game where you can just have fun dicking around in the world, even if there isn’t an objective. And it has plenty of endgame content to keep you entertained after you beat the campaign.
I posted a review here earlier this year, but A Way Out was an excellent 2-player co-op game! I really enjoyed it. Story rich puzzles with some action interspersed. And it’s split-screen even if you’re playing online, so you can see what your partner is up to and coordinate with them. The ending was heart-wrenching too! Such an emotionally impacting story. Check out my review for a spoiler-free intro to that game.
Surprise early review! I usually spend all night writing these (because I’m a night owl) and then post it first thing in the morning before I go to bed. But I wound up with a free day and nothing to do, so I decided to write a review this afternoon....
Similarly, Far Cry 5. At the beginning, when you’re told to arrest Joseph Seed, you can choose to just turn around and walk out the door. The sheriff will agree with you, saying it’s best to just leave him and his cult alone and it would’ve only ended in your deaths if you tried to arrest him. Then the game ends.
I don’t think the nuclear explosion was related to Joseph Seed. He was just a “prophet,” claiming the end times were here. The nukes were going to happen regardless, he was just trying to save as many people as he could, whether they wanted to be saved or not. He was the villain, but only in an “ends justify the means” sense. In the end, he was actually right; the world did fall to nuclear holocaust.
I personally really enjoyed New Dawn, but it gets a lot of hate from the community. Maybe because each Far Cry game is a completely unique game, and New Dawn is just a continuation of Far Cry 5. I read a lot of reviews that said it didn’t bring anything new to the franchise. Of course! It’s just part 2 of a previous game! You get to see what the world is like 17 years after the events of Project Eden, so the map is the same and a lot of the gameplay mechanics are the same. You do have a community that you’re trying to build up; restoring order and safety amongst survivors of the nuclear fallout, so that’s unique.
One thing I didn’t like was that your character from Far Cry 5 (the Deputy) makes an appearance in New Dawn. Turns out they’ve been brainwashed by Joseph Seed after spending 17 years trapped in a bunker alone with him, so they’re fiercely loyal to Joseph now. Fortunately, Joseph is not the enemy in this game. You actually ally with Joseph’s new group New Eden, so the Deputy (now called The Judge) becomes a gun-for-hire.
I did not like Primal. I played a couple hours of it and just couldn’t get into it. It’s more of a survival game than a Far Cry game. You have to craft everything to survive and you have a stamina bar that depletes unless you regularly eat and sleep. Fast-traveling takes a huge chunk out of stamina, which is annoying and defeats the purpose of “fast” traveling, but I guess it’s realistic.
Unlike most Far Cry games where you’re isolated in a region, trying to overthrow a dictator-wannabe or something, Primal is more about building a community and eventually becoming chief of your own tribe. Sure, there are other tribes to fight against, but it just felt weird not having a solid objective besides surviving. Maybe there’s more plot to it and I just didn’t play enough to get into it.
I still haven’t played Far Cry 3 and Blood Dragon. I own both of them and I’ve been meaning to get around to it. I’m an '80s child, so I love the retro-futuristic aesthetic of Blood Dragon. Are they related in story at all, or is Blood Dragon just a standalone expansion for Far Cry 3? If it’s unrelated to Far Cry 3’s plot, I might just jump into it and check it out.
Welcome back! Today we’re going to be doing an in-depth look at the first game I ever posted here: Enshrouded. Now that I do long-form blog discussions instead of just screenshot posts, I figured it was time to revisit this game and give it a solid overview....
I haven’t heard anything specific from the developers about wiping gameplay for a final product, but I will say that I’ve been playing since it released and I’ve never once had my progress wiped. The devs have been pretty good about upgrading your progress to match the current build so you don’t need to start over. Even with radical changes, your base building is left untouched.
A friend and I spent weeks building a massive pyramid and temple on an empty hill once. One day, we logged in and found that a new village had been added to the game, near the top of that hill. Our base was completely untouched; everything we changed in our build area stayed the same.
It was weird to see a village spawned right up to our build area, then get cut off right at the border. But we were glad to see that our progress was left untouched.
Even stuff like XP and leveling has been progressing instead of resetting. I maxed out my character’s level and gear and spent months just exploring the game and building stuff, not worrying about character progression. Then when the latest zone unlocked for exploration, I noticed I could level up even higher and upgrade even more abilities in my skill tree. None of my progress was reset for the new zone.
Heck, even with a formally maxed out character, the new zone was surprisingly challenging and I had to work to progress my character’s stats and equipment even more in order to survive there.
When I first started playing, when lore was just a small thing you could piece together by reading bits of scrolls and journals scattered around the world, I theorized that The Shroud was keeping the world trapped in stasis. That’s why, no matter how much you changed, it’d always reset back to its original state after you left the area for 30 minutes (or logged out and back in again).
The Flame Altars kept The Shroud out, so you could enact permanent change near them. And your own Flameborn soul ensured nothing changed while you stuck nearby. But no changes would stick anywhere else in the world.
Of course, now there is tons of new lore in the game and my theory is practically debunked. But it’s still my little fan theory. I’m hoping that the final game will have an endgame plot to rid the land of The Shroud permanently. But I’ve been playing so long now, I’m kind of used to it perpetually being around and I’m not all that concerned with its tenacity now.
I’ve definitely wasted many evenings building in this game. I actually had to cut off one of my friends; he was exclusively building in my server and would message me all the time, asking me to boot up Enshrouded and leave it running overnight so he could play.
There is an Enshrouded Dedicated Server you can set up so the game is always running in the background for people to connect to. But I’ve had problems getting it working, and I’d rather not dedicate resources to hosting a game in the background if I only have a couple friends pop in once in a while.
So my friends mostly don’t play unless I’m playing too, which has encouraged me to spend oodles of time in Enshrouded over the past year. There’s a reason it’s my #3 most played game despite only being out for a year and a half.
I overheard someone talking about this weird sci-fi cloning space game with survival/crafting/base building elements a few days ago. It sounded so unique, preposterous, and yet intriguing. I had to track it down and check it out....
It’s published by the same studio (11 bit studios), but they each have different developers. 11 bit studios also created The Alters, but Starward Industries created The Invincible.
Thank you! I enjoy discussing video games (and movies, but my movie review blog has been abandoned for the past couple years), and I’ve always wanted to find someone who goes into a little depth on games; someone who introduces people to the premise of a game and gets them interested. The little summary on Steam isn’t always enough to let me know if it’s going to be fun or not.
Since I couldn’t find any content like that, I decided to just create it myself. I’m retired young and I got nothing else going on, so why not?
Thanks! I do this as a hobby and would probably get burnt out if I had to do this for work. I attempted to make daily posts for a while as a personal writing challenge and I got to #50 before I had to take a break.
But my posting would definitely be more consistent if someone paid me to do it. 😆 I need to go back and redo the first handful of posts I’ve made here, since I started out just posting a single screenshot. It’d be nice to actually discuss those games in depth too.
Yeah, there definitely seems to be a story the game wants to tell, and you’re punished for veering too far from the plot. I’ve definitely restarted a save or two to undo a bad choice.
I do like that it highlights your previous conversation choices, so you know which route you picked and could try another option in your next run. That definitely makes it a bit easier.
I’m excited to see what new alters you create and what their personalities will be like, but I’m also kind of dreading the personnel management system getting too complex.
Ah! That makes sense! I wondered if there was going to be some twist in the plot where the original Jan was an alter himself (the actual #2) and the real original died with the rest of the crew. But I didn’t want to speculate and inadvertently spoil a good twist.
I’ve watched thousands of movies and TV shows and played a lot of games, and my wife gets mad at me because I’m pretty good at spotting a twist coming a mile away now. So I do my best not to speculate where the plot is going in these posts. But you’re right, it might just be as simple as counting how many clones have been made.
It can definitely seem unfair at times. I mentioned in another comment that it feels like the game has a story it wants to tell and it punishes you for straying too far from the plot. Fortunately, it marks your conversation choices, so if you have to redo conversations, you know which path you previously took.
2 Day’s until a year! Today’s game is Red Dead Redemption 1. The Last of Us was initially planned for today, but the crashing kept getting on my nerves that i decided to step back for a sec. I’m going to try and look into a fix because i’m really enjoying but those freezes seem particularly horrendous today for some...
When I first bought Red Dead Redemption (well over a decade ago, for the Xbox 360), I got it exclusively for the “Undead Nightmare” expansion pack. I love zombie games, and setting it in the Wild West? That’s a unique twist I hadn’t seen yet.
However, I didn’t want to just jump right into the zombie gameplay. I wanted to be intimately familiar with the world and its lore first, so I could squeeze all the enjoyment out of the zombie expansion. I wanted to know all the townsfolk, so when I had to blow someone’s brains out, I’d understand their relationship to the main character and how emotionally impactful that choice was.
Suffice to say, I was so anxious to get to the zombie expansion that I rushed through the entire game in maybe 2 evenings. I didn’t really enjoy my playthrough because I was just trying to get it over with as quickly as I could.
When I finally got to the zombie expansion, I didn’t really enjoy it that much. It was at that moment I realized that the original game was far more fun than the zombie expansion. But I had rushed it and wasted my whole experience.
Last year, I finally got around to playing through the game again and I made sure to slow down and really enjoy it. It’s such a fantastic story. I played the Undead Nightmare expansion afterwards and made a post about it here for Halloween month. That, too, was more fun than I remembered.
Now I need to finally play Red Dead Redemption 2. I’ve owned it for years, but I always get bored maybe an hour into the gameplay. They put so much effort into making it as realistic and complex as possible that I just get distracted and lose the plot. RDR1 was a more straightforward plot and kept me engaged, but I keep losing focus on the sequel. I need to force myself to sit still and power through it sometime. #ADHDproblems
Hey, it’s been a minute! I took a break from gaming for a bit; partly voluntary, partly because some jerk destroyed the Internet cable in my yard and it took forever to get someone to come fix it. But I’m back! And just in time to play a really fun co-op game that just dropped last month....
I have two original Steam controllers and I absolutely hated them. The track pads, whereas a cool innovative technology, weren’t good for 90% of my games. I needed that D-pad, or at least a joystick. I hardly used my controllers, and now I just hold onto them as a piece of Valve history.
Mine came with the physical Steam Link box. I bought two of those boxes, so I could use Steam from a couple different places in my home away from my gaming desk. Instead of the controller, I just plugged in a keyboard and mouse to the Steam Link box. They did away with the hardware though, and now it’s just an app on Smart TVs and app stores. So I can’t use my keyboard and mouse without some extra steps.
Today I’m going to be looking at the demo for an upcoming narrative-driven simulation game that looks like a lot of fun! It’s called inKonbini: One Store. Many Stories. This demo is free on Steam, so feel free to check it out for yourself....
I felt the same way. It was even more disappointing because Epic Games got their claws into it, so it released as an exclusive title. I had to wait a year before I could play it on Steam, and it didn’t even live up to the hype!
I recently re-installed Far Cry 6 and a friend and I have been replaying it in co-op mode. It’s actually a lot more fun than I remember. I don’t know if it received a bunch of patches/updates since I last tried it, or if I was just super-critical after Far Cry 5. But it’s not a horrible game. At least not yet; we’re only a couple hours into it so far.
Oh damn. I’ve spent $30,359.76 on Steam in the 17 years I’ve had an account. And I just passed 4,000 games in my Steam library within the last month. That checks out.
I really like video games. And I’m retired young(ish), so I have all the time in the world to game now.
Plus, I have a (relatively new) blog dedicated to introducing games to people, which encourages me to play through a variety of games in my library. It’s basically just archiving my “Random Screenshots of my Games” posts in !games.
And according to the SteamDB, I’ve played 26% of my games. The last time I checked, it was at 38%, but that was maybe 2,000 games ago. I need to keep working through my library!
Video games and collecting Sonic the Hedgehog comics are my two expensive hobbies; I don’t spend money on much else besides essentials (food, shelter), so I can afford to splurge a bit on these hobbies. I am not wealthy by any stretch of the imagination, but the US military took really good care of me for 20 years and continues to provide for me in retirement, so I’m able to live a pretty relaxed life now.
If you somehow dont have Metro 2033 yet, you can still add it to your library for free today.
I saw that it was free for 48 hours! I already have the whole Metro franchise, but I’ve informed my gaming friends about the deal this morning. Thanks for spreading the news!
One caveat to my Steam library is that I always try to wait for deals before I buy; I rarely buy anything at full price. I don’t want to think about how much money I might’ve spent if I bought everything at full price! 😱
Long time no see! I really need to stop promising to write about specific games. I get too in my head about it, then I feel obligated to write instead of wanting to write. This is supposed to be a fun personal writing project, not work!...
Here’s a bonus screenshot for you. I really like this image, just because it’s sort of an ominous “quiet before the storm” shot. Seeing both scientists watch you with silent anticipation as you’re about to cause a world-altering event in that next room.
They put a ton of effort into remaking Xen so that it blends better into the gameplay and story. I think I read somewhere that Half-Life took about an hour to slog through Xen, but Black Mesa, despite having around 4 hours of Xen gameplay, was actually really enjoyable.
Thanks for your support! My posts originally started as just a random screenshot or two of the latest game I was playing. But I always hated how people just talked about specific video games like everyone on the thread was intimately familiar with them. Especially if it was a game that sounded interesting to me. I wanted to know more about it!
So I decided to use my screenshots as a way to introduce newcomers to each game; give them a little intro to the plot and gameplay so they’d be interested in trying it out for themselves. Or to remind previous players of a great game they hadn’t played in a while.
By the time I started writing long-form blog entries on video games, I already had a bit of a series going and I didn’t want to suddenly change the title of my numbered posts. So they are “random” screenshots of my games, but they’re also a spoiler-free in-depth exploration of each game.
One day, I plan to go back and re-do some of my earlier posts so I can actually have in-depth discussion on those games too.
I’ve also been archiving my posts on a personal blog, in case any of them get taken down or blocked here for any reason. If anyone’s interested in checking out my history of posts, it’s a bit easier to review the archive at that link.
It’s not that bad. They have three difficulty settings: Normal, Black Mesa, and Hard. I played on Normal and I haven’t really struggled anywhere. I think I’ve only died once in my whole gameplay, and it was when I was fighting off waves of Marines flooding a single large space that I couldn’t leave. I’m assuming “Black Mesa” is their suggested difficulty level.
Top ones I know of these days are siege, but some people have made a case that dead by daylight is pretty bad as well. Like if any of you remember the Xbox 360 Halo days. I think those would pass for toxic today. What do you guys think? Is the most toxic community out there in gaming?
A childhood friend of mine worked as a developer for Riot Games over a decade ago, when League of Legends first became popular. He tried to get me to play it with him, but the community was so toxic, it’s the first and only game I ever quit solely because of the community.
If you didn’t play specific characters with very specific builds, you were just wasting everyone’s time and any losses would be blamed on you. It was really bad.
I love the content and lore that comes from LoL (Arcane, K/DA, etc.), but I can’t stand the game itself.
I was actually in the middle of a Half-Life review (spoiler for my next post!) and I got a new Steam Deck in the mail, which thoroughly distracted me for the past few days. That, and I threw my back out, so sitting comfortably at my gaming PC has been impossible lately. Instead, I’ve been lying in bed, enjoying some of my...
This is actually my second Steam Deck. I bought the original LCD-screen one back when they were first announced, but they had a nasty habit of the bumper buttons (L1 and R1) breaking. Sure enough my L1 button broke and I just never sent it back to get it fixed. I’ve just been re-mapping that button to the L2 (trigger) button instead.
Recently, my wife expressed interest in having a Steam Deck (she almost bought her own when they first came out), and she claimed she was perfectly content taking my old one, since she doesn’t game as much as me anyway. So I bought a fancy new HDR OLED-screen Steam Deck. It’s much more responsive than my first one. And the bumper buttons work! I forgot how nice it is to just play a game without re-mapping buttons first.
The plots of Portal 2 singleplayer, co-op, and PTI are very “distant” from anything happening with Half-Life.
From what I understand (it’s been a while since I read up on the lore), Portal 1 and 2 take place after the Combine invasion of Earth, shortly after the first Half-Life game. That’s why Aperture Science is almost completely devoid of life, minus the personality cores that are attempting to continue running things. It’s because of the resonance cascade incident at Black Mesa that Aperture Science is now mostly defunct, and Chell is trapped as a lab rat at GLaDOS’ mercy.
So the Portal series is pretty reliant on Half-Life’s story to justify their plot, even if it’s never directly addressed in the game itself.
Today i continued through Alan Wake 2. I have started Alan’s Section. I got to the very end of Chapter 2, but ran into a bug where Alan doesn’t push a subway car door open while being chased so i stopped there....
Epic just recently announced that they’re never releasing it outside of their store. They’re the exclusive publisher, so they have distribution rights, and their CEO Tim Sweeney is determined to snub his nose at Steam, even though Alan Wake 2 still hasn’t earned back its production costs. It’s a complete flop, but they won’t extend to the Steam market to help sales.
Unlike other games, where publishers sign exclusivity contracts with Epic Games for a certain time period, Alan Wake 2 was actually published by Epic Games, meaning that Epic Games gets to decide what systems the game releases on. So it’s not coming to Steam. Which means I’ll never get to play it, because I’m never giving a penny to that awful store of theirs.
On the surface, MiSide looks like a dating simulation game. And I very nearly passed right over it in the Steam store. But then I caught the “psychological horror” tag and thought, ‘That’s an odd tag to put on a dating sim.’ At worst, maybe it’s commentary on dating sims as a whole; letting you experience a loving...
I have not; although I have been warned that it’s not at all what it appears to be and that I should go into it blind for the best experience. So I’m assuming it’s going to be something like MiSide. It’s definitely on my list of games to play!
Don’t worry, I’m alive! I took the holidays off and traveled to visit family, then had a hard time getting back into posting about the games I’ve been playing, so I apologize for my nearly 2 months of silence. I actually have a bunch of games lined up that I want to write about, so hopefully you’ll see more posts in the...
Does anyone remember Seaman? That game was great! Why are you giggling? I’m just talking about Seaman! Why does everybody giggle when I say I want to play with Seaman???...
This happened to me with Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor the year it released. I got tired of waiting for it to go on sale, so I finally bought it at full $60 price. The very next day, it was on sale for $5.99. D’oh!
I’m jumping into psychological horror today, with a walking simulator called POOLS. This game has no jump scares, no monsters. It’s just dark (and sometimes bright), liminal spaces that give you an eerie, creeped-out vibe, themed around indoor pools with unnaturally dark waters. The longer you walk through this maze of...
I’m just an enthusiastic gamer, raving about some of the games I’ve enjoyed. But I’m sure the developers of this game will be glad to hear that you’re interested.
Best Co-Op Games? angielski
What are the best co-op games you enjoy? Anything from the modern games, to the old games....
Random Screenshots of my Games #65 - Vampire Hunters angielski
Surprise early review! I usually spend all night writing these (because I’m a night owl) and then post it first thing in the morning before I go to bed. But I wound up with a free day and nothing to do, so I decided to write a review this afternoon....
Games Where Nothing Happens (SPOILERS for various game plots) angielski
Good Day good people....
Random Screenshots of my Games #64 - Enshrouded (Revisited) angielski
Welcome back! Today we’re going to be doing an in-depth look at the first game I ever posted here: Enshrouded. Now that I do long-form blog discussions instead of just screenshot posts, I figured it was time to revisit this game and give it a solid overview....
Random Screenshots of my Games #63 - The Alters angielski
I overheard someone talking about this weird sci-fi cloning space game with survival/crafting/base building elements a few days ago. It sounded so unique, preposterous, and yet intriguing. I had to track it down and check it out....
Day 363 of posting a Daily Screenshot from the games I've been playing angielski
2 Day’s until a year! Today’s game is Red Dead Redemption 1. The Last of Us was initially planned for today, but the crashing kept getting on my nerves that i decided to step back for a sec. I’m going to try and look into a fix because i’m really enjoying but those freezes seem particularly horrendous today for some...
Random Screenshots of my Games #62 - PEAK angielski
Hey, it’s been a minute! I took a break from gaming for a bit; partly voluntary, partly because some jerk destroyed the Internet cable in my yard and it took forever to get someone to come fix it. But I’m back! And just in time to play a really fun co-op game that just dropped last month....
The Steam controller was ahead of its time angielski
The original Steam Controller is undoubtedly one of the coolest pieces of gear I own—and one of the most innovative, too....
Random Screenshots of my Games #61 - The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog angielski
Sheesh, Amy, don’t look so happy that Sonic’s dead…...
Random Screenshots of my Games #60 - inKonbini: One Store. Many Stories (demo) angielski
Today I’m going to be looking at the demo for an upcoming narrative-driven simulation game that looks like a lot of fun! It’s called inKonbini: One Store. Many Stories. This demo is free on Steam, so feel free to check it out for yourself....
Random Screenshots of my Games #59 - Far Cry 5 angielski
Welcome back! For my next screenshot-laden game discussion, I’m going to be talking about my favorite of the Far Cry series, Far Cry 5....
'Oh god': There's a buried Steam help page that shows how much money you've ever spent on the platform, and you may not want to know (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Random Screenshots of my Games #58 - Black Mesa (Half-Life) angielski
Long time no see! I really need to stop promising to write about specific games. I get too in my head about it, then I feel obligated to write instead of wanting to write. This is supposed to be a fun personal writing project, not work!...
What games have the most toxic communities? angielski
Top ones I know of these days are siege, but some people have made a case that dead by daylight is pretty bad as well. Like if any of you remember the Xbox 360 Halo days. I think those would pass for toxic today. What do you guys think? Is the most toxic community out there in gaming?
Random Screenshots of my Games #57 - Aperture Desk Job (lemmy.world) angielski
I was actually in the middle of a Half-Life review (spoiler for my next post!) and I got a new Steam Deck in the mail, which thoroughly distracted me for the past few days. That, and I threw my back out, so sitting comfortably at my gaming PC has been impossible lately. Instead, I’ve been lying in bed, enjoying some of my...
Day 201 of posting a Daily Screenshot from the games I’ve been playing until I forget to post Screenshots (pxscdn.com) angielski
Today i continued through Alan Wake 2. I have started Alan’s Section. I got to the very end of Chapter 2, but ran into a bug where Alan doesn’t push a subway car door open while being chased so i stopped there....
Random Screenshots of my Games #56 - MiSide (lemmy.world) angielski
On the surface, MiSide looks like a dating simulation game. And I very nearly passed right over it in the Steam store. But then I caught the “psychological horror” tag and thought, ‘That’s an odd tag to put on a dating sim.’ At worst, maybe it’s commentary on dating sims as a whole; letting you experience a loving...
Random Screenshots of my Games #55 - A Way Out (lemmy.world) angielski
Don’t worry, I’m alive! I took the holidays off and traveled to visit family, then had a hard time getting back into posting about the games I’ve been playing, so I apologize for my nearly 2 months of silence. I actually have a bunch of games lined up that I want to write about, so hopefully you’ll see more posts in the...
We all need Seaman back in our lives! angielski
Does anyone remember Seaman? That game was great! Why are you giggling? I’m just talking about Seaman! Why does everybody giggle when I say I want to play with Seaman???...
It's like they wait for you to buy it (lemmy.world) angielski
Random Screenshots of my Games #12 - POOLS (lemmy.world) angielski
I’m jumping into psychological horror today, with a walking simulator called POOLS. This game has no jump scares, no monsters. It’s just dark (and sometimes bright), liminal spaces that give you an eerie, creeped-out vibe, themed around indoor pools with unnaturally dark waters. The longer you walk through this maze of...