I enjoyed FO4 way more than the community, I know it’s lacking a bit in some areas but behind Skyrim it’s my favourite game to mod. The common criticisms just didn’t bother me I guess. I put nearly a thousand hours into it (mostly modding) and had a blast the whole time. I hope you enjoy it like I did and not like the general community did.
I was just playing skyrim. did not complete it but I can see how much they added. Its funny needing to have the hold down the button thing due to all the options. I prefer fantasy settings or utopia science fiction but its very good so far.
Skyrim is my most played game ever, but honestly a vast majority of that playtime was not spent on the main storyline at all. The game is best when you’re doing side quests and just exploring the world (and modding of course, it has a massive modding community, literally half of all mods on nexus are for Skyrim). The main quest is fine, but it’s nothing special. It’s your run-of-the-mill “you’re the savour of the world” type thing. But the thieves guild and dark brotherhood are both a lot of fun, the civil war is really fun too, and there’s just so much care put into the environment. Go check out random caves and camps and pay close attention to your surroundings, and you’ll see so many stories there that never get explicitly told. Environmental story telling is Skyrim’s strong suit for sure.
There was a bluesky thread on games that scared you as a child, and I was reminded one of mine was Duke Nukem 3D. Since I haven’t played it in over 20 years, I decided to look up that remastered version and you know what, pretty fun game still. The levels feel much smaller to me nowadays - even though they’re fairly dense - but the guns feel good, killing enemies is satisfying, staying on your toes all the time hits just right. I also find it deeply amusing that creating a character was as easy as putting as many one liners from your favorite movies in the script as you can.
Picked up Nioh 2 on the PC, a game that I already owned for the Ps4, but now I’m trying the complete edition. Turns out that the DLC added new weapon types - and weapons in Nioh are far more intricate and complex than other soul-styled games - including a Fist type. Not only that, but literally the first skill you can learn is the Dempsey Roll! I feel cheated from having played only the base version. Maybe this time I’ll actually finish this game.
Ion Fury just felt wrong to me. Looks and feels like Duke3D, but isn’t. And it’s somehow missing some of that character from back in the days. Hard to explain. I’d rather recommend Shadow Warrior Classic (or the Redux Version) which also uses the Build engine, came out shortly after Duke3D and has some great humour.
I’m not in any rush, so I’ll keep that in mind, but currently my plans for after I’m satisfied with Duke 3D is trying Dark Forces and the original Doom, both that I also haven’t played in a few decades
How hard exactly are the Nioh games? I’m playing through the Ninja Gaiden series at the moment so I guess I’m on a bit of a Team Ninja kick, which has made me look at them again. But from what I’ve heard they’re perhaps even more prohibitively difficult than Ninja Gaiden.
Having played very little Ninja Gaiden, I don’t think they’re similar at all save from being 3rd person games. Nioh is much closer to the Souls formula, which slower combat, stamina consumption on actions and a demanding care on facing enemies, with the added complexity (though not necessarily added difficulty) of weapon stances and combos, skill trees, colored loot, and a Devil Trigger-like skill.
If you’re going to try one, you should expect something more akin to Dark Souls + Diablo lootfest than the action romp that is Ninja Gaiden
Oh interesting! I knew about the different weapons and combos and coming from Ninja Gaiden that is appealing but the Diablo style loot piñata gameplay I was not expecting. Not sure it makes it more appealing to me though, sadly. I had hoped it was more of a Souls-meets-Ninja-Gaiden.
I’m still a bit scared, even though Ninja Gaiden have an even more brutal reputation than Dark Souls I found NGB and NG2 manageable whereas DS3 and Elden Ring felt like just on the border of what I can handle, sometimes going over it. Maybe we’re all just given to different types of games?
Overall, I find Nioh to give you far more tools than the usual Souls game, but also not demand as much mastery of them. There’s still some punishing mechanics (the only game that I’ve enjoyed doing the Exp recover after dying was Lies of P) and obtuse stats (even more when you consider the loot piñatas), but its still a game where I can go “All right, I don’t want to deal with this” and use the Yokai transformation to melt a boss’ HP.
Of course, at the end of the day, to each its own, so if Souls+Diablo gameplay doesn’t sound appealing to you, its an easy skip.
The PC version of Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter. This game is super difficult for me but I’m having fun trying. It also tends to jump-scare me more than any horror game has before. Sadly, I can’t get GRAW2 to run because of weird Physx problems and Wine/Proton, so I might go re-play Ghost Recon Future Soldier for the Xbox 360 again after this one. I’m too busy to get to that this week, though.
I also scooped up a Fire Emblem Awakening cartridge last week. I might try to finish the last two chapters of Fire Emblem Warriors and then dive into that one. I’d play both at the same time but the contrasting speeds of the two genres might be a bit too much.
My “I have 10 minutes to play” game this week is BlazBlue: Clone Phantasma. I really enjoy the BlazBlue series (especially the 3DS release) and this one is the cutesy/chibi arena fighter version. Very simple and shallow but great for quick games.
Path of exile 2 is free this weekend, and has a new season starting in a few hours, I’m trying to get my friends together to jump in.
It’s not very in the spirit of this sub though, but it did take a lot of patience to get here.
I’m still kicking around the idea of getting no man’s sky, but it hasn’t dropped enough yet.
Persona 5 was in the humble bundle, I’ve yet to get into a persona game (tried 3 and 4) to the point of “gameplay” there’s so much story than just doesn’t connect with me before the gameplay starts. Makes me miss Pokemon Red/blue.
P5R may not be to your liking then either. I found it to be less front loaded on the narrative than P4G, but it’s still a very narrative focused game. I can say however that I much preferred the story of P5R. I haven’t played P3(any version) yet. That’s just kind of the way Persona games are. They all start kind of slow. At least the two I’ve played. SMT may be more to your liking. I’ve only played SMT IV but SMT seems to be more gameplay focused. That one is at least from what I remember.
I played the demo of smt5 (which is how I know you’re referring to shin megami tensai (sp?) in case anyone else wants to experience it) and it was a really fun game, definitely faster to pick up the gameplay, and it reminded me, in many good ways, of dragon warrior monsters and Digimon, but at the end of the demo I was hesitant to pull the trigger because there are so many other games that deserve some play time.
I’ll definitely go back to it when it’s on sale, and I’m going to give p5 a, maybe not fair, shake.
Yeah Shin Megami Tensei is often abbreviated as SMT. I’d say with P5 if you don’t like it by the end of the first palace, then you probably won’t like the rest of it. You’ve seen most of the core gameplay and mechanics by then. I would definitely say play P5R and not vanilla P5 if you have the option. Some mechanics are changed in P5R that make it a smoother experience. The big new additions are mostly at the end, the “Third Semester”.
Traded in a bunch of stuff on Monday and picked up a PS5. So far really enjoying it and especially the controller, that thing is amazing. Next payday I’m definitely buying the newer Astro Bot game.
On the fallout 3 thing? I’m using Winlator on a Samsung Galaxy s24 Ultra with my Backbone. Sound skips a bit but the animation of the game itself it’s clean.
I managed to finish Ninja Gaiden 2 (Xbox 360) on Normal. What a beautiful fucking mess of a game. If only they would have taken their time polishing it instead of pushing it out the door hoping for a bonus payout it really could have ended up the best action game of all time. Even though I spent more time screaming at it than any other game I’ve played so far I really can’t wait for a Ninja Gaiden 2 Black sale to try it with FiendBusa’s “White” mod.
Having come this far, and with NG4 on the horizon, I thought I might as well give Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor’s Edge a try as well. Just to complete the trilogy. Man, I really don’t like this game. I don’t know whether I’ll actually manage to make myself finish it. And it’s weird because the combat had all the ingredients to be the very best of the entire series. Ryu is more fluid than ever, his moveset is larger than ever and the dynamic flexibility of combat is higher than ever. All the fundamentals are there. It just… doesn’t feel that good to play. The game wants you to play for Steel On Bone counters, but that type of reactive gameplay is not that fun. It doesn’t feel as measured and precise as NGB combat, and not as frantic and viscerally satisfying as NG2 combat.
Also, let’s talk about the setting and the story. NGB did not have a good story, but it had a cool setting with the eclectic mix of ancient, steampunk and futuristic. Also the story was kind of comic book-y and didn’t get in the way. NG2 dialled everything up to 11, and the story devolved into the absolutely insane campy nonsense that is so bad it’s almost good. It’s trash, but entertaining in a B-movie type way. Also NG2 had some incredible variation in locales, and while the globetrotting didn’t make any sense you constantly saw new and exciting locations and the levels themselves were pretty cool.
NG3RE has an absolutely woeful story, so actively bad it’s actually getting in the way of my enjoyment. It manages to be boring, derivative, cliche-ridden and lame without ever crossing over into so-bad-it’s-good. It also completely ruins the vibe by reframing the game into some sort of Call of Duty or Ghost Recon-esque military special agent story, and the levels are poorly designed and extremely boring. NG2 had varied and interesting combat arenas, these are just mind numbing open squares with again a CoD type of military theme.
And on top of all this it’s hard. Like, really fucking hard. And often not in a fun way, but in a “fuck you and your enjoyment”-way that makes the Itagaki games look strictly pleasant. Some of these boss fights make me wish I was fighting Gigadeath again, and that’s a feat I thought was impossible.
I hopped in to unlock all the gear and achievements (all except for “Speed runner” since I can’t be bothered with downgrading the game just to unlock it). Went pretty fast since levels are small and requirements simple but it was fun nonetheless.
I’ll have to jump back in to do some proper photos of the DLC stages but that’ll have to wait a bit.
Persona 3 Portable
Progressing pretty slowly with this one as I treat it like a “play before bed” type of game. I really like Kotone and enjoy the new events written for her, hopefully they keep their quality throughout. Social links seem to have the same problem as the original ones for the most part (agree with people to make them like you) but whatever.
There’s one thing that’s bothering me and that’s lack of audio settings - the sound effects (especially crit hits) during combat tend to be slightly louder than everything else and quickly become rather grating to hear.
All in all, it’s pretty fun so far. While I don’t expect much differences in terms of the main story I’m curious where the rest of the writing ends up.
Project Wingman
I’ve decided to take another stab at playing this thing in VR. My initial attempt was a bit weird as even though my PC is close to being bare minimum to run the thing in VR it didn’t seem to use all of the available resources during gameplay. After some searching I found multiple claims that VR performance got kinda wrecked with the release of patch 2.0 so I decided to give the old version a shot. Boy was it worth it! Well, kind of.
Both performance and hardware utilisation are definitely better, giving the speed and smoothness I didn’t see during my previous session. It’s super fun to play and gives me hope I might be able to finish the campaign before I finally manage to upgrade my PC. It’s also has a functional menu controls in VR unlike the 2.0 version.
It’s really fun and being able to look around makes planning your moves way easier (I should look into non-VR head tracking for my normal playthrough).
At the same time, 1.0 is 1.0. The anniversary update brought with it various improvements, including: better control of cloud settings, visual improvements to stages and updated HUD. It’s also the only version of the game you can play the DLC with which is unfortunate since I really want to play the “Express Lane” in VR.
It’s an acceptable compromise overall but far from ideal way to experience the game. Oh well…
Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown
I honestly didn’t expect to play this game any time soon due to price but it’s currently 90% off (or 84% directly on Steam) so I decided to take this opportunity and compare it with Project Wingman while it’s still fresh in my mind.
I haven’t played much yet (only 5 missions so far) so I’ll stick to first impressions, with more thought out writeup probably next week. Here are the things that stood out the most so far:
Not being able to rebind HOTAS controls in game is a terrible choice and whoever decided on that should feel bad. It can be done by editing an ini file but that shouldn’t be necessary in this day and age. Also, no mouse support for menus - seriously?
Speed control doesn’t feel right yet, I’m sure I’ll get used to it though.
Flares are so limited you might as well not have them. Not that they’re as necessary as in PW but still.
Not yet sold on voice acting, prefer Project Wingman on that front so far. It feels a bit too… clinical (or slightly less natural), I guess?
I have similar feelings towards writing in general. It feels a bit too sterile, corporate and unnatural, with lots of “lordumpy” narration. Not the worst thing ever but it’s definitely noticeable.
Game looks great, more dynamic elements in the cockpit are always a plus.
The idea of music fading out when flying through clouds is cool but gets annoying really fast. Decent way to push people away from flying into them, I guess.
I’m playing on hard but it’s not particularly challenging so far. I hope things pick up or there’s an unlockable higher difficulty after completing the game.
All in all, I think PW is a better game for me at the moment - not because AC7 is bad, but rather because it’s a bit more “safe” in comparison. I still like it and hope to warm up to it as I play but so far it kinda makes me want to go back to PW, not gonna lie.
Shantae and The Pirate’s Curse. This weeb game showed up in my GOG library for free somehow, so I thought I’d install it so I can decide that I hate it, uninstall and move on. The problem is I love it because it’s a great fucking game. Casual platforming, metroidvania elements, bangin’ ass soundtrack, every character has giant tits for no reason. I recommend it!
I’m replaying Riftbreaker. They just dropped the extended endgame (plus a bunch of other new features) and it’s a good reason to play through it again.
The combination of base building, tower defense, and action gameplay just works for me.
Please stop me from building over-defended walls at the far borders of the entire map and using a consistent 4x4 grid placement for flooring that aligns the entire gotdamn map…
Hey, did Camo unlock in your playthrough with this update? I started with coop_beta and have since gone back to the main branch after the update, and the tech and blueprint unlocked, but I can’t actually select it.
I have this vague recollection from one or two earlier playthroughs that during one of the mission maps, some cloaked dudes show up, theres some Ashley/Mr. Riggs dialogue, and you suddenly can use Cloak. Separate from scanning enough of them to unlock the tech/blueprint. Tried Googling and couldn’t find anything about that, though I feel like I went on this journey once before and got reminded of the mission thing from some website.
That doesn’t sound entirely unfamiliar but I can’t remember if that was actually something that happened in an earlier version of the game. All I know is that enough familiarity with those guys plus hazenite handling will also get you there.
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A gaming community free from the hype and oversaturation of current releases, catering to gamers who wait at least 12 months after release to play a game. Whether it’s price, waiting for bugs/issues to be patched, DLC to be released, don’t meet the system requirements, or just haven’t had the time to keep up with the latest releases.
fallout 4 still. imma slow.
I enjoyed FO4 way more than the community, I know it’s lacking a bit in some areas but behind Skyrim it’s my favourite game to mod. The common criticisms just didn’t bother me I guess. I put nearly a thousand hours into it (mostly modding) and had a blast the whole time. I hope you enjoy it like I did and not like the general community did.
I was just playing skyrim. did not complete it but I can see how much they added. Its funny needing to have the hold down the button thing due to all the options. I prefer fantasy settings or utopia science fiction but its very good so far.
Skyrim is my most played game ever, but honestly a vast majority of that playtime was not spent on the main storyline at all. The game is best when you’re doing side quests and just exploring the world (and modding of course, it has a massive modding community, literally half of all mods on nexus are for Skyrim). The main quest is fine, but it’s nothing special. It’s your run-of-the-mill “you’re the savour of the world” type thing. But the thieves guild and dark brotherhood are both a lot of fun, the civil war is really fun too, and there’s just so much care put into the environment. Go check out random caves and camps and pay close attention to your surroundings, and you’ll see so many stories there that never get explicitly told. Environmental story telling is Skyrim’s strong suit for sure.
Oh im not finished. I actually did not mod and I may restart with mods.
There was a bluesky thread on games that scared you as a child, and I was reminded one of mine was Duke Nukem 3D. Since I haven’t played it in over 20 years, I decided to look up that remastered version and you know what, pretty fun game still. The levels feel much smaller to me nowadays - even though they’re fairly dense - but the guns feel good, killing enemies is satisfying, staying on your toes all the time hits just right. I also find it deeply amusing that creating a character was as easy as putting as many one liners from your favorite movies in the script as you can.
Picked up Nioh 2 on the PC, a game that I already owned for the Ps4, but now I’m trying the complete edition. Turns out that the DLC added new weapon types - and weapons in Nioh are far more intricate and complex than other soul-styled games - including a Fist type. Not only that, but literally the first skill you can learn is the Dempsey Roll! I feel cheated from having played only the base version. Maybe this time I’ll actually finish this game.
If you’re digging Duke 3D, I can’t recommend Ion Fury enough. It’s incredible how far their team has pushed the Build engine.
Ion Fury just felt wrong to me. Looks and feels like Duke3D, but isn’t. And it’s somehow missing some of that character from back in the days. Hard to explain. I’d rather recommend Shadow Warrior Classic (or the Redux Version) which also uses the Build engine, came out shortly after Duke3D and has some great humour.
I’m not in any rush, so I’ll keep that in mind, but currently my plans for after I’m satisfied with Duke 3D is trying Dark Forces and the original Doom, both that I also haven’t played in a few decades
How hard exactly are the Nioh games? I’m playing through the Ninja Gaiden series at the moment so I guess I’m on a bit of a Team Ninja kick, which has made me look at them again. But from what I’ve heard they’re perhaps even more prohibitively difficult than Ninja Gaiden.
Having played very little Ninja Gaiden, I don’t think they’re similar at all save from being 3rd person games. Nioh is much closer to the Souls formula, which slower combat, stamina consumption on actions and a demanding care on facing enemies, with the added complexity (though not necessarily added difficulty) of weapon stances and combos, skill trees, colored loot, and a Devil Trigger-like skill.
If you’re going to try one, you should expect something more akin to Dark Souls + Diablo lootfest than the action romp that is Ninja Gaiden
Oh interesting! I knew about the different weapons and combos and coming from Ninja Gaiden that is appealing but the Diablo style loot piñata gameplay I was not expecting. Not sure it makes it more appealing to me though, sadly. I had hoped it was more of a Souls-meets-Ninja-Gaiden.
I’m still a bit scared, even though Ninja Gaiden have an even more brutal reputation than Dark Souls I found NGB and NG2 manageable whereas DS3 and Elden Ring felt like just on the border of what I can handle, sometimes going over it. Maybe we’re all just given to different types of games?
Overall, I find Nioh to give you far more tools than the usual Souls game, but also not demand as much mastery of them. There’s still some punishing mechanics (the only game that I’ve enjoyed doing the Exp recover after dying was Lies of P) and obtuse stats (even more when you consider the loot piñatas), but its still a game where I can go “All right, I don’t want to deal with this” and use the Yokai transformation to melt a boss’ HP.
Of course, at the end of the day, to each its own, so if Souls+Diablo gameplay doesn’t sound appealing to you, its an easy skip.
Alright, thank you so much! I will keep it in mind and maybe tentatively wishlist them for a deep sale!
The PC version of Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter. This game is super difficult for me but I’m having fun trying. It also tends to jump-scare me more than any horror game has before. Sadly, I can’t get GRAW2 to run because of weird Physx problems and Wine/Proton, so I might go re-play Ghost Recon Future Soldier for the Xbox 360 again after this one. I’m too busy to get to that this week, though.
I also scooped up a Fire Emblem Awakening cartridge last week. I might try to finish the last two chapters of Fire Emblem Warriors and then dive into that one. I’d play both at the same time but the contrasting speeds of the two genres might be a bit too much.
My “I have 10 minutes to play” game this week is BlazBlue: Clone Phantasma. I really enjoy the BlazBlue series (especially the 3DS release) and this one is the cutesy/chibi arena fighter version. Very simple and shallow but great for quick games.
Those advanced warfighter games were so cool. Rarely see them mentioned but I fucking loved those squad based shooters.
might as well be a solo game, though. my squad mates are as dumb as a bag of hammers 😆
Path of exile 2 is free this weekend, and has a new season starting in a few hours, I’m trying to get my friends together to jump in.
It’s not very in the spirit of this sub though, but it did take a lot of patience to get here.
I’m still kicking around the idea of getting no man’s sky, but it hasn’t dropped enough yet.
Persona 5 was in the humble bundle, I’ve yet to get into a persona game (tried 3 and 4) to the point of “gameplay” there’s so much story than just doesn’t connect with me before the gameplay starts. Makes me miss Pokemon Red/blue.
P5R may not be to your liking then either. I found it to be less front loaded on the narrative than P4G, but it’s still a very narrative focused game. I can say however that I much preferred the story of P5R. I haven’t played P3(any version) yet. That’s just kind of the way Persona games are. They all start kind of slow. At least the two I’ve played. SMT may be more to your liking. I’ve only played SMT IV but SMT seems to be more gameplay focused. That one is at least from what I remember.
I played the demo of smt5 (which is how I know you’re referring to shin megami tensai (sp?) in case anyone else wants to experience it) and it was a really fun game, definitely faster to pick up the gameplay, and it reminded me, in many good ways, of dragon warrior monsters and Digimon, but at the end of the demo I was hesitant to pull the trigger because there are so many other games that deserve some play time.
I’ll definitely go back to it when it’s on sale, and I’m going to give p5 a, maybe not fair, shake.
Yeah Shin Megami Tensei is often abbreviated as SMT. I’d say with P5 if you don’t like it by the end of the first palace, then you probably won’t like the rest of it. You’ve seen most of the core gameplay and mechanics by then. I would definitely say play P5R and not vanilla P5 if you have the option. Some mechanics are changed in P5R that make it a smoother experience. The big new additions are mostly at the end, the “Third Semester”.
Started playing Pikmin
Horizon Zero Dawn and Astro’s Playroom
Traded in a bunch of stuff on Monday and picked up a PS5. So far really enjoying it and especially the controller, that thing is amazing. Next payday I’m definitely buying the newer Astro Bot game.
Astro bot is so damn good. I haven’t found another PS game that maximizes the functions of the dualsense like they did, it’s kind of a shame.
I burned probably a half hour just enjoying the vibration textures while walking on different surfaces lol.
Just figured out how to play fallout 3 on my phone so that and I’m also playing Mo.Co I’m loving that game
You need to enlighten us
On the fallout 3 thing? I’m using Winlator on a Samsung Galaxy s24 Ultra with my Backbone. Sound skips a bit but the animation of the game itself it’s clean.
Okii thanks !
I managed to finish Ninja Gaiden 2 (Xbox 360) on Normal. What a beautiful fucking mess of a game. If only they would have taken their time polishing it instead of pushing it out the door hoping for a bonus payout it really could have ended up the best action game of all time. Even though I spent more time screaming at it than any other game I’ve played so far I really can’t wait for a Ninja Gaiden 2 Black sale to try it with FiendBusa’s “White” mod.
Having come this far, and with NG4 on the horizon, I thought I might as well give Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor’s Edge a try as well. Just to complete the trilogy. Man, I really don’t like this game. I don’t know whether I’ll actually manage to make myself finish it. And it’s weird because the combat had all the ingredients to be the very best of the entire series. Ryu is more fluid than ever, his moveset is larger than ever and the dynamic flexibility of combat is higher than ever. All the fundamentals are there. It just… doesn’t feel that good to play. The game wants you to play for Steel On Bone counters, but that type of reactive gameplay is not that fun. It doesn’t feel as measured and precise as NGB combat, and not as frantic and viscerally satisfying as NG2 combat.
Also, let’s talk about the setting and the story. NGB did not have a good story, but it had a cool setting with the eclectic mix of ancient, steampunk and futuristic. Also the story was kind of comic book-y and didn’t get in the way. NG2 dialled everything up to 11, and the story devolved into the absolutely insane campy nonsense that is so bad it’s almost good. It’s trash, but entertaining in a B-movie type way. Also NG2 had some incredible variation in locales, and while the globetrotting didn’t make any sense you constantly saw new and exciting locations and the levels themselves were pretty cool.
NG3RE has an absolutely woeful story, so actively bad it’s actually getting in the way of my enjoyment. It manages to be boring, derivative, cliche-ridden and lame without ever crossing over into so-bad-it’s-good. It also completely ruins the vibe by reframing the game into some sort of Call of Duty or Ghost Recon-esque military special agent story, and the levels are poorly designed and extremely boring. NG2 had varied and interesting combat arenas, these are just mind numbing open squares with again a CoD type of military theme.
And on top of all this it’s hard. Like, really fucking hard. And often not in a fun way, but in a “fuck you and your enjoyment”-way that makes the Itagaki games look strictly pleasant. Some of these boss fights make me wish I was fighting Gigadeath again, and that’s a feat I thought was impossible.
Umurangi Generation
I hopped in to unlock all the gear and achievements (all except for “Speed runner” since I can’t be bothered with downgrading the game just to unlock it). Went pretty fast since levels are small and requirements simple but it was fun nonetheless.
I’ll have to jump back in to do some proper photos of the DLC stages but that’ll have to wait a bit.
Persona 3 Portable
Progressing pretty slowly with this one as I treat it like a “play before bed” type of game. I really like Kotone and enjoy the new events written for her, hopefully they keep their quality throughout. Social links seem to have the same problem as the original ones for the most part (agree with people to make them like you) but whatever.
There’s one thing that’s bothering me and that’s lack of audio settings - the sound effects (especially crit hits) during combat tend to be slightly louder than everything else and quickly become rather grating to hear.
All in all, it’s pretty fun so far. While I don’t expect much differences in terms of the main story I’m curious where the rest of the writing ends up.
Project Wingman
I’ve decided to take another stab at playing this thing in VR. My initial attempt was a bit weird as even though my PC is close to being bare minimum to run the thing in VR it didn’t seem to use all of the available resources during gameplay. After some searching I found multiple claims that VR performance got kinda wrecked with the release of patch 2.0 so I decided to give the old version a shot. Boy was it worth it! Well, kind of.
Both performance and hardware utilisation are definitely better, giving the speed and smoothness I didn’t see during my previous session. It’s super fun to play and gives me hope I might be able to finish the campaign before I finally manage to upgrade my PC. It’s also has a functional menu controls in VR unlike the 2.0 version.
It’s really fun and being able to look around makes planning your moves way easier (I should look into non-VR head tracking for my normal playthrough).
At the same time, 1.0 is 1.0. The anniversary update brought with it various improvements, including: better control of cloud settings, visual improvements to stages and updated HUD. It’s also the only version of the game you can play the DLC with which is unfortunate since I really want to play the “Express Lane” in VR.
It’s an acceptable compromise overall but far from ideal way to experience the game. Oh well…
Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown
I honestly didn’t expect to play this game any time soon due to price but it’s currently 90% off (or 84% directly on Steam) so I decided to take this opportunity and compare it with Project Wingman while it’s still fresh in my mind.
I haven’t played much yet (only 5 missions so far) so I’ll stick to first impressions, with more thought out writeup probably next week. Here are the things that stood out the most so far:
All in all, I think PW is a better game for me at the moment - not because AC7 is bad, but rather because it’s a bit more “safe” in comparison. I still like it and hope to warm up to it as I play but so far it kinda makes me want to go back to PW, not gonna lie.
Shantae and The Pirate’s Curse. This weeb game showed up in my GOG library for free somehow, so I thought I’d install it so I can decide that I hate it, uninstall and move on. The problem is I love it because it’s a great fucking game. Casual platforming, metroidvania elements, bangin’ ass soundtrack, every character has giant tits for no reason. I recommend it!
The Shantae series are some great metroidvanias with a lot of sass. Definite recommendation.
That said, Pirate’s Curse is my favorite of the bunch; the gameplay is just so satisfyingly smooth.
I‘m gonna play Outpath when I have time solo and Peak with my gf. And I‘ll probably randomly boot up half a dozen other games if Outpath loses me.
Outpath was a good time 🙂
Right now i play “A Game about digging a Hole”. I feel very dwarfy rn.
I’m replaying Riftbreaker. They just dropped the extended endgame (plus a bunch of other new features) and it’s a good reason to play through it again.
The combination of base building, tower defense, and action gameplay just works for me.
Please stop me from building over-defended walls at the far borders of the entire map and using a consistent 4x4 grid placement for flooring that aligns the entire gotdamn map…
Edit: said map
Can’t. I’m too busy building fusion reactors in bulk to power my wall of gatling laser towers.
Hey, did Camo unlock in your playthrough with this update? I started with coop_beta and have since gone back to the main branch after the update, and the tech and blueprint unlocked, but I can’t actually select it.
Normally, I think. I haven’t built it yet but it has unlocked. Not sure what triggered it, though.
Honestly, I’m not going to be using it – I’ve been showered with unique red chainsaws so my stealth consists of cutting down all potential witnesses.
I have this vague recollection from one or two earlier playthroughs that during one of the mission maps, some cloaked dudes show up, theres some Ashley/Mr. Riggs dialogue, and you suddenly can use Cloak. Separate from scanning enough of them to unlock the tech/blueprint. Tried Googling and couldn’t find anything about that, though I feel like I went on this journey once before and got reminded of the mission thing from some website.
That doesn’t sound entirely unfamiliar but I can’t remember if that was actually something that happened in an earlier version of the game. All I know is that enough familiarity with those guys plus hazenite handling will also get you there.
I’m playing Morimens. It’s a gacha, but I love the dark, supernatural theme and atmosphere. The music is great, too.
I keep speedrunning already-completed levels in Demon Turf, doing occasional dungeons runs in Atlyss and playing new Doom 2 mapsets.
Demon Turf
Atlyss
Doom (Remanence)