Still not a fan. I find it very generic and soulless. Very pretty and robot dinosaurs but at the same time also very empty. One of those „find the colored ledge where the devs want you to climb - and nowhere else!“ games, had me run around a cliff a dozen times already. SPOILERS: That in the end they made an AI to fix extinction by AI to be screwed over by another AI again was funny tho lol. Anyway, gonna beat it now, I‘m basically at the end anyway, might as well. Forbidden West is practically off the table for me.
Schedule I
My gf wanted to try it so I said yes. What all the reviews don‘t tell you: If your connection is not top notch stable, the game loves to desync and eat your inventory without telling you at all. We had days where other games were fine but Schedule I would desync and/or dc every 2-5 minutes. When it works it‘s fun though. My gf loves cooking if you know what I mean.
I keep chipping away at Octopath Traveler (chapter 3s) and Titan Quest (works criminally well on Deck for being stitched on gamepad support) on my Deck before bedtime.
Someone on Lemmy gifted me “Beyond the Edge of Owlsgard”, an old school point & click adventure. I’ve been having a lot of fun with it. The voice acting is great!
I’m also almost half way through “Black Mesa” a.k.a. the Half-life 1 fan remaster. It’s pretty good, but a bit unintuitive at times.
There’s also a not-patient game I’m playing: “StarRupture” released in early access a few days ago. It’s made by the developers of “Green Hell” which I really liked. It’s like Satisfactory with much more combat and base defense. I’m only a few hours in bur so far I like it!
Wanted: Dead and I was taught a valuable lesson about action game reviews: if your review doesn’t come with gameplay footage, it’s effectively worthless.
I have no idea how most people played this game, but I watched enough negative reviews with dogshit footage to come to this conclusion.
Like no shit you don’t have enough bullets but you have i-frames on your rolls, dashes, counters, finishers, and metered attack because the game is clearly asking you to do more melee… and no shit the AI runs away from your grenades because the freaking game is asking you to use them to snuff out enemies hiding behind covers… but no, let’s just turtle behind a cover, shoot, and complain about bullets… I could go on. It’s ridiculous.
The game is awesome, and absolutely was not meant for a mainstream audience. If you liked Vanquish and Gungrave, I recommend Wanted: Dead.
Good eye! It is made by Soleil (Itagaki’s studio) and you’re correct in assuming enemies aren’t as aggressive in general; however, in this particular clip, the grenades the boss keeps tossing from off screen and the multiple group knockdowns/finishers here make them look more docile than they actually are. If I miss the gun counter at the beginning, or if I don’t have enough meter to execute the gun takedown near the end, the encounter was gonna look much different.
The one enemy left near the end did not attack because I killed enough to trigger a cut scene. He comes after me after it ends.
In terms of difficulty, I’m playing on normal here, and I have died a lot so far, but this could be due to my general discomfort with aiming and gun-based combat in most games, so your milage may vary there. Also Hard difficulty is unlocked from the get-go, so the option is available.
Ah, that makes sense! Damn I wish Itagaki was still with us. That might make me actually wishlist this game, though. I played Samurai Jack: Battle Through Time recently (also by Soleil, the last game Itagaki was involved in) and was pretty positively surprised by it.
Still working on Bloodborne and am having a pretty good time. My local library happened to have the strategy guide available so I checked it out and have kind of been retroactively checking to see what I missed in a given area when I move onto a new one. I’m at Mergo’s Wet Nurse and somehow I completely missed the Forsaken Cainhurst Castle and Upper Cathedral Ward, so it looks like I have some stuff to catch up on before I tackle her. I was also pretty surprised to see that Mergo is, at least by percentage of the guide remaining, towards the end of the game. I thought that couldn’t be right and checked to see how much time I’ve put into Bloodborne and I’m at about 25 hours, which is way more than I was expecting. Not sure where I’m going with this, but that feels like some sort of testament to how fun the game is when you get so lost in the game and your concept of time just dissapears.
I played The Stanley Parable for the first time this week. I wasn’t a PC person back then, so now I’ve picked up the physical copy of the Switch version. Fascinatingly weird.
More spoilery thoughts on the game
I got most of the endings I think. Did the obvious routes and a couple I happened on, then I looked up the old lists of endings. And at least got the ‘Epilogue’ for the Ultra Deluxe stuff.
At the opening, it’s so interesting. It feels like a game that has a lot to discover. It turns out though that the joke is kinda that there isn’t. It has tons of little hints that lead nowhere. Still, I smiled and laughed like an idiot a few times when it called out my expectations.
The other games route was cool, but I wish it were still Minecraft and Portal instead of Firewatch and Rocket League; the latter two I have no strong feelings for.
So I finished up the campaign on Monday and it’s still as great as I remember. Noble Team :(
Satisfactory
Not normally my kind of game but my wife wanted to play together and it’s been fun. Our base is a mix of tidyness (her) and absolute mess (me)… So the perfect match.
First clear of 2026! Gothic is a game I played many times in the past but never really finished - until now. It still plays and feels really good and I’m pretty happy with it for the most part, I did however completely forgot how unfinished it is. Very limited side content which doesn’t really expand past chapter 2, a bunch of partially implemented or just empty areas, characters that seem like they should have something going on with them. There’s a lot but it didn’t really affect my enjoyment.
I played the game using OpenGothic, project technically focused on Gothic 2 Night of the Raven but it does support the first game as a bonus. Having the ability to play natively on Linux is pretty cool and the whole thing was rather promising early on but the longer I played the more issues cropped up. Some of the problems I’ve encountered include:
Missing visual effects (barrier) and minor rendering issues (mostly water, especially waterfalls).
Forests feel less threatening due to longer draw distance and lighter ambiance inside.
Static rivers - when swimming in rivers in the original water current moves player appropriately, this isn’t the case in OpenGothic.
Some quests end without removing brought quest items.
Rare quest trigger/advancement issues, ability to trigger things out of order.
Various NPC problems, including:
Enemies wouldn’t loot player if won in combat (fixed with the latest release).
Enemy combat AI can be really wonky.
Two-handed weapons are stowed sideways on NPC’s backs (introduced in the latest release).
Female characters keep spinning in place.
Not really a problem but I don’t really care for the updated visuals and feel they take away from the art style at times.
I’m not sure how many of these have to do with OpenGothic in general and what’s the fault of me playing G1 rather than 2 (as I said, support for the first games is just a bonus). I’m sure some of them were also present in the original but I don’t remember enough from G1 to pick them out. Thankfully, none of these problems were game breaking but I think I’ll play Gothic 2 the normal way (whenever that happens).
All in all, it was a fun ride but it also reminded me why I spent waaaay more time with the second game in the past.
Short follow-up to last week's recap
After writing my end of the year recap I thought it could be fun to try and come up with the first completion date for as many games in my library as I can. I have a spreadsheet with all of them already so all that was left is to try and figure out the dates. It was easy with some and harder with others but I managed to come up with results for 151 games, with the oldest completion date going as far back as 2003.
Why bother? It’ll make another recap easier to write, simple as that. I also like organising things so the process was fun in its own way and gave me a chance to look back at my gaming habits throughout the years.
Does the open source Gothic engine have any options to modernize the camera and movement controls? That’s what killed my interest in the first two despite them being on paper the perfect games for me (and I enjoyed 3 and Risen despite them being considered a step down in quality from the first two).
It’s been ages, but I remember one of the first things Gothic 2 has you do is navigate down a narrow spiral staircase that resets your camera and walking direction any time you brush against the walls. It’s as if the developers wanted to warn you ahead of time about the control issues.
Just checked with G1 and 2, the issue is still present for both. The reason it works like this, I think, is because both games can be played entirely with keyboard which makes sudden turns a bit of a pain compared to the mouse. It’s pretty much an assist feature if you will.
But yeah, regardless of the reason for its existence it’s still there.
oooh. my weekly ff12 posting. so I learned something about the diamon armlet and rare drops from chests at least in the zodiac version. Again this is not really outlayed well from web searches I have seen. What you do see is that the armlet has a 5% chance for a chest to do its rare drop. What is a bit less clear is each chest has its own rare drop and that is the only thing that will come from it. You may see mention that chests don’t only appear but what I do not see mentioned is it seems the chance of a chest appearing seems to be based on how rare its drop is. I can’t prove it as I have not collected data and plotted a chart or such but belive me. I have been running this thing in the cerobbie step that is supposed to have the darksword ninja sword thing. I initially had ran around and man I reallly was wondering if the rare drop had been taken out or something at some point but one finally happened. So I decided I would just start going for a few chests. this line from the save crystal entrace point going between two rocks that have a chest with two inbetween. After going back and forth many many times I can plainly see the darksword chest comes up way less than chests that have the dueling mask (which I got) and the sextant and ultima is much rarer than both of those but the darkblade is that much rarer to show up. So you have a 5% chance for the armlet to work but you have another percentage for rare loot that is smaller the rarer it is. So like lets say the darkblad chest has a 5% chance to populate (this feels about right or maybe lower). So then like if you respawn the zone 400 times then maybe 20 times that chest will spawn and maybe the darkblad will drop. Between zone cutover time and actually running around at 2x speed it results in a rediculous amount of time. I would have stopped if it was not for the fact I can play my steamdeck on the toilet. (sorry tmi?)
I think TALKER Expanded is in a stable and decent enough state to take a little break, which I sorely need honestly. Been burning out a bit on it lately. So this week I will finally be playing some games.
First on the docket is the Lake House DLC for Alan Wake 2. I was in the middle of playing the DLCs when I got sidetracked into this project. After that I’ll get into one of my Christmas games, either Chrono Ark or The Banner Saga. Might play both depending on how long they are and how much of a break I need. Leaning on starting with the Banner Saga.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [email protected]
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.
Horizon Zero Dawn
Still not a fan. I find it very generic and soulless. Very pretty and robot dinosaurs but at the same time also very empty. One of those „find the colored ledge where the devs want you to climb - and nowhere else!“ games, had me run around a cliff a dozen times already. SPOILERS: That in the end they made an AI to fix extinction by AI to be screwed over by another AI again was funny tho lol. Anyway, gonna beat it now, I‘m basically at the end anyway, might as well. Forbidden West is practically off the table for me.
Schedule I
My gf wanted to try it so I said yes. What all the reviews don‘t tell you: If your connection is not top notch stable, the game loves to desync and eat your inventory without telling you at all. We had days where other games were fine but Schedule I would desync and/or dc every 2-5 minutes. When it works it‘s fun though. My gf loves cooking if you know what I mean.
I keep chipping away at Octopath Traveler (chapter 3s) and Titan Quest (works criminally well on Deck for being stitched on gamepad support) on my Deck before bedtime.
Someone on Lemmy gifted me “Beyond the Edge of Owlsgard”, an old school point & click adventure. I’ve been having a lot of fun with it. The voice acting is great!
I’m also almost half way through “Black Mesa” a.k.a. the Half-life 1 fan remaster. It’s pretty good, but a bit unintuitive at times.
There’s also a not-patient game I’m playing: “StarRupture” released in early access a few days ago. It’s made by the developers of “Green Hell” which I really liked. It’s like Satisfactory with much more combat and base defense. I’m only a few hours in bur so far I like it!
RoboCop: Rogue City is a pretty fun game, even if the character models can keep people up at night.
Wanted: Dead and I was taught a valuable lesson about action game reviews: if your review doesn’t come with gameplay footage, it’s effectively worthless.
I have no idea how most people played this game, but I watched enough negative reviews with dogshit footage to come to this conclusion.
Like no shit you don’t have enough bullets but you have i-frames on your rolls, dashes, counters, finishers, and metered attack because the game is clearly asking you to do more melee… and no shit the AI runs away from your grenades because the freaking game is asking you to use them to snuff out enemies hiding behind covers… but no, let’s just turtle behind a cover, shoot, and complain about bullets… I could go on. It’s ridiculous.
The game is awesome, and absolutely was not meant for a mainstream audience. If you liked Vanquish and Gungrave, I recommend Wanted: Dead.
Wishlisted. Definitely will give it a look when it goes on sale. Your review sold me.
Clip from my gameplay footage to give anyone interested some idea of what you can do in Wanted: Dead: https://video.hardlimit.com/w/k9q4sng5bEY67L46hBtzPX
Gives me Ninja Gaiden 2 vibes, only with less aggressive enemies.
Good eye! It is made by Soleil (Itagaki’s studio) and you’re correct in assuming enemies aren’t as aggressive in general; however, in this particular clip, the grenades the boss keeps tossing from off screen and the multiple group knockdowns/finishers here make them look more docile than they actually are. If I miss the gun counter at the beginning, or if I don’t have enough meter to execute the gun takedown near the end, the encounter was gonna look much different.
The one enemy left near the end did not attack because I killed enough to trigger a cut scene. He comes after me after it ends.
In terms of difficulty, I’m playing on normal here, and I have died a lot so far, but this could be due to my general discomfort with aiming and gun-based combat in most games, so your milage may vary there. Also Hard difficulty is unlocked from the get-go, so the option is available.
Ah, that makes sense! Damn I wish Itagaki was still with us. That might make me actually wishlist this game, though. I played Samurai Jack: Battle Through Time recently (also by Soleil, the last game Itagaki was involved in) and was pretty positively surprised by it.
Still working on Bloodborne and am having a pretty good time. My local library happened to have the strategy guide available so I checked it out and have kind of been retroactively checking to see what I missed in a given area when I move onto a new one. I’m at Mergo’s Wet Nurse and somehow I completely missed the Forsaken Cainhurst Castle and Upper Cathedral Ward, so it looks like I have some stuff to catch up on before I tackle her. I was also pretty surprised to see that Mergo is, at least by percentage of the guide remaining, towards the end of the game. I thought that couldn’t be right and checked to see how much time I’ve put into Bloodborne and I’m at about 25 hours, which is way more than I was expecting. Not sure where I’m going with this, but that feels like some sort of testament to how fun the game is when you get so lost in the game and your concept of time just dissapears.
Idk if its patient but I started Arc Raiders and it’s great.
I played The Stanley Parable for the first time this week. I wasn’t a PC person back then, so now I’ve picked up the physical copy of the Switch version. Fascinatingly weird.
More spoilery thoughts on the game
I got most of the endings I think. Did the obvious routes and a couple I happened on, then I looked up the old lists of endings. And at least got the ‘Epilogue’ for the Ultra Deluxe stuff.
At the opening, it’s so interesting. It feels like a game that has a lot to discover. It turns out though that the joke is kinda that there isn’t. It has tons of little hints that lead nowhere. Still, I smiled and laughed like an idiot a few times when it called out my expectations.
The other games route was cool, but I wish it were still Minecraft and Portal instead of Firewatch and Rocket League; the latter two I have no strong feelings for.
I’ve been sick so all I’ve been playing has been a bit of Animal Crossing New Horizons. Saw Celeste again, so that was cute!
Halo: Reach
So I finished up the campaign on Monday and it’s still as great as I remember. Noble Team :(
Satisfactory
Not normally my kind of game but my wife wanted to play together and it’s been fun. Our base is a mix of tidyness (her) and absolute mess (me)… So the perfect match.
Halo Reach is so good. It’s been a while since I’ve played it all the way through, I really should give it a shot again soon.
Gothic
First clear of 2026! Gothic is a game I played many times in the past but never really finished - until now. It still plays and feels really good and I’m pretty happy with it for the most part, I did however completely forgot how unfinished it is. Very limited side content which doesn’t really expand past chapter 2, a bunch of partially implemented or just empty areas, characters that seem like they should have something going on with them. There’s a lot but it didn’t really affect my enjoyment.
I played the game using OpenGothic, project technically focused on Gothic 2 Night of the Raven but it does support the first game as a bonus. Having the ability to play natively on Linux is pretty cool and the whole thing was rather promising early on but the longer I played the more issues cropped up. Some of the problems I’ve encountered include:
I’m not sure how many of these have to do with OpenGothic in general and what’s the fault of me playing G1 rather than 2 (as I said, support for the first games is just a bonus). I’m sure some of them were also present in the original but I don’t remember enough from G1 to pick them out. Thankfully, none of these problems were game breaking but I think I’ll play Gothic 2 the normal way (whenever that happens).
All in all, it was a fun ride but it also reminded me why I spent waaaay more time with the second game in the past.
Short follow-up to last week's recap
After writing my end of the year recap I thought it could be fun to try and come up with the first completion date for as many games in my library as I can. I have a spreadsheet with all of them already so all that was left is to try and figure out the dates. It was easy with some and harder with others but I managed to come up with results for 151 games, with the oldest completion date going as far back as 2003.
Why bother? It’ll make another recap easier to write, simple as that. I also like organising things so the process was fun in its own way and gave me a chance to look back at my gaming habits throughout the years.
Does the open source Gothic engine have any options to modernize the camera and movement controls? That’s what killed my interest in the first two despite them being on paper the perfect games for me (and I enjoyed 3 and Risen despite them being considered a step down in quality from the first two).
It’s been ages, but I remember one of the first things Gothic 2 has you do is navigate down a narrow spiral staircase that resets your camera and walking direction any time you brush against the walls. It’s as if the developers wanted to warn you ahead of time about the control issues.
Just checked with G1 and 2, the issue is still present for both. The reason it works like this, I think, is because both games can be played entirely with keyboard which makes sudden turns a bit of a pain compared to the mouse. It’s pretty much an assist feature if you will.
But yeah, regardless of the reason for its existence it’s still there.
oooh. my weekly ff12 posting. so I learned something about the diamon armlet and rare drops from chests at least in the zodiac version. Again this is not really outlayed well from web searches I have seen. What you do see is that the armlet has a 5% chance for a chest to do its rare drop. What is a bit less clear is each chest has its own rare drop and that is the only thing that will come from it. You may see mention that chests don’t only appear but what I do not see mentioned is it seems the chance of a chest appearing seems to be based on how rare its drop is. I can’t prove it as I have not collected data and plotted a chart or such but belive me. I have been running this thing in the cerobbie step that is supposed to have the darksword ninja sword thing. I initially had ran around and man I reallly was wondering if the rare drop had been taken out or something at some point but one finally happened. So I decided I would just start going for a few chests. this line from the save crystal entrace point going between two rocks that have a chest with two inbetween. After going back and forth many many times I can plainly see the darksword chest comes up way less than chests that have the dueling mask (which I got) and the sextant and ultima is much rarer than both of those but the darkblade is that much rarer to show up. So you have a 5% chance for the armlet to work but you have another percentage for rare loot that is smaller the rarer it is. So like lets say the darkblad chest has a 5% chance to populate (this feels about right or maybe lower). So then like if you respawn the zone 400 times then maybe 20 times that chest will spawn and maybe the darkblad will drop. Between zone cutover time and actually running around at 2x speed it results in a rediculous amount of time. I would have stopped if it was not for the fact I can play my steamdeck on the toilet. (sorry tmi?)
Dying Light 2 has been my go-to for the last few weeks, so I’ll probably play some more of that.
I think TALKER Expanded is in a stable and decent enough state to take a little break, which I sorely need honestly. Been burning out a bit on it lately. So this week I will finally be playing some games.
First on the docket is the Lake House DLC for Alan Wake 2. I was in the middle of playing the DLCs when I got sidetracked into this project. After that I’ll get into one of my Christmas games, either Chrono Ark or The Banner Saga. Might play both depending on how long they are and how much of a break I need. Leaning on starting with the Banner Saga.