I believe I’ve been to Ulfric’s throne room few times, but can’t remember why, probably some sidequests take you there as well? I do think I’ve done the war-quest but for the life of me I can’t recall which side I was on, or if it was good/bad/meh.

Usually in this kind of games I tend to do few runs to see each side of mutually exclusive paths, but… well, it’s been a while, like a decade according to steam.

could be, honestly not even sure - it’s been a while since last visit to Skyrim, and even then it likely was just random exploration and sidequests! :P

heh, it happens.

Frankly, I didn’t even regognize Ulfric either once I got to meet him later in the game. Sidequests for days until progressing anything main plot related, heh.

Admittedly I haven’t played Skyrim in ages, but surely Ralof doesn’t die during the intro? One of the prisoners does die when they try to escape but not Ralof.

according to hastily googled 'scrolls wiki: https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/Ralof

… However, Alduin attacks Helgen, and Ralof is able to escape. After reaching shelter, Ralof frees the Dragonborn from their bindings and asks for help against the Imperial soldiers. Later, the Dragonborn has the opportunity to rejoin Ralof and escape from Helgen. …

he’s part of few quest lines later on as well.

edit: but truth be told, even with name, I wouldn’t have regognized him after helgen anyway.

It’s been a minute since I last tried it, but: Forge: The Magic: The Gathering Rules Engine https://card-forge.github.io/forge/ & https://github.com/Card-Forge/forge

It’s essentially MTG: Shandalar - but free & opensource. So basically you start with some starter deck, roam the lands to defeat color-coded wizards and dungeons for ante-cards and money (which you use to just buy cards from vendors), build deck, and ultimately defeat the elemental gods etc. Shandalar. :)

The game has actual MTG cards (can be downloaded via the game’s menus).

Been chipping away with Elden Ring, but I do use seamless coop for the off chance my friends want to join, and some easymode mod because I am so unbelievably bad at these games.

Having fun, but it’s funny when every time I think I could do with less easymode, some enemy absolutely curbstomps me. Maybe one day I can manage without:P

I do like how there’s very little waypoint-guidance, but some todo-list for things I have agreed to would be nice. But that’s the style, I guess.

huh. I do kinda like this kind of story/telltalesque games and I can’t say I had ever even heard about this one. Though admittedly I’m only a “surface-level trekkie”.

Either way, kinda bummer to see it go.

also, probably not a thing vast majority of gamers have the ability to set-up or maintain.

SDV felt quite hectic when I tried to do everything the game told me about, but once I let go and didn’t worry about the upcoming evaluation, everything became nicer.

But if you can’t shake the need to do everything ASAP, can’t help you there. But the game has very few (if any?) missable things, no need to do everything NOW NOW NOW, there’s always next year.

Though, yea, there’s quite a bit of work to do for eg. 100% community center or both dungeons. I suppose there’s mods to alleviate the “grind/difficulty”, but haven’t checked.

Probably the LJN’s entire NES-catalogue? IIRC they were pretty much all some media-property-license-schlock.

I’ve played very few movie-to-game adaptations, but one that I did play was Total Recall for NES. It’s fairly ass, imo.

The game does follow the movie fairly well, although I can’t say I recall Arnie pummeling dozens of hobos in a cement factory in the movie x)

The controls were fairly stiff and difficulty quite high up there, it was on NES after all.

I think that one option might be to have two lists of achievements.

And then we’d just replace one problem with another, some people care way too much about achievements and they’d be working even more to get ALL of them / both sets.

Friend of mine recommended it to me, and it was already on my radar as it did look very interesting. Bought it, played about an hour and proceeded to ask for a refund. It didn’t do it for me at all.

The funny thing is that on paper it should have been a slam dunk for me, but literally nothing in-game felt like I liked doing it. Weird.

Welp, not every game is for me, and in this case I know I’m a rare outlier. :P

Entirely up to the game & how interesting the post-game stuff is.

I have 100%'s eg. Batman: Arkham Asylum (on normal, not gonna try-hard it). The amount of collectibles was within the toleranse and it was fairly fun to hunt the items with the hints provided.

Now, few years forward with Arkham City and Arkham Knight? Hard nope. Too many collectibles/activities/timewasters, stupendously huge areas, too obscure hints, nah, nopety-nope-nope. And the good ending in AK was tied to finishing “optional activities” which I just could not be bothered with, watched the ending on youtube and uninstalled.

Diablo-likes I can grind for hundreds, if not thousands of hours, as the “click go brrrr, get item of +1 betterness” after campaign is fun for surprisingly long periods for me. But at the moment I have the problem that I have pretty much played all of the available ones (edit: ones that I’m willing to buy, that is).

Bricky is entertaining and laces the lore with memes. Easy entry to the lore, if a bit wrong at times - or so I’ve been told. “Close enough”, imo.

An absolute banger of a management/“sim” game. My all time favorites.

Worth noting that while ottd (the free one) does the same thing, you can use the original assets (graphics, sounds, music) with it. The og soundtrack is absolutely masterpiece of latin influenced midi jazz.

All good and fair when it comes to a bit of banter :)

Besides, the game sets unrealistic expectations as the characters actually talk.

are you sure they’re not just… Finnish?

heh, kinda fair, tbh. But then again, so am I, and it still feels like watching aliens :D

Started playing Rauniot - a post-apocalyptic isometric point&click adventure game set in Lapland. Only few hours in and the vibes are great, although the voice acting and dialogue feels … I dunno, it’s not “bad”, but it feels a bit “off”, like it’s written by “semi-edgy artsyfartsy” type, and the dialogue is performed by aliens who only got the tldr version of how to act human.

Visually the game looks quite a bit like Fallout 1 and 2, just with higher colordepth and resolution. Sound (apart from dialogue) is pretty ambient. So all good in my books. And I gotta respect the absolutely slamming metal tune the main character is blasting in their car during the intro sequence. Hell. Yea. \,,/

Puzzles have been mostly “find a tool to do x”, some items (eg. a rope in the first screen of the game) do blend into the background, so hovering over everything on the screen is a must. Interactables are highlighted in yellow outline, which on some cases can be really soft and it blends to the apocalyptic colorpalette of sepia/brown/gray surprisingly well, but at least all interactable things have a soundeffect when hovered with a mouse.

Gotta play more, I do want to see where it goes with the story and puzzles later on.

doing everything in one playthrough is not the same as softlocking the game. Exclude one path, sure. Softlock? Bullshit.

No doubt about it. Still feels bad to step on those landmines. :P

Admittedly, I haven’t played MM further than the first few minutes, I like old adventure games (esp. LucasArts ones), but just haven’t bothered with this one.

I suspect the garage puzzle probably has some hint, like “it’s too heavy/I’m not strong enough” when attempting to open it, so the player atleast can figure out that strength training is a thing. Still a bit of a stretch, as it’s cartoon logic to actually become stronger after one workout - but… it is a cartoony comedy game.

The envelope thing sounds like one of those “needs a crystal ball” -things that many of the games of the era unfortunately had. I don’t think people even at the time appreciated the “dead man walking” -design. Must be fun for the softlock to become apparent hours or days later. It’s just a dick move design-wise.

It the map has locations named and there’s a compass, I’ll manage. The quest pointer in later bethesda games is “a bit” too much handholding, imo. But that said I’ve seen some mw memes about some cube and how hard it is to find… No idea what that’s about but probably going to find out :P

so, I take there’s no in-game map then? oof, but I can deal with map on second monitor.

attacks not connecting might bug me a bit, but I suspect there’s some mod for that if it ends up breaking my brain.

Thanks, these were good to know stuff!

ah, in that case I’m gonna venture forth without it. Expansions are cool, but I kinda want to get my feet wet with the base game first. QoL mods which make the experience have “less friction” I’m entirely fine with

oh for sure (near vanilla) experience for first time. Gameplay changing mods etc are for playthroughs after the first one.

I take the Tamrield Rebuilt mods are mostly quality-of-life -stuff?

I’ve been meaning to check out Morrowind, most people have been frothing about it since forever and… tbh, only Elder Scrolls game I have really played has been Skyrim, only dabbled with Oblivion and Morrowind.

And… oh, OpenMW is in my linux distro’s repository too, that’s one barrier removed already! I take MW is quite a bit more approachable than Daggerfall, but probably quite a bit less than eg. Skyrim?

I’ve been waiting for this demo, right off the bat I have 2 technical points to raise:

• please offer a toggle for the filmgrain/noise. streamers and youtubers will thank you, as that stuff absolutely murders capture quality.
• my framerate tanked to 35 and stayed there after the intro interrogation, which ran fine at stable 120 fps (uncapped, vsync). Using linux + proton-ge, rtx3090, r5800x3d, 64gb

so… FBC: Firebreak 2: MTX Boogaloo: Revenge

honestly, can’t remember the plot at all, it’s been about 3 eternities since I’ve played it. I do recall liking the gameplay tho. :P

heh, yea, my approach is also full on murderhobo in Styx, but I do it so nobody notices anything if at all possible. Levels can take several hours with this method so … uh, it’s not really optimal way to play but damnit that’s how I roll. Admittedly the near constant presence of the void/cliffs/etc bottomless pits makes it fairly easy to get rid of bodies.

Never really felt the need to chase the time bonuses, just collectables etc are enough for me. Admittedly I have not finished either of the games, but played pretty darn far in both.

Oh, also: Rochard - if you can get it anywhere, it is pretty dope. It’s a bit of a mix of action & puzzle platformer but with Abuse-like controls. It was pulled from steam years ago, dunno if it’s available on consoles still.

Way back I played a bit of A.R.E.S: Extinction Agenda (https://store.steampowered.com/app/92300/ARES_Extinction_Agenda/) - it’s a bit of a score attack game, but controls pretty similarly to Abuse.

If purely multiplayer game is your thing, Teeworlds (https://store.steampowered.com/app/380840/Teeworlds/ , https://teeworlds.com/) controls just like Abuse. It’s about cure orb-shaped creatures duking it out. It’s free, btw.

(video games, slang) Video games from Europe (especially Eastern Europe) with ambitious concepts but lacking in execution and sometimes exhibiting unintended glitches.

as per Wiktionary (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Eurojank)

I was under the assumption the Styx -devs were german, but apparently the studio is French. Either way. I also don’t recall any specific glitches, but the first game has a bit stiff climbing mechanics where you can (and will) do some unintended jumps to void etc.

Basically “AA game” instead if “AAA big budget game”

I honestly can’t remember where the episode ended, as it has been several years since I played it. Sorry :/

It does have the bratty schoolgirls being bratty, but it isn’t the entire episode.

Telltales Batman is on my TODO list, gotta get on that. IMO the first TT Borderlands was fairly fun, haven’t touched the second season.

It’s been several years since I played LiS, so the details of the game are a bit hazy. I recall it feeling bit lame on the beginning, but it did ramp up quite a bit towards the end. The beginning was (mostly) some school drama, like some girls acting like absolute brats and dealing with that.

The first episode is free on steam, btw. If you’re on the fence, try it out before purchase.

I’ve only played through the first LiS “season”, it’s all right. Gameplay is pretty similar to Telltale’s Walking Dead/Wolf Among Us/etc -if you enjoyed those, you probably will enjoy LiS.

If you aren’t familiar with Telltale’s games, theyre “adventure games”. Quotes because they don’t really have a “verb menu” or inventory puzzles etc like the traditional point&click adventure games. They’re more of a interactive stories with few branching paths/choices, kinda walking-sim adjacent ish.

I’d recommend the Walking Dead or Wolf Among Us over Life is strange, but it isn’t bad either.

While I do like the first 2 Styx games (the 3rd one is out soon-ish? if not now?), they are quite the “quicksave/quickload trial and error patience games” and quite deep in the eurojank spectrum. The climbing in the first one is pretty jank, and in both games the character breaks 4th wall deadpool-style pretty often, enemies are dumb as bricks but will absolutely murder you once alerted enough.

But on the upside, it’s one of those rare stealth games where murder is not penalized at all.

That said, the games are great!

That’s looks like the part of the game where you chase the mob guy with the squeaky voice. I recall having to redo the part several times, if the random goons didn’t kill me, the “boss” sure did.

But then again most scenes in the game were like that, the difficulty felt hella swingy all the time.

Guessing or do you have some edge case to present? Last I tried portal 2 ran fine on 64bit system. In fact I’m not entirely use I have ever actually ran it on 32bit one.