I know it isn’t what you mentioned but it reminded me when I wad reading anyway. I am quite hyped for the new Heroes of Might and Magic.

Oh fuck thanks for the warning.

Is anyone surprised by this? Really? At this stage, after we’ve seen the lenghts that Sony has went to stuff PSN account requirements on even their offline singleplayer games?

I got pretty much the same opinion as you, probably a bit angrier about all the shit they did, with Unreal Tournament, their store and spyware and exclusives, and their unoptimized bloated game engine taking over the industry.

So no, I guess I don’t claim those games or have an account. I already have a million games I’ll never finish playing on Steam and emulators anyway.

And that, too, isn’t new. It’s been done since at least the Spellforce series, or Dawn of War 2.

If you want to see what an “innovated” RTS looks like, check out Beyond All Reason. The base formula is Total Annihilation, but with nearly 30 years of player driven improvements and QoL. That game’s UX is extremely smart, and you can keybind or automate so many things on the fly, freeing you up to make strategic and tactical level decisions , instead of spamclicking for micro. Which, you can also do if you want to.

Just picked this one up since it was cheap.and I’ve been wanting to play a village management game in a while. Holy crap this game is amazing. I spent 6 hours on it un the first day alone. I love how the roguelike format keeps it always engaging and direct, without meandering about trying to figure out what I want to do. It has clear goals, needs to be met, and multiple ways to reach those goals. I usually like playing RTS games in short bursts of Skirmishes, and this feels very similar. Trying different strategies with different buildings and terrains.

I was also looking at Timberborn (funny how both games have postapocalyptic sentient beavers) and Farthest Frontier, but I think I’ll be busy with AtS for a while until I get to try those two. And I’ll never need to even consider giving Ubisoft my money for Anno ever again.

When in doubt, true doubt, Doom is always there for me, in every device I own.

Me too. Stopped a couple years ago after I hit 2,000 hours of play time. This year I’ve played a lot of Helldivers 2 and Monster Hunter, which I have a combined total of nearly 1,800 hours again.

Usually around Christmas time it’s vacations and steam sale times and sometimes beach trips with my Switch and phone. So it depends a lot. But, also because of that, there are some games I played on the past in this time of the year that kinda got stuck with holidays vibes because of it. Some kf them are Doom, Quake and Monster Hunter. I think I’ll be playing Pokemon Platinum this year too, on my phone.

I don’t remember that Oni game by Bungie. That cover art looks nice.

Hmm for patient games I’m playing now… Does Super Robot Wars V count? I feel like I’ve mentioned it in several weekly threads already. I’ll also mention NFSU2 with the underground2.net modpack, then.

Very good ARPG with tons of depth to build making and a nice dark fantasy theme. One half of my favorite Diablo-likes, the other being the much simpler and more casual Torchlight 2.

Doom and Doom 2 MIDI’s. Playing these games at night just feels right. And also, the intro and soundtracks of Unreal Tournament '99. Absolute late night vibes.

Super Robot Wars V! I’m having a blast with the silly crossover story finding excuses to throw dozens of mecha from different shows at me all at once. Last night I played a mission where I had 8 Gundams in the field from 4 different shows at once! And we were fighting dragons from Cross Ange.

That one is great! I love this indie trend of low poly graphics.

I experienced the whole original trilogy last year with a friend on coop. I get it now. Why so many people love Halo.

Btw, Halo 2 and 3 are much better than the first one. If you already liked that, you’re in for a treat.

Been on Monster Hunter Sunbreak for a couple weeks now. It’s absolutely become my favorite modern monhun game, and it’s significantly improved my mental state.

Also playing Redout 2 and Blue Revolver, an old bullet hell shmup that just got a massive game revision.

Other than that, I was playing NFSU2 because of the 20th anniversary and the release of a great soft-remaster mod

My favorite, most played game AND intro to the series was MH 4 Ultimate on the 3DS. I had a total of 1,000 hours just on that game, across two saves (the first one went to 850 hours) and later I moved on to Gen and GenU on the Switch several years later when I found out I could carry over my save file. GenU is literally a game with infinite content and I don’t think I’ll ever fully finish it, but I’ll keep coming back to it every now and then. I only wish they hadn’t crippled the moveset of my favorite weapon, the Charge Blade.

I played World and Iceborne, but only for 200 hours, didn’t enjoy it much. I liked base Rise on the Switch a lot, and I’m finally playing Sunbreak now on the PC, and it’s instantly become my favorite modern monster hunter game.

I also plan on eventually playing Portable3rd and Freedom Unite on emulators.

As much as Monster Hunter is my favorite series of all time, and I have about 1600 hours combined total over several games, it’s still not caught up to my total of over 2000 hours in Warframe. Love that game to bits but yeah I think I played it enough.

Most other games I play, that I played a lot, hover between 100 and 300 hours each.

Monster Hunter. The first one I played, MH4U back in the 3DS days, I put 1,000 hours into. That was nearly 10 years ago, and I’m still playing the franchise to this day. Currently finally going through the Sunbreak expansion of Monster Hunter Rise on the PC, and noticing a marked improvement in my mental health over playing other games.

I just reinstalled NFSU2 because of the new big expansion mod underground2.net Between this, my brother wanting to play Halo, and the new Linkin Park album coming out this week, I feel like I’m in 2004 again.

Take-Two CEO? absolutely do not believe anything coming out of his mouth or company. Scum.

Lol, lmao, no.

The banner ad looks like they’re promoting a free week of the game… Which is already free to play. Are they really that desperate to get attention on it to counter these negative reviews? Lmao. I haven’t played in a while but I left a negative review there.

Ace Combat, all of them but especially the PS2 Holy Trinity.

Shadow of the Colossus.

NFSU2, Most Wanted and Burnout 3, even if theyre licensed music and not really original.

Doom midis in general are fun. Touhou games too.

Played the beta last night and yeah, it got me in the mood for monster hunting again. Time to finally go play Sunbreak since I bought it ages ago, but never played through it again (bought the base game first on the Switch)

Good move, too bad it’s tied to an incredibly bad game that ruins the franchise. Thanks a fucking lot Randy you sleazeball. Never trust Gearbox with anything.

Came here to mention just that. Base Stalker has some nice storms, but the mods built into Gamma make those absolutely terrifying. I think I genuinely fear the weather more than any mutated monster in the Zone.

As long as the .modern AAA game development scene is still incapable of making GOOD new games that at least match their old beloved titles, I’ll take the remakes of the old games instead.

I like playing “Asuna” as a minecraft-adjacent experience, with a bunch of nice world generation mods already packed in. But I also have concocted my own modsoup on top of that, so it’s also pretty far from the vanilla of that. There’s other games that come up mostly ready for play, like Mesecraft or Voxelibre (that one being mostly an actual MC clone, also renamed) look around the content DB tho, there’s a ton of nice stuff around.

This mod is awesome. It can convert any fully vanilla assets map pack into Doom 64 too. And there is a project that recreated Doom 64 maps in Doom 2 format. Yes you can stack them!

also, just noticed your username. Cool Eragon reference, took me a second to remember that it meant “dragon” in the elven language.

I mean, I played several other horde shooters. Firing continually while backpedaling is the most vintage of infantry tactics, after all. I get that these games are old and simpler, but their base gameplay must still be fun if they were so popular back in the day. I’ll at least give it a shot, since I already have them anyway…

You’ve convinced me to finally play Serious Sam. I’ve had it on Steam for years.

Depends on what you consider “cozy”. OP listed Medal of Honor and CoD, I think Doom is super cozy. If shooting Nazis or demons is our comfort activity, anything can be cozy. I still desperately need to play Boltgun, too.

sigh. Not everything must be GZDoom and Brutal Doom. The new port is perfectly fine if they’re going to play mostly vanilla. There’s no need to be this angry at everything you don’t understand in the internet.

Absolutely second the recommendations of Doom and Quake here in the thread. Boomer shooters in general. Even if the movement can be really fast, playing them on your own can be extremely cozy. Just get into the rhythm of circle strafing, shooting and weaving in and out of cover and you’ll be in the zone very quickly. Bonus point, that both Doom and Quake have 30 years of EXCELLENT quality player created content that can keep you playing fresh new levels for as long as you want to. You could play them for the rest of your life, at your own pace and preferred difficulty.

The new rereleases of both games even bundle a mod browser that you can access with zero knowledge of modding, just hop on.

Companies want all games to be multiplayer with online live ops and events and a steady flow of microtransactions money.

Yes, actually, it is part of the charm. The series started back on the PS2 and still kinda looks like that. Instead, they get to use fancy bright lighting for the weapons and lasers, and hundreds of enemies on screen at the same time, with each of them blowing up into hundreds of tiny pieces. It’s a very bonkers game, just focused on being a fun horde destroying experience. And it’s themed as classic monster B-movies with alien invasions and legally distinct Godzillas.

Win11 might get “usable” in the same sense that 8.1 was “usable” closer to the end. It was still a turd. I’m sticking with my Windows10 install as long as I can, and later switching the gaming PC to Linux if necessary. Maybe even keep a partition or drive with 10 as a “retrobox” for when it’s end of life. It’s mostly old games that don’t run well on Linux, anything more modern should be fine.