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.
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I’m playing Thief (2014). It’s often discounted at the Steam sales.
Not bad, but I made the mistake of pretty much being ignorant of the side quests for a good portion of the game! And those quests and city exploration parts are actually when you can use your special items the most 🤦♂️
The Planet Crafter, and I have a feeling that it might be here for some time. I like it’s gentle cerebralness
Still Pokémon Soul Silver. Thoughts originally here on !pokemon@sopuli.xyz.
Just went and read your other post. Great read. I love HGSS, I know people sometimes complain about the level curve but to me those games were always the peak of the series. So much content, so much charm, just an absolute love letter to Gen 1 and 2, the dual region is still the coolest thing ever and the Pokewalker was a great little gadget. Though I still haven't gotten my flying or surfing Pikachu from it as those fuckers have like a 2% spawn rate and no pity system.
HGSS will forever be my favourite Pokemon game and probably my favourite handheld (DS/GameBoy/etc) game. Having the Pokemon follow you around, plus Johto is just my favourite region, and the music, it’s just such a great game.
I finally got Ballatro and it's taken over my week.
I finally finished Abiotic Factor, and yup. I need more story and places to explore already. And I haven't even done everything there is to do yet.
I've also been playing some more Enshrouded. Finally got to the mountains, and now I just need to make some warm armor. I probably need to take a day or two to expand my main base, as it's getting a little cramped. I have pretty much all the crafters and some villagers in the main building with all their stations shoved into different corners, but my farmers actually have a house that I built for them with a separate bedroom upstairs.
I just saw the news of a new Enshrouded update yesterday and thought about trying it again. Did they change the build system in recent months? While I enjoyed discovering the map, I somehow found the building lacking. My benchmark is the Valheim build system, that is the sweet spot for me. What I crave for is a "survival" game with a Valheim build system AND a reason to build castles/villages/whatever. That is what Enshrouded did well with those characters.
Wow, I love both but I feel the building in Enshrouded is way deeper than Valheim. Sure there aren't as many "specialized" pieces like beams and arches and such, there are ways to get around it or use other decorative objects. Which this game has an absolute shitload of decorations, kinda like Conan Exiles. There are tons of chairs, beds, candles, flowers, plates and dishes; even cabinets for certain items you can find while exploring, and tons of shelves.
The world is pretty massive too, with tons of verticality. Like if you were to go as high up as you can and fall straight down, you'd probably be falling for like a minute or so.
Once Upon A Katamari, the new Katamari Damacy game.
I have been playing Shadowrun on my Sega. Always good to get this one out again.
still ff12. been meaning to post about builds someplace. im going with some recommendations but wanted to tweak it to get every class but was unwilling to give up some stuff. stupid knight needing both mystic armor and 3 speed increases.
Just started Moonlighter 2 today.
I followed the dev logs on Youtube and learned a few Godot tricks from them. Got this on day one to support the dev and indie scene and just started playing. It's a blast. Fast paced hack and slash parkour action. It feels extremely satisfying to clear a room of enemies as you whip around.
Halo 4
I finished the game, it was alright - neither an extraordinary experience nor an abomination as some Halo fans tried to paint it as throughout the years. Gameplay was solid, level design quality varied depending on the theme, pretty great sound effects, kind of generic music though it did have some neat tracks here and there.
Still don't care about the Forerunner storyline. I enjoyed bits and pieces (talking about the plan with Dr. Tillson during Composer was really well done) but as a whole the campaign wasn't that interesting for me. I did like Cortana's arc - it was pretty emotional and just well done in general. A tasteful ending to her adventures with Chief (yes, I'm aware of Halo 5, no I don't count it since I won't be playing it).
Dunno if anyone remembers but when writing about Halo 2 I mentioned how I really like its art style. While some of the classic stuff still looks good (except for the new Pelicans) I don't vibe with Forerunner designs at all in this game. I mean... architecture is fiiine and the natural segments were cools but enemies? I didn't particularly care for them.
My reaction to Forerunner weapons is even harsher than towards Covenant ones - I just don't like them. Human tech was always my favourite part of these games and Halo 4 did not change that. I especially love the DMR, it sounds and feels fantastic. It ended up being my favourite weapon in the game and I'd be more than happy to play the whole thing using just that.
All in all, I was a bit worried about this game but it turned out better than expected. Definitely not my favourite but solid enough to not regret playing it.
Oh, audio quality of secret videos is not great. Does anyone know if it was like this in the original release or did something go wrong when porting to MCC?
Master Chief Collection
This is it, the end of Master Chief Collection. It was an enjoyable ride - not as great as I hoped it would be but that wasn't really a probable goal considering the years of hype I witnessed about the series. All of the games in the collection are solid to great, they just aren't up my alley as much as I hoped they'd be. Nothing wrong with that though, just a personal preference.
I mentioned this before but this playthrough made me realise that my favourite way of experiencing Halo's universe is through the books rather than the games (except for Reach and, to lesser extent, ODST). They tend to focus on different vibes and tone which work very well with my tastes.
I'm glad I got to play this, if only to have an informed opinion on a series which helped to shape the medium into what it is today.
Sam and Max Hit the Road
After playing through entirety of MCC in such short amount of time I thought I could use a change of pace for a bit. I don't play many point & clicks these days, especially the really old ones, so Sam & Max felt like a perfect choice for that.
First things I noticed were the tone of the game and characterisation of our protagonists. Heck, writing in general turned out way different than expected - not in a bad way mind you, I simply didn't expect the main duo to be such a menace or to hear multiple F-bombs in the middle of a conversation (even censored ones).
Puzzles aren't too bad however there were a few times where I needed to use the hint book as a crutch. It'll take a couple more games before I adjust my brain to playing completely raw but even doing it like this is enjoyable and that's what matters. I also don't see the point in feeling bad about doing so in general - while S&M isn't the worst in this respect, I'm fully aware of the moon logic used in some of these games and I'd rather have fun than tear my hair out trying to figure out some of the more ridiculous solutions.
Game works pretty great using ScummVM. I did have to tinker with it a bit to make saves work correctly (game crashed when I tried to load them) but other than that I had zero issues. Lets hope it stays that way.
Got some additional thoughts after finishing the game. First things first, I forgot to mention how good the game looks, I really love the pixel art work on display here. Same with music to be honest.
Voice acting was great, even if I didn't always care for the direction they went with. It did what it wanted to really well.
As for the rest of the game, some of the later segments were pretty rough - both in terms of what needed to be done but also things like finding the map transitions hitboxes.
Story was alright, enjoyable enough to play but never managed to fully grab my attention. Humour was also a bit of a mixed bad - some of it was great, some felt a bit outdated and some just wasn't my cup of tea. Nothing I'd outright hate at least.
All in all, a fun distraction after my non stop shooting spree. Probably won't be coming back to it but it did its job. It also did kinda fit the bill with my pew pew marathon thanks to the shooting gallery during credits. Looks like I need to choose something less modern for my next playthrough.
Edit: Just finished Sam & Max, added some thoughts.
I’m happy to see you finished all the Halo games. The Bungie games (CE-Reach) are some of my all-time favourite games and I love to see others enjoy them too. It’s too bad it didn’t gel with you as much as it did with me but I’m still glad you had fun with the series regardless.
Writing this out made me super nostalgic for Reach actually. Probably my best ever gaming moments were playing Reach multiplayer with a friend of mine I haven’t seen in probably close to a decade now. I’d give anything to go back to prime Reach multiplayer again with him. That’s the trouble with multiplayer games, it’s hard to revisit years later. I also used to play a ton of Battlefield 4 multiplayer one time but again, can’t really replay that these days. I stick to single player games now which does have the nice side effect of future replayability. I’ve got a super strong sense of nostalgia for Batman Arkham City and thankfully for that game I can actually go back and revisit it. But multiplayer games I can’t.
I've been playing Dragon's Dogma Online. Playing solo and trying to catch up so I can play with my friends.
I'm back to the modding relapse. My playthrough of STALKER: Anomaly has stalled out again as I'm week-deep into a project of modifying the mod that got me playing again in the first place: TALKER (the AI-powered mod that lets you chat with NPCs in game).
What begun as some tweaks to the prompt and minor edits to faction personalities has turned into both some hacky vibe coding and a ton of prose writing as I'm pushing to see how much character description I can feed the model to improve the output.
I‘m playing Crime Boss on my PC and AC Rogue on my Deck. Crime Boss is kinda underrated, it‘s got fun gameplay and flashy visuals, just gotta skip the nostalgia bait story. It also gives me old CoD Zombies vibes sometimes I‘m enjoying it.