Trying to force my way through the last few quests of Final Fantasy XVI. This has been my first FF since the PS2 era and wow… what a let down. It stinks of design by committee. I also started Final Fantasy IX again the other day to see if I’m just being an out of touch old person and no… that game is absolutely magical. Modern FF really is that bad.
this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2026
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ff9 is destroying my adhd by the time i get to disc 3
I've never gotten through it all but damnit, retroarch cloud saves is making it easier to focus on one game
FF16 was such a weird one, they tried so hard to make something that appealed to the western audience that it barely has anything to do with Final Fantasy. It's wannabe game of thrones with wannabe devil may cry combat. Square have no idea where to take this series. That said Final Fantasy 7 Remake is solid and you should've gone with that imo.
Yeah it isn’t even a JRPG… not sure what they were thinking.
I grabbed VII remake in the sale so I will give it a go soon but my expectations are now pretty low. Maybe my nostalgia for the music will carry me through.
I'm playing through Skyrim for the very first time
Same!! Its been really fun. No mods for the pure 2011 experience.
I didn’t realize someone existed that hasn’t played Skyrim yet. /s
Enjoy! I’ve got 5,600 hours in it, there’s lots of content there. I hope you have fun with it. How far are you? What do you think of it so far?
A couple hours in, I'm level 4 I think. I'm pretty impressed by it so far, but I'm playing on a PS5, I can't imagine how it felt to play this on the original consoles.
Very slow, that’s how. Load times were notoriously bad on 360/PS3. PC obviously depended on specs. It was a great time though, I do miss those days.
What race are you playing as? And what playstyle?
I am an Imperial named Gord, and I have a few playstyles, as I'm learning which enemies are weaker to certain weapons or spells: generally, though, I'm using a 2h sword as my main DPS, switching to a sword and shield for extra defences, or having flames in one hand and healing in the other for DoT (or against enemies weak to fire)
Just try not to slip into sneaky Archer. It's overpowered.
I love 2H sword, it’s my favourite playstyle. Stealth archer is the cliché build but it’s a ton of fun too, and massively overpowered if you’re into that. It’s worth trying on a second playthrough for sure.
Have you done any major side quests or factions yet? Or just the main story?
The only side quest I did was returning the gold claw to a merchant, but I did that one by accident. Been doing MSQ so far, don't really want to overwhelm myself with too many quests.
Although, I did find out the very hard way that you could be caught "trespassing" in shops.
Yeah that’s fair. I don’t usually play the main quest these days, just side stuff since that’s imo the best content in any Bethesda game, but on a first playthrough the main quest can be pretty epic. I hope you enjoy your time with it.
I'm playing Starsector with some difficulty mods. Looking forward to the upcoming "Extended mode" which is supposed to make the game require more more logistical planning as well as making ships harder to come by.
Playing through Subnautica and having fun with it. I just completed the Seamoth last night so I can delve into the deepest depths of the ocean.
I wish I could play it for the first time again, it impacted me a lot and I consider it one of the best games of the past decade.
It coincides with real life really well right now because my wife and I started snorkeling recently and it’s been a nice disconnect.
I wish I was brave enough to keep playing. Even at 720p docked on the Switch I was just too stressed out all the time. The low rendering distance didn’t help, I’ll admit. Beautiful world though
I'm going to play some Steamworld Build because a kind Lemming gifted me a key :) I played it years ago on a different platform, but it was early and had a lot of bugs iirc. I heard it got better.
I also got Portal 2 on sale for 2€. Good times.
I keep advancing in Cronos: The New Dawn:
spoiler
I'm at the hospital and already have the 3 chemical compounds needed for the antigen. I also just got the double barrel shotgun, exploring does pay off in this game.
I'm expecting a boss fight almost immediately, and I don't think I have much longer left before I finish the playthrough.
One thing I've forgotten to mention is the cats you encounter around while exploring. I find it funny that they all seem to have fuzzy hair, like one of my cats, I've always considered this to be kind of uncommon for cats.
I started Alan Wake 2:
spoiler
I haven't played long but the game seems interesting, I like the detective stuff, but I'm worried about how long Alan Wake will actually be playable in this game. I've read he has less play time than Saga, which I find a bit underwhelming.
The game is poorly optimized, it runs mostly ok without ray tracing except while traversing Bright Falls, where it drops to 50s and even 40s sometimes, and it also stutters a bit every now and then. I find baffling that FSR is mandatory, what in the world were they thinking? I don't want to attribute it to laziness, but I don't now what else it could be.
Maybe I'm CPU-bound for this one, I should just try it on my IPS monitor and see how it performs.
I'm confused by the claim that FSR is mandatory in Alan Wake 2. I played with DLSS but you can play in native if you want unless a recent patch changed it. What platform are you on? It is a very demanding game though, although funny enough I found the forest to be more demanding than Bright Falls. It does look amazing though, especially in HDR and with ray tracing.
You have also read wrong about the protagonist split, it's more or less an even 50/50.
I'm curious to hear what you think of the double barreled shotgun in Cronos. I actually preferred the first shotgun that you can charge. Also, how intense was that hospital level? The morgue was such a tough fight, at least for me.
I'm on Fedora. Unless I'm mistaken, playing in native resolution still uses FSR/DLSS for anti aliasing, there are no other anti aliasing options. I would have liked to have a choice like in most games. The game isn't a smooth experience, even in areas where I'm at 60 fps. Every turn of the camera makes it go 1-2 fps down breaking vsync, which is quite noticeable playing on A CRT. I also tried on my IPS monitor and the performance is more or less the same at 1440p. I miss HDR, I had an HDR monitor but it started breaking and got a refund, and I spent that money to partially fund my 9070 XT.
I haven't played Cronos today yet, the hospital was quite tense, but for some reason for me the game isn't as unnerving as say Silent Hill 2 remake or first person survival horror games. Still the atmosphere is incredible. I survived the morgue quite well, but I spent a lot of ammo and I was left with very few bullets, which is going to be a problem really soon. I already had to punch a mid-boss to death before arriving to the hospital lol.
To be honest, I find DLAA to be quite a good form of anti-aliasing, almost as good as DLDSR. I don't have much personal experience with FSR though as I have an Nvidia card.
I guess that screen tearing is a result of CRT and being locked into Vsync? I used G-Sync and never had any screen tearing issues.
Shame about your monitor, HDR is addictive when you get used to it.
Yeah, Cronos is a survival horror that emphasises survival over horror in my opinion. It isn't really too scary, just atmospheric and with cool lore and story. It's more about scraping by on the edge of resources and ammo than it is scaring the shit out of you.
FSR 4 is fine, but since I'm playing on a CRT, it's upscaling from lower resolutions, which is less than ideal. That's why I prefer other AA solutions for my use case. I think the hiccups came from the DP to VGA adapter. I bought a high-end Startech in anticipation to receiving my new CRT monitor, but when I received the monitor it turns out the adapter only gave me the option to use 60hz refresh rate at any resolution (it wasn't the case with the other, smaller monitor, strange). I swapped it with an older Startech adapter I was using until now and I can set higher refresh rates at any resolution with my new monitor and the hiccups are gone. Speaking of which, I might have gone a bit too far, it's a 20 inch monitor and it's huge 😅
Edit: In Alan Wake's case it's not even upscaling but it still looks kinda blurry.
I recently got UFO50 after initially not thinking it is for me, but hearing about it in Grogpod got me interested. I was born 1990 so games from the 80s really have more of a relic character for me, but it is still really good! I got it on switch because I saw many of the games have a multiplayer mode and that is fun, too!
Some games from it I enjoyed so far:
- Porgi: submarine metroidvania where you need to collect fuel upgrades to dive/explore deeper and deeper
- Party House: roguelike deck builder / boardgame; bit like Dominion and fun game for wife and me but also fun alone
- Devilition: puzzle game
- Avianos: Turn based strategy / boardgame
- Rock on Island: Bloons style TD
- Magic Garden: snake like arcade game
- Golfaria: Golf 2d isometric metroidvania / zeldalike
- Onion delivery: 2d car driving kinda roguelike... reminds me a bit of GTA 2... hard as a brick though
Brotato. It’s always Brotato eventually
I'm playing The first berserker: Khazan. It's fantastic if like me you have intense soulslike brainrot, it switches up the formula enough with the focus on skills and combos, it also has some nice parry and block action. Gameplay is really solid, bossfights are fun.
I'm moving at a snail pace though, I'm only at the 4th boss. I haven't played much of anything this past month and some change but so far I'm having a blast.
Still mostly playing on the 2DS and I'd recommend anyone tempted by 3ds.hack.guide to do it.
Nintendo Pocket Football
It's a cutesy football manager game where you upgrade stats, choose tactics and watch your little players kick the ball about. I mostly lose.
I got The Invincible in the Steam summer sale for very cheap. It's a walking simulator scifi mystery with Flash Gorden aesthetics. Pretty fun but also very slow.
I'm in between games. I finished Road 96, and was somewhat disappointed in it. It is occasionally funny, it has a charm and has its moments, but is mostly let down by too much subpar writing and too much terrible voice acting. Nice art, good music and some good ideas and concepts that fall flat of delivering the great experience it could have been. The political angle and story takes too much of center stage, especially in the second half, but the writers don't have the chops to deliver anything other than a very superficial plot overall. It's also just very uneven. If every character was written and acted as well as John, this could have been something great. In the end I don't regret spending €4 on it, but I was expecting more based on the reviews and past recommendations.
I was planning on The Drifter next, but I might need something more action packed first so I'm also considering Wanted: Dead.
just got a budget handheld console and the first thing i have been playing is GameBoy Color game Hamtaro: Ham-Hams Unite! it is a simple collecting game with some puzzles, and very cute (i am terrible at the bowling & soccer mini-games though)
Rotating between Mary Skelter Finale and Final Fantasy X-2 Last Mission.
For Mary Skelter, I was curious how to story would end, specially the previous two games being on the higher end of story quality for Idea Factory (bar's not very high but still work well). So far it's good, though gameplay feels more streamlined than the previous two games, likely given the multiple points of view mechanic not given much space for individual gimmicks.
For Last Mission, tbf I started playing as a pure test when I found a backup of my PS3 disc sitting on the PS3's HDD, and I was concerned it could have been corrupted (old HDD and all that). As I kept playing after confirming the disc works, to my surprise, the game is being more fun than I remembered, and for sure more imo than FFX-2 itself. However, it's a game that expects the player to lose a lot, being somewhere between roguelike and roguelite, and proceeding certain floors requiring ~~a bit of moon logic~~ testing randomly or following a guide. Also samurai job with white mage (for curaga/esuna) and alchemist (for item esuna) as secondary jobs ftw! Confuseproof is a good call too (personal experience saying e.e"), and remember to merge whatever job spheres you find for your primary one, so you become a walking tank.
Mostly Skyrim but also playing enshrouded with some friends
Things didn't really improve on my side so a focused playthrough of anything in particular is still a no-go, I did however manage to fix my issue with Division 2.
For some reason, installing Ubisoft Connect through Lutris makes it only work with specific setup and specific version of Proton (GE-Proton 9.27) - that however no longer works correctly with TD2. The app itself launched fine but the game wouldn't run due to issue with Easy Anti-Cheat not booting. At the same time, changing WINE version failed to launch UC in the first place so I couldn't even check if it would help with the game.
What was the solution then? Just install UC through the Heroic Launcher, that's it.
I'm now using GE-Proton 11.1 and the game runs without any issues. I spent so much time trying to make things work as usual and it turned out the solution was this simple. Ehh... At least it works. Mindless slaughter it is (for now)!
Vintage Story. Same as every week. I'm sure I'll burn myself out eventually, but there's no sign of that yet.
Replayed Blasphemous and Blasphemous 2 for the fourth time since Blasphemous 2 just got a pretty good "legally distinct Castlevania" DLC for free recently.
Blasphemous 2 is still pretty far up on the list of greatest metroidvanias and can be had pretty cheap these days.
Witcher 3! A classic, and there's a new expansion coming out.
Sworn. Decent Hades clone with multiplayer. It's been fun to play with friends and it's on sale right now on steam.
Wife was gifted a 3DS with two games, so my ancient butt is currently playing Pokémon Y
Edit: fixed a typo
Nice! I haven’t played that one in years but I remember really liking it.
Been playing through The Last Caretaker. Something about the setting just clicked and going around on my boat all alone fills me with a lot of peace. Just chuggin' along.
For the patient part:It's time for my yearly Euro Truck Simulator play. For some reason every summer I install it, play for a week or two and then uninstall.
Probably the same feeling of just truckin' along that captures me.
I am taking another stab at Rimworld, after a long hiatus. Putting together a mod pack for multiplayer.
Specifically, I’m testing out adding XML mods to the multi-playerable mod pack (with the dev for the MP compat mod maintains themself): https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3736544231
Started up Dead Cells again. Gotten to the Throne Room on a few runs, haven't beat the Hand of the King yet.
Playing through the Titanfall 2 campaign. It’s quite cool so far. The campaign is about 6 hours. Awesome movement.
Replaying the Ratchet and Clank PS2 quadrilogy. On Deadlocked now. Some of humour is a little dated and falls flat in places, but the gameplay itself holds up well.
After finishing Syberia 3, I’ve moved on to The World Before. It’s so much better! It could do with more puzzles, but the Syberia atmosphere is back. The story also seems better so far, and the graphics are gorgeous. Controls are also hugely better.
Persona 2 Innocent Sin (PSP version). Compared to P1, the story has a lot more of the contemporary Persona beats and holds up surprisingly well.