Still playing Subnautica, working on my cove tree base in the lost river. This game got a lot less scary when I realized that if you see a dangerous animal you can just ram with your cyclops. Sea monsters don't handle getting rammed by a 40ft submarine very well.
Loved that game, even tho it felt tedious at times. Recommend Below Zero too.
I've heard mixed things about Below Zero, but it's gonna be a long time till Subnautica 2 so I might check it out.
Only one problem though: Glow Whales. I am not afraid of the deep any more than the next person, but I do have a real bad phobia of baleen whales. Nothing in Subnautica has been any more scary than the developers intended, but I saw a clip of those friendly Glow Whales in action and it hit my lizard brain and I started crying.
So I'd need to mod those out first.
Oh yea, totally understandable, Subnautica is kind of a landmine for a lot of stuff that way. TBH gameplay wise Below Zero doesnt add that much, but i found the audio logs cute, that's probably very subjective tho. Also theres themes of terrorism against the big corp, which is cool af.
I haven't played much helldivers 2 since the major gameplay changes sort of removed what I loved about the game but I did load it up to try out the m1903 springfield they released to celebrate Liberty Day and it is delightfully inadqueate for fighting hundreds of communist laserbots.
It doesn't even have stripper clips you have to reload each round by hand it's great.
Blade of Galadriel for Shadow of War is somewhat disapointed. I'm not sure what to make of the "light" mechanic and abilities. Most of the side bosses are immune to everything, including the light mechanic, which makes the fights tedious at best while also perplexingly preventing the player from using the core new gameplay mechanics of the update.
The characters are delightful though. I like the ancient orc Archer who decided to join the fight against Sauron purpley because he used to work directly for Morgoth and thinks Sauron is a punk ass kid who needs to be put in his place. Olog-hai Leonardo DaVinci is also cool. A gigantic war troll waxing poetic about the wonders of evil architecture in a completely friendly and good natured way to an elf who has been the enemy of his people since the world was new is just so unexpected and goofy.
I wish you could take Eltariel and Baranor and their skills and equipment in to the main game. I wish games in general would do more to integrate new systems, items, and enemies in dlc content in to the core game. Like the Iki Island expansion for Ghost of Tsushima introduced a bunch of cool, challenging new enemies but once you finish the dlc you'll never see them again.
I've been really enjoying Helldiver's 2 now that they finished all the much needed buffs. It just feels more fun now. Still punishing if you fuck up but it feels recoverable most of the time now.
Mostly though I've been rocking Factorio Space Age.
My complaint is that the change to the armor system fundamentally changed the nature of the game. You no longer need heavy weapons to fight tanks and armor. There's no real need to think about the niche and role of the weapons in your loadout. There's no need to really cooperate with your team and work together.
I didn't need buffs. I was really, really good, understood all the weapons and strats, and knew when and how to use them efficiently.
Now it just doesn't matter what you take. Which is what people wanted. They wanted everything to function the same way and not have to care about differentiating squad roles or taking a balanced loadout. But since it doesn't matter nothing has any character. Everything feels the same.
Chargers and bts have been made a complete non issue. For me, not speaking for anyone else, they were never a serious threat. I was able to dance around them and mostly ignore them much of the time, and drop them quickly with eat17s or ops or whatever if they were causing problems. Bts are just a complete non-issue now. Since they die in one shot to most heavy weapons i rarely see them survive their spawn animations.
Most area denial strats can kill everything now so it's not uncommon to just wipe out entire patrols and wipe out breaches and drops before they finish their animations, so there's often nothing to do. The buffed artillery strikes can wipe out entire bases reliably so you don't really need to go in to bases if you don't want to. A 500kg can wipe most of a medium or even large bug nest.
All of this means that a huge amount of gameplay is just gone. With chargers and bts neutralized they can't run interference for small and medium bugs. Hunters were nerfed in to the ground too. So now muchs just die without ever really presenting a threat. The heavies were needed to draw player attention until mediums and lights could get in to range to be a threat and they can't do that anymore.
With bots everything has been nerfed so hard. Rocket devs rarely manage to get shots off, so many things can kill hulks with 1-3 shots to the front they're not a threat. All the bots have left, sorta, is heavy devs and they've been heavily nerfed. Gunships went from an absolute nightmare you had to plan around to skeet shooting.
It's so streamlined and simple now. All the complexity and systems interactions that turned each fight in to a fun little tactics puzzle are gone. You (well, I) just walk in a straight line to the objective killing everything. They even removed the 4x patrol modifier after mission complete so you're not even pressured to evac.
Everything I loved abouit the game has been removed. Like I'm
Dark Souls 1, great scythe dex/pyro build. Time for my annual fall season replay
MH Rise starting a fresh character and trying gunlance, hopefully it keeps my attention until MH Wilds is released. Last time I tried gunlance out as a main weapon was Tri era
Factorio restarted again to celebrate the release of Space age.
I already played multiple sessions and haven't even reached the new content, I'm so excited for it tho. I just researched the rocket silo and got my trains running.
X4: Foundations
A 4X space sandbox sim with dogfighting, fleet management, and a pretty robust economical and industrial simulation. Has been a lot of fun exploring it's depth.
In the first pic (you might have to zoom in), you can see the trail of dead rogue AI ships I had been fighting through in my slow ass destroyer on its way to destroy one of their stations. The destroyer can carry and launch up to 40 small fighters, each of which you can pilot yourself if you choose to.
Satisfactory, it's been so relaxing.
SHADOW GENERATIONS
It's good! Sonic is so back.
Looking forward to playing this. I really enjoyed base generations and I've hears this is the SM3DWorld + Bowser's Fury version of that game
imo it's the best-feeling boost game so far, and the little Frontiers-esque "open zone" hub is fun to mess around in too.
All UFO 50 all the time.
It's good.
I played the Lakehouse for Alan Wake 2, which was quite short (3 hours) but it was high quality, with some excellent gameplay modifications to basically let you turn off combat (one shot kill, invulnerable, infinite ammo, infinite flashlight power) so I was able to ignore an apparently terrible boss fight.
It's a pretty obvious stab from remedy at the notion of using AI to mimic art, but I love when the subtext becomes the text itself so I enjoyed it.
Continuing through master rank monster hunter rise. Beta for wilds begins tomorrow though so I'll sample the various weapons and try to figure out what weapon I'll focus on this game (I've played hammer, sword and shield, dual blade, light bowgun, switch axe and charge blade) I'm leaning towards hunting horn I think, but might want to try heavy bowgun, and great sword is always tempting.
Not really any video games, just had my monthly game of 40k in TTS. Orks may be able to kill squishy humies, but it turns out that if you distract them with one really big tank they won't be able to do anything to the rest! RIP in piece Stormblade, you blew up some killa kans.
What edition you play? I've been thinking about TTS for 4th. Edition since it now has the Old World. Wouldn't mind playing Chain of Command and some of the 40k hacks that have been made for it, either.
10th, and it's crusade so even more wildly unbalanced than 40k already is. I just got an upgrade on a tank commander that makes it untargetable unless you're within 12".
I have not touched 10th. and probably won't lol. I want my area terrain and vehicle facings, Gork dammit.
I'll have you know it's perfectly reasonable for my russ to fire all of its guns at that ork over there, because there is a single visible pixel from the back-left corner of the hull.
I'm too busy :kitty-cri:
Might do some Monstroscopy, but my attention span is really in the shitter.
Factorio Space Age, Monster Hunter Frontier, and Team Fortress 2
the 2 week minecraft phase has returned
Talked myself back into playing Cosmoteer. Lost my flagship in the final push to clear out a system attacking a space station guarded by 5 or 6 capital ships.
Spent a few hours trying to redesign a new one, only to watch it immediately explode in testing. Are 48 ion beams too much to ask for? I may just have to use the larger ships mod and staple two or three or five of my old flagship together.
I've been really getting into classic Sonic games, and have gotten most of the way through Sonic 2, as well as finally putting some time into finishing Sonic Mania. I dropped Sonic 1 after finishing a few zones, as it became clear that the level design in that game is not up to par with later releases. Also poking around at the Master System Sonic games, which are totally different games than the mainline release, but have some interesting stuff in them (my original exposure to Sonic was looking over another kid's shoulder while he played Sonic on Game Gear).
I've always been a Mario Enjoyer, and just never quite understood Sonic... the platforming aspect of Sonic always felt so clunky because of how much less air control you have. But I think I get it now, it's all about figuring out the right paths through the levels to just go fucking apeshit turbo mode and blast through them as fast as possible. GOTTA GO FAST.
Also helps that I've got a nice CRT tv setup and am playing on original hardware. The super fast scrolling of Sonic works way better, it's not a blur like it is on a crappy LCD screen.
Tabletop, DnD, board games, and minecraft. Also Animal Crossing.
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