Games

"TABLETOP COUNTS!" CORNER: World of Darkness

I got 2/3 of my party arrested. Two of us are Vampires, my character being from clan Malkavian. I figured I could tap into the Malkavian network and find out where The Prince is so the two of us vampires could follow etiquette and go meet him since we're new in town. The network says "Oh, don't worry, we'll find you."

I think "Great! They're gonna send us a limo and we're gonna go meet The Prince!"

Then a cop car arrives. The two of us vampires turn invisible and the were-creature we've been slumming it with runs off into the bushes. After a while, I come to realize the cops are there for us and I think "Oh, this is what we get for calling them 'Vanilla Camarilla' all the time. We got some fuckin' hardcore Camarilla around here" and, like an idiot, I turn myself in. The other one, who's a gangrel, could take these cops in a fight no fuckin' problem. But instead he listens to my character babbling and turns himself over too.

Arc Raiders! I've never gotten in to extraction shooters but this one is very motivating. It's fun trying to unlock everything and also keep the flywheel of getting materials and crafting loadouts going.

playing shattered pixel dungeon a ton recently, actually crazy this game (and all the other derivatives) are open source based off the original from 10 years ago. i think it's a cool little insight into what the future of gaming under socialism could be like once IP is destroyed

Citizen sleeper. A bit disco elisum sci fi rpg, with an interesting dice mechanic. I’m enjoying it so far

Continuing my game of Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic. I grabbed a map of Cuba from the Steam workshop a couple weeks ago and have been chipping away at it. Playing on "Realistic Mode" with all systems enabled, but medium money / happiness / fire / disaster / world events difficulty settings.

The population has reached 5000 and is growing faster than I can put buildings up. I'm long overdue for starting a second city, but overcoming problems with the first continues to be a priority. These problems have included a fire at the main power transformer causing a total power outage, a lack of pressure at the water treatment plant threatening the supply of drinking water, and a looming financial crisis as imports continued to exceed exports into the eighth year of the republic. The financial crisis was solved moments before being forced to take out loans by the completion of a coal mine, ore processing facility, and the rail infrastructure necessary to export it at volume - a project several years in the making.

While this put the republic's finances on a sustainable trajectory, the facilities generated so much waste that a new crisis emerged. While a waste processing facility, incinerator, and construction waste recycling plant had been built along the way, the volume of waste was so great that the logistics of trucking it several kilometers were tremendously strained. With multiple technical offices, distribution offices, and waste transfer facilities set up in strategic locations, it is barely enough to keep the trash moving. Over 1000 tons of ash have been produced at the incinerator already (there's a Steam acheivement for this). Then, the "carpocolypse" struck, as a large portion of the original fleet of vehicles began reaching levels of wear that could not be managed by a vehicle repair station. A bunch of old buses needed to be moved into storage, but it was a good opportunity to replace them with newer, faster models and consolidate a bunch of redundant lines into higher capacity buses - reflecting the large increase in population. There are still a bunch of incredibly rusty trucks driving around though.

Anyway, with the finances sorted out, railroad tracks are gradually being laid down to allow construction materials to be carried many kilometers away to a less mountainous part of the island suitable for a second city, port, and agricultural industries.

Ghost of Tsushima

Started again after two long hiatuses. When I first started it, I was impressed but only played a bit. Returning a couple of years later, I had no clue how to play any more, died a bunch of times, gave up. Now, I've taken 15 minutes to deliberately reacquire myself with the mechanics, reading through the skill tree, quest log etc, and now it clicked!

Some thoughts (no spoilers, I'm just in act 1 anyway)

• When the shine wears off it's a fairly standard open world game at its core and I don't like those. Samey quests, repetitive events. For a bit I considered just playing the main quest but then thought better of it, instead I'm just embracing it how it is. I'll follow the birds, climb all the little mountains, trace the footsteps, and just enjoy the moment-to moment mechanics, and then the story at its own pace.

• The ludonarrative dissonance is real with this one. Some lady going hungry? Let's grab the stack of 8 supplies behind her. 95% of the island population are bandits or Mongols. Following questlines simultaneously where one person is in two places at the same time. Oh no, healer late by minutes, after me putting off the quest for hours. Places I've cleared out moments ago are suddenly a bandit hideout.

• Picking of enemies one by one or in small groups is encouraged by the combat mechanics, which falls flat when dealing with larger groups. But at the same time, the game narrative keeps reinforcing that it is wrong and bad of you to play so. This is similar to the criticism that can be aimed at games like Spec Ops: The Line, which try to confront you with the consequences of a choice you didn't have (other than not playing).

Ni No Kuni: Also picked up again after a long while, and also the sort of game where you simply have to accept it's gonna take a while. Enjoying it, but I found that encounters are either super easy, or they start going downhill (e.g. a character dies) and then there's no saving it. There's no goldilocks zone to it.

Resogun: Just one trophy to go, to finish the arcade mode on experienced difficulty without continues. Not in sight yet.

Astro Bot: Cleaning up the recently added challenge levels, now at the final one with the different powerups. No checkpoints!

The Settlers DS: How does this even exist! I love these kind of oddball handheld/console ports, which why I'm collecting them a bit, also e.g. Age of Empires on PS2 and DS, Civilization II on PS1, etc. For Settlers, I'll probably just finish a campaign mission or two and call it quits.

Ghost of War: Chains of Olympus: got a 20 euro deal for the 2 PSP games so finally getting back on my God of War journey. Plays great so far. The sex minigame was something.

Been on a Valheim kick lately. Despite them being one of humanity's oldest weapons, spears/polearms are disturbingly under-represented in video game pre-modern combat.

Im trying to get into Europa Universalis 5 and man this is complicated. I like it so far and it feels very ambitious but Crusader Kings 3 and Stellaris feel MUCH easier. Even Vicky kind of feels easier since Vicky 3 is just economy manipulation with a lil bit of politics on top. Probably will need like 30h just to get a general idea of the game and then I will still be bad at it.

Trying for the second time to finish cross code but just like last time I'm at that stupid big tree dungeon and it's not fun and I fucking hate it and want to stop again

Played 1941 Counter Attack, trying to cut down how many credits I need to complete. I can do stage 1 (out of 7) on a single credit and like half of stage 2. But I still need about 10 credits total to beat it (down from like 15 though). I can definitely get it lower but no idea how much lower and since I don't play arcade shmups (or if I do it's home ports with set difficulties) I'm not really sure where I wanna' set my goal for it.

Went back to replay Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War again. The game is quite fun as an arcade flight game, and the narrative is quite interesting from a certain standpoint, it can be seen as an alternate history WW2 on a fictional version of earth with modern and science fiction weaponry, and nuclear weapons.

Gameplay is extremely unrealistic (your plane has 100+ missiles and can pull constant 30G turns), as a plane nerd it breaks my brain a bit, but it is very fun. Definitely the peak of series.

Eu5 all week. Playing a Teutonic Order -> Prussia -> Germany -> European Union run. Going okay so far, but running into so many damn bugs, especially around army management, that make the game more tedious to play. Game really needs a bunch more patches soon.

After years of suggesting that people play Rogue Galaxy, I realized I'd never finished it myself. Whoops.

Was was having fun with Voices of the Void until 30-50 feral hogs showed up :scared:

More KSP and FF7R. Got my Minmus space station and first comm relay deployed, and added a reusable lander to the station since Minmus landings are so cheap in dV terms so the station can be constantly running its lab. I have uncrewed orbital probes on the way to Moho, Sarnus, Urlum, and Neidon, and the Duna transfer window is coming up so I'll be sending a crewed mission there. The Neidon probe is gonna take so long to get there by Hohmann transfer that there's a decent chance I beat it out there with a constant burn torchship.

My controller is now paired correctly and working with Lutris so I don't have to run my high seas copy of FF7R through Steam for the steam input anymore.

Congrats to your friends!

I just finished Wind Waker last night. It was not my first time playing it, but it has been a long time and I wanted to revisit it. Pretty fun! Everyone complains about collecting the Triforce Shards, but I didn't have a problem with it. It's way better than the beginning of the game, I was honestly wondering if I actually liked this game at first lol. I originally was replaying it so I could have the game fresh in my mind for a Phantom Hourglass playthrough since I've never played the DS Zelda games, but somewhere along the way I got a desire to play Zelda II instead, so Phantom Hourglass will have to wait until after that.

I was playing Drova: Forsaken Kin, but I've hit a bit of a wall. Same with Valheim, every enemy outside of the the first two biomes kicks my ass.

Sometimes I'll play The Long Dark when I'm bored, I play it on super easy mode so I am just wandering around collecting canned food and making camp fires, it is a pretty good lazy hermit simulator.

I was playing the new PoE league, but they killed my farm and they killed the economy, also i think the league mechanic kinda sucks, so I'm kinda at a loss now for stuff to play

Working through my backlog; I finally found time to finish Oblivion Remaster last week. It was pretty comical doing the entire main quest after having finished all the guilds' quest chains, the arena, Shivering Isles, and so forth.

Now I'm back on Sea of Stars. I had stopped just before the Clockwork Castle to go around the map finding any chests or rainbow conchs that I might have missed along the way, not realizing that I'm really not that close to endgame and some of these (even in early-ish areas) require sidequests that I can't even start yet. I had to briefly rage-quit last night because diving back into the middle of a save after 11 months while remembering fuck all about the specific timed hit gimmicks meant that I blundered my way into a situation where random encounters were dealing enough damage to cause a party wipe in one or two rounds of combat. I fired up Clair Obscur: E33 for a bit, realized after 40ish minutes of cutscenes that it has the exact same mechanics ("wot if Super Mario RPG but depressing, steampunk, and 1880s France"), and decided to power through Sea of Stars some more. Once I got the hang of Resh'an's regular attack's timing, Air Elemental Skyland was less of a slog. I wouldn't quite say "a breeze" (), but not quite as ragequit-inducing. I don't know if I just undergeared Zale or what, but it was brutal, especially while re-learning the game.

I downloaded Niota again and I'm spending a bit more tine trying to understand this chaotic puzzle of a game

Im chasing the map game dragon

I have my issues with eu 5 (namely ai) but this is the best mapslop yet

Pokémon Zed Eh, still. I'm having a blast finding off-meta teams for Link Play. Galarian Stunfisk party rocks way harder than it has any right to.

I finally beat the first Crash Bandicoot game and I have 5 crystals left in Crash 2. Fuck slippery climb. Crash 2 is still a healthy challenge but it’s a cakewalk compared to that level alone.

Going through The House in Fata Morgana after not reading any VNs for a while. So far very interesting. Not sure where it's gonna go, but it gives me Spirit Circle vibes if I'm understanding it correctly. And I absolutely loved Spirit Circle, so I have high hopes here too. Maybe something to finally scratch that same itch.