Games

1. Open Steam
2. Scroll down
3. I feel like shit and don't feel like playing anything
4. Close Steam

repeat 3x every day

i saw that cartoonish gta knockoff Saints Row (The Third, not remastered) on sale for like $2.47 and that it is supported for steam deck/linux, so i got it over xmas break.

the SR setting and plot makes the GTA franchise look like it was crafted by Tolstoy or Chekhov. basically the Jersey Shore meets the mind of a 12 year old in dire need of adult supervision. i cannot discourage playing this game enough, because it's all oversexed and offensive. even for its time in the mid 2000s, and it has not aged well. but it cost me less than a 2 liter of soda.

admittedly, i have kept playing it. i have taken over like 95% of the city despite barely finishing the first act of the story lol.

i like the mechanic of filling in the map so my gang takes over a whole city. that was one of my favorite parts of GTA:SA, when you can just kind of stop doing missions and instead fill in LA to be all green for Grove Street Families. of course, i did that after maxing out how absurdly jacked my guy was at the gym, lmao.

so, now my gang members appear everywhere and i make really strong cash everyday from all these businesses for my upgrades. i also like that i can customize (and recustomize) how i and my gang members look (sort of). i made them all ninjas, so it's like the foot clan because everything "mine" has to be purple in this game. a ludicrous, high saturation purple. most of the other gang appearance choices are too absurd though: exotic dancers, sex workers, BDSM gear. like i can appreciate an SUV pulling up just loaded with completely roided out, well oiled and armed men in leather thongs getting out is intimidating, but that's not the vibe i am going for right now.

if they just sort of made a sandboxy style game that was this organized crime syndicate takeover of a city to fill in a map of territories and neighborhoods, extorting businesses in my territory (kind of like Godfather: Black Hand), but let me customize (and re-customize/refine) the shit out of myself and my gang (name, colors, symbols), i would pay the hell out of that. tagging over markings, lighting up dudes / taking over strongholds, beating up small business tyrants, stealing/modifying cars, and occasionally making an example of cops before losing their partners in the dangerous alleys of my territories.

that kind of thing has a nice "pick up and play for a half hour" kind of feel that works for me. steadily getting incrementally stronger with more resources until you have an entire area dominated.

I'm playing some dreamcast ports on pc, PSO, Grandia II, Crazy Taxi etc

Chrono Trigger

Been playing Where Winds Meet on @Awoo@hexbear.net 's recommendation. It's pretty fun, I like the characters and world. The combat is broadly "soulslike" but it has the difficulty options and assistance modes to make that not odious. There's just so much game in this game, it feels like it's introducing a new mechanic every few minutes.

Been playing Nethack. I like a game with a lot of hidden depth.

My time at Sandrock. It's got real Stardew valley vibes but more focused on construction and resource gathering with very little farming. Feels a lot less grindy because new story events happen really frequently.

Finished Metal Garden! Fun little mini-FPS that replicates the source engine very well despite being UE5. Probably going to finish the Dead Space Remake next.

I started playing the Shroom & Gloom demo again after forgetting about it for a long time.

It's been in development for quite a chunk of time now and, as long as the game has a decent amount of length to it and they don't phone in the latter parts of the game, it's going to be a contender for my GOTY when it drops.

It's a roguelike deckbuilder (sigh...) but there's a lot of love that has gone into the game - roguelikes and/deckbuilders are less like genres and more like signifiers of lazy gameplay mechanics these days but S&G feels very different to me, despite the structure of the gameplay being very familiar. There are a lot of nice touches to the game and the art style is fantastic. It's immersive in the way that Cloverpit is in comparison to Luck Be A Landlord, and there is a very different but somehow reminiscent feeling of horror to S&G, although S&G is more cosmic horror with elements of body horror.

I'm gonna need to put the demo down soon so I don't burn myself out on the game before it has even been released.

Still playing Civ V these days lol, gotta hunt down those achievements.

I'll play Planescape: Torment for the first time this evening after half a year of not playing any videogame.

Finished Expedition 33, it's fine but imo extremely overrated. Stopped engaging with the skill system after I got a full roster with one capstone 10-point skill around 15 hours in and never really felt like I was underperforming (I lost to the second-last boss of Act 2 twice, but that was due to parry fuckups on instakill moves). Also just balanced everyone's stat points evenly, and ran the exact same luminas on everyone. Up until the end of Act 2 I did basically all the optional content except the stuff that obviously was going to take too long. Finished Act 2, did Frozen Heart, then went to go to two optional areas but was told I couldn't go there. I suddenly got bored, and ran through the final area to fight the final boss, skipping everything along the way. Imo the ending is actively bad because it ignores something extremely important:

More Warframe, as per usual, nothing of note accomplished in the past week due to bad luck (though I did get the missing part I needed for one vaulted prime pistol, wowee). Am right below cap for void traces and have like 40 aya so all set for the new resurgence later this week.

Got a bunch more progress in Hades 2. Got 2 wins over the down boss and am now trying to get to the up boss. Made it as far as the boss of the third up area and got fucked by a hit for like 100 damage. I'm definitely going to keep playing more. The weapons don't seem close to balanced. Daggers seem better than everything else, staff is okay, wands suck, axe sucks (unless you spam the omega special by having unlimited mana?), gun is weirdly close-range considering it's a gun. Haven't tried out fists, only just unlocked them after my last run.

Has anyone played Rue Valley yet? I know Robert Kurvitz endorsed it before it came out but… it sounds really bad. Getting stuck in a time loop and being forced to go to therapy over and over to figure out your player character’s like tragic backstory?

I mean I’m totally open to it being really good if anyone played it but like fuck that sounds bad. Can’t wait for whatever Red Info ends up doing.

Btw it’s Darkwood cause the sequel got announced. It’s an indie Polish horror game based on folklore.

Rogue Flight has taken my attention this week. It's an indie rail-shooter a la Starfox, with utterly gorgeous anime-inspired graphics and some roguelite progression as the name suggests. Fairly close to "finishing" new game+ after about 8h, but I feel like there's a bit more content and lore in there that I'm yet to discover.

Finished Sonic Mania recently and now I'm playing Sonic 1-3+CD via Origins right now. Glad I'm playing via Origins because of the infinite continues and much easier ways to get chaos emeralds/special stages in it. This would have been impossible for me on Genesis to get them all in Sonic 1&2.