Tabletop, DnD, board games, and minecraft. Also Animal Crossing.
Rules
just broke my 200+ hour factorio streak and started playing Minecraft with my sibling. haven’t put any serious effort into it since 1.8 beta
kinda fun discovering all of the new things and gawking at the eye-candy shader pack I installed.
going to organically learn how to traverse the deep dark soon (yes I know about the warden, kinda), wish me luck!
I am continuing to play through morrowind
Nwah! This is my Skyrim. I should start another game... Anyways! It's been, uh, a while since my last post. I continued to avoid my Mass Effect and BG3^[That said, a friend hinted at wanting to do a co-op run, so now there is a fire growing under my ass to make progress...] saves by playing a bunch of classics.
First on my list was Ground Control. I played it long ago when it first came out, but (unwisely) sold it to GameStop after beating it. It's an early 2000s RTS that completely does away with base building. Instead you configure your dropship loadout before a mission like XCom or Total War multiplayer games. Unlike other RTSs, there isn't a traditional early-mid-late game progression, instead relying on a good army composition where each unit has multiple roles. It definitely suffers from being an early 3D strategy game, with wonky camera controls and AI that definitely cheats^[Cheats as in enemy-artillary-somehow-sees-my-units-from-behind-a-mountain cheese], and (most sadly :boohoo:) no skirmish mode against computers, so only the single player campaign is available. Despite these problems, the game itself has a fun tactical feel where every class has it's purpose. I'm planning on skipping the DLC and moving on to the sequel.
Next my nephew is making me play another game of Ocarina of Time. I've created a monster! Good thing this is a comfort game. This time I'm playing using the Zelda Recompilation project, specifically the Ship of Harkinian port. It's so weird seeing this game played at high framerates! I've also introduced SoH to a friend who never played OoT before, so I'm quietly hyping him up for it. In other news, now that the Banjo-Kazooie project has a release, I'll have to pick that up as well. Additionally I also installed 2 Ship 2 Harkinian (Majora's Mask), Spaghettikart (Mario Kart 64), and Starship (Star Fox 64). I'm currently watching Goldeneye with interest, and holding perennial hope for Jet Force Gemini...
I had some friends over for a weekend, and I decided to dust off my VR headset and run SUPERHOT VR for them to play. It's my favorite VR game right now^[Elite Dangerous is looking angrily in my direction. I'll get to you eventually...] and a great introduction to VR for somebody new. You feel like you're in the Matrix and it's incredible.
Last but not least, I ran a fun single-session D&D campaign for a bunch of family kids who never played it before. They got hyped on it from watching Stranger Things and wanted to play themselves. They are all becoming geeks under my tutelage :sickubus: :sicko-satan: all part of the plan :curry-space:
Oh yeah Superhot is THE SHIT
About over halfway through with the original RE3 (past the clock tower). Aside from the jank-ass dodge mechanic, it's peak and I get why people were so pissed with the remake (even if I think it's overhated and itself is a good game).
Next up is the original RE4. Maybe after I'll go straight to Leon's story in 6 in time for Requiem's release.
Playing through EYE Divine Cybermancy again. I really love that all the dialogue options in the game are like
I'm still on Where Winds Meet and Forever Skies. If anybody wants to play the former, @Awoo@hexbear.net set up a guild, you should join it. It's fun and has more Stuff To Do than you can shake a stick at.
more Stuff To Do than you can shake a stick at.
Free to try. But I won't pretend that the cosmetics won't get their claws into you if you stick around.
the ol' warframe special
My train game atm is nfs carbon, just finished most wanted but getting kinda tired of racing again. I think ill finally do it and start baldurs gay 3 cos its just sitting there and I need something to tide me over until resi 9 comes out.
My train game atm is nfs carbon
now i want a train racing game
Got hooked on Warframe again. Been having a blast listening to audiobooks while playing around with different builds. Finally getting around to finishing The Jakarta Method and Mirage Men and re-listening to The Southern Reach as I haven’t got to Absolution yet.
More unc raiders, got killed by a human for the first time which was a little annoying. Going to do some duos with my brother today who hasn't played yet so it'll be fun to help gear him up.
Also some more modded Minecraft, Cuboid Outpost 1.20.1 edition. Getting systematized resource generation set up, till now it's been pretty ad hoc and not well connected to storage and auto crafting
Project Epoch - a free, private WoW classic+ server with very low population. It's a lot slower than retail which I haven't played in over a decade, and I am enjoying it immensely.
Was Epoch not targeted by Blizzard and shut down before they even opened? I try to follow private servers news, but it's hard to keep track of sometimes.
More project Zomboid.. I've got a really good apocalypse run going with rare loot.
Keep an eye of the condition of your footwear, gamers! My boots broke and I didn't notice. Walked barefoot through a pile of broken glass. Thankfully i had tweezers and a needle but i needed thread.
Holed up in a trailer grinding out tailoring so i could get thread to stitch up my feet. Thankfully i survived so i burned down the trailer to celebrate
I rolled credits on Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Red Rescue Team the other day, now I'm taking on the post-game dungeons. I think once I've had my fill of that I'm gonna play Explorers of Sky. I beat Darkness several times as a kid but I've never finished Sky, only played the beginning. Also a PC port of Banjo-Kazooie released so I'd like to play that soon. Oh, and I tried Hytale, it seems okay but I'm not that into Minecraft any more and it doesn't really stand out from it so far.
Elden Ring again. I never beat the DLC so Im going back there. Doing a lot of cooperating and shit. Using daggers like I've never really done in a souls-like. It's been a good time and I'm almost back to the Shadow of the Erdtree content
I downloaded Sonic R for windows and tricked it out with QOL mods and it's great! If anyone wants my mod list, it's in this video I followed.
I have such raw memories of playing the pc release of sonic R with absolutely no music trying to find the secrets on each track alone with nothing but sanics tippy taps of his shoes.
That's 
NO GOOD. The soundtrack to this game is wonderful.
Some Streets of Rogue with my siblings. The success rolls on the comedian's jokes are viciously low, my sister ended up saving me from angry mobs way more often that intended.
dragonquest 2(hd2d)
The Stoneblock 4 modpack is super fun. As usual I'm trying to maximize my use of Create. I'm wrapping up a pretty huge build I've made where I have a 7x4 grid of unearthers (basically villagers you exploit to produce ores for you when you give them blocks like gravel, sand, soul sand, and food) that I'm supplying with the new logistics system. I can just slap on 2 factory gauges to these guys and they automatically cause the things they need to get crafted by the rest of my network. It's cool stuff.
Have you done much with the central machine upgrading thing?
Yeah I'm at tier 3 with a lot of the AE2 stuff done but I've decided to go on my little Create journey instead of focusing on the progression.
This is my main pure "tech" setup. Just the Mekanism machines I need and the core of my ME system. Very ugly but I plan to make proper rooms for this stuff once I get resource generation up to speed.
This is my power generation. Lava chicken into drain into Oritech refinery. Refinery makes sheol fire and steam. Sheol fire then goes into lava generators with steam addon. Annoyingly, the steam the refinery makes from lava is Mekanism steam, while the one from the boiler addon on the lava generators is Oritech steam. This means I have to make separate engine lines that consume each type of steam. This setup makes about 4k RF/t but can be upgraded a lot if you just add more steam engines, the amount of steam you get is copious.
Then this is my super fun Create setup.
Redstone controls keep the gravel, sand, and dust stocked up by sending it to the line of grinding wheels.
Packages come in here addressed to wash, haunt, smoke, or blast. They get filtered by the tunnels and the arms distribute them on the depots while they get processed.
Then my interns can do the unearthing in this WIP productivity zone.
Path of Exile Phrecia League 2 starts on Thursday January 29 at 4 PM EST. The league will last for at least 3 weeks. This league might be difficult for new players. Many experienced POE players considered Phrecia to be the best POE league of all time. The idol mechanic makes it possible to scale zone modifiers higher than possible using the atlas tree.
Though we have not received the patch notes for Phrecia 2 yet, I have very high hopes for the league. I highly recommend playing it. I will make a thread when the patch notes come out.
Path of Exile patch 3.28 league will be released in early March.
Path of Exile 2 patch 0.5 league should come out around May, maybe late April.
I like roguelites with deep theorycrafting and build customization, would I enjoy Granvir?
there's pretty good variety in parts and weapons, but i'm not sure it's as deep as you'd want it to be
it is being updated frequently though, so it might get there
the torrent is only a couple of gig if you wanted to try it out
It's me. The Barney Gamer. And thusly I am playing Barney Hide & Seek on Genesis.
They made Stalker 2 good now so I've been traipsing around the zone platforming on industrial equipment and shooting wildlife. It only crashes every 20-120 minutes so things are going well. I am running some overhaul mods.
I finished Outer Worlds 2. It was... okay. Just like the first game. Aggressively 'okay'. Which in the greater scope of games, is kind of bad. There's so many 'good' to 'great' things someone can play instead. The camp factor was turned up even more and it's just never really funny or clever with what it presents since everyone is such an obvious caricature.
It also lasted about 10 - 15 hours too long. There were a lot of things that could have been cut. There's a whole planet that is just shops and like 3 quests owned by the minor Sub Rosa faction that doesn't expand on them at all or give any interesting lore. There's also interactions you can have with the main antagonist faction, because originally it was planned you could join them like a Caesar's Legion type thing, but they couldn't pull that off. So there's just these little dangling quests that don't really lead to anything. There's a lot of time just spent running around the planets shooting creatures to get to Point B but there's not as much environmental storytelling filling in the gaps like there are in the Fallout games.
It ran well and the shooting felt nice. Some of the companions are cool, like one connected to the Order. At least one is very very undercooked. The Order was the only faction I found interesting. They're also the only objectively good ones in the whole game. Like the game tries to pull a "but they're secretly" evil thing,
spoiler
but it's just a few rogue members doing it, not baked into their ideology. Every ending slide I had improved things when it involved the things I did to help the Order.
My Three Kingdoms Total War campaign is on hold. I'm on a Legendary Yellow Turban campaign where I own half the map and Cao Cao and his allies own the other. Every turn has like 5 battles in it and it's just me inching and inching forward. Neither of us have the resources to deliver a killing blow yet, so it's kind of a slog.
I went and tried to play Total War Warhammer 3, as I put a ton of hours into 1 and 2, but compared to what I was just facing in 3K, the game is very easy? Surprisingly so. Corruption and other faction effects don't seem to be a threat, battles are relatively easy, I technically won my Cathay campaign in about 40 turns by playing hyper aggressively, which I noted previously was one of my weaknesses. It's annoying that they removed pre-made formations they had in earlier historical games and there's no way to save them. As long as your army doesn't change at all, it'll remember your formation from the start of last battle, but otherwise setting up checkerboards to let guns shoot between your infantry lines and stuff is very tedious. I don't think I like the game, tbh.
So I went back and installed Attilla, did some performance tweaks, and installed the Fall of Eagles mod. I haven't gotten to play it too much yet, but it has War Weariness so you're discouraged from constantly blitzing from city to city. Pace of the campaign and battles is a lot slower and more comfortable to manage. There's more diplomacy and things happening. I think we need to go back.
Im of the opinion that historical Total War peaked with Attila. The only bad thing I can say about that game is that the colors are a bit drab otherwise its a much more interesting and deep game then Rome 2 imho . I just prefer Atilla lot over basically all the older Total War games like Rome 2 and Shogun etc. Oh and Attilas performance sucks if you dont have a great rig (like I do)
On Total Warhammer 3 you should try a more challenging campaign like Kislev with Katarin on legendary for example.
I really should give Pharaoh Dynasties a try 
Attila and, in particular, Charlemagne come close after Fall of the Samurai as far as historical games go for me. The management layer in particular is something I love about it (also with how Charlemagne adopted formable nations a la Paradox, something which I wish was in the series earlier). On the downside, I've had late game lag making games feel much less enjoyable but maybe I can try with my new set-up.
I think I understand why people love Shogun. Im just a sucker for the setting of Attila and it feels like a Total War game that REALLY tries with the campaign layer and the depths of its mechanics. Besides the fact that its actually legit challenging (or at least that is how I remembered it)
I think I would agree, though I do like Shogun 2 and Fall of the Samurai, as a typical historical fan. Three Kingdoms is cool too but some stuff sure does annoy me, like spawning stacks of bandits in the corners of the maps to represent the people's outside the boundaries invading inwards. You just have to have a stack permanently parked in the corner to stop them from spawning and that's their only purpose. Alliances also seem to mean nothing in that game on higher difficulties, which is one positive I think I can say for the Warhammer games is that you can actually have long term friendships with other races, as long as they're also Order/Chaos or similar.
My Attila performance seems fine since I upgraded to a 9070 XT recently and did some of the config file tweaks. Fall of the Eagles also fixes a lot of bugs and stuff on its own.
I could try a harder Warhammer campaign for sure. I know Cathay was marked as an easy one, but that campaign I just finished was on Legendary, so I was expecting something more. The Great Bastion does cut off any potential attacks from the north, and allying with your brother cuts off any from the south as long as he doesn't get overwhelmed early by ogres. So that eases things up. I honestly didn't like their roster all that much either, tbh.
I was interested in Pharaoh Dynasties as well. It's one of the ones I haven't played. Along with Shogun 1, Troy, Thrones, Empire, and Napoleon.
PS. I hope Fedora is treating you well.
Thank you for the in-depth comment. I also bought a 9070 XT before prices went up and yeah, that card eats Attila for breakfast. (Im on 1440p but im really happy with my rig)
Of the ones you havent tried, Id recommend Dynasties and either Empire or Napoleon, mainly because theyre so different. That said, Ive heard that Empire or was it Napoleon ? can be a bit buggy. Just hearsay though since I never actually played those games.
Dynasties has the advantage of using a modern engine, so it should run super smoothly and look great while doing so. Ive got to confess I havent really gotten into Dynasties yet because of limited time. Ive mostly heard good things about Pharaoh Dynasties, and after the big update it seems like it has a solid amount of content and options.
Ive played campaigns on Legendary in Total War Warhammer before, but Im not thaaat good at the game overall. I think Im decent at battles, or at least I can sometimes turn losses into victories.
I also ended my dual-boot setup yesterday. Im now completely on Fedora KDE. Hope I can use it for a verrrry long time and who knows maybe I check out other distros one day if I feel like it.
EDIT : Funny you mentioned Outer Worlds 2 I also thought that game was the definition of mediocre ....which as you said is not great considering how many actually good games there are.
Just finished Act 1 of Baldur's Gate! A lot of tough choices so far.
Avowed... Going over it again
Just got disavowed by a mod.
