Tabletop, DnD, board games, and minecraft. Also Animal Crossing.
Rules
Our Lord Ditto died for your sins so that His prophet, this regular ordinary human child, could rebuild a society for Our Blessed Trainers to return to.
i've actually been building a church in pokopia, crucified ditto and all
We're building competing megachurches in each of the five areas. We already completed construction on the Cyber Sanctorum, led by the Reverend of Funk DJ Rotom:
Next up we're building a church around Mosslax and Chef Dente that's just full of food.
Started finally properly playing Ocarina of Time via the Ship of Harkinian PC port (and in Japanese, for immersion practice)! Over the years, I think I've watched at least half a dozen streamers play through the first couple of dungeons or so, but this will be my first time experiencing more of the game, and I'm right on the cusp of that new material having finished Dodongo's Cavern and picked up my two Great Fairy Fountain upgrades. Thankfully, my knowledge of the Adult Link portion of the game is very limited, so I'll be experiencing a lot of that completely blind.
At any rate, even though a good chunk of what I've played is stuff I've seen before, I'm really enjoying myself. I love the sense of wonder and exploration that you get skulking around the alleys of Hyrule Castle Town or wending your way through the Lost Woods. I can't remember where it was, but I read/watched something recently talking about how fixed camera angles are a legitimate artistic tool and not just a relic of a resource-constrained past, and the Temple of Time exterior is a perfect illustration. You just wouldn't get that same sense of awe and foreboding with a standard 3rd person camera. It's really making me want to go tackle the original three Resident Evil games, since I've played all the mainline games from RE4 onward including the REmakes (and excluding RE9, so far) but haven't had the guts to tackle the fixed camera titles. Honestly, even more than the fixed camera, I think it's the limited saving that has me quaking in my boots, since I tend to be a save-every-thirty-seconds kind of scaredycat.
As far as my Ship of Harkinian set up goes, I have only a very minimal set of Quality of Life tweaks applied:
and then I have the resolution and FPS cranked up + LOD and draw distance disabled, but it's otherwise a vanilla experience—no texture packs or major modifications.
I'm trying to use guides as little as possible, so I'm taking lots of notes so I know where to backtrack and which items I've collected where. I'd love to have a very spoiler-reduced checklist kind of thing that would just tell me, say, how many collectibles are in a given location, and allow me to progressively drill down in something like the below structure to minimize future spoilers and give me a chance to attempt find things on my own if I know they're in a certain area without risking missing something completely because I tripped some progression flag:
If anyone knows of something that already exists along these lines, definitely let me know! And if not, who knows...maybe if this playthrough turns me into an OoT superfan, I'll end up making it myself.
Anyway, Ship of Harkinian is an incredibly cool project that's emblematic of the wonderful things that people can accomplish working together without a hint of a profit motive. As the quote on their homepage proudly states, "Proof that the unofficial option is sometimes the best option"—Nintendo could never. I only listed a few tweaks, but there are literally hundreds of little flags you can toggle, and extensive support for randomized playthroughs and mods. Probably just about anything about the original game you can think of that you'd want to change, there's a way to do so.
Remembering your save location so you don't have to start back at your house every time
I'm not knowledgeable enough on the coding side to know if it's a limitation, but Link to the Past is similar iirc so it might be a game design carry-over.
I'm an avid Ocarina of Time player. It's one of my comfort games, and it codifies many races and features that are mainstays of the series now. I'm also pretty hyped about Ship of Harkinian as well as other N64 decomps.
There are some in-game UI/UX hints that will help keep you spoiler free. I'll try to keep any spoilers vague.
Remembering your save location so you don't have to start back at your house every time
I use emulator save states because it's 2026, so no shame.
Some random things that come to mind. I keep it to advice, but spoiler'd just in case you want to be completely blind.
I feel like a bad leftist for emulating a fictional fascist, but I’m doing a Skyrim run inspired by Treize Khushrenada from Gundam and what I know from official TES Lore about nords and dragonborn. The best spoiler-free description I can give of Treize is he’s an aristocratic villain who believes war is a necessary part of human nature, and there’s a soul to it.
So I have a few self-imposed rules:
(for brevity, put the rules here)
Survival mode + Adept difficulty. No one gets special treatment, not even me.
Permadeath. If I die, then it’s a beautiful tragedy about a hero who was too good for this doomed world. There’s actual stakes. If you’re not confident just do “three strikes you’re out”
No sneak attacks, no illusion, or conjuration, and no poisons. Keep the fight ‘beautiful’. Enchanting uses souls of mortals and is forbidden too. Followers are allowed, however
Never flee a fight from humanoids. Wildlife is fine as its survival and not war. But I must take something from wildlife so it doesn’t ‘go to waste’. I can do tactical retreats but I can’t fully flee the fight. Either I clear an area or I don’t even bother.
If they yield, you must let them recuperate. You’re not cold-blooded. They’ll stand back up and you can give them a proper warrior fight to the end
leave behind a flower for any particularly difficult fights
Undead and automatons deserve none of these rules, they’re an insult to war and industrialize it. That means you also don’t go out of your way to grind out bandits
sometimes check up on your stats and all the people you have slain, were they all really necessary? Are you just as bad as Alduin because the journey to get to him cost hundreds of lives?
gonna play the deadlock playtest, the new patch is cool
also gonna finish my second playthrough of Deadeye Deepfake Simulacrum, an indie game about hacking computers and shooting people (if u can call corpo cyborg agents people)
I played a little bit of Pharaoh total war.
Thoughts so far:
"What if we gave one faction all the shit units" is an interesting design choice. Gotta give them some credit on that. Bay (The Canaanite that isn't the "Burn everything down" guy) having the worst standard melee infantry, the worst ranged units and no access to cavalry/chariots but instead having more dedicated charge infantry in his roster (That don't have any armor or suitability, but instead are meant to be hidden) is a choice. In return he gets uhhhh, easy access to conversion and a production building that's just "Crimes".
Also you can choose to worship El but not Yahweh.
Also you get bonus to sneaking
Also you get an achievement for backstabbing your allies.
Guys is this game antisemitic?
Since Turtle WoW is being shut down and I've finally been released from the curse I finished The Wandering Village, which is a colony Sim where you live on the back of a giant dinosaur and have to deal with different biomes as it travels across the world. Just picked up Clean Fall which is sort of like Terraria / Noita except you can make turret ships and there seems to be a lot of depth / mechanics to soak up my time. Also trying to set up a time for a co-op Baldurs Gate 3 but I gotta figure out people's schedules still.
Me and my wife started Valheim not long ago.
Other then that FF14 dropped a new patch and I'm trying to get the final Cosmic Exploration crafting and gathering main hands before the next planet comes out. Also been doing a lot of gpose prompts. (In game pictures)
I wish there were like, NPCs and quests and more To Do in valheim because i literally can't get my partner to play it with me long enough to get out of the meadows before she dies of boredom
Damn I'm sorry. Me and her have had similar problems with games that the other is not into.
I hope you can find someone to play with in the future!
It's fine, we have other options, it's just i thought valheim was kinda fun but don't wanna play it alone
If y'all like games like that, I only played a bit of a pirated copy but theres a early access game called Windrose that basically felt like "valheim but you're pirates"
Oooh! That sounds interesting! We'll need to check it out!
Np, impressions from my pirated copy are: it's a little janky, looks pretty, valheim has more impressive water physics (but i didn't really get to getting a ship so maybe open ocean storms look good), and also it's really fucking hard. I died like 15 times to pigs, quit, started up again, then i got to the first quest to rescue your npc crewmates and i had to fight 4 human npcs and it's like
Im good at games but i'm not good at soulslike dodge parry if you fuck up and get hit twice you're dead shit. Maybe if i played it a lot id get good but the process of getting good does nothing to drive the dopamine treadmill i need videogames to power
That'd have been easier with a friend though, or if i saved my bullets (you start with a few and can make more, but you need gunpowder too and i couldn't find sulfur)
It seems like they have base npcs and production stuff like that though which i also find cool (if valheim had that itd be something to do, building an actual village)
I luckily have a partner who likes to build the base while I gather materials for upgrades. We both enjoy the survival crafting gameplay loop though
Lol that's exactly how we are. I don't hate building bases but she loves doing the little finicky stuff to make it really awesome. I tend to be too practical for my own good at times.
It makes a very good team though. I love supporting her creative vision.
It's honestly hard to find games to play together because I'm a big nerd who wants to rush to get the best gear before having any fun and in most games that means i have to basically leave my wife behind which isn't fun for either of us.
These games i can be survival she can be crafting.
i gathered a bunch of thistles and mushrooms and honey and meats so we can optimize our food buffs
i built a beautiful and functional kitchen and workshop with a central storage. You better have brought a lot of fine wood too!
Yeah i tried to be like "i'll be a lumberjack and just bring you stuff" but she still gets bored. It doesn't help that resource collection in valheim is realllllllly slow especially if you're building anything big
We're probably going to do a second playthrough of Abiotic Factor sometime this summer though when they release their DLC. We both had a lot of fun with that, having a plot quest to progress through helped keep her attention
Stellaris and Vic3 through the free weekend. I'm in the end game of my Stellaris Communist empire I detailed in the previous Sunday Gaming thread. The war I talked about in the end took a huge toll on my empire, it was basically a genocide given I'm now down to 4.4k pops and I'm having to grow quick so I can start liberating the galaxy from capitalism. The 2 Awakened Empires are gonna be hard tho. Good thing the main species of my empire is now Psionic and the Composer of Strands let's me add 100 pops to all systems with her aura every now and then.
For Vic3 I started with Colombia in the tutorial and let me tell you, what a useless tutorial lol, it tells you to do something then doesn't tell you anything else you can do and how until it finishes, so either you take initiative and start messing around which will fuck up things fast or you just stare at the screen waiting for it to finish the building the tutorial wanted you to build, which is just extremely boring. It got so bad I completely fucked my economy with not way of getting it back on track because the game simply did not tell me how to fix it, just told me I had to. So I started over with a bit more knowledge I got from exploring the menus, and now I have a much better understanding and for some reason now the game tells me about how to properly check my economy and how to fix it.
Also I just found out you can't simply reform the government separating religion and the state in Colombia, because now the church wants to do a revolution, which I had to search to understand since the game yet again does not tell me how to properly deal with that. I thought Stellaris tutorial was bad, but this one takes the cake, it's almost useless lmao.
trying to get the cracked wukong game to work.. doesn't work in Lutris so trying in a sandboxie env in a win10 vm
Using a repack or anything? There was also a crackfix put out that may solve it. At least one comment elsewhere says it works through Lutris once they applied the fix.I haven't tried to get the cracked one to work yet, but at least ProtonDB people say the game in general works great.
Animal Crossing New Leaf... dumped it from my 3DS onto my MacBook via SD card (to USB adapter to USB-C adapter, fun times) and running in... I forget the name but it's a Citra fork with a Middle Eastern sounding name/looking flower icon. Playing with an 8bitdo SN30 Pro controller (like a Super NES controller but with two analogue sticks and an extra set of (digital only) triggers). Mouse (or rather the MacBook's trackpad) for interacting with the touch screen, which sits off to the side. Graphics filters make it look almost as pretty as the Switch version (New Horizons).
Azahar is what you are thinking of
Finished my Yuan Bo campaign in Total Warhammer 3 and have started playing as Tamurkhan, who is fucking busted with all the legendary heroes. Nurgle recruitment is pretty weird and I'm not a huge fan. Somehow Boris beat Archaon so I have a new enemy in the north.
Playing some warframe here and there, finished Khora, doing some Perita, Caliban, and Protea farming. Protea is by far the worst of those 3, I forgot just how shit the drop rate feels. I guess Belly of the Beast is soon, so I'll probably do some of that.
Protea farm is undoubtedly one of the worst in the game
Tell me about it, I got ONE of whichever part comes from the highest level Granum Void in the course of getting every Tenet weapon.
Been playing Tokyo Xtreme Racer a lot recently. I've gotten pretty close to unlocking my IRL car so that'll be fun.
My Valheim party has been thoroughly storming the Ashlands, leading to that, "Aw, we're pretty much done" sadness and falling off of the game.
I'm currently at 70 hours in Slay The Spire 2 and looking for my next game. Maybe I'll pick up Stoneshard on sale
AAAAA I GOT THE NEW STEAM CONTROLLER A FEW SECONDS BEFORE IT WENT OUT OF STOCK IM SO EXCITED!!!
I finally picked up Baba is You the other week and I've been slowly bashing my head against it. I'm really enjoying it, but also finding it quite difficult. It makes its own internal kind of sense, in that solutions are always logical according to the game rules and somewhat obvious in retrospect. But the game operates so fundamentally differently than what I'd expect from a puzzle game that it's utterly mindbending. Turns the "Ah ha!" moment you get in something like Portal into more of an "Oh, of -course-!" when something clicks. Highly rewarding.
Played Dirt Rally 2.0 and I can see the appeal of simrigs now. I like the feel of it but it's starting to look a little dated, and there's a video on Youtube saying the game is dead now, perfect timing since I started playing it.
I decided to check out another game and downloaded Assetto Corsa Rally. There's a portable version on the high seas that just works. Bunch of texture problems but great for a game that doesn't need to be installed. It felt a bit more off compared to Rally 2.0. Gear shifts were slower which was something I had to get used to. It's also one of the few UE5 games I've played and I can really see that blurriness people complain about. I might stick with Dirt and acquire the 0.3 version of ACR given it just game out
Back on the final fantasy xi grind
Been playing the PS2 Berserk Game, full title: Berserk Millennium Falcon Arc: Chapter of the Holy Demon War. There is an English fan translation for the game as it was only released in Japan, apparently done by an Italian Team.
I am playing via an emulator with a Xbox One Controller. As you Do.
Anyway its pretty fun with good voice acting and cut-scenes though the game is a bit clunky with its fighting mechanics. But this might be due to me not playing fighting games before and spamming the act button too much.
I'm about to be running some Ultramodern 5 (think d20 Modern for whatever you want to call the current edition of D&D) but since I haven't done it yet, I can't really comment on it.
That being said, I'd like to introduce the community to No More Jockeys. I've played it with a couple other users here and it was quite fun.
Last episode I burnt myself out on Factorio again. I needed a lighter snack, so I am replaying Halo 2. I put it on heroic difficulty which is fine and comfortable... except the Flood. Fuck the Flood. I hate the Flood in every one of these games.
Let me rant on how bullshit the Flood are.
The only thing I think they don't do is throw grenades!
Halo has some fun gunplay when facing off against humans or Covanent, especially managing my recharging shields against theirs adding a layer of necessary tactics. Even when I die I usually understand what I did wrong. With the Flood all that goes right out the window. A few Flood chasing you guns blazing is basically a repeating death sentence, only to respawn at some checkpoint five waves ago.
And boy don't get me started on the lore logic required for all these Flood. It's as if everybody in-universe makes the worst possible decisions that get everybody infected. There are so many questionable choices the Forerunners make for research that would cause Wayland-Yutani to raise an eyebrow. What is the point of the Halo Array if you are just going to send a time capsule of Flood to future species to accidentally Pandora's Box?
I'll probably beat it this week and might jump straight into Halo 3 after.
