Yoooo, I’ve been playing 3 games this week:

Uppers

A miracle happened: Steam recommended me a game I ended up actually enjoying. What an insane mess this game is 😂 Last I played it, it had me kick someone into a flying helicopter, it exploded, and the game crashed. Absolute insanity, I love it.

Assault Android Cactus+

OK, I’m back: finally got over my gripes with the game and can officially say I’ve been converted to a fan. Honestly, in a world where nearly every western twin-stick shooter is some kind of rogue- variant, this game is worth supporting, even though it’s old. I respect Isaac and its legion of mimics, but I find games like this and Nex Machina much more fun. Arcade design FTW 🤘

Gunvein

Finally went on sale! I waited for a year! Totally worth the wait! What an intense, fun game. Probably my 3rd favorite shmup on Steam, after Crimzon Clover and Hellsinker. I look forward to practicing 1CCs.

I finally started God of War!!! Got it on a sale and has been in my backlog, waiting for its moment to shine.

And I’m back to Fields of Mistria, because there’s an update due soon.

In the previous weeks (I forgot to participate): Expedition 33, Palworld and Baba is You.

Coral Island. Was gifted to me over the holidays as just-another-stardew-clone but it’s actually really cute and addicting.

Took a while to hit a decent groove but once I got to that point it’s actually a lot of fun top to bottom.

Busy week.

Started with Team Fortress 2. Basically I was looking for a pvp game to scratch the itch. Many of the current ones suck terribly. Either weird and unreasonable requirements with full access to PC data or plain bad gameplay.With TF2, it’s steam so they’re kinda lawful evil about it.
But I do suck at the game. Completed the tutorials, played against bots a bit, then went into a regular match. Ended with 16 kills and 32 deaths, most of the better ones had over 40 kills. It’s good enough to slap the pvp itch away from time to time.

Found an Eternal something game, Korean isometric battle royale. Can’t remember the name, but it’s alright. Many characters, currencies, micro transactions as is standard. A forced tutorial that’s kinda annoying. A solo mode that doesn’t work. And only one regular match with bots before being thrown into hell.

I’ll probably get frustrated quickly enough and quit, but for now it’s fun.

Through family share, Ghost of Tsushima was recommended and I’m still on Act 1. It’s big in size. As with all games, I’m really bad at parrying so that’s not good.

A fun thing i enjoyed was when I met enemies on some cliffs and dropped on them to assassinate. I don’t know if it’s fixed to that area or to a number of kills, but the interruption made me chuckle.

The default enhanced visual settings make the game look crappy though for my hardware, so I had to disable a lot of the extra options. Like during cinematics, the background would get patchy, blotchy, low res dissonant kinda way. It was distracting.

Other than games, I’ve been running old sci-fi (50s-60s) movies in the background. Though rare, it’s funny to hear when some actors are quite bad at saying their lines.

Just recently got a 3DS for the first time. Currently playing through some NDS and GBA games before I get to their 3DS sequels. Almost done with Castlevania: Circle of the Moon and Pokémon Platinum (which will also be my first finished Pokémon game).

Great use of a 3DS, I know. But I like to explore game series from the beginning, or reasonably close to the beginning. Also getting an R36S for a more accurate Game Boy experience.

The great granddaddy of fantasy 4x games, Master of Magic (1994).

Mind you, I’m playing a variety of modded versions of Caster of Magic II (native Windows), but it’s still crazy that a game that old is still being actively modded.

Probably cycling through Nier Automata (finally using it other than as a CPU check), Baba is You, Dicey Tales and Castlevania 2, since those are the ones I have readily installed and I can’t decide for some other game to play.

im playing midnight suns again, and gonna try finishing far cry 6

I’m finally playing Crysis. For a 2007 game it’s really good looking. The shooting is less frantic and a lot more tactical than I thought it would be though. Great experience so far.

Chrono Ark

I’m decently deep into it now, and I keep enjoying it immensely. The only unfortunate thing about it (depending on how you look at it) is that it’s really rather long. I had for some reason thought this could be a medium-length game I could get through in a reasonable time frame and feel good about finishing. Instead it’s probably something of a 100-hour affair if you want the true ending - which is on par for the JRPG influences I suppose. I am also in finding that each run being around 3 hours in total is maybe a tad long: if you ever fail against the end boss it’s easy to get frustrated as you need to beat it every time in order to progress the story. And the story is quite important to the game, while the meta progression (which happens even on failed runs) is rather limited. So it can sometimes feel like you wasted 3 hours if you experimented with a new team and didn’t get there.

In the end though, this is more telling of the fact that the story is actually quite interesting, since the frustration is more stemming from the fact that I want to progress further in it and get impatient at a failed run. Otherwise not much to say about gameplay, it’s a really solid and fun roguelike deckbuilder. Every character is very well designed and unique, there are many combos and synergies and there is a lot of variety in every run with various unlocks, card upgrades and so on. If you like the genre, you would love this. Really can’t recommend it enough.

Ninja Gaiden 4

Played a couple of chapters so far, still on the Hard difficulty. Really liking the bosses so far, this has previously been a weak point in the series but have delivered here so far. I am pushing myself a bit playing on Hard, but I have been able to manage it thus far. I wasn’t thrilled about the idea of adding parrying and deflecting to a Ninja Gaiden game, but it really does make the bosses a lot more fun.

The general combat (outside of bosses) feels really good, but it’s still somewhat weird to not have fighting game style specific strings to work with, and I don’t know how to feel about that. On the one hand it’s much more dynamic and free flowing than ever, but I still miss memorising specific strings like “okay, XX->XY with the dual katanas is a guaranteed decapitation against humanoids, I’ll use it here” etc.

Overall though it’s the best Character Action Game in years and if you like the genre you should definitely play it.

Just (re)finished Myst III: Exile, and it’s still good.

Do you ever hperfixate on something to the point of spending almost every free moment of your time on it? Even if the thing in question isn’t something you’re a huge fan of? That’s exactly what happened to me over the last week. I’ve been on a binge of listening to Ridge Racer soundtracks, watching retrospectives and other videos as well as playing Ridge Racer 2 (the PSP one). It was pretty much non-stop RR time until I “finished” the game - it was great!

Was being the keyword here. After reaching the credits I unlocked duel races and they… these races are honestly the most miserable experience I had with this game (or any other racer I’ve played so far). I’m all for challenging content but simple stages with limited drifting opportunities mixed with opponents in much faster cars than you do not make for a fun challenge. I dunno, maybe I’m just bad at the game but it really felt less like a skill check and more like an RNG encounter even when driving “perfectly”.

I managed to beat one of these guys and after trying the second (out of three?) I don’t really want to play any more. It was enough to rip me out of this trance and make me go “you know what, I think I’m good on Ridge Racer for now”.

An unfortunate end to a pretty fun week but I can finally go back to Reverse Collapse. That’s a win, I guess.

I’m developing a new game based on luanti https://forum.luanti.org/viewtopic.php?t=32325 hobby game development is more engaging than playing games.

Wasteland 3. It’s a lot of fun to play co-op.

I’ve been playing Dagger Directive, which isn’t an old game but you wouldn’t know that by looking at it. It’s an intentional throwback to the original Delta Force games. I bought it on some sort of early sale, but even full price it’s only $20.

If you like the original Delta Force or Ghost Recon games, this has a similar vibe with missions where you can select the time of day to start, and are then dropped in wide open maps. I’ve been having a lot of fun turning the HUD off and playing night missions. The game takes into account how night vision goggles interfere with looking down sights, which in turn makes things like IR lasers and dedicated night vision scopes useful. I’ve seen community complaints (some of them more recent than the newest AI update) that suppressors don’t do anything regarding enemy AI, but I’ve had a lot of success with them and think people might be having wrong expectations on how silent the guns are going to be and/or how oblivious enemies are going to be.

The weapon selection is fairly good and getting expanded with updates. The scope system gets some flack, but it is an intentional recreation of the Delta Force scope system.

For the most part I’m ambivalent about it, although now that red dots have been added to the equipment they use the same picture-in-picture window that magnified scopes do, which makes red dots actually kind of useless for close range fast paced fighting (which is the entire IRL point of them), and I’d actually recommend using no attachments or using an IR laser with night vision instead of using a red dot in the game.

The sound design sneaks up on you. Things will be quiet and boring one second, and then your audio is filled with terrifying cracks and whistles of gunfire as an enemy machinegun ambushes you the next.