Finished Any Games Lately?

Completed a second run through of the main story on Horizon Zero Dawn in about 40 hours as NG+. Was over 100 hours for the first run through but a great game and a favourite form the last couple of years (on PC). Now the long wait for the new one...

Garth wrote:

Finished up Dark Pictures Anthology: Lost Hope...you lose characters for not unlocking certain personality traits?

That part really annoyed me; I didn't learn until I was done that you were supposed to make the character choices they wanted you to, rather than playing the characters they way you wanted to or thought they should be played. That's a new mechanic for the series, and if they told me it was something I was supposed to do I completely missed it. I managed to keep everyone from dying, and then they suddenly up and killed two characters with a message that amounted to "dead because you didn't play our hidden system right".

Overall I still thought the story and writing were better than Man of Medan, but I'm increasingly of the opinion that Until Dawn was a fluke, or that some of the people who made it work have left for other jobs.

I beat Dying Light! (The first one.)

The main story is as boring and rote as you can imagine, but it never stopped being fun catapulting off a zombie's head across the landscape.

I finished Prey over the weekend.

Well worth the time to do so. Great sense of place and a wonderful piece of sci-fi in addition to being a good game. Wish they'd make a sequel.

Well, in terms of name, they did, but that's what you just played.

Finished The Persistence last night, one of the free Playstation Plus offerings from either January or December. It's a sci-fi roguelike that's made for VR play, but I played it without VR. Premise being that there's been an accident on a space ship and your consciousness has been loaded into a clone. Every time you die a new clone is decanted and you start again. Like most modern roguelikes you can upgrade your stats as you progress (and die over and over again) buy collecting credits and stem cells. The credits can be used to upgrade your spacesuit/worksuit and the stem cells are used to upgrade your clone body... in a needlessly graphic way I might add.

While it wasn't exactly awesome I kept finding myself playing it when I had some free time. It didn't require a lot of thought and it was interesting enough to keep going until I finished it. I do wish I still had a PSVR; it definitely would have been cool to play that way.

Trachalio wrote:

Finished The Persistence last night...I do wish I still had a PSVR; it definitely would have been cool to play that way.

It very much is. A horror/stealth/survival game where you're constantly hiding behind objects works fantastically well in VR. The developer, Firesprite Studios, was one of Sony's recent acquisitions, which made me happy as a current PSVR owner and someone who's very interested in PSVR 2.

Evan E wrote:

Well, in terms of name, they did, but that's what you just played. ;)

Yeah, I played a bit of that one back in the day. It was nowhere near as good as the 2017 game, and there's no connection between the stories that I'm aware of.

Timespike wrote:

I finished Prey over the weekend.

Well worth the time to do so. Great sense of place and a wonderful piece of sci-fi in addition to being a good game. Wish they'd make a sequel.

Mooncrash is well worth it if you want more Prey. Don’t be put off by the Groundhog Day repeating structure of it.

gewy wrote:

Mooncrash is well worth it if you want more Prey. Don’t be put off by the Groundhog Day repeating structure of it.

I've been listening to a number of "Best Of The Year" gaming podcasts recently and on a number of them people have said they could see a direct lineage from Mooncrash to Deathloop, and that they actually liked Mooncrash more.

A few catch-up items for me here.

On October 18, 2021 I finished the Critically Acclaimed Final Fantasy XIV's award-winning first expansion: Heavensward. I started playing that expansion sometime in 2015. I then played through the post-expansion content and completed the 3.x storyline on November 1.

On November 7, 2021 I finished the second expansion: Stormblood, and the post-expansion content for 4.x on November 11.

On December 3, 2021 I finished the third expansion: Shadowbringers, and the post-expansion content for 5.x on December 10.

On January 15, 2021 I finished the fourth/current expansion: Endwalker, and took a breather from FFXIV.

I'm not going to go into detail about how super amazing this game is, how friendly the player community is, etc. Anything I write here won't change your mind, if you haven't already played it by now, despite the incredibly generous offer of being completely free to play all the way up through the entire base game and first expansion (when they re-enable it after server loads cool down a bit).

All dates above are not from me taking meticulous notes, but rather exploiting Discord's search history of my posts in the #mmo channel. And speaking of which - thank you everyone in there for supporting me through this arduous (and totally enjoyable) experience.

P.S.:

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/rMRjtQ0.png)

gewy wrote:
Timespike wrote:

I finished Prey over the weekend.

Well worth the time to do so. Great sense of place and a wonderful piece of sci-fi in addition to being a good game. Wish they'd make a sequel.

Mooncrash is well worth it if you want more Prey. Don’t be put off by the Groundhog Day repeating structure of it.

Good to know. I may have to jump into that.

I finished my first run in Tainted Grail: Conquest last week.

This is only supposed to be scratching the surface, as you need at least a few more runs under your belt in order to unlock the "true" final boss. But... for my purposes, I'm treating that as end game content!

I'm actually more excited to dive back into Slay the Spire now that Tainted Gail has started scratching that roguelike deckbuilding itch.

Finished Solasta: Crown of the Magister. If what you want from your rpg:s is good tactical combat, it's got you covered. It really brought Wrath of the Righteous' design with endless lists of feats that funnels you into crippling overspecialization that renders 99% of loot irrelevant to a character into stark relief, and underlined how much I disliked it.

However, if what you want is good writing, or interesting characters...you'll want to look elsewhere. You create your whole party, and there's an interesting attempt at assigning them a personality and having them interject according to their background and values, but it doesn't work very well in practice, and descends into non sequiturs at worst. As for the main plot, there was like one neat moment in the whole thing.

Just finished Total War: Rome II - the Rise of the Republic Expansion. This game is about 9 years old now and I decided to give it a go after all of the patches and improvements and DLC over the years. The Rise of the Republic scenario starts at the infancy of Rome when it is surrounded by enemy tribes from all sides. Otherwise you know the deal with the game.

Going back to TW: R2 after playing a scandalous amount of hours with the TW: Warhammer series, it's interesting how initially the Roman version seems so bland, but over time you begin to realize this is where the major shift for the TW series begins. Instead of dozens of mini armies, all the TW games now limited your armies (at least initially) to fewer but more powerful stacks. Originally it was jarring since it made your military strategy a lot less flexible and reactionary, but instead it made the player focus on long term planning with broad strokes of strategy using armies, hordes and legions.

Also, Rome: TW2 is where city design now requires the player to specialize cities. Although Medieval: TW2 asked the player to make choices between selecting castles (aka military) vs cities (aka economy) in each region, here the vision for region development is fully realized. I'll admit I hated this approach at first, but over multiple subsequent titles, I have to admit it was the right approach. Warhammer: TW1 and 2 do not exist as the amazing (and best) TW experiences without this design decision.

Still there are some warts underneath the toga (sorry). After playing with Orcs, Elves, Dvarves, Undead, Demons, Waterlogged pirates, Egyptian mummies, Ratmen, and Lizardmen, it's hard to really differentiate one human with a spear and a shield from another. One has fancier armor, the other is hairier and has an axe, and this guy over here likes chariots and has a different accent, but overall a human is a human is a human.

In other words, Total War: Rome 2 is the regular life you return to after the drug induced fever dream of Total War: Warhammer 2

"Salve, Brutus"
"Salve, Scipio"
"I had the strangest dream last night. I led an army of walking trees and dragons, I could shoot fire from my fingertips. We were fighting an army of rats riding giant wheels and...here's the strangest part...there were women in my army. With pointy ears who-"
"Scipio?"
"Yes, Brutus"
"I told you not to eat those mushrooms. Anyway here's your pointy stick. We're fighting the other men with pointy sticks today."

Overall I'm glad I gave the old lady another look, but I am also happy to move on.

Up next, probably some Sci Fi strategy game or RPG or a palate cleanser before diving into TW: WH3.

And on a similar note I forgot to mention I "finished" Star Wars: The Old Republic. By that I mean I've completed the main storyline with my primary character (Jedi Knight of course).

Look, SW:TOR is not the greatest MMO of all time, but it is unfairly underrated. The sheer amount of content, gameplay, story, and (a personal focus of mine) the hours of voiceover for fully voiced characters according to their individual class and gender is just staggering, especially when you consider that you get so much of it for free. It's hundreds of hours before you even need to spend any money to continue the story. And the main story actually does a surprisingly good job of wrapping up a massive story told over a decade across multiple expansions. It's a good attempt at closure - if you ever complained about the need for an MMO story to have closure, SW:TOR has a very satisfying "ending".

But of course it will continue because DAT SUBSRIPTION CASH IS LEGIT YO

...sorry.

SW:TOR is your casual, alternate MMO. It's the one you play when you just want to tune out to a certain extent and just "kind of sort of play a game, maybe an MMO" when doing other things on the side, or when you just want to do something "Star Warsy" but don't know what and you only have about 20 minutes.

The game still hits up against certain barriers of an MMO design, like "why is a Jedi farming for gear when they need to avoid attachment to things?", or "why do I need new shoulderpad armor when my defacto uniform is a brown robe (City of Heroes had a similar problem with providing gear that didn't alter your costume)?". Best not to overthink it. It's a Star Wars MMO. It's fun, the grind is getting handled better and better, but it's not going to change the world, and it doesn't overpromise and underdeliver like certain MMOs recently purchased by Microsoft.

Pokemon Legends: Arceus...I'd never thought I'd consider giving a Pokemon game top 10 honors (first completion of 2022 for me so there's still time for it to fall off) but this feels like the Pokemon game that those of us who grew up with this have been waiting for. Let's hope they keep most of what's here and use it in the main games

I just finished my first playthrough of Persona 4 Golden. This was so much fun! So much, that I will play it again immediately and likely seek out the Platinum Trophy!

Copied from my post on the monthly Pile Thread:

"The Persona Compendium is at 95%, I maxed out 13 Social Links - almost 16 but ran out of time -, I beat a ton of optional bosses and got some interesting weapons. I was just one book shy of getting the related trophy and totally missed out on a handful of events, but that's what the second go-around is for.

Having played through every mainline Persona game to date - I refuse to play Royal, though -, I can say that this has been my favorite one. It truly felt like I was saying goodbye to close friends, and I genuinely laughed at a few situations during the final in-game days."

Finished a bunch of games over the last couple of days.

I really wanted to like Pillars of Eternity 2. I have very fond memories of the original Baldur's Gate games. But just like the first one, Pillars 2 left me feeling a bit meh. I did enjoy it when the game let me settle into a decent dungeon crawl, but as soon as I got back out to a hub town I found myself thinking, "Oh great, now I've got to walk round this whole place, talk to every boring dickhead and get their tedious fetch quest."

On a more positive note, I finished Black Book and Disco Elysium. I don't have much to add to what's been said on the podcast and elsewhere, other than to reiterate that they're both amazing games with amazing writing.

I beat The Medium just under the wire since it's leaving Game Pass today. First game that I crossed off for 2022. I had started it last year since it had music composed by Akira Yamaoka of Silent HIll fame. The music was nice in places but I actually appreciated other elements more. The dual realities on one screen was cool at first but did eventually become gimmicky. Still, there were a few fun puzzles related to it. It was really pretty and atmospheric and the mystery in the story kept me going.

My biggest complaint was the gameplay since the controls were very stiff and slow and it got very repetitive at times. Don't get started on the stealth and chase sequences. I don't think I'd recommend paying full price for this game but it was a good Game Pass game.

jontra wrote:

On a more positive note, I finished Black Book

I had not heard of this before but it looks splendid. And Russian folk music? I'm so in!

Natus wrote:
jontra wrote:

On a more positive note, I finished Black Book

I had not heard of this before but it looks splendid. And Russian folk music? I'm so in!

I've had Black Book on my wishlist for a while now. It's in this month's Humble Choice over on humblebundle.com, so I'll likely be getting it from there as there are a couple of other games in the bundle that look interesting.

Natus wrote:
jontra wrote:

On a more positive note, I finished Black Book

I had not heard of this before but it looks splendid. And Russian folk music? I'm so in!

Yes! The music and art are amazing, the devs did a great job of evoking the particular time and place of the setting.

Last night I watched credits roll on Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice. Probably the most satisfying, gorgeous, upsetting game I have played in quite a while.

Last night I finished Echoes Of The Eye, the DLC for The Outer Wilds. To my surprise, I never really mentioned Outer Wilds when I finished it before, but fortunately pretty much everything you can say about the main game also applies to the DLC. To whit: The Outer Wilds is an overflowing cornucopia of some of the most incredible moments in forty years of computer/video gaming I have ever experienced. I really have to go back to something like Infocom's Trinity to think of another game that has completely captured my mind and imagination both while playing and while not.

It's a game where all the progression is locked by your own insights. You've got a rickety, jerry-rigged spaceship that allows you to fly the solar system and investigate, and the solar system is filled with things that regularly dropped my jaw to the floor in amazement. I can't begin to count the times I was completely gobsmacked by what I was presented with, and then gobsmacked again when I realized how the thing in front of me fit into the thing I saw on another planet eight hours ago. Along the way everything you run across is fleshed out by writings from another culture that you translate, and the writing is a model of witty brevity, full of character and goofy charm (sadly, there's no text you can translate in the DLC, the one area where I think the DLC is slightly less than the main game). Everything you see and read is logged automatically by your ship's log, which helps point you in directions you can go.

Did I occasionally still resort to YouTube videos to point out something I'd either been missing or that I'm not sure I would have ever figured out? Yes, I did, but 95% of the time I was able to figure out what I needed to do and get that Eureka! endorphin rush that fuels the obsessive "OMG what amazing thing is next?!?" feeling driving me forward. Outside of games like Myst, and Portal, and The Witness (and Manifold Garden, a new entry into that pantheon for me), obvious comparisons, I came to the realization that The Outer Wilds makes me feel like Mark Watney in The Martian, using my brain to lead me from wonder to wonder. It's an amazing feeling the game engenders, over and over and over.

Unfortunately...in both the main game and the DLC there's one giant turd in the middle of the five-star meal, a sequence that's so frustrating and awful that in both cases I came to the knife's edge of quitting and hating the entire experience, even when so much before was so very, very great. And it's not like they weren't sufficiently playtested or broken - as far as I can tell, they play out exactly the way the developers intended, but they're monstrously unfun and aggravating, and I found myself dying over and over in them, so they take a disproportionately large amount of the game's time (I spent about 40 hours each on the main game and the DLC). In the DLC, you're being chased in pitch blackness - you have a lantern, but using it will give away your position, and in my case most of the time the only thing it revealed to me, as I was being killed, was that I had been looking at the ceiling, so for the last five minutes when I thought I was turning and moving I was just spinning in place. Maybe this kind of hide-and-seek wouldn't be so terrible in real life, but in a video game you have no sense of touch to tell you when you've run into a wall, and you have no idea if you're looking forward or at your feet.

When it happened in the main game, I thought that whole section was a mistake, but when something equally terrible happens in the DLC... I guess the developers think it's fun? Ugh, I was desperate for a button that just allowed me to skip to the rest of the incredibly joyous, mind-bogglingly wondrous game.

I hope that hasn't put off anyone who might be interested in the game that hasn't already played it. Both the main game and the DLC are pirate's hoards of incredible, amazing moments, that unfortunately each come with a single sequence that's apparently willfully awful. I'm sure with time the bad parts will recede and I'll be left with memories of the incredible wonders the game constantly unfolds (that had already happened with the main game, but the DLC just reminded me of how much I hated those weird, anomalous sequences). If anyone who loves puzzle games tried Outer Wilds and bounced off it because of the Newtonian space travel, here's three tips for it that I've seen numerous YouTube Let's Players never realize:

1) Your onboard log allows you to mark the next place you want to go, and then it will be flagged in the sky, making it brain-dead easy to pick out your destination.
2) The ship has an auto-pilot, so once you point your ship at your destination, you can lock on to where you want to go and the ship will accelerate, steer, and decelerate to your target; all you have to do is land (which brings up 2b: there's a downward-pointing camera, which can aid in the actual landing part). The auto-pilot's not too smart, though, so you'll need to keep watch over it in case some other celestial body puts itself between you and your goal.
3) The realistic inertial physics of the game's space travel can be frustrating until you realize that once you lock onto an object you can come to a dead stop in relationship to it with a single button press. So if you over- or under-correct and find yourself hurtling toward or away from your destination, just hit the correct button and your "space brakes" will come to the rescue.

Got my platinum trophy in Jedi: Fallen Order on PS5 last night. I really enjoyed this game. Took me a while to try it because I’m not too into Star Wars anymore. But I liked the characters and story, the force powers and combat and the metroidvania elements of unlocking new paths with powers. I hope the sequel adds fast travel, though, even if it doesn't unlock until story complete. Overall, though, great game. I don't platinum a lot of games, but I wanted to spend more time in this world.

Garth wrote:

Last night I watched credits roll on Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice. Probably the most satisfying, gorgeous, upsetting game I have played in quite a while.

Hellblade’s incredible on its own, but with the binaural audio it’s taken to another level, and rather than being a gimmick it fundamentally reinforces Senua’s headspace.

I was really upset when Microsoft bought Ninja Theory and the sequel became a console exclusive, but when they later bought Bethesda that became “Well, I guess I’m going to have to buy an Xbox for Elder Scrolls 6, but that means I’ll get to play Senua 2, also. Score!”

Evan E wrote:
Garth wrote:

Last night I watched credits roll on Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice. Probably the most satisfying, gorgeous, upsetting game I have played in quite a while.

Hellblade’s incredible on its own, but with the binaural audio it’s taken to another level, and rather than being a gimmick it fundamentally reinforces Senua’s headspace.

I was really upset when Microsoft bought Ninja Theory and the sequel became a console exclusive, but when they later bought Bethesda that became “Well, I guess I’m going to have to buy an Xbox for Elder Scrolls 6, but that means I’ll get to play Senua 2, also. Score!”

I hope you know you just ruined my day. I am sure I head heard about them purchasing Ninja Theory, but the dots didn't connect at the time. Man...what a bummer. I only have a PS5 and Switch. I knew a sequel was coming (and in all honesty, I didn't feel like I needed it, but now knowing that it is out there...) but didn't know it was an exclusive. Bummer.

I finished Assassin’s Creed Odyssey around the 57 hour (give or take). And by beat, I mean the main story. I’m having fun, and I plan to keep at it to take down the cult and knock out the DLC, plus go farm some achievements for a bit, but this made for a good time to check in with what I think. There’s endless amounts of content and things to go hunt or do, a never ending drip, drip, drip that keeps you engaged, but also doesn't demand any particular session to be lengthy, making it in many ways to be a perfect game for busy adults. All quests or missions take like 5-15 minutes, even story missions. Nothing ever takes too long, and you can just go through the world pretty easily doing action video game things with all the action video game skills you’ve built up over the years. It’s basically the Ubisoft formula, given perfect form.

But on the flip side, it’s very much a paint by numbers game, and the formula it is following is too obvious to ignore. Since there’s a never ending drip, drip, drip of things to do, none of them seem too essential. And there doesn't seem to be that much of a sense of progression, either. Your numbers go up but theirs do to, so all the combat still feels very samey, even 50 hours into it, despite all the tools you get. And again, that makes it perfect for picking it up and putting it down; no difficulty spikes means you don’t have to be locked in on any given evening to get through a part.

It’s the sort of game that is destined to be a top 4 in a GOTY list in most years for me the way it just hits all the neurons just right to keep you going (this year is kind of stacked with new releases, though), but it could never be #1 since it doesn’t make me feel anything. It’s a paint-by-numbers, made grand by having a whole lot of numbers. And that isn’t necessarily true for all AC games; for instance, Black Flag made me feel something (it could have been the setting and atmosphere, but most likely just the sea shanties). Anyway, it’s a good game, but that’s kind of all it is. And maybe that shows the limits of the Ubisoft formula.

If I were to rank the different AC games, I would probably go Black Flag > Odyssey > 2 > Origins > Brotherhood > Rogue. And even Rogue wasn’t a bad game by any stretch, it just felt like Black Flag lite. Meanwhile, Odyssey is like Origins but more and better of everything.

I knocked out Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs as well as Fuser (well, the campaign of it anyway. Those rhythm games always have a score-chasing element that means you could really play them forever.