Playing through the campaign of Call of Duty Advanced warfare because I got it for cheap on an xbox sale and wanted something completely different to play from FF14 while it patches all day.
@spacetown CoD games also still have hoard mode.
canāt wait, keep up the good work 
the late game events are buggier in addition to being less interesting so my progress has slowed considerably at this point but I am 100% gonna finish it this year and Iāve done a much, much better job up to this point than I had in the past, so if youāre interested, I would say go ahead and start with what I haveā¦
Finally caught a glimpse of the Fall Guys and it reminded me a lot of the foot races in Pen Pen Triicelon on the Dreamcast
I cannot believe you are the second person Iāve seen compare Fall Guys to Pen Pen
Iām going to have to buy this now
I am the one person who hears āItās like Pen Pen Triicelonā and says āSold!!!ā
The Quest of Kai
Sorry to say but your efforts are lost on me because Iām too distracted by how Zalmoās sprite has these super huge eyebrows while his portrait basically has none. Does he wear falsies?
completed Haunting Ground - i liked it overall, although the part where it suddenly drops a button mashing QTE sequence with no actual button prompts or feedback that youāre pressing the right thing at the end is supreme bullshit. the evil maid lady was eventually replaced byā¦ a british man with a gun (new frontiers in terror!!) and then by a creepy old guy.
something i liked is that the plot is alchemy themed and it was fun to have this constant thread of hermetic mysticism running through a capcom game. you solve one puzzle in a planetarium built around a pre-copernican model of the solar system, and another one involves printing out plates with magic words that you can use to animate golems.
your characterās main mode of attack is to kick things, so itās quite funny to be wandering around this atmospheric mansion and just kicking apart ornate item-holding vases on the ground. in an escalated case of adventure game logic, later thereās a puzzle which can only be solved if you accept that your character would want to kick apart rusted water pipes with her bare feet for no reason in particular.
plot spoilers, content warning for some sexual creepiness
it turns out that the thing all the villains are trying to secure isā¦ your characterās womb! which is either a magic, alchemical womb or just a regular kind. they do not go into this too deeply. itās kind of a mixture of sleazy and clever since the game is already riffing on gothic pastiche, the young lady imprisoned in the castle etc - so itās a very gamey way to connect to the kind of stolen-virtue motif of that stuff, and also helps explain why all the enemies feel like very victorian images of āSexual Threatā (hulking groundskeeper guy, carmilla-esque undead lady, evil monk, an old lech). just a slightly more thematically integrated way to get a lot of cheesecake in there than i was expecting, really. the main appeal is that the monk guy keeps yelling dialogue like this until you break all his limbs.
guys only want one thing, etc
when i completed the game i was told that my ādog levelā was A.
i was also very happy to see that the completely purposeless alcove chair from near the start had its own piece of concept art. i wonder if whoever painted it got a lot of shit internally for his spooky chair concept.
think iām reaching the final stretch of front mission 3.
on one hand, i canāt overstate how fun it is to use the in-gameās internet service. having to cross-reference names, addresses, passwords (and in some cases, password patterns) to figure out the gameās whole story is a joy. i have a whole sheet of paper full of notes and pointers to help me navigate the online ecosystem. from procurement papers, general bookkepping, conspiratorial e-mail chains, psychological reports, newspapers, forums and staff lists, thereās just so much.
on the other, though, i canāt help but feel the game is a bit too easy. i chose the āalisa scenarioā because i was told it was both more straightforward and considerably harder. it turns out the plot really is straightforward, but the game is still not much of a challenge. i have a whole collection of different mechs, each with a handful of special skills i can unlock, but my current setup can handle pretty much all situations as it is. yesterday i did a bit of grinding just so i could get all the best skills for min-maxing sake, but i donāt see the point really.
the ideal would be to radically change my loadout for the experimentation, but it takes so long i donāt wanna do it in this playthrough. maybe in a future, next one.
like, the game is still fantastic to play, donāt get me wrong. itās tactics where the goalposts are both very precise and clean but leave a lot of space for player ingenuity and i respect that. itās just no ff tactics, i guess
I played Roboticist for the first time in a few years and a wizard exploded everyones butts off so I turned some of them into buttbots
Youāre not alone, my mom loves Pen Pen Triicelon. If I told her about Fall Guys the same way, sheād also probably go get herself a PS4 haha
iāve been playing unhealthy amounts of elite dangerous because i have insomnia so what better way to while away the hours between 10pm and 10am than by space truckin.
iām currently flying kinda-sorta to the core (in a roundabout way) and just made it to the first really civilised system iāve seen in like, a week. i stopped there because i realised that my fuel scoop fucking sucks! turns out, a ratio of 10mins of flight : 20mins of refueling is Really Bad. so i picked up a better scoop, and while i was at it, in a sleep-deprived delirium, i spent 17 dollars and bought a new paint job, a bunch of decals, and some dumb bits of metal to bolt on to my ship to make it look ācoolā.
i present, The Arcott (named after a kind of sheep, which is in turn named after the Animal Research Center in Ottowa, lol):
(yes, it does say ādogsā on the other side as well)
Well I finished my Sunless Sea at last, after 40-something hours. That game had a serious hold over me. And, truth be told, I was pretty exhausted by the end of it. Sometimes games just do that, I find. Theyāre incredibly fun for like 85% of my playtime, but the last 15% is rough going. Tying up loose ends, ticking boxes, and stumbling into more work in the process than you expected to be doing, or would like to do. But youāre so close anyway, it couldnāt be another 8 hours. But it usually is.
Sunless Sea is really great though. The early game hours are by far when itās at its best, when everything is scary and, if it hasnāt sunk your enthusiasm already, the problems with UI and the way text and quest information is presented can be tolerated because itās all in service of some pretty cool writing and experiences. But, in the late game, those problems are just constant companions and in the midst of long zee voyages I was definitely nearly drooling looking at screen caps of how Sunless Skies made improvements to these elements. Seriously, the granularity and complexity that the Qualities systems allows for Failbetter to achieve with their narrative design puts an overwhelming amount of work on the plate of the player. A wikipedia serves nearly the same function as your in-game Journal, yet the wiki is easier to read and search through. I do not know how Skies handles this specific aspect, but I hope it is completely redesigned.
But yeah I loved this game. With my small dingy of a brain, I canāt paddle around that fact for too long before running out of fuel and just babbling about adverbs and the value of hunting Lorn-Flukes and LOLing every time I see a passenger shuttle get sucked into a whirlpool.
Finished Ghost of Tsushima. Well, for the most part.
Neither overwhelming or underwhelming. āWhelmedā isnāt really a word (Iām editing this to say I looked it up and it is and it doesnāt mean what Iām saying it means, but!) but I guess thatās kinda where Iām at on it, overall.
I mean, I didnāt have a bad time with it! Hell, Iām pretty close to getting the Platinum and thinking āhmm, may as well!ā Even the ending kinda bummed me out, in the way they probably wanted it to!
Itās justā¦very pretty and does the open world thing competently. And boy howdy, thereās been a lot of that in the last, what, ten years or so now?
I mean, good on 'em! I just feel kinda bad that such an overall competent game I put this much time into is probably gonna slip from my memory once I uninstall it.
Ah, well. What can ya do.
hot take:
open world action rpg :: AAA games
metroidvanias :: indie games
and they are essentially the same genre with different levels of funding
Metrovania structure seems more similar to Souls games than open-world to me.
I think the genre distinctions are clearer when youāre playing hard, sharp takes, comparing the expansive potential of GTA or Breath of the Wild to the tight probing and solving of La Mulana or Rain World.
But pushing towards mass appeal has generally meant sanding off edges and shifting towards accommodating from demanding and that blurs distinctions between all games. Action games have RPG loops and semi-open segments; Mario is restructured as a livable puzzle hunt; shortcuts and automappers reduce traversal problems as much as possible.
So the sumptuous (and I mean that as a pejorative) open-world games and Metroid-likes are working towards the same aesthetics: satisfaction of progression, soft exploration, fantasy of another place.