So, I did play a bit of it the other day. First time playing on the big TV, in fact, instead of at my computer with my headphones on. My brother has his PC hooked up to it, and just got a nice wireless controller so he can save his back and sit on the couch. Since he was taking a break, I asked him if he minded if I knocked out a mission or two and he said no.
So, not having played in most of a year or so, I figured I’d shake the rust off and do something not particularly demanding by playing 444, the mission that serves as the introduction to the penal squadron. As soon as the Warden started the mission briefing my little dog Bear just started barking at the TV, like, going ballistic. He never does that, and even woke up Bandit who looked around and let out a few half-hearted barks in confusion before realizing all was fine. I went ahead and skipped the briefing and after far too long staring at planes and deciding what I was going to fly-even though, and in all honestly, I knew before I took off what it’d be-I got on with the mission without any real hiccups.
Afterward, I did the second mission and as soon as the briefing began, Bear just perked up and started at the TV for a minute, wagged his tail once and paced back and forth quietly before curling up next to me to watch the TV as I got on with that mission.
I have to give you major kudos for this post, because it turned me on to both of these games, and I’ve been really enjoying them! Both are perfect for muting and listening to music, which is the highest ideal a video game can hit for me.
Getting combos going in Luck be a Landlord is so satisfying, and so cute. I love getting the rare fruit lady who gets permanent bonuses for eating fruit, and then just totally going wild filling my board with fruits and seeds until I’ve got the strongest health nut ever just throwing money at me.
Super Auto Pets has this great form of asynchronous online multiplayer where you’re facing off against pretty much just a saved build another player put together. That means: There’s no wait to face an opponent because you’re not actually facing an opponent, you can take as long as you want, you can save in the middle of a run and come back whenever and nobody is waiting on you, and nobody can harass you ever! I’d never played an “autobattler” before but I see the appeal now. Assembling a team of cute lil’ animals that summon more animals and buff the summons, it’s great. Turkeys are OP.
If you ever find any other games in this vein that you recommend, hit me up, because I am all over this stuff!
Neither brave or foolhardy enough to read the many hundred of posts in the Death Stranding thread but it still holds my free time as hostage and all negotiations otherwise will continue to fail until Elden Ring is installed directly into my brain next Friday
Without attempting too much deconstruction at this stage (Episode 6: Deadman) it really blows my mind that this is essentially Kojima’s Fetch Quest: The Movie: The Game made compelling through endless terrain, invisible horrors and (sexy)leggy robots and I will not stop until all preppers think higher of me than my ever-increasing Numbers-Go-Up
Imo Death Stranding is really unimpeachably good. The plot is some grade A 100% unadulterated Kojima nonsense but I’ve never seen a more dramatic and compelling video game version of just walking around
Despite saying over and over I can’t handle driving games anymore I sat down with Road to Guangdong. It’s a unity indie game about driving across China to visit family members after your parents died in a car accident.
It really scratches an itch for long distance driving. The game doesn’t properly explain it ever but it is on rails so you just drive straight until the next interactive thing. I haven’t driven a real car in 2 years and just staring straight ahead on the highway is really appealling. You’re driving with your aunt who only wants to listen to traditional Chinese music.
You need to visit 6 different relatives, and choose them on a map then it “generates” the road so guess it is semi random. I choose the farthest relative away first so spent about 45 minutes just driving straight. See your car is an old piece of shit that feels like an old piece of shit. The coolant light comes on if you accelerate too fast, you have to keep stopping at scrap heaps to pick up spare parts. You need to make sure you have spare gas and oil. I haven’t gotten stuck yet, but I have creeped into a gas station slamming the accelerator over and over to roll in.
Each family member story is real slight and maybe unfailable. I think the whole experience is 3 hours long but it has the most extreme drop on trophy percentage.
That I have to hover around 45 ?miles?km and adjust the fan belt every 10 minutes is fun actually.
Look forward to finishing it off some time next week. Give my hands a break. But constantly adjusting my pressure on r2 wasn’t bad.
Yeah I remember you asking for this exact thing a while back and didn’t have good answers for you then – both of these games came out after you’d asked!
I think enough time has passed that some designers have sort of internalized the lessons and pitfalls of single player deck builders and autochesses and now there are some pretty tightly-designed games in the space.
Most Slay the Spire clones, for example, don’t live up to the quality bar that StS sets, so it’s nice to have games that are actually adjacent and not trying to be StS with exactly 3 differences or whatever.
Playing Black Mesa since it first launched on Steam in… whenever that was. Planning to go through the whole completed thing now that it’s finished, and as I am playing it I keep thinking: why would I recommend this version over the original, or why wouldn’t I? I’m still not settled on that question. It’s an interesting one to me, thinking about people who aren’t already invested in some historical notion about videogames or find appealing the charm of 90s FPS games. If my friend who has never played Half-Life before asked me if they should play this or the original, would I be wrong to suggest Black Mesa? Remakes are interesting, because if they are successful or good, they always complicate things like this. The ultimate thing is to say play both and compare, but you can never really say to do that as a recommendation if someone asks.
tried another run and it took me just under an hour. the hardest part is bowser’s 3rd stage because it’s still designed to test your mastery of the platforming mechanics. even when skipping 80% of the courses, this is still the best 3D platformer ever made
sekiro: shadows die twice
inch by inch im getting further into this game. i really like it! im entering ashina castle rn
x-wing 2.0
tabletop game. it was a demo game with a local from the miniatures / boardgaming scene who offered to show me the ropes and i had a really great time with it. i might even get into the game myself…
keep your battle: unchained
Dungeon Fantasy RPG (Powered by GURPS). This week we fought the demon and Chauvini got out of the box. I got to play my backup character, a dirty bushwacker named Boughry Joriyah.
I like this game a lot despite not caring all that much about Star Wars. I haven’t tried the 2.0 version, as they charged a fortune for the “conversion kits” that replace whatever has to be replaced to play by the new rules.
Well, and also everyone I used to play with occasionally had moved away by the time the new version came out.
yeah all these main story cases were irritatingly vague. intentionally so, there’s a character constantly trying to tell sherlock throughout the game how everything is subjective etc. but I play a detective game to figure things out that are there, not be a detective fiction writer. a detective game that has no strong opinions on who murdered anybody is just frustrating
the police side cases are all just going to an area and figuring out what order things happened in with what characters going by the case files, pretty simplistic, that’s fine I guess. there are other cases that I think are dlc or something, those were more enjoyable but there’s only a couple.
wish I got a screenshot of this ingame painting that’s clearly of john goodman as some sort of person of lordly caliber but you know that’s part of the nvidia geforce experience, who the fuck knows when their app decides to work or not, or when it wants to scan your entire 5tb games drive, which also happens to be your noisiest drive
there was one story case that was okay, because the events that happened weren’t in dispute, you just have to decide who and how to punish. and I think it thought it was making it a no win scenario with your choices at the end there but any time bad people in positions of power are all “help me out of this one thing and I’ll be able to use my position to make things easier for a lot of people in the future” that’s a plea falling on deaf ears here, so that was an easy call despite what the game seemed to think. let justice be done though the heavens fall
there were a few of those (at least 3) and to be honest I thought they were all pretty fun and diverting?
like every one of them got reviewed as “I’m just not sure this is really descent” and I came away thinking no one had a clear idea what they were looking for
