I've been trying to play the actual game but finding mods to make it look halfway decent, getting them installed, resolving conflilcts and keeping the game from crashing took me a couple of days. I might actually get around the playing the game at some point.
For years I've been thinking about a "mod manager sim," about distilling the hunt for mods and the struggle to get them working into a fun core loop. Haven't come up with much, but it's by far what I spend the most time on.
That's like trying to make paying taxes a fun game.
After countless hours I finally managed to divine a mod order that doesn't have graphical artifacts and the game only bluescreens every hour or so. Yay.
I switched to MO2 from FOMM the other day and I'm really impressed.
MO2 keeps every mod in a separate directory and only merges them virtually when the game starts. Unlike all the other managers I've tried that means mods don't permanently overwrite each other's files (which is huge considering how most Fallout mods work). You can also change the mod order or remove them with zero effort or negative permanent effect on other mods.
I don't even know when I started. Must have been at least that long ago. A few years ago I started looking for mods. A year ago I finally installed the game and some mods. And a week ago I had to start all over again because some mods where outdated, the game kept crashing and the mod manager I originally used (FOMM) wasn't very good.
Edit: I switched to MO2 a few days ago and its virtualization is a game-changer. If you're still trying to get mods working I recommend giving that one a try.
Right now, killing time until Victoria 3 launches. Then I will probably be playing that for ages to come.
As for actually playing, right now my rotation consist of the following:
Anno 1800: Got to scratch that Victorian itch somehow, this will be the way.
Earth Defense Force 4.1: Have had it for a while and wanted to play it. Finally got around to it after watching Russian Badger give it a play. Very fun and silly arcade game, for if you just want something where you can blow up giant spiders and robots without having to put too much effort into it (the gameplay being very much "Easy to learn, Difficult to master")
Warframe: My buddies got into this recently again, and we have started getting back to the old grind. Unfortunately, I had never really got that far on PC (having previously played on Xbox), so I am somewhat restarting from scratch. At least I roughly remembered my build, so I have my old frame and guns back.
Snowrunner: Will always stay in my rotation as a good downtime "podcast" game. Fun offroad trucking game.
Power to the People: Recently got this. Its a power management game, where you are in charge of building and maintaining the power grid of a region, and connecting cities to the grid without overloading lines and substations (as well as producing enough power of course). Interestingly, it is one of the only modern games I have seen handle renewable power in a reasonable way. By which I mean, arguably the optimal strategy for the game is to have something like Gas or Coal as your base load power, then use Renewables as something you can turn on to pick up the slack during peak demand.
I've been playing that a lot, too. Although I've been scaling back a bit lately because they've replaced the creative lead with the former lead of the community team (which is where all the progressive shit has been coming from as far as I can tell). So I'm kind of worried Warframe is going to get Kathleen Kennedy'd.
Modded Skyrim on PC because I love the game, The Sims 4 which is a guilty pleasure, and Assassins Creed Valhalla. I saw a police simulator on steam I wanna buy
Ah the Sims, fond memories. Never played myself but I watched tons of videos by this psychopath playing it the way it was meant to be ... by raising 100 kids in a cage.
I play all these games in Japanese to further my understanding of the language, no tranny localizations for me. All of them are developed by Alicesoft, and I think the eroge industry has a ton of soul, unlike the corporate trash that gets published nowadays.
Rance VI: The Collapse of Zeth - Erotic JRPG. The story is really good, the gameplay is standard for JRPGs but with some unique mechanics, some of them good, others bizarre. The music is top notch. The H-scenes range from good to great. The girls are all cute in their own way, and my boy Rance is still a lovable dork despite all the evil things he does. Kanami is best girl, as always, and I wish I had a friend like Rocky.
闘神都市(Toushin Toshi) - Old as balls erotic JRPG. Clunky but easy. The story is fine, the boss mechanics are interesting, and the scenes are meh. Running the game is a pain in the ass, since I have to change the virtual floppy discs between dungeons and it has a memory leak, which kills the game every 20 minutes or so. Gotta save often.
超昂大戦 - Japanese erotic gacha. I only play this because of one VA and a couple characters. The main story is shounen-level, but the special events and the character stories are interesting. The music is great, the gameplay is generic. All the characters have a lovey-dovey scene and a rape scene, but I refuse to watch them due to the brutality and to avoid the mental damage they deal. I seriously don’t wanna know what the writers take to come up with all the scenes.
It’s true. I read manga and watch anime in Japanese all the time, but I used to struggle with books and VNs, the stories were too boring for me to push through with all the gaps in my language ability. I played the first Rance once I found out that Konosuba and others had been inspired by it, and I found the series to be incredibly compelling.
Sure, the titties are great, but it’s the gameplay, the story, the music, etc. that really drive me to keep on studying.
Your macro-level taste is impeccable, but your micro-level taste grows ever curiouser. Aside from the obvious that Rance is clearly best girl, why Kanami?
She's cute and I love her design. Small frame but not flat, long purple hair, the cowlick. The ninja clothes are great, too.
I like how she sometimes plays the straight man to Rance's antics.
She's feminine and is not a shameless seductress like other girls. I love how she does many things while being absolutely embarrassed; her vow of loyalty to Lia and her clumsiness throw her into interesting situations.
When her usually stoic self breaks down and her true feelings come out it makes me want to protect her. Getting to that point requires some bullying though, which is nice in moderate quantities.
The best step to take first of all is to learn the basic hiragana alphabet. It's an alphabet which is not massively larger than ours, so at a fundamental level you can do this with a sheet of paper and an image search, just writing them out repeatedly on each line (if you can find something that shows you the stroke order), sounding them out, and blind memory testing yourself. A prodigy might pull that off in an evening or just casually you can have them solidly memorised in a week or two.
I don't have any great resources myself. I am in this 'Japanese & English' Discord server (invite link); I haven't followed any of the chat there in a couple of years but I remember it being generally helpful and not overtly woke, at least at surface level, having a lot of resource links as well as the bots for vocab and kanji lookup, etc. But it is Discord in the end.
Anyway with the basic alphabet memorised, you have all you need to at least read any pre-schooler level grammar and vocab lessons you find online. Most likely the first grammar point you'll encounter will be sentence structure and 'particles' - the alphabet characters used to break up sentences and denote the roles of words within them - then moving onto verbs, tenses, conjugations and whatnot. From there you can gradually build beginner vocab as you go, learn the katakana alphabet (annoying and often redundant but unavoidable) and begin to set out on memorising kanji. Kanji should be combined with vocab learning and you can't really beat the helpful sheet of A4 scribbles for it IMO, but everyone seems to be about Anki and online flashcards these days.
Without knowing any kanji, you have no chance of reading most Japanese media in general. However, stuff aimed at young kids or teens may have yomigana above the kanji (basic characters to help with reading), though it's a coinflip for stuff aimed at teens. So once you reach the point you want to challenge yourself with rando manga or other media, you can check if it's for you by scanning a few pages and making sure there are hiragana or katakana characters above all the kanji, then at least you'll know whether you have an easy lookup method.
As an extreme example of shortcutting, to give you an idea of your available range of approaches, one thing I would not recommend doing but which is theoretically possible would be to:
-learn hiragana, katakana and particles (can't skip particles)
-download a screen text hooker program and fire up some japanese titty games
-feed the game text into a translator like DeepL with the aid of the text-hooker. Normally this would not have much chance of passing for structured learning EXCEPT FOR the fact that 1) you already know particles, so you mostly know which characters are part of a vocab word and which are not and 2) the game has yomigana, so you're able to match the basic kana to the kanji and match it all to the vocab and grammar output of the translator. DeepL's not perfect but it's a lot better than Google Translate and will give you a fairly good idea, most of the time - in fact commercial Jap2English translators have been getting scolded lately for outputting DeepL-dependent work. One less lazy and retarded possibility would be to only use such a text hooker as an aid, for isolated words.
But like I say, I would not recommend that sort of sudden headfirst dive too early on. I could never get a text-hooker to work worth a damn anyway, the couple of times I tried. I look up stuff on my phone using Gboard direct stroke input and a dictionary app (about the only thing I use my smartphone for - I hear you can also look stuff up via the cam on them these days).
Historically ive heard one of the best things to do is to actually speak with Japanese speakers consistently. You actually have people you get to use it with or do you get by mainly with study?
The purpose of the question being, I wonder if someone can truly get to proper speaking form with study alone. Although I guess listening to Japanese through videos or whatever probably has most of the same effect, but actually engaging in speech must have some form of otherwise unobtainable benefit.
I learnt Japanese as part of a course with a listening and speaking element plus I spent time in Japan, so I did have those options - but they were my least favourite way of learning. Listening was always my weakest aspect of Japanese by a distance and it remains the only aspect of the language that continues to throw up difficulties for me. Learning by reading with an audio accompaniment is great, but in the early stages the problem with having just an aural source alone was than my understanding of a sentence would instantly collapse when I encountered vocab I was unfamiliar with, or else when encountering a new word which was homophonic with a word I already knew, and there are many many homophones in Japanese.
With speaking, in contrast you can just kind of babble and stick to comfortable forms and colloquialisms, just trying to express yourself as a best effort with the tools you remember - much like anyone does in their native language, really. The advantage of having both speaking and listening as an element of your learning is that you can start to actually think and formulate ideas in Japanese, which is key to getting to near-native-level communication.
You can however coach yourself in those Japanese patterns of thought without necessarily having a conversation partner. Replaying lines of dialogue that you hear in media, speaking them out loud yourself in practice, are one way (visual novels or JRPGs with a replayable text backlog are great for this). It's also a similar way to several Europeans I've heard from who've said they learnt English as a second language by listening to songs and watching media. The pitfall is you have to be careful of coming out sounding like an anime character, which will just add more cringe to the world. Don't emulate any character that screams a lot, nor anyone that acts like it's nothing personnel, nor any narrators, and certainly not females, especially if you are one.
This website has a great guide and a ton of resources to help you get started.
This video has another good breakdown on what to do. The channel itself is pretty good. I would recommend you watch his series on the Genki books if you get your hands on them (there are pdfs out there you can acquire for free).
The important thing is to make a habit out of studying, as willpower alone won't be enough for the long journey ahead. The book Atomic Habits is a good one that can give you some tips on how to build and maintain habits.
It look like Minecraft but it's basically a DnD inspired roguelike. The magic system is cool, has a follower system, and mechanics for alchemy, tinkering (think engineering in wow), and stealth. It's also coop for 4 players so it's fun to divide up the roles and split up loot we find. It's also actually pretty difficult.
Its like a card game with no hand where the deck draws your obstacles and lays them in a circle. You have two cards facing you and limited actions you can take. You can activate the cards in front of you, if its a monster you attack and it attacks, if its a potion you drink it, if its a chest you open it, etc. Or you can rotate the circle of cards to get new ones. Rotating might trigger an enemy attack or timed events.
The mechanics are straightforward and the gameplay depths improves as you unlock items and optimize your tactics.
The art style took a bit for me to get used to but its not bad, just abstract similar to Slay the Spire.
The game feels "small" so if you can grab it for $10-20 or less or in a bundle its worth picking up.
Game was weird, but really fun. Played quite a bit of that. You had to have a little luck on your side to get a good run going, but was very enjoyable when you did
Tower of Fantasy wasn't off to a good start for me, but that may have mostly been because it wouldn't take DS4 inputs on the PC client. I only gave it an hour before I gave up.
PSO2:NGS is where I go for daily grind and gameplay. Don't bother getting on my ass about the faggotry in the Global team, I already know. Story is shit, plenty of character fashion.
Currently in the middle of Yakuza (7): Like a Dragon. Because turn-based RPG in a modern corrupt city setting.
Ever since the release of Sunbreak, Monster Hunter Rise has dominated my gaming for the past couple of months. It may not be as massive of a game as World and its expansion, Iceborne, but it's gonna really be hard to go back to the old format of fighting without all the cool new features Rise brought, not the least of which are the wirebugs that you can use to web-sling around.
Playing XCOM2 again because modding it is always fun. Doing a run with one now where every recruit is a President, and it just makes for hilarious situations like needing Ranger Roosevelt to melee an alien to death because fucking Jimmy Carter low rolled a grenade damage and didn't kill, while Sniper Kennedy continues his unbeatable hit streak.
Also playing through Xenoblade 3, because it turns out the worst part of MMORPGs were other players, so removing them creates a very fun single player game worth 100s of hours.
World of Tanks showed up in my YouTube recommendations again, and in a moment of weakness I reinstalled only to be reminded why it wasn't installed.
Played Stray, but performance was atrocious and so far I haven't seen any updates for it so I haven't tried again.
I've spent the last year going for walks to try and do something with my weight and horribly bad stamina, even started doing some squats and lifting some weights
And despite working in a bookstore I've barely read any books for far to long. And Yesterday I went back to the pistol Club for the first time in years and shot 100 rnds of .22
All of these things are more enticing than gaming at this point.
If you never played Monster Hunter Rise or World are a good place to start. It can be pretty tough and there's a lot of stuff to learn, but once you get used to it it's pretty fun.
edit: actually scratch that i just realized those are fan lyrics and a fan cover the official song was a made up language not Japanese. .But whatever i still like the fanmade Japanese version it fits the theme.
Jumped into Mount and Blade II. Played it two years ago. Thought I’d see what progress they’ve made in early release. It feels nearly the same to me. May return once more if anyone ever mods Lotr into it.
Epic Seven has been my jam for a minute. It's a waifu/husbando collector like Genshin but I'd recommend to anyone for two main reasons.
It's generous as hell, I've been playing for months and the amount of stuff the developers give you is insane. I haven't spent a cent and I have half the characters, half the items and every single "meta" unit. When there's problems or any bugs the developers will shower you with shit to make up for it.
The story is actually pretty good for a jrpg, it's a bit tropey but it's refreshing to have a hero who gives no fucks and does what needs to be done. No 30 page death monologues or letting the enemy go seventeen times for them to keep coming back; the hero cuts them down on the first time and they're permanently dead and the story moves on.
Wow somehow I never put the Zelda thing together with the cover and never really looked it up. So looking at gameplay it looks much more like older Zelda games and not the Breath of the Wild formula?
It takes Darkest Dungeon's combat system, improves on it, and puts it in a game that doesn't want you to feel miserable. You can build and replace minions without having to rely on RNG to get the heroes you want, there's a strictly limited amount of fights in the game so you can't grind, and the majority of enemies have 0 evasion, except for specific enemies which have or can gain quite a lot of evasion which you need specific answers to. You, the necromancer, can also cast one spell every combat round; this can salvage a bad situation, move a minion without spending their turn, buff a minion, or deal guaranteed damage to an enemy. Partybuilding and strategies are deep, varied, and I'm still finding new synergies a hundred hours in. It's not a perfect game; it was released basically unfinished due to budget issues and the DLC expansion, Wrath of the Necromancer, is what finishes the game. There's also a couple of poorly designed bosses like the Geralt expy. Overall though it's very good, and decidedly non woke; most of the female minions and enemies have skimpy clothing and jiggle physics.
Finished Ys 8: Lacrimosa of Dana. I was looking for a JRPG with a likeable roster and I got a sense from user reviews that it might be what I was looking for. I'd say it surpassed my expectations, got a good classic JRPG/action-rpg feel and a colourful vibrant atmos - really had a bit of a relaxing transportive effect on me for a while. It starts very childish in tone then after a while the world starts to come together, with some interesting lore and surprising developments. But the complete dogshit ending did it's best to leave me with a lasting bad taste. I'd say it failed in ruining the game, so I can recommend it as a good time.
Reading Baldr Sky Dive 1&2, on route 3 of 6, I believe - not sure how comparable this is to the all ages version on Steam since I've nabbed the Japanese version, of which there's a bunch more instalments under the Baldr Sky title than what's available in English. I stuck with what I understood to be the JP version of the one available in English. Felt a hankering for a cyberpunky dystopic story, but reading this at the same time as playing Scarlet Nexus got a bit confusing since I started to confuse some of the plot points; they both have the same 'cyber-enhanced youths in a virtually augmented world' central flavour. Baldr Sky's keeping me entertained even though it has a tough act to follow, as the last VN I read was the excellent FMD Muramasa. Main char in Baldr Sky is a chump in comparison, but the world is likeable.
I shelved Scarlet Nexus ages ago after completing the story for one of the 2 main characters - it was getting a little repetitive by the end but it was enjoyable enough that I've made a mental note to return and do the second char's campaign eventually.
Playing Circadian Dice in 20 minute blasts here and there. Cheap but compulsive indie game where you roll dice to beat baddies and you get different kinds of attacks, defences, skills, resources and die faces based on which of the 10-ish classes you pick. Lot of different 'dungeons', couple different modes and a hard mode, decent meat in that game for the price. Art's a little wack.
And playing a long-ago gifted copy of Batman: Arkham Origins since someone else recently gifted me Arkham Knight. I love Arkham City but Origins is really kind of balls. Janky af and everything's slightly off-brand or recycled-feeling in it, since it wasn't a Rocksteady effort. Just trying to power through it. Honestly I don't have much higher hopes for Knight either, but some eye candy would be nice.
Also I was playing Kingdom Come the other week on and off when my net was busted. I abandoned the plot long ago but I like the pastoral escapism.
I've quit Mahjong Soul. Fuck my luck and every jammy cunt still playing.
I adored Scarlet Nexus. Great character building. I'm assuming you beat the story with Yuito first. I think I enjoyed it even more playing through with Kasane. I really hope they make another game in the series with a bigger budget. Also, I added the theme song to my streaming playlist. DREAM in DRIVE!!
Yeah I beat Yuito's route first. I feel like I clicked with the combat pretty nicely and it was pitched about right for me on Hard (can't remember if there was a hardEST).
I enjoyed just about everything about it, just that with the challenge rooms and the social links (which I did max in the end) I started to feel the game stretching away for hours ahead of me without changing much, and without even having touched Kasane's side of the game. Do the SAS bond levels carry over into her side...??
A bigger budget would be lovely because the limited number of locations was starting to be a drag as well, but I loved the look and concept. It's maybe the best representation I've seen of augmented reality in a world - so cool how the main city (I wanted to say Suzushiro City? but that's Baldr Sky lmao) turns completely drab and grey when all the augments shut off. And that's the city that bellpeppers/duds see all the time, compared to Yuito and co. Nice ideas.
It's been a while but I'll get back to it for Kasane.
I think you can do a new game plus when you start with her. That would carry over items and levels I think, but don't believe bonds do.
The limited environments was a bummer, but like you said they did a nice job changing the mood in them to at least give the appearance of a different area. And there are some different locations in each story so another reason to play both
I got my Steam Deck a few weeks ago, so ive just been expierementing with emulation and which steam games work best on it. Ive mainly stuck with Outer Wilds for the most part.
A lot different than I used to. Back in the summer I started playing online with a cousin and thinking we'd play occasionally for a couple hours turned into a really close relationship and playing together several times a week. So I've got a lot more multiplayer stuff.
Stuff we've been into lately: Fishing Planet (I don't know why but this game has taken up a LOT of late nights, I never even cared about such games and we tried it on a whim), Forza Horizon 5, modded GTA V, some multiplayer shooters occasionally, TheHunter Call of the Wild, handful of other racing games, I'm sure I'm missing a lot of stuff. We both tend to like to jump around a lot to different games.
On my own I played through Strange Brigade. It's ok, like Tomb Raider met a zombie shooter. I did Valheim with a friend back in the spring. We killed three bosses I think and haven't really spent a ton of time since. It's a great game though. Once I finish Strange Brigade I will probably go back to Yakuza 4 and finish it, but I don't game by myself that much anymore so it will be a while.
GTR 2: I play lots of older racing sims but this is the one I'm on at the moment. Pretty much have played it off and on since release way back when.
Grim Dawn: These type of games aren't usually my cup of tea, but a friend convinced me to play thru it with him. It's held my attention so far.
MX Bikes: The best moto/supercross simulator out right now imo. Really steep learning curve but that makes it rewarding.
Ground Branch: No friendly ai, so playing with friends is pretty much mandatory, but if you have some people to play with, this is the true tactical shooting successor to old Ghost Recon/Rainbow Six. Very barebones atm and development has been s-l-o-w. Weapon handling is second to none.
Panzer Elite: With some mods, probably the best WW2 tank sim I've played. Not the easiest thing to get running well on modern systems, and there is a pretty high jank factor.
X4 Foundations: Has slowly improved since release to a point where I'd recommend it to almost anybody, especially former Eve players. It scratches the itch somewhat.
I haven't played MX Bikes in probably a month, but surprised to see it here since it's such a strange niche. Fun game though despite being quite difficult
Replaying Earthbound with some hacks, doing some Elden Ring modding, there’s supposed to be a Darkest Dungeon 2 update pretty soon, looking forward to that. I’ve really gotten into Conan Exiles lately, it has a lot of problems but I can’t deny how addictive it is. Also trying out Wabbajack for the first time to see how much it can streamline my modding.
As for what I’m looking forward to I think Atomic Heart looks pretty sick, I really liked the gamescom footage of it and Lies of P, people may be getting sick of these kind of soulslike hack and slashes but I think the art direction and stuff looks awesome. The new Team Ninja game likewise looks good but what I’m most looking forward to is probably The Callisto Protocol.
Death Stranding: Pretentious and ridiculous, but actually gets challenging the more you progress. I like that since it isn't chiefly focused on combat but rather delivery, you actually have to tactically adjust your equipment and prep for the task at hand. Can be both relaxing and stressful depending on the mission.
Days Gone: Wanted to play something involving a masculine, straight-white male as the lead kicking butt and taking names. There's a huge dearth of these of the AAA variety these days, so this was a nice touch. A gritty post-apoc zombie survival, story-driven action game. It's got a lot of busy-work when it comes to collecting scraps for crafting, but the combat feels decent enough and I like the focus on motorcycle traversal.
Ride 3: Another fun game about motorcycles. I occasionally dip in just to ride some of the more rare motorcycles they have, which is quite extensive. The designs are fantastic and the customization and upgrades available really help give this game a lot of replayability and legs.
Earth Defense Force 4/5.1: Been replaying both of these games off and on. Really love the Fencer for their high-powered weapons. It's one of the only games where the weapon size and impacts really feel heavy and impactful, and seeing bugs get blasted to pieces and buildings crumble in the wake of your massive firepower is really quite something. I love the aesthetic, enemies and missions of EDF 4, but I prefer the weapons and more intuitive upgrades available in EDF 5.1.
Star Citizen: May be in alpha but just unlike anything else out there. I strangely find myself drawn to the delivery missions, as they play out very similar to Death Stranding, where weather, location, time-of-day, or potential random encounters with enemy NPCs or friendly/enemy players can completely change the complexity of the mission. The search and investigation missions are also kind of cool because you never know when crap might hit the fan. I recently had a newbie follow me into an elevator at the hangar one time and he ended up joining me on a few bounty missions for a couple of hours, collecting gear, loot, and making some dosh. The bugs can be annoying but it's a completely different experience to everything else out there when it works.
but actually gets challenging the more you progress
I actually found it the opposite. The first time to any zone when I had to go on foot in unknown terrain was always the hardest. The second time there was always at least some left over player stuff to make things easy. The third time I'd have roads/ziplines/bridges ready and completely trivialize it all. Even more so later in the game with my exo skeletons and weapons, compared to early game where I had to actually stealth and make hard decisions about weight regarding packages vs gear I took.
That's actually my big complaint with the game. The more you play it, the less gameplay you actually get. You have to self impose challenges on yourself beyond just the extra modifiers (which are always so easy you should never skip them) to continue to have that "rugged wrestling with the terrain and nature" feel.
I still love the game, and that late game loop is incredibly relaxing regardless of how OP you become, but outside of anything with the Wind Farm* nothing in the late game holds up difficulty wise compared to the early.
*I heard the DC version added highways through the mountains and even one that reaches to the Wind Farm, which would only exacerbate my issue. Though I can't confirm any of that.
I heard the DC version added highways through the mountains and even one that reaches to the Wind Farm, which would only exacerbate my issue. Though I can't confirm any of that.
Yeah, the DC version does add highways through parts of the mountain, but the mountainous regions are still really hard to get through. Especially the parts off the grid where you can't rely on player structures to help you scale up or down the mountain.
Without giving anything away, the parts where you have to venture through the mountain, risking frostbite (which causes Sam to shiver and makes it difficult to move), and not being able to use vehicles was what really made it hard. I remember spending like an hour or two on just one mission thinking "This is actually kind of challenging" trying not to fall down the mountain or damage the cargo in the process.
You're right that some things get easier with the zip lines and whatnot, but for some missions where you're carrying fragile cargo (or cargo that requires multiple floating carriers) through BT territory and you can't use a vehicle (or doing the pizza delivery missions) it makes it a lot more challenging because of how you have to equip yourself for the terrain and potential challenges.
Especially the parts off the grid where you can't rely on player structures to help you scale up or down the mountain.
Yeah the first time into uncharted territory is always fucking terrifying. Though honestly once I had the right exo suit, and made sure to carry a few extra ladders/ropes, most mountain areas weren't too hard.
Unless the game physics took a shit and suddenly Sam slipped off something he was clearly on and fell way further than he should have due to clipping issues. Honestly the physics seem to lose a lot of their polish in the mountain zone and I noticed far more issues where gravity or friction ceased to function proper.
you can't use a vehicle
You'd be surprised at what you can manage to accomplish with a vehicle, especially in missions/zones where they very clearly intended you to not use one. I've gotten many trucks up those mountains. For as many people who complained about the vehicle physics being horrible (and they are the moment you hit rough terrain), very few of them realized that meant you could learn to abuse those physics back.
The pizza missions are never easier though. I honestly wish there were more of those simply because it did basically remove any options you had and forced you to play it the hard way.
The Chronicles of Myrtana - gothic 2 mod that has a completely different story set in the same universe. I really like it, it reminded me how much I like good written RPGs.
Xenoblade Chronicles - finally got around to playing it, I'm not very impressed to be honest.
I've installed scummvm on my phone and added the curse of monkey island and sam and max hit the road for nostalgia. They play ok on android.
I've seen Syntheticman play Elex 2 and it looked ok, I want to give it a try this year. I've heard bad things about Elex 1 but maybe the sequel is better. Not the best graphics but I think graphics keep out normies.
I still have a big backlog of older games I want to try but very little time to play them.
I played Elex 1 and even though I finished it, it's kinda hard to recommend. You really need to be a glutton for punishment and be able to sit through 5-10 hours of running away from everything before you can even start to fight enemies. You kinda go straight from horribly underpowered to horribly overpowered with no transition in between.
The dev is notorious for "balance" like that. For some reason the never bothered to smooth the progression curve out in any of the games. Gothic and Risen all suffer from this to some extent although Elex 1 was by far the worst. They do make interesting worlds though.
I like the progression on Gothic and Risen but I would not like a more extreme version of that.
For one is different then other games. I do not like scaling areas like in Oblivion and I do not like leveled areas as having are level 10, area level 40 etc, they feel way to artificial.
I also do not like leveled monsters, going from killing a giant lizard in an area and then getting my ass beaten by a higher level flamingo is just stupid.
There is no progression if you are always at the same level as the monsters around you and on a somewhat equal power level relative to the environment.
Progression is when you have to avoid the mind flayers or the beholder cult until you are stronger and can kick their buts. Sorry for the Baldurs Gate reference but that also has the same style of progression and is why I did not like BG3.
Going on a tangent, in BG3 you are level 3 but you kill drow, an owlbear, a hag, a beholder, miniotours, hook horrors, an ogre magi and I think a lot more. 3'd level characters should be fighting lizardmen, goblins and skeletons not take on a hag.
Sorry for my BG3 rant.
Gothic did it in a more organic way. You got warnings from the start to not go in to the forest because it was dangerous, you had guides to help you early on and you had higher level areas blocked by golems or orcs so you would know it is a higher level area.
Even lower level areas you still had to avoid shadowbeasts.
That made progression worth it.
Enough of my ramblings. But yea I like gothic and risen progression system but it is easy to go overboard and make the game to hard or to overpowered. Gothic 1 actually suffered from that, you got overpowered very fast. Gothic 2 implemented that progressive stat increase cost that made the game balanced but it was annoying as hack. They did fix the system in Chronicles of Myrtana but that also has issues with progression as well.
Is there really a difference between having leveled areas and the Gothic/Elex system? They've got the same stats, the latter just doesn't have a 10 or 40 floating above the monster.
But yea Oblivion's scaling sucked. I barely made it out of the starting area and random bandits were already wearing some of the best armor in the game. Needed a ton of balancing mods to fix that nonsense.
Having areas more dangerous then others are not the same as having a leveled areas. For instance you can go in gothic 1 at the edges of the forest and kill some blood flies or a lone wolf, later you can kill the packs of wolves but if you go in center a shadowbeast will kill you. So the area does not have a particular level.
For other areas that are cut off via high level monsters like a golem in a pass or orcs near a bridge is a much more organic way of setting up an area level then having this open areas for level 20-22 and this area for level 10-14 that do not give xp anymore. Even in this dangerous areas you will still find wolves or scavengers or other easier monsters but the segmentation of the dangerous area is to make the world seem bigger and for story. And then there are caves or mini-dungeons to explore and you expect those to be harder.
For instance Witcher 3 allowed you to explore everything and when you got to the main quest you were so overpowered that it was meaningless and boring. Gothic 2 hinders you by armor, training and limited areas to explore to avoid that.
In a way Gothic 2 has a much better progression then Witcher 3.
Where this system fails is that it assumes a lot that the player knows to avoid fighting monsters or what monsters he can kill and at what level . This is something that should be very intuitive but is the fact that we played so many games where you just see monster you kill monster that makes it counter-intuitive. Even in games like Neverwinter, Witcher, Dragon Age you kill every monster in every area, there is no ok that monster is tough I need to avoid it, I'll return later, despite this being what progression means. Baldurs Gate did that in both 1 and 2 and it did a good job. As an example, in BG1 you had the tower expansion and you had this animated armor dudes with big swords, it has been more then a decade since last I replayed this game so I do not remember details. This were very thought to deal with, harder then most levels inside, the point of those were to make the player know that the tower was a hard area and you should avoid it until you are strong enough to deal with it.
Is not much different then having leveled areas but it does make it kind of natural rather then artificial.
I also hate as I said leveled monsters. You do not need to have a level on a creature to know that a giant rat is easier then a wolf, the wolf is easier to deal then a snapper etc. Having a level on a monster is artificial. Technically having level on your character is artificial but I'm not sure how you can work around that. Leveled monsters allow for things like 10 level lion and then 20 level giant rat, is stupid.
Castlevania portable collection: playing the first one. It's fun not knowing where I'm going. Some of the exploration And abilities are dumb. I had to learn jump, then double jump, then tackle. The controls are awkward.
Cuphead: I enjoyed the cartoons so much I bought the game. My wife watches me progress by losing and cheers. It's a lot of fun.
Kirby the 3D One: this is just a fun game to play with family. I can beat the game, and my wife feels like she is playing along. It's easy, imaginative fun.
Against my better judgement, I bought the game a couple months ago on a pretty steep discount. It was like a tidal wave of nostalgia. I'm grateful they added the ability to swap between legacy and remastered graphics.
The only "new thing" I've been playing recently is a 3 of the Stronghold games I bought off the steam sale for £2, mostly 2. Liking a lot of the community maps on offer plus there's something cathartic about having a trebuchet artillery barrage on an enemy castle.
Fallout New Vegas Mod Organizer 2
I've been trying to play the actual game but finding mods to make it look halfway decent, getting them installed, resolving conflilcts and keeping the game from crashing took me a couple of days. I might actually get around the playing the game at some point.
For years I've been thinking about a "mod manager sim," about distilling the hunt for mods and the struggle to get them working into a fun core loop. Haven't come up with much, but it's by far what I spend the most time on.
That's like trying to make paying taxes a fun game.
After countless hours I finally managed to divine a mod order that doesn't have graphical artifacts and the game only bluescreens every hour or so. Yay.
I wish more people would realize that Wabbajack has support for more than just Skyrim.
I switched to MO2 from FOMM the other day and I'm really impressed.
MO2 keeps every mod in a separate directory and only merges them virtually when the game starts. Unlike all the other managers I've tried that means mods don't permanently overwrite each other's files (which is huge considering how most Fallout mods work). You can also change the mod order or remove them with zero effort or negative permanent effect on other mods.
I think I've spent more time modding New Vegas than actually playing it.
I’ve been doing that for the last two years.
I don't even know when I started. Must have been at least that long ago. A few years ago I started looking for mods. A year ago I finally installed the game and some mods. And a week ago I had to start all over again because some mods where outdated, the game kept crashing and the mod manager I originally used (FOMM) wasn't very good.
Edit: I switched to MO2 a few days ago and its virtualization is a game-changer. If you're still trying to get mods working I recommend giving that one a try.
Right now, killing time until Victoria 3 launches. Then I will probably be playing that for ages to come.
As for actually playing, right now my rotation consist of the following:
Anno 1800: Got to scratch that Victorian itch somehow, this will be the way.
Earth Defense Force 4.1: Have had it for a while and wanted to play it. Finally got around to it after watching Russian Badger give it a play. Very fun and silly arcade game, for if you just want something where you can blow up giant spiders and robots without having to put too much effort into it (the gameplay being very much "Easy to learn, Difficult to master")
Warframe: My buddies got into this recently again, and we have started getting back to the old grind. Unfortunately, I had never really got that far on PC (having previously played on Xbox), so I am somewhat restarting from scratch. At least I roughly remembered my build, so I have my old frame and guns back.
Snowrunner: Will always stay in my rotation as a good downtime "podcast" game. Fun offroad trucking game.
Power to the People: Recently got this. Its a power management game, where you are in charge of building and maintaining the power grid of a region, and connecting cities to the grid without overloading lines and substations (as well as producing enough power of course). Interestingly, it is one of the only modern games I have seen handle renewable power in a reasonable way. By which I mean, arguably the optimal strategy for the game is to have something like Gas or Coal as your base load power, then use Renewables as something you can turn on to pick up the slack during peak demand.
I've been playing that a lot, too. Although I've been scaling back a bit lately because they've replaced the creative lead with the former lead of the community team (which is where all the progressive shit has been coming from as far as I can tell). So I'm kind of worried Warframe is going to get Kathleen Kennedy'd.
Modded Skyrim on PC because I love the game, The Sims 4 which is a guilty pleasure, and Assassins Creed Valhalla. I saw a police simulator on steam I wanna buy
Ah the Sims, fond memories. Never played myself but I watched tons of videos by this psychopath playing it the way it was meant to be ... by raising 100 kids in a cage.
I play all these games in Japanese to further my understanding of the language, no tranny localizations for me. All of them are developed by Alicesoft, and I think the eroge industry has a ton of soul, unlike the corporate trash that gets published nowadays.
Rance VI: The Collapse of Zeth - Erotic JRPG. The story is really good, the gameplay is standard for JRPGs but with some unique mechanics, some of them good, others bizarre. The music is top notch. The H-scenes range from good to great. The girls are all cute in their own way, and my boy Rance is still a lovable dork despite all the evil things he does. Kanami is best girl, as always, and I wish I had a friend like Rocky.
闘神都市(Toushin Toshi) - Old as balls erotic JRPG. Clunky but easy. The story is fine, the boss mechanics are interesting, and the scenes are meh. Running the game is a pain in the ass, since I have to change the virtual floppy discs between dungeons and it has a memory leak, which kills the game every 20 minutes or so. Gotta save often.
超昂大戦 - Japanese erotic gacha. I only play this because of one VA and a couple characters. The main story is shounen-level, but the special events and the character stories are interesting. The music is great, the gameplay is generic. All the characters have a lovey-dovey scene and a rape scene, but I refuse to watch them due to the brutality and to avoid the mental damage they deal. I seriously don’t wanna know what the writers take to come up with all the scenes.
Ah yes, a man of culture I see.
It’s true. I read manga and watch anime in Japanese all the time, but I used to struggle with books and VNs, the stories were too boring for me to push through with all the gaps in my language ability. I played the first Rance once I found out that Konosuba and others had been inspired by it, and I found the series to be incredibly compelling.
Sure, the titties are great, but it’s the gameplay, the story, the music, etc. that really drive me to keep on studying.
Your macro-level taste is impeccable, but your micro-level taste grows ever curiouser. Aside from the obvious that Rance is clearly best girl, why Kanami?
So... Because she's a tsundere in a world of derederes?
Reasonable. Variety and differences is key in character design.
What's a good way to get into learning Japanese? I assume playing Japanese language titty games is more of an intermediate level activity.
The best step to take first of all is to learn the basic hiragana alphabet. It's an alphabet which is not massively larger than ours, so at a fundamental level you can do this with a sheet of paper and an image search, just writing them out repeatedly on each line (if you can find something that shows you the stroke order), sounding them out, and blind memory testing yourself. A prodigy might pull that off in an evening or just casually you can have them solidly memorised in a week or two.
I don't have any great resources myself. I am in this 'Japanese & English' Discord server (invite link); I haven't followed any of the chat there in a couple of years but I remember it being generally helpful and not overtly woke, at least at surface level, having a lot of resource links as well as the bots for vocab and kanji lookup, etc. But it is Discord in the end.
Anyway with the basic alphabet memorised, you have all you need to at least read any pre-schooler level grammar and vocab lessons you find online. Most likely the first grammar point you'll encounter will be sentence structure and 'particles' - the alphabet characters used to break up sentences and denote the roles of words within them - then moving onto verbs, tenses, conjugations and whatnot. From there you can gradually build beginner vocab as you go, learn the katakana alphabet (annoying and often redundant but unavoidable) and begin to set out on memorising kanji. Kanji should be combined with vocab learning and you can't really beat the helpful sheet of A4 scribbles for it IMO, but everyone seems to be about Anki and online flashcards these days.
Without knowing any kanji, you have no chance of reading most Japanese media in general. However, stuff aimed at young kids or teens may have yomigana above the kanji (basic characters to help with reading), though it's a coinflip for stuff aimed at teens. So once you reach the point you want to challenge yourself with rando manga or other media, you can check if it's for you by scanning a few pages and making sure there are hiragana or katakana characters above all the kanji, then at least you'll know whether you have an easy lookup method.
As an extreme example of shortcutting, to give you an idea of your available range of approaches, one thing I would not recommend doing but which is theoretically possible would be to:
-learn hiragana, katakana and particles (can't skip particles)
-download a screen text hooker program and fire up some japanese titty games
-feed the game text into a translator like DeepL with the aid of the text-hooker. Normally this would not have much chance of passing for structured learning EXCEPT FOR the fact that 1) you already know particles, so you mostly know which characters are part of a vocab word and which are not and 2) the game has yomigana, so you're able to match the basic kana to the kanji and match it all to the vocab and grammar output of the translator. DeepL's not perfect but it's a lot better than Google Translate and will give you a fairly good idea, most of the time - in fact commercial Jap2English translators have been getting scolded lately for outputting DeepL-dependent work. One less lazy and retarded possibility would be to only use such a text hooker as an aid, for isolated words.
But like I say, I would not recommend that sort of sudden headfirst dive too early on. I could never get a text-hooker to work worth a damn anyway, the couple of times I tried. I look up stuff on my phone using Gboard direct stroke input and a dictionary app (about the only thing I use my smartphone for - I hear you can also look stuff up via the cam on them these days).
Historically ive heard one of the best things to do is to actually speak with Japanese speakers consistently. You actually have people you get to use it with or do you get by mainly with study?
The purpose of the question being, I wonder if someone can truly get to proper speaking form with study alone. Although I guess listening to Japanese through videos or whatever probably has most of the same effect, but actually engaging in speech must have some form of otherwise unobtainable benefit.
I learnt Japanese as part of a course with a listening and speaking element plus I spent time in Japan, so I did have those options - but they were my least favourite way of learning. Listening was always my weakest aspect of Japanese by a distance and it remains the only aspect of the language that continues to throw up difficulties for me. Learning by reading with an audio accompaniment is great, but in the early stages the problem with having just an aural source alone was than my understanding of a sentence would instantly collapse when I encountered vocab I was unfamiliar with, or else when encountering a new word which was homophonic with a word I already knew, and there are many many homophones in Japanese.
With speaking, in contrast you can just kind of babble and stick to comfortable forms and colloquialisms, just trying to express yourself as a best effort with the tools you remember - much like anyone does in their native language, really. The advantage of having both speaking and listening as an element of your learning is that you can start to actually think and formulate ideas in Japanese, which is key to getting to near-native-level communication.
You can however coach yourself in those Japanese patterns of thought without necessarily having a conversation partner. Replaying lines of dialogue that you hear in media, speaking them out loud yourself in practice, are one way (visual novels or JRPGs with a replayable text backlog are great for this). It's also a similar way to several Europeans I've heard from who've said they learnt English as a second language by listening to songs and watching media. The pitfall is you have to be careful of coming out sounding like an anime character, which will just add more cringe to the world. Don't emulate any character that screams a lot, nor anyone that acts like it's nothing personnel, nor any narrators, and certainly not females, especially if you are one.
This website has a great guide and a ton of resources to help you get started.
This video has another good breakdown on what to do. The channel itself is pretty good. I would recommend you watch his series on the Genki books if you get your hands on them (there are pdfs out there you can acquire for free).
This guy is a cunt at times but some of his videos are really good.
The important thing is to make a habit out of studying, as willpower alone won't be enough for the long journey ahead. The book Atomic Habits is a good one that can give you some tips on how to build and maintain habits.
Excellent, thank you.
Mega Man Unlimited and Mega Man Rock'n'Roll, two of the greatest fangames of anything ever.
Mega Man: Super Fighting Robot as well, but you'll need Joy2Key for that.
Extremely based.
Always meant to give it a try after Internet Historian's video. Looks like they really turned the initial clusterfuck around.
I'd like to simp for Barony.
It look like Minecraft but it's basically a DnD inspired roguelike. The magic system is cool, has a follower system, and mechanics for alchemy, tinkering (think engineering in wow), and stealth. It's also coop for 4 players so it's fun to divide up the roles and split up loot we find. It's also actually pretty difficult.
Ring of Pain was free on Epic store.
Its like a card game with no hand where the deck draws your obstacles and lays them in a circle. You have two cards facing you and limited actions you can take. You can activate the cards in front of you, if its a monster you attack and it attacks, if its a potion you drink it, if its a chest you open it, etc. Or you can rotate the circle of cards to get new ones. Rotating might trigger an enemy attack or timed events.
The mechanics are straightforward and the gameplay depths improves as you unlock items and optimize your tactics.
The art style took a bit for me to get used to but its not bad, just abstract similar to Slay the Spire.
The game feels "small" so if you can grab it for $10-20 or less or in a bundle its worth picking up.
Game was weird, but really fun. Played quite a bit of that. You had to have a little luck on your side to get a good run going, but was very enjoyable when you did
Tower of Fantasy wasn't off to a good start for me, but that may have mostly been because it wouldn't take DS4 inputs on the PC client. I only gave it an hour before I gave up.
PSO2:NGS is where I go for daily grind and gameplay. Don't bother getting on my ass about the faggotry in the Global team, I already know. Story is shit, plenty of character fashion.
Currently in the middle of Yakuza (7): Like a Dragon. Because turn-based RPG in a modern corrupt city setting.
I set up DS4Windows when I was trying ToF too. Didn't help. Is it getting a Steam release? That may be the only way for me to give it another shot.
Ever since the release of Sunbreak, Monster Hunter Rise has dominated my gaming for the past couple of months. It may not be as massive of a game as World and its expansion, Iceborne, but it's gonna really be hard to go back to the old format of fighting without all the cool new features Rise brought, not the least of which are the wirebugs that you can use to web-sling around.
Playing XCOM2 again because modding it is always fun. Doing a run with one now where every recruit is a President, and it just makes for hilarious situations like needing Ranger Roosevelt to melee an alien to death because fucking Jimmy Carter low rolled a grenade damage and didn't kill, while Sniper Kennedy continues his unbeatable hit streak.
Also playing through Xenoblade 3, because it turns out the worst part of MMORPGs were other players, so removing them creates a very fun single player game worth 100s of hours.
World of Tanks showed up in my YouTube recommendations again, and in a moment of weakness I reinstalled only to be reminded why it wasn't installed.
Played Stray, but performance was atrocious and so far I haven't seen any updates for it so I haven't tried again.
I've spent the last year going for walks to try and do something with my weight and horribly bad stamina, even started doing some squats and lifting some weights
And despite working in a bookstore I've barely read any books for far to long. And Yesterday I went back to the pistol Club for the first time in years and shot 100 rnds of .22
All of these things are more enticing than gaming at this point.
Mostly Monster Hunter Rise lately. I've been having a good time.
If you never played Monster Hunter Rise or World are a good place to start. It can be pretty tough and there's a lot of stuff to learn, but once you get used to it it's pretty fun.
i like the song from the game. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mseVUP-X_h0&ab_channel=Unit076. Its funny this song is so peaceful but the lyrics is about a village getting destroyed by dragons
edit: actually scratch that i just realized those are fan lyrics and a fan cover the official song was a made up language not Japanese. .But whatever i still like the fanmade Japanese version it fits the theme.
Satisfactory. It’s absorbed all my time recently.
Gave Valheim a try. Just couldn’t get into it.
Jumped into Mount and Blade II. Played it two years ago. Thought I’d see what progress they’ve made in early release. It feels nearly the same to me. May return once more if anyone ever mods Lotr into it.
Epic Seven has been my jam for a minute. It's a waifu/husbando collector like Genshin but I'd recommend to anyone for two main reasons.
It's generous as hell, I've been playing for months and the amount of stuff the developers give you is insane. I haven't spent a cent and I have half the characters, half the items and every single "meta" unit. When there's problems or any bugs the developers will shower you with shit to make up for it.
The story is actually pretty good for a jrpg, it's a bit tropey but it's refreshing to have a hero who gives no fucks and does what needs to be done. No 30 page death monologues or letting the enemy go seventeen times for them to keep coming back; the hero cuts them down on the first time and they're permanently dead and the story moves on.
Wow somehow I never put the Zelda thing together with the cover and never really looked it up. So looking at gameplay it looks much more like older Zelda games and not the Breath of the Wild formula?
Iratus: Lord of the Dead
It takes Darkest Dungeon's combat system, improves on it, and puts it in a game that doesn't want you to feel miserable. You can build and replace minions without having to rely on RNG to get the heroes you want, there's a strictly limited amount of fights in the game so you can't grind, and the majority of enemies have 0 evasion, except for specific enemies which have or can gain quite a lot of evasion which you need specific answers to. You, the necromancer, can also cast one spell every combat round; this can salvage a bad situation, move a minion without spending their turn, buff a minion, or deal guaranteed damage to an enemy. Partybuilding and strategies are deep, varied, and I'm still finding new synergies a hundred hours in. It's not a perfect game; it was released basically unfinished due to budget issues and the DLC expansion, Wrath of the Necromancer, is what finishes the game. There's also a couple of poorly designed bosses like the Geralt expy. Overall though it's very good, and decidedly non woke; most of the female minions and enemies have skimpy clothing and jiggle physics.
Finished Ys 8: Lacrimosa of Dana. I was looking for a JRPG with a likeable roster and I got a sense from user reviews that it might be what I was looking for. I'd say it surpassed my expectations, got a good classic JRPG/action-rpg feel and a colourful vibrant atmos - really had a bit of a relaxing transportive effect on me for a while. It starts very childish in tone then after a while the world starts to come together, with some interesting lore and surprising developments. But the complete dogshit ending did it's best to leave me with a lasting bad taste. I'd say it failed in ruining the game, so I can recommend it as a good time.
Reading Baldr Sky Dive 1&2, on route 3 of 6, I believe - not sure how comparable this is to the all ages version on Steam since I've nabbed the Japanese version, of which there's a bunch more instalments under the Baldr Sky title than what's available in English. I stuck with what I understood to be the JP version of the one available in English. Felt a hankering for a cyberpunky dystopic story, but reading this at the same time as playing Scarlet Nexus got a bit confusing since I started to confuse some of the plot points; they both have the same 'cyber-enhanced youths in a virtually augmented world' central flavour. Baldr Sky's keeping me entertained even though it has a tough act to follow, as the last VN I read was the excellent FMD Muramasa. Main char in Baldr Sky is a chump in comparison, but the world is likeable.
I shelved Scarlet Nexus ages ago after completing the story for one of the 2 main characters - it was getting a little repetitive by the end but it was enjoyable enough that I've made a mental note to return and do the second char's campaign eventually.
Playing Circadian Dice in 20 minute blasts here and there. Cheap but compulsive indie game where you roll dice to beat baddies and you get different kinds of attacks, defences, skills, resources and die faces based on which of the 10-ish classes you pick. Lot of different 'dungeons', couple different modes and a hard mode, decent meat in that game for the price. Art's a little wack.
And playing a long-ago gifted copy of Batman: Arkham Origins since someone else recently gifted me Arkham Knight. I love Arkham City but Origins is really kind of balls. Janky af and everything's slightly off-brand or recycled-feeling in it, since it wasn't a Rocksteady effort. Just trying to power through it. Honestly I don't have much higher hopes for Knight either, but some eye candy would be nice.
Also I was playing Kingdom Come the other week on and off when my net was busted. I abandoned the plot long ago but I like the pastoral escapism.
I've quit Mahjong Soul. Fuck my luck and every jammy cunt still playing.
I adored Scarlet Nexus. Great character building. I'm assuming you beat the story with Yuito first. I think I enjoyed it even more playing through with Kasane. I really hope they make another game in the series with a bigger budget. Also, I added the theme song to my streaming playlist. DREAM in DRIVE!!
Yeah I beat Yuito's route first. I feel like I clicked with the combat pretty nicely and it was pitched about right for me on Hard (can't remember if there was a hardEST).
I enjoyed just about everything about it, just that with the challenge rooms and the social links (which I did max in the end) I started to feel the game stretching away for hours ahead of me without changing much, and without even having touched Kasane's side of the game. Do the SAS bond levels carry over into her side...??
A bigger budget would be lovely because the limited number of locations was starting to be a drag as well, but I loved the look and concept. It's maybe the best representation I've seen of augmented reality in a world - so cool how the main city (I wanted to say Suzushiro City? but that's Baldr Sky lmao) turns completely drab and grey when all the augments shut off. And that's the city that bellpeppers/duds see all the time, compared to Yuito and co. Nice ideas.
It's been a while but I'll get back to it for Kasane.
I think you can do a new game plus when you start with her. That would carry over items and levels I think, but don't believe bonds do.
The limited environments was a bummer, but like you said they did a nice job changing the mood in them to at least give the appearance of a different area. And there are some different locations in each story so another reason to play both
I got my Steam Deck a few weeks ago, so ive just been expierementing with emulation and which steam games work best on it. Ive mainly stuck with Outer Wilds for the most part.
A lot different than I used to. Back in the summer I started playing online with a cousin and thinking we'd play occasionally for a couple hours turned into a really close relationship and playing together several times a week. So I've got a lot more multiplayer stuff.
Stuff we've been into lately: Fishing Planet (I don't know why but this game has taken up a LOT of late nights, I never even cared about such games and we tried it on a whim), Forza Horizon 5, modded GTA V, some multiplayer shooters occasionally, TheHunter Call of the Wild, handful of other racing games, I'm sure I'm missing a lot of stuff. We both tend to like to jump around a lot to different games.
On my own I played through Strange Brigade. It's ok, like Tomb Raider met a zombie shooter. I did Valheim with a friend back in the spring. We killed three bosses I think and haven't really spent a ton of time since. It's a great game though. Once I finish Strange Brigade I will probably go back to Yakuza 4 and finish it, but I don't game by myself that much anymore so it will be a while.
Oh that's cool. We have a ton of unexplored map left. I want to try to move the world to a server so we can play on our own time too.
GTR 2: I play lots of older racing sims but this is the one I'm on at the moment. Pretty much have played it off and on since release way back when.
Grim Dawn: These type of games aren't usually my cup of tea, but a friend convinced me to play thru it with him. It's held my attention so far.
MX Bikes: The best moto/supercross simulator out right now imo. Really steep learning curve but that makes it rewarding.
Ground Branch: No friendly ai, so playing with friends is pretty much mandatory, but if you have some people to play with, this is the true tactical shooting successor to old Ghost Recon/Rainbow Six. Very barebones atm and development has been s-l-o-w. Weapon handling is second to none.
Panzer Elite: With some mods, probably the best WW2 tank sim I've played. Not the easiest thing to get running well on modern systems, and there is a pretty high jank factor.
X4 Foundations: Has slowly improved since release to a point where I'd recommend it to almost anybody, especially former Eve players. It scratches the itch somewhat.
I haven't played MX Bikes in probably a month, but surprised to see it here since it's such a strange niche. Fun game though despite being quite difficult
Replaying Earthbound with some hacks, doing some Elden Ring modding, there’s supposed to be a Darkest Dungeon 2 update pretty soon, looking forward to that. I’ve really gotten into Conan Exiles lately, it has a lot of problems but I can’t deny how addictive it is. Also trying out Wabbajack for the first time to see how much it can streamline my modding.
As for what I’m looking forward to I think Atomic Heart looks pretty sick, I really liked the gamescom footage of it and Lies of P, people may be getting sick of these kind of soulslike hack and slashes but I think the art direction and stuff looks awesome. The new Team Ninja game likewise looks good but what I’m most looking forward to is probably The Callisto Protocol.
Death Stranding: Pretentious and ridiculous, but actually gets challenging the more you progress. I like that since it isn't chiefly focused on combat but rather delivery, you actually have to tactically adjust your equipment and prep for the task at hand. Can be both relaxing and stressful depending on the mission.
Days Gone: Wanted to play something involving a masculine, straight-white male as the lead kicking butt and taking names. There's a huge dearth of these of the AAA variety these days, so this was a nice touch. A gritty post-apoc zombie survival, story-driven action game. It's got a lot of busy-work when it comes to collecting scraps for crafting, but the combat feels decent enough and I like the focus on motorcycle traversal.
Ride 3: Another fun game about motorcycles. I occasionally dip in just to ride some of the more rare motorcycles they have, which is quite extensive. The designs are fantastic and the customization and upgrades available really help give this game a lot of replayability and legs.
Earth Defense Force 4/5.1: Been replaying both of these games off and on. Really love the Fencer for their high-powered weapons. It's one of the only games where the weapon size and impacts really feel heavy and impactful, and seeing bugs get blasted to pieces and buildings crumble in the wake of your massive firepower is really quite something. I love the aesthetic, enemies and missions of EDF 4, but I prefer the weapons and more intuitive upgrades available in EDF 5.1.
Star Citizen: May be in alpha but just unlike anything else out there. I strangely find myself drawn to the delivery missions, as they play out very similar to Death Stranding, where weather, location, time-of-day, or potential random encounters with enemy NPCs or friendly/enemy players can completely change the complexity of the mission. The search and investigation missions are also kind of cool because you never know when crap might hit the fan. I recently had a newbie follow me into an elevator at the hangar one time and he ended up joining me on a few bounty missions for a couple of hours, collecting gear, loot, and making some dosh. The bugs can be annoying but it's a completely different experience to everything else out there when it works.
I actually found it the opposite. The first time to any zone when I had to go on foot in unknown terrain was always the hardest. The second time there was always at least some left over player stuff to make things easy. The third time I'd have roads/ziplines/bridges ready and completely trivialize it all. Even more so later in the game with my exo skeletons and weapons, compared to early game where I had to actually stealth and make hard decisions about weight regarding packages vs gear I took.
That's actually my big complaint with the game. The more you play it, the less gameplay you actually get. You have to self impose challenges on yourself beyond just the extra modifiers (which are always so easy you should never skip them) to continue to have that "rugged wrestling with the terrain and nature" feel.
I still love the game, and that late game loop is incredibly relaxing regardless of how OP you become, but outside of anything with the Wind Farm* nothing in the late game holds up difficulty wise compared to the early.
*I heard the DC version added highways through the mountains and even one that reaches to the Wind Farm, which would only exacerbate my issue. Though I can't confirm any of that.
Yeah, the DC version does add highways through parts of the mountain, but the mountainous regions are still really hard to get through. Especially the parts off the grid where you can't rely on player structures to help you scale up or down the mountain.
Without giving anything away, the parts where you have to venture through the mountain, risking frostbite (which causes Sam to shiver and makes it difficult to move), and not being able to use vehicles was what really made it hard. I remember spending like an hour or two on just one mission thinking "This is actually kind of challenging" trying not to fall down the mountain or damage the cargo in the process.
You're right that some things get easier with the zip lines and whatnot, but for some missions where you're carrying fragile cargo (or cargo that requires multiple floating carriers) through BT territory and you can't use a vehicle (or doing the pizza delivery missions) it makes it a lot more challenging because of how you have to equip yourself for the terrain and potential challenges.
Yeah the first time into uncharted territory is always fucking terrifying. Though honestly once I had the right exo suit, and made sure to carry a few extra ladders/ropes, most mountain areas weren't too hard.
Unless the game physics took a shit and suddenly Sam slipped off something he was clearly on and fell way further than he should have due to clipping issues. Honestly the physics seem to lose a lot of their polish in the mountain zone and I noticed far more issues where gravity or friction ceased to function proper.
You'd be surprised at what you can manage to accomplish with a vehicle, especially in missions/zones where they very clearly intended you to not use one. I've gotten many trucks up those mountains. For as many people who complained about the vehicle physics being horrible (and they are the moment you hit rough terrain), very few of them realized that meant you could learn to abuse those physics back.
The pizza missions are never easier though. I honestly wish there were more of those simply because it did basically remove any options you had and forced you to play it the hard way.
I’ll stan Death Stranding any time.
Satisfactory and Minecraft, personally. The Factory Must Grow.
The Chronicles of Myrtana - gothic 2 mod that has a completely different story set in the same universe. I really like it, it reminded me how much I like good written RPGs.
Xenoblade Chronicles - finally got around to playing it, I'm not very impressed to be honest.
I've installed scummvm on my phone and added the curse of monkey island and sam and max hit the road for nostalgia. They play ok on android.
I've seen Syntheticman play Elex 2 and it looked ok, I want to give it a try this year. I've heard bad things about Elex 1 but maybe the sequel is better. Not the best graphics but I think graphics keep out normies.
I still have a big backlog of older games I want to try but very little time to play them.
I played Elex 1 and even though I finished it, it's kinda hard to recommend. You really need to be a glutton for punishment and be able to sit through 5-10 hours of running away from everything before you can even start to fight enemies. You kinda go straight from horribly underpowered to horribly overpowered with no transition in between.
Still going to give Elex 2 a try eventually.
Elex 2 on stream was kind of ok but I do remember Synth complaining that he died a lot at early levels so not sure what to make of it.
If it has a progression similar to gothic 2 I'm ok with that.
The dev is notorious for "balance" like that. For some reason the never bothered to smooth the progression curve out in any of the games. Gothic and Risen all suffer from this to some extent although Elex 1 was by far the worst. They do make interesting worlds though.
I like the progression on Gothic and Risen but I would not like a more extreme version of that. For one is different then other games. I do not like scaling areas like in Oblivion and I do not like leveled areas as having are level 10, area level 40 etc, they feel way to artificial. I also do not like leveled monsters, going from killing a giant lizard in an area and then getting my ass beaten by a higher level flamingo is just stupid.
There is no progression if you are always at the same level as the monsters around you and on a somewhat equal power level relative to the environment. Progression is when you have to avoid the mind flayers or the beholder cult until you are stronger and can kick their buts. Sorry for the Baldurs Gate reference but that also has the same style of progression and is why I did not like BG3. Going on a tangent, in BG3 you are level 3 but you kill drow, an owlbear, a hag, a beholder, miniotours, hook horrors, an ogre magi and I think a lot more. 3'd level characters should be fighting lizardmen, goblins and skeletons not take on a hag. Sorry for my BG3 rant.
Gothic did it in a more organic way. You got warnings from the start to not go in to the forest because it was dangerous, you had guides to help you early on and you had higher level areas blocked by golems or orcs so you would know it is a higher level area. Even lower level areas you still had to avoid shadowbeasts.
That made progression worth it.
Enough of my ramblings. But yea I like gothic and risen progression system but it is easy to go overboard and make the game to hard or to overpowered. Gothic 1 actually suffered from that, you got overpowered very fast. Gothic 2 implemented that progressive stat increase cost that made the game balanced but it was annoying as hack. They did fix the system in Chronicles of Myrtana but that also has issues with progression as well.
Is there really a difference between having leveled areas and the Gothic/Elex system? They've got the same stats, the latter just doesn't have a 10 or 40 floating above the monster.
But yea Oblivion's scaling sucked. I barely made it out of the starting area and random bandits were already wearing some of the best armor in the game. Needed a ton of balancing mods to fix that nonsense.
Having areas more dangerous then others are not the same as having a leveled areas. For instance you can go in gothic 1 at the edges of the forest and kill some blood flies or a lone wolf, later you can kill the packs of wolves but if you go in center a shadowbeast will kill you. So the area does not have a particular level. For other areas that are cut off via high level monsters like a golem in a pass or orcs near a bridge is a much more organic way of setting up an area level then having this open areas for level 20-22 and this area for level 10-14 that do not give xp anymore. Even in this dangerous areas you will still find wolves or scavengers or other easier monsters but the segmentation of the dangerous area is to make the world seem bigger and for story. And then there are caves or mini-dungeons to explore and you expect those to be harder.
For instance Witcher 3 allowed you to explore everything and when you got to the main quest you were so overpowered that it was meaningless and boring. Gothic 2 hinders you by armor, training and limited areas to explore to avoid that. In a way Gothic 2 has a much better progression then Witcher 3.
Where this system fails is that it assumes a lot that the player knows to avoid fighting monsters or what monsters he can kill and at what level . This is something that should be very intuitive but is the fact that we played so many games where you just see monster you kill monster that makes it counter-intuitive. Even in games like Neverwinter, Witcher, Dragon Age you kill every monster in every area, there is no ok that monster is tough I need to avoid it, I'll return later, despite this being what progression means. Baldurs Gate did that in both 1 and 2 and it did a good job. As an example, in BG1 you had the tower expansion and you had this animated armor dudes with big swords, it has been more then a decade since last I replayed this game so I do not remember details. This were very thought to deal with, harder then most levels inside, the point of those were to make the player know that the tower was a hard area and you should avoid it until you are strong enough to deal with it. Is not much different then having leveled areas but it does make it kind of natural rather then artificial.
I also hate as I said leveled monsters. You do not need to have a level on a creature to know that a giant rat is easier then a wolf, the wolf is easier to deal then a snapper etc. Having a level on a monster is artificial. Technically having level on your character is artificial but I'm not sure how you can work around that. Leveled monsters allow for things like 10 level lion and then 20 level giant rat, is stupid.
I've been having a blast playing "Just Cause 2" on my steamdeck. I swear if Panau really existed I'd be packing my bags and moving there.
Castlevania portable collection: playing the first one. It's fun not knowing where I'm going. Some of the exploration And abilities are dumb. I had to learn jump, then double jump, then tackle. The controls are awkward.
Cuphead: I enjoyed the cartoons so much I bought the game. My wife watches me progress by losing and cheers. It's a lot of fun.
Kirby the 3D One: this is just a fun game to play with family. I can beat the game, and my wife feels like she is playing along. It's easy, imaginative fun.
Trying out the Calamity mod for Terraria. Seriously can not wait for the resprites to be added. RIP Nugget Yharon
Diablo 2 Resurrected. I'll never get tired of that game.
Against my better judgement, I bought the game a couple months ago on a pretty steep discount. It was like a tidal wave of nostalgia. I'm grateful they added the ability to swap between legacy and remastered graphics.
Just started playing Terraria again after not playing for years.
Not able to game as much as I used to, but when I do:
Still working my way through Dragon Quest XI. SHTF with the plot and still trying to make it right
Endless Sky with the new Midnight mods; adds a lot of cool content to the game
These days, mostly No Man's Sky when I get the time. I still need to get back to finishing Recettear and Diablo 1 Belzebub though.
The only "new thing" I've been playing recently is a 3 of the Stronghold games I bought off the steam sale for £2, mostly 2. Liking a lot of the community maps on offer plus there's something cathartic about having a trebuchet artillery barrage on an enemy castle.