I recently have been playing Across The Obelisk and I have been having a blast with the game. The game is basically a mix of Slay the Spire roguelike deckbuilder battles and Dungeons and Dragons.
Instead of controlling just one character like in Slay the Spire, you control 4 characters each with different cards to choose from.
The game has four different classes(Tank, Mage, Scout and Healer) with 4 unique characters for each class with a total of 16 unique characters.
You also have progression elements such as perks and town upgrades which persist after every run.
The best part of the game is that it has upto 4 player co-op multiplayer where each person can play a single character.
It is extremely fun playing this with friends. You can also play with just two or three friends and in that case you have each person or one person control two characters.
BTW, Across the Obelisk is currently on sale on Steam in case anyone is interested in it.
What games have you played recently?
I just played through Metal Gear Solid and Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. The former I hadn't played since it came out 25 years ago, and I had forgotten all of the plot; so it was like playing it again for the first time. The latter I had never played and had managed to avoid the plot spoilers over the decades.
MGS2 lays the ham on a bit too thick in parts of the story, but god damn where those games good. I look forward to playing them in 25 years when I've forgotten them again.
Also played through Sonic Adventure for the Dreamcast, a game which I'd started but never finished before. The widescreen and 60fps patches played on an emulator really breathe some new life into what was already a good (albeit a bit easy) game. Something about first and early 2nd gen 3D graphics really appeals to me.
Have an Ocarina of Time playthrough I started last year I've been thinking I need to continue. May just start it from scratch again. Another classic I had never played.
I need to get an XP gaming VM up and running on my gaming rig so I can play some older games that don't run correctly on more modern Windows version. Perhaps a good "lazy Monday" activity. Just hope I can find an XP driver for my graphics card.
What platform are you playing on? I seem to recall MGS2 relied heavily on PS2's pressure-sensitive buttons. Does it work alright?
I'm pretty surprised how much of that game I actually don't remember at all. I might enjoy a new playthrough myself.
I remember playing it on the Xbox 360 and then on the PS3. It's not as smooth on the Xbox because of the pressure-sensitive controls, just as you say, but you can play it alright, I cleared MGS2 several times on both consoles. Some say the Xbox 360 version is better because of the graphics, but the PS controls feel better.
Playstation 2 emulator (PCSX2). I was playing it with a PS2 controller, but the USB adapter I have is kinda weird and I'm not sure how well it handled the pressure-sensitive buttons (the emulator itself supports them I think).
I didn't run into much issue, but yeah after the fact I learned you could hold guards up by feathering the shoot button.
I hate to say it because I've been a hardware purist for a long time, but the emulators work really well and look really nice when you use the hardware renderers and turn on the upscaling (so the game actually renders in your screen resolution).
My initial thought was "probably 90% of the people who thought this was all profound in 2001 were screaming at their fellow man to wear masks, 'stay home, stay safe', and get vaccinated".
My second thought was that in the game the blame for the centralized information control is placed at the feet of the AI and the uber-elite Patriots who created it, whereas blame for the centralized information control we have today is far more diffuse. And people actually like it! How many people who thought this was profound in 2001 went on to work at twitter's "disinformation" team or write articles about how twitter needs to do more to fight "disinformation"? Elon Musk comes along and makes overtures toward playing the protagonist of the game and dismantle the centralized information control, and all these people howl in rage over it.
My third thought was one of sadness, as I was in college studying Computer Science when this game came out, and when my cohort (who played and enjoyed this game and its message) graduated they went on to build that centralized information control system.
MGS2 is a work of art for the system it was on originally first, the second being how it payed homage to the original while also being entirely unique, and third it shows real emotion/dramatics of the personal and the societal are you keep going down the rabbit hole. MGS series still has the most creative boss battles of all time that isn’t finger twitching but true subversion, being able to kill The End of old age through waiting him out in save time is just hilarious genius we rarely see in gaming.