I just started Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep, as I make my way through the collection. I’m only about an hour in, but it seems like it might be a nice change of pace from the previous games. I am also getting huge Star Wars vibes off this one. Ven is a padawan, Terra is not yet granted the rank of Master. Eraqus reminds me of Qui-Gon a little, and Xehanort was clearly a Sith-y motherfucker even before what went down with Ansem.
The wandering village
It is a nice little recourse management game. What makes it special is that you need to do it on the back of an ancient “animal”. If you befriend (it trusts your judgement ) or tame it can you tell it what to do like where to go (so you can pick a bio), sleep, eat, run, walk and so on. I went for the befriend route, hurting it by ripping out resources from it didn’t sit well with me (but I am very curious, because you do miss out on a lot). The story is pretty simple but it is nicely paced and I do like the lore. I actually didn’t really think the main quest would be anything special so I was happily surprised.
I remember being interested in it when it was first announced, but I totally forgot about it afterwards until your comment. I’ll definitely have to give it a try sometime.
Started playing the Talos Principle. Took a bit of tinkering to get it to work properly but now I’m loving it. Awesome puzzle game, highly recommended.
I think the best thing about the sequel is they took out all the puzzles that involve killing you with turrets and mines.
Oh good to know. I’ll probably really like it then. I’m loving my time in the first one so far, but the mines and turrets are very annoying.
Yeah, I think there was a demo, and it wasn’t nearly as instant death based as the full game.
The sequel gets a lot of cut scenes and other characters that I wasn’t sure about, but once you’re through that initial bit of exposition, it opens up a bit and lets you just get on with the puzzles. There’s a demo of it, which I recommend if you’re on a potato PC, because my 1060 really struggled. PS5 version was fine though.
I found it a bit easier than the first game, but the DLC certainly ramps it up again.
Good to know. I’m using a laptop at the moment running a 3060 mobile. I get around 350-400 fps playing the first game. Most modern games run at a relatively stable 60fps on high settings or around 30-40 fps on ultra settings. When running around the open world in CP2077 I get 45-60 fps depending on the environment. I can’t remember if it’s at high or ultra. I think I’ll probably be able to handle TP2, but then again who knows. Looking on ProtonDB some people mention low fps even with decent hardware so I guess we’ll see when I inevitably purchase the game.
This week is more Enderal for me. A free total conversion of Skyrim (you need Skyrim obviously). It’s a complete new game with new mechanics, story, skills, etc. It’s fully voiced and waaaay better than Skyrim IMHO.
I’ll definitely check that out. Looks very promising.
Best thing: no level scaling. Yes you will die a lot in the beginning. But becoming more powerful is now actually worth it!
In the end I had a manaless fireball cannonade spell. I very much enjoyed Enderal. Much better story than Skyrim imo.
Oh sweet. I hate level scaling 99% of the time. It’s one of my biggest gripes with Skyrim, and with most games that implement it. It’s one of the many reasons I love the Souls franchise so much. Good to know that mod doesn’t have it.
I stopped playing because it is a bit too hard for me. I keep getting killed by spiders. Maybe I’ll give it another go.
I switched from melee to spellcaster in heavy armor. That made it a lot easier. Also spending all your learning points (buy books) and memory points (press Z, that took me far too long to figure out)
Thank you, I’ll give it another try.
I decided to take a break from BG3 and started playing the first Death Stranding. I’m still pretty early in the game but it’s already got me intrigued. The story is way out there and I hope it all comes together to make sense at some point.
CP2077, nearing the end of the phantom liberty expansion
I’m back to playing Colin McRae Rally 04 - mostly on desktop by I also finally took the time to set it up on a Steam Deck. It runs and plays great!
I love me some old rally games.
Hey! I feel like I haven’t seen you comment in a long time, I miss your write-ups you used to do on these posts.
I’m going to have to try Rally 04, I like rally games.
Man, I didn’t expect people to remember me. Uhm… hi! ヾ(・ω・*)
I’ve been busy with less fun stuff for a while and when I did play games it wasn’t for long enough to warrant a post unfortunately. I’m hoping for a more permanent return soon as I’m eying to start some titles that will fit this community again.
CMR04 is great! Still holds up really well, has a nice balance between arcade and sim in its driving model, looks simple but in a readable way and has a mod for widescreen resolutions on PC. It also has no problems on Linux which is a big win for me. Probably my favourite rally game of that era.
Oh shoot, I hope everything is okay.
Glad to know about both widescreen and Linux, those are both pretty important to me.
It’s not but I make do. You’d be surprised how well hobbies and lack of sleep can help with that! I appreciate the sentiment though.
Same here, it was a really nice surprise. I love how well so many old titles work on the penguin.
I feel that. Hobbies have definitely helped me through many rough times. Dark Souls and practicing piano have both gotten me through a lot. I’m lucky enough to have a kid on the way, she’ll be my first, but I am worried that I might go through a dark period and won’t have time to use my hobbies as much to help me out. Maybe raising a kid will take that place. I’ve heard it’s very rewarding.
I usually play older games (hence me being on here), and when I made the switch to Linux I was very happy to see almost all my games play flawlessly. Even newer games or somewhat newer games run great. I’m currently playing through the Talos Principle (2014 I think) and getting 350-400 fps. It’s certainly not the most demanding game but that’s impressive to me.
Man, I’d be terrified to have a kid honestly. I’ve had enough experience with taking care of people to know I REALLY don’t want to deal with that if I have a choice - I’m too much of a self-sacrificing idiot for that. Good luck though! My friends with kids are happy about their choices so I hope you’ll end up the same way.
My first experience with Linux made me swear I’ll never going to touch it again, funnily enough. Now here I am, running it as a main OS on everything I can and having a great time with both games and any kind of personal projects I can come up with. Heck, the fact that some games run better than on Windows is still kinda crazy to me at times even though I understand why. It’s amazing how much things progressed.
I am indeed terrified to have a kid. Excited but terrified. I feel like I can’t even take care of myself and now I’m supposed to be responsible for a whole other person in a matter of weeks? Wild.
I only switched to Linux recently. I started with mint, then quickly switched to Bazzite after hearing it’s good for gaming, but I found out I don’t like rpm-ostree so I’ll probably be switching to another deb/ubuntu based distro again soon. Either that or go full masochist and do arch. Probably a bad idea though. I’ll probably either go back to mint again or try kubuntu (I really don’t like GNOME). Which distro do you run on your main gaming machine?
Satisfactory
I think almost everyone knows this game. I‘m in phase 4 and about to start producing the needed items. All I‘m gonna say is that I would‘ve gone insane if not for community-made blueprints. My biggest gripes with the game are how awful it feels to build a train track, how dumb drones are (cause otherwise everyone would ditch trains, I reckon), and that the hoverpack doesn‘t have a built-in jetpack for when you‘re out of electrical grid range. All in all, I probably prefer this kinda game to be isometric/2D, it‘s finnicky to build a big factory in 3D, although more satisfying to then see it in 3D. I know this sounds negative but that’s just cause it’s quicker to list the negatives since there‘s too many positives - I did have a good time, as my 100+ hours thus far would suggest.
Horizon Chase Turbo
Putting the finishing touches on this one and, my God, get the Senna Forever DLC, it‘s the absolute best part of it! To anyone who doesn‘t know this game: It‘s an old-school racing game that runs at full 90 even on the Deck. I mean old old-school when racing games were 2D and scrolling, although this one is 3D it feels the same. It‘s nice to have a high fps racer on the Deck, so I recommend it. The aforementioned DLC gives it a 1st person camera and F1 racing, and it‘s a match made in heaven!
CP2077. Love the looks. Gameplay is fine. City is mostly backdrop yes, most of the focus seems to have been at crafting a bombastic main quest line. So far so good, just wish there were more depth to the city and its systems.
It feels like a great linear game somehow constrained by being an open world sprawlfest.
I’d genuinely recommend skipping all the fixer missions because they take ages and add very little to the experience, while also reducing the urgency of the storyline.
Make sure to play Phantom Liberty because that’s honestly better than the main game.
Yeah early on at least it seems like one is encouraged to do side missions to get eddies. That seems to be the main motivation to me at the stage I’m in.
I can’t say I was ever hurting for money.
I think it just tonally doesn’t fit the game at all after act 1.
“Here is a very urgent thing. We can’t stress enough how urgent this is. Also would you like to do a load of pointless shit for these random people that have no bearing on anything?”
They give such a minor amount of money, that I’d just sell the guns that drop and they drop by the dozen. The only real thing to buy is new chrome, and it’s something I basically did twice during my playthrough. Once when things were getting rough in combat, which made things far too easy tbh, and again when I hit max level and there wasn’t anything better to have. I think originally there were stats on clothes as well, but that’s all gone since the 2.0 update.
I still did them, but that’s mostly because I’d bought the game and didn’t want to leave gameplay on the table as it were. This is really the first game that made me question why I do that, and if I should. I’ll often skip the boring collectibles in games, and these quests really felt bordering on collecting 100 feathers in Assassin’s Creed or something.
I think CDPR have has this issue since the Witcher 3 tbh. They know how to make amazing story based games, with nice enough writing and characters, and some lovely grey area decisions where there’s no real right and wrong, and then mar it with boring open world design.
“Here is a very urgent thing. We can’t stress enough how urgent this is. Also would you like to do a load of pointless shit for these random people that have no bearing on anything?”
Lol every RPG ever. Though some pull it off better than others by somehow connecting more pieces back to the main quest.
I think CDPR have has this issue since the Witcher 3 tbh. They know how to make amazing story based games, with nice enough writing and characters, and some lovely grey area decisions where there’s no real right and wrong, and then mar it with boring open world design.
Yes absolutely, although I don’t recall this being quite so egregious in the Witcher. But that was a long time ago, I may not remember it well.
My main takeaway from The Witcher 3 was “must find Ciri, the world is in danger!” followed by quite a lot of Gwent.
The Bloody Baron questline was probably the highlight, along with the Hearts of Stone storyline. The rest of it was going to question marks on the map, hoping to find something more interesting than a box to open or a surprise enemy attack. This got especially bad once you reached Skellige and had to faff about with a boat to reach half of them.
It really felt like they were pressured into making it open world or something. I’ve said before that it’s a really good, cinematic action game that is stapled to an average open world backdrop, and the two halves work more against eachother than they work together.
If you can stomach the ludonarrative dissonance and maintain your suspension of disbelief though it’s a really good game at this point.
Also surprised it’s still buggy after all this time. Nothing too serious, but still. Treating it as a flawed but pretty action adventure game with neon lights is the only way.
Maybe CDPR underestimated the effort to create a convincing modern metropolis open world. It’s a whole different ball game to the small villages and towns of the Witcher. Maybe they’ll get it right in the sequel, if they make one.
Fire Emblem: Three Houses. My kid and I assigned video games to each other for the summer and that’s what I got assigned. They’re playing Persona 5 Golden.
Not a patient game anytime soon, but they loved the original Fantasy Life and we’ve been playing and loving the new one too.
it’s mostly been Soulstone Survivors
It’s pretty great “vampire survivors”-like game, with a bunch of characters, weapons for each, passive and “active” skills. I put quotes around “active” because all skills are used automatically all the time, they’re just the attacks/abilities you pick up during the run.
The game has pretty neat 3d flat shaded / “low poly” fantasy-style. Skills have varying effects on screen, anywhere from a greenish bubbling circle to massive explosions… The spell effects get REALLY obnoxious at higher levels when everything causes at minimum screensize explosion which obscures everything. Luckily there’s a setting to turn down spell visibility, I just wish it’d have some dynamic option to allow higher effects at the start of the run, and gear it down towards the end.
Started out trying to play F.E.A.R. platinum edition and Tomb Raider GOTY edition. I just don’t like story games… TR is far more story heavy than F.E.A.R. but both have plenty of cut scenes. I also feel like maybe TR was created during the peak of quick time events because the first half hour was just mash some button repeatedly to win the movie (the game uses the word “mash”, that’s not just me). I ended up playing Dead Cells and Gradius V instead. I suppose I just like more arcadey style games.
I finally finished downloading all the digital games I had for the PS4 that had single player content and disable the network connection in order to prepare for an eventual jailbreak, so maybe I’ll play DOOM 2016 this week. Never did finish it.
I played F.E.A.R. just a few months ago and it’s so good man. Holds up so well. Still looks great too. Are you using the EchoPatch? I found it to be just a super solid timeless FPS that can stand on its own purely based on gameplay. Apart from the bizarrely anemic assault rifle all the weapons are so satisfying to use, and the AI still feels surprisingly good even in 2025.
Also, make sure you play the first expansion Extraction Point, it’s imo even better than the base game. Don’t play the second expansion though.
I very much remember when the ceiling ninjas show up for the first time in F.E.A.R. I physically recoiled and almost fell out of my chair.
I played TR probably back in 2018-2019 ish, I remember mostly enjoying it but nothing really stuck with me. I almost started a new playthrough yesterday actually but decided to make my way through my backlog instead.
Links Awakening - all time favourite and is fun on switch or gameboy
Age of Wonders 3.
Most games tend to go the same way. I kindly and peacefully expand my empire by slaughtering mobs while the bot players destroy each other. Eventually i hold over half the map, tens of thousands in gold and stacks of armies on the borders. When the final bot unavoidably declares war on me, I overwhelm their least defended cities, tank their economy and watch it lose its armies due to lack of gold, giving me an easy win.
Cosmoteer
It’s a 2D space sim where you build spaceships, manage subsystems, break up pirate ships to add parts to yours (even mid battle), with absolute freedom to do whatever and mechanics that encourage experimentation. Man, I don’t remember when a game pulled me in so bad.
