The Weekly 'What are you playing?' Discussion

Palword. Good brain dead fun.

It's clucky building needs work but the world is cool and the pals hilarious.
- Played hard for a couple weeks but got bored kinda quick. Feel like I wish there were, idk, more things to do or story to unfold.
  
  Was playing in a buddy's server initially so maybe part of losing interest kinda quick was not wanting to run all the early game again solo.

Since release I've been playing BG3 every week with a friend and we finally beat the game on Saturday. Great game, but man we've been playing it for a long time.

Picked up Viewfinder yesterday. Fun little indie puzzler. Very cool concept, don't know how much I care about the plot or anything but it's got some of the same trippy fun as Superliminal.

Oh, and I played a couple hours of Against the Storm and have been hesitant to pick it up again because I'm pretty sure it's going to be problematic for my already busy schedule.

Viewfinder has such a cool concept, I tried picking it up but 5 minutes in my motion sickness got the best of me.

Guardians of the galaxy currently

Me too, but I'm not too impressed. I mean it looks great and all, but the gameplay is a bit monotonous. Maybe it caters more to fans who actually care about the story and characters.

So I'm throwing some Deep Rock Galactic missions into the mix. I've met a player in their first ever mission and tagged along to help out a bit and now we're playing a lot together and it's great fun.
- Thats a wholesome story, I'll have to look into that game. Yeah I'm enjoying it more as an interactive movie.
- Rock and Stone, you beautiful dwarf!
  
  Tip: Check out latest devstream for awesome things to come.

GTA V offline, of all things. Haven't played it in years and found out its carpool grew quite a lot, matching the forza games and currently scratching my itch for an offline open world car game with a crapton of cars.

I have been espousing its merits so much that I surely look like a shill but check out Motor Town as a low poly open world driving game that centers on supply chains of deliveries and basically GTA side job driving quests fleshed out to an entire genre with pizza delivery on mopeds, box vans delivering packages, garbage trucks, taxi drivers delivering urgent passengers as fast as possible, tow truck jobs and tractor trailer jobs etc….

The physics and driving feel are superb (very realistic unlike GTA V not that GTA V’s driving isn’t a blast), and there is a diversity of vehicles from a wide variety of sports cars to pretty much any type of work vehicle you can think of. You can tweak, tune and engine swap to turn basically any of them into a fire breathing metal box that transports you as fast as possible to utter ruin. You can play multiplayer collaborating with others on deliveries or just play singleplayer.

It’s early access but it’s got a demo so check it out! If you are anything like me you will throw your fists in the air and angrily shout why nobody has made a game like this for you before lol when you try it. I know it doesn’t look like a racing game but you can absolutely play everything in the game except bus driving like a racing game (and you can just have AI do the bus driving if you want to do bus stuff).

Tooling along in a semi with a trailer at 80mph on a windy country road and plowing cars out of the way like soccer balls for fun has never felt so good in a video game.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1369670/Motor_Town_Behind_The_Wheel/
- Yeah, I've been playing this on and off for the past year or so. It's a great game and the dev is nice and active in the community.

It was BG3 still with Palworld, but enough of my friends started playing and we made a dedicated private server. It's now consuming me. I'm sure the obsession with subside in a bit, but right now it's just dumb fun. Currently riding around on a panda mount duel weilding rocket launches and just laying everything to waste.

Palworld and factorio.

Prince of Persia is awesome

Dawncaster on mobile. An expansion comes out tomorrow and it's the first mobile dlc I'm legitimately excited to throw money at. Excellent developers with an excellent game. Think Slay the Spire, but designed for mobile.

Caves of Qud on Steam Deck. It's been a few years since I last played and it's very different from what I remember. Combo that with using a controller for the first time and it's been an enjoyable but challenging experience.

Hell Let Loose on PC. This may be my favorite multiplayer shooter of all time. I was a competitive counterstrike player back in 1.6 (Cal-M), so unseating those memories is an incredible achievement. It's just so good.

The learning curve is steep and there's plenty of room for frustration, but once you're over that hump it's legitimately a terrific experience.

I recently set up a Xbox 360 emulator using Xenia to play all Gears of War games in my PC, and had a lot of fun setting things up (Xenia is way harder to set up than any other emulator I've used): patching, tweaking and testing stuff, modding some files, and obviusly playing.

Lots of fun playing, and the games have aged pretty well, IMO.

got some free time so i made my mission to beat all zachtronics games. right now i'm playing EXAPUNKS. finishing the levels are doable although requires a bit of trial and error, but getting good scores let alone perfect ones is a nightmare. highly recommend it to anyone that wants a great challenging puzzle game.

I am loving the new Prince of Persia game. About half way through and every minute has been great. Honestly enjoying it more than Metroid Dread or Hollow Knight. Movement and combat are both so crisp. Strong recommend for any fans of metroidvania type games.

Still Baldur's Gate 3. I don't know if I commented last week but I finished my first play through (chaotic neutral). Was really fun and already started 2 other runs 👀, one githyanki run with custom Tav, Lae'zel and the gith hireling and a lawful good run with my half-orc monk oc.

Yakuza: Like a Dragon. I've been meaning to get to it for a while. Still early on in the game when it's still introducing new mechanics, but I'm enjoying it so far. I was kind of skeptical if I'd enjoy a turn-based RPG Yakuza game as much as I'd enjoyed the previous ones, but the combat is winning me over. Being able to summon a flock of pigeons to peck enemies unconsciously certainly helped.

I'm 20+ hrs into it. The silliness just keeps ramping up, especially now that I'm collecting "Pound Mates".

Been trying to get into final fantasy XIV because of a friend. Kind of fun and I like that I can customize the HUD and the control scheme between the in-game systems and the steam deck controls. I feel like I've tried MMOs in the past and didn't enjoy them, but this one seems all right.

I still contend that the climax of Shadowbringers is one of my favourite and most meaningful gaming experiences. Enjoy the ride!
- Completely agree. I absolutely loved Shadowbringers. IMO it’s the best story SE has put out in years.
- I wish I could forget it and experience it for the first time again.

I've been really enjoying Roboquest. It's a solid movement shooter rogue like that really nails flow state. It's got solid style, but the story is just kind of tacked on and can be ignored. You good bot. You kill bad bots. You kill bad bots gooder over time. Do again until bored. Good for genre fans.

Necesse has also been in my rotation. This is a weird one to pin down. Top down terraria / rimworld gets the basic idea across. It looks very newgrounds flash game but has some surprising depth and it gets its claws into you, eating away time. I'm only still in the beginnings, but I'm sure I'll be putting more time into this one.

As a huge Terraria fan I've been eyeing Necesse for a while now. Seems I really should check it out, thanks!

GRID (2019), there seems to be a lack of decent arcade track racers nowadays but this is a good one.

I recently got FF7 (original) for Switch and have been playing through that hard. KotR was nearing mastery and I figured I'd double check to make sure I hadn't missed anything. I missed Ramuh. There's no way to go back and get it and my only earlier save is just after Temple of the Ancients. I won't be able to make my own Master Summon Materia. I was just settling into the final grind/side quests. Guess I'll have to slot another full playthrough sooner than I had anticipated. On the plus side, there's so much more information readily available than when I had played decades ago and I've learned a few new tricks. And being able to speed up most stuff to x3 speed has been great.

I just got my first gaming laptop, so I've been going ham on Planet Coaster when I have time. Such a fun game and I am loving every single second - it's like a grown-up RCT3, but 10x better.

I've been working my way through the Career section and I hope to finish it!

Slowly working my way up to harder difficulties in Against The Storm. Up to Prestige 6 now. Really nice difficulty curve.

Also got and finished Chants of Sennaar, and loved it! I'd really love a hard mode dlc without the journal some time, for a new language. I still need to finish Heavens Vault.

Both great games! I spent ~150 hours of Against the Storm and was playing around prestige 5-6 when I started to feel like I really understood how to play well. I'm really impressed with how well put together the game's systems are. I hope they do GDC presentations so other developers can learn from them.

Sea of Stars. Beautiful hommage to the classics.

Helldivers 2

I've been glued to BeamNG.drive, ever since I finally broke down and decided "it's not gonna get much cheaper than this" during the Steam sale.

It's exactly, precisely what I thought it would be. Half completely freeform "let's crash cars and watch them crumple in slow motion" and half "let's do these scenarios." Flip back and forth between the two, and it's suddenly "oh, SHIT, how did three hours go by already???"

I'll get around to poking my nose into the modding scene, soon enough, too. I haven't even touched that side of it, yet.

Also, the game apparently has VR support, which I didn't realize until I bought it. I haven't bothered trying that out, since I also don't have my driving wheel set up, at the moment. Driving games with a controller are basically the only category of VR content that can give me the ol' lunch-launch-itis.

I'm bouncing between witcher 3, desperados 3, below and noita.

Less "playing" and more "bug testing". In the final stages of developing an aircraft for XPlane 11/12 and have been putting in a lot of hours in flight looking for graphical glitches, system bugs, etc...

Final fantasy 7(orginal) & kaizo mario rom hacks

After leaving it in my backlog for close to a decade, I finally started playing Fallout 3. Yeah. On a technical level it's mostly fine, save for some shocking framerate dips and the way it sometimes repeats my movement inputs. Other than that, it's a pretty good game, particularly for loot whores like myself.

The Talos Principle, Road to Gehenna DLC. Such beautiful and hard game

Been playing Helldivers 2, really fun game!
Question about it: It offers a curved HUD option in the settings, which is really neat in the YT vids I’ve seen, especially since I have a curved monitor. I’d love to enable this, but it doesn’t work at all for me. Does it for anyone else?

Baldur's Gate 3 on the desktop because it's so good and Bayonetta on my Steamdeck because I got it dirt cheap from humble bundle and it plays great there :)

Jumping around, Arma 3 with Antistasi mod, Saints Row, Dragon's Dogma, Grim Dawn coop, and just bought Void Destroyer 2 for a very low price.

I'm going on a long plane ride, so I have my phone loaded with Zelda Link Between Worlds and some Mario 3d Land for 3DS. I have Titan Quest and Baldurs Gate 2 on my Chromebook. I'm probably going to be tending to kids the entire flight, realistically.

I just started up Spiderman Remastered. I hate the militarized police propaganda, but as an action game, zipping around on webs and aerial combat is entertaining.

Since I blew up my Skyrim by accidentally updating and rollback doesn‘t work for me, I‘m just playing some Spiral Knights and GRID (2019) while waiting for mods to catch up again.

I'm taking a break from BG3 to replay Doom Eternal. I got the DLC for it a while ago and never played. I also need the space back on my Steam Deck lol so I need to finish it so I can uninstall.

Kenshi

Having some fun in palworld with a friend, but I'm obssessed with Immortal Life now, a farming game with a wuxia theme where you can use chinese magic to help you water crops and stuff, very cute and a nice QoL for these games.

Mainly Genshin/HSR/Arknights

Just finished Yakuza Gaiden so not much to do. Was great to play Gaiden though, it was invigorating to not feel like I was on a daily grind.

A lot of my gameplay is gated by friend availability atm, and they have not been available.

Man, I have been so into EVE Online lately. I don’t know what it is, but it’s got its hold on me. Slow, incremental improvements that pay off later, with inventory/time management and a solid corp (EUNI) just ticks all my MMO boxes.

Just beat the Telltale Expanse game (plus DLC). Just goooooood fun.

Beyond that, trying to wrap up Grounded.

I saw so many Meh reviews of The Expanse. Glad to hear someone who enjoyed it! I'm a HUUGE fan of the books and TV show and would love to play the game at some point!
- It’s not the best game ever, but I do love me some expanse, so I had to play it. It’s a prequel to the show/books.

Just finished breath of the wild and hitman absolution. Went back to journey to the savage planet for the first time in ages. I also played some Mario tennis on citra.

I've finally got and sat down to play Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty.

And I had not played since around release when I beat the game. I will say this: If this game had come out in this state - including the content from the xpack - I would have loved it. It's still buggy and janky, but little enough to be funny instead of grating. All the new interactions they added like romances visiting you is amazing and adds a lot of details and atmosphere, and the new story being far more on-rails helps so much in establishing and keeping tension.
My one big criticism I'd still have is for how much the game sometimes struggles against it's underlying design. The whole map being a city feels weird, because like the countryside in Witcher III, vast areas of it feel dead and empty. Luckily with the xpack being centered on the very dense and compact Dogtown, that is largely solved for the new content.

8/10, would recommend if you enjoyed Cyberpunk 2077.

Having played through the PL story, I didn't like the overhauled skill system as much as I'd hoped, but I still want to go back through the main story again. There are still some old sidequests I never got around to as well.

Xenonauts 2 alpha 3 released. Playing that.

And Factorio, but's that's like answering "what are you doing this weekend" with "I'm going to do X... And I'm going to be breathing."

Getting back into Zelda TotK. Mapping out the depths...

Maybe some Sacred Gold or Kirby: Forgotten land. Away from my gaming pc so old laptop and switch will have to do.

The Finals is probably one of the better shooters to come out in a minute, especially if you like lots of gatgets and tools. My only real complaint is that devs are reactive to game balance and don't seem to think about how the game will ultimately be played.

Starfield

Playing 5 games right now....

Mega Man (original NES version) - fast paced and better than I expected platformer
Lonely Mountains Downhill - calming and chill mountain biking game
Voices of the Void - silly and mildly aggravating at times but fun once you get into it simulator game
Sam & Max Hit the Road - funny point-and-click adventure game with puzzles that are fair and logical
Skies Of Arcadia - classic turn based RPG with an entertaining story can't believe I never played it years ago

My game tips for each game
spoiler
- Mega Man (original NES version) - keep shooting while jumping forward, keep distance from the bosses, time jumps based on audio cues
- Lonely Mountains Downhill - take the shortcuts whenever possible
- Voices of the Void - upgrade your server stability stat as soon as possible, use the toilet to restore stamina, buy shrimp packs
- Sam & Max Hit the Road - read the game manual for minigame instructions, check each screen very carefully
- Skies Of Arcadia - use gear grease in ship battles, use increm magic to increase attack, red and purple magic are strong against each other

SoA is excellent but the random battles are too much. I've played it so many times over the years but never actually completed it!
- Yes the random battles in SoA do get kinda repetitive especially since many of them seem so easy and the game has you going back and forth on the world map with the same enemies that don't level scale at all with the characters.

Deltarune Chapter 2

Just finished Drakengard 3 and feeling empty - both because the final boss fight took me 4 days to beat and because, despite many issues I have with the game, ending still managed to hit pretty hard. I love this shitty game.

WoW raid carry and LoL

Splatoon on Wii U

Just got Snufkin: Melody of the Moomin Valley

Originally for my wife, but she got annoyed by the movement too fast. My favourite review of the game so far:

"In this game you will play as the world famous criminal and ecoterrorist Snufkin.

Snufkin is unemployed but charismatic traveller-musician helping various interesting creatures of Moominvalley, all while sabotaging typical autocratic right-winger Hemulen's plans on making up mundane rules and destroying everything good and beautiful.

Cops in the game are represented evil and stupid, as they are in real life, so I would recommend the game for the whole family as educational game.

On the serious note: Gameplay is fine for this type of game. The core is in the atmosphere, dialogue and sound design which all are great. So far the experience has been smooth, fun and relaxing. Would recommend, but adults should not expect much challenge here."

im more of a casual gamer but: please try cats are liquid

a better place comes first in the story, and then a light in the shadows

Tried playing Sly Cooper: Thieves In Time using RPCS3 on my laptop. Didn't get far into the tutorial before it completely froze. Gave up and completely removed RPCS3 because it was also causing my laptops fan to work hard.

Otherwise, I at least started to get back into Krosmaga by playing a single match in a very long time on my phone last night.

This is my conundrum.

I would like to play Age of Water for Xbox Series X.

...at the same time;

I would like to not be disappointed.

hAlp?