What have you been playing and what do you think of it? 07/27/2023

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System shock remake... Pretty incredible. Never played 1 but beat 2 a few years ago and it's awesome playing an old school game again with a modern flair. Hoping to finish before baldurs gate comes out.

Just finished Sleeping Dogs, strange hybrid game from 2012. On one hand story mission structure from GTA games, melee combat emblematic of that era (focused on countering like Batman: Arkham or early AC games), shooting feels terrible and it borrows heavily from Max Payne. Then you have Hong Kong setting, but the game is made by a Western studio which allows for more graphic violence than say Yakuza series. All in all recommended for open world aficionados, who enjoy that GTA-feeling story, but definitely the ideas become stale after around 3-4 hour mark.

Remnant 2. I didn’t like the first one but man they’ve made an awesome sequel. It’s a ton of fun and very replayable, they’ve really managed to nail the Souls-Like formula while acing the procedural aspects as well.

Just got the Spyro and crash trilogies on sale on my Xbox. Haven't played spyro since it came out on the ps1. Nostalgia hit to the max, and my 3 y/o daughter loves watching it too.

Naraka Bladepoint. It's a shrinking-circle-style battle royale focused around fast-paced melee weapon combat. It's been out for around 2 years but just went free to play a couple weeks ago. It's fantastic. I've always loved invasions in Dark Souls, and while the combat is definitely different (maybe closer to Sekiro, but that's not quite right either) it honestly feels like an improvement, as its designed for PvP first.

I am still going strong on Tears of the Kingdom. I love exploring a world I already new with changes and additions. I love having an open world game where I am still mandated to be a good person. I love getting creative with weird things. I love that my oldest kid plays as well and my youngest likes to help me solve puzzles. It has just been a blast for my family.

Remnant 2 - fun game, not as difficult as Remnant 1 imo but better for it.

Cities Skylines - no idea why I got the urge to play it. I've had a few failed attempts previously. And I still find it hard as hell to plan my shit out instead of haphazardly placing zones and industries. I'm still very early on (pre-office blocks) and my map is already a mess. I'm playing with the industry, mass transit and plazas DLCs. The industry one seems like fun but I haven't got to the other two yet. I'm looking forward to the sequel but I know I'm going to suck at that too

I've been giving Exoprimal a try (free on GamePass). It's actually a really fun mix of PvE and PvP so far! The story is hilariously strange as well. Not sure I'd think it's worth $60, but for free it's been a blast!

I recently got a ps4, and am catching up on things I've missed. This week I finished Infamous: second son Infamous 2 was my favorite open world game of its generation, and Second Son felt like a lot of the same. I feel like it was short, a lot of the missions felt copy/pasted, and I think the karma system wasn't as interesting. The multiple power gimmick was fun, but I wish it was easier to swap around. It was disappointing that my favorite power is unavailable for the last few boss fights.

Overall I felt it was a 6/10, I liberated all the regions and beat the story with the "Good" end, but I'm not compelled to go back and try the evil route or finish everything 100%

Zelda TotK and I just love how I run around the most random places and there‘s an activity there (like the sign support dude) lol, it gives the completionist in me anxiety though. Still not a fan of the glass weapon system, it just makes me not use the good stuff. Hope there‘ll be a version with better image quality and framerate in the future, maybe a bit crisper textures too. The game deserves it.

Sadly I am way to old and have to many life things (kids, mostly kids) to play through most games anymore. I took off the first few weekends when FF16 came out and did do a dent in it but now I am back to playing it whenever I get the chance. So I guess this is my primary game right now. There's like 5 others from this year alone I would love to play but probably won't... it's been a fantastic year for games, last year I barely had any I cared to play which was great for catching up a little.

My daily game is fall guys only because about 6 friends of mine still play it if not every night it's ever other night for an hour or so. It's mostly just to give us something mindless to do while having a drink and catching up.

Sadly I have gotten into phone gacha games over the past few years. Been playing Honkai: Star Rail and now Brown Dust 2. I don't really give them money but I will toss them like $10 once if I really enjoy the game and the purchase seems at least somewhat ok. It's crazy how little they give you for the ridiculous amount of money they will get from some people, thankfully I don't have that kind of addiction to care but I hate that companies are allowed to target others that do and will spend tons on crap.

I've jumped back into Fallout: New Vegas recently. I've had a really hard time getting into games properly in the last few years, so figured trying a return to an old favourite might be worth a go. I've tried my hand in modding it a bit to try and make it feel a little less dated, and so far I'm enjoying it. That said due to chance I've not been able to get much more than 40 minutes at a go in game before something's lead me to have to go and do something else, but baby steps.

I'm looking forward to Baldur's Gate 3 later this week and I'm hoping it's not going to be another case of me playing a couple of hours and enjoying it before not returning to it for a few months, restarting it, not keeping it up, coming back a few months later and restarting it again ad infinitum.

LoZ: Ocarina of Time. I really appreciate that I can run across the main part of the map in less than an in-game day. BotW and TotK are vast and I love them in their own right but I am really enjoying the OG scale of the map.

Edit to add: and the dungeons! :)

Hunt Showdown with my mates, really loving this event. Had been burned out of the game for a long time but it feels sorta new now.

Crusader Kings 3, loving Tours and Tournaments. Hadn't played much ck3 till now, I miss some features from CK2 but, I'm sure it'll get there eventually. Not like CK2 was perfect out of the box.

Project Zomboid: doing a TLoU inspired run with a bunch of mods on apocalypse settings. It's pretty hard, but very fun.

Rimworld: always there when I need it. Currently running a mafioso vampires run, pretty fun, but I think I'm ready to move on.

Pikmin 4, it's got so many more useful navigation and UI features than the older games it really takes out a lot of the tedium, really getting in to it.

Diablo 4, I wish it was more fast paced in every aspect of the game.

I also played dordogne yesterday, it had a cute story, beautiful art, but the gestures needed for many things would have played better on a tablet than on pc that I played it on.

Been enjoying Ghost of Tsushima: Legends. It’s a lot of fun. Deeper than it appears from the surface.

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I've gotten back into Guild Wars 2 and I'm enjoying it a lot more than where I left off. The game definitely matured since the end of the first expansion where I was and it seems like it's in a good way. I like that there's a lot to continually do and the grind to get to new fun stuff doesn't seem too high.

Other than that, my take my mind off of stuff game has been Sailwind which is an early access sailboat sim/merchant sim game. It's pretty cathartic to haul stuff across an open sea from point a to point b.

Steelrising is pretty cool, I'm like 10 hours in and it's super fun.

I've been playing Arcade Paradise the past couple of weeks. It's been enjoyable. Some of the arcade mini games are fun. Best part has been my wife walking in, looking at the TV, and asking "Are you playing a video game about doing laundry? Couldn't you just actually do laundry?"

Now that I've mostly wrapped that up, I think I'm taking the next few weeks away from games to catch up on some reading.

I've played terraria for years, but somehow my buddies and I were discussing games and it came up. So we started playing it and while I would've made progress in a world much faster, they've had a lot of fun, and it's been so refreshing playing a game I love with my friends that also begin to fall in love. I may have gained a few years to my life during our playthrough