Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of June 1st

Final Fantasy XIV has added The Occult Crescent field zone, and I have basically been living there.

Pokémon Crystal (Polished Crystal ROM hack). It's amazing. It's a Vanilla+ experience of Crystal. The most notable thing to me is It's now 60fps. Then all the QoL improvements but all the changes are within Pokémon lore. It feels like a GBA game now and takes my top spot as favorite Pokémon game

I picked up Void Crew, it’s been fun but I’m still unsure how to do anything but shoot guns 😅 and the community seems very nice, only met one troll so far who was promptly banned from our group. Would recommend

I absolutely suck at it, but I started a save on SimCity 3000. I have a lot of learning to do because my city is 100% dying, so I should probably run through the tutorial...

I have also been doing very minor chip damage on completing Gemcraft: Chasing Shadows. I'm far enough along it takes a long time for me to beat any levels. And probably even longer when I finally am able to beat the 200+ wave level.

I also discovered that Portal is now 7.63GB in size currently, after buying The Orange Box for $3.99 and wanting to check out a mod I found for Portal that I didn't realize wasn't released yet. Don't know how big the game originally was on launch, but now it's nearing the 11.88 GB size of Portal 2, which I find insane.

I also kept failing at Zuma Deluxe due to bad luck and skill issues on my end.

I’ve been playing fantasy life i so much since it released. I loved the 3ds game and waited so long for this sequel and it’s living up to most of my expectations so far, which is nice

I’m also doing a Lae’zel run in Bg3. She jumped up to my favorite so quickly <3

I recently got one of those gba emulator devices so I’ve been doing a firered nuzlight. I just beat Blaine and I’m on my way to kick Giovanni’s ass >:)

I'm finishing Xenoblade Chronicles X. I finished the original Wii U story, which was alright but

I'm now doing a few of the remaining side quests and I might try fighting some higher level tyrants before continuing with the new chapter.

I tried a couple of roguelikes, it's a genre I haven't played much so I was curious to try it:

I tried Hades. The story is probably good, but I just can't stand the gameplay. I didn't find the combat to be particularly engaging, it's too button mashy and none of the weapons feel good to use. I consistently get to Elysium in 25-30 minutes, then die at the boss and end up having to redo everything just for an attempt at fighting them.

Similarly for One Step From Eden, it takes me almost an hour to reach the final boss, for which I'm not ready since it takes so long to get to it. I do prefer the gameplay of this one, there's more variety in the bosses and there seem to be more options for builds, although I haven't had success in deviating from the one strategy I found.

I didn't really find the gameplay of either interesting enough to justify the grind, so I have dropped them.

I got back to Marvel Heroes (tldr: "mmo" diablo-clone with marvel characters), as the private server emulator resurrected the game.

The game got killed ~8 years ago, and every passing year since made my craving for the game that much worse. And late 2024 some absolute madlads released a server emulator, and it's seems to work great, though the server I'm currently playing is having occasional lag spikes, which isn't great. I could self-host the server for just for me and/or some friends, but that'd require effort. :D

Anyhoo, got through the story-campaign with my fav marvel character, started looking at the end game ... and suddenly I remembered why I stopped playing the game in the first place. It gets pretty grindy. Oh well, I still have a truck load of characters to play - they all play quite differently, give or take some similar ones (like, the thing, hulk, etc bruisers are fairly samey, gun-tooting-heroes also are somewhat similar, but still all of them have their own twist to it). Each max leveled character gives an account-wide exp boost so leveling gets faster and faster. So... gotta churn them levels, I guess. :)

EDIT: oh right, I also finished Kathy Rain, a pretty neat detective point-and-click adventure. I can't say I had heard of the game before, but as people were frothing about Kathy Rain 2, and the first one was on steep discount, I decided to give it a go... and oh man, worth.

The art, voice acting and gameplay were great. Puzzles were logical for the most part, but there were 2-3 puzzles which did stump me a bit and had to take a peek on a walkthrough - one wasn't even difficult, but I was overthinking it way too hard and somehow confused red and blue repeatedly, but I guess few beers do affect detective skills... In any case I got through the game with a LONG single session, but I just couldn't let it go.

Anyhoo, Kathy Rain was pretty dope, eagerly waiting to pick up the sequel later on.

Satisfactory-I’m hooked hard.

Near-Mage. It's a point-and-click adventure from the same studio that also made Gibbous, and set in the same world. However, the theme is much lighter. Gibbous was (while still a comedy) about cosmic horror. Near-Mage is fantasy.

While I definitely recommend the game, it is lacking a bit when it comes to riddles. Most point-and-click adventure games have lots of them, where you need to think, give up, and then just try random stuff until something happens. This is almost completely missing in Near-Mage... There is almost always a quest goal that directly tells you what to do - up to the point that situations that give you a choice are explicitly marked as such.

On the other hand, just like Gibbous, the game is beautifully drawn and animated, and all dialogues are fully voiced. The characters are likeable and - call me a furry if you want - really cute. What keeps me playing is mostly the world - there is always new stuff to discover, even in late-game, and the mix of fantasy and (what I assume to be) Romanian folklore is great.