I think I’m going to check out more of River City Girls 2 which I restarted last weekend. It got an update which makes it way more playable, I hadn’t played for months, but the input lag was excruciating before. Maybe some Mario Wonder which I haven’t played in a while (and still need to finish!).
What about you? What have all of you been playing?
I'm eyeing a run through of Pokemon Crystal because I am still on that kick. XD
My husband just picked up the Demo for Unicorn Overlord and to be honest it looks pretty good, so I'm tempted to also give that one a try. The pacing is nice and snappy and the game play seems straightforward enough. The story is a pretty standard hero's journey, which isn't high praise but certainly doesn't count against it.
Who doesn't enjoy the occasional boxed-mac-and-cheesesque storyline?
Always, not just this weekend: Nintendogs + Cats on 3DS. I’m not in a rush to get through everything the game has, and I’m not “good at the game” insofar this is even a criterion for this type of game. I posted a screenshot in a comment to the weekly thread a few weeks ago. Since then, I discovered that you can only have 3000 screenshots on the 3DS’s memory card (I made a post about that on !3ds). 3000 might sound like a high number, but it is really not if you have a lot of near-misses in pressing the capture button. So now I have the interesting secondary task of sorting through all the screenshots that I moved to my desktop. Not really a game, though.
In addition to that, I started a new playthrough of Pokémon Crystal. I’m doing a not-so-hardcore Nuzlocke challenge to make it more interesting for myself. But this is really not about difficulty, this is what I can play in short bursts without having to use my brain all that much (I have other games in my backlog for that, and also other non-game things to do). While I still have my childhood Gameboy Color and game cartridges that I keep for sentimental reasons, I opt to play on an emulator on my Android for convenience.
After nearly five months and 260 hours, I finally finished Starfield at level 105 with 1000/1000 achievements, all main quests, and all the side quests and activities that weren’t bugged.
I ended up with 23/24 powers (including the one you get as part of a companion mission), but Vladimir refused to give me the final location and I had no other quests to complete besides the final one.
I’ll take another look once the Shattered Space DLC is released, probably within the next couple of months.
How did you feel about Skyrim and Fallout 4? Because it’s the same game, but in space.
I would give it a B. The sheer size of the game is impressive (I completed 200 plot quests), and several of the quests, or at least the ideas contained within, are memorable—particularly some of the side quests. The ship builder is also a highlight, though I wish Bethesda would fix their janky camera issues. And the FPS gun mechanics are better than in their previous games.
But they also tried way too hard to make this a game people would want to play endlessly in new game plus, and there’s just not enough variety or real consequences to justify that. Once you play through it, that’s basically it. Sure, you could support this faction over that faction, but it doesn’t actually make any material difference in the game until what is effectively an ending clip show. They might have 120 star systems and thousands of worlds to land on, but one can only stand so much same-y autogenerated content. This is why I don’t play looter shooters.
And for a game about space travel, they really made actually traveling in space pretty unimportant via fast travel. Many of the systems, like outpost building, don’t really have a point, and the companions, while much better realized than Skyrim, are still not quite at the Mass Effect level. Don’t get me started on how the characters don’t seem to be situationally aware or adjust their tone or responses based on the world. There are only so many stop-everything heart-to-heart chats I can have during a life-or-death firefight.
But like I said, overall there’s enough there that I found worthwhile. Most people won’t spend as long on it as I did, but I think it’s a pleasant way to spend 50-150 hours.
Skyrim in space, that’s all I wanted from Starfield, but then I heard it’s not Skyrim, it’s something else, and maybe not as good. Anyways, it’s kind of a game that I would try myself, no matter what the reviewers say. It’s nice to see that there are people who are enjoying it for 100+ hours. Hopefully all the QoL releases by the time I get around to it, will make it much better.
Skyrim in space, that’s all I wanted from Starfield, but then I heard it’s not Skyrim, it’s something else, and maybe not as good.
You heard correctly. The biggest thing about Bethesda games has always been exploration, and Starfield utterly fails at it. There are things to enjoy about Starfield, but not the one thing Bethesda is known best for.
The reason I said Skyrim or Fallout 4 was not to invoke exploration, but all the typical trappings of a Bethesda game, the quests, the engine, the mechanics that are sort of vaguely interesting but don’t always hang together well, etc.
Oh yeah, the worst things about Bethesda games are there in spades! That said, I got some enjoyment out of it - the NASA museum part was particularly well-done.
The game was really fun. When starting it, I was afraid that game might feel a bit dated, but other than not able to save anywhere (which didn’t effect me much because of save states), I didn’t had any issue with it. Excited for thousand year doors now!
Currently playing Lichtspeer: Double Speer Edition. Following my this year’s resolution of focusing on games that have been on my wishlist for a while, I checked the games in my list and noticed Lichtspeer was on discount for $1.something, so got it. It’s a fun little game, which gets pretty difficult, but restart takes just a second, so it’s not a big deal. I am on second last level I think, and things are getting pretty insane. I don’t think I would be able to play it on higher level difficulties.
Also playing Jotun: Valhalla Edition. Same story as above, except I had it on PS+, so playing it on my PS5. The game wasn’t too difficult but the last boss is giving me tough time. Hopefully will be able to beat it soon.
These were smaller, in-between games. I wanted to start Octopath Traveller this week, but it just got de-listed from eShop. Apparently they are changing publishers. Was thinking about downloading demo and trying it, before buying it in a week or so. I guess I’ll have to wait a little bit for that.
It’s like a light storied and easier version of Soul Blazer that focuses more on dungeon aspects. I don’t love it but I haven’t stopped playing either. I’m a good 4hrs in.
Still slowly making my way through Sparks of Hope. I’m almost done with the third world and it’s been my favorite one yet. Having enemies that don’t trigger reaction abilities finally forced me to switch up my party a bit. Mario and Luigi’s hair trigger abilities have been really good in the first game, so I was really surprised to see them getting buffed to an absurd degree in the sequel! I don’t think the game expected me to focus all my skill points into that tree, but I know what I want.
I recently completed Nier: Automata. I’ve beaten the game before, but didn’t complete it. Granted, ‘completion’ refers to just the Steam achievements and 100% sub quest completion, I don’t need every in-game metric to be maxed out, especially fishing.
So with that slot opened up, I will finally play Batman: Arkham Knight for the first time. It wasn’t the game I planned to play next, but hearing about the failure of the Suicide Squad kinda put me in the mood for it. To be honest, I’m… kinda nervous. I love the other Arkham games (even Origins) and I didn’t have a PC strong enough to run Arkham Knight until a few months ago, so I’ve always had an excuse not to play it. And now I can finally play it… I really can’t describe why I’m nervous about it. It’s like seeing an old friend again for the first time in many years. A good kind of nervous, I guess.
I very nearly started Batman: Arkham Knight yesterday too. Octopath Traveler wasn’t available and I was almost done with my previous game, but then got stuck at the last boss, so didn’t start anything else 😀
As I mentioned on my previous comment this game has a lot of flaws, and I don’t know if I can call it good or recommend it - but it does have its fair share of charms too.
They did a really good job in making me care about the main characters and see them as a “family” - seeing Leben geting gradually closer to the others and Enoa’s growth over the game was great. The character designs are interesting, the OST is solid. The plot is a bit of a mess, with a LOT of crazy twists, but I still enjoyed it.
Combat is fun and flashy, and I never got bored of it while going through the main game. That being said, there’s a lot of extra content that I didn’t do, and I think that if I tried to go for full completion the repetitiveness would end up wearing me out.
Also, a minor thing, but I’m really annoyed that I didn’t realize before the endgame that you can equip the same gear to all three characters. Spent quite some time trying to find good setups without overlaps. :/
This “metroidvania” game has a very melancholic mood in all aspects - visuals, music and storyline. You play as a little girl who apparently is the last survivor of a line of priestesses, who goes purifying monsters in ravaged land while being protected by the spirits of dead warriors.
I always associate darker visuals and styles with Dark Souls so I was worried it would be another game going towards that direction, but this one is a lot less stressful to play - it can be fairly challenging and I already died quite a few times, but there’s zero penalty for that.
There’s some really good QOL features too - I like how a fast travel is unlocked less than 1h into the game, and I love that the map indicates if there are missing still missing items in a room. This is a particularly big deal because some of the rooms are huge and can take a long time to explore.
Have you played Crystar? If yes, how do you compare the two games. And if not, why not?
No I haven’t, and it’s because I had never heard of Crystar before - I only learned Crymachina had a “spiritual prequel” when someone on Mastodon asked me this exact same question.
Anyway, I have Crystar on my radar now, but from what I’m seeing it doesn’t share the sci-fi setting which is a bummer to me, that was one of the things that drew my attention to Crymachina.
I have heard lots of good things about Ender Lilies, and now that it’s getting a sequel soon, I think I should try to play it too.
Spoiler for next week’s post: It’s a really good game, but the difficulty spikes brutally on the second half of the game and it gets quite frustrating at times.
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