Warframe, finished the resurgence so I’m now grinding out the Perita event. Got my second Tauron Strike last night. I’m like 2k mastery away from LR5 so I might just go do some SP nodes I never finished to creep over the finish line. Or is it the finish line? Now that LR6 is available (to founders, anyway), perhaps I should just keep grinding? Unrelated, but Uriel’s spin move is so fucking weird (in a good way), why can he just fly around the map, please DE buff Zephyr.

Started Clair Obscur and it’s not pulling me in too much, but I’ve only been playing for like 5 hours. It is a very French game. In some ways it’s impressive, and in other ways (Gestral Beach, the way the characters move around, the flower necklace resetting on Sophie in the opening cutscene) it feels like a cheapo asset flip. My biggest complaint so far is that the Game Over screen takes way too long. The “challenge bosses” where they just oneshot you if a single hit goes through are pretty easy to fail, and I don’t like having to wait 10 whole seconds to start the fight again.

sucked all the marrow from spider man, so i just started Miles Morales. turns out it’s set during Christmas so that’s cool

0 A.D. and NFS Heat

I’ve been talking with a friend about beat em ups and arcade games in general so that’s got me on an arcade kick recently. I gave Streets of Rage 2 a try since I’ve never gotten into this genre before and it sounds like it’s a good game for beginners. I also played some Fantasy Zone and Parodius da!, both are pretty fun. Something else I learned is that I can use a tool to run Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune 3 DX+ on my computer so that’s been pretty cool. It feels pretty similar to the Initial D games I’ve played, though I’d say it’s easier since it’s focused on racing stretches of highway instead of winding mountain courses. I think I can run the newest Maximum Tune release in that series as well but I’ve been having some technical issues lately so I just felt like playing what I know works rather then messing with something new for now.

Flotsam. It’s a cute little settlement builder, sort of Rimworld on peaceful mode with the aesthetics of Raft.

Dipped into Manor Lords to see how it’s coming along. Game is in a decent spot overall with a lot of minor annoyances. You can make a stone castle now, although you have a limited number of parts. Production chains have been updated and new goods introduced since I played last, which I am quite enjoying. They also are redoing the settlement perk/specialization system into I think a more streamlined, but interesting one. Instead of piecemeal unlocking buildings or abilities, you choose from a variety of development cards representing the nature of your town at each level (only the first is implemented yet.) Each card has a set of bonuses and a malus, which I think is a fun way to encourage specialization and gives you different ways to consider what your particular region is best suited towards. I haven’t actually managed to progress to level 3 burgages in this version yet, so although I’ve been experimenting with the difficulty, the game is I think more challenging now. One interesting new challenge is on-map opponents. They’re not especially dynamic yet, but I did have a really massive and extended battle with one of them that resulted in over 300 dead by the end of it. The opponent then waited a year or more while I went into debt and neglected rebuilding my military trying to get a second settlement set up to automatically trade a bunch of required resources between it and my larger town. Just as I got everything set, they made another push for the territory and I was caught without a levy or money for mercenaries. I reloaded to try again and jacked my town’s taxes all the way up to afford some while prioritizing producing more spears and shields. We’ll see if it’s enough to win this next fight!

Most of my gripes with the game are bugs or fiddly UI elements and mixed organization. Probably my biggest irritant in the game right now is that logging certain areas produces broad swathes of brush and small trees that don’t grow or get cut, so just sit there indefinitely. You can clear them yourself by building over them (pastures work very well for this) or you can attempt to reforest the area, but the computer players do neither of these things, so their towns end up with a radius of this weird scrubland around them that just doesn’t look quite right. It seems like, at the least, these areas would be gone over for firewood at some point rather than felling giant oaks much further away.

But overall I think the game is a lot of fun and actually has a fairly compelling production chain management side with plenty of sinks for your surplus. Also gorgeous, also has a good soundtrack.

I “think” Im gonna dive into Tainted Grail: The Fall Of Avalon. I heard its like a indie bethesda style game (think skyrim,oblivion) with decent artstyle and eurojank. Seems just like what the doctor ordered…

Just bits and pieces of Midtroid Prime 4

Midway through Clair Obscur. It’s fun! Parrying takes some gettng used to, but I haven’t dodged since the tutorial because parrying is so satisfying to pull off.

Hades 2 is also great, like it over 1 so far (though I’m very early).

Pretty soon will be my regular replay of New Vegas, tons of huge mods have come out since last I played.

Artifacts (rumored):

Shaft And The Renowned Tongue

Trying to get a new fort running while the succession game moves along. I have what I think is a good start, though it hasn’t been flawless. I have no metal except for four platinum nuggets and my militia commander has already been drowned by a mandril. The only short sword and one of only two copper armor sets are still down there with her bones.

Playing Half-Life, it’s weird but I swear this game looks better in software mode.

Im playing fire emblem 3 houses, black eagles im getting to the war phase next chapter so im ranking up c supports on my team

I was playing fallout 3 but i always get burned out and quit around 20 hours in. The gameplay loop is just not good. I started up cyberpunk again to try and get to the dlc area in a new game and i still find the vanilla story to just be so boring. The gameplay is so tight now zipping around with a shotgun and feeling like a god and the main story is like blah blah blah scan the poo stain on the wall blah blah blah drive blah blah scan blah blah cutscene and braindance blah blah. Hoping the dlc has a bit more action in it. Pet another cat in Cronos

All in all, what can I say. This game clearly isn’t even close to being the GOAT, nor is it a terrible game. Sure, that horse is cool, moddable Weapons arts (refuse to call them the dumb elden ring name), the world is fucking massive and the art direction of it deserved the award it got. But at the same time, as much as they expanded the game, it really feels like they actually hollowed out the core experience. The bosses never played by the same rules you did obviously, but I don’t think it has ever been this egregious. They have 50 hit combos, which then if you try to hit them, chain into other 50 hit combos. If you get hit once in some of these combos, you’re dead, since you can’t recover. They input read and hit you specifically when you’re healing. They very realistically delay their attack, and then swing it at the speed of light. One of them even has an attack where you either have to be a kilometer away to dodge it, or you have to go on youtube and look up the most unintuitive way to dodge an attack ever.

But even the RPG aspect is rather trimmed down in a way, with metas now being the prevalent way to play. And those playstyles require having all the necessary items, which can only be found if you look at the wiki and run the risk of spoiling yourself. Although you no longer really have to worry, since you can pretty much fast travel from any point of the map, but that still kind of defeats the feeling of danger you had traversing the worlds of the other games. It’s a massive open world, there is no way someone is going to explore all of it alone, especially when there is only 7 bosses that aren’t repeated, despite there being like 150 in total. A boss fight used to be a pretty special event in the other souls games, whereas in Elden Ring it just feels like another mindless obstacle that you overcame 10 hours ago with a beefed up statline. Despite it being massive, the game just kind of gets stale, and you’ll be begging it to end by the late game sections. On the whole, I’d give it about a 7-7.5/10.

Just 1cc’d the latest touhou. Time to grind the extra stage!