Fuck me what a shootout between Max and Kimi. I thought Max would snipe it but Kimi is just in insane form right now. I don’t know when Merc’s titanium dioxide supply runs out but for now Kimi is proving a lot of doubters wrong.

Also a classic barrier contact for Leclerc, wouldn’t be Monaco without it. Great qualy!

Great lap by Charles, that.

Even these regs can’t destroy the magic of it. I wish the official broadcast was more generous with cockpit cameras though. But I guess it helps sell F1TV.

Yeah… this is the way. I really wish I had just one fixation that stuck with me my whole life. I think I would have been a lot happier. And also would have wasted less money on temporary interests.

Yeah, I get that. I assume you’ve already burned through Split Fiction and the rest of the highly rated co-op games and then it’ll be tough. Have you tried playing detective games together? Stuff like Blue Prince, Obra Dinn etc? It’s not exactly co-op but it’s fun to do together. And way way better than losing your sanity in League.

Well, Darkwood is actually also extremely light on survival mechanics. There is no hunger, thirst or sleep. It’s mostly about scavenging for stuff to barricade you at night and survive. Nights without stuff getting into your hideout won’t last forever. And also yeah, there’ll be scarier/more dangerous enemies further in.

And I like the day/night cycle gameplay loop a lot. It provides a very nice cycle of tension/release, and somehow helps draw the tension to a finer point when night time hits.

No problem at all, I love Anomaly and modding it (as you can tell) so I will happily talk your ear off about it if you give me half a chance to. And I’ll be happy to give further help or tips in the future if you want to, too.

Enjoy diving into the rabbit hole, I’ll keep an eye out for future weekly threads to see what you end up with!

First of all, I hope you’re feeling better! Also I know you don’t need me to tell you this but: you need to kick your League habit, man. MOBAs are black holes where free time and happiness go to die. I used to play Dota, trust me I know.

Anyway I’m glad you’re liking Darkwood! How does it differ from what you expected? I guess I didn’t focus much on the daytime survival stuff, and that does take up a large amount of the playtime. But there’s still a lot of tension there, and the stress of impending nighttime is kind of terrifying in itself. I don’t know, maybe I’m also colored by playing on Hard but it’s probably the best horror game I’ve ever played.

EDIT: I forgot to actually answer the weekly question. It’s tough but I think my answer might actually be Blasphemous. I had my gripes with that game mechanically but I loved the art and the world building and story. I guess that it’s debatable whether this aesthetic falls under the same umbrella as Dark Souls 1-3, but for me there is a clear distinction as Blasphemous has a very strong Spanish catholic influence that I really enjoyed. I am not Christian, but I have always been fascinated with Christian mysticism and I thought this was very well executed here.

That’s awesome, do you know if it has the DLCs included? Survival (part of the Mission Mode DLC) is my favourite part of the game for quick access mindless action.

In general NG2 is an incredibly unique game. To this day there is nothing quite like it, you will either love it or hate it - and probably both in equal measures. It was unfortunately rushed out and released in an unfinished and unbalanced state due to some internal issues at Team Ninja, and you see this particularly in the later levels and the higher difficulties. But when it hits and it’s delivering fights against groups of humanoid enemies it really delivers a feeling of “what if cocaine was playable?” that no other game matches.

Will be interested to hear your thoughts, and let me know if you want any tips. It doesn’t really play like any other action games.

You can use one image for the title and put the rest in the body. That’s the only way to do it, I believe.

Are you planning on giving Ninja Gaiden 2 a spin? You have a chance to experience the original Chapter 10 staircase fight, where there are so many enemies on screen at once the game slows down to full-on bullet time time dilation because there is too much game for the hardware to handle.

People can hate all they want but we’ve had solid races there every year we’ve been. I would much rather kick out Abu Dhabi and end the season in Vegas, it would be a better spectacle. The worst thing about it currently is that there is so much hullabaloo around the race that it feels like the season finale, and then you have a couple of additional anticlimactic races after.

I don’t know that I would call it a favourite (see my recent rant), but people who have never played an action game calling anything third-person with a dodge button a Soulslike is kind of a Boss Baby moment.

Can’t believe I’m shilling for Nintendo for the second time in like a month but this seems to be a type of fantasy Donkey Kong: Bananza could fulfill? That whole game’s selling point was fully destructible environments.

Yeah, Discord replacing forums and places like ModDB is definitely terrible. I hate it too.

For me I kind of approach modding in reverse, almost. I tend to first canvas as much as I can and put together a collection that I like, and then I will playtest and if I run into specific issues I’ll look for further mods that solve them as I go. For me it saves me time because I know right off the bat there’s going to be things I want to change, and I don’t need to play vanilla first to know that.

Also a note about that document I linked: it’s very very far from being comprehensive. It was made to save me time on the Discord because users kept asking about mods to add onto the baseline HACR pack. So I have omitted a ton of essential mods (as you could tell) simply because they were already in HACR base. But it’s something at least.

Yes well, development on official Anomaly versions is extremely slow, and so Demonized releases his modded exes on a much faster development cycle.

Yeah, the modding landscape is very messy. A lot of presumed foreknowledge, very user unfriendly and also very scattered. Nexusmods for Anomaly is largely unused, ModDB is a mess and a lot of stuff is now scattered across various Discords, sometimes with important patches and additions buried deep inside threads with absolutely zero discoverability.

I would personally recommend some weather mod, I find vanilla weathers pretty underwhelming in comparison. There are a bunch though, Melancholy Weathers is close to a 1.0 release. But I have that opinion about most things Vanilla Anomaly. It does its intended job extremely well, which is to be a stable and unified platform for modders (compared to the mess of Call of Chernobyl-based mods that preceeded it), but it’s fairly lacking without add-ons. Although I may just have been ruined at this point, I have played and modded Anomaly a lot.

Another thing I forgot was the Mod Configuration Menu. A lot of mods will also depend on that for configuration. It’s so easy to forget all these absolute bedrock foundational mods, sorry! Here is another must-have: Beef’s NVGs.

Final recommendation (for now) is Dark Signal Audio packs. These are some of the best sounds you can find for Anomaly. They work fine with the other audio mods from that sheet I linked, you can futz with the load order in MO2 to decide which should overwrite what.

Let me know if there is something else specific you’re looking for, I can go back and sift through my stuff and refresh my memory. But I think the absolute best way to get a baseline grasp of what exists out there is to download some modpack(s) and look through their mod list. Even if you decide to build from scratch yourself later rather than use something as a baseline, it will help clue you in into what mods exist.

Okay. I already knew that much, but thank you. Yeah that is the reason I only use IsThereAnyDeal.com to find sales, instead of like G2A/Kinguin.

Wait, I’m out of the loop here. What is this G2A fight? I don’t use that site because it’s greymarket and often ends up not actually supporting the developers, but would still like to know what is happening.

Enjoy! The intended experience is playing on Hard (semi-permadeath, you have limited extra lives) but I recommend playing on Normal. I started off on Hard but restarted on Normal because I still have a faint hope of actually finishing the game and I think it’s a little too difficult to pull that off on a first playthrough on Hard (and I’m not going to start over if I lose my save after 15 hours).

But keep that in mind when playing. The tension and stakes are just so much higher when you have limited extra lives. It definitely does heighten the experience.

The fascist quest is actually quite interesting. I was definitely surprised by it, although I shouldn’t have been given the general level of writing in Disco. It’s a shame so few players will actually get to see it.

But yeah, being mean to Kim sucks though.

It’s worth sitting through as “homework” for the later games, in my opinion. It has some great moments still, and the story is interesting. But yeah, a bit too much clunky combat in similar-looking forests.