I’ve started playing Death Stranding. It’s strange how a disappointing 2019 game is the perfect 2020 game. It’s just orienteering! Lovely lockdown game!
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Yeah I enjoyed the wandering.
Then it got a bit more gamey. Best bits for me where when nothing happens, the music kicks in and the camera zooms out.
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I’m still very much in tutorial territory. I just got the bike. Seems like the kind of game I’d rather play in short bursts a few times a week.
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2 suggestions that are very different:
Call of Duty: Warzone is free and has crossplay. Decent shooty battle royale that’s very accessible to anyone who’s ever played a first-person shooter.
Unrailed is much more colourful and much more indie. It’s an arcadey game where you cooperate to build a mini railway track faster than the train that it’s carrying (a bit like that scene in Wallace and Gromit). You need to chop trees and mine rocks as you go in order to craft track. It’s got simple gameplay but has lots of different upgrades to the train that mix up the game and different levels to visit as you go. Had loads of fun with it with friends and it looks like they’ve recently added PC/PS4 crossplay.
and a 3rd to echo @Boronian:
Left 4 Dead 2 is arguably the best coop game of all time, while it doesn’t have cross play it’s old enough that it will run on most old laptops. Once you’ve played through the excellent campaigns it also has a great modding scene on PC - beating the Battle for Helm’s Deep survival map is the most fun I’ve had playing any game and comes highly recommended if you want to replay something over and over to truly master it.
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Yesterday I played approximately 12 hours of Ghost of Tsushima.
That’s not an exaggeration. It may be slightly conservative as an estimate (woke up at 9, ate 3 crumpets for breakfast with fresh coffee, played until about 1pm when I made pasta with veggie tomato sauce, played until about 6pm when I had to go shovel the driveway and sidewalk, prepped a chicken for roasting, played for 2 hours until the chicken roasted, ate roast chicken with mashed potatoes, played until midnight, went to bed).
It is… spectacular. And I’m not even done the first Act! At a guess, I’m going to say it’s a 3-act game (based on the size of the map and how much of it I have explored thus far). It’s beautiful, I’m playing it with Japanese audio and English subtitles (aside: how stupid is it that I still get a tiny little thrill every time somebody says anything in a not-English language that I understand? Like, just a phrase and I’ll be “Hey! I know what that means! Not the next twelve sentences, but that one sentence, I understood that!”). I haven’t been playing it on Kurosawa-mode, although the temptation was there, maybe on my next run-through.
Anyway. It’s hard for me to move away from my button-mashing tendencies and towards the slower, more thoughtful style of combat the game wants me to embrace, but it’s incredibly satisfying when I do. If I had a complaint, it’s this: I want a proper straw hat, and the game refuses to give me one (the “Patchwork Straw hat” is close, but all the other ones are the huge straw hats with holes where your eyes can see out of and I always thought looked utterly ridiculous). And the armour tends towards the ridiculous (massive shoulder pads), but thankfully you can rein that in optionally (once you’ve unlocked more-ridiculous levels of flare for your gear, you can choose to go back and use the more reasonable gear).
A tonne of fun thus far, and a great, enjoyable way to spend all day yesterday. Played for another hour today, but I have work to do for the majority of today so I won’t get back to it until tomorrow or the day after, but man, am I ever glad I picked it up.
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As per usual, I’m a couple years behind and just started playing Detroit Become Human for the first time…and I’m blown away by it so far. Amazing. I am really enjoying it.
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Haha! I almost bought that instead of Detroit Become Human this afternoon! I was feeling just a tad more…sedate today. It seems to me that you and I both made the right choice! 
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Beat Saber!
Now my arms are tired
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YEESSSSSS! Join us!! 
I made it all the way to the chorus on a song at Expert+ last week. So proud 
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I’ve been enjoying Unravel 1 & 2. £5 for the bundle on PS store. Recommend it highly!
It might be my fav of the ‘Limbo-a-like’ 2d platformers. Charming, absolutely stunningly beautiful, interesting mechanics, mildly surprising puzzles, and a quaint, faintly emotional story.
I’ve completed 1 and about a third of the way through 2. They feel like very different games, but enjoying both so far!
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Do I dare admit that I’ve been playing Cyberpunk? On my laptop with an external GPU, it runs nicely. Although it mostly says 30fps which I know is too little for most people. It’s fine for me with all settings on ultra but no raytracing because I don’t have that kind of GPU.
Bugs are minor after several patches. I play on normal and reloading all the time because I’m too bad for this game. I’ve been enjoying it though. Can’t say much about my expectations being met because despite knowing about the game for a long time, I haven’t played many comparable games in recent years and neglected to have many expectations at all except that I get a cyberpunk themed game with Keanu Reeves 
Plus:
- atmosphere of the city including even the loading screens (though there could be a tad more variety in those)
- soundtrack <3
- what I can see of the character system looks huge maybe too huge and I have no idea what I am doing but that is awesome. Progression has been steady and rewarding so far.
- Tutorial introducing different gameplay concepts is really helpful also options to skip scripted sequences… I would have expected to have more difficulties learning the game
- story great so far (I basically played through the intro and possibly the first chapter of the game)
- Keanu!!!
- hacking. although I wish I could do even more with that
- sneaking. I already had one longish sneaky sequence that despite being difficult was rather enjoyable.
- shooting myself out of one place was also quite fun and different from what I am used to with Borderlands 2/3. I enjoy having to scramble for cover and actually sneaking up behind opponents
Minus:
- cars, I hate driving. Luckily this is not GTA as I have destroyed half the city just driving around
- this is not GTA, I’d have expected more “consequences” outside of missions
- character generation is so elaborate but you rarely get to see your character. Also character creation choices don’t seem to matter much after the intro but I could be wrong…
- keybindings–why is it so hard to offer me 2 distinct keys for every binding? Far far older games can do this.
- the whole way this game came about to be published when it was, including crunchtime and lying about how it would run on older consoles.
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I was gifted a version of it but haven’t loaded it yet onto the PS5.
I hope to give it a try at some point during the break.
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I’ve also been enjoying it, it’s sooooo pretty on Ultra (I do have RTX so am using that and DLSS both). FWIW, consequence-wise, I’m not sure what you mean by “outside of missions”, but the game does a fair amount of branching and consequence stuff that’s not really signposted - I’ve been specifically reading about a number of things that I never would have realized were based on my choices if people hadn’t told me about other ways it could go.
But yes, keybindings are a problem. And I really wish that when you hit a button to go to the map or journal or whatever you could hit it again to exit to gameplay. It’s so easy, it’s so common…why did they not do it? (And yeah, all the stuff around the game is… 
)
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This is rather specific. So I feel the need to clarify: In the first hour of play or so, I tried to be rather careful about bumping into people and I felt horrible about my driving skills but quickly noticed it didn’t matter much how many people I accidentally mowed down or into how many accidents I got or driving backwards on the highway when I miss an exit. This feels wrong to me on the one hand–on the other I am glad because there would be that much more reloading if there were consequences to my driving (like police or dead NPCs or a ruined car bursting into flames or my general reputation being damaged)–maybe there is more to it. I am still very early in the game and haven’t done many side missions.
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Oh, yeah, no. There is a very rudimentary wanted system where if a cop sees you injure a civilian (or probably other specific things), they’ll start shooting at you and bring in backup, but in my experience all you have to do to get away is drive fast for a few hundred meters, and there are no long term consequences to that as far as I know. But mostly that means that, for example, you’ll get into trouble if you chase a crooked ripperdoc out into the street before landing the killing blow (speaking from personal experience here). And then you’ll need to book it for a brief moment. Not GTA-level escalation or tracking.
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I didn’t intend to get Cyberpunk but my brother bought it for me. I just spent all today playing it and… it’s really damn good on PC. Surprising amount of time dedicated to emotional story instead of gunfights, which is the way you keep players hooked. Some bugs, but only as much as a Bethesda game, and they’re patching fast. I’ve also seen it run on xbox one and it wasn’t horrible?
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I actually quite enjoy the driving, which I think makes me a very rare breed. Got the Quadra Turbo for free in a side quest thing, and I will sometimes forego fast travel to drive it, just for the experience. The driving mechanics aren’t the greatest, but I’m very familiar with racing games so I can cope. I have not yet run over a pedestrian! But I did scare someone into standing in a fire? Which they continued to stand in until they died? HMmm.
As far as the character progression system, I’ve gone pretty far down the body route which gives you access to stuff like unlimited sprinting/shooting and reloading while sprinting, and improves shotguns and punching - which basically turns the game into a completely different game. I’m playing Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 Multiplayer on Hardcore (and I’m the eternally hated shotgun-guy who also kniferuns), the AI are playing a bullet sponge shooter. Gorilla fists and double jump implants are the icing on the cake of side quest based overlevelling - I’m basically low budget One Punch Man whenever I return to a main mission.
I’m enjoying the super fast playstyle (it’s what I’m good at), but I would like to challenge myself with more methodical combat if I ever do a second run through.
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I can vouch for berserker charging with a katana also working out pretty well…mostly. Lotso limbs flying. It’s not really a very hard game, and I’m fine with that.
I have fast travelled exactly once, when a side quest took me up to the memorial in North Oaks, and I really didn’t want to drive back down a bunch of hairpin turns and then another 3k. Otherwise it’s way more fun taking in the city.
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We played a ton of Return of the Obra Dinn the last days. It is such a great and unique game, love it!
It is an excellent detective game and there are so many things to deduce and it is a lot of fun to do so. The game mechanics, the graphic and the story all create an amazing game.
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Sorry, got another parental question.
My youngest is going to be 12 at the beginning of February. He’s not going to be able to see his friends so we were thinking about some kind of online party.
Basically, is it possible to buy a Minecraft world/ server that he and his friends could explore together, either as a permanent thing, or have access to for a couple of hours?
Thanks