Not the first thing that came to mind. Looks like dangerous would top my list…
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If you get a lot of titan blood and max out Chiron(?) for the bow, you can just spam attack while also being able to dodge. Don’t try it before you invest a lot of blood though, or your damage output will be too low.
Spear I can’t remember, maybe I went for the Hades powered up sweep.
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So I basically had four days off due to lack of work, and I sunk most of them into Highfleet. A round of applause for the finale - just a great bit of design.
Spoilers you *really* don't want to read if you ever intend to play the game
After you capture the nuclear reactor in the capitol, the enemy initiates nuclear war, intending to just blow up the entire city and its nuclear stockpile. Two heavily escorted missile cruisers and a nuclear-capable strike fleet start approaching the capitol from off-map from multiple unknown directions. If they get into one of a dozen cities within 2000 km, they can launch ballistic nuclear missiles that you have almost no hope of intercepting. All the locals rally to you and money becomes meaningless, all services provided for free. Of course there are other missile-capable tactical groups around too, and they all start using nuclear missiles as well. It’s brutal. After I found the cruisers and strike group using elint to detect their radar/jammers, I sent in my heavy cruisers, but with their huge radar signatures they got spotted early and each took four tactical nuclear missiles to the face. Each time a missile is incoming, time slows down and you get this super-creepy slow-mo crescendo and maybe time for just one artillery barrage - the anti-missile missiles seem too slow. I got 1 in 4 of the missiles this way, with the others being air-bursts that sent my cruisers spinning out of control. You lose Comms too, so there’s a tense moment waiting to see if they have been knocked out of the air. The battleship I posted above lost both tankers and half the ship, but was in just enough shape and had just enough fuel to get to the strike group, where it took down four ships as it’s remaining guns, engines, and ammo got destroyed. It finally won by basically falling into the last enemy ship while firing it’s last remaining battery. The missile carriers I later managed to take out using faster strike groups under the radar while baiting out missiles.
Anyway, just great how it reverses your situation in the campaign - from an intruding strike fleet to an army defending against three strike fleets and supporting tactical groups.
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I’m trying a stab at Encased, a sci-fi RPG that’s… interesting?
I’ve only played for an hour or two, and there are certainly elements that are poorly (or not) explained that are annoying me: do Medikets heal damage or not? Are there side-effects from using them? What is Fatigue? How do I get rid of it? Why do I gain it? How do I pick locks sometimes, but not others?
There’s a lot going on under the covers and the game would really benefit from a good tutorial rather than the barebones one you get. That stated, the dialog trees are done pretty well, and the game seems promising, plus it’s got a lot of “weird” to go with its sci-fi, and I approve of that… but I think it’s a bit too clunky and way too confusing for me at this point. I may stick with it a little longer (I’m at the first… dungeon, I suppose? The third major area of the game), see if there’s a big payoff, but yeah, a lot of poorly explained mechanics so far.
I may pick up Wasteland 3 next time it’s on sale… that seems a little more straightforward, perhaps? Although I never finished Gear Tactics, and that was very straightforward in a clever way… we will see, we will see.
I was weak this weekend, and on the Steam sale I got Crusader Kings 3…
So far just played once, but it sucked away hours without hardly noticing. I need to get more nuanced with the game, as it is slightly different than its predecessor, and I was getting my ass kicked by a count being a “duke” in Ireland on my first war.
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Further playing Nobody Saves the World with my son, for whom it has become the latest obsession. Fun and deeper than it first appears, still very much enjoying this.
Also Lords of Xulima for very old school CRPG goodness. Tough as a badger’s scrotum at first but gets softer and more yielding after a while. Oh and the game gets a bit easier too.
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This is a mental image I did not need right now. Or ever.
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I’m actually playing something with modest dedication for the first time in a long time, and it’s a beast: Ghosts n’ Goblins Resurrection. I started out on Legendary difficulty to start but I feel like I wasted time there. The game offers multiple difficulty modes, and notably the lower modes offer checkpoints that can be revisited (practiced).
I’ve beaten Ghouls n’ Ghosts “properly” (both loops, one coin), but I was so much younger and sharper, and with more time on my hands. We’ll see if I ever get to the “proper” challenge level with this one.
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I played Ghosts n Goblins on the Spectrum +2 aged… not a lot, and I can tell you, I did not ever last more than 2 minutes. Kinda curious to try it again now.
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I played it on the NES back in the day and considered myself lucky if I got past the first boss. Then I got an NES mini and played it on that. It’s still impossible!
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This all depends on your level of masochism. I’m bonkers for this kind of suffering. 
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It was the Dark Souls of the 80s, wasn’t it? I remember being able to finish Altered Beast and get really far away in Golden Axe with just one coin, but Ghouls was unreal.
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Dark Souls and other Souls-style games are nowhere near as punishing as G&G!
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Actually, Ghosts n’ Goblins stood out among hundreds of other brutal games because it was actually good. Different era, different design ethos (earn money 25 cents at a time). It was wildly difficult but not explicitly a quarter-muncher. Not being hot garbage was its notable achievement, to say nothing of its awesome cartoon-horror world.
Dark Souls earned its reputation for being an outlier with respect to its difficulty and (so often not mentioned) its approach to storytelling/narrative. Both of these aspects made it pretty weird relative to its peers.
[EDIT] Oh! And PS: Lucifer is kaput. 
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I think I read recently (in a retro games magazine) that for (either Ghosts and Goblins or Ghouls and Ghosts) they watched people play the alpha and then changed the level design to be more difficult based on the parts the players succeeded at. So it was not only difficult, it was specifically optimised to be even more difficult.
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Oh I don’t think there’s any question in my mind that it’s the hardest in the series. Playing on full difficulty is an absolute nightmare.
[EDIT/BUMP]
On the heels of my “soft” beat of Ghosts n’ Goblins, I’ve moved on for now to the leisurely pace of scrolling shooters.
Andro Dunos 2 is the current focus, and it’s excellent. I have some nostalgia for the obscure original, but mostly I was interested by the number of people losing their minds over the sequel, and I have to say, I can mostly see why. It’s pretty rare to get a modern, non-danmaku (bullet-hell) shooter out of Japan, and they aren’t usually any good. I’m happy to report this is a big time exception. Wow.
I continue to have a lot of free time all on my lonesome, due to work being very slow. I have recently been filling the time with a lot of Hardspace: shipbreaker.
It’s very satisfying carving up spaceships into manageable chunks for processing, and the challenge ramps up at a reasonable rate. I recently selected one of the earlier smaller ships to salvage, because it had a few parts I needed to fix up my own fixer-upper (seems to be a sub-quest of sorts). I was expecting an easy return to familiar well-worn territory, only to find the ship full of explosive fuel and coolant, and the tiny cramped confines made it all the more challenging. Most of my first shift was just wondering how I was going to cut anything without the whole thing going up in flames and me with it. So it was all the more satisfying when I eventually carved it all up neatly.
Minor quibble about the setting
It’s mostly great - unregulated company runs everything, and you in debt-ridden desperation basically sign away all your rights, and more, only to end up in even more crippling debt. But there’s one glaring point of dissonance that I can’t overlook. The company is supposed to want to tie you up in an endless debt cycle forever, and has apparently done so for many of the characters in the game, but no matter how much salvage you literally blow up, you are never charged a cent for it. How and why are you not held liable for destroying company property, when absolutely everything you salvage is itemised and credited to you for paying off your debt? It makes no sense, and it seems to me such damage not being added to your debt can only have been a last minute feelgood gameplay decision. I’d much prefer the company to be exactly as evil as they are portrayed as being.
Highly recommend this game.
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Shipbreaker is so good. I’ve stepped away from it whilst they finish the narrative campaign.
I did became particularly relaxed about death although the cost of cloning is prohibitive.
I think it’s finished now?
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I played Shipbreaker a bit while it was in early access but I must admit I never got in far enough to become to become any good at it.
In other news after a two week vacation break, I managed to down Hades with the spear (at long last) in my first attempt (though it was close, I was on my last life with about 40 HP remaining). This was my first actual spear run, the previous spear run was … one that per story let me pass without having to fight him.. Now it is just the bow. When I get that I’ll have a go at another game I guess 
I have got a bit better with it over the past few bow runs so one day I’ll get the right spec together and do it!
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