Wot are you playing (video games)

Marx · 27 November 2022 13:28

shakes fist at Steam Autumn Sale

Well, I picked up Assassin’s Creed Origins, and despite a completely nonsensical opening (I’m killing masked people, apparently, as something called a Medjay? Or I was a Medjay but am not? Or I’m a Medjay for somewhere else?), it continues to be very satisfying. And super cheap, which is important.

I’ve also poured about 20 hours into Roguebook, which is a nice, albeit not great, rogue-like. Colourful, neat hero options, and fast.

And I’ve played about 5 hours of The Vale, and this one is really interesting. The basic hook is that you’re playing a blind protagonist, so there are literally no graphics: the entire game is auditory. They’ve done a really, really good job with it thus far (although, admittedly, scrolling through menus is really annoying with just audio, but I open my eyes and just use the text for those parts). Voice actors are great, and the story has been really interesting so far. A touch on the easy side, but I suspect I am still very early on (it’s a 500 mile journey, and I think I’ve gone about… 20?). Highly recommend if you like the idea of closing your eyes and trying to visualize a story you are interacting with: it is way better than I thought it would be. Oh, and there’s a free demo! Worth a shot.

I also bought and tried the Enhanced Baldur’s Gate II, and I don’t think I can do it any more. I tried (and then just died arbitrarily… walking down a corridor, then just… dead), and I forgot how far game design has come. Even little things like highlighting elements you can interact with is really hit-and-miss. I’ll probably give it another stab, but yeah, I loved it when it came out and now… hmm.

Lastly, I picked up Civilization VI, played it for about an hour and… meh. It’s not bad, but gosh is there a lot of things to try and keep track of and that vertical learning curve coupled to tiny text that can’t be made larger… I think my Civ days are past me. Oh well. Not like I have a shortage of games to play!

I’m hoping I can pick up Signalis on heavy discount at some point, and a buddy told me about a sprawling Metroidvania (Soul-something?) that he’s really enjoying, but I think I’m happy with my 'Creed and Vale for now.

COMaestro · 27 November 2022 14:33

I just picked up AC: Origins myself, but on PS5. Funny enough, I am still working my way through AC: Valhalla, which is two games after Origins, but whatever.

I also purchased a Star Wars bundle which contains Racer, Republic Commando, Jedi Knight II, and Jedi Academy. Also, the TMNT Cowabunga Collection, as I loved those arcade games back in the day. Also, because it was really cheap, I bought Werewolf: the Apocalypse - Earthblood, as I have been curious about it, and reviews have been very mixed.

All of those were digital purchases. I also ordered a physical copy of Sifu, which I have seen some videos of and it looks really cool, though I hear it is punishingly difficult. Been wanting to try it and finally found it at a price I was willing to pay.

So, that’s me sorted on video games for probably 2+ years.

bort · 28 November 2022 00:35

Dome Keeper. I don’t really play many games, but this one caught my eye and I thought it sounded fun. Dig for stuff and fight off aliens, what could be better?

yashima · 28 November 2022 13:16

Shapez.io 2 is coming I just saw this while browsing the steam sale… big surprise: I didn’t buy anything.

RogerBW · 28 November 2022 13:31

I had a lot of fun with #1, and then fired it up a week or two ago and felt completely lost, as if I should start from the beginning again. So maybe I shall.

(I have a reasonably efficient design in my head still for muxing and demuxing to feed a battery of slow machines, but first I need to check how demuxers cope when one output is blocked…)

lalunaverde · 28 November 2022 13:40

Oh man. As a big fan of Zachtronic Games, this looks super to me

yashima · 28 November 2022 14:52

and v2 looks pretty neat, too.

edit: shapez - Shapez 2 Steam Page Launch - Wishlist now! - Steam News

SteveB_uk · 28 November 2022 21:44

I’ve been trying to go back to Mass Effect: Andromeda and it’s just bad. I had a bit of a play with putting full-auto on guns that aren’t meant to be full-auto, and that got the dps up a bit, but the story and tasks are so shallow it doesn’t really work. I feel sorry for anyone going up against the defining AAA series that is Mass Effect, but come on. (I absolutely love ME1-3, and I have an N7 hoodie somewhere).

malkav11 · 29 November 2022 15:07

To each their own. I think it’s the best combat in the series, often the best looking game in it, and while the characters and story don’t hold up next to ME2 and ME1, respectively, it comes the closest to recapturing the feel of ME1 (my favorite) of any of the later games for me and they’re still pretty acceptable. I’m sad we never got the DLC they intended.

Shadows over Loathing and Beacon Pines are my current ventures, the former is extremely silly and I love it, the latter is cute and lovely and surprisingly dark for a kids-adventure tale. It’s more linear than the premise of collecting and using verbs at branch points would suggest but oh well. Recently finished Citizen Sleeper, which has a great time/energy/resource management mechanical structure that eventually runs out of juice, and terrific writing that never does.

Marx · 29 November 2022 15:51

I love ME:A, but I also agree that it’s probably the weakest of the series aside from the “Screeching-brakes-we-ran-out-of-money”-ending of ME3. I love several of the characters (Sara Ryder, Peebee, and Vetra), and I only actively dislike Jaal (and that’s not his fault: his race as an entire effort is such a cop-out… “Look, they have exactly the same tech as us but just a little different names!”).

My big complaints, and I think I’ve said this before, are:

Way too many fetch-quests with 3 or 4 parts of “in space, go to system, land on system, go to place, go back to space, go to other system, go to a different system, go to another system, land on system, go to place.” Way, way, way too many. 2 would’ve been too many, and there are, like… 15? 20?
The new baddies are just The Reapers But Biological. Come on, guys… you can do better than this. In fact, you’d have to try very, very hard to do worse than this.
A whole new galaxy! A whole new set of technologies and races and… oh, wait. Everything is exactly the same tech (Shotgun! Pistol! Rifle!) and all the new races are bipeds that are the same height and build as existing races and there are only two new races. Two! In an entire galaxy! Three if you include the Remnant! THREE! IN THE WHOLE… oh, I’m making myself angry.
And that ONE gameplay mechanic where your crew will start a really interesting conversation in your little armoured buggy (why doesn’t it have a freakin’ GUN!?) but if ANYTHING happens, the conversation is immediately interrupted and never repeated. THAT I actively hated. “Oh, Peebee is talking! HIT THE BRAKES! SCAN THE SKIES IN A PANIC UNTIL SHE’S DONE TALKING!”

Oh, and where are the Quarians, damnit. They should be spearheading the entire Initiative! If anyone is going to build a ship capable of traveling for centuries without breaking… I’m just sayin’…

But, again, love the game. Ryder in particular is a really strong character without the N7 edge, and I love the way SAM is justified to make you a supersoldier. I don’t like that the entire story hinges on the deus ex machina of SAM in your head, that’s weak, but I’d accept it if they had done a better job with it… but it worked, it was fine.

Combat was fun, exploration was fun, building and assisting the colonies was fun. Even some of the story was neat (although almost all of it was telegraphed), and there were a few geniune laugh-out-loud moments, and that final run in the Nomad with the starship overhead… yeah. that was damn good. Really strong.

So… yeah. I get it. Not for everyone, and they really fumbled on the potential of what they did. But I’d still love to see a ME:A2…

EDIT: N7. I don’t know what N3 is/was, but it’s definitely not the program that produced Shepard.

malkav11 · 29 November 2022 16:16

The Quarian ark’s fate was going to be the focus of DLC, sounds like? (and a lot of the smaller races were traveling with them). But of course we never got that.

Assussanni · 29 November 2022 21:13

I went in late to ME:A, and so had very low expectations for it after reading a lot of negative things about it. In fact, I think I only bought it because it was in a deal with Dragon Age: Inquisition. I enjoyed it much more than I expected, particularly the combat.

My main issues with it were nicely summarised by @Marx. The Kett felt really similar to the Collectors to me and we basically got one, at most, new interesting race. Compared that to ME1 when, ironically, I felt much much like an explorer stepping out into the unknown (Turians, Asari, Salarians, Quarians, Krogan, Elcor, Volus, Hanar…).

malkav11 · 30 November 2022 00:19

Yeah, I think it’s pretty inarguable it does way less than it should with the new galaxy premise. Or indeed the colonization efforts.

SteveB_uk · 30 November 2022 12:17

I think a lot of my issues with it are the characters, and the guns.

I never thought I was someone who cared about guns before, but this is Mass Effect, and having many of the guns looking “alien lumpy” while the iconic main rifle from the original games has a DPS so low it’s unusable (seriously, the max DPS is HALF that of other ARs in the game. Half.) it just felt… uninspired. The jump-and-hover combat is great, the enemy AI is actually very clever at times and I haven’t fully tried Biotics yet, but the guns feel weak and boring to me. (Apart from the Widow sniper, which is awesome as always).

Rider is actually a great character, but I’m not getting into any of the others like I did with even ME1. I know the original ME has a trilogy to give them more depth, but the writing in ME:A failed to grab me. I don’t mind that the quests are very obvious repeated travel-and-fetch etc, if you want to spend time with the characters or in combat the actual quests can be less exciting.

Anyway, I don’t hate it, but when the next ME game comes out it’s not this one I’ll be looking for more of, it’s mostly 1-3.

Boronian · 30 November 2022 21:17

So Warhammer 40k Battlesector is leaving Game Pass tomorrow, so I played it a ton during the last week whenever I found the time.

It is a turn based strategy game and I love these. I don’t know anything about Warhammer 40k, so the story didn’t make any sense to me. But the game itself is good, got to like 60% of the campaign till I got tired of it today

I bought some games I am curious about:

Eternal Threads (something about time travel) and King Arthur Knight’s Tale (another turn based game, yay!)

SteveB_uk · 1 December 2022 12:39

Solved my issue with ME:A’s guns by sticking a full auto mod and bio thing on a Valkyrie rifle. Now it’s trivially easy, but strangely more satisfying.

SteveB_uk · 10 December 2022 12:57

I noticed that, despite my complaining about Mass Effect Andromeda, I’m still playing it It’s grown on me quite a lot.

I also did about 20 hours of X-COM 2, and it’s very addictive, but the difficulty level is insane and that’s just no fun, so I’m giving up.

(I am not bad at this type of sniper/heavy/overwatch game. My first thought when playing X-COM 2 was “Oh, it’s Laser Squad that I played on the ZX Spectrum in 1989”. It is indeed a direct sequel. But no amount of prep, positioning, overwatch etc can defeat this number of enemies that you can’t stealth around, it’s busted.)

RogerBW · 10 December 2022 13:27

I have achieved an Anything Machine in shapez.io. (Well, almost. It doesn’t handle the collapse of non-overlapping layers as in the infamous level 26.)

Now I’m working on a better one.

yashima · 10 December 2022 17:37

Hades 2 was announced yesternight or so reddit suggested on scrolling…

Lordof1 · 10 December 2022 19:16

You have set me down a dark path.

Ps if anyone is interested in Shapez after the demo it’s currently just over £3 on Steam.

Relatedly, and probably of interest here, Steam is having something of a board game sale so worth having a look! Hard to link to but have a look at the Steam Autumn Board Game Sale.