Because of the show, I have gone back to replay The Last of Us, though I shelled out for the Part 1 because it was billed as having updated play mechanics and expanded exploration. Sadly, I am not noticing any difference in those two categories from the PS3 version, but it certainly looks nice.
I also picked up Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic which despite being a big SW fan, I’ve never played before because it was initially an X-box exclusive and I didn’t have one. Now I have it on my Switch and it’s pretty good.
Having just watched all the Mad Max films for Ribbon of Memes, the film podcast I do with @RogerBW , I was pleased to see the Mad Max game from 2015 for less than 4 quid. Having also picked up Expeditions: Vikings for £6 as a few people (including people here) have recommended it to me.
I think I prefer Civ 5 to 4 (and 6). That might be because I was getting fed up of my cities being flattened by 100-unit tall stacks of pikemen though…
I find the one unit per tile change means way more micromanagement and makes me pretty unwilling to wage wars. But also I recommend IV because it has a bunch of stellar total conversion mods and far as I know neither subsequent game has anything comparable.
I’ve been working my way through Squad 51 vs. The Flying Saucers and enjoying the heck out of it. It’s a style-over-substance shooter, which is generally a pretty big red flag for me, but the campy sci-fi aesthetic was too good to not to try, and for the most part, it’s really solid!
The team should definitely be commended for their work on the visuals, since it’s a chaotic (and monochromatic!) mess, but rarely will you lose track of key information, or find much ambiguity between the foreground and background. Aside from some frustration in the back half of stage 8 (of 11), it’s been a bit of a treat, actually.
For sure worth the 15 Canadian funbux I paid, but we’ll see if it’s worth pursuing for scores (the true mark of a goodun’). It does have dynamic scaling, which isn’t something I’m generally keen about, but does add additional incentive post credits.
Started playing Project Zomboid to cheer me up after the twin joys of covid and norovirus. My first character was an agoraphobic fisherwoman who never had to confront her fear as she was eaten by zombies within the first hour. My next character, a deaf mechanic, never even heard them coming. It turns out that a bathroom door is quite flimsy.
My final character, an asthmatic park ranger, fared better. She found my previous character (the mechanic), and beat him to (un)death with a waffle iron. Then she found an alarm clock and had the great idea of setting it off outside the front door to distract any nearby zombies.
Set the alarm fine. Couldn’t work out how to drop it.
By the time she finally placed it down, buzzing like a pissed off bees’ nest, she was surrounded by a horde. The waffle iron bought her some room, and some time, and she ran for her life… but not very far because of the asthma.
Got back into the “Homecoming” server of City of Heroes, which resurrected the 2004-2012 MMO in 2019 or so.
I played then but not since, and I’ve just seen that the admins are really putting time into improving it, balancing classes etc even now. Having spent a lot of time on MMOs over the years, I can honestly say that this one… may be one of the best ever. The graphics are 20 years out of date, but the fact that you can pick just about any class and any set of superpowers to pair up and still have it work fine is just amazing. The character creation is A+ (a friend used to describe it as the best avatar-maker, which also has a game attached).
I played it back in the day. Got bored of the typical mmo grind though, it’s just endless samey random “dungeons”, right? Even tried some roleplay groups for it, won a prize in a costume contest, but that all required too much time and attention.
