I've played through a fair amount of games lately, although none of them were particularly fun or memorable apart from Control.

Assassin's Creed Rogue is basically a poor AC4 expansion pack. No more lush jungle and tropical environments, a boring protagonist, forgettable and irritating cast, and only exists to tie up some loose ends and link itself to AC3 and Unity.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider manages to somehow be more generic and boring than Rise of the Tomb Raider, which is impressively sad.

Spider-Man is a hybrid of your typical Ubisoft Open World™ game complete with tons of repetitive crime fighting activities to perform and collectibles to gather in order to level up and unlock a bunch of abilities to further trivialize the already mindlessly simple Batman Arkham-like combat. The main story dragged on for far too long, and what should've been interesting and difficult encounters against the supervillains during the last 5 missions that they were crammed into were about as tough as a Crash Bandicoot boss.

I enjoyed the City That Never Sleeps DLC episodes due to already being max level with all abilities, as well as them having less of a focus of collectibles and side-stories, but more on the overall story progression, variety of enemies and boss encounters.

MediEvil hasn't really aged well. Stiff movement, awkward combat and a nauseating variable framerate made it an unpleasant experience. In a smiliar case to the Spyro collection, the new art style has completely destroyed the old Tim Burton-esque gothic horror/fantasy atmosphere.

On a much more positive note, I bought the Diablo III Eternal Collection the other day and I'm having tons of fun bashing up baddies with my barbarian, so I'm going to get back to that.

I've been juggling playing a bunch of games lately. I dusted off an old DS game I purchased at a bargain a while back but never got very far in it called Puzzle Kingdoms, which combines match-three block puzzles with a battle system. I recommend it if you haven't tried it, the game also appeared on the Wii and PC. The fact the main villain's name is Melkor is probably a reference to the Lord of the Rings character of the same name, as it's doubtful many characters have that name. I only just beat it a few days ago, though I haven't 100% completed it (i.e. have all the heroes be at the max level of 20).

Also been playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons daily to get those daily things and Pokemon Sword/Shield due to the Isle of Armor. Updated Smash Ultimate with the Min Min DLC. Just bought Bug Fables yesterday and am playing it right now. Speaking of purchases, I still haven't played Undertale yet despite owning the game for a while now (forgot when I got it but I think it was left September). It's basically on of those cases in which one has a lot of stuff but has yet to get through it all if you know what I mean. Heck, there's plenty of books I like I haven't got to yet!

I've been playing new Animal Crossing since launch but I don't play it as much now, as there's not much to do in the game compared to new leaf.

I continued playing Stardew Valley recently and I'm often playing Paladins now.

With the combination of donkey Kong country and super Mario land ,I'll also be playing streets of rage and Super Mario Land 3: Wario Land

Just finished Disco Elysium (it gud), onto Blasphemous, default to TF2 and FFXIV when I feel like shutting my brain off and letting muscle memory take over

Played Red Dead 2 up to chapter 3. Spent too much time doing challenges but finally got my dead eye meter to level 9. Needed to take a break so I started playing Commandos 1 because I was interested in Desperados 3. Bought commandos 2, desperados 1, helldorado and shadow tactics from summer sale. Thinking of doing a lonewolf stealth run of Divinity OS after all this. I'm set for a while.

Played through Earthbound last week. That final boss is really something.

Played through Monkey Island 1 (the original, on the Amiga) for the first time in like 20 years. Didn't remember you have to play disk jockey as well for the final scenes. They really could have thought that through a bit better. Anyway, still a very good game.

I just started Skyrim for the first time. I've put about 5 hours into it and killing the first dragon was easier than killing most of the basic enemies I've fought so I feel like I might be doing something wrong.

I'm trying to play Master Chief Collection, but it so god damned broken that I regret shelling out however much it cost to get Halo 2 and Reach. Most fun I've had has been modding campaign, but it is brutally boring when you make yourself a speed faster than walking through a pool of sand. I've also been playing Plutonia Experiment, with Brutal Doom Sperglord Edition v16, and modding the maps. Here is a part of what I've done to map 3, an older version of it anyway:

I've been playing Minecraft again. The new nether update is really cool. I love the basalt areas that have ash floating in the air. It really upped the difficulty, too. You have to be fucking CAREFUL.

Was playing Donkey Kong Country ,continued off with 28 lives at beginning from the automatic save I had since I was in the middle of the first battle of Master Necky's battle... my favorite level in the forest/lake area would have to be Orangutan gang it really tests your patience and platforming skills if you're doing the rest of the playthrough with low banana accumulation,trying to keep the amount of lives available to fine a minimum and meanwhile attempting pacifist and actively punishing if you've reached pass the threshhold of what you're allowed to get away with. Let's see i've atleast created 6/7 different ways to play this game based on all the notes i've kept and written so far... lost my last life on the level after Fear Factory... hey i gotta keep my favorite game since childhood interesting somehow

I'm playing Catherine: Full Body and i'm stuck on Clock Tower

Prey (2017)

Changed up my current roster again so that it's not mainly 2d platformers

Pocket Card Jockey,Luigi's Mansion Dark Moon, DKC1,Fire Embiem Shadows of valentia ,streets of rage,Super mario land,Galaga ,Pokemon Yellow and wario land

Just played Pocket Card Jockey for a good hour and a half a while ago... probably one of the more casual games on my 3ds but it's pretty addicting ,did pretty bad on the first 2 races but the 3rd went well

At 7/17/20 09:40 AM, argile wrote:

I see that this game has a upgrade system ,I am checking a walkthrough for a reference of what's considered the medium and lowest I can go for it delivers a more difficult 2nd and 3rd playthrough

Feels like a century since I've made a proper post in here, but I finished up a bunch of games recently.

Prey 2017

Like probably many others I slept on this one at release, thinking it was a cynical reboot of the 2006 game (which I liked well enough). Turns out that's not AT ALL what it is - it's actually Deus Ex meets Alien in a massive art deco space station. It's exactly my kind of shit and immediately became one of my favorite games. It's also primarily a horror game, with survival-horror elements, pushing it even further up my alley.

The title was a publisher decision, the game was originally titled Neuroshock and places itself firmly in the 0451 lineage, and while it doesn't have many NPCs to talk to it might be the single greatest example of the Deus Ex design philosophy when it comes to environment design, every inch of the station is player accessible (including the exterior) and there's almost always several different paths around any given obstacle.

It's clever and interesting enough that I don't want to give anything away, but definitely check this out if you missed it (or didn't realize what it was thanks to the awful title and marketing).

The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners

Probably my current favorite made-for-VR game and might be my all time favorite licensed game by default. This is a survival-horror game built around scavenging, and actually has some immersive sim elements (several interlocking mechanics, open environments with many routes, focus on stealth).

Melee combat is particularly good, and gruesome. Weapons have somewhat realistic weight and you must for eg swing an axe just right to penetrate the skull, then it embeds and you have to yank it back out. Which leads to great moments where you're frantically trying to pull your screwdriver out of one Z's head before the other one closes in, or you might just drop the weapon and try to pull out something else. Small moments like that, or just reloading a gun under pressure are SO good in VR but hard to convey without playing it.

It also obviously has the walking dead zombie rules, so everyone is infected and any human killed rises again as a zombie within a couple minutes even if they haven't been bitten. This makes clearing out human strongholds interesting in ways I've never seen before, as anyone you take down becomes a timed liability for both sides.

Skyrim VR

Skyrim doesn't need any more praise but after nearly 3 years of on-and-off playing and 230 hours logged I've done just about everything, and my save files were starting to come apart at the seams so it was about time anyway. VR is such a perfect fit for this game, massively improved my enjoyment and appreciation of the TES world to the point where if the next game doesn't have VR support at launch I'll probably skip it until add it.

Spider-Man 2018

Actually beat this a few months ago, but returned to get the platinum trophy. Wasn't worth it, there's an ungodly amount of bullshit repetitive tasks to do, started the DLC but it's just more of the same and actually really dampened my enthusiasm for the game and any potential sequels. If they can't come up with enough variety to keep one game interesting then what hope is there for another? I still love the cutscenes and the game features excellent renditions of so many characters, but there's so much monotony between story beats that I ended up lowering the difficulty just to speed through it.

My favorite element is just the city itself, probably one of my favourite open world maps at least aesthetically, I was still impressed with the visuals even after too many hours of it and swinging around didn't get old even when everything else did.

Return of the Obra Dinn

I'm someone who didn't at all get the appeal of Papers Please but this one was way more my thing, it's nice to see the same guy take functionally similar gameplay but turn it into such a drastically different game. Also the visual parallel between old monochrome monitors and old print is absolute genius, the visuals took a bit to get used to but I find them incredible now, in action it really looks like a moving illustration.

Only thing I didn't like was a sort of forced pace. Gameplay consists of finding corpses, rewinding to the moment of death and figuring out what happened. Cause of death is usually obvious, but figuring out the identity of the victim and (where applicable) the murderer is where the big-brain Sherlocking comes in.

My problem is that each time you enter a new memory the game forces you to stay there for about a minute before leaving. I assume this is to force players to really examine the scene so they don't miss, for example, another character in an adjacent room, but for this type of game surely the player is going to take in every detail without the game having to take command. Oddly enough I found this less egregious as it went on, maybe it had just worn me down though.

Anyway, a very unique game executed well, though I don't quite get the sheer praise that's been heaped on it. I've been burned by over-hyped indie games quite a bit but I'm glad I checked this one out.

Starwars Battlefront 2, The Sims 4, ooblets

Let it die, a cool and radically styled game, a Mario inspired game about climbing a tower laden with all sorts of mushrooms each with all sorts of effects. The story and bosses are rather simple and short interactions, but man those difficulty leaps get rough. My favorite weapon is the flamethrower which can shoot balls of fire, much like in Mario's game.

Payday2: Payday 2, Payday 2, with the gun and the money, crime doesnt end in payday 2. The big heist, the big heist, crime doesnt end on payday with the money, the money, the guns, the guns and the money. Get money, get paid

Little Witch Academia: Chamber of Time. Uhhhh this one is about Constanze and her very different sort of machinations along with her budding relationship with Sucy. Its a pretty good story game with meh dungeon crawling thrown in, its a bit of a grind, but its a good anime for sure. Extremely charming.

Nintendo Nightmare lmao.

It's actually kinda fun and has that crappy amateur-ish feel to it that I like for some reason. Somehow it's giving me the motivation to update a 3d game maker game I finished a while ago, though I'm not gonna do that yet because I'm already busy with other projects.

mortal kombat xl

I played Ghost of Tsushima up until I unlocked the second half of the map, then felt the will to live leaving me at the prospect of having to explore another bland, empty open world. Open world is a fucking cancer on game design, games are only ever good in spite of it, not because of it. Will not be finishing it, even though the combat is pretty fun.

It did prompt me to boot up Sekiro again, blitzed through to after the first boss last night. I ALMOST got Genichiro in the prologue but the Mikiri counter muscle memory is too strong and I dodged straight into his thrust. This game is very good and I'm glad I've waiting this long to replay it, feels fresh when the lack of build variety meant I thought I was never going to touch it again after the first time.

Hard disagree, off the top of my head TES, Fallout (basically anything that acts like a large scale immersive sim), GTA are good largely if not primarily because of their open worlds. Though I notice those are all series that predate the huge adoption of Ubisoft-style worlds. I like many of those Ubisoft games they definitely inspired a wave of open worlds in games that didn't need it.

To add to this, I've been thinking the main reason Outer Worlds had no longevity was the lack of proper open world, it was basically open enough to give the impression of freedom but not even close to big enough to set off in one direction and just come across random things for hours like you can in Fallout. All the elements are good but everyone basically played it and then forgot about it.

In that type of game exploring for its own sake and the kind of emergent events from so many variables interacting in an open space have a huge hand in making those games so memorable and still appealing over hundreds of hours.

Half-Life.

...Yes, I know I'm 22 years late.

Even the games I like that you've listed, thinking back on them all my fond memories are of everything other than the open world. New Vegas has amazing quest reactivity and great writing, and wandering from A to B in the desert to get from one to the next is the price you pay to experience them. GTA (the good ones at least) is very funny, but it's the characters that stick in my mind, not eating burgers or driving to the next mission.

Immersive sims are a different beast, there's a big different between an open world in the Deus Ex sense and an Elder Scrolls or Witcher 3.

I just found it too similar to the games it apes from and the story not interesting enough to carry it.

I can't think of a single game where I've enjoyed exploring. It holds absolutely no interest for me. Give me a linear series of all your best shit, don't make me stumble around the woods for hours hoping to trip over it.

WoW & Black ops 1

Playing some Super Mario Bros trying out different Ways to go about It.and to also take my mind off the current events going on atm

But the wandering is the best part! This is probably why I don't think NV is that much better than 3 and 4. The writing is better than 3 and significantly better than 4, but the writing wasn't primarily what I was playing for, and NV is significantly worse for exploration in that the map is segmented and railroads you around the same path every playthough.

On the other hand I have more hours in Fallout 4 than probably the rest of the series combined and there's still chunks of the map I haven't seen.

You didn't spend a dumb number of hours causing meaningless havoc in GTA as a kid?

Elder Scrolls post-Morrowind is, imo, clearly an immersive sim. That might seem like a hot take but all the same elements are there only in a world that trades some depth for breadth, afaik it was Warren Spector himself who coined the metaphor of Skyrim being an ocean wide and an ankle deep in comparison to his own games.

Though it's a fair comparison and he didn't mean it to be insulting it's still selling Skyrim short though, it objectively has more mechanical depth than most games, and for me the defining feature of an immersive sim is to have enough mechanics available in a reactive world so that any two players will intuitively try different methods for different situations and still succeed.