Hello everybody. Hope you all have had a good week and weekend. This week I’ve continued my Elden Ring Seamless co op mod playthrough with my brother, and finished my OG Rome Total War campaign as the Scipii with conquering the entire map. I have put 1000s of hours in RTW since I was a kid, but while taking stock near the end of my campaign I noticed I had a governor in Spain that was 95 years old, which to my memory is the oldest character I’ve ever seen. Unfortunately he died right before I conquered the final region.
Anyway, hope you all have been doing well. Happy Gaming
SPIRAL KNIGHTS IS BACK BABY!!! EVERYONE GET IN THE SPIRAL AND INTO THAT ARCADE!!!
Anyone have any recommendations for mobile games? Burnt out on Balatro, would rather not slough aimlessly through the microtransactions/ad-slop games to find something decent. Don’t mind shelling out some money to buy the game if it means avoiding that.
If you want more roguelikes, Slay The Spire is also available on mobile
Got a new thinkpad so I’ve been testing out some retro windows titles, like arma 2, lost planet, ffxi (all demos and benchmarks so far) gonna load up Diablo 1 shareware today on devilutionx.
Lost Planet 2 also has a benchmark and may be playable. It’s my favorite in the series.
If you have any emulation-related questions feel free to hit me up ideally through replies here in case it also could help someone else
Subnatica below zero. Just finished FF16 and was pleasently surprised by it. It was nice to play a true to form final fantasy game again, though while the combat was fun I do miss the classic open world turned based combat.
Playing through the dishonored series, currently finishing Knife of Dunwall and then on to the Brigmore Witches. Very solid game and honestly love playing the DLC since I never tried that. Trying out some new demos on steam as well, Burn-9 seems interesting you play as the operator for a Solid Snake style figure in a mission that’s gone FUBAR. It’s by the same peeps that did Citizen Sleeper so the writing seems to be good/going somewhere
Dishonored series is fucking P E A K
It really is, it’s got an art direction that’s timeless and the vibes of gritty gloomy streets are just immaculate. Looking forward to Dishonored 2 once I’m done with the first.
Oh yeah the level design is WILD shit in the second game . The first game is almost grounded by comparison. Also the artstyle really helps the game feel timeless
Warframe has its hooks in me, man.
I’m thoroughly impressed by the balance of power fantasy gameplay, grimbright world building, and just enough spreadsheet simulator to scratch my autism. Even rank and file daily quests feel satisfying and useful. Do rebind crouch to Caps Lock, though. Your pinky may fall off otherwise.
Hell yeag, more Tennos here! The sheer amount of content the game has right now is truly impressive.
I have it on E with melee attack switched to mouse 4, and a dedicated roll button on left alt. My pinky still gets tired holding shift to occasionally lol.
2 more days till the new frames!
007, did play it to the first mission but it is not for me. Now playing Gothic remake, got cheeky at the first gate and got my ass handed to me swiftly. Another go tonight.
After finishing first light i went on a 007 binge and completed a bunch of games in the series but burned out half way through 007 goldeneye reloaded
I’m playing Cairn and it’s a really unique and memorable experience of a game, and it’s also about climbing that I do irl at climbing gyms so it’s really cool for me.
I also finally don’t suck ass at Deadlock and most of my games these days are going pretty good stats wise
I set up Moonlight/Sunshine on my Switch and PC. Tested it out briefly and it seems to work all right with low input lag. There’s a fork of Moonlight in Switch that runs way better than the old version. Excited to be able to play chill narrative games and stuff on a TV in another room without having to do anything complicated. Didn’t even turn on overclocking for it yet for presumably better performance.
Can you link the Moonlight fork for the Switch? I did the same setup at the start of the year but the input lag was very noticiable, even with overclock, I was pretty bummed out by it, specially since I didn’t want to reinstall Android on it because it is a pretty jank experience on the Switch.
https://github.com/XITRIX/Moonlight-Switch It’s also on the Homebrew App store or whatever it’s called.
And then Installed the latest nightly build of Sunshine.
The TV is a 768/720p plasma so maybe I can get away rendering games at a lower resolution too. Not sure if there’s any effective super sampling happening here when they’re rendering at 1080p on the PC and sent to a 720 screen.
Finished Silent Hill Origins this week, which was surprisingly decent although still flawed. Preferred it to SHf anyway. It felt like a clunky pastiche but at least they were trying to copy something great and succeeded some of the time (enemy designs, location designs, general atmosphere). There’s an enemy in a mental hospital/sanitarium that’s like a floating rusty neck brace/cage and then a twisted humanoid shadow extending from it but it’s not rendered the same as usual shadows are and it definitely sparks the same primitive mental associations SH games would do. It reminded me of what a person in the night illuminated by headlights might look like maybe Travis hit and killed someone previously or worries about it as a truck driver, but it also looks like a bird cage because the residents at the facility feel trapped and invisible. Stuff like that really appeals to me. Like, I saw someone mention a personal theory in SH2 about how the boss relating to Angela has these pistons in the walls that also looks like cigarette rolling devices with the cylindrical filter going in and out of the device at the end and maybe Angela’s dad rolled his own cigarettes and could tie into the flames she sees - you also get a lighter as a puzzle item in this location - (on top of the more likely interpretation of them being SA and arson representations) and it reminds how good that style of psychological horror is. Probably why it works for so many internationally since the building blocks it works with are so primitive and near-universal.
shadows of colossus, i never finished it back in the day so i’m just going for a fresh start run through. i like the lack of mook bashing and the focus being on these singular puzzle fights, nice to play with my mind half focused on other stuff.
Love SOTC
I’ve started playing Of Ash and Steel, a Gothic inspired game released last Fall. It was buggy as hell on release, but they’ve made some patches and I want to see if it at least doesn’t fall apart at the seams.
Also still playing Opus Magnum. The machines are mesmerizing to look at.
Opus Magnum machines
Opus Magnum looks really neat. I’m planning for it to be my second Zachtronics game, after I get around to finishing Shenzhen I/O
I never thought to use the useless pieces in Opus Magnum that way to map out the collision of the element pieces. I gotta’ play that DLC that released for it but it’s been so long.
No Man’s Sky, Gotta catch 'em all
Waiting for Stellaris Nomads tomorrow.
is that tomorrow? fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck gotta wait a couple weeks anyway for all my mods to update
Werewolf: The Apocalypse - Earthblood : Solid buy if you get it for $5 or less. I knew going in that it was supposed to be mediocre, but I what I didn’t know was it’s relation to the Vampire: The Masquerade series, so that was a fun rabbit-hole to explore.
The gameplay is very sloppy but mostly decent fun, split between very bland stealth segments and gigantic hulking werewolf action segments that kind of remind me of the combat in games like Prototype, if people remember that game (you’re a super-hero / bio-horror in an open-world setting).
The premise of the story is great, in that you’re a band of werewolf eco-terrorists who … do werewolf eco-terrorism. The game was either unwilling or unable to fully actualize this vision in the actual plot. Might have been publisher squeamishness, might have been EU arts funding stipulation.
Most of the other characters you have relationships with have models that look multiple console-generations older than the protagonist (who to the game’s credit looks pretty good in human and werewolf forms), and this makes some of the attempts at emotional cut-scenes very funny. One of the main allies you have looks like she was purchased from the Unity asset store and they forgot to add anything to her model.
Environments look great though, shout-out to the environmental artist. The first area is my favorite: pacific northwestern forest at night with a full moon looking gorgeous, realistically rendered but with some stylization in its presentation to give it a more mystical vibe, but then inter-cut with scenes of a devastating logging operation, oil-rigs visible off the coast, hastily build roads carving through to facilitate the continued extraction.
It’s alright.
vtm/werewolf/mages are some of the most fun ttrpg’s to play with people you know and trust and perhaps the worst to play with randos in all of gaming. i did like earthblood well enough though, i agree with the plot compromises and gameplay clunk but like you say it was a decent romp for what it is, the background lore is a lot of fun, and the game world is pretty.
