What VIDEO GAME(s) have you been playing?

Finished Horizon: Zero Dawn. I picked it up in 2018 and dropped it after only a few hours because I couldn't get into its weird world. For some reason I gave it another try and this time it clicked. I ended up really enjoying it.

It had a neat story but it loads most of it in the final quarter with a lot of infodumps. It very much should have been spread out more. And it doesn't help itself that it presents a global catastrophe where every aspect of it took place within a very small area.

Biggest complaint is the mushiness of the controls. A lot of context-sensitive controls that just plain don't work right, causing a lot of frustration. Also sometimes you can do things and sometimes you can't and it's never clear when or why.

I liked that I didn't have to learn much. You are told how combat works at the beginning of the game and that's how it works; you just get better stuff later on that makes the same attacks hit harder. See below for contrast.

My PS5 came with Horizon: Forbidden West which, at the time, I didn't care about, but now I will grab it and play it eventually.

I then moved on to Spider-Man: Miles Morales. I've only played a tiny bit of it so far. I enjoyed the original SM but cranked the combat down on it and ignored most of the suit and gadget stuff. As I implied above, I have no head for finessing combos. Never did and especially don't now. If an upgrade gives me some new kind of attack I will never remember it and never use it. I literally cannot tell you on demand which button is circle and which is triangle without looking and if your game needs me to know this in a flash I can't play it.

In SM, with the combat down, the basic moves allowed me to take care of the bad guys while still being able to do some pretty cool stuff. I've only played MM for about an hour and already they're trying to give me all these special moves and shit that I'll never keep track of. So that'll probably get nerfed. Sucks being old.

I've gotten hooked into Spiritfarer on the Switch. It's a lovely little game about ferrying people to the afterlife on a boat that is full of buildings, like a little city. You have to cook, fish, farm, and do all sorts of handywork. It's very relaxing. As a huge fan of Stardew Valley, I'd say this one is not quite as good for me because it's on rails and not just a farm sim. Maybe the story will make it better as it plays out.

I’ve regularly been playing Rumbleverse and mostly enjoying it. It’s free to play and I bought the battle pass when it came out. Doing the daily and weekly goals to go up levels and earn cosmetics has its hooks in me deep. However, in thinking about how once this season ends, there will just be another one, I think I actually hate it. I know it’s the whole point of these games, but I don’t want to be on an endless treadmill, so I don’t think I’ll buy the next battle pass. And honestly, I’m not entirely sure if it will hold my interest consistently past the next month or so anyway.

I do hate that all of these service games expect you to play JUST their game, like they are the only thing worth playing in the universe. It's arrogant and ridiculous.

Thief Gold - Last year I made it fairly deep into Deus Ex, and I've always been really fascinated by the immersive sim heritage. So Thief caught my fancy. I'm on Mission 7 and enjoying it pretty well, though I've taken a break for a couple days now because it's the sort of game that races through my head when I'm not playing. It's got its fair share of junk about it, but it really does work for me, and I'm having lots of fun with it.

Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars - I started a little "adventure game book club" on Discord, which basically amounts to a friend and me talking about the process of playing a different game now and then. He picked this one and I'm really enjoying it. I'm roughly halfway through and I think it's one of the best titles I've played in the genre, maybe up there with the first Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle. I've always wanted a Tintin adventure game in the mid-90s style, and this is probably as close as I'll get.

Bioshock - I bought the collection on my Switch so I'm revisiting these games. It's kind of passe to praise these games now but I still really like them all.

Cyberpunk 2077 - watching Cyberpunk: Edgerunners made me break it back out. Some changes I think I'm seeing are:

- Removed the ability to buy drinks, disassemble the drinks into parts, and sell the parts for profit.
- More billboards in town.
- Nerfed a few weapons, specifically Widow Maker.

What didn't change: those cars still drive like crap.

I'm... dubious about the claims of Overwatch 2 being besieged by a DDoS attack. It seems like an easy PR out for underpreparing your server provisioning, but I'm an IT cynic, so /shrug.

When I've managed to get in, it's mostly played fine. I'm actually acclimating to the concept of a solo tank since most recent games in the OG OW have devolved to dependence on the skill level of the main tank and the healers.

Video by the creator about clearing Trials of Death. Took him 7 years and over 4000 hours.

Yesterday, I finally made the blessed 1k achievement benchmark in Payday 2. 2,300 hours. Worth every minute. Unlocked armor and weapon skins, and the Great Immortal mask, which looks awesome. Just in time for Halloween. Out of 1,302 achievements in the game, there's only 300 left for me to do, but I don't think I'll finish them, as they are of the Death Wish, Death Sentence, Death Sentence-One Down variety. I'm slowly warming up to Death Wish difficulty, but I absolutely despise Death Sentence and DSOD, because it makes it overly hard and beyond not fun.

I DID finish all the DW,DS, DSOD for the Kobayashi Maru of the game-Safe House Nightmare. The heist just sucks at harder difficulties, and I wasn't looking forward to doing the other difficulties. However, I Captain Kirk'ed it. There's a turret exploit. In one area of the safe house, there's a sofa by a wall. Put the turret behind the sofa, and then the Dozers and Cloakers congregate there, trying to destroy it but can't. Took me a handful of tries, but I pulled it off.

I also unlocked all the bank heist achievements, by going full genocidal. Played solo with bots. Bought spy cams for locations of patrolling guards. Locate and neutralize camera room. Then wait for the guards to go outside, or to blind spots where I kill them with ease. Then, drop an ECM, kill the tellers (so they don't hit the alarm) and then everyone in the lobby, finishing off any pedestrians that come to close and see the carnage. Ugly? Damn straight. But, it got the job done.

I finished Miles Morales. It was okay, and I admit I skipped a lot of side stuff to just get it done. The storyline was a lot of dumb superhero nonsense that took place in a ridiculous time frame, with a bunch of teenagers casually slinging around absolutely world changing technology they just came up with in an effort to stop a guy from deploying different world-changing technology. It was of course capped off with a long, tedious fight in which all the cool moves and abilities you have picked up are of course taken away because what you really wanted to do was an endless slugfest fight of attrition, not actually be Spider-Man.

I just don't care about superhero shit anymore. It all just bounces off me at best and irritates me at worst (I bought this game a couple years ago when I was slightly more amenable to Marvel shit.) At least it didn't do multiverse bullshit and kept the action more or less at street level.

Moved on to Tunic, which I was hesitating on because everyone who talks about it can only compare it to Zelda and I've never played a Zelda game, so I don't have that nostalgia fueling it. But enough people eventually assured me it stands on its own (kids, this is why you don't "review" something just by comparing it to other things.)

I'm really enjoying the exploration aspects but, and I know I sound like a broken record, the combat is un-fun. We've decided that everything now has to be at least Souls-aspirational so it's just a lot of bullshit that one-shots you over and over until you find the only move that works against it, which takes off one HP, so you get to do this for hours. I'm exaggerating, but that's how it feels to me. Thankfully they let you dial that shit down, which I'll do, but it's infuriating to me that this is now the default. Sucks to get old I guess.

I finished Broken Sword. I really enjoyed it, it's probably one of the best adventure games for people new to the genre.

Trying to get back into Stellaris, because I guess we're at that point in the cycle of me really wanting to love Paradox grand strategy games.

Downloaded Marvel Snap yesterday for the phone and played for a couple hours. One of those rare games that is so simple it might be brilliant, like when I played Codenames the first week.

The core gameplay is basically Smash Up, vying for three areas, with a few key wrinkles. Cards have a cost, and the energy you have to play cards goes up by 1 each turn, a la Hearthstone. There is a limit of 4 cards per side location. The locations have a wide variety of effects, and are revealed one per each of the first three turns. Lastly, and this is important: cards are selected simultaneously and location-blind. So not only is gameplay fast and without interruption, but it leads to great mind games. Win 2/3 locations and you win.

Also, you can “snap” and double down on a game, or retreat early if things look bad. I’ve so far seen very few retreats.

Cyberpunk 2077 - I've now played the story missions up to the point where I'm at the final story mission (Nocturne OP55N1), but will do a bunch more side jobs just for laughs. I'm killing everyone with Overheat, unless I feel like sniping them from a distance. This is the third time I'll have finished, and it hasn't changed a whole lot. Like I said a little while back, the cars still suck.

I think I've finally gotten to the point in Deathloop where I can complete the game. You end up playing through levels / times of day numerous times to uncover bits of information each time, and to gain power that you can keep permanently. In order to break the loop, you have to murder 7 visionaries in the same day, and doing that requires a lot of manipulation on your part in order to get them where (and when) you want them to be.

The game is fascinating, it's extremely well done, and more people should play it. It's not as good as Prey, but you can tell the same studio made it.

It's been some time since a video game really caught my interest, but Warhammer 40K Chaos Gate Daemonhunters has been something I look forward to at the end of a long day. It's an XCOM style game that features much cooler units and it seems to go heavy on having destructible objects on the map. You can have a space marine tackle a huge concrete pillar that then topples on the enemy. You can position a grenade so that the enemy is sent over a cliff to their demise. You can get an ammunition box to explode and send your enemy into the overwatch firing arc of a friendly unit.
It's taken me a long time to understand the difference between a Justicar, Purgator, and an Interceptor as the 40K terminology doesn't come naturally to me, but I'm glad I've put in the effort.