What VIDEO GAME(s) have you been playing?

Played a small amount of The Quarry this weekend. Anyone who has played one of the earlier titles (Man of Medan, Little Hope, etc.) knows what to expect. This one has a Friday the 13th style setup, and while I am not far in enough to know what exactly is going on, I do know that Lance Henriksen appears to be a crazy man who has covered himself in blood and is roving around the woods.

Anyway, one of the characters was watching some security monitors, and suddenly Henriksen appears in the monitor and smashes the camera. The character says "It's probably nothing." and walks off! I have to believe this ridiculous dialog is an homage as opposed to just bad writing. I hope.

Did a reset on my PC to try and combat a minor freezing problem, which didn't end up working. Oh well. Now my PC desktop is very spartan, a handful of icons and two games: Payday 2 and Bigfoot. I'm still the Brother of Mercy in PD2, helping noobs play the game and survive. In one heist we were playing, the new player said he was trying to unlock a particular achievement (NOT TODAY: Kill a kicking Cloaker with the GL40). He said that the best time to kill the Cloaker was at the end of the heist where's there a lot of terrain that would for the unit to jump over, thereby giving him a chance to unlock the achievement. I told him that we'll hang out at the end and give him a chance to unlock it, as I didn't have anything to do.

That was easier said than done, we cook the meth, and escape in our getaway vehicle.... Which promptly crashes and we have to wait for evac. I joked to the other guy and said, "Watch, the street gang's gonna betray us on the next day." Boom.... They betrayed us, they didn't even pull Machiavellian crap like waiting for us to go the apartment before ambushing us. We walked up to the truck and they instantly pulled out their guns. Much shooting later, we then arrived at the overpass to finish the last part of the heist.

We had another player join us then and after I explained what was going on, he agreed to help. Now comes the painful part. I was running bots on my crew. the only remaining bot on the crew was Bonnie, and she was armed with a .50 sniper rifle. I hope you're beginning to see the problem.

Every SINGLE time the new guy was setting the Cloaker up to be thumped, the inevitable would happen. BANG! Cloaker dropped and the bot triumphantly saying they killed the Cloaker. I kept yelling at the bot to follow me and I kept trying to put her in a position where she wouldn't snipe the guy's kills but nothing worked. Eventually, the guy said to pack it in and we agreed.


I finally fixed the mouse pointer problem in Bigfoot on my own, and then set about hunting the homicidal furry. The game was nice to me and I successfully found the code for the gun safe in the firetower and got the automatic rifle. I then proceeded to cheese the big guy off by laying traps around the area baited with meat, and the idiot would go to it and then get hurt. When he would make his way to the tower, I set up a propane tank near a corner where he would come around. He turns the corner, BLAM, he's on fire. While he's dazed, I lit him up with the rifle. Then when he approached me, I escaped by jumping on the nearby zip line and land a good distance away. When he approached again, I'd pop him with the flare gun and daze him. Wash rinse repeat.

Eventually that trick stopped working as he can destroy the zip line posts. So, I had to move my griefer ass to ANOTHER zip line and start anew. And, of course, it worked like a charm. I only had to do it once or twice. Now, when the monster takes too much damage in an encounter, he'll try to flee. He was already hurting because I kept emptying the shotgun into him. When he turned to run, I aimed at his head and fired. I FINALLY got to see the scene of that asshat falling to his knees and slumping to the ground. Best feeling in the world.

If you like Resident Evil and you have Game Pass, you should check out Signalis. It is basically a PS1-era graphics sci-fi RE.

I'm enjoying it quite a bit.

Played some Warhammer 40,000 Darktide, which is a co-op shooter from the makers of Vermintide. I did not care for Vermintide, but Darktide is a lot of fun. Partly because of my liking 40k much more than the fantasy version.

My main complaint so far is that missions are generally about 30 minutes long, and they would be better served by being 20 minutes long.

I noticed this too, hotseat, when watching streamers play the game. Missions are too long!

I really want to try Marvel Midnight Sun or whatever it's called, looks like a really fun tactics/card game thing... Whenever it comes out on the PS4 I'll probably grab it. Not really sold on the Persona esque relationship building with Marvel characters, but it at least sounds weird to go fishing with Blade or whatever.

Yeah, sounds like that's a HUGE part of the game. Mass effect style walk around the home base chatting people up stuff.

Ugh. Why do games have to do this? I tried to like Fire Emblem Three Houses and I just can’t.

I don't mind it really, I just wouldn't want to be surprised by it. I liked Mass Effect pretty well.

hotseatgames wrote: Played some Warhammer 40,000 Darktide, which is a co-op shooter from the makers of Vermintide. I did not care for Vermintide, but Darktide is a lot of fun. Partly because of my liking 40k much more than the fantasy version.

My main complaint so far is that missions are generally about 30 minutes long, and they would be better served by being 20 minutes long.

If they made the matches 20 minutes I'd spend as much time in load screens as I would on the mission.

I tried it, played four missions, and felt no character progression at all. I guess I'm not the target audience for it. Played the veteran and spent half of every mission with the shovel out swatting at swarms.

Yeah I think the Midnight Suns relationship building stuff is actually pretty good if your expectations aren't high.

I really was underwhelmed by it initially, but the variety of situations and different things you can do around the abbey made it relatively interesting. I ended up really enjoying after several hours.

The card battling of course is the main reason to play.

www.polygon.com/reviews/23484477/marvels...pc-ps5-xbox-series-x

Here's Charlest's polygon review for context

Trying to focus on bigger games. Completed Far Cry 5 after decided it was completely rubbish. Well, re-playing it have made me change my mind. Just make sure to get a Helicopter as soon as possible.

Grabbed Assassin's Creed: Valhalla on the sale. Loving it. Raid mechanics is fun, the system is very player friendly (re-spec at anytime), scenery is gorgeous, I like Vikings, and the characters are likeable. Just need to see if they will hold my attention span for the wholly expected super-stretched gameplay content.

I really hated far cry 5. The story was so incredibly bad and off putting that it just ruined the entire game. The gameplay was Fine (ie exactly like every other FC game) but fine wasn't nearly enough to get past the horrible story shit. And I enjoyed FC3 and 4 quite a bit, so it's not like my bar is particularly high for this kind of thing

We’ve been obsessed with Valheim for the past week. The open world exploration, and the freedom to grow a character without constant combat really keep me hooked. Of course I have no idea what I’m talking about and nothing really to compare it to. For context, Pac-Man came out while I was in college, and prior to this I’d played only a dozen or two hours of video games in my life. My wife is of course vastly more capable than I am at this, and her character is much more capable than mine and has developed his world much more than mine in preparation for the first boss fight.

There’s definitely a story, but I’m really enjoying not being forced into a particular path, enjoying the puzzle of learning how the world works, and enjoying running a character that has to live and grow by hunting, building, eating, sleeping, etc in a tiny reflection of life. Maybe it’s because it’s new to me, but Valheim is good fun.