What VIDEO GAME(s) have you been playing?

DEFINITELY nothing wrong about old games, barring some quality of life improvements like the ability to save, or at least pause, anywhere because the days of being able to ignore mom telling me to take out the trash are loooooong gone and my damned snot nosed kids are always playing MMO games with no pausing or saving and GOD FORBID they gotta stop gorilla tag for 2 seconds to actually eat and pee!

I'm finding that the overly rich detail in modern games is distracting. I'm playing Starfield and Baldur's Gate 3 and GOOD GRIEF what poor bastard (or team of bastards) had to fill all these maps with random shit? I can't see enemies through all the grass, pipes, desks, and general ground clutter all around. There was a certain tactical charm to those grid based SSI rpgs and the "right angle only" low res textured Wolfenstein (ok, ok, I'll go up to Quake with mouse look!) that helped me to focus on the game play and less about eye strain squinting at a giant highly detailed bush to find the bad guy.

The retro pixelated games in vogue now are refreshing. We get clean simple graphics with modern gameplay conveniences.

Halo MCC highlighted this. I think it's 1 & 2 where they remastered them, and let you switch back and a forth at the press of a button.

and it's legitimately easier to play with the "old" graphics. The new ones are pretty, sure....but there's so much glare and the colors are relatively muted or everything kind of blurs together, it can be harder to pick out enemies from the background.



Starfield is weird...It's not worth picking everything up. But i feel like everything in fallout or skyrim was able to be picked up. In Starfield it's like they chose to make half of the objects interactive, but only a third of those are worthwhile to interact with.

Mortal Kombat update: Still making my way through the story. It may be the best one they have ever done. All of the voice actors were killing it.... and then in comes Megan Fox. She plays Nitara, the demon. Her voice "acting" is fucking awful. It's like she is in a different game than everyone else.

Johnny Cage is fantastic, and I was cheering when my boy Quan Chi showed up. Yes he is a buffoon, but I love him.

Finished story mode for Mortal Kombat 1, and am ready to declare it the best story mode they have ever done. If you have been a long time fan, particularly of the Deadly Alliance era, you absolutely need to play it, the last chapter is fucking wild. There is also a reason to replay the final chapter, which I will definitely be doing.

Currently playing A LOT of Project: Zomboid. Minecraft meets the Walking Dead. The learning curve for me was high, as was killing every zombie I saw. Once I learned how they operate, as well the crafting menus, I just got sucked into it. I get a sense of accomplishment when I fix up a car to go resource gathering/zombie purging. I feel safer when I build wooden walls and barricade safe houses and stockpile food. I laugh when I make disgusting stir fry, that my character somehow enjoys. Told one concoction to my wife, (Mutton, beef jerky, and tomato sauce), and she made a face and asked, "How are you still alive?"

I have yet to farm anything, but I don't really see the point. I'm literally the last man on Earth, power is still on. I have generators when that fails, and there's a SHIT ton of canned goods all over the place. I can also trap game and forage for berries and vegetables. I'll be fine. If the town runs out, I'll drive to another town and start the process over.

I did pull a Rick Grimes. Got too big for my britches, drove to Louisville, during the dead of winter. Only to find out, they had the entire city FENCED OFF, and the access points were full of zombies. I tried circumnavigating the fence, or even find shelter, and found that they burned down any structure outside of the fence. I got attacked, bit, and just let the character die. The only thing I'm mad at is the character found a welder's mask, which I desperately need. So his dead ass is meandering about outside of Louisville.

I may very well go back and kill his ass just to get it.

I played that for a bit years ago, but could never get to that fun equilibrium point where I could ask myself "ok, what do you want to do now?" from a position of marginal safety.

Gary Sax wrote: I played that for a bit years ago, but could never get to that fun equilibrium point where I could ask myself "ok, what do you want to do now?" from a position of marginal safety.

I understand that. That's why I set up a custom sandbox to play in. Since there's no achievements to go for, I just set it that once the zombies are dead, they do not respawn. I did make the helicopter show up more than once, and have other screw you factors (gunfire, screaming) to keep it fresh. I also set the power to go out in 0-5 years. The longest one character was two months, and that was a long time ago. My current character is getting to beat that bench mark.

Even without a respawn, there's a ton of zombies around. At this point, I don't think I'll ever get into Louisville. Let the dead have that place.

Rliyen wrote:

Gary Sax wrote: I played that for a bit years ago, but could never get to that fun equilibrium point where I could ask myself "ok, what do you want to do now?" from a position of marginal safety.

I understand that. That's why I set up a custom sandbox to play in. Since there's no achievements to go for, I just set it that once the zombies are dead, they do not respawn. I did make the helicopter show up more than once, and have other screw you factors (gunfire, screaming) to keep it fresh. I also set the power to go out in 0-5 years. The longest one character was two months, and that was a long time ago. My current character is getting to beat that bench mark.

Even without a respawn, there's a ton of zombies around. At this point, I don't think I'll ever get into Louisville. Let the dead have that place.

There's a reason why it always says at the beginning "This is How You Died". My Burglar character joined the Walking Dead. I got too cocky and and zombie bit me. Had to drive from the podunk town where I was all the way back to Riverside, so I could leave all his belongings in my safe house. After dropping everything, I walked outside, grabbed the clothes off a dead walker, and then doused myself in steak sauce. The zombies took a while nibbling on me before I dropped. My new character has not found my old one as of yet, but he's dressed fairly wildly (Nothing but a choker, skirt and tennis shoes). So, I come across him in Riverside, I'll be sure to drop him.

I also found a welding mask! YAY!

IN my two days off last week, I didn't play nearly as much of Payday 3 as I thought I would. Reason being, unlike Payday 2, there is no peer to peer. It's their servers only, which was already hitting capacity on the 18th during the pre-launch play. I could have played during that time, but I wanted to let them fix that problem. Well, it's not in great shape. Add to that, there is no single player game. In order to play by yourself, you have to request an Invite Only server, and then wait for one to open up, which can take up to 3 minutes.

Don't get me wrong, it's fucking amazing, but the newness needs to wear off and they need to add more server capacity before I'll start playing it regularly.

In the meantime, I've just been helping new players out in Payday 2 and helping one of my friends gain achievements so he can unlock his Mayhem level mask. Best run we had, which was also tense as Hell, was Murky Station on DSOD. We worked like an absolute unit, with some minor hiccups along the way. However, we did it in one try. We also had some stupid fun with Mountain Master heist, wherein there's an achievement called Crouching Bomber, Hidden Flamer. Requirement was each crew member wearing a different variation of the Dragon Bomber outfit and killing Yufu Wang with flamethrowers only.

We did it under 12 minutes, we speed rushed that thing. It was great.

In an extremely surprising turn of events, the demo for Robocop Rogue City is fucking incredible. If you have a PC that has some heft to it, get it.

Picked up Spellmasons on Steam. It's a rogue-like of sorts in which you play a wizard who randomly acquires spells which you then use to creatively dispatch your foes. You can play co-op, which is a blast. You really have to maximize your mana usage each turn, and once you acquire a few spells it can get pretty interesting. For example:

A giant boss is coming your way, he will definitely one-shot you. But you can cast Debilitate, which causes him to take 200% damage. You chose the Archer wizard, who gets to cast Arrow for the same cost all the time (each time you cast a spell within the same round, the cost normally goes up). You proceed to obliterate him with arrows like you are Hawk the Slayer. Cool stuff!

Played a surprising amount of Payday 3 this past weekend. The interval for invite only servers is down to 45 seconds on average. I've finished up the main storyline (i.e. all the heists), and now waiting for them to release more, which probably won't occur until early next year. I enjoy the fact that you can do more without masking up immediately and that's nice. Gone are the body bags, so you really need to find a good spot to hide dead bodies.

The game is essentially PDTH 2.0. I've read a lot of the negative reviews on it and people not liking the armor mechanic, since it's fundamentally different from PD2. I actually like it. Call me a masochist, but I like the concept of armor being ablative and a finite resource. Drives home the concept that COVER IS YOUR FRIEND and to have your head on a swivel. It's a learning curve, but I got used to it.

One thing I'm not too happy with right now is the weapon selection. In PD2, you had a selection of weaponry that would rival a 3rd World warlord's armory, but currently it's down to a small section in PD3. Gone are the GLs, Rocket Launchers, and the like. They've reserved those to what are called Overkill Weapons, a special drop when you kill enough LEOs and it gets air dropped for you to collect. It's limited use power up so to speak. Currently, they only have the Piglet grenade launcher and a bullpup sniper rifle, which is Infamy level locked. Between the two, I prefer the rifle, as the GL is wholly underwhelming to use. Takes an average of two grenades to kill LEO, unless you hit them directly with it.

Another thing that's disappointing is the weapon modification system. Again, various mods are LEVEL locked by use of the weapon. So, in order to unlock the various mods, you have to use that particular weapon during heists. It's annoying that I have to use a CAR-4, grind it to double digits, just to unlock a speed pull magazine or silencer. The PD2 take on mods was way better.

In fact, I'm just not a fan of their overuse of level locking in the game in general. Want a different weapon? Get to x Infamy level. Want different masks? Same. Want to gain Infamy, grind challenges. Sorry, but I'm going to hate grind a challenge when I have to do it x number of times to get a good IP payout. It's not fun, it's a chore.

Aside from those nitpicks, I really like it.

I also picked up F.E.A.R. franchise in a bundle sale on Sunday on Steam. Even with it being made in 2005, it looks pretty good. Gives me the HL meets X-Files vibe.

First FEAR is awesome. Second one eh... third is pretty non-stop action if I recall.

It follows the HL playbook pretty well. One of the things I found funny at the time was how destructible everything is. It might have been a selling point, but when I see chunks of concrete missing from the wall the size of 20mm shells, I chuckle.

Playing Inscryption, but the goddamn Angler boss (the second boss) has beaten me so many times, I'm losing interest. His bullshit tactics are decidedly unfun.

Edit - finally beat him with an overpowered Death card that could fly.

Edit again - Wow.... had a great run and actually beat the game... and what came after was truly surprising. I won't spoil it here, but if you get a chance to grab this on sale, there is more than meets the eye to it.

Between grinding challenges of Payday 3, my friend and I played a bit of Bigfoot and Horror Legends.

The more I play PD3, the more I think it will grow well once they start putting out as much content that they did for PD2. It's got promise, and I'll patiently await for the new stuff as soon as it comes down. Found out that my friend, AJ, uninstalled the game, saying that PD2 is much better. He's not wrong, but I pointed out to him that PD2 only had 11 heists in the beginning, and the game needs time to grow.

After that discussion, we played Bigfoot. The devs updated it to Unreal Engine, which was great, but it made the game. Not. Entirely. Stable. At one point during the game, AJ's game froze and he couldn't move or do anything. I was about to call it, but Bigfoot came out and attacked him. Suddenly, he was able to move again and we continued.

Didn't matter in the end. We were trying the "Find the Ebidence and Bail" strategy in Redwood Park. We found the four bodies, and the footy prints. We were just missing a &^(!*!@ scratch mark on a tree. IS THAT TOO MUCH TO ASK FOR? Bigfoot dogged us pretty badly, and we both got bodied by wolves. Wolves are assholes.

To make matters worse, we only found 7 health kits. AJ was killed first, leaving me alone with like 35 health, and BF with over 1,000. Resigning myself to my fate, I hid in a lodge and hoped he wouldn't find me.

He found me. I shot him a few times with the sniper rifle until he floored me. Then did the Hulk n' Loki dance.

I died. We both said, "Fuck Bigfoot."

Then, we played Horror Legends, a labor of love by a one man dev, who loved 80s horror movies and DbD. It's actually fun, but not so much when you're playing with 2 people. Unlike BF, there are no AI Monsters, just Cast Member bots, which are actually kind of competent but still not a match for an actual player.

We played a few games, the first one to let him figure out the controls, the others, we started to try to actively kill each other. My favorite Legend is the Werewolf. When I was younger, I had such a horrified fascination with them. They scared me, yet I found them neat. The finishing move by the Werewolf was about akin to the Dog Soldiers beginning when the campers are playing tug of war with the(unseen) wuf wufs. Then, the massive infliction of damage.

I'll see if I can get my son play Horror Legends with us, so it's a bit more fair.