This week I’ve done pretty much nothing, I’m in between games right now and I’m not sure what I’m going to play next.
What are you guys playing?
Project Button Masher

I teach myself music composition by imitating the style of various videogame soundtracks. How did it turn out? Listen for yourself.
How I Plan To Rule This Dumb Industry

Here is how I'd conquer the game-publishing business. (Hint: NOT by copying EA, 2K, Activision, Take-Two, or Ubisoft.)
Playstation 3

What was the problem with the Playstation 3 hardware and why did Sony build it that way?
The Best of 2018

I called 2018 "The Year of Good News". Here is a list of the games I thought were interesting or worth talking about that year.
id Software Coding Style

When the source code for Doom 3 was released, we got a look at some of the style conventions used by the developers. Here I analyze this style and explain what it all means.
Finished Last Train Home. Story gets better later, but game still holds up on train management bits. Final mission was a bit dissapointingly easy.
Started Dominions 6. Minute changes from 5, but imo holds well enough to warrant buying.
Dominions. Now that is a name that I have not heard in a long time …
I think I briefly played the first one on a recommendation from someone in a newsgroup at the time. I lost track of it. The idea still sounds interesting and I’ll have to try to remember it for the future at some point.
It’s another series where I’m more in love with the concept than with the execution. I really like reading about the things you can do in these games but I bounced off the high level of entry and for me the gameplay does not live up to the flavourful concept.
Finished Ori and the Will of the Wisps. The gameplay was a lot of fun, even if it was a bit more generic (Hollow Knight inspired, I assume) than the first Ori, but some of their story choices annoyed me. The ending took a pretty lame swerve and the awesome Owl friend
is just a macguffin who is with you and conscious for like 5 minutes of the whole game.I finished Lies of P, which I stopped playing a while ago pretty close to the end of the game for no particular reason. Unfortunately I picked an option at the end of the game which skipped the final boss completely, and with no way to go back and no desire to play the whole game all over again that means I won’t get to see it. Ah well. It was a quite good souls game, at least.
And I just started playing Pseudoregalia, which is a 3D metroidvania. Unfortunately either it doesn’t have a map at all or I don’t know how to find it, which is an absolutely crippling issue for a metroidvania. Give me a map and give me the ability to put arbitary pins in it, this is not optional. The mobility stuff is pretty fun.
It was cold this weekend so I managed to get in a run of The Old Republic with my Consular. I’m still having a lot of fun with this character, as she can be a bit mean and snarky but ultimately wants to do the right thing … most of the time. That lets me choose meaner and snarkier options and more Dark Side options without making the character one that really couldn’t work as a Jedi at all.
I also kept playing Pool of Radiance. Bumping my HP up helped get through some of the early fights, but it’s not grabbing me yet, likely because I haven’t gotten far enough into the game to get to the story yet (and I think PoR has less story than some of the later games). I kinda like the strategic combat, though. I’m not sure yet if trying to play through the Gold Box games is the right thing to do or if it’s a mistake on my part and I’ll end up ditching it at some point.
Barely anything this week. One level of Tales of Berseria, some Super Auto Pets, some Chess. Got waylaid trying to do a writeup of the Flash movie; I’m currently eight hours into a two and a half hour movie, with about 75 minutes of movie to go. Amazon closed on me claiming lack of memory. I think it just knew that was too much of the Flash for any healthy person.
Enjoying Vampire Survivors. The core game loop is as simple as it looks, but there are a lot of other interesting systems built around it. Kinda neat.
For me personally the post-release updates have kinda diluted the game. I still enjoy the core gameplay loop and I appreciate the new maps with their challenges but I feel much less drive to play the game now that I feel I’ve technically beaten it and it just keeps moving the goalpost for “unlock everything”.
Giving Tunic a second playthrough, the puzzles are more enjoyable now that I know to do them while exploring for treasure and manual pages. First time through I misremembered the game’s gimmick as translating more of the manual as you get more pages, so I didn’t pay close enough attention to figure out how to do the puzzles until it was absolutely necessary to progress the plot
Also finished the hardware half of Nandgame; that’s encouraging since I’m going through the book it was based off of, and haven’t quite finished the hardware section of said book
Playing Tunic a second time sounds like it would be kind of funny, I imagine you can sequence break it pretty hard. Not quite as dramatic as playing, say, Outer Wilds a second time, but it’s definitely a game where knowledge is power.
I can definitely get to a lot more places early on than I did on my first playthrough, though it’s soon enough in the run that I haven’t done anything too crazy yet
Nier: Automata is consuming my life. What a game. The gameplay, the characters, the soundtrack, everything merges perfectly and I can’t stop finding interesting details. I’m in like my 5th playthrough and I’ve paused the story to hunt for sidequests and endings. This thing has 26 different endings! Most of them are of course just silly, but they still demand going out of your way to get them. I found one of them to be absolutely brutal, and I don’t think I could do it ever again.
Apparently, the last ending (well, not the last one by design, but the last one you should do for the very reason I’m about to detail) will outright erase your save file, so I have to make sure I’ve unlocked everything before I attempt it. Got some grinding to do to be able to finish those DLC colosseums, so this whole thing is going to take me at least one more week.
I did need a bit of a palate cleanser after that brutal ending (to clarify, it’s not the ending itself, but what you need to do to achieve it what broke me), so I started a new playthrough of the Resident Evil 2 Remake. From scratch, with nothing unlocked. Kinda regretting that a bit because I had forgotten just how bullet-spongy the zombies are in this game, but I’m otherwise doing fine.
Finished episodes 4 and 5 of Life is Strange 2. It was okay. I never stopped enjoying it but I sure as hell won’t be thinking about it years from now. It has a fairly deep, interesting decision tree, probably up there with Detroit: Become Human for sheer complexity in this type of choice/consequence narrative game, and it can be fun to see how things play out. I do think the hurdles the protagonists faced were a bit unimaginative. In order, their problems: a racist neighbor, a racist cop, a racist redneck, a mountain lion (likely not racist but possible in this setting), a mildly racist small town, a stoner’s terrible plan to rob Gustavo Fring, TWO racist rednecks, a fundamentalist cult (refreshingly, they hate gays instead of Mexicans!), and two final racist rednecks. When I remember that this game was made in 2018 by a bunch of French guys, I do rather wonder exactly what news of Trump’s America was making it over the pond because it’s a pretty silly picture of the USA.
Started The Dungeon of Naheulbeuk, a turn-based tactical RPG that parodies dungeon crawlers and roleplaying in general. It’s been relatively funny and pleasantly difficult – the RPG mechanics are pretty light, but the XCOM-esque tactical positioning is something you can’t slack off on or it will wreck you. The game was a freebie on Epic so I wasn’t expecting a ton, but it’s been worth my time through 15 hours.
Started playing [b]Palworld[/b] off watching streams of people playing it. It’s very much Ark + Creatures-You-Can-Catch-That-Are-Definitely-Not-Pokemon. I like the systems in this better than Ark’s, though. It’s still very Early Access so there’s some bugs and other stuff, but it’s fun so far.
I got an urge to play Rimworld. My bunch that doesn’t like violence is trying to her enough alpacas to produce milk and wool and grow some interesting plants for reselling.
Did nothing special since my last check-in.
It was a GDQ week and I just played World of Warcraft on the side. Did not achieve my self set goals for the week. I miscalculated.
Before GDQ a friend and me we finished Puzzle Compound. Meaning we got the last speedrun achievement. It is one of the better escape room games. Some levels have some obscure puzzle solutions and some annoying mini games. Still recommended.
Tried a bit of Turbo Golf Racing It is basically Golf paired with a Kart Racer/Rocket League. It is not bad and the CPU opponents are quite serviceable. It is fine but I do not enjoy the battle pass system. The UI feels as if the devs have copied Fall Guys.
The new version of Clue/Cluedo. It runs fine. But the game is slow as a mammoth in molasses. I have no clue why the devs of board game adaptations always forget to implement a speed up option for CPU opponents and a option to skip animations. It just stops the flow if you have to wait 5 minutes between your turns. Sometimes without needing to do anything because no new information is presented. But the features in the game are all nice. There is a metagame there and three game modes. But the DLC is really pricey. Especially for cosmetics and achievements.
Last on the block Chants of Senhaar. I am in the endgame. I like the gimmick of deciphering languages from clues. The last level before the endgame sadly skips this gimmick a lot by learning the languages through some simple puzzles. There is also a stealth mechanic in the second level (mostly) which is fine and serviceable but not what I am in for in that game. I enjoyed it.
Tons of other smaller puzzle games, which were fine but not worth mentioning by name.
I’ve clearly been out of touch, as I like board game adaptations in general — long ago I bought and still occasionally play the Axis and Allies and Risk II adaptations — and probably should have been paying attention to see if more of these were out there. Does the Clue/Cluedo game allow for “hotseat” play instead of against CPU players? That would solve the speed problems and I’m the sort of person who does play games like that against myself as a more RPG experience than a board game one …
There are tons of board game adaptations. Some are better than others. But most are enjoyable and can be played either online with friends or other people. Or is the case with clue they offer the online version and a local version where every player has a clue sheet app.
For Clue I would not know how to solve the hidden information issue if everyone is sharing a screen. But that sound like an interesting design exercise.
If you’re looking for a good place to game in both real time and turn based… I cannot reccomend board game arena enough.
As for board game adaptations, we’ll I’ve been playing gloomhaven once a week with two friends and it really is excellent (I’d hate to play it in real life because of the faff, but once you have digital set up… It’s just a to of fun)
I tend to avoid the ones with the app-based add-ons because in general I don’t have access to apps, although I set up an emulator to run the Legendary randomizer since I have the actual physical game. I might take a look at board game arena, since my board gaming was general done on the Board Game Geek but some of that is fading.
I played a little bit of Against The Storm because it looked like a fun game to try, and one of my D&D players got it for me. But, it’s been more frustrating than anything else.
I’ve mostly been prepping for my D&D campaign. The party is in an old fort that’s been converted to a temple for a Tabaxi pleasure cult that has had really horribly shit go down. My brother has joined the campaign, and he’s playing a Guard Captain/Police officer inspired by the guards from Assassin’s Creed 2. When they get back to town, everything will have gone to shit >:)
I have Against the Storm in my backlog, waiting to find a spot for it in my gaming schedule. I usually get tired of open-ended citybuilders so it seemed like a perfect fit what with smaller, somewhat goal-oriented maps and a progression system but I’d be really curious to hear what frustrated you about it.