What VIDEO GAME(s) have you been playing?

Hunt Showdown looked pretty cool during early access but now that it's out it looks fucking awesome. I love slow paced, considered shooters. I'm bad with twitch stuff.

I played it during its beta a while back. It's interesting, but not the kind of thing I'd want to play with randos.

My girlfriend and I got Man of Medan and have been playing it together this weekend. It's from the team behind Until Dawn, and is a similar experience. We are really enjoying it, and if you like "choose your own adventure" games with high production values, check it out.

I will say from a technical perspective, it looks great, but I'm playing on an original Xbox One and it does hitch a bit at times. Nothing that would dissuade me from playing, though.

Time for a talk about genuinely free games. I think there are two that are truly worth while (possibly three). The first is Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead this is a zombie crafting game where you start with nothing and have to survive in a world gone mental. There are few graphics worth mentioning but the actual game play is very deep. The game is updated practically daily by gamers on github with a simple interface to update. It's rogue-like so you die and you start again. Zombies are powerful, you'll need to do a lot of running or nick a car. What about clean water and food? Time to raid the nearby town.

Can't recommend this enough, there are a ton of mods and a really helpful reddit page. Also, it's free.

The second is a very deep and complex Sci Fi game again, with very few graphics but emergent stories from game play. Can be a bit like spreadsheets in space but, again, very immersive. My empire is doing well having researched trans Newtonian physics we are now on our way to testing the first engines ready to go and mine Mars. Later its all in your face jump gates, guns and defending civilization. For now, it's mining so I can build fuck off ships. The name is Aurora and it's free and there is an easy installer. The dev is updating it because it was written in Visual Basic and updates should be done by the new year in C++ It really is super immersive and unforgiving. If those space baddies find your system before you've researched, tested and mounted big guns then you are toast.

Both of these games do require a bit of research because manuals are not their strong point. I recommend the reddit pages for both, as the folk are very helpful with new players. There's a magic mod for C:DDA if you want to change the game a bit and a load of other stuff. Barely scratched the surface with it but it is massive fun.

The third is the old Dwarf Fortress, perhaps the best at emergent story telling but I actually find it less immersive than either of the previous two games. I dabble in it and there is an easy installer for it but it doesn't grip me like the other two do.

Cataclysm latest: Me and my NPC hanger-on make it to the nearest town but the zombies hear us so I get into a decent position to fire a 10 shot auto burst, Yeah, I'm not that good with submachine gun recoil and end up killing the NPC and mildly annoying the said zombie. Time to fucking run unless I want to start again!! Tried to light a brazier to boil water in the evac centre and nearly died of monoxide poisoning before I realised I needed to open the windows. Unfortunately, zombies have a keen sense of smell so maybe not such a good idea as I am now barricaded in the evac centre trying to poke a pointy stick at an annoying zombie that just won't fuck off and leave me alone. Ammo run out (of course). Must think about crafting some bullets, mm.... what metal do I need and have I got the skill not to kill myself while trying to do it? Christ, my mental state is dropping fast which means I can't craft as well. I need to do something to cheer myself up. I know, kill some zombies. Tried it a few days ago and had to kill a zombie baby which sent me into my current depressive state of mind. Perhaps looting some big guns from the shooting range might help.....what could possibly go wrong?????

hotseatgames wrote: I played it during its beta a while back. It's interesting, but not the kind of thing I'd want to play with randos.

Yes, absolutely

I bought Konami's 'Castlevania Collection' on day one. I play an Xbox.
I only play occasionally, but I'm going through the collection's games in chronological order. So far, I've revisited:

Castlevania (NES)
Castlevania II : Simon's Quest (NES)
Castlevania Adventures (Gameboy)
and now I'm chipping through
Castlevania III (NES)

Great games. Great value. I'm having a blast.

I've been wanting a big RPG to sink my teeth into for a while now. Picked up Dragon Quest XI to solve that problem. I didn't realize just how long it'd been since I last played a "normal" JRPG, and DQ has always been the normal-est. This isn't really a complaint as it does it well (after 11 games you'd hope so).

What I'd forgotten about these is how long they're willing to take before giving the player things. Stuff like playing several hours before you even have a full party. My dopamine receptors are all broken thanks to games focused on constantly shoving new shit in front of you. It's been nice to reset, the rewards feel more earned. The pace may be glacial but it feels right for what it's trying to do.

Also the writing is so cheesy at times that the disc kills lactose intolerant people on contact. This works on two levels: I enjoy the goofiness, and it makes the serious plot points hit harder. So far it hasn't taken a swing at my heart like some games in the genre do, but I hear it goes off the rails about halfway and I'm not there yet.

I beat Man of Medan over the weekend. It's brief, probably 6 hours, but it's only $30 and you can play again, making different choices. There are 5 characters and I only managed to have 2 of them breathing at the end of the game.

Highly recommended if you liked Until Dawn. But man, there are some stuttery frame rates at times.

Still playing Clash Royale. Game just hit its third anniversary which is pretty long for a mobile game. Still enjoying it and have mostly found workarounds to the paywalls trying to suck money out of my wallet. I'm 100% free-to-play and in a clan with various IRL gaming buddies, so that's nice.

Rediscovered my love of roguelikes and have been playing a bunch of WazHack. It's the best roguelike on the phone IMO, and the only roguelike I've played to really figure out a side-scrolling format. Haven't won, because I play too fast and get distracted and make stupid mistakes.

Also playing Brogue on the tablet. It's a more traditional roguelike, with ASCII graphics and a top-down interface. Touch interface is clunky though.

Onto game three of the semi-official TWBG Through the Ages club. I did pretty well the first game; in the second Ah_Pook dominated me. SanIlDefanso timed out in game two and the AI that took over almost beat me too, which was a bit embarrassing.

Desert Golfing is maybe the epitome of great dumb phone game.

Pixa is a game I had a while ago and recently revisited. It's a remake of the old Atari Adventure, completely with duck-dragons and all. It now has 24 different set levels, followed by an endless amount of procedurally-generated ones. But: find the keys, open the castles, navigate the map, kill the dragons. Lots of clever little tweaks to make the game fun and replayable.

March 20 will be the release of Animal Crossing. I don't expect to do much after that, other than fetch apples for lazy animals.

Got a secondhand copy of Skyrim for the Switch, so that's been a background piece of gaming now and then. It's my first time playing, believe it or not, and my first extensive exposure to the Elder Scrolls, aside from a few hours playing Oblivion. No need to unpack it more than that, though there is kind of a "the future is now" feeling playing Skyrim on a portable system.

My son also just spent some birthday money on Captain Toad's Treasure Tracker . I can see dad putting in some time there as well.

hotseatgames wrote: March 20 will be the release of Animal Crossing. I don't expect to do much after that, other than fetch apples for lazy animals.

Animal Crossing is the other reason I bought a switch recently. My wife and I both love that series.

The first reason being Mario Maker 2, which is maybe bad for my life? But also an incredible game. I may or may not be obsessively spending like 15-20 hours making and uploading levels recently. I like to make levels right on the edge of my personal skill level, which makes it very hard to then upload them (ie beat them all the way through without dying). The last one I made too me 6 hours to finally upload. This one I'm at 3 and I can make it to the check point sort of consistently.

Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker rules.

I've been playing Thimbleweed Park, which is a modern take on old point and click adventures. It's by one of the creators of Maniac Mansion.

It's a neat game, and the story is interesting. My main complaint is perhaps an odd thing to complain about... there's too much of it. Everything is a damn puzzle... this might seem great when playing a PUZZLE game, but there are times that you just want to advance the story to see what will happen. Something totally elementary will become some minor fetch quest. It gets to be tiring, so I have been playing just small bits at a time.

I don't know if I will make it all the way through the game, but I've completed way more than I thought I would, so I suppose that's a testimony to how good the game is.

dysjunct wrote: Onto game three of the semi-official TWBG Through the Ages club. I did pretty well the first game; in the second Ah_Pook dominated me. SanIlDefanso timed out in game two and the AI that took over almost beat me too, which was a bit embarrassing.

This games gonna end bad too if yall dont remember that military exists

ALSO THE EXPANSION IS OUT! some of yall go buy it so we can play it already.

So far I have played 2 hours of Borderlands 3. There are a lot of quality of life improvements, and driving already seems a lot better. The way you unlock skills also is much more flexible than before.

It is most definitely "another Borderlands." That is enough for me, but if you wanted a huge departure, this is not it.