What VIDEO GAME(s) have you been playing?

What I'm playing:

Wingspan - it's Wingspan.

Football Manager 2020 - I'm coaching two different teams, in the lowest English soccer leagues. I still don't know jack shit about soccerfootball. I guess I'll keep flailing around and learn by doing.

Star Wars: Squadrons - I bought it, but haven't played it much. Mostly because I don't like dragging my HOTAS out and setting it up. A very First-World problem.

Ah_Pook wrote: I've been trying to get hype for Cyberpunk, but it got delayed another month. The fact that it's coming in so so hot kinda makes me feel like I should wait and see if it's a hot mess on release or not, which is a shame.

You're breaking my heart. I guess it'll be a Christmas present to myself.

A note on the swine that are computer hardware manufacturers. I had to buy a new PC earlier this year, because my old one (that I use for both work and play) was taking longer and longer to start or restart*. Black screen. The old one was about 3 or 4 years old, and had a GeForce GTX-970 in it. The new one came with a GTX-1650 in it. Faster GPU, go me! How much faster? I looked it up the other day, and the GTX-1650 is about 15% slower than the 970. Granted, it's smaller and uses less power than the 970, but I don't GAS about the space it takes up, and I'm lucky enough to afford the electricity, so it got put in the new PC.

*It turns out that a lot of motherboards, including the one in the old sickly machine, have a backup bios that can be made the primary bios. I moved a jumper, and problem solved. Only found that out a month later.

While back in the day I never had a problem with both xwing and tie fighter, the barrel roll ability really brings on the nausea and is making premedication with Benadryl a must. Squadrons seems to be a game I’ll have to plan for at the end of a day as 45 minutes in I’ll pass out from drowsiness.

I bought squadrons but really I just play Mario maker and Tony hawk to the exclusion of anything else.

BillyBobThwarton wrote: While back in the day I never had a problem with both xwing and tie fighter, the barrel roll ability really brings on the nausea and is making premedication with Benadryl a must. Squadrons seems to be a game I’ll have to plan for at the end of a day as 45 minutes in I’ll pass out from drowsiness.

I used to get nauseous from free-floating screens, but I think I played enough Red Baron and Wing Commander II to break myself of it.

Judging by what it does to me, I'm not sure how Benadryl is even legal. If I take it for a tickling cough, I won't be getting up to go to work the next day.

ETA: I bought Tie Fighter for $3 or something like that from GoG about a year ago. Man, that was rough. With the blockiness and the 320x200, I was definitely made of sterner stuff when I played it way back when.

Tie Fighter Special Edition looks pretty good and has SVGA graphics.

I can't quit figure out Squadrons, or rather my opinion on it. It's so exceptional at times and is very thrilling, but multiplayer feels so shallow and cold. I think primarily the problem is there is only two modes and there's typically zero communication between you and your squadmates if playing with random people online.

I haven't played it in a week or two and don't know if I will go back.

Still playing Escape From Tarkov daily. Just finished a raid where I killed three people in a crazy CQB firefight in an abandoned dormitory.

^feels like ANOTHER one of those games you need a five stack of digital friends who are always hanging out in discord to play with.

I just don't have that, and never will, so I don't play shit like that. Which is bummer, to be clear, but being an adult is weird.

Playing through the remastered DAY OF THE TENTACLE with the spawn. It is definitely a relic of a bygone era -- fun with a 5yo but I doubt I'd play through it by myself. Snarky or quirky dialogue that is sometimes fun but also seems a bit "let's write clever dialogue options because we make funny games." The art is good, the puzzles aren't too hard, and the core conceit is well done. And some of the stuff is honestly pretty funny. The only downside is that the animation is pretty rough, even when remastered. Seems like it needed a few more rounds of smoothing out or adding frames.

It looks like there's enough solo content in SW: Squadrons to keep me entertained. So my plan is/was to go through the solo content, which would sharpen me up enough to be decent in multiplayer if I wanted more.

Perhaps there are 5 people here who could meet up for a SW Squadrons session?

After having it sit in my wishlist for months, I finally bought GTFO on Steam. It's on sale for $28 right now. What finally pushed me over the edge was that they have now added matchmaking and in-game voice, although I can't speak to whether or not they are any good since I just got it.

It's a 4 person horror co-op FPS and has a reputation for being crazy hard. It demands strong teamwork so voice chat is essential. Levels are dark and foggy, which I imagine has a side effect of making the game run well on all sorts of hardware since draw distance is short. Looking forward to trying it out.

edit- just played my first game of it, with 3 randos. All but one of us was new, and we were all cool and friendly. Quite amazing in itself. Cooperation was great, and the tension in that game is amazing. Really cool stuff. We succeeded in the first mission, which took an hour.

dysjunct wrote: Playing through the remastered DAY OF THE TENTACLE with the spawn. It is definitely a relic of a bygone era -- fun with a 5yo but I doubt I'd play through it by myself. Snarky or quirky dialogue that is sometimes fun but also seems a bit "let's write clever dialogue options because we make funny games." The art is good, the puzzles aren't too hard, and the core conceit is well done. And some of the stuff is honestly pretty funny. The only downside is that the animation is pretty rough, even when remastered. Seems like it needed a few more rounds of smoothing out or adding frames.

I replayed Sam & Max Hit The Road with my kids last year. That one has never been remastered, but it has a lot of the same qualities. Broad silly writing (often very funny, though still pretty 90s), really nice SVGA graphics, etc. I also think they are, combined with the first Monkey Island games, some of the fairest adventure games that Lucasarts made, although I recognize that is really open to interpretation.

I do think that the puzzle design in Day of the Tentacle might be the best Lucasarts did though. I love having to juggle three different time streams, and the payoff to a lot of puzzle solutions really makes me happy. I also think that DotT represents the best utilization of the SCUMM engine, since it still had the little grid of verbs down in the corner, but actually utilized them all pretty well. Sam & Max futzed with the interface some, and that combined with some of its more bonkers puzzles makes it the slightly less polished game.

Day of the Tentacle is also the best thing Tim Schaeffer was ever involved in. It's a way better game than either Full Throttle or Grim Fandango. That second one might qualify as a somewhat hot take in the world of adventure games, but Grim Fandango has some absolutely dreadful puzzle design. Full Throttle is a pretty fun game, but has those real-time components that don't really work.

Also picked up Due Process, which is a Counter-Strike style game with voxel graphics, but looks better than you might be thinking.

The big hook here is that each week they roll out 20 randomly generated maps, and there is a planning phase in which everyone can draw on the map to plan strategy. Played with my kids, and it was pretty fun.

I'm not a fan of how "realistic" they are with ammo management, but I can deal with it.

Most recently I've been playing Agar.io, a pretty simplistic browser game, an previously I played Crowfall, Camelot Unchained and League of Legends

Had another tense session of GTFO last night. This game is the real deal. The equipment each team member takes is important, sharing supplies is important, etc. If someone is greedy or foolish, failure is almost guaranteed.

One person works a bio scanner that is much like the motion tracker from Aliens, but the monsters in the game don't move around until they are upset. They are sensitive to light and noise, so when you see some, or at least know they are "somewhere" out there in the dark and fog, you have to creep up slowly with your flashlight turned off. If they start to become agitated they will shake and glow. It's these moments that are the most tense... the team is slowly creeping up to individual targets, using voice comms to manage movement. We used "red light, green light" commands to tell the entire team to stop or start moving based on the enemy agitation. Once everyone is in range (all team members carry a giant hammer in addition to firearms and equipment), we "charge" the hammer attack at the same time and release at the same time to bash all of the enemies' heads in simultaneously. This either goes well, in which case everyone exhales and says great job.... OR something goes wrong and chaos erupts. Either way, it is fantastic.