What VIDEO GAME(s) have you been playing?

Not sure if this really counts, but learning the ins and outs of Fantasy Ground Unity in order to run some 5e adventures with it.

It's pretty good for online experiences with, say, Discord for voice.

Quite overwhelming character creation but that's more an issue of not playing DnD since 1980. Apparently, there are more than 3 classes these days.

Unfortunately, trying to find peeps for GMT+3 hours on my weekend (Thursday and Friday night) is proving difficult. I totally get it though, people are pretty burned out with online stuff and are already spending a high proportion of their time in front of a screen, never mind their actual free time.

Once I get more experienced, I'll open a thread on here and see if anyone can fit in. Players can join with the free Demo version as long as I have the full version, which I do, with no restrictions.

Maybe, I can get by with a more US centric time frame, might mean I have to stay up late though. Bummer with a working week from Sunday to Thursday though.

On other news, playing a fair bit of Phoenix Point which is designed by one of the folk that designed the new (ish) XCOM and it is very similar with some interesting tac changes to boot. Recommended if you like XCOM.

Also playing some John Tiller classic hex and counter wargames delving into the history of Serbia and mountain warfare in 1914 with Serbia '14. The detailed research in these games is absolutely amazing. I gain great pleasure from reading the reference material as well as playing these well designed games.

I picked up a new game in the Darkest Dungeon vein, Warsaw. Set during the 44 Warsaw uprising, you have to keep morale high, conserve supplies, marshal your forces, etc. I like the historical setting. If you like WW2 and DD, the game would appeal to you.

I finally played WH40K: Inquisitor on the PS4 after getting it months ago. I dig it. Just jumped into the seasonal session and it is pretty fun. I don't think it does anything different than other games like it, but the setting sells me on it.

On the PSVR side, I bought Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners. Whoa. it is very satisfying to take a bat, gripped in both hands and tee off on a walker. your weapons can get stuck in a skull, so it can get frantic when surrounded. There is an option to activate your headset microphone that would make your in game character make noise.

Mortal Kombat 11 has an interesting side mode that I am having entirely too much fun with. It's called AI Battle, and it's like it sounds. You select 3 characters, adjust their AI behaviors, and send them into battle against some other opponent's AI team. You can watch the fights at 1, 2, or 4x speed, and I find it hilarious and almost like watching a horse race.

Tonight I won my first battle. My team is currently Joker, Scorpion, Baraka.

I cashed in some loyalty points on the Switch e-shop and got myself Slay The Spire. It's pretty great so far.

Also I indulged in some birthday spending and got myself Crusader Kings III. I gave about 6 hours to CK2, and bounced off of it because I had trouble nailing down the finer points of medieval inheritance and the UI was a hot mess. But I've been hankering for a strategy fix besides Civ 6, which I like but haven't been able to get excited about playing in a long time. So given the upgrades to the UI and the tooltips in CK3 I think I want to actually nail down this new version. I am generally a fan of the more open-ended roleplaying approach to strategy, so I think if I am okay with spending numerous hours without totally understanding what I'm doing. The 2.5 hours I spent without really thinking about it today seems to indicate that it will have legs.

jason10mm wrote: Yeah, I was hoping for a RGO sale as well.

Ya'll got me hooked to Hades. Now I REALLY hate Meg, to the point I don't think I can even watch the Disney Hercules movie anymore

I'm trying not to read up on optimizing runs and just learn it through sweat and blood.

You think you hate Meg, wait until you get to one of the later bosses. The one I'm thinking of still draws my ire after numerous clears. I can beat them every time, but I just...hate them so much.

One thing about Hades that upped my appreciation considerably is using God Mode, which gives you a small amount of damage resistance with every failure. I probably would have made it eventually even without that, but it increased my enjoyment considerably.

I have decided to focus on Vampire: Bloodlines for now, and play Cyberpunk 2077 later when the game has gotten more patching. For a long time, I was stuck on a stealth mission in a parking ramp, where a screw-up would result in getting swarmed by 6 to 12 gun-toting goons. Skill with firearms in this Vampire game doesn't just affect your chance to hit, it also modifies how much damage you do, so I tend to prefer chopping up opponents with my trusty axe. Melee damage is also modified by skill level, but hitting is automatic if you are close enough and swing your weapon in the right direction. There also seems to be a damage bonus if you hit with a melee weapon while charging at your opponent.

Finishing that mission by finally figuring out the full stealth approach was a big relief, and left me free to run through quite a few shorter and easier missions. Completing tasks is a mild joy in and of itself. But now I am stuck again, this time in a situation where my stealth/melee character is in a difficult shootout situation.

I enter a big room that used to be a bunch of smaller rooms but now most of the walls have been knocked down, leaving scattered cover towards the corners and edges of the space. There are a couple dozen slow zombies in the room, and they gradually converge on me whenever I stop moving. But my main opponent is Bishop Vick, a crazy, disease-ridden Toreador vampire with a combat shotgun. He also has the supernatural discipline of Celerity, which allows him brief bursts of superhumanly fast movement. A slight bug in the game causes my weapon in hand to get reholstered while we talk, and then he is abruptly blazing away at me. I can take cover and shoot back, but the zombies sometimes block my line of fire, and attack me when they get close. Or I can charge at Vick to attack in melee, but can't get in more than a couple of hits before he uses Celerity to race over to a different part of this large room. Plus he usually shoots me a couple of times as I approach. My best weapon is a shotgun that is identical to Vick's, and none of my supernatural disciplines are useful in this fight. Unless I get careless, the zombies are fairly easy to avoid, but they really latch on if they do hit, and their damage gives me a temporary penalty to Wits and therefore combat defense.

The previous time that I got this far in the game, I was running a Gangrel vampire with a couple of relevant combat powers: Fortitude for supernatural toughness and Protean for claws that do aggravated damage to vampires. Since those powers are unavailable to my current Malkavian vampire, I need to find a way to make the best of a bad situation. Vick seems to have unlimited ammo and is surprisingly durable. And he never runs out of blood from using his Celerity. However, he is rarely able to hit me if I am running (unless I am running straight at him), and he needs to reload after every five shots. And compared to some weapons, reloading the shotgun is a bit slow. Besides the axe and the shotgun, I've got a 9mm machine pistol that is mainly good for spray and pray attacks, and a crossbow that needs to be reloaded after each shot but loads fairly quickly. Vampires in this game take reduced damage from bullets, but full damage from the crossbow and from melee weapons with an edge like my axe.

One more possibility is that I go back to a save point from just before the start of this mission, and go do some other missions until I have a few more XP to level up my firearms skill again. I definitely do not want to grind through Groundhog's Day style, because the zombies and the decrepit building are hideous, and the fight is stressful. Especially since I always start the fight without a weapon in hand.

Just in case anyone was wondering what 805 hours of learning and grinding kaizo Mario Maker 2 gets you, starting from scratch

Ah_Pook wrote: Just in case anyone was wondering what 805 hours of learning and grinding kaizo Mario Maker 2 gets you, starting from scratch

The people who have the patience required for that kind of fuckery are wired very differently from me.

I finally beat Sekiro's last boss, after returning to it after a year+ of not playing. Just went tip to tip on that motherfucker over and over and stopped using any special tools or anything else for the most part.

I recently finished Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. It remained schizophrenic to the end; where you unlock all sorts of Force powers with which you can render most enemies trivial, but which are of limited utility during boss fights against other Force users. There aren't that many of this type of fight, the rest being "creature" bosses that skew toward the gimmicky with their special attacks and QTE's sprinkled in here and there.

Before I played the game I was hoping that I'd get into more duels with Sith acolytes, that sort of thing, rather than tons of Stormtroopers, local fauna, and Purge Troopers whose bullshit wind-up animations make learning they're parrying timings not worth the effort. Which is a shame, because the combat against the final boss is what I wish it was in the other 99% of the game, where the parry windows are easily discernible and it feels like an actual duel instead of trying to figure out how to cheese it with Force powers.

We also downloaded the Doom: Eternal DLC and I've decided that I'm too old for this shit. It's the sort of expansion where I'm destined to die as I'm trying to remember how to switch weapon mods, or grenade types, or which weapon I want to use (all while forgetting to use the flamethrower to gain armor), as I'm hit from every direction by a never-ending flood of enemies.

SebastianBludd wrote: We also downloaded the Doom: Eternal DLC and I've decided that I'm too old for this shit. It's the sort of expansion where I'm destined to die as I'm trying to remember how to switch weapon mods, or grenade types, or which weapon I want to use (all while forgetting to use the flamethrower to gain armor), as I'm hit from every direction by a never-ending flood of enemies.

You don't have to denigrate yourself because Doom eternal is a bad game . It's just a grinder of endless waves of enemies and overly complicated systems, dlc or base game.

They could have just done "more" DOOM 2016. I would have enjoyed that. But nooooooooooo.

WH40K: Inquisitor has it's hooks in me pretty good now. After a number of story missions against Drukarii, chaos minions, traitor marines, and rebel Imperial Guard, I fought against proper Eldar. That was pretty fun going up against warp spiders, banshees, wraithguard, and such. I like the cover system in the game that allows you to fire from a covered position and take less damage....until the cover gets blown apart.

My sniper can pretty much oneshot most enemies and I have a power that will reset a cooldown power on a kill, so my sniper shots suffer no delay other than aiming/charging the shot.

It is a bit more measured than Diablo combat and that is fine with me. The enemies don't really have much tactical AI behind them, but I suppose that is expected in a shoot and loot.

There are random missions (intelligence missions) that can be found as loot on levels. This allows you to take a random mission and boost it with a tarot card. the taro cards will give you bonuses, but also penalties to the win condition. The fun thing is that you know the broad scope of the penalty, but not the actual penalty until you choose the tarot. And once you choose it, you have to keep it or back out of the mission and lose the opportunity.

If you like 40K, I think it is worth picking up.

Played through all of the story portion of Pokemon Sword on the switch... it's... all right, I guess? There's some nice quality of life improvements made to the game like fast travel after you've been to areas and your entire squad of 6 gaining XP even if they're not the ones to actually fight. Even with these changes the game feels pretty dated. I realized that these changes exist because my girlfriend dug up the old DS Platinum (Gen 4) game out of her basement and I'm now struggling with my Turtwig and company. Lots of TACKLE, TACKLE, TACKLE...

I have quite a bit of nostalgia for the original game, even though I played Blue emulated on my computer back in 1999. I played quite a bit of GO the first two years it was out and also kicked around with the card game from time to time.

While I've been playing Sword, my girlfriend has been playing Shield (yeah, we're dorks), but I'm trying to come up with what we can do next together. I'm thinking it might be a board game, but Cobble & Fog didn't instantly light a fire under us. I'm wondering if maybe some coop legacy or campaign style game could do it.

Played more Bloodlines last night. Decided to skip Brother Vick for now and go explore Hollywood. Happened to be in a convenience store during an armed robbery, so I got to do the classic action movie convenience store shootout. After saving the day, it turns out that the clerk deals weapons on the side. I bought a .44 magnum pistol and plenty of ammo, plus some kevlar clothing.

Then a surprising and awkward encounter happens, one I had totally forgotten about over the years since the last time I played this far. An attractive latina woman approaches me, and it just so happens that I dated someone who looked like her about 20 years ago, IRL. So as a player, I am already dumbfounded, just by the resemblance, and Troika put some extra effort into this scene, with better facial animation than usual. Anyway, she is somebody who knows my character from before he turned into a vampire, and she is shocked and relieved to see that he is okay. Only, I am playing the crazy vampire, so my dialogue responses are all weird and now she thinks that I had a mental breakdown and have been living on the streets. Which is half true. But this is a threat to the Masquerade, and if it drops much lower, L.A. will be swarming with vampire hunters soon. So I cut the conversation short and walk away, but she makes a phone call and then follows me. When I try to approach her to talk again, all she does is smile and tell me that everything will be okay. I thought about opening a manhole lid and going into the sewer to lose her. Then I noticed that I was low on blood and led her to a nearby dark alley for a snack. I lunge at her, but she screams and runs away, and then the cops show up.

Aside from that, I killed some russian mobsters, hacked up a bunch of zombies in a cemetery, and tied up a couple of other loose ends, to rack up enough XP to elevate my skill with firearms. Then I went back downtown for a fresh shot at Brother Vick. This time went better. At long range, his shotgun was nearly worthless against my kevlar, so I focused on chopping up zombies. Then Vick sped over to fairly close range and started blasting me for real damage. I took cover and switched from fire axe to my own shotgun. I got in a few good shots, but he still killed me. I think I could take him on a rematch if I exercise more patience. Wounds in this game gradually regenerate, so sticking to cover and picking my shots more carefully will also get me a little more healing before the next time I am exposed to his shotgun fire. Also, I still want to try the crossbow against him.