What VIDEO GAME(s) have you been playing?

I started playing enter the gungeon again, hadn't played since it first came out. It is a much better game than when it came out. More forgiving with more interesting elements around explicit synergies between items and guns.

I beat SPELUNKY 2 (Easy) yesterday, for the first time. A little anti-climactic, we'd been there before and whiffed, but we got it this time. Going right back in though, there is so much more to do.

A few games going at the moment:
Mortal Kombat 11 Ultimate: playing through the second campaign. Similar in quality to the first campaign, but you play C tier characters so it isn't as fun for me. Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa's performance as Shang Tsung is worth the price of admission though. He's awesome.

Resident Evil 7 - I had avoided this game earlier; its change to first person had me thinking it would be too scary to be fun. I finally decided to check it out, and it's definitely scary, but it's also goofy in that Resident Evil way. Once the "find this emblem to stick on the wall" puzzles started coming out, I felt like it was in fact a Resident Evil game.

So far my biggest criticism is that the set piece moments feel like they are overly scripted, thus removing tension; you definitely have moments where it doesn't matter what you do or how long you take doing it. The game won't continue the story until an exact event is triggered. This is in contrast to the Resident Evil 2 remake, which kept you on your toes with that asshole Mr. X.

Tyranny - this Black Isle RPG has a unique setting and very cool "moral" choices that actually have impact. I'm enjoying playing as a hard-ass servant of the land's Overlord.

On my 6th try, I finally beat Brother Vick. I ran for cover, crouched down, and pulled out my axe. Vick kept shooting from a distance, as the zombies closed in on me. I chopped up the zombies, frequently pausing to duck behind cover as Vick zipped about and fired on me from different angles. After finishing the zombies, I switched to crossbow. Vick was shooting at me from close by, but I found an odd angle in cover where I had better cover than Vick. He audibly winced every time I shot him with a crossbow bolt, but eventually I ran out of bolts and switched to my own shotgun. I used up a lot of ammo but eventually dusted him.

Feeling confident, I ran around tackling other missions, including a nasty fight in a junkyard. Then I was feeling pretty good about running some errands, like visiting one of my blood doll friends, doing some dancing in a night club (to restore a point of humanity), and checking in with some old contacts for possible fresh leads. I even stopped by to say hi to a couple of CDC guys in hazmat suits who will be leaving soon (because I killed Vick). One of the hazmat guys offered a dialogue option, so I tried to talk to him. I got back a muffled two-syllable response that sounded like fuck you.

As I was stepping out of one nightclub, I got a very nasty surprise, in the form of getting hit in the face with a flaming torch. Even though I had gone out of my way to do missions to restore the masquerade to full, a vampire hunter had found me. I was unarmed, so I though that maybe I could run away and get prepped, but she chased me down two dark alleys. I whipped out the axe and went to work, but her torch was doing a lot more damage because vampires are so vulnerable to fire. Before I knew it, I was dead.

So I went back a save point and made a couple of different choices. I took a mission to kill a disguised hunter who was actively looking for vamps, and wasted her. The game expected me to fight a bouncer, too and then run out the back door, but instead I used Obfuscate to sneak out the front door. I was just walking away, and happened to notice a very beefy dude with a crossbow covering the back door into the alley. So I snuck up on him and slashed his throat. A cop saw me do it, so I had to hide in the sewers for a while until the police called off the search. A little later, I spotted the hunter with the torch, but she held back because a cop walked between us. I followed the cop closely and she gave up for now. I hope that this is a temporary situation, because the hunters are vicious and killing them tends to draw police attention (and gunfire).

I have such a weird relationship with these twin stick shooter run-base games. I've been playing Enter the Gungeon, and this run I got what are considered to be two game breaking weapons... and then I just threw it all away on the fifth floor, didn't even get to the final boss. I can't tell if this is a fun motivating frustration or just regular frustration I am not good enough to get through these bosses easily. I'm not sure I need much more of that second type of frustration in my life.

Yea I always hit a wall in roguelight games where I have to either get way way better or grey frustrated and quit. How many hours in that wall comes varies game to game, but so far the only game where the answer hasnt been get frustrated and quit was Rogue Legacy. Even that one I didn't do the final challenge thing (beating the game in under X lives, I forget exactly how many).

It's a different story for something like Slay The Spire or Monster Train, as they're not twitch action games.

It's so variable for me! FTL didn't work for me because of the final boss thing but I could play Into the Breach forever.

Haha, I am just the opposite. I could not attach to INTO THE BREACH, but I beat FTL at least 20 different ways.

Speaking of Roguelikes though, SPELUNKY 2 still has its grips in me. I am just pecking away. There's no one thing about it that feels unfair--you almost always feel like you blew it. Rushing? Punished. Greedy? Punished. Trying to pull off a risky move? Well, risks have consequences don't they.

I just beat Gungeon a few minutes ago so maybe it's the good kind of frustration? There's a billion more things to do, need to think on whether I'll keep going.

I've bitched about it here before, but in FTL I just loathed that the final boss was basically telling you that most of the ways you could have played the game and got there were wrong except boarding and stealth iirc. Maybe they changed it but that got me hopping mad.

Gary Sax wrote: I've bitched about it here before, but in FTL I just loathed that the final boss was basically telling you that most of the ways you could have played the game and got there were wrong except boarding and stealth iirc. Maybe they changed it but that got me hopping mad.

I try not to think about it now, but the most damning criticism about Vampire: Bloodlines is nearly the same problem. You can play much of the game as a stealth or social character, but the final stretch is nearly all combat. And if you didn't dedicate enough of your XP to combat for the endgame, you are screwed. My character is currently about 50/50 stealth and combat, but after putting a little more into hacking and lockpicking, I should plan on dumping the rest of my ongoing XP gains into anything that can help in combat.

I found both FTL and Into the Breach to more admirable than fun. But Hades? Inject it into my veins. Slay the Spire is a great one too, but it hasn't quite put its claws in my brain in the same way.

Gary Sax wrote: I've bitched about it here before, but in FTL I just loathed that the final boss was basically telling you that most of the ways you could have played the game and got there were wrong except boarding and stealth iirc. Maybe they changed it but that got me hopping mad.

It has been a long time since I last played FTL but I wouldn't say you are right or wrong. On one hand, you can beat the final boss in a variety of ways. On the other, you do need some ways to deal with the bullshit, if you don't have stealth or drones you are going to have a bad time. I actually find the automated ships in the last few levels to be a more limiting factor. If you can't get through their shields, you are done.

Im playing through the Lego Marvel Super Hero with my kid. This is the first(?) one from a ways back so it is a real workout for my shiny new Xbox series X

Anyway, my kid loves the MCU and there is enough influence here that he digs it quite a bit. But there is enough other stuff (mutants, F4, etc) that it is opening him up to a lot of other marvel stuff. And even back then Deadpool was apparently a big draw because DAMN you gotta work to get him. Not sure how my kid even knows who he is but i guess there is enough DP in the youtube zeitgeist that he has glommed on to it in a big way.

Which leads to endless gold brick farming and really makes this game a grind. I've played a ton of lego Star Wars and Indiana Jones and there was either a lot less grinding or the rewards (new vehicles and stuff) were way better because i enjoyed them far more. Even the missions in this game are a chore, maybe because they aren't apeing a specific film scene but they are very gimmicky, often requiring a tedious sequence of events with non intuitive power usage of each hero on the mission all while enemies are pouring out at you and shit is flying all over the screen. The trigger boxes for when a power does "the puzzle solving thing" versus the normal power are so small, we often get stuck just running around the arena with each character hoping to get lucky when it is clear we need to trigger SOMETHING to progress.

Anyway, just collecting heroes is pretty fun and the kid just LOVES it so i imagine there will be more lego games in my future. I think the lego DC hero games are more interesting to me both from a story and character roster perspective so hopefully i can wean him off marvel for a bit. Or maybe the Hobbit one since we are reading that story at bedtime.

Note to the designers of Immortals: Fenyx Rising: The correct answer to no good question is "more crate- and switch-based puzzles."

I would echo that and add "ANY quicktime event" to it.

Not sure what purpose QTEs ever served (other than IIRC a Jason Bourne game that used them in a much more intuitive way). They suck suck suck. Even more sonwhen you are console agnostic and play xbox, ps, and switch games that all use them.