What VIDEO GAME(s) have you been playing?

I stalled on Re 7, I need to get back to it. If it was third person I would have beat it by now.

For the King is on sale in the PlayStation store for like $6 atm, so I picked that up and have played maybe 3 hours of it so far. It seems pretty rad! It's basically a run based party driven tabletop rpg/boardgame hybrid. The king is murdered, you are in a quest to find his murderer and stop the dark magic that's spreading across the kingdom. The world is procedurally generated each time through, and when your party wipes youre back at the beginning in a new world. Kinda reminds me of Runebound turned into a video game and with a randomly generated map each game. Everything is percentage based die rolls/skill checks, even down to how far you can move each turn. I'm having a lot of fun with it so far!

One of the joys of revisiting an old game is to approach with a different mindset and potentially discover overlooked content. I am still playing Vampire Bloodlines from time to time, and have been feeling stuck lately. I can't figure out my only clue to the core storyline, and my most important contact is not available at this time. So I have been going around completing various sidequests while keeping an eye for certain clues, and that has led me to some things that I overlooked in previous plays. I checked back in with a contact that I thought I had already milked dry, and that led to a surprising conversation related to the core storyline. And another lively conversation with an NPC earned me a lapdance and tastefully censored sex. (The screen goes black during the sex, but there are sounds.)

I have still been having some trouble with the hunters, despite deliberately focusing on policing the masquerade, a cooperative effort by all vampires to avoid and suppress public knowledge of our nature. One zealous hunter came running at me as I got out of a taxi cab, but she had trouble getting around a random cop on foot patrol who just happened to wander in front of her alleyway. So I ran away and ducked into the sewers. I snuck up on another vampire hunter just outside the graveyard, and cut her throat. Later, another hunter chased me across Santa Monica. I thought that I had built up enough of a lead to escape into the sewers, but she caught up and prevented my escape while whacking me with her torch. I whipped out my latest melee weapon acquisition, a sledge hammer, and went to work. While the sledge hammer is great for smashing up mortals, it is cumbersome to use, especially in a narrow alleyway. An old wino happened to be in the same alley, and every other swing of my hammer was hitting him along with the hunter. When he died, I lost a point of humanity.

Way back the first time that I played this game in 2004, I made an interesting discovery. Except for Chinatown, every city hub in this game has at least one night club with music and a dance floor. If you go out on the dance floor and stand there for a few seconds, a white icon shaped like of a dancer appears. If you click on that icon, your character starts dancing until you click again. Once you start dancing, more NPCs flock to the dance floor, and a few randomly leave and return from time to time, or move to another part of the dance floor, all very much like a real dance floor in a goth club. If you dance for at least five minutes, your character regains one point of humanity if below the maximum of 10.

Humanity is not crucial in this game, but a character with low humanity can get worse dialogue options and is more likely to fall into an uncontrolled frenzy when low on blood. Frenzy can be helpful in combat, giving a bonus to strength and maybe toughness. Frenzy is terrible in all other situations, especially on the street, where law enforcement will show up in increasing numbers until you hide or escape to the sewers. For my crazy vampire, a low humanity score also means increasingly loud crazy whispers in my character's head, which can sometimes make conversation more difficult.

I just finished Subnautica after starting it a few weeks ago. I liked how there's no hand-holding or required objectives (at first); it just dumps you and your escape pod in the ocean and turns you loose. In the early going the game has a Castaway vibe and the fabricator is a very neat way to sidestep the potential immersion-breaking issue of how, among other things, two hunks of copper ore can become a spool of copper wire.

I also like how the dangerous fauna can be avoided or ignored (there is torpedo tech but I never used it) and the game very cleverly uses depth - both in regard to how much oxygen your tank can hold as well as the crush strength of your vehicles' hulls - to gatekeep your progression in a logical way.

There are some niggles - the game isn't optimized that well (I don't give a shit but if occasional stuttering or tearing gives you the cold sweats this isn't the game for you), the vehicles can be buggy to the point of requiring a reload, and nothing about building bases is intuitive or explained - but the art design and atmosphere are top-notch so I can forgive a lot. My first attempt took me 50-60 hours and I'm already planning on making my own cheat sheet of locations for my next playthrough after I take a break.

Last year I got stuck in Subnautica at the thing that would breach the next level of depth and just got caught in a circle where I couldn't figure out what I was supposed to do... before that I was really enjoying it.

I've been thinking a lot about outer wilds ending recently. I get chills along with the soundtrack. Very 2020 prescient, tbh.

I picked that up a while ago during a sale. I should probably get around to playing it.

I picked up Super Mario 3d World and my wife and i have played the first couple worlds coop. Surprising absolutely nobody, it's a delight. I didn't have a wiiu so this is my first time through. I haven't checked out the new Bowser's Fury open works thing they added. It's quite fun coop also, which is the main reason I grabbed it. The difficulty is low so far, which is good for couch coop with kids or my wife who doesn't play video games much.

Finished Yakuza Kiwami 2, and am now breezing through the Majima side story. Yakuza 2 was awesome, and definitely better than the first game. I really enjoy these games, although they do seem determined to add some arbitrarily difficult event in each game that makes me want to quit. In the first game it was a rail shooter sequence that literally did make me quit, and in the second one it's the LAST event in the game, in which you can completely dominate a boss fight only to be instantly killed if you miss a single button quick time event. This event is extremly easy to miss, and miss I did.

3d world is great. Big difficulty doesn't come till the post credits levels.

Returned to Bloodlines the other day, to spend more time in the Los Angeles of the World of Darkness. Went through one of my least favorite sections of the game, the house in the hills of North Hollywood. One of the most horrid vampire clans is the Tzimisce, as their signature power is Vicissitude, the ability to re-shape living flesh and bone. One of these fiends has used vicissitude to turn a house into a living manse, with sculpted flesh lining the ceiling and walls inside, along with occasional decorative structures and obstacles made of bone. Even Hannibal Lector and Ed Gein would likely be disgusted by this hideous spectacle. The Tzimisce also crafted some speedy and nasty little monsters that are all head and teeth and hands, darting in and out of combat with startling speed.

Although my usual go-to weapon in this game has been a fire ax, I arbitrarily decided to switch to the cutlery store katana while fighting these things. One of the mods incorporated in this version of the game actually gives a little more personality to the differences in the weapons, and it turns out that this katana is highly suitable for fighting these monsters. If I time my strikes right, I get up to two automatic follow-through strikes, and 3 hits is more than enough to kill one. The animation makes it look really slick, like a well-rehearsed kata. It helps that I exceed the minimum melee combat skill requirement for this weapon.

After a conversation with the Tzimisce and another battle in the basement, I found my way into the sewer tunnels. I wandered around killings more of those things, but got lost in the process. I likely need to crawl through some very dark sewer pipes to get out of here, but the close sides and darkness are slightly triggering for me. Reminds me of a spelunking expedition back in my Boy Scout days, when my dad nearly got stuck crawling through a tight passage and I suddenly became very aware of the vast mass of stone between us and the surface.

Disgustipater wrote: I picked that up a while ago during a sale. I should probably get around to playing it.

It was very profound for me, channeled/reflected a lot of feelings I've been having the past year. Especially the ending.

It requires a bit too much of you in terms of precision flying and platforming, though, I think it gets in the way at times. So you have to fight through some parts.

I keep getting that confused with The Outer Worlds. "I don't remember a robot with a banjo."

Speaking of which, I just finished The Outer Worlds. The dialog is the best part of that game. There's usually more than one way to complete each mission, although my style was "shoot it until it stops moving." It took about 50 hours of game time, and I think I completed about 90% of the missions.

Dragon Age: Origins - By God I'm going to finish DA:O. It'll only be my fifth or sixth try.

Been messing around with Hitman again. Hitman is neat. I don't think I have the patience for Hitman.