What VIDEO GAME(s) have you been playing?

Started playing Aliens:Fireteam Elite. It isn't the best game ever but I gotta tell yah, the soul deep sense of satisfaction when you unleash the smart gun down a corridor full of xenos and NOT ONE OF THE BASTARDS makes it to you is pretty damn good

Unless you got $40 just itching to be spent I'd wait a bit though for some QoL improvements and more multiplayer options like crossplay. But if it's time to go on a bug hunt, it fits the bill.

jason10mm wrote: Damn, Ascent is GORGEOUS! Definitely a Diablo clone but wow, the level detail is just insane. There is a first person mod for the PC that is all sorts of ridiculous but im on Xbox. Only complaint is that the text for stats can be a bit small, though I'm sure there is a font adjust in a menu somewhere.

Couple of hours in and it is a blast. Having a firefight break out in a crowded area and seeing bystander aliens and droids get cut down in the crossfire (OK ok, maybe it is mostly me with a SMG) is oddly tragic.

I think this stuck in my subconscious, because I sprung for it this weekend. Then I had to buy an xbox controller for my PC because had I even known what a twin stick shooter was I would have passed.

Having said that, I'm starting to get the hang of the controls. I did play a lot of Robotron back in the Dawn of Time.

I would have thought you could play with mouse and KB like Diablo. Is this not the case?

That said, I think a controller has value even for PC for racing and flight games unless you have a joystick or wheel.

jason10mm wrote: I would have thought you could play with mouse and KB like Diablo. Is this not the case?

That said, I think a controller has value even for PC for racing and flight games unless you have a joystick or wheel.

On the PC, The Ascent uses WASD for movement (left joystick) and the mouse to change facing (right joystick). Diablo is point-and-click to move, but you can freeze your player in place if you want to stay far away from your target. WASD was fine (actually felt a little wonky), but my mind kept wanting to play Diablo with the mouse. I beat my head on it for about an hour, then said the hell with it and visited Amazon.

I have a joystick/throttle for flight sims already. Now all I need are three 60" TVs and I'm set.

I have friends with the NORAD set-up, I'm so jelly.

But then again I have a spouse and offspring, so there are trade offs in life

I'm lookin to get one of those curved 34" monitors that I think will enhance the type of PC gaming I do without being a total desk dominator. 2-3 workscreens worth of space when I need to work from home and then a glorious semi-wrap around experience for FPS or sim gaming.

I bought Humankind, which is a very familiar civ genre game but also sort of not in some key ways. You don't play a single civ, you choose a civ each era from a menu. I think I like it, you can shift depending on what you want to do that era. It also has territories that can only be controlled by one civ with one city each, which I think overall is a good thing. I tire of the AI (or myself) sneaking in shitty little cities through borders etc. You also win via fame, which requires getting stars for achievements that are specific to each era.

I don't have too many opinions on it yet; it has a big tile and terrain focus which it shares with civ 6. I like that about civ 6, so I like it here... I could do without the semi-tactical combat. It does have the one more turn thing.

I've been keeping a keen eye on Humankind for a while now and very nearly bought it last week. It would be great to hear your views after you've had an opportunity to play some more.
I'm not sure how I feel about the nation swapping, it makes sense from a mechanical perspective but I'm wondering where that leaves players from an emotional buy-in, as in what is your identity in the game and how that influences your purpose/strategy. From what I've seen the early game also looks much more interesting than the late game, but I find that generally holds with the Civ series as well where it all gets a bit grindy and micro-managed toward the end.

Really enjoying Aliens:Fireteam Elite. There is a LOT of weapon and skill depth in there and so far at least the gameplay loop grind isn't too bad. There is a good variety of enemies and while it is mostly zerg rush/brutes or stay back and take potshot types, the mix of the two keeps you moving. They even have daily(?) challenges to incentivize you to try some new things. I thought the "kill 300 enemies with a CQW" challenge would take a while. Nope, did it in 1 mission 'cause shotgun

It leans HEAVILY into Prometheus, like REALLY HEAVY. If the lore and art aesthetic of that film is your jam, you will love this. If you thought the black goo canisters and monolithic easter island like statues were lame....well some missions are gonna be rough. I just got the Free League Alien RPG and I'm curious how overlapping their lore is. Not sure if there is some lucky SOB at 20th Fox that gets to curate and manage the Alien property bible or if each of these projects is just riffing off the films on their own.

I hope this team is getting the cash flow to keep making content. A more active L4D style director is almost a must, and they could probably work up a randomly generated "investigate this colony/derelict ship" floorplan just for fun. They also need to work on MP matching and crossplay 'cause I have some friends who might play this on PC but they eschew the consoles (though now that I think about it I might be able to get this on PC since I bought the xbox version...).

There are all sorts of crazy stuff like grenade and rocket launchers still to be unlocked, not sure how well that stuff will work within the missions, I'm hoping the APC makes an appearance even if you can only use it as a static gun platform. There is a brief scene of the dropship raining fire and it is pretty glorious, more of that please! This is a good stress relief game to play between bouts of Alien:Isolation as they are polar opposite experiences within the Alien world.

I haven't posted here since July, so let's break the trend! Lots of video games getting played around here.

Fallout - After several unsuccessful attempts I finished the original Fallout game. It's pretty great, but man, that UI is tough to crack into in the year of our Lord 2021. But I did have a great time, I'm actually playing Fallout 2 as well in little dribs and drabs, though I'm not sure I'm going to go the distance with that one on the first try either.

Baldur's Gate 2 - I finished a play through of the original way back in like March, but I took some time before replaying the second one. Not much to add to that, it's still great and the first two games together represent some of my favorites.

Pathfinder Kingmaker - I got a discount code for this one from GOG, and since it runs natively on Mac I took the plunge. I've heard some more mixed stuff on it, but so far it's been a positive experience for me. I don't tend to play this kind of stuff on a high difficulty, so I haven't hit the hard difficulty curve the game was known for. I'm not wild about very crunchy detailed D20 rulesets in person, but the Pathfinder rules work really well in a CRPG setting. I'm now in the part of the game where you start managing your kingdom, and while I don't hate it I'm not sure it's something I want to do for dozens of hours either. But the first 20 hours or so have been great, I'm really enjoying it.

Just finished Disco Elysium: The Final Cut last night, after about 40 hours total of gameplay. It went on a little longer than I wanted or that I thought was entirely sustainable narratively, but it's hard to fault this game for the grandness of its ambitions when it fulfills nearly all of them. It's probably too niche to be widely remembered down the road as a landmark game, but I don't think you can deny it that status given the richness of its world, the full realization of its many characters (who in the Final Cut are all voice acted), the scope of its narrative (running to something like a million words of text--again, now, all VA'd), its willingness to delve (only occasionally to its detriment) into varying political philosophies, the novelty of its skill system categories ("Shivers"? "Half-Light"? "Esprit d'Corps"?), and the full heft of its range of choices (within, admittedly, the limitations of a largely consistent narrative).

When I got done telling my wife about it, she said, "So it's *not* about disco?" I said, "Oh, there's definitely some disco in there."

Aliens:Fireteam Elite IS the Aliens game you have been waiting for. I'm almost done with the 3rd and final campaign and it delivers everything you could really want from an aliens game. It is drawing on a lot of lore, most(?) from the prequel book which I now want to read, but enough to flesh out this universe in a way the films can't quite manage.

Not sure how long I'll play just to unlock weapons and skills for the various classes but any new campaign can't come soon enough.

I gotta think a Predator mission is on the drawing board. They have three somewhat distinct enemy 'races' so far but hopefully they can go to true human versus human conflict (which seems like it must be the primary type of fight the Colonial Marines get into but never seems to be depicted) and just spin out a new campaign every other month or so. Between ship actions, space station raids, and planet-side colony assaults they have a lot of leeway, and that's without doing Engineer alien base/ship stuff.

jpat wrote: Just finished Disco Elysium: The Final Cut last night, after about 40 hours total of gameplay. It went on a little longer than I wanted or that I thought was entirely sustainable narratively, but it's hard to fault this game for the grandness of its ambitions when it fulfills nearly all of them. It's probably too niche to be widely remembered down the road as a landmark game, but I don't think you can deny it that status given the richness of its world, the full realization of its many characters (who in the Final Cut are all voice acted), the scope of its narrative (running to something like a million words of text--again, now, all VA'd), its willingness to delve (only occasionally to its detriment) into varying political philosophies, the novelty of its skill system categories ("Shivers"? "Half-Light"? "Esprit d'Corps"?), and the full heft of its range of choices (within, admittedly, the limitations of a largely consistent narrative).

When I got done telling my wife about it, she said, "So it's *not* about disco?" I said, "Oh, there's definitely some disco in there."

I feel like Disco Elysium is the first CRPG that has a decent understanding of "fail forward" mechanics, in that failing a check doesn't usually result in simply not being able to do something, but often creates whole new interactions and other stuff. It's also probably the first of the new crop of CRPGs from the last decade or so that doesn't feel like it's just riffing on an Infinity Engine game. I mean, it's a little like Planescape Torment, but it's a better-designed game and definitely separates itself from that heritage. It might be a niche game, since it's part of a niche genre, but it's probably one of the most remarkable design achievements in CRPGS since the days of Fallout 1 and Baldur's Gate.

Actually, thinking about Disco Elysium a little more, I am not sure that it really does embrace "fail forward" mechanics in any meaningful way. I think what I remembered is that there were lots of ways to make progress, and failing a check didn't feel like the story had ground to a halt.

All of this ties back to what I realized the REAL strength of the game is, which is that it takes the roleplaying part seriously, and builds on that from the ground up. Most CRPGs say they want you to be able to play a role, but then they have lots of combat that requires attention to builds and so forth, or tactical mastery, etc. So you can role-play, but only so much. You need to have a viable "build" still.

But DE actually puts its money where its mouth is, and lets you play the role however you want to. Do you want to be a stupid muscle-bound creep with fascist leanings? Go nuts. Do you want to be a hopelessly addicted, hopelessly idealistic weakling? It's right there. The mechanical scaffolding is all designed to let you progress in the game in a way that will be unique depending on how you are roleplaying. That is a pretty special thing, and it has the polish to back it all up, a rare quality in CRPGs.

It does get a little long-winded in the home stretch. I think I read a novel's worth of text in my last four hours of the game. It feels like it's about to end for several hours. But I can absolutely see myself replaying the game at some point, and I expect to have a very different experience.

I don't remember when you played it, but it is all voice acted now so I wonder if that would change your experience.

I found myself, especially at the end, just reading through the text and skipping good chunks of the VO. That's unfortunate, because the VA is nearly universally good to great (the "inside your head" narrator is particularly perfect), but there's just so much. If there's a big weakness, it's, as has been said, in the last few hours after a big event but prior to the final wrap-up. With the choices I made along the way, that stretch made sense, but it was overlong for me and not hugely satisfying. But that's basically a nitpick of a stellar game, as far as I'm concerned. There's also some room left to revisit the world, which is . . . intriguing, though I'd be just as happy to never have a sequel.