What VIDEO GAME(s) have you been playing?

Wait, Back 4 blood ISN'T an actual L4D sequel?

Playing Aliens Fireteam burned me out on this game play with bots so hopefully I can russle up some online play.

jason10mm wrote:

Ah_Pook wrote: Owning a pinball table is a hobby unto itself. Constant tinkering and maintenance on extremely specialized parts. I see the appeal, but I'm not in a place where I can really do that myself. Kinda like owning and restoring a classic car.

I was staying at a Disney resort once and they had an Indiana Jones pinball machine in their little mostly neglected arcade room.

I actually cased the joint to see if there was a legit possibility I could steal that machine and get it into the minivan and off the resort

I saw a room like that in Animal Kingdom lodge and considered the same!

I have been thinking about how cool it would be to have my own copy of Red and Teds Roadshow. My family has had some acreage outside a small Texas town for the past 100+ years. The current farmhouse is quite unpleasant and we might finally be breaking ground on a new house in the upcoming weeks. At the last moment, the individual calling the shots added on an extra space I loathe, but could be converted to a game room when their opinion no longer hold weight. I am visualizing a pinball table there, though I do have a fear of it regularly needing something I might not be able to provide.

Fallout 4 was on sale on Steam for $8, so I figured why not? Still too new to have much of an opinion except, "Feels a lot like Skyrim."

I’ve been playing a bit of M:TG Arena. Just got up to platinum in constructed standard by playing Delver variants. One of the best common creature one-drops ever is in standard and it feels good…

I took a long hiatus from video games at some point last spring. I was having a lot of fun replaying the classic Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines game, which takes place in Los Angeles in the World of Darkness. But I hit a notoriously difficult point in the game, Pump 118a in the sewer tunnels below Los Angeles. While walking on a metal catwalk, it collapses, dumping you into ankle-deep water in a large room. There are massive electrical discharges happening on the far side of the room, near the only ladder, and there are small monsters running around on the remaining section of catwalk above.

First I cleared the catwalk by getting out my revolver and expending a great deal of cheap ammo to pick off the monsters. They are strictly hand-to-hand, so all they can do is run around and cause me to waste some extra ammo while gunning them down. Then I got scorched a few times by electrical discharges, until I learned patience and studied the timing pattern of the discharges. Once I got up on the catwalk, I was able to shut down the electrical discharges. Further exploration revealed a flooded tunnel leading to a t-intersection and two partially filled reservoir silos with exit holes on the ceiling. Escaping this area requires emptying the reservoirs, then turning the pump back on to refill the reservoirs.

The problem is that there is a very narrow window of opportunity between turning the pump back on and escaping the area. Even the slightest delay means that the water current will be too strong to allow you to reach the t-intersection. An early patch to the game allowed just enough time, but I am playing a much later patch that added a significant amount of new content to the game but restored this section to the original difficulty level. I tried and failed like 50 times last spring, before taking a long break from the game. Last night, I tried a dozen more times before resorting to the noclip cheat code. But the noclip is too unstable, freguently launching me with high-speed to a distant location where I can't get back into my section of the game. So I went looking for more online suggestions, and found nothing. Finally, I poked around in some more general information about the game and found a possible solution. My character is currently wearing a hazmat suit, which functions in this game as the second best armor available to a Malkavian player character. But it comes with a -1 to Dexterity, and my research indicates that Dexterity affects movement speed. So my next attempt will start with my character taking off his leather and putting on regular street clothes. That should give me just enough additional speed to get to the water faster, and swim past the pump faster.

This game has just a handful of encounters that amount to very difficult bottlenecks, and this one is one of the two worst. The other is the two-part final battle which I never quite managed to beat in my best previous playthrough. My problem that time around was that I never committed to one of the three major types of fighting: guns, melee, or HTH, and ended up second-rate in all three. This time around, I plan to be a melee weapon specialist by the time I reach the final stretch.

My memory of that game was that it was immersive and great, but the game tricked you into thinking you could have non-combat solutions to all puzzles until you can't. Working off of memory here so it's a little hazy, but several times I got to the stage where you were trapped in a sewer with a boss fight and never making it past that point. I didn't want a combat game, there are just so many games better at it than this one. Never went back to it.

That's true. A fair amount of the early to mid-game offers multiple ways to succeed: stealth, combat, social skills. But there are certain bottlenecks where the only way forward is to fight and kill. And then there is one encounter where you can't possibly win in combat and must rely on stealth or trickery. Then the final stretch of the game is mostly combat, and some of it feels repetitive. The reason is that Bloodlines was always intended to use the Half-Life 2 engine, and when Half-Life 2 got hacked during development, the Bloodlines team got stuck and lost some of their team while waiting to move forward. As a result, Bloodlines got published with excessive bugs and the final section of the game got streamlined into mostly combat. They quickly issued a major patch, but never did get around to offering more alternatives in the late game.

More Vampire: Bloodlines. Yep, taking off my hazmat suit made just enough difference in movement rate that I was able to finally swim past Pump 118a. And then I was reminded why this whole section of the game is unpopular and why at least one of the mods offers a shortcut to bypass it all.

There were some nasty obstacles to overcome, including one that had me stumped for quite a while. I had a nasty fight with big, freaky monster that was more or less the Frankenstein Monster version of a centaur, and it threw corpses at me. This was the first of at least a dozen that I will be fighting soon. And I started in on another perplexing and multi-level maze of sewer tunnels where these monsters are hanging out. The first time I played this game, I remember using junk from my inventory to mark intersections and help me find the exit. Like, clues that I've already used, or even weapons that are readily found throughout the game, like knives and baseball bats. It's worth reminding myself that my character is good in combat but great at sneaking, because those big monsters are very dangerous in a fight. My fast guns don't do much damage, and my deadly guns are slow to reload. My crossbow is even slower.

I got to play Plinball Legends at Sam's Club a couple of weekends ago. It was pretty underwhelming. The cabinet is a little smaller than a full-size pinball machine, maybe 3/4 size. The slope is a little greater than a conventional playfield. Animation seemed okay, not great. Whatever animation engine it was running on worked fine, but it looked a little cartoony.

I guess my biggest gripe is that the machine I played didn't vibrate under your hand like a real machine would. With every collision it reminded you that it's a simulation. It seems like fixing that would be doable; there are such things as force-feedback controllers.

If you are a hard-core pinball addict, or just want to have more cool stuff in your game room, it might be worth the $700. But I don't know if I'd consider it a way to check "Own a pinball machine" off your bucket list. In any case, I'd try it first before I bought it.

I've been watching for an opportunity to get one of those pinball machines. They seem perpetually out of stock.

I have been playing a ton of Slay the Spire on my Switch, so I bought it on my laptop.

Turns out the only thing keeping me from playing Slay the Spire for four hours a day was having to share the Switch with my kids.

You bringing it up on twitter got me to play Slay the Spire again this week. Currently banging my head against the wall that is Ascension 20 with the Ironclad and Silent. I beat it with the defect awhile ago for the Steam achievement, but I kinda want to do it with the others. I kinda gave up around A8 with the Watcher, maybe I should go back to her instead.

I think it’s my most played game on Steam.

I've put in probably about 50 hours between the Switch and my laptop, but I've only had a single clear, as the Silent. My games are going deeper on a regular basis now, so I'm clearly learning the game slowly. Very small efficiencies are not where my brain automatically gravitates, so I'm kind of a slow learner in games like this.

I have everything unlocked on my Switch version, but now I need to go about getting all the unlocks on the ol' laptop. Guess that means I'll need to play for several more hours.

The Silent is absolutely my favorite class though.

Finally got to spend some time with Battlefield 2042. There is a lot of hate being thrown around online, but I have had a blast with this game. The sheer chaos is a sight to behold, with bullets flying everywhere, tanks exploding, etc. Yes, it does suck to spawn in and immediately get decimated by an attack helicopter, but that is how it goes sometimes. Try again.

So far I've had the most fun playing as a medic, putting myself in harm's way to try to revive downed soldiers. The medic can also shoot a syringe into teammates to heal them, and can even heal themself.

If you don't have a full squad, you get thrown into a random squad on your team. This is helpful because you can spawn on squadmates.

I appreciate the concept of the Battlefield franchise, but I just don't enjoy large scale fps games at all personally. Goes for the large modes in COD and etc too. They never feel like I can have an impact on the match, and everything I do is just futilely running towards a thing and then dying when I get there.