What VIDEO GAME(s) have you been playing?

Been playing some Pokemon Unite on my phone. If you’ve been looking for a replacement to Heroes of the Storm and don’t want to give Blizzard any money, this is probably it. Decent enough little MOBA if you like the source material all right.

New World - I've been playing it for about two weeks now. It's an MMO that feels kind of like a mix of Skyrim and GW2. What I've found so far:

- New World has that GW2 model where you buy the game, and the servers are included in the cost. Eventually there will be expansions, if the game lives that long. I sprung for the standard game - I didn't want to spend extra for cool skins and a pet for my house.

- The servers that the games run on are named and gathered in server locations, and AFAICT you can only have two characters in each server location. Locations are US East, US West, Europe, APAC, etc. I think these locations are real, assuming I can trust there performance meters.

- There aren't multiple races, just humans. I guess that balances all the races. All characters have 5 attributes; STR, DEX, INT, FOC (Wisdom/determines mana pool size), and CON. Characters do level up, but you just get x points to spend on those attributes. At certain levels things get unlocked, like "can buy a house", or how many bags you can carry.

- Like Skyrim there aren't character classes in the game. Everything your character can do hangs off of your equipped weapons. You can toggle between two equipped weapons, and each weapon has three active weapon skills. However, you have all the passive attributes of both weapons. Shamefully enough, I'm lvl 30 (halfway to level cap) and I'm not sure if you can swap equipped weapons from your bags while in combat.

- Weapons are pretty typical; 1-hand melee (3 types), 2-hand melee (3), 1-hand magic (3), 2-hand magic (2), 2-hand ranged (2). If you have a 1-hand weapon you can have a shield. Weapons level up with use. They have multiple skill trees, and it takes a good bit of use to level them past the first few levels.

- There are the MMO-standard armor types - cloth, leather, and metal. Again like Skyrim, armor types don't affect weapon use. If you want to heal in plate you can.

- Combat is realtime-ish. Active skills are on cooldowns after use. Weapons have to be sort of aimed, especially ranged weapons. Feels like Skyrim.

- Crafting is like Skyrim in that you don't pick a crafting skill, but like weapons you just use the skill to level it up. Unlike Skyrim, a lot of recipes are already included, and also unlike Skyrim you can't just throw mats together and see if something happens.

- It steals GW2's (IIRC) and Dark Age of Camelot's three-cornered faction system. You can do missions for faction points to increase your standing in a faction. You're not locked into your faction, and you can change anytime. However, it's a little bit of a PITA to raise your standing in a faction, and changing factions puts you back at zero, so you can't just hop back and forth without some pain involved. Unlike WoW, you can visit cities of other factions, and get quests in them.

- I don't think you can faction PVP until you get to 50, but I could be wrong about that. If you feel like individual PVP, you can turn it on or off at will. Fights at forts and towns are scheduled, and the times are announced every so often to let you know about it.

- There are PvE instances, but I haven't messed with them yet. They're keyed, and someone in the group has to have the key. AFAICT, fighting in groups is the typical MMO holy trinity, except I think there's only one healing weapon and one tanking weapon that can be skilled up to hold aggro. I could be wrong about that.

- Storage isn't painful, but it's MMO storage, with its own headaches. You can have multiple storage lockers, one for each town, but you can only fetch across towns in your faction, and it's kind of expensive. You don't have to drag items out of storage to craft with them if you're in town, which is nice.

- You can build a house and furnish it a'la the old Star Wars MMO. Unless it's useful for storage (and I think it might be) I probably won't mess with it.

- Unlike WoW or GW, you run. A lot. You can hearth back to your home inn, or spend a resource (azoth) to travel between towns and gates if you've seen them . AFAICT there are no mounts. Getting azoth isn't particularly hard, but the amount you can carry is capped and azoth has a lot of uses (crafting) besides powering teleporters. You can build a camp for effectively nothing that you can use as a home base to respawn at if you're in a risky area.

- There are guilds. They're guilds; nothing crazy going on. I think it can be for all factions, or it can be limited to a particular faction.

- Death in PVE just results in armor damage. It's relatively cheap to repair, but you don't want to make fixing it a habit. Damaging a piece of gear to zero makes the item ineffective, but it can still be replaced.

- AFAICT, there is no store that sells gear or mats, except for your faction vendor. And items from the faction vendor cost both money and faction points. Everything else runs through an auction house. The auction houses are shared throughout the game, but taxes can be different from game to game.

- Quests are quests. There are main questlines and side questlines. You get money, azoth, and zone reputation when you complete a quest. As you level up your zone rep you can use the rep to lower taxes, speed up harvesting, get an XP bonus, and other fun stuff like that. You get to pick what you want to emphasize in each zone.

- AFAIK, real money is only useful for cosmetic items. I don't think you can buy anything useful in the game with it, like bag space. Nor can you unlock extra characters in a server location.

That's enough info dump for now. For me, it feels like Skyrim mixed with PVE instances and GW2 faction PVP fights. Everything levels up - your character, your weapon, your crafting skills, your faction rep, your zone rep, etc. If anyone else is playing this, drop me a line.

I picked up Roguebook yesterday, and got a win on my third run, by abusing the Courage mechanic with the female swordsman. I guess it’s not a Richard Garfield game without a (nearly) infinite combo.

So far it seems like a fine entry into the Slay the Spire / Monster Train world. Unsure about long term legs. The way you can craft your upgraded cards is interesting.

I played a lot of rogue book when it first came out, and it was all infinites all the way down. Fun, but it got a little old. Plus the lack of diversity in the endgame bosses and looooots of niggling issues all over the place (ui, bugs, etcetcetc) made me fall off. I've been meaning to check back in and see where it is after x months of patching, as it had a lot of potential imo but also a lot of rough edges.

jason10mm wrote: My kid is now into Cuphead. Beautiful art style, but DO NOT get this game unless you have a lot of soft pillows in which to throw your controller as you rage quit again and again

Re: soft pillow recommendation

Also needed for Hotline Miami, Deadbolt, and certain Payday 2 heists played at Death Wish or Above.

Played some more Vampire Bloodlines today. I survived the long subterranean journey through the L.A. sewer system and stranger places, and finally arrived at Chinatown. My crazy vampire wandered into a curio shop that seems to be run by an equally crazy Chinese dude with eyes of two different colors. We talked, and he told me an odd folktale, then hired me to steal the eyeballs from a corpse in a walk-in cooler in a nearby noodle shop. I scouted it out and it looks like trouble because there are a couple of triad gangsters hanging out in the kitchen.

I started replaying this game many months ago because somebody did a large mod for the game, including three new generic missions plus one new mission for each clan. It has been bothering me for a long time that I had an unsolved clue regarding that custom mission, but I finally had an epiphany. I was going all around Hollywood talking to people to get my next lead, but remembered that my crazy vampire sometimes gets dialogue boxes with inanimate objects, like his tv set or a map on the side of a local bus station. So I wandered around Hollywood looking for any objects that seemed out of place. Spoilers follow:

BillyBobThwarton wrote: I’ll be very interested to hear how you like the pinball table.

I got to put this thing through the paces this weekend. My overall impression is very positive. The build quality is nice, and it is sturdy. It is smaller than a standard pinball machine, but it is not really an issue.

Some tables seem to be highly sensitive to being "shaken". You can physically shake the table itself, but there are also nudge buttons. They put these nudge buttons right next to the flipper buttons, which is less than ideal. You can change the control mappings but I haven't looked into that yet.

It comes with 22 tables, many of which are quite nice. Some of them are REALLY old, like from the '60s, and they tend to be boring as fuck since they don't have any music and barely make any noise at all. The more modern tables utilize the back glass much more, which will display art, scores, and the little dot matrix style screens when appropriate.

You can download additional tables. It seems like this always involves inserting a USB flash drive into the top of the machine, which I think is less than ideal. I would prefer a card slot or something. Regardless it doesn't seem to have any available storage of its own, and I was also surprised that there doesn't seem to be a ton of downloadable tables. I am still investigating how all of that works, though.

You can upload high scores and see how they compare to other table owners, which is kind of cool. One thing that seems strange, and is possibly a bug, is that we found games would end prematurely, when we thought other people still had turns to take. We could be wrong, but it happened often enough that it seemed like something was going on.

Those quirks aside, as I said, I'm happy with it and I think it will see a lot of play.

Boomerang-fu on the switch (might be on other platforms as well) is a really fun, incredibly fast paced tight little arena battle game where you play a cute little avatar that can dash, slash, or throw a....boomerang to eviscerate your foes and become the last survivor. It's totally harmless, good for little kids. Easy to play but the arenas are varied with their own hazards and the simple controls belie some nice physics with ricocheting the 'rang and catching foes on the return (reminds me of that scene in Black Dynamite). A match can take just a few seconds or maybe a minute or so, and its never more than a couple of button presses away from a rematch to uphold your honor and get revenge.

New World - I forgot how terrible MMO chat is. My old WoW guild had a standing rule, no talking shit in public. Words to live by. What was the WoW term? "Barrens Chat." Yeah, it's in the New World too.

I've been playing the original single-player campaign ("Reassemble") for Marvel's Avengers via GamePass. I had no real expectations for it, knowing that the game had been pretty heavily critiqued, but this single-player campaign has been a fair bit of fun despite some glitches, somewhat fussy camera, and repetitive area/level design (which, I gather, is or was worse in the multiplayer). The storyline is heavily derivative, but the VA is very good, and, aside from some quirks and questionable choices, the plot and characterization are good, especially, I think, for Kamala (which is good considering she's the main plot driver). Having little to no interest in multiplayer battles or the microtransaction-based cosmetics, I've just enjoyed the relatively fluid, Arkham-style combat and watching power levels grow--minutely from level to level but fairly noticeable at wider gaps. Far from perfect or anything particularly special, but the core beat-em-up works solidly within a fairly well-developed if unoriginal plotline (and by that, I mean not that it's just the usual cycling of old ideas but rather a fairly direct rip of Infinity War/Endgame).

I almost bought the guardians game now it's down to like 30 bucks. It's supposed to be pretty good as a narrative game. I'm just not sure I'd pay 60 for that.

Cosmic Marvel is the only Marvel I really like, so that's me being weird.

We got it on the $25 Black Friday sale, it’s -really- good. I would say it’s the best AAA game I’ve played in a long time but I guess I don’t really play many AAA games. The action is great, it looks amazing (PS5), and the writing is unusually good- it’s actually really funny, I’ve LOLed a few times. Even though it’s not tied to the films it is definitely in that spirit. It has a pretty bangin’ soundtrack- Autograph, Flock of Seagulls, Gary Numan, Kiss, Pat Benatar, etc.

I really like the moral choices, you get these real time prompts sort of like Mass Effect and choose outcomes and that impacts team morale. I pissed off Rocket last night by allowing Drax to throw him across a gap.There’s also a morale mechanic in the fights where you can call for a huddle to see how everyone is feeling and then try to encourage them. If you get it “right”, it queues up a song and everybody fights harder. It’s fun!

There are some neat references in it too, like a Fighting Fantasy book in Peter Quill’s room. And a ColecoVision.

It’s worth noting that this is specifically a game that is NOT an online service and there is no DOC. It also respects my time- there are no bullshit collection quests or anything like that, it’s just a good old fashioned linear action adventure game.

I’ve been “quality testing” my son’s Xmas Series X. I like it better than the PS5, full stop. It was neat to sign on after a full generation and see my old Xbox live avatar with the UNSC Infinity hoodie. Halo Infinite is looking pretty great and I’ve been catching up on 5. Forza 5 is amazing, so thrilled I got to replicate my Wrangler in it, which I’d rather drive than a Koenigsegg. Mechwarrior 5 is pretty good.

^It's really, really hard to argue with gamepass as a killer app, too, given the amount they must be spending to get day and date shit that you'll play a lot but may never return to.

Anyone else ever use Sega Channel? It was basically the same thing, but way before its time. It used your cable connection to stream long before anyone else used it for internet.

Gary Sax wrote: ^It's really, really hard to argue with gamepass as a killer app, too, given the amount they must be spending to get day and date shit that you'll play a lot but may never return to.

No kidding, I think I can play Halo Infinite with gamepass, that used to be their biggest blockbuster seller!

I use the bing/xbox reward system to earn points to pay for GP, so they aren't really even making money off me, as I don't really know how much monetary value they get from bing searches and the little quizzes/surveys.

I think ultimately GP will lead to the same general diminishment of quality of games that streaming services have done to media. I.e. the "just good enough to not unsubscribe" mentality versus "so good I'll spend money now to see it". Plus it heavily encourages DLC type purchases off of a "free" base game.

But for indies, it is magical. I play a million little indie games like Doughnut Country that I would never have bought.