What VIDEO GAME(s) have you been playing?

I have Netflix... how does one access whatever games they are offering? Seems like they are keeping it a secret for some reason.

My understanding is that you download the game for your device and then log in to the game with your Netflix name/password. I could be wrong though.

Sounds like something I doubt I'll ever investigate, I have enough games to last me 3 lifetimes anyway.

Taking a break from heisting to play the insurmountable backlog of games I have in my inventory. I started playing Stars in Shadow, a 4x space game made by MOO2 fanboys. The art direction is nice, the characters are all hand drawn and is just a downright joy to play. I haven't played MOO2 in 20 years, and this makes me want to pull it out, as well as the original, and get back to playing them.

On my recommendation, my in-laws picked up Super Mario Bros. U: Deluxe for a birthday. Shared screen co-op? Classic 2D platform action? Mario? A slam dunk, I thought. A great choice for my boys. I was wrong. I have rarely wanted to scream more at my children than while playing that game.

I’m not claiming to be a Mario savant, but I know I would have made survived to the end if a child hadn’t come out of nowhere to bounce off my head or get under me and throw my timing all the way out the window. Or to have my bubble popped while over a pit with no chance to jump to safety. Or to just be pushed off the screen by a child racing too far ahead.

Sometimes I just let the boys float in their bubbles while racing through a series of tricky jumps. I recommend the game at those times.

Over the Christmas holidays, I've expanded my collection. First up is Urtuk: The Desolation. Take the art direction and grimdark theme of Darkest Dungeon, and pair it with tactical, turn based combat, and you have Urtuk. The nice mechanic is extracting aspects of defeated foes and taking those abilities to your characters. You can also improve a mutation by collecting multiple and merging them together. I'm on the last level, and the final boss is silly stupid hard. Not because of his abilities, but because he has a LITERAL ARMY BRIGADE of minions. Worst part is when you kill a minion, it comes back as a Revenant. You kill the Revenant, it's down for good. However, any character you have that dies, IT comes back as a Revenant serving the bad guy. And no, you can't retreat. The minor thing that's good is certain characters are generating the Revenants. Kill them, and at least that problem is solved.

Another DD clone I picked up on New Year's was Iratus: Lord of the Undead. Take DD, flip the script to make the BBEG the protagonist, and you have Iratus. Just like in DD, you can build up the "town" of Iratus, granting different benefits (leveling undead units, healing them, etc.). Then there's the creation of undead units, which is like spending certain resources to create them. They have your usual Skeletons, Zombies, etc. but there are also esoteric units like the Abomination and the Shade that do different things. The air breathers have two bars, dealing with HP and Sanity, and certain monsters do better/do different things against people with no or low Sanity. Sometimes, the characters go insane and do random things (like attack their own, become paralyzed, etc.). There's so much depth to the game, and I've been playing it nonstop for the past few days.

I picked up a few games during the year end sales...
Baldur's Gate 3 - surprise, it's great! Combat can happen suddenly, however, and can be devastating. Save early, save often. Your AI partners are also quite adept at stepping on obvious hazards. Even ones they themselves pointed out.

Days Gone - Take the gameplay of a recent Tomb Raider game and throw in zombies that are so deadly that more than one can completely ruin your day. It's good, but the dialog is.... less than good.

Powerslave Exhumed - a retro FPS that has Metroidvania aspects to it. It's fun in brief stints, but I wish some of the hazards would just hurt you instead of insta-kill you.

Devil Spire - a PS1-style first person dungeon crawl straight out of Daggerfall. Climb a tower floor by floor, dealing with random layouts, traps, loot, etc. I am quite enjoying it. It is difficult.

Robocop;Rogue City continues to be a joy. Having Robocop use a pay phone to call folks, a shootout in a VHS video store, a surprisingly deep psyche element to Robocop himself, massive gore and set destruction with heavy weapons, its all there in nostalgic glory.

I've been working on a video game for the last several months. It's currently listed as Coming Soon on Steam, and if you would add it to your Wishlist it would be greatly appreciated. Valve uses that metric (and ONLY that metric, as far as I can tell) to decide what to promote. It's very much a Rich Get Richer scenario. I have no real data to back this up, but I suspect most games on Steam make little to no money whatsoever, while a very tiny percentage make a fortune. I don't think there is a lot in between. Wishlist it here and revel in the trailer: store.steampowered.com/app/2982840/Office_Nightmare/

I have an early demo available here: hotseatgames.itch.io/office-nightmare

Feel free to check it out and give me some feedback if you like. I am holding off on making the demo available on Steam because I want to take part in the Steam NextFest in October. I missed the registration deadline for the NextFest happening in June. :/

I have had a great time working on the game. But man.... it is a FUCK TON of work.

Been playing a lot of Warhammer: Vermintide, just to get better weapons. Surprisingly, there are still players about. Still playing Payday 2, just to help out new players. After refunding Darktide once, I got back into it because one of my friends across the pond begged me to. So, I got into it and HOLY SHIT is it ever chaotic. A lot of stuff going on, barely any direction, and getting mobbed at every turn, and I like it.

After the big patch to Payday 3, I believe it's finally going in the right direction. Gone are the challenges, they were the least liked part of the game. With that, you get a MUCH better progression system akin to Payday 2, and it now feels like your getting somewhere as opposed to running in place. They added a new skill line, Assassin, made some new rolling stealth/loud modifiers (e.g. Shield bearers now have flashlights on their shields like their US Marshal Shield counterpart in Payday 2)., and a Mask of the Week. It's a yandere-esque anime waifu mask, which ALL the heisters I've been playing with have been wearing, including myself. I hadn't played PD3 in months, and this update just brought me right back.

I've heard Darktide has improved since its bad release.

The public playtest for Office Nightmare is out on Steam. It's not "officially" a demo but.... it's a demo.

store.steampowered.com/app/2982840/Office_Nightmare/

I beat Tinykin, entirely on my Steam Deck. This is a pretty chill game that has very low stakes. You are tiny, you are inside a regular size house, so each room is enormous, and you use "tinykin" to overcome various challenges. Some of them blow up obstacles, some of them carry large objects, some stack on top of each other to build a tower you can climb. It's fun, but by the end of its 6 areas, I was ready for it to be done.

I also started another play of Sniper Elite III. The third one is where they really started getting good, and if you have a friend, it has asymmetric co-op that they never put in parts 4 or 5. It is fantastic.

As of late, I've divvied up my time with Warhammer: Vermintide, Warhammer: Darktide, Payday 3 and several other games. Darktide and Payday 3 got substantial updates recently and they're all good. PD3 FINALLY got a single player mode. It's in Beta obviously, but seems pretty stable. The new DLC, Boys in Blue, is really good. They brought back Clover (YAY!), and now we have our first LMG as a primary weapon. They are still sticking with the ablative armor, which a lot of players DON'T like, but I'm indifferent to.

Getting gud in Warhammer: Vermintide. All the characters have orange level gear, with nearly all having Exotics. I'm dipping my toe in Nightmare level and it's a hard experience. The rewards are waaaay better, but it's a skill issue for me. Sometimes, I blow through them, and others, TPK.

Recently, I bought Drug Dealer Simulator and it's a welcome change from what I've played. It's strangely relaxing. Buy drugs and sell them to customers. They say cutting your drugs will make them last longer, but for me it's just a hassle. Now growing my own MJ so I don't have to buy from the Cartel. I've been keeping my head down, so I don't get police scrutiny. I might buy the sequel once I finish this one, but I've heard mixed things about it.

I bought Dying Light 2 on sale on Steam. I never beat the first game because I found the "night phase" so unpleasant, and the night is unpleasant in this one too, but not as bad. It's got the parkour of Mirror's Edge combined with zombie apocalypse downfall of society blah blah blah. There is so much in this game, it can be very overwhelming, which is one of my main complaints; they pile so much bullshit in your way when you just want to go kill some zombies, it can be annoying. It has co-op, which would probably be a blast, but I have not tried it yet.