Just (re)finished Myst III: Exile, and it’s still good.

Fable Anniversary

I think I’m in the end game now. I was going to go through and find all the collectables first (silver keys, dolls, demon doors etc) but I think I’ll just finish the story and move on to Fable II.

Forza Motorsport 4

Picked it up a couple days ago and played a few hours already. It’s just as fun as I remember but a shame the 360 doesn’t have online functions anymore for the “rivals” stuff. It still looks really good and makes you realise why the console lasted for so long.

I’m playing dragon quest viii.

I played 11 and loved it. I only have a few hours so far, but I’m enjoying it a lot.

I’m playing the 3ds version.

I’ve been playing Dagger Directive, which isn’t an old game but you wouldn’t know that by looking at it. It’s an intentional throwback to the original Delta Force games. I bought it on some sort of early sale, but even full price it’s only $20.

If you like the original Delta Force or Ghost Recon games, this has a similar vibe with missions where you can select the time of day to start, and are then dropped in wide open maps. I’ve been having a lot of fun turning the HUD off and playing night missions. The game takes into account how night vision goggles interfere with looking down sights, which in turn makes things like IR lasers and dedicated night vision scopes useful. I’ve seen community complaints (some of them more recent than the newest AI update) that suppressors don’t do anything regarding enemy AI, but I’ve had a lot of success with them and think people might be having wrong expectations on how silent the guns are going to be and/or how oblivious enemies are going to be.

The weapon selection is fairly good and getting expanded with updates. The scope system gets some flack, but it is an intentional recreation of the Delta Force scope system.

For the most part I’m ambivalent about it, although now that red dots have been added to the equipment they use the same picture-in-picture window that magnified scopes do, which makes red dots actually kind of useless for close range fast paced fighting (which is the entire IRL point of them), and I’d actually recommend using no attachments or using an IR laser with night vision instead of using a red dot in the game.

The sound design sneaks up on you. Things will be quiet and boring one second, and then your audio is filled with terrifying cracks and whistles of gunfire as an enemy machinegun ambushes you the next.

I’m finally playing Crysis. For a 2007 game it’s really good looking. The shooting is less frantic and a lot more tactical than I thought it would be though. Great experience so far.

Probably cycling through Nier Automata (finally using it other than as a CPU check), Baba is You, Dicey Tales and Castlevania 2, since those are the ones I have readily installed and I can’t decide for some other game to play.

I was playing Evoland 2 on my phone.

It’s had a few graphics bugs but nothing major untill I came to a bullet rain segment and the enemy projectiles are invisible… I managed to beat the first boss, or it’s first form or whatever, but it’s absolutely impossible after that to guess where the enemies are shooting.

Shame.

Chrono Ark

I’m decently deep into it now, and I keep enjoying it immensely. The only unfortunate thing about it (depending on how you look at it) is that it’s really rather long. I had for some reason thought this could be a medium-length game I could get through in a reasonable time frame and feel good about finishing. Instead it’s probably something of a 100-hour affair if you want the true ending - which is on par for the JRPG influences I suppose. I am also in finding that each run being around 3 hours in total is maybe a tad long: if you ever fail against the end boss it’s easy to get frustrated as you need to beat it every time in order to progress the story. And the story is quite important to the game, while the meta progression (which happens even on failed runs) is rather limited. So it can sometimes feel like you wasted 3 hours if you experimented with a new team and didn’t get there.

In the end though, this is more telling of the fact that the story is actually quite interesting, since the frustration is more stemming from the fact that I want to progress further in it and get impatient at a failed run. Otherwise not much to say about gameplay, it’s a really solid and fun roguelike deckbuilder. Every character is very well designed and unique, there are many combos and synergies and there is a lot of variety in every run with various unlocks, card upgrades and so on. If you like the genre, you would love this. Really can’t recommend it enough.

Ninja Gaiden 4

Played a couple of chapters so far, still on the Hard difficulty. Really liking the bosses so far, this has previously been a weak point in the series but have delivered here so far. I am pushing myself a bit playing on Hard, but I have been able to manage it thus far. I wasn’t thrilled about the idea of adding parrying and deflecting to a Ninja Gaiden game, but it really does make the bosses a lot more fun.

The general combat (outside of bosses) feels really good, but it’s still somewhat weird to not have fighting game style specific strings to work with, and I don’t know how to feel about that. On the one hand it’s much more dynamic and free flowing than ever, but I still miss memorising specific strings like “okay, XX->XY with the dual katanas is a guaranteed decapitation against humanoids, I’ll use it here” etc.

Overall though it’s the best Character Action Game in years and if you like the genre you should definitely play it.

Really enjoying Mewgenics.

I finally started God of War!!! Got it on a sale and has been in my backlog, waiting for its moment to shine.

And I’m back to Fields of Mistria, because there’s an update due soon.

In the previous weeks (I forgot to participate): Expedition 33, Palworld and Baba is You.

The great granddaddy of fantasy 4x games, Master of Magic (1994).

Mind you, I’m playing a variety of modded versions of Caster of Magic II (native Windows), but it’s still crazy that a game that old is still being actively modded.

Wasteland 3. It’s a lot of fun to play co-op.

I’m developing a new game based on luanti https://forum.luanti.org/viewtopic.php?t=32325 hobby game development is more engaging than playing games.

I just downloaded the demo of Relooted, and am about to give that a go. It looks interesting.

im playing midnight suns again, and gonna try finishing far cry 6