General Game Discussion for March 2026

[dxchase]

Thats a dope lookin skin for that deck. I still havent bought one yet.

So, heading off to Kentucky tomorrow for the louisville game expo and will be playing my heart out on some old school consoles and pinball machines all weekend. Im excited for it. Its about an 8 hour drive from here which isnt terrible imo. There might be some old pc setups to jump on. Ill try to get some pics! Ill also be livestreaming a little bit of it.

As for gaming...

Well its been mostly Diablo 4 and Arc Raiders. Diablos new season isnt all that great, its cool to turn into the butcher and destroy the town hubs you spawn in, but it gets old quick. My biggest reason to play right now is collecting all the Doom crossover stuff they have, along with the usual seasonal rewards/cosmetics etc.

Arc is arc, just cant get enough of that pvp! I pve too but that games pvp keeps me going.

I bought Crimson Desert and wanted to wait a week or 2 before playing it because of the patches that have been added since launch. By now, i know where i need to go right in the beginning w/o having played more than 5 hours yet.



I had a review set up as a draft for the Gallon 100 SD keyboard Corsair released. Seems the system deleted the draft so i gotta re-do it, no biggie. But its a great keyboard to say the least. Worth the pricetag tho?

 

[neogunhero]

Speaking of my Steam Deck, it'll be 4-years in my possession very soon and I've finally decided I wanted to give it a makeover. I bought this skin, which was $20 and came with two applications, as well as these textured grips for the buttons and sides (which I didn't put on ABXY) and I'm pretty happy with it; I enjoy the colorful look and the grips feel quite nice. Still love this thing.

That looks awesome! Love the textured grips. I can't use a controller without them anymore, it feels like my hands are slipping on smooth surfaces.

I played another Archipelago world with two of my friends yesterday. This time I was playing Pokémon Emerald, while my friends were playing Civilization VI and Dark Souls III. Also, this time we turned Deathlink on, which means that if one of us dies, everyone dies. It was a lot of fun, but it also showed that you have to pay good attention while choosing games and picking the randomising settings for each game.

I'm always so fascinated at reading your Archipelago sessions. It seems so complex yet so much fun.

So, heading off to Kentucky tomorrow for the louisville game expo and will be playing my heart out on some old school consoles and pinball machines all weekend. Im excited for it. Its about an 8 hour drive from here which isnt terrible imo. There might be some old pc setups to jump on. Ill try to get some pics! Ill also be livestreaming a little bit of it.

Have fun! I've always wanted to go to a game expo, but can't justify such a long drive as yours 🤣 After about three hours on the road I start to fall asleep.

 

[Pifanjr]

I'm always so fascinated at reading your Archipelago sessions. It seems so complex yet so much fun.

It's really not that complex, but it is really fun. I ended up playing until 2 AM and I've already set up 4 other games to play and one of my friends got 2 or 3 other games he's setting up as well.

Neon Chrome, a rogue like where you play as a hacker and you're trying to overthrow the Overseer who has gone crazy with power.

That sounds great!

*looks it up*

Oh... it's a twin stick shooter. I thought there would be something closer to actual hacking.

 

[Zloth]

I did play through all of Portal and started on Portal 2, which I like a lot and has been many years since I played. I finally got to the Cave Johnson stuff, which is by far the best part of the game and I'm slowly putting in time there.

The lemon speech was awesome!

...though I'm thinking about running around in my undies.

I didn't even switch because it promptly started snowing. Awww, pretty! And snow even covers the ground! And... oh, I'm getting cold? I'm still getting colder and colder? OK, easy enough to start a fire - though not very fun to just stand there waiting to heat up. Just as I nearly got out of the 'cold' body temperature, I caught a cold!

I finally saved up enough to get blue sand armor. Combined with my halberd-with-hyena-teeth, it's getting safer to travel - but the snow is still falling and the places I've found to explore seem pretty rough, so I think it's time to skip town and seek a warmer climate.

The thing is, my stash chest is in my house. Wherever I go, I won't have a house for a long time, so how do I get into my stash? Will I be locked out of it?? How much will it cost me to get home? This whole one-save thing is getting on my nerves.

 

[Pifanjr]

We did another Archipelago session yesterday. This time one of my friends decided to play Kingdom Hearts 2 and the other one played Outer Wilds. Since Kingdom Hearts 2 does not support Deathlink, I went with Yu Gi Oh 2006, which is the only game I have that doesn't have Deathlink either.

For Yu Gi Oh, I get rewards for winning duels with specific win conditions, while I have to unlock new opponents and new booster packs to buy. It was a lot of fun making different decks from a limited selection of cards to get the various win conditions.

One problem we ran into however is that Kingdom Hearts 2 is a far bigger game than either Outer Wilds or Yu Gi Oh 2006. It has well over 600 items, while Outer Wilds and Yu Gi Oh have about 80 each. This meant that the Kingdom Hearts 2 player was mostly collecting his own (useless) items and had to backtrack a bunch if he happened to miss a chest somewhere containing an important item for me or my other friend.

One way to prevent this is to specify a list of locations/checks that will or won't have important rewards. For example, in my Yu Gi Oh game I specifically excluded important rewards for finding specific ultra rare cards in booster packs, since opening a hundred packs in the hopes of finding the right card just so someone can keep playing their game sucks. However, neither of my friends did this, so if they missed any item they could risk missing something important for someone else.

 

[Tesxdrew]

Yeah, “followed” always felt like a weird metric compared to wishlists. I get that it shows engagement, but wishlists seem way closer to actual sales intent.
Also curious about that iRacing arcade game if they manage to keep the driving feel but make it more accessible, that could be a really nice middle ground.

 

[neogunhero]

As you guys probably know, I've been going very hard into Crimson Desert. We've been posting regularly over on the Crimson Desert thread. After 20 hours of gameplay, I can wholeheartedly recommend this game to anyone who is a fan of open world sandbox action games.

It's not exactly an RPG, and the story definitely is the weakest part of the game, but the gameplay more than makes up for the entire experience. It gives off a great sense of exploration, there are even some slight immersive sim elements to it. You are given lots of tools, and often there is more than one way to complete an objective while using these tools.

If I had to compare this game to others, I'd say it gives off a mix of Skyrim, Zelda BotW and RDR2 while maintaining it's own unique gameplay style.

If you're a sandbox sicko like me who enjoys slaying tons of enemies in the most fashionable and mechanically complex ways you can think of, this is the game for you. Also, this game has a high tendency to make your brain go "I wonder what's over that hill" while on your way to an objective, only to be completely sidetracked for the next hour. This type of game was seemingly made for me and I'm loving every minute of it. Definitely something I can play for months to come.

 

[Zloth]

So, when I last posted, I was still in the starter town in Outward. Snow was falling. I had finally scraped up enough money for some OK armor, then I scraped up another 200-and-a-little to use the fast travel to get to the town added by the DLC, which I heard had an easy way to get your mana set up. I'm sure the devs wouldn't still have that option sitting right there if it was just trapping new players.

Yeah... I probably shouldn't have done that. First, it was still snowing in the new area. Second, I now only had a little money. I had hoped to simply go outside of town and do a little hunting/exploring to get some good food, but it was even colder than home and there was very little to find close to the city gates. I ended up scrambling all over town, opening every chest I could find, and even selling off a pitchfork I found. I got enough for the trip back home (odd that it takes 3 rations - it only took 2 to get here) and even some to buy a snow tent and a little training. This time, before getting my mana, I quit out and backed up my save.

I grabbed my mana (you get to pick how much you have by picking how much health and stamina to sacrifice), and - oh! I get a free spell! I have no clue what they are, so I looked them up in the Wiki as well as where you could get them normally. One was kinda far from home, the other was very far from home in a swampy town called Monsoon. OK, get the spell from the Monsoon.

I walked over to the caravan, paid my 200 silver, and got carted back... wait, this isn't home. Where am I?? <sigh> I'm in Monsoon. That's why I needed an extra ration. No house to stash my stuff in. Not a lot of point in having this snow tent out in a swamp, either. Well - glad I backed up my save.

Re-load my save from before the mana choice. This time, buy a nicer lantern and a cheaper tent. pick the other spell, and go to the caravan. Sure enough, it says 'Monsoon' right there, if I had bothered to read the prompt.

I pitch a tent in town, get some sleep, eat some of my cheap dried mushroom bars (ugh!), and head out in search of something better to kill and eat. That fire circle spell you can get here should be pretty cheap and it will change my wimpy mana spark spell into a fireball! I went out and found a monster that looked a bit like a velociraptor. Ummm.... I haven't seen one before in this game, but I've never seen a weak one in any other game. Well, so what? I can't really die and I'm close to town, so I might as well try, right?

I was pretty close to defeating the thing, but it won. Instead of getting dragged back to town by some nice person, though, the critter hauled me up to its layer! Just inside the door of its layer, thank goodness, not deep inside. Once I saw the door out, I turned around to try and see if there was anything good, found two more of these monsters coming at me, and ran out the door as fast as I could!

Now I'm out in some dangerous marshes with pretty bad health. It looks like town isn't super far away, but it isn't close, either. And I'm still very short on cash.

 

[Zed Clampet]

I'm not kidding when I say I almost cried when I read, "Stunlock Studios is working on a new game set in the beautiful, strange, and gothic world of V Rising. This will be our most ambitious project yet in our 15-year history of making games, and we can’t wait to begin this journey with you. The hunt for blood is about to evolve."

As I've shown for years in my profile in Steam, V-Rising is my all-time favorite game, and V-Rising 2 will be my most anticipated game until the moment it releases, which will be a few years from now.

@Colif you may want to check out V-Rising. It has ARPG combat. It lists itself as a survival game, but you can minimalize survival components when you set up your game:

Gathering resources: during set-up maximize anything related to your crew of vampires you convert. You can send them on missions, and if you have everything on "max" then they will bring you what you need plus some. It will take an hour, maybe, to get to this point, so also make your own resource collection "max" that way when you chop a single tree, you'll get hundreds of wood.

Base building: Base building is incredibly easy, although there is some "bonuses" strategy to it if you want to pursue that. But the easiest you can make this is to set up your game where you get max base size from the beginning. Then you can easily just make a huge rectangle and be done with it. You will have to make and place storage chests and crafting tables. There's no way around that without mods, but the crafting is easy since it pulls from any chest on your property. You'll want to speed up crafting during game setup.

You have to drink (blood) every now and then, but you can get blood any time you fight anything, and you can also change how long the blood lasts you in the settings during game set-up so that you almost never have to remember to drink during combat.

Unlike ARPG's, there is only minimal story. You are basically just working your way through tech and skill upgrades by beating the 67 bosses on your way to Dracula. The story comes from reading about each boss.

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

Im around half way through Resident Evil 4 Remake. Starting to really get into it although its difficult for me to find time to play with the kid around. Fun game, nice that it has a parry although it took some time to get used to not having a dedicated dodge. Loving the shooting and exploration, story is fun, just wish I could play it more often.

Getting to the end of Guardians Of the Galaxy. Started playing it because my kid loves the movies. The characters are similar to the movies, Im guesing closer to the comic book. The game is a lot better then it has any right to be, playing as Peter Quill/Star Lord you get a radial menu to use special abilities of the other Guardians, which have some light synergies to exploit. Theres also environmental prompts and finishing moves to pull off with other character that just kind of happen in combat. Some of the puzzles and combat QTE stuff in boss fights wasnt intuitive or obvious for me, I just couldnt see a way through at times. Having said that quite often my kid saw what needed doing so I'm probably just old and blind to it somehow.

The Guardians are easily my favourite Marvel movies, so I find these characters and their barks and banter pretty funny. The story is fairly terrible, but its an ok vehicle for the banter and decent fun combat along the way.

I also started Hyper Light Drifter on the Steam Deck. Damn what a good game, beautiful neon pixel art and ambient synth sound, and nice medium paced deliberate 2d top down iframe dodge based combat. The art style and music along with the abstract story teling and weird post apocalyptic cyberpunk world all introduced with no text or VO make it feel really alien. Not so alien that its impossible to intuit what to do, just enough that it feels like your brain is engaged and intrigued all the time. Im only a couple hours in but I hope this feeling keeps up.

 

[Zed Clampet]

Hear me out. I was in the top 8 every day this week in Monster Train 2. I kept the screenshots to show Guido. There were only two other players who were on more than one day, and they were each on two days. This leads me to believe that if the game had an over-time ranking instead of just a daily, that there's an argument to be made that I would be #1.

 

[BeardyHat]

I finished off Portal 2 earlier this week.

It's an excellent game, but I still had to give myself a push to finish it, because I realize I don't find it as engaging as I do Half-Life as a series. It does have fantastic atmosphere, great story and fun dialogue, but I definitely prefer shooting things over solving strict puzzles; usually when I enter a new room in Portal, I just start to feel a little mentally fatigued and unready to do the steps completed to figure things out and solve them.

Also slowing down with Retro Rewind; I like it a lot and almost through the first month (about 8-hours in) and I think I might be a little bored? Feels like the gameplay has kind of shown me all the tricks it can do, unless I'm missing something. I'll probably play into the next month and see if it picks up anymore steam to see if I get interested again, otherwise I'll start thinking about something else.

 

[Zed Clampet]

Made a disposable base in Dune so I can pick up our non-disposable base. This one I'll eventually let the sand storms take.

I didn't have enough room for my vision of the base, so I just kind of improvised. 🙂 I could have bought more space, but I don't want to get attached to this base like I am the other one.

 

[Zloth]

Phew, Outward is pretty rough all right. I finally made it back around to my homeland just as the snow cleared up, so that will help. Seems like I've been playing quite a while without getting a whole lot stronger, though. If I have to take on two bandits at once, I should be able to live most of the time, barely, where a single bandit was trouble when I started.

I can now cast a fireball, but I need to make a fire circle to cast them from and I need a manastone to do that. Those aren't very common - certainly not common enough that I would want to use them in every battle.

I finished off Portal 2 earlier this week.

Spaaaaaaaaaace!!!

 

[Frindis]

I have been having a blast in Crimson Desert doing puzzles. What I really like about the puzzles is that, while I tend to overthink some of them, some actually lean more on thinking outside the box, and I find that to be a breath of fresh air when it comes to puzzles.

Saying that, there is no total freedom in the puzzle solving so far, because when I skipped a part of a tower puzzle I was doing by utilizing one of my grappling skills as a way to think outside the box, the puzzle mechanics stopped working, even if I got past the obstacle. This is something The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom did better because as long as you managed to get to the exit of the puzzle, you could do it your own way.

It is understandable that you can cannot have this total freedom in Crismon Desert though, because a lot of the puzzles have either a distinct pattern you have to follow, a certain way to open a door, a timed sequence or a certain set of tones to play, to mention some. They seem to be relying more on mechanical ways to interact than on you being the toolkit, if that makes sense.

 

[Frindis]

Made an extra post, so it did not get so long:

I have 81 hours in Crimson Desert and If I were to score it now, it would get a solid 9/10.

Sure, plenty of bugs, weird AI at times, and some vendor items and random items you find seem weirdly weighted when it comes to their value in currency. The waterfalls still looks like absolute garbage, but I just close my eyes, no big deal. Some bad quest designs at times, and way too many fetch quests. On the flip side, the easy fetch quest to get your inventory space expanded pretty fast.

The good things in this game outweigh anything bad by a mile. It looks insanely good, the exploration is perfect as you really feel like you are on an adventure. Jawdropping stuff to see, secrets upon secrets, clever puzzles, items that are starting to grow on me as I get better and better ones, different awesome-looking bioms. You can arm wrestle, box, arrow competitions, spear duels, do card matches, do different skill challenges...

Then you are able to do just about anything else, like I dunno (since I actually dunno all you can do) make a base, be a bank investor, wagon trader, robber, send companions on missions (and give them gifts), actually repair and do changes in the world that YOU can see and even see workers fixing! Have your own place you can customize, get different pets/mounts (even legendary ones), make potions/dyes, food, weapons, and armour. Agument weapons/armour with stats, skills and even mix them to make some hybrid. You can arm wrestle, box, arrow competitions, do card matches.

*phew* ummm, oh yeah, use an arsenal of really cool skills, that not only kill stuff, but you can use them to mine, chop trees, trap stuff, meditate, slow time down, fly and solve puzzles or even to just burn down some stuff. The devs literally put every other game in the world inside of this one, and I love it!

Oh, and it would not be an RPG game if you could not do or witness this:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPN4BOcbikg

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S64I0kaCS0o

 

[dxchase]

Hello!! Well im back from not playing on my PC for... 4 days! (maybe early thursday morning but)

The Louisville Arcade Expo was a blast! Attached are some pictures i took along with the streams i TRIED to run while i was there. The wifi there was gated but it was also very poor due to all the different systems connecting to the network. But i got SOME stuff. Check it out, i hit up all the rooms, some parts might be boring, but youll get a good scope of what this expo was.

The best part of this convention for me? THE LAN ROOM! Playing Unreal Tournament 2004 and Half-Life. There was also a couple PCs set up with multiple games. I spent a good hour at one playing someones diablo character, shadow warrior and sim city 2000. All on an old pc, it was a great time. Haha. Sure i had fun with the arcades, all the different consoles and pinballs, but the lan room got me, my wife and son playing and laughing with strangers for hours. Good times.



As far as "gaming" i still have not really ventured into Crimson Desert. I see all these cool videos and stuff but when i wind up having time to play, i pop on something else other than Crimson, idk why but i think ill eventually get around to playing it lol.




Pics/videos:

Here is one of the livestreams casing the whole place. I have a couple others, mind the audio and some of the weird parts like the beginning lol. It was hard to get stuff set up with limited internet and a lot of noise, so please dont hate too much. Again, check it out so you can get a scope of the whole thing. It was big and the event was a blast from open until close.

View: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2734869554

 

[Zloth]

Kids talk about 6 7... Me, I get excited when I see 4:3! Though I guess some of those monitors are probably 5:4.

 

[BeardyHat]

The best part of this convention for me? THE LAN ROOM! Playing Unreal Tournament 2004 and Half-Life. There was also a couple PCs set up with multiple games. I spent a good hour at one playing someones diablo character, shadow warrior and sim city 2000. All on an old pc, it was a great time. Haha. Sure i had fun with the arcades, all the different consoles and pinballs, but the lan room got me, my wife and son playing and laughing with strangers for hours. Good times.

Looks awesome! How'd you do with the LAN multiplayer?

I played a bit of Quake 3 at VCF Midwest last year and I did ok, middle of the pack. Felt like my multiplayer FPS skills definitely atrophied in the last 20 years!

Just recently finished a book called Shadow Divers, about a group of divers that find a WW2-era German Uboat off the New Jersey coast. It was a damn interesting read and I couldn't put it down and it ended-up getting me pretty intrigued for the war at sea, which is an aspect of WW2 I haven't really been interested in or explored.

But that new thirst finally gave me the push I needed to earnestly start the game UBOAT, which has been sitting in my library for about two years now, unplayed.

UBOAT on Steam

UBOAT is a simulator of a submarine from WWII era. It is a survival sandbox with crew management mechanics while its primary theme is life of German sailors. The boat is their home, but it can become their grave at any time.

store.steampowered.com

It's hella janky, mouse clicks don't always do what you expect them to and sometimes things just don't work the way you expect them to. It runs ok on Steam Deck, but it's definitely not optimized for it when it comes down to controls and UI scale, so things can be challenging to read. And there's just a lot of interconnected systems that can be very tough to navigate through and especially with my awful memory, it can be challenging for me to remember where things are and how to do certain things, so I need to constantly turn to Google for stuff. Also, it really wants to be on an NVMe. Performance is completely awful on an HDD, so bad that I had to make room for it on my NVMe on my main PC and move it over there...which also performance in general is quite bad. It runs fairly poorly on my laptop, which isn't a powerhouse, but the game doesn't look good enough to justify how it actually runs.

But, I'm loving it and I can't stop thinking about it. Each time I put it down and do something else for a bit, my mind drifts back to the game and I end-up firing it back up again. There are long stretches of boredom (like real sea life, I suppose), but thankfully there is a time compression mechanic where you can speed the game up from x12 to x15000 (not a typo) speed.

I'm only playing on Easy, with a lot of the simulation aspects turned off (I definitely don't want to calculate a firing solution on a moving ship, while mine is also moving), but it still feels very Sim heavy. There's a lot of management aspects to it as well, such as trying to keep your crew morale up and managing your officers and their exhaustion, as well as what jobs they need to be doing at any given time.

So far, I've only been on four or five missions, mine laying, sinking merchant ships, etc, but it's been a very good time. I just started one where I need to make it to another Uboat wreck and recover the Enigma code before the Brits can, which I'm not sure how that'll go. I just arrived at the location and there's a British Cruiser and another small ship, clearly surveying or diving the wreck, so I'm not sure if I should wait or attack them and hope for the best. I tend to get my ass kicked rapidly when I engage warships.

Speaking of, fun fact I learned (not so fun, actually): German Uboats in WW2 weren't actually terribly effective. They did their jobs effectively, but ultimately didn't sink enough cargo to really make an impact on the war (obviously). I read somewhere that they actually sunk about less than a % of the total cargo sent from the US to Britain and Uboats also had about a 70% casualty rate. Only about 12000 of 40000 Uboat sailors ever returned home. That is absolutely brutal.

 

[Johnway]

Not much to say on my front, still playing Path of exile but this time my main build the elemental strike slayer has been performing wonders throughout the campaign. Bosses just melted. but i suspect it was because i had my witch character do most of the initial leg work, but its all fun and games for now. The real test is when it comes to the red tier maps...

besides playing POE, i've installed a few more indie games. One of them was neverending nightmares. Technically, i've beaten the game, having seen one of the endings. but i will play a bit more to see the other endings.

Besides that i've been doing my usual art and the end is in sight. nearly 3 months of work on and off. Most of it i did last week on my week off. hopefully with easter weekend coming up, i can finish off the rest of it. Atm i've left the main bit seriously under developed and there are some glaring flaws to address. its highly possible large alterations are going to be needed...

 

[Zed Clampet]

It's hella janky,

It's a Playway game, so it could have been a lot worse. For instance, they could have launched it into early access and a month later, with no updates, declared it 1.0 and that they were moving on. Yet, I have untold Playway games, and I usually like them. I really wish they would give all the developers the time they need instead of trying to cheaply spray and pray their way to success. Most of their games are failures, but that doesn't bother them because every now and then they have a huge hit. At any given time they have about 100 games "coming soon" on Steam. The thing is that a lot of the failures could actually have been good games if they had a different philosophy.

 

[BeardyHat]

It's a Playway game, so it could have been a lot worse. For instance, they could have launched it into early access and a month later, with no updates, declared it 1.0 and that they were moving on. Yet, I have untold Playway games, and I usually like them. I really wish they would give all the developers the time they need instead of trying to cheaply spray and pray their way to success. Most of their games are failures, but that doesn't bother them because every now and then they have a huge hit. At any given time they have about 100 games "coming soon" on Steam. The thing is that a lot of the failures could actually have been good games if they had a different philosophy.

Interesting, never actually heard of them until now.

Though seems like UBOAT has been around for quite awhile. Feel like I've seen posts going back to 2021 and even earlier at times.

 

[Zed Clampet]

Interesting, never actually heard of them until now.

Though seems like UBOAT has been around for quite awhile. Feel like I've seen posts going back to 2021 and even earlier at times.

I may have given the wrong impression. They have a lot of good games and Uboat is one of them. They've been around for about 15 years. Their games are kind of difficult to track because they own partially or in full, about 100 developers and publishers, and who they list on their games is more a matter of marketing than reality. Used to be, they would take their name off of any game that didn't have good user reviews, but the company has become a lot more professional over the last few years. I get frustrated with their "toss a hundred games out and see if anything sticks" philosophy, but, as I said, I own a lot of Playway games. and I've never been disappointed, but that's because I do 10 times the research when I know it's Playway.

 

[Zloth]

Ha! I'm getting somewhere in Outward. There's a little castle full of ghosts, which drop mana stones, which I can easily turn into fire stones, which let me cast fireballs. I think I'll back up my save, toss a bunch around to practice, then restore it. (Outward is supposed to be one of those one-save-so-your-choices-matter kind of games, and then they don't give you enough info to make good choices.)

But yeah, MUCH patience is required for this game, given that you have to jog everywhere.