July 2023 Random Game Thoughts Thread

[Kaamos_Llama]

yeah i find that a bit of a double edged sword sometimes. The game world is strangely lifeless without all those messages on the floor or those ghostly reflections. i don't mean dead, more in a sterile/bland sense.

I did play Dark Souls 2 offline for a large chunk of it near the end as frankly getting invaded was just annoying as hell. if i recall, certain areas were PVP and you didn't need to be human to do PVP content. Someone invades and the fight is on. I found the whole thing irritating. Especially when you're not very good, not geared for PVP play and the people who do invade made no pretentions as to their motives; to be a bunch of dicks and to rob you in the process. Sure the AI invaded you but honestly i was ok with that as they were part of the game, the human players weren't and frankly being their to be unintentionally ganked filled me with hatred for my fellow man.


Not much to report on the Hollow knight side of things. Still plodding along mapping the game world, gearing up before i face off against the 3 main dreamers. I've finally acquired all the maps, the tram card and the last of the nailmaster skills and started to harvest stuff with the dreamnail. I'm not sure what to think tbh, most seem to warn me to stop or feel like innocent souls minding their own business. i mean, one of them is a Girl scout bug begging people to buy her cookies so she could go home. i can't harvest that... I'm not a monster. i mean, yeah, its dead, but same time it feels sentient. Currently at 300-400ish souls.

i did make some unintentional detour into the deepnest after i slipped and fell down a large hole. Took me ages mapping that place and its filled with spiders, parasites and stuff of nightmares. Will go back there last once i've mapped the other stuff.

I first played DS to completion on the Switch in 2018 or something, and I wasnt going to subscribe to Nintendo online just for that. Definitely made the game a lot harder, and missed a lot of stuff because of it. I still loved it and played all the other games straight after, but the messages definitely make the games feel more alive, and I wouldnt turn them off on purpose.

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No time for many games for me for a while. Stuck halfway through a Doom replay and 20+ hours into Per Aspera. Doom is still fantastic, but its a bit weird to not have all the toys yet after finishing Eternal fairly recently. Barely need to use the chainsaw for ammo early on, feels kind of weird.

 

[Zloth]

I actually revved up Dark Messiah of Might & Magic - it was too hot to play anything modern, my A/C has enough work to do without my PC adding to it from the inside.

The mighty boot is back with a vengeance! I'm spending a good bit of time in the battles running away to a place where I can kick my enemy over a ledge, into a fire, or into one of the many spike beds. The controls were a bit rough at first, but I'm getting used to them.

 

[Pifanjr]

Despite my initial plan to ignore the settlements in Fallout 4 as much as possible, I just can't bring myself to ignore my settlers' plight for such silly things as having enough water to drink and a bed(roll) to sleep. And while I had planned to use the settlers as living mannequins for my legendary loot, I find it too tedious to get that stuff out of a chest and then try to track down a settler to give it too, so they just get whatever I happen to have in my inventory. Which is at least miles better than the standard pipe pistol most of them have.

I've gotten slightly annoyed at the fact that the reload button is the same button for opening containers and the one for taking all of the items from that container once opened. It doesn't happen often enough that I open a container instead of reloading that I've bothered to look for a solution, but it's still annoying every time it does happen. Similarly, it's annoying that the melee power attack button is also the button for throwing explosives, if held for a second. I hardly use melee weapons, which makes it all the more likely I'll forget not to hold the power attack button too long when I do use one.

 

[ZedClampet]

Played some Remnant 2 by myself. They have something called Adventure Mode. Basically, you reroll the world and can start over as many times as you want to. Anything you get in that mode carries over to the campaign, so it's sort of like grinding. However, the levels are randomized, so you get to go new places.

Let's just say that the game is a hell of a lot harder without Guido. Not really being a shooter guy, I don't have that much practice, but I'm sure getting it today.

 

[OsaX Nymloth]

Trying to max out achievements in Ghostwire: Tokyo and I am going crazy trying to locate yokai in the Spider's Thread mode. 10h in and I haven't found a single Oni for example. At least I've maxed out my character, so I just need to.... *checks the list*
buy every skill
get 9 lost cats that I missed
get the damn yokai
finish the 30th floor, again

Yeah, this will TAKE A WHILE.

 

[mainer]

I think I'm in a love/hate relationship with the System Shock Remake. Most times the game is immersive, fun, and the gameplay flows along really well. But then I'll get to an area, or into a situation that just becomes overly tedious, difficult, or have obscure goals you need to complete to get to the next level. The amount of backtracking to previous levels has also increased. Sometimes you'll have to go back down to a certain level to flip a specific switch. Good luck with that if you haven't marked it on your map, as very few things are marked, and the levels are huge mazes.

It's gotten so that I mark any door that I can't immediately open for some reason, or any switch/button I find, I mark them on the levels map, so it makes it a little easier to find something later. For example, on the map below I've just started the engineering level, and all those orange markers are ones I've placed marking inaccessible doors or switches.

In all, it makes for a game that's a bit erratic in gameplay, in my opinion at least. I do like it overall and would still recommend it, as some of those things that bug me may not be an issue to others. I did fix my cyberspace frustration by downloading 3 mods that make that experience much more enjoyable. There aren't many mods available, but they're really easy to install, as it's just a drag and drop into a specific folder.

I'm trying to finish SS up by Thursday 8/3 11:00 AM, as that's when the full release of BG3 is available for the EST time zone. I was originally going to wait until after I played Starfield, but there's just no way I can wait, especially after seeing some of the recent gameplay footage. The amount of work Larian has done with the voice acting and motion capture tech is just amazing. Once 9/6 hits, I'll have another choice to make: keep playing or switch to Starfield. I'll worry about that in September.

Speaking of BG3, I recently received another Steam Key for BG3. I've had the EA version since it released and it's already installed, so the extra key isn't doing me any good. So if any of our current regular members are interested in a key for BG3, let me know and I can PM you. Hopefully it's someone who really wants to play it (I know there are a couple members planning to play day 1) and hasn't already purchased it.

 

[Zloth]

Dark Messian of Might & Magic is... interesting. It's Arkane, that's for sure. You'll find multiple paths to victory for many things, though maybe not all.

You also get a companion. Eeesh. She falls in love with you practically on sight. She'll also fall over random things on the ground, gets hurt, blames you, and causes the quest to immediately fail! Most of the time, she'll simply run over to some locked gate that you'll need to get to the other side of and wait there for you - then tell you what a manly man you are when you open it for her. Once, though, she came along for the battle. OMG! There were a LOT of orcs, so just telling her to wait someplace way out of the way wasn't working out, but she fought so incredibly stupid that I had to re-load many times to get through the battle!

There's another woman companion that's just in your head. She's some sort of spirit (maybe a succubus?) who is also, shall we say, thirsty.

The game has some bugs, but they've been funny ones so far. It seems I left some hostile goblins behind somewhere when this happened:

View: https://youtu.be/bNsASFDWwgU

I'm trying to finish SS up by Thursday 8/3 11:00 AM, as that's when the full release of BG3 is available for the EST time zone.

I need to bookmark that post. If I hear any complains about 'timed quests,' I'm bringing this up!

 

[Brian Boru]

I was originally going to wait until after I played Starfield, but there's just no way I can wait

Since both are A1 choices for you, BG3 seems the obvious one to play first—and of course more so since it releases a month earlier.

Reason being the release bugs in Starfield are probably going to be much worse than those in BG3, going on the respective devs' form to date. So completing BG3 will give valuable fixing time to SF.

Anyway, best of enjoyable luck with both, hope they're stellar and top quality

 

[Pifanjr]

I actually revved up Dark Messiah of Might & Magic - it was too hot to play anything modern, my A/C has enough work to do without my PC adding to it from the inside.

The mighty boot is back with a vengeance! I'm spending a good bit of time in the battles running away to a place where I can kick my enemy over a ledge, into a fire, or into one of the many spike beds. The controls were a bit rough at first, but I'm getting used to them.

I once spent probably two hours just messing with a bunch of goblins. I made a save just before an area that kept spawning them for a while and just kept reloading it whenever they ran out. Making icy spots on the floor so they'd slip into a fire or off of a ledge never really got old.

 

[neogunhero]

Had a busy weekend and only found an hour to play some games. Decided on some Vampire Survivors for a quick play session. I can unlock a new level by getting to level 80 on Gallo Tower. Easy enough I thought, so I tried to get to it. Hit level 78 then… my power went out. Wtf??? That discouraged me from playing anymore yesterday…

 

[XoRn]

I saw the Batman Arkham games were on sale this weekend so I picked up Arkham City and Arkham Knight. I have some vague recollection of enjoying Arkham Asylum roughly a decade or more ago so I decided to refresh my memory and play it first.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover I had the remaster of Arkham Asylum in my Steam library. Apparently they gave free copies to owners of the original game.

I'm a few hours in and... it still holds up. I'd even go so far as to say while it's no longer the top dog, it's still one of the best superhero games around. Maybe it's just my nostalgia punching through my modern critical lenses, but the moment I heard Kevin Conroy's iconic voice under the cowl and pummeled the first room full of thugs with a series of balletic flip kicks and open palm strikes I was just enjoying myself to much to nitpick the minor contrivances.

It's a definitive Batman experience with all the right verbs: combat, stealth, gadgets, detecting and lots of frightened enemies. Maybe the weakest part so far has been the optional Riddler Trophies, since you aren't actually solving riddles to get them, so much as waiting to unlock the correct ability to destroy a wall or tear down a vent cover. That and the button layout can be a little confusing to get used too, requiring holding left trigger in order to use whatever gadget is currently equipped, its just a few to many steps to feel slick in swapping on the fly.

I'm excited to get to the sequels, both of which are as good, if not even better from what I understand.

 

[Johnway]

We're almost at end game terrortory now in hollow knight. Got my nail maxed out, completed 2 of 3 arena challenges, most of the grubs rescued and i've started to dig into DLC content and mopping up the final bosses. its getting a lot harder now, namely the bosses are more aggressive/faster and/or hit harder (so taking 2 instead of 1 health at a time).

We'll see what we can do, the challenge is trying to use the right pins before battle to give me an edge. The problem is that i can't have healing/do serious damage etc. The other thing is to try and convert the fragile pins into non fragile ones so they won't break. Easier said then done though as it will require 90000+ geo and i'm sitting at 20000....

Looking at the godhood DLC its come to my attention i've missed a few bosses. So i need to hunt for them too.

 

[Pifanjr]

Instead of searching through itch.io for games to play when I'm on my laptop, I decided to give Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup (DCSS) a try.

It's a classic roguelike like Angband, which I've played quite a lot of, but it is very much it's own game. One major difference is that Angband has items that let you instantly teleport away, whereas in DCSS it takes a couple of turns before you're teleported. In Angband you need to be able to escape at a moment's notice because most enemies can kill you in one attack if you aren't prepared, especially on deeper levels. So far it seems that death in DCSS occurs far less sudden, but you also have less options to get away if things do suddenly take a turn for the worse.

So far I think I prefer Angband to DCSS still, but I haven't gotten very far in DCSS yet and there are a couple of mechanics that are very interesting which I'm looking forward to discover more of.

 

[ZedClampet]

I'm going to be late making the August random thoughts thread. Probably won't be until tomorrow afternoon.

 

[Zloth]

I'm excited to get to the sequels, both of which are as good, if not even better from what I understand.

I liked City the best. There were a lot more Riddler-trophies-that-aren't-riddles, but they're good puzzles anyway. There's one series of quests that has you going from one side of the city to another as fast as possible, which felt like the old City of Heroes days where we would race each other to the next mission.

I'm going to be late making the August random thoughts thread. Probably won't be until tomorrow afternoon.

That's still August 1st where I'm sitting!