What are you playing this weekend? December 2023

[Pifanjr]

I was going to say that the sentries would give her a hard time, but I didn't know you could get rid of them in the options. You should be aware that you are constantly having to gather resources and that crafting all the things you need can be a bit complex. I'm assuming you can't get rid of fuel needs in the options, and everything in the game requires fuel of some type, including all of your tools, most of which need different fuels.

The Waypoint update of October 2022 added a Custom difficulty, in which you can turn off all fuel costs, double the yield when mining resources and make crafting and all items available in shops completely free. With all of that I suspect the amount of resources you need to gather will be doable for her, or I'll be able to do it quickly myself if she wants to craft something specific. If that's still too complex, she can also try playing in creative mode.

She's old enough to enjoy Wizard101 now, and the first world is free if you ever want to try that. My kids played that from age 5, and they still play it occasionally today. Combat after the first 3 worlds gets slightly challenging, but the first three worlds will last you a good while, and you could always help her with strategies later. Game is very well written and every line is voice acted. Wonderful game for kids.

I'll definitely check that out, thanks for the suggestion! Every line being voice acted is amazing, as helping her read dialogue is quite a bother for a lot of games. Especially since she wants me to translate it all, even though she understands English pretty well.

 

[DXCHASE]

Does it have fog mode so you can relive what it looked like on Nintendo 64?

Oh yea it does. There is a CRT filter too i can use which is nice. They re-did the animations during cut-scenes but its still very n64 like with the fog in the background lol.

 

[Zloth]

Spore was the beta version of NMS... even had the same marketing.

its also 20+ years old so can understand why it feels limiting now.

It also has some M.U.L.E. easter eggs, including the music popping up sometimes when you're in space. That music drove me insane when I first heard it in Spore because I knew I had heard it before but couldn't figure out where. After an hour, I finally remembered.

So, Spore was 20 years back and MULE was about 20 years before Spore. Sheeesh!

If that's still too complex, she can also try playing in creative mode.

There you go! Creative is also good for learning how to do the controls.

The hardest part of No Man's Sky is the first 30 minutes or so, when you find your ship and have to get it working.

 

[Pifanjr]

There you go! Creative is also good for learning how to do the controls.

The hardest part of No Man's Sky is the first 30 minutes or so, when you find your ship and have to get it working.

I'm worried that starting in creative will be overwhelming with everything being unlocked and there would be no sense of progression, but I'm not entirely sure how much she cares about that. Or rather, I know she likes getting rewards for doing things, but only if the thing that needs to be done isn't too boring, otherwise it just feels like doing a chore with the reward as your payment. Which is understandable of course, I just don't know yet whether having to gather resources would be a chore for her or something she would enjoy doing.

For now she's really into Fortnite though, so there's no need to get a new game for her just yet. She really likes that there's a train riding around the island now.

 

[Brian Boru]

she's really into Fortnite

Oh I didn't know they'd started 'Bring your daughter to murder' days—nice

 

[Pifanjr]

Oh I didn't know they'd started 'Bring your daughter to murder' days—nice

They get taught murder at school. They had a fairy theme week and she loved Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood, especially how the villains were dealt with.

 

[WoodenSaucer]

I'm not sure if I'll have much gaming time this weekend, but if I do, I'll probably be playing Starfield. I'm having about as much fun with it as I did with Skyrim. Bethesda is good at making buggy, last-gen-looking games that are very fun to play (in my opinion).

I might get some time in on Monday, though. My brother is coming over to see my PC for the first time.

 

[Pifanjr]

I suspect I'll be playing a bunch of the new LEGO survival mode in Fortnite with my kid. I played it a little bit yesterday and so far it looks like it'll be fairly simple, but decent.
Getting resources seemed a bit more grindy than I would like, but you can ask NPCs to help collect stuff and I quit before I saw how useful they are.
The combat feels good. There's a dodge button that lets you roll/jump out of the way of attacks and your melee attacks chain nicely.
Building works well. You can either put down a blueprint and build it piece by piece or just freely place pieces in the world yourself.
One nice little touch is that you can get resources from neutral animals by petting them.

One of the most impressive parts, as a software developer myself, is that they converted almost all available Fortnite skins into LEGO versions using some sort of algorithm. The more elaborate skins are missing parts, but it's pretty impressive nonetheless, and those skins have a note they will be updated later. It does seem they might have some licensing issues though, as Optimus Prime and Ahsoka Tano weren't available as LEGO skins at all.

 

[kittycat60]

League of legends and Genshin. Also recently have tried a new one game from korean developers called https://www.mark-onca.com/. Cool one tho. U should definitely try it once!

 

[Johnway]

With the POE league up and running i'll probably play that. The good news is that this league challenges looks doable for a change. but we'll see...

Failing that, finishing some doomwads or a bit of AOE2. i believe chiv2 is having a free weekend so there will be fresh meat, but honestly i'm past that now. The sweatlords are stil there and just ruin any sense of balanced teams as they love to stack to one side.

 

[DXCHASE]

Aside from my usual beatdown grinds of Diablo 4 and Destiny 2 i have had the pleasure of trying Slarogs Dream its kinda like Diablo meets Skyrim. Its a unique twist on the genres. I find the combat to be competent enough, the graphics are ok and i wish there was more dialogue, but the soundtrack is nice and building up your character along with eating/cooking etc. feels good so far.

 

[Zloth]

I'm playing Solasta's Palace of Ice DLC. There's an early, unmissable achievement that only about 7% of players have gotten, so few people have played it. That's a pity, the first few hours have already been fun. Though it does seem to have duplicated a few of my items in the transition from the main game to the DLC.

 

[ZedClampet]

Train people are dang pleased with this line operations sim because it's not too hardcore, nor too simple

Railroader is swig of truck simulator, a dash of a proper train sim, and a sprinkling of co-op.

www.pcgamer.com

This is the only new thing I'm playing this weekend. Got it on Friday and was surprised to see they did an article on it.

I'm not really a train guy. I'm more of a railroad person, and the economy in this game suits me just fine. I have had fun driving the trains, but I'll probably switch to AI engineers here soon and just work the strategy/econ side of it.

(oops, it's Monday--retired life)

 

[томиго]

My brother is playing and I really liked it​

 

[ZedClampet]

Playing some House Flipper 2
Ranch Sim
Pioneers of Pagonia
and Cult of the Lamb

If the kids are willing, might play some Lethal Company and Phasmophobia or if it's just Guido, maybe some Avatar or Medieval Dynasty.

Probably going to be no kids this weekend, though.

 

[Zloth]

Still playing the Palace of Ice DLC for Solasta. I'm starting to get some stats above 20. The most recent battles have been on the easy side - I went up against some boss fire giant last night and none of my characters took any damage at all. They got hit a few times, but it all came off of temporary hit points. It's probably time to up the difficulty.

 

[BeardyHat]

Probably won't have a ton of time this weekend, but I fit in a little bit of Dredge today. I'm currently at about 8 hours total and still liking it, but slowing down a little bit from my initial infatuation with it. But all things considered, when I fire up something else, like trying to play a little bit of Turtle WoW, I end-up just thinking that I ought to go back to Dredge.

Also finally picked-up Summon Night: Swordcraft Story on my Miyoo Mini, which has been nice to play when I don't feel like playing anything involved, such as Dredge. Very easy to just power the thing up and play for 10 minutes, then set it back down and not have to think too much about it.

 

[Brian Boru]

Ghost Recon Breakpoint

I never actually played this since it got a generally bad rep, so decided to give it a spin when I tripped over it earlier. Blech. It's been uninstalled again

Launch Problem

Downloaded and installed fine from Ubi, but went a bit screen crazy on launch. Flashing while attempting to change resolution. Eventually sorted it via the Windows 10 Troubleshooter—which usually is no help, so kudos this time. It set it to 640x480 resolution in Compatibility Mode. Yes really, it's been a couple of decades since I last saw that

TPP

I didn't realize it's third-person view, which usually doesn't work for me—I'm missing the TPP gene, it's a hereditary thing. After the usual stupid intro sequence—reminded me of a poor relation of Crysis' intro—I faffed around for a bit, but no dice, not a friendly TPP for me.

One item of interest is there is an option to make aiming FPP. The mod for full FPP on Nexus—thanks guys, as always—seems constrained by what they have to work with, and therefore buggy in various ways.

Graphics Options

There are loads of choices in Options, so this game might suit an RPG player looking to try a shooter. I poked in the Graphics section, and it had my resolution set to 1280 x 720—so not the 640x480 mentioned above, which of course was not 16:9 aspect ratio. 1080p was available so I changed to that—and the game went screen Breakpoint on me again!

So enough, I'm Ghosting it now

 

[Zloth]

It's probably time to up the difficulty.

Did. Managed to get my wizard killed in a tough battle but recovered. Fun restored!

Many games have that option - I wish more did!

 

[Brian Boru]

What Remains of Edith Finch

Gave this a shot yesterday. Lasted about an hour, and that's only to make sure I wasn't missing anything, given all the rave receptions it got some years ago.

It's a kids' or teen fantasy walking sim, which got boring very quickly. It would make a nice animated short film—reminded me of those Polish cartoons which were on TV as fillers decades ago.

Not an adult game tho, in any sense of the word—choices, agency, themes, story. Could appeal if you like slow Hidden Object games, but I'm not into those either—I can take normal paced ones in small doses.

 

[gebena]

I play league of legends all the time

 

[AdamAdam]

Unfortunately, 90% of the weekends of the year are working, and the same is true of holidays, so when I have time off I classically fall into a moment with a second WOW or StarCraft (with two rounds). Then I throw in something much older, Half Life and Street Fighter II (a title I still remember from the days of flip games where we played for days )

Greetings and have a nice day

 

[Magatach]

This weekend I started playing It Take Two with my wife, well, I can say that we are already holding on with all our strength

 

[eltarinkderut]

Over the weekend I plunged into the world of World of Warcraft, I think next weekend I will continue and I invite you

 

[AdamAdam]

Over the weekend I plunged into the world of World of Warcraft, I think next weekend I will continue and I invite you

Out of curiosity in which version? I wonder if there are players here who are able to go through entire campaigns from scratch after a while, it happens to me after 2-4 years, such a sentiment. I it in love with Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness and already with the add-on Warcraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal it does the whole thing an amazing job.