What are you playing right now?

Ive been playing Ace Combat 7. Holy shit its so kino. Im a sourpuss most of the time and this game has made me grin like an idiot a couple of times. The music is amazing. Having such a funtime that Im even considering getting a flight stick and a VR headset.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=p39XNj-F7-c, list: PLvnl04mTlSUghWj9I8BpJOk8VunGeCaBb
Get ready to enjoy the sequel with this lovely lady(?) in it!!!
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What do you mean you're "black fatigued", what does that mean?
 
Trying to clear the last of my unfinished Xbox 360 games. Just finished Hitman Absolution. Yeah, not bad. Reminded me of Splinter Cell rather than the other Hitman games I've played, didn't seem to be many options and very linear. Some of the paths felt unintuitive but I got there in the end. But I had fun with it once I got the hang of it.

Now all I have left is ... Batman: Arkham Origins. A game I've owned for twelve years and shut off after that fucking bridge... wish me luck.
 
I don't handle actual horror well and I suspect that for a "horror-ish" Deep Southern thing South of Midnight (I loved We Happy Few from the same devs) would work better for me. People were slagging it off as woke but from what I've read it isn't, it's just... about Black people. In Louisiana. Where Black people live.
If you loved We Happy Few then you should definitely check out South of Midnight. I played both games and I'd say SoM is more polished, and while the gameplay feels a bit dated it was better than We Happy Few's. The story didn't feel "woke" or preachy to me. The characters had depth to them and even the more antagonistic ones had a sympathetic side. Also, the music is excellent and I'm a sucker for a good soundtrack.
 
Harold Halibut is improving.
I ragequit (from boredom) Suzerain today. And it took me several tries (in the sense of bouncing on first opening it) to get launched.
I was not pleased when I realized how much it is just a visual novel, down to including the obvious decoy bad answers; the equivalent of the Jap porno hentai game having an option where you ask a girl if you can slap her tits being toasting the Communists at the Small Business Owner's Association or whatever), but what really killed it for me was all the Ruritanian gibberish names.

I've played several games that do this, Disco Elysium does it, Ace Combat does it, but those aren't asking you to keep track of several ethnic groups, a dozen countries, dozens of politicians, etc., and usually they have a strength in that they're lazier so they will just straight up expy a culture, or they'll lazily slap two together (like I seem to recall the structural American analogue in Ace Combat has French cultured names). Here I have syllable salad of Germanic/Balkan-sounding nonsense and the whole game is expressed through text, basically, so I have no feeling for what "Sordland" even looks like. I cannot invest in this shite. I just found myself wishing that I was given an alternate history or straight up history scenario.

I think Disco Elysium did a better job with religion, too. It's genuienly hard to make plausible (especially sociologically plausible) and unique religions and Nurity isn't one to one, but I liked Disco Elysium's central church (whatever it was called) a lot better, the way it was basically History in the Hegelian since being incarnated (one per mode of production) in an anthopomorphic Pope.
 
Making my way through the Borderlands Pandora's Box collection on PC. I breezed through the first game and I'm currently playing 2. I've only ever played on consoles, so it's nice having my game run smoothly and not drop most of my frames if there's more than 2-3 explosions at a time.

Super excited to run through (some of) these games again
 
LitDoom (A mod for Doom 1/2). Tough but fun shit, has a steep learning curve but once you get the hang of it, it is truly fun.

I just finished Castlevania 3 (Fam version) with Grant Danasty, he basically makes a mockery of some level designs with his climbing ability (but by god, that shit is finnicky) and he actually throws daggers for free in this version. I can only conclude that the american version was so much harder as to motivate people buying the game instead of renting it.

Now Im playing Vampire Survivors and travelling through time as I apparently lose entire fucking hours playing the fucking thing so now I need to unfuck my mind free out of this addiction again.
 
I just can't stop playing 'Utopia Must Fall' even though I can survive past 40 days and have unlocked everything possible in both Standard and Berzerker runs. You just get flavor text for upgrades at that point.

I just can't get past day 30 in a Hermit run because without nuclear weapons you have no chance clearing out the Technodrome boss's constant shower of near-unkillable nuclear mines and the clusters of 'crabs' it spawns that drop nuclear boulders on your city at the same time before you can crack the drome open. The 'flare rockets' you get in exchange for nukes are almost worthless even fully upgraded.

Can't wait for Brotato's new DLC to drop. That will bring me right back into that addiction again.
 
Robocop Rogue City

I bought this for like 3 bucks. And oh man, probably the best game I played for that cheap. The game nails the aesthetic, the atmosphere, the characters, and the cheesy one liners. The kid asking Murphy to do the robodance made me lose my shit.

Beckett could have been played by an early 90s Michael Keaton and Wendell could have been played by a younger Gary Oldman.

Some of my favorite parts are the conversations with Olivia Blanche

The story and everything feeling like what Robocop 3 should have been. If the team had a bigger budget, they could have made something really special. But I am not complaining one bit.

One game I recommend to get if you’re a fan of the original movie.
 
Firstly that people said it's kind of a skateboarding game (it's not), a genre I never played (TOny Hawk was before my time and I wasn't a suburban White boy),
Sunset Overdrive had the flow of a skateboarding or extreme sports game from chaining together parkour movements with engaging enemies in rapid succession. You HAD to keep moving and shooting to get far.

You see what I'm getting at. Sunset Overdrive was tonally at odds with its era, so it got excoriated for being tryhard and cringe.
I remember how colorful, crass and fast Sunset Overdrive was. It was during an apocalypse from an energy drink, but it never lost its "positive" charm. It definitely stood out from typical grim, gray, serious games from the 360/PS3 era. Loosely speaking, it reminds me of an adult Ratchet & Clank title.
 
I traded in my XBox 360 catalogue for a Steam card at Game Stop.

Hellish Quart is... really engaging and also kind of mediocre. It's Slavjank and is one of those things that a single man has been working on, in Early Access, for half a decade now. Actively. The game is basically a fighting game (as in the genre) of 17th Century European HEMA, focus, the With FIre and Sword era of Ruthenian history. You get some tokens for Western Europe, but they're still framed as adventurers passing through. I had actually tried some of this shit in college. I never could quite connect with it. Fencing (epee, saber, foil) just didn't touch me either of the two times I picked it up, nor did the SCA, and all told I think I didn't have the drive to athleticism the former required or whimsy and engagement with crafts the latter did. But it means this feels strange and familiar to me at once because I don't do fighting games but I do understand the fundamentals of fencing, and that is basically what all this swordfighting is. At first - like real life - you can't even tell what the fuck is going on because real duels are very thin pieces of metal moving very fast, knicking people at weird angles on weird parts of the body in ways you might not even notice as the victim in the moment, and this game is physics-based. But after playing a lot of it in two days, I went from winning most fights button-mashing (never a good sign) to winning most fights understanding sort of what I did.

The game has no UI worth a damn, a money system perplexingly stapled on, explains little, and it has a story mode... that consists of a string of duels tied together until it ends, one fifth of the way through, without finishing that campaign, on a "work in progress" message. The story feels like watching a foreign soap opera where you have the vague sense of a plot, the acting doesn't really come through with the language barrier but you still are strangely engaged by the barest sketch of what's happening, like an animal watching people.

In all I like it. I'd like more Western European/American colonial content, but it was made by Slavs for Slavs. It's a toy that was made for and with the assistance of the HEMA community, down to noting each character's doctrine, and within that niche people love it. I mostly play the Western European women (because of their weapons and outfits, the Eastern stuff has little draw on me), the Scot, and the shepherd with his shepherd axe (fascinating weapon).


Grand Tactician: The Civil War I got despite its trajectory (from rough but excited launch to people panning it bitterly, like Terra Invicta got) and booted up to poke around in. I was a bit reluctant because of all the bitching about it and also that it frankly is ugly in battles; it, like Ultimate General, simply is not a spectacle battle simulator like Total War games are. But what it does try to do is basically simulate in extreme detail the War between the States on a logistical and OOB level (kind of like Hearts of Iron III, I suppose), it caught my eye that you can do a vaguely Twilight Struggle like "configure your alternate history background" thing (it unfortunately doesn't change the map, but you can at least know in your lore that Cuba was annexed), and it has a DLC (I did not get) that tapes on essentially a light Civil War officer RPG the point of which is to LARP as yourself becoming Grant. The UI is immaculate, and the reviews said a lot about that, everything has a great attention to detail where feeling like newspapers and telegraph reports and cartographic maps is concerned.

What kind of hardcore jank is it? Order delay exists. This alone changes everything, it's quite detailed - you can set things like signals to have a group of units all primed to move at once, or set them to move at a time, or order them to move at once - and that one change alone completely changes the feeling from what I already knew was very unrealistic, indulgent battlefield artistry in Total War - micromanaging forces to do insanely complicated maneuvers and figures to maximize outgoing lead - into something more like cat herding and watching disasters unfold slowly. Then you also can toggle on Feuds, which allows your prima donna officers to sometimes, when they're on the period, just flagrantly disobey you.

I have low expectations but am interested to see how this shapes up. Napoleon Total War had a Civil War mod but it was only battles and it was one of those autistic, half broken things that clutters your UI with literally thousands of units because every shitty variation of the same Massachusetts state militia regiment gets a distinct unit. Empire Total War had one but in addition to being Empire (broken without Darth Mod) it also had to suffer from being stuck with the hardcoded Creative Assembly map, which is barely servicable for doing a good job of Enlightenment North America, much less the Civil War. Ultimate General also only has battles and... it's decent? I've played a bit of it. I will say, I don't actually know much operational history of the War - I'm mostly interested in the political, social, economic history around it, really more of the Old South itself - and Ultimate General communicated really well how much dick it sucked to fight at Shiloh.

Speaking of which, it may not render the Southwest, California, Cuba or Nicaragua or Mexico on map, but Grand Tactician has Glorieta Pass as a battle. Finally recognition for Confederate Arizona.
 
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