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Sunday is Gaming Day: What Are You Playing thread

Happy weekend everybody. I finished a playthrough of XCOM 2 and now have started a new playthrough of Baldur's Gate 3, as "The Dark Urge". Hope everyone's summer has been going well

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  • I'm playing Cookie Clicker and have been playing Cookie Clicker for over a decade and have no plans to ever stop playing Cookie Clicker.

    • My death plans include a laptop shoved in a closet still playing Progress Quest until someone finally cleans it out.

  • Been emulating a lot of PSP games lately, and also inexplicably on a racing game kick. I think cause they usually have lots of things to unlock, and unlocking shit makes brain go brrrrrr.

    To that end, Burnout Dominator has been my mot played the past week, but also slowly playing the X Men Origins game, and have OutRun 2006 to start in a little bit here.

  • Continuing my playthrough of Fallout: London. I'll save my full thoughts so far for a future possible review. By and large, this is a full-scale Fallout spinoff. There are certain game design issues, and problems with some of the writing. Quality is varied, some of the game is fantastic, and other parts miss the mark. However, if you're starved for Fallout content, this is the best release in many years.

    If you want to give it a go, maybe wait for one or two major patches, there has been a hotfix but it's still rough around the edges.

    The biggest takeaway though is that it makes me crave Fallout 4: New Vegas' release, and has me stoked for Fallout: Miami and Fallout: Cascadia, all 3 of which are under heavy and active development. It also has me wanting to replay New Vegas, but with a personally built mega-modpack.

    Tips for Survival: sleep often, go to west rather than east when you first emerge, and consider focusing on Gunslinger or Rifleman for a build. Early game pistols are strong. Do not take Kamikaze without high investment in a full VATS build, because stacked with Survival you will die in a single hit frequently.

    • i looked at my save file and realized i had been playing that game for over a day. it's so fun, genuinely the best mod i've played in a long time

      • I'm around 30 hours in too! I'm stubbornly sticking with survival mode, haha.

        One thing I will say, I genuinely adore the "biome" aspect with the different districts. They each have their own flavors of raiders and flora/fauna, something the official Fallout games haven't quite nailed yet.

        Any Londoner probably appreciates the mod's references far more than I can, but I have the main games for that, haha.

    • i tried playing this a few times, including a few times today, but it crashes on me so constantly i just can't be bothered with trying anymore

      • I have a high tolerance from being a huge fan of mods to begin with, I suppose. If you haven't updated it, try that, if you have, best to wait a few patches.

  • Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord

    Picked the game up again from a few months ago. After a few more days my paramilitary company grew enough to turn it into a kingdom, allowing me to pass edicts/policies, a few of which can greatly increase maximum party size. I have been running around with 410 of my closest boys and girls demolishing any size of army from castles and up to 700 man armies in open field fights. No multi-party army necessary. My enemies keep replenishing only to be destroyed while their armies are mostly recruits and level 2 pushovers. I have 3.3 millon denars. Just think how much I'll be able to buy after the reval!

  • Giving Turtle WoW another go, got my bear druid Hexbear to 20 last night on HC mode.

  • Just beat Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia. I started after FE: Blazing Blade decided to have a level that seems to be luck-based in order to beat. It quickly became the only game I was playing, and I finally beat it today. It was a really great game, and it felt really fresh and different compared to many of the other FE games. Would highly recommend if you like tactics RPGs or Fire Emblem in general, it was quite the experience. In terms of story, it was better than I expected. It seems like a pretty standard plot, but it becomes a little more as the game goes on. If I had to give one criticism to the game, it would be some of the main antagonists. One of them is done very well, and the other is more of what I was expecting. Also some of the minor antagonists are really annoying, and you'll know them when you see them.

    Shadows of Valentia spoilers

    There's a twist that gets hinted towards throughout the game, and in higher frequencies towards the end, and it was pretty obvious. There is, however, a twist within the twist that I did not see coming at all, added a surprising amount of depth to the story that really had me thinking about Valentia's geopolitics, considering Alm and Celica go through most of the game pretty ignorant of Valentia's political intricacies.

    • The gameplay of SoV makes it hard to play other FE games afterwards imo. I really appreciate how refined it is: minimal inventory, few classes, small roster, no eugenics, no battle gimmicks.

      Even though other games in the franchise are more complex, echoes feels the most tactical to me. Because more often than not, the optimal way to play other entries is to spam the strongest class with the best characters - chess if your pawns were queens and your knights were queens and your rooks were queens, etc.

      Also this might be just me but I HATE the inventory management aspect of FE. I'm not playing these games to rifle through menus and go grocery shopping!

  • Last night I drank a bit to much beer and went on a bit of a gaming binge, played about an hour of Stardew, fifteen minutes of Brigador, half an hour of Workers and Resources and then did one Hades run. Overall pretty fun night but I hit the hay a little late and woke up mildly hungover.

  • Total War: PHARAOH DYNASTIES. It’s good, folks. I don’t want to hype it up too much, but I’m pretty stoked for it. It has a lot of cool systems, some of which are pretty different from other total wars, like the resource system. From a technical standpoint, it runs buttery smooth, with large battles hitting over 100 FPS.

    Plus I consider the Bronze Age just a super underused setting. I legit think this could become a top 3 historical total war for me.

    • Big Total War fan? I'd be interested to know how it compares to Warhammer 3 and 3K. I played a ton of Warhammer 2, Shogun 2, and Attila but kind of fell off when they killed 3K early (rip my baby) and started milking the WH3 DLC super hard.

      • I would say im a big Total War fan. My favorite historical Total War game is Attila, though the only thing I disliked about Attila was the performance.

        Now, the truth is, I don’t want to recommend Pharaoh Dynasties just (YET) because I’ve only played it for a couple of hours. However, everything I’ve seen, heard, and read so far looks amazing. Keep in mind the game is very infantry-focused, but the infantry feels quite varied. Battles seem more fluid to me than in Total Warhammer, and movement and positioning feel more important. While Warhammers combat offers a wider range of options, Pharaoh feels deeper—like how rain can create mud that slows down troops. There are loads of weather and terrain interactions, and characters can die in combat or from old age.

        Pharaoh also has a lot more systems and mechanics than Rome 2 or Shogun. You actually have to trade extensively with other factions to get the most out of the resource system. It’s also the most adaptable Total War game to date, with tons of pre-game options such as Ironman mode, the rate at which years pass, and lethality settings. In my opinion, Pharaoh is also harder than Total Warhammer 3 (and I’ve played Warhammer 3 on Legendary from time to time).

        Take some of these observations with a grain of salt but I think Creative Assembly really cooked with Pharaoh Dynasties.

        I will make a thread about Pharaoh Dynasties after I played it for one or two full campaigns.

        If you have any questions feel free to ask

  • Snowrunner! I'm doing it IRL rn and when I get home this evening and get settled for the night, I'm playing actual Snowrunner

  • Same as last week, I'm about to make these threads boring as hell. Continuing SWTOR, trying to achieve a faux Legendary status by finishing the stories on two servers

  • A coworker started bringing dominos to play at break. I hadn't played dominos in over a decade. Then on Friday I picked up a chess board and improvised some pieces to play martian chess.

  • i've played through New Vegas Bounties (1, 2 & 3) in the past few days and it was kind of strange:

    spoilers, CW SV regular violence

    spoiler

    voice acting existing, and being fairly good is bizarre. but it's so much polish on what is inevitably a shallow and not very creative experience. the only format is 'go here, kill guy' occasionally spiced up with opportunities for speech-check nonviolence. then its punctuated with almost absurdist levels of edginess, yeah okay so there's room for 100 big bad serial killers/rapists in this area with an average town population of 20. with two occupying armies actively running around.

    II was kinda fun with a more open presentation of targets, having posters spread out made you travel to different areas get the quests, which half solved the back-and-fourth from the bounty office format of #I. but you still had to return to the office to collect money. there was a moment i thought II might get me scared a little, there was a cliche killer clown child murderer and i have mild coulrophobia so that most lazy spooky clowns freak me out. then i heard the line delivery of dime-store Cicero from Skyrim, cRazY rAnDoM writing, and just offputting 'crazy sad clown made that way by sad (edgy) circumstances' backstory you get with the nonlethal takedown. i swear these quests bend over backwards to give the child-murderers the sympathetic backstories then ruthlessly gun down the most normal criminals. i doubt its to be like pro child murder just "subvert" your expectations

    #III is the one that crosses into simply bad, hamfisted "consequences of your actions" hooey as the main theme, a hideous new worldspace that's a pain to navigate and i guess has multiple characters/side quests? i wouldn't even know because the gameplay loop went back to 'go to bounty office' 'go kill guy' 'go to bounty office', you can't see distant locations to go explore cause they're all covered in trees so when the hell was i going to run into side characters and do stuff for them? the only place in the town the quest requires you to go to at any point, twice in fact, is the saloon. at the end there's this broken cutscene with the shocking revelation of who the main villain was (dude you met earlier) and a very stilted railroad where he kills all your friends you never met from town & buries you alive. then classic Kill Bill third act you get out mow down betrayers etc. but the difficulty spike got unreasonable with the final fight, this regular ass man not even wearing armor has more health than the legendary deathclaw and magically hits just as hard with a pissant .357. a lot of the dialogue with this Marko character talks about how pointless and shallow your accomplishments are, and you even have the option to end the quest & leave without exacting revenge, there's very little ceremony to the getting revenge and this is the germ of a clever idea. but making the gameplay clash so hard with that, not even letting you take his head off at range-a perfect anticlimax-it has to be a Duel where he can speech at you how anticlimatic this is followed by a fight better cheated through. guess what it wouldn't be very fun to see Clint Eastwood cooly standoff and talk to the Bad Guy then the fight involves both of them getting shot 30 times instead of the faster draw prevailing

    overall I & II are decent diversions for extra money & xp in a normal playthrough if you can ignore the edginess and sexual violence, III is a pointless and fairly buggy slog. I'm going to play the 'conclusion' quest 'Better Angels' next, it's about a slave rebellion against caesar so it might be good, the first ranger you meet actually has this fantastic 'i just work here' energy but i swear if its all about abused women i'm gonna be pissed

    • now if you compare these experiences to the sex mods for FNV...volcel-judge volcel-judge volcel-judge VOLCEL POLICE ARE ON THE SCENE WE"RE LOCKING THIS COMMENT DOWN volcel-judge volcel-judge volcel-judge

    • A bit on NVB III, it's more enjoyable if you've played The Inheritance and did the optional content, as well as Russell. Those mods add content to III if you've completed them. III is still a bit of a downer, but it does tie up most of the loose ends.

      • it did a very poor job of establishing there was side content and the worldspace was just hostile to making me want to explore, the map is useless despite having big impassable obstacles, the trees obscure LOS on anything, and there's 1,000 random hostile assholes wandering around. i don't want to wander around a place where i have to fight a lil swarm of dudes every half kilometer, that's just not fun especially when their inflated stats lets them 1-shot dome me with a cowboy repeater (so add the frustration that i have to crouch-run everywhere)

  • I've been doing a playthrough of Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous for a bit, and that will probably take awhile to finish. I'm doing a playthrough as a chaotic good Aasimar warpriest of Gorum. I'm thinking of going with the angel mythic path, but I might do golden dragon. I haven't finished act 1, so I have some time to feel it out still.

    • Warning you now that Golden Dragon is very limp, you can really only do it in act 5 and it doesn't get a lot of meat. Angel is fleshed out but I don't like Angel and I think the devs agree tbh, Owlcat does not present lawful alignment very flatteringly in the long run. Azata get all the proper good guy moments imo

  • My partner and I got into Diablo IV on Xbox because it is on game pass and can be played split screen. Probably more of that and trying out the Hexcraft server later

  • Didn't really like death sorceries when Elden Ring released, but I've heard Shadow of the Erdtree has some decent items for faith/int casters and some fun death sorceries so I'm blitzing through base Elden Ring to have a character ready to use them.

  • I bought and played a bunch of hours of 20 Minutes Till Dawn this weekend after seeing a single screenshot and knowing it was a bullet heaven game. It's pretty neat but definitely on the lighter end as far as content since I'm already past like Darkness 5 and have almost all the characters and weapons. The Dev posted a blog in March saying a pretty substantial update/overhaul is coming soon though.

    The art style is so great and now I have a full set of avatars.

  • I've been on Pokemon showdown, playing VGC. Regulation H is such a breath of fresh air, they banned every single legendary and sub-legendary. The power level is a lot lower and less focused on absurdly powerful legendaries one-shotting everything.

    It's a lot like Regulation A except this time with Rillaboom, Incineroar, and the ridiculous Ursulana forms. If anyone has been curious about competitive Pokemon, now is a great time to give it a shot.

    I tried an Excadrill-Tyrantiar team but it just lost to Incineroar. Two physical attackers and only one clear amulet is unfortunate. I've been having a bit more success with a Baxcalibur snow team, with Bax being my main setup and offensive mon and basically everything else to assist it. Hisuian Ninetails sets up snow and aurora veil, H-Arcanine and Meowscarada get rid of problematic matchups like Gholdengo, and Indeedee runs follow me to help Bax setup. Also I have trick room on Indeedee but never use it for myself, only to undo opponents trick room. It's so satisfying to predict your opponent to setup trick room and take it down in the same turn.

  • Trying to transition to mid-game in the new Oxygen Not Included DLC. Accidentally released a pocket of several hundreds of kilograms of oxygen into my base. At least I don't need to worry about breathability for many, many cycles blob-no-thoughts

    Live reaction of my duplicants (the little dudes that run my colony) looking at all the decor items I built to counteract their long-term perma-"popped eardrums" stress debuff: lenin-palace

  • I finally beat the final campaign level in Brigador (a top down isometric mech game with crazy good art, atmosphere, and writing, albeit made by at least one bigot) and Im thinking of seeing whats new in Zero Sievert (a top down 2D survival shooter with rpg elements that draws heavily from S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Escape From Tarkov) tonight since I haven't checked in on that game in a hot minute. I really wanted to get started on Heaven Will Be Mine (space lesbian mech pilot visual novel, the @halimede twitter account is based off of a character from this) but it just doesnt want to run through proton and now Im kicking myself for not getting the version on itch.io thats built to be linux compatible.

  • I completed BUMPERS & BROADSWORDS: MAXIMUM this week. Free, fairly easy/casual, short, fun mechanics, highly recommend

    Tags Anime, Deck Building, GameMaker, Parody, Pixel Art, Retro, Roguelike, Strategy RPG, Top Down Adventure, Turn-Based Combat

  • I'm playing more and more indie metroidvania. I'm switching between "9 Years of Shadows" for the first time and once again playing "Blasphemous 2"

  • Pirated Lone Echo (which can only be picked up on the Oculus store if you don't pirate it lol) and it's pretty great so far. One of the closest things to a AAA VR game that isn't Alyx or heavily modded Skyrim.

    You play a robot on a space station near Saturn and shit happens and you got to jet around and fix stuff. It has made it clear to me that in addition to deep water I am also quite scared of drifting untethered into empty space 👍

  • I'm playing Okamiden and it's so funny that it's a DS game. Everything is so crunchy and the open world is really just a long hallway, to account for the D-pad. Aside from the veeeeery slow text speed I don't mind though, it's charming.

  • L4d2 I had this game in my library for way too long and I couldn't get into the multiplayer modes Turns out it's still enjoyable single player

  • EDF 6 does not disappoint if you happen to like the very specific type of game that EDF is. Obviously limited assets and an old engine still get used very inventively, and that's not even mentioning the writing. 5 really surprised me with its surprisingly clever and self-aware script, delivered entirely by voice actors who sound like they normally do translations of textbooks rather than fiction, which somehow adds to the vibe.

  • My plans kinda fell through, so I got more time and money. Deciding to buy Tavern Master for my city-management fix.

  • Got bored of Tarkov PvE and I've been revisiting some strategy games, playin some Company of Heroes 2, bought the Ardennes assault dlc on sale and now I seethe at every cutscene about the -oh so heroic Yanks and their toils- while I had to grimace my way through the main campaign which constantly villainized the very Soviets you were playing as, fighting against the fuckin Nazis who barely get any mention or condemnation.

  • Got 100% completion in Supraland the other day and started Six Inches Under. Might push for 100% on it as well just for completeness.

  • Yes, Your Grace.

    The name made me fearful that this game would be cringe. However, the trailer assured me that it would be awesome. It's very story-driven, and while the narrative is pretty set on rails/linear you do have "importance" of choices when it comes to resource management.

    The game has a lot of great humor and music throughout. It even will K.O. punch you right in the feels.

    The game also "respects your time" which is great these days...

  • I've started playing Jenny LeClue: Detectivu, which is one of those children point and click games that was crowdfunded in the early 2010's that is almost played exclusively by adults to feel like children again. it's a good game i doubt it'll be long but it's fun and cute.

    probably gonna play submachine: legacy after it which is an interesting puzzler by the looks of it.

  • started the tutorial for Victoria 3 today.. seems like it will take far more time than I have to even begin to understand

  • Balatro has been eating up a lot of my time. Was playing Hardcore on Diablo 3, but then the server crashed and killed my monk (wasn't even anywhere dangerous). So I got tilted back to Balatro. Gonna finish up my draft on Magic Arena then play some Vermintide 2.

  • Hades 2 early access

  • Pirate copy of Wreckfest doing figure 8 demolition racing in my armored up not an El Camino

  • FNV mod "The Better Angels", B+ for what it is, takes an hour or two, it's essentially free of the edginess that characterizes New Vegas Bounties except one scene of civilian executions that you can stop. and also escaping slaves accidentally running onto your mines but that's sort of on me. the main course is Caesar's Legion doing a 30 minute long assault on a river beachhead you're at with the NCR which is a huge experience farm if you're an ace on the rifle like me & set loads of mines around. best to bring a posse of companions because even with me nailing 50+% of the legionaires all the named characters in camp besides the essential ranger died lol. probably missed some repartee between the ghoul and the supermutant buddies if they manage to survive

    • The someguy series has its ups and downs, but at this point is tied to the identity of New Vegas modding.

  • Victoria 3, finished my Japan playthrough and started a Prussia->Germany playthrough to try for the Hegemony goals achievement. While I wasn't paying attention, Great Britain has conquered Vietnam before 1880, and now they're trying to protectorate Egypt which seems... a bit much. Heavenly Kingdom shattered Qing so I've been going in and picking up some of the smaller countries as protectorates to get ready for the "control 40% of the world's population" goals. Might try to grab some GB stuff by joining in the Egypt war, idk.

    My economy is so bad lmao -300k, way into the red, but interest is only like -5k so who cares, build more fuckin' iron mines.

  • Last week, after 137 hours, I finally finished Trails into Reverie. It was good. It's a pure fanservice game and a pretty okay epilogue for the Cold Steel and Crossbell characters. The cast for Cold Steel/Crossbell has ballooned to 40+ characters and it was nice to be able to play as them all and create teams for whoever you liked. It's more a third Crossbell game than a Cold Steel game and you finally get some much needed closure for the Crossbell characters and their battle for independence. The story did get kinda wacky at times lol, but I'm glad to finally move onto Trails through Daybreak and onto another new country/story arc.

    I'm currently playing the first Ace Attorney trilogy and enjoying it. I'm replaying AA1 after many years and can't wait to play the other games in the trilogy. I'm on the final case of AA1 and will try to finish it tonight. phoenix-evidence

  • Started another attempt at pathologic 2. It’s actually been quite a while since I’ve played any games, but patho has been showing up in my dreams lately, so I decided to give it another go

  • Guild Wars 2. Sometimes, I just mess around on the mounts without any actual goal in mind.

  • Kirby forgotten land. I have this one last closseum gauntlet to get through and the secret bosses are annoying

  • Path of Exile! Just hit 93 on my icicle mine deadeye, a hair under 6m dps and the build is mostly "done" in that relevant upgrades would be dozens of div when I have made ~65 all league.

    Currently focused on the "delve to 400 depth" challenge.

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