What have you been playing recently?

It really puts it into perspective when you realize the 890J is the same length, width, height, and mass as the US Navy's South Dakota class battleships. So, for XenoThreat we turned it into one. We had every turret manned PLUS three tanks in the hangar. I hit the button, the hangar doors open, the lift raises up and...

Vampire Survivors lately. Just finished getting level 100 with Morty and Panda, for my last two achievements.

Anybody tried the Alex Jones mod for Fallout 4?

Funny, but it won't be replacing the Macho Man deathclaw mod in my game.

Baba Is You is everything I wanted it to be. Feels so good subverting the puzzle against itself, even though deep down I know that's what's expected of me.

Lawn Mowing Simulator on Xbox. It's annoyingly addictive.

Giving Nuclear Throne a go, it's a top-down 2D shooter in a nuclear wasteland. It's fun with some interesting guns and bosses and a variety of monsters to play as. You get to pick a mutation at level up rather than just getting HP. The bouncy gun is, unsurprisingly, the best so far.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider on PC.

I just got a Nintendo Switch with the entire Nintendo Library for my birthday, so I'm ripping through all the old games in the catalog. Currently deep into Asphalt 9. A smashem crashem competitive race game. Surprised at how seamless and fun the system is.

Aven, a world building game. Played it over the weekend. I'm bored of it already.

The six-year-old wiped my Baba save, so I went back to EDGE today. It runs very well through the cycle of "oh this looks like a lengthy, hard gauntlet, I dread this, here goes nothing" and eight to twelve minutes later I've beaten the level and am feeling a little better about my skillz. Over halfway through the normal levels now.

Dusted off Fallout76 recently. It's significantly less terribru now. For one thing, it actually runs with some degree of stability. On top of that, there are actual NPCs to interact with, and a larger variety of missions and objectives.

Yes, you're still sick/hungry/thirsty all the damn time, and fast travel on the yuuugest map EVAR still costs caps, but it doesn't suck quite so bad now overall.

HOW?! HOW DO ANY OF YOU PLAY MODERN GAMES?!

I want to play The Crew 2, which I just got on sale for $9 on Steam, and I have to install the uPlay app before I can even get to the menu screen. It, of course, is bugged, and keeps asking for a CD key that doesn't exist as I bought it through Steam.

So I go to play some of my older Origin games, and now you need to use the EA Play app instead.

I tried to install half a dozen games, and all of them now require either uPlay, EA, Epic Games Launcher, which means registering accounts, setting up authenticator access, massive, massive, MASSIVE updates, and other shit when ALL I WANT TO DO IS PLAY MY GODDAMN GAME.

How do people who game often put up with this? I've spent 5 hours today just trying to play a few games, and getting to play exactly none of them.

When it got more involved than just shoving a cartridge/CD/DVD in, I bailed.

I get you. The worst mistake Steam ever made was allowing third party launchers to be used through its platform. Before, all you needed was the Steam app and you had access to thousands of games that only required you pressing "Play."
This is where GOG excels, in that it is completely DRM free. No launchers required (though I'm on Linux so I use Lutris which lets me play all of those Windows only games). Unfortunately, GOG doesn't have the breadth or depth of Steam, and mostly caters to older titles, though I ended up getting Cyberpunk 2077 for $20 there, and I seriously enjoyed that game. Not much for replayability, though. :/

Maybe I'm too old now and don't have the patience to deal with the ridiculous amount of hoop jumping and privacy eroding measures used to monetize, track, and bloat my system so I can play a $70 game that has to be updated 20 times a month because it was shoved out the door as a bug ridden mess. I don't blame the developers, but I do blame the publishers, and the industry itself for getting us to this point.

Finished Hogwarts Legacy, returned to God of War Ragnarok . Hogwarts was good, but GoW is a better all around game.

COD MW2

Tried a couple of free little games off of itch.io.

Carni-Forest is an interesting little concept. It's a turn-based RPG (if you can call it that) where the enemies appear in a 3x3 grid. You get five attack slots. Each attack is a particular shape of blocks that you fit into the 3x3 grid to attack with damage, armor reduction, or health steal. It's very roguelike in that the enemies you face and the attacks you have a chance to buy will heavily determine whether you make it very far, but once you make it past level 20 or so you can just keep going indefinitely. It's just a little game jam thing. I'll probably hang on to it as something to scratch an itch when I have ten minutes to kill.

Hue Flowing is a platformer where you're a samurai or something and you splash color as you move around, revealing a pretty landscape. Interesting idea again but not fleshed out much.

Despite the issues, I downloaded the PC version of Jedi: Survivor from Steam (primarily because I don't have an XBox Series X or PS5 and I'm not in the mood to upgrade to either just yet). Turning down some of the graphics settings as per this guide:

https://www.pcinvasion.com/how-to-improve-fps-in-jedi-survivor-low-star-wars/

Really helped - apart from getting stuck in a wall at one point I had no issues with the whole of the Coruscant opening story. Now on Kobah looking for Greez. Gameplay is very similar to Fallen Order but that's good, except for the bloody jump puzzles (wall running seems a bit trickier to do flips to boost your height on the wall, so I fell several times and only fared better when I managed to start higher up on the wall to begin). The new grappling hook helps, and having other characters to occasionally assist in battle is a good new addition (and you can't accidentally lop their limbs off with a wild saber swing, which is good).

So far it's doing a good job of luring me back into the bleakness of the pre-ANH era, where there isn't even a Rebellion yet (just Saw's Partisans).

OK I've had a few issues with framerate on Kobah, usually when over 6 enemies are around or that weird blue stuff that slowly kills you. Also missed a couple of leap-and-grab bits due to the controller not reacting in time, but I got there in the end.

Reunion with Greez was good if bittersweet. It's really not good being a Jedi after Order 66. If you aren't dead, you might feel like it some days.

Sokobond is a clever expansion of Sokoban involving chemistry. Instead of a man pushing boxes around, you're an atom pushing yourself around to form bonds with other atoms to make increasingly complex real-life molecules via the power of valence electrons. Later stages add bond-related mechanics and so far it's all well-designed and fun. It's also pretty neat that a former acquaintance worked on this.

Given up on Jedi Survivor for a day for the sake of not turning to the Dark Side because of a particularly annoying jump puzzle on the Koboh Moon. Have to zipline down, jumping from line to line to avoid electrical bolts, then a lengthy wall run. Failing any bit gets you right back to the start. Wall running is tricky to maintain the right height on the surface, so it's perfectly possible to fail by a fraction each and every fucking time.

At least some games with this sort of shit will spawn you at the next point on if you die while close enough.

I remember way back when WOW was huge and the SP episode came out about it. I had burned on everquest so I was playing an anime based game on a message board called Gaia online. So while all my friends were talking about their WOW raiding I was the one basically on hello kitty's island adventure.

That is always the way for me.

I got past it, having briefly toyed with the idea of installing CheatEngine and using the Debug mode to teleport across. There have been a couple of other points since I nearly ragequit but I eventually made it past all of them. Once you unlock Dash some of the earlier jumps become easier but the game does like to throw in new jumps that require Dash and often Jump-Dash-Jump-Dash combos. The bit where you have to follow Merrin through some portals nearly got me as you can sometimes not spot the next portal and think you need to jump-Dash elsewhere.

The new moves do add some variety and make you feel even more Jedi-like. Story is pretty strong so far (I'm aware of spoilers) - currently looking for Rayvis on the Shattered Moon.

Just finished the forest array mission.

Faeria is another Magic-like CCG that has the twist that "lands" you play are actually lands you add to a gameboard that your units traverse to attack the opponent. Also there are energy wells off on the sides of the board that your units can stand by to give you more energy each turn, which avoids the chess situation where the center is automatically way more important to occupy than the sides. I'm enjoying it so far, but I always enjoy these CCGs until I get way too many cards to manage (over 800 in the base set) and my decks apparently turn into a mess because I'm more interested in playing fun/favorite cards than in looking up optimal builds. Anyway I like a Green deck best, but Blue has quirky mechanics. It doesn't feel P2W, I've been getting a lot of boosters thrown at me. Whether I have free access to the expansion sets remains to be seen, but I'm quite happy to play vs Computer most of the time anyway.

Started Stellaris last night. It's a lot more complicated than Stars!, and iterates daily rather than by year, and sometimes it takes a lot of clicking around to figure out how to get it to do something. But I appreciate the added details for the most part -- it's great to have star systems instead of just planets wandering around on their own -- and I think it'll fill that 4x void in my brain. After it takes ten minutes to load.

I've been busy lately:

Kicking it old school with some donkey Kong country on snes.