Started playing Dusk again because I'm getting back into boomer shooters. I've been playing soulslikes for years and decided to go back to my first love. I think the way to bridge the gap between the two is to play shooters on higher difficulty settings so I can get that methodical feel where everything feels more on a razor's edge as well.

I've been playing Doom Eternal on Nightmare but it can get a bit exhausting at times and the Gladiator boss fucking sucked. Dusk is more my thing because there is less to manage, it's faster paced, and the level design is more about collecting access cards to explore an area. It's more Doom and Duke Nukem 3D than what I call Painkiller pacing where you're locked in a room facing waves of enemies until you get through them. I don't mind Painkiller paced games like Ultrakill, but the Duke Nukem setup feels more natural.

Was playing a lot of deadlock until I found out about Vintage Story and decided to try it out. Holy hell, why didn't anyone tell me about this game earlier, game's so damn addicting. And the mods! So many cool mods!

Welp, Warframe took over my life. It's been a week since I played BG3 and Stellaris, but I do want to get back into both games this week. I replayed all the Journeys from Natah to the Prelude to War, and then yesterday I played The New War, which was long but fuck was it good! It starts with a banger with you controlling a Grineer, a Corpus and Teshin before controlling your own character. I won't spoil anything other than that, but I thought it was also a very confusing quest halfway through, still great but I'm confused by some stuff, like the some stuff regarding the Drifter and Ballas.

Good thing I have other Journeys to go through that will probably both answer some stuff and create more questions lol. I'll probably watch lore videos after that so I can better understand it.

Oh and happy pride month comrades!

EDIT: I just did the Old Peace and HOLY SHIT.

A new Total Conversion Megawad for Doom 2 just dropped this week out of nowhere, called Eye Juice. The art style is absolutely fabulous and the level design is excellent. The difficulty is a bit more forgiving than the typical modern slaughter maps.

It is quite fun. I died while staring at a spinning doomcute shwarma in the middle of a shopping mall.

Finished Pseudoregalia. It's 7/10

Let's start with the stuff I liked.

The movement is obviously the star of the show and is really the entire point of the game. You've got a bunch of fairly simple movement abilities that you unlock throughout the game and the fun comes from learning to combine them together in creative ways. Traversing the levels is really fun and feels (mostly) effortless when you learn the movement. The feeling reminds of Mirrors Edge or Celeste. A good feeling to have.

Another great thing is the level design. The game is divided into these interconnected levels that you can traverse and explore in any order you want. The only thing that restricts you is the movement abilities you currenly have unlocked. Kinda feels like Dark Souls 1. I think people call this type of game "metroidvania". Each level feels unique and memorable due to their music and different texturing work. Music in particular is very solid. And despite the game being stylised to look like something that could probably run on N64, some areas look legitimately beautiful.

spoiler

Also the deer-bunny girl is

Now the stuff I didn't like.

First of all, despite how good the underlying movement systems are, I think the game does a poor job at taking full advantage of them. It is simply too short and has too few levels. On top of that, some of your best movement abilities with some of the highest sandbox potential(wall run, hit-bounce thing) are unlocked very late into the game and you barely get the chance to play around with them. Imagine if Celeste's dash ability was unlocked in it's final area. It would have served the game really well to have just one extra level specifically designed with all the movement in mind, something that would really tie the game together. In fact, there is even a perfect opportunity to place such a level. At one point you would come across a giant door with 5 key holes. Your job from then on becomes collecting these 5 keys in order to unlock the door. To get all the keys your character would need to have all their movement abilities unlocked. The game essentially asks you for the proof that you've unlocked and mastered all the mechanics it has to offer - a perfect opportunity for one final challenge, right? Instead, the door leads to a rather underwhelming final boos fight (more on that later). Very disappointing.

Level design is also not without it's flaws. Since the game is a "metroidvania", level designer(s) need to be very careful and make sure each path is designed with all possible movement combinations in mind. Unfortunately, I found a couple instances where with creative use of my available movement, I was able to progress into paths where I technically wasn't supposed to be, until I hit an area where my current movement was clearly insufficient to progress any further. That would fine, except I also found myself unable to backtrack since this would require the abilities I currently didn't have - it's a softlock. This unfortunately discouraged me from trying to be creative about exploration and from that point on I would only try to progress through areas which I 100% knew I could beat. There is another way level design discouraged my careless exploration - most levels have paths that lead to some older areas, and there were cases where going down those paths would leave me unable to return to the area I actually wanted to explore (without making a huge circle around the entire game). This taught me to constantly check the map at every intersection to make sure I'm not going into areas where I don't want to be.

A little paragraph on combat. It sure does exist. And it's by far the weakest part of the game. It essentially amounts to running around the enemy and whacking it with a stick until it dies. It's not very challenging or interesting in the first place but what makes it even worse is that your character unlocks new combat abilities throughout the game, which quickly makes her extremely overpowered. Making your character stronger makes sense in a game where combat becomes more difficult over time, however in this game you gonna be fighting the same 5 enemies from beginning to the end. I straight up think that combat is an unfinished aspect of the game because it only felt interesting or creative in the very beginning (there were couple of fun surprises with the knight enemy for example).

Now on to bosses. There are two of them! Two! There is one close to the beginning and one final boss at the very end. It's probably too much to ask from a small indie game for each area to have it's own thematically appropriate boss, but two? I think it would have been less strange if the game only had one final boss, but as it stands it feels like they made one boss for the beginning of the game, then completely forgot about this aspect for rest of the game, and then decided they needed one final challenge at the end. These bosses aren't particularly interesting either - there are basically just normal enemies with beefier health bars. Both of them are combat challenges occurring on a flat, mostly featureless arena. This could be fine for the first boss (maybe it's just teaching you the basics of combat) but focusing your final challenge of the game ENTIRELY around it's weakest part is a terrible decision. The final boss is not much different from all other combat in the game - you run up to it, hit it a few times, it teleports away, rinse and repeat. Yes, the movement plays no part in this fight. One great way they could have improved it is by mixing combat and movement together - for example, you hit the boss a few times, it teleports away somewhere unreachable, then you have to parkour to it using all the movement abilities you have learned in order to hit it again. Or they could have removed the combat aspect altogether - just make it a long traversal challenge, kinda like what Braid did for it's boss. Honestly if they did either of these, it might have alleviated most of the problems I had with not fully utilising the movement. Also the final boss was super easy due to the character being extremely overpowered, I beat it on my first try. Maybe if they at least made the boss a bit harder, this could have added a reason for all those combat upgrades to exist.

Another thing that soured my experience a bit is all the bugs. Most of the bugs are harmless. The menu system in particular is incredibly buggy for some reason - amateur stuff. But I also encountered two, more serious bugs where my character got stuck in an animation without any way to move - both times it happened on moving platforms. One of them caused me to lose significant amount of progress.

Also I don't know if this is just a skill issue but some movement abilities feel weird to use. The "kick" ability sometimes activates when I don't want it to and the wall run sometimes doesn't activate when I do. I'm sure if spend another hour specifically practicing these abilities I could get them to work consistently but I believe basic movement should come naturally. The challenge of the movement has to be about how you combine these abilities in a clever way, not about fighting the controls.

Overall a good experience but it could have been so much better with some more time in the oven.

Also I've been going through the original Company of Heroes campaigns. I wish my infantry knew some parkour so they could jump over a fucking fence

Mina the Hollower is kinda taking over my life. I played like 5 hours yesterday lol. Very good game so far and exactly my kind of thing. There's a bunch of secrets and rewards for exploring and it's been a lot of fun dissecting each area. And of course the sound track is excellent, everything Jake Kaufman composes is top quality.

I also got to try Twinkle Star Sprites on Fightcade with my friend the other day. It's a PvP shoot em up game where you shoot the enemies that appear on your side of the screen to launch attacks at your opponents side of the screen. There's a bunch of different characters with different shot types and special moves, you can reflect your opponent's attacks back at them, and you can even summon a boss monster to your opponent's side of the screen. It's really fun, it's fast-paced but not too hectic and not too tricky to get the hang of. I definitely recommend giving it a try if you've got someone to play with.

Completed Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number this week.Its very intensive, frustrating and rewarding all at the same time. But: why can enemies kill you off screen when you can't see and respond to them!!! Good sound design and music, the sudden stop of the level music once its complete and a change of track is a good feature. I guess it grounds you into realising what you have done to complete the level; sure its a video game and the violence is fictional but its almost as if what you've done is impacting the story progression.

I don't quite understand the story but its seemed interesting and has some depth that's probably worth delving into when I go through again on Hard mode.

I also went back to the Splatoon series this weekend. Was Splatoon 1's 11th anniversary so I hopped into the Pretendo servers for a bit. Seems to be a reasonable amount still playing and possibly new players judging from the player levels. Though it could be long-term players trying a new save instead of porting their old one over, though others have (including me). I had my Splatoon 3 muscle memory after over a year after not playing, was nice to see that my skill level didn't drop. Though the issue of being on a losing streak when playing with a less aggressive gear-set is still there. Will be good to just hop in Splatoon 3 every now and then for some intensive matches and it was also nice to re-remember all the lore that honestly got me fascinated with the series. Though looking back into it raises some questions into how the English localisation severely differs and portrays some of the world differently, some of it worryingly.

Still farting around with mortal kombat arcade, can almost clear it on medium (with continues).

I finished Cyberpunk! So much fun, what a great game. Just drenched in atmosphere. The devs really knew how to put you in situations that just feel cool, like meeting a samurai in a black trench coat by a river in the rain. I thought the DLC was the strongest part of the game, Reed and Songbird are the strongest characters in the game, besides Johnny and V.

I've already got the itch to play again, as a corpo, and make all different choices, as well as bumping up the difficulty. But I have many games on my backlog, most pressing of which is Elden Ring, which I've now started. I'm only a couple hours in, so any advice?

Got to the endgame region in Pokopia. Of course, the first thing I did was build out a subway system. Not surprisingly, it is the best combination of speed and efficiency in getting around the map. Built out some housing, an arcade/internet cafe. Terraforming an area to be a coniferous forest, thinking I’ll make some ancient ruins after that.

Replaying Chrono Trigger because it's been like a decade. Still remember every single detail about it.

Started playing Doki Doki Literature Club. Unfortunately everything was spoiled for me when I watched some video essay that mentioned it a while back but still enjoying it.

Still playing Planescape Torment and really enjoying it. Kinda taking my time with it at the moment because there's some heavy lore dump going on and my mind isn't prepared to take in all this information about inner and outer planes and githyanki and whatever else is going on at the smoldering corpse bar.

Games I started playing and abandoned for various reasons: Baldur's Gate 3 - It's fine. It's overwhelming. There is so much going on. I'll come back to it eventually. Cyberpunk: Same reasons as BG3. Bayonetta. I don't remember why I stopped playing it. FF13: God I really wanted to like this but I'm like 20 hours in and I'm so bored. I think I'll just watch how it ends.

I did finish Zero Parades. Overall, I did have a great time playing it. Plenty of laughs from some good writing, which is a high mark for me because most game writing sucks. If any game can get my to laugh and cry, its an instant 10/10 (disco elysium) However, I really don't think the game stuck the landing in the end very much. By the end of the first act, i expected the plot to go to something like

I'd probably like to play it again, possible if they release a directors cut or something. i did encounter at least a few bugs while playing. Also i apparently missed an entire character.

9/10

Currently Mostly only spending my gaming time playing No Man’s Sky. The Nexus seems to have an annoying fetish for sending me to a planet with aggressive sentinels and chromatic fog and it was some of the least fun shit I’ve experienced in the game so far

A work friend suckered me into playing War Thunder. It's a little more arcadey than I usually play, but I've been enjoying casually playing with shitty free planes

Played a bit of Zero Parades for Dead Spies and it's... it's... I mean it's literally a bad game, but I feel silly pointing that out. Like I feel like people are gonna say it's because of the ZA/UM factor, but it's just poorly made. Before we get into the story or anything else we simply have to contend with the fact that it is poor craftsmanship. Everything stutters weirdly and if there's any kind of graphical overlay that shit will literally just stick around until you alt-f4 the game, half the time sound doesn't play or it plays at odd volumes or it only plays half the dialogue, and sometimes you just can't select stuff in the environment. Also there's literally no reason not to savescum since unlike disco elysium failure is never interesting, or at least it hasn't been so far.

a bit of BG1, got my party together (Imoen, Khalid, Jaheira, Minsc, Dynaheir) and finally don’t have timed companion quests to chase after so I can slow down and explore the wilderness looking for encounters and magic gear, my druid has access to Web now so fights are a lot easier

Schrödinger's Cat Burglar, mostly. Because I will never not play a cat game. It's Aussie, too, which is just more motivation. It's also actually really, really good.

It's kind of cliche to describe a puzzle game as 'like Portal but with X', and they were clearly going for a similar vibe or homage, right down to the orange/blue colour scheme. It works though, and it's definitely its own thing rather than a cheap copy. The central gimmick is that you control two copies of the same cat, and it forces you to think differently as a result, similar to what Portal did by breaking your expectations of physics.

The learning curve is gentle, the vibes are friendly, the humour is less dark, the stakes are lower, and the cat is really cute. Highly recommended.

Monsters and Memories

Still playing Zeroranger. I made it to the final final boss (again... ), this time I will take precautions

Did a few runs of Risk of Rain 2 after picking up the latest DLC, but it hasn't sucked me back in yet. Not really a big fan of either of the two new characters so far.

Continuing my Warframe grinds and came to the first week where I already have everything from the circuit. Running out of things to do but it's such a good brain off action game.

Playing a fair bit of Total Warhammer 3. Started a coop campaign as Clan Moulder and the mechanic of giving your units every disease so that you can unlock the ability to make Gigachad Rat Ogres with like 80 speed and 70 charge bonus is fun. Why the fuck wolf rats get magic attacks, I'll never know, but it makes them shockingly strong.

And lastly, I started CrossCode but have only had time to play for an hour or so. Seems neat!

Hitman and Watch Dogs 2. I replay same games over and over

Currently on an Octopath Traveler 0 binge. This little nugget keeps coming back to haunt me, and it cracks me up every time. [CW for pixelated meat, I guess?]

My thoughts thus far -- at about 40 hours in, a large chunk of which has been puttering around and trying to explore things I'm not supposed to be able to survive yet -- are that it's kind of mid. OT1 had a very old-school JRPG vibe to it and you could tell that they hadn't thought everything through on the first go, which is pretty understandable. OT2 was a goddamned masterpiece. OT0 feels like a step backwards from OT2 because they probably didn't have a great sense of direction in mind when they started on it. Admittedly, I'm not all the way through the main story yet, but having something like 36 goddamned gacha game characters in here with very little story around any of them beyond a brief vignette and a couple of sidequests makes me think they were banking on the "shiny objects" factor. Add in that most of the experience thus far has been trope-laden cutscenes that always end in a "But m'lord, you must!" choice popup and yeah... I'm glad I didn't pay full price.

At least I got to go John Brown mode and recruit enby Gollum.

Tactical Assault VR with a buddy, Star Citizen with an org (currently on a blueprint grind), and Rimworld again. I should be finishing a handful of games on my backlog but I'm not feeling crpgs atm.

I was on a Borderlands kick recently and decided to try Dead Island 2 since it's kind of similar. I've really been enjoying it

Yakuza 4 on my ps3, this game is so good. Played through all of them before so now just doing another play through with the all the substories

Path of Exile 2 new league just dropped. Also Paralives with my partner so I can help her with it.

Been giving my PS Portal the business this past week, hadn't touched it or the PS5 in multiple months. My PS Plus lapsed and I didn't even notice, that's how little I've g*med lately.

Lawn Mowing Simulator, Anno 1800, Hot Shots Golf 2, Goat Sim 3, and RDR1 this week. And Fork Knife with my daughter tonite after dinner.