Games

I'm mostly playing Hollow Knight and Majoras Mask right now. Just started a new HK file, and I'm through Woodfall temple in MM. I can definitely recommend both games as fantastic.

Started Esoteric Ebb and watched some Warcraft 3 Altar of Champions, a tournament where the participants are streamers that aren't experienced with WC3.

So far I find Esoteric Ebb funnier but not as clever compared to Disco Elysium.

Some of the developers of HorizonXI, one of the better Final Fantasy XI servers, are doing an alpha test of a new Ragnarok Online server called SpringRO.

There's not very many people playing right now because they've done 0 advertising except a single post in the HorizonXI Discord, but plan to get om ratemyserver and such later on. They're building some stuff from scratch instead of using janky scripts from other servers that are also sometimes paywalled. There's no multiboxing allowed (thank god). I like Horizon a lot, so I have confidence this will become the largest RO server over the next year or two. Surprisingly, with the ridiculous and unnecessary number of servers with 15 players, few of them do Classic+ in the same vein as TurtleWoW. The goal is apparently to expand on the original content, rebalance classes so that some are more viable than just buff bots, niche/meme builds are viable, etc. They said they want to develop like Old School Runescape with most big decisions getting community input.

They also made a little Poring Clicker game over the weekend to keep people busy.

I don't necessarily recommend it right this second since there's no timeline for the alpha/beta or release, but it's supposed to be fairly quick. Maybe a few months? The server is going to be wiped at least once on the way though, so there's no point in trying to progress super hard instead of just experimenting with classes if you're new.

Anyway, I'm already back on my mage shit, using Frost Diver + Lightning bolt to eliminate anything in my way. No fire needed. I want to play a battlesmith when the server actually goes live, but that's a lot of investment right now.

Nightreign is hopefully a good sign that they'll do a better job with multiplayer... though I just hope that doesn't mean more nightreign-likes. Where's my damn Armoured Souls, come ooooooon, Doll's Nest has a stab at it but it's not my cup of tea.

I've been playing Subnautica 2. It's fun, has a stronger ecological theme, and they made the fabricator draw from storage instead needing interminable inventory juggling. But I'll probably stop for a while, since I've reached the part of the worldmap where it starts saying "you can't build here, it's under development" and I want to build there...

Im just waiting for the CIV 7 Test of Time update which is a free update that reworks the entire game and also makes it possible to play a CIV from start to finish. Civ switching never bothered me but im quite curious to try the update since it does other things as well like re-work how the victories work. The update launches this Tuesday so yes very soon.

Started Silksong again. I got very far into the game but didn't quite finish Act III when it came out. Compared to my first time I feel like a professional. I'm just breezing through some stuff where I was stuck forever on my first playthrough.

I have mostly been playing terraria with the nerds of the matrix chat this last weeks, we played vainilla and calamity its been really fun.p

I have mostly played as the best class Summoner and its been fun, i dont have to dodge much because bosses always target @RedNajm@hexbear.net for the sin of being melee class, the calamity moon lord has been the hardest boss in my opinion the only one where human wave tactics wasnt cutting it

I also been playing Age of empires 2, i finished the hindustani campaign, it was pretty good, it was about babur who founded the mughal empire

I'm playing Transistor but I don't think I am gonna finish it. The art and music are cool but the combat makes no sense to me.

Getting back into Stellaris. Apparently you can now play coop as a single empire which is super cool.

Ultramodern, though I'm starting to see what the negative reviews were seeing. I think it was originally developed to be d20 Modern using 4th edition D&D as a framework, but by the time they were going to finish, 5th edition D&D was launching, and so what they landed on has all the benefits of 5e and all the hindrances of 4e. Furthermore, having played a bunch of OSR systems, I miss when the rulebook was more like guidelines on how to issue rulings and run your game instead of rigid and intricate rules.

As for video'd games, been playing Divinity: Original Sin (the first one) with a friend, because it's very plainly supposed to be a 2 player co-op experience. We named our party Magic Pockets Club. When I don't feel like making up a new character in an RPG I have a character I default to who's very Snake Plissken, but having an in-game friend has altered that. This time he's a little bit softer, and I like it.

I've been playing alabaster dawn, very cool game from the crosscode folks. It only has half of chapter 2 done currently. But plays really good!

And lots of slay the spire 2. Just slowing working up acensions with ironclad currently.

Entered some tournaments. New people showed up this time and i was given the honor of promoting them from competitors to spectators. They immediately left after bracket instead of sticking around for casual games so i doubt theyll show up again.

Playing Call of the Elder Gods, pretty good so far and I loved Call of the Sea (it takes Lovecraft and unracisms it, current main character is a black scholar dealing with what seem to be Nazis via operation paperclip and a rich American science lodge).

Finally got to start Rangers of Shadow Deep! We played a mission that splits into multiple smaller scenarios. I still want to do a solo run starting from level 1. I learned spellcasters can be kind of weak because they can only use a spell once per scenario, unlike a lot of games where you can use the same spell multiple times but there's risks like miscasting or failing the attempt.

I haven't played much this week, but I have been installing and configuring a bunch of old PC games which is its own type of game for me. It started with getting a software synth set up for Sonic & Knuckles Collection and then I figured I should find some fun DOS games to try to get more use out of the synth. So far I've got Blood, Star Wars Dark Forces, Ultimate Doom, Jazz Jackrabbit (although I'm not using MIDI for that one), Ultima Underworld, and Warcraft. I don't know which game I'm actually going to play first though lol, probably Doom? I've never played any of those old shooter games (or really DOS games in general) so I feel like I owe it a shot. Ultima Underworld is the game I'm most interested in trying, but I don't know if I'm ready to commit to something like that yet.

I've been really dragging my feet about completing the current Valheim content; trying to dodge that sadness-that-it's over vibe

Still playing Diablo 1 and having so much nostalgia, I actually got some op endgame gear in single player like a sword of haste. I'm used to diablo 2 where the real good shit is locked away in nightmare and hell, but in diablo 1 high tier stuff can drop in normal in hell

I somehow found myself creating an ironman in osrs. Idk why ive done this to myself but I have and I am enjoying it so far

Finished my Total Warhammer 3 Tamurkhan campaign, started a Changeling campaign. It's interesting, definitely far far easier than a normal campaign once you get your cults off the ground and the passives from schemes start rolling in, but not a fan of how some of the scheme objectives are reliant on various AI factions staying alive given how random that can be. Since I can't hold territory and I want to be at war with everyone at once, I'm mostly just trying to keep Couronne alive in the face of Wintertooth and transferring their settlements back to them. Also not sure who a good pick would be for Formless Horror, currently I'm going with Tyrion since he has generally good stats.

Also playing some Warframe here and there, no actual progress made in the last week other than doing weeklies, grinding the event currency, and too many failed runs to get Protea.

I'm still on my China inspired Stellaris run with the Workers Coop of cute lizard folk I talked about in the previous Sunday thread. The empire is very tall since it's a Ring World and I have only been able to have the 3 sections colonized + 1 single planet + 1 habitat. But things are looking good.

The Workers Coop trade policy is kinda broken, no? l can just build a bunch of trade and all the basic resources are accounted for in abundance, then all I have to do is keep trade high and build facilities to transform it into advanced resources. I have also formed a trade federation with two other smaller empires. My fleet was bad tho and the megacorp nearby kept declaring war on me but they never invaded since I kept the starbase well pretected. Now I have found the Head of Zarqlan yet again so that's not an issue anymore.

Outside that, my internet went out the other day and since Stellaris cloud saves are stored exclusively on the cloud with no local copy for some reason, I decided to start playing something else, and that was Baldur's Gate 3. I had forgotten how good this game is. Previously I only finished the first act and played a bit of the second wieh a necromancer tiefling, in this new save I'm doing a melee warlock with an elf. I've just gotten Karlach (my beloved) into the party.

EDIT: Also tried V Rising and Asltral Ascent in the free weekend, and both are good but Astral Ascent is gorgeous, the pixel art is amazing and the gameplay is really fun too, I would probably just change the keybindings on the controller since you attack with X and dash with B and it's the kind of game where you do both constantly.

currenly trying to scratch my real-time tactics itch

I finally picked up homeworld remastered series (last time I player homeworld was before the remasters) and I just remembered how good these games are. Oh my god homeworld 2 is soooo good. Pushing my carrier through dense enemy defenses, deciding which targets should be prioritised by my bombers, making sure to recall my interceptors at just the right time, so satisfying

also got back to shogun 2, my favourite total war game. Playing as Ikko-Ikki being super aggresive, which seems to be paying off

This week i started playing Elden Ring seamless co-op with my brother

good stuff. I almost finished it with my friend but he got a bit too mad at some of the final bosses so we abandoned it

I just restarted Expedition 33 because there are two trophies I missed. Fighting the mime in Lumiere and getting one of the records.

I need to finish Knuckles Chaotix and then either get back to my TOTK playthrough or I'm tempted to play the Half-Life 2 port on XBOX for unknown reasons. I played a little bit and it goes down to like 4 FPS during a couple scenes where there's explostions plus an open area, but otherwise it runs okay-ish. I still care about performance in games but I'm caring less and less these days. I played the original 3DS port of Hyrule Warriors for a little and that's probably the worst-running game I've ever played (on console) and didn't really mind too much.

• got pretty into Battlestar Galactica Scattered Hopes, a roguelitey thing that has been pretty fun so far
• a little Sonic Racing Crossworlds on switch emulator, fun little cart racer, can recommend
• some Goblin Cleanup with my lovely fiancée

Played all of Assemble with Care

Delightful little game! Exceptionally well voice acted, scored, and illustrated. Puzzles are fairly straightforward, but it's more about just soaking up the vibe :) also apparently made by the folks who did Monument Valley which is cool

I've been enjoying pillars of eternity 2: deadfire, playing it for the first time. I liked other classic crpgs of the genre and this one is pretty good. I like the archipelago/age of sail/early gunpowder setting, it's different than typical medieval fantasy settings.

I've been playing some Parking Garage Rally Circuit. At 50% off it's $7.50 AUD. Despite having rally in the title it's more of a drifting cart racer. I thought it would be hard to tell the levels apart because of the theme but they all have their own character. It can get a little hard to figure out where to go, and the difficulty curve feels quite steep as you'll be constantly restarting to try nap the top spot because those ghosts really go hard

After euthanizing one of my chickens on Friday I played a bunch of crypt custodian, and then some timberborn