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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.

  • 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

  • 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.

    • 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!

  • 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 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 POLICE ARE ON THE SCENE WE"RE LOCKING THIS COMMENT DOWN

    • 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)

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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

    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:

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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...

  • 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.

  • 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

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

  • 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

  • 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.

78 comments