Sunday is Gaming Day: What Are You Playing Weekly Thread

Started my yearly Halloween VTMB playthrough the other day. Still an amazing fucking game.

Canceled the WoW sub after 2 months. Really put into focus that the part of WoW I enjoyed was playing with my friends, and they don't play anymore. Anyway, maybe I'll dip back in in 15 years again.
Since then I've been playing Pacific Drive with all the fiddly crafting systems turned way down thanks to the recent update they put out. I've got to say, though, as someone who has been to the Olympic Peninsula, they kind of did a really bad job of capturing what it looks like. It's not nearly wet enough. There's no moss. There are no rivers. No waterfalls. Idk. In execution, it's not as cool as the concept, and I think at least some of that can be laid at the feet of the art direction.
And I've done a few runs in the new Hades 2 update, but haven't managed to stay alive long enough to see the new content because I got rusty.
- yeah i only played a little of Pacific drive but it didn't seem as cool as it might have been. I found the voice acting lacking too and not in a charming kind of way

I've been playing the occasional Balatro run. I've gotten to that point of my life where I appreciate the consistency of the high card build more than the power of the usual flush spam. Also I had a successful Obelisk run, one of those jokers that's very good in theory but you need to have the right setup to successfully pivot using it.
- Huh, how'd you do the Obelisk run? Pivot into high card or pair or something?
  
  I had played around 10 flushes. I basically had to get a bunch of copies of a single rank of card, then I played every hand type I could. The secret is to always avoid playing pairs and high cards, because if you play those too often you'll max out on the hands you want to use as discards. Eventually, I had several copies of an 8 card so I was consistently drawing 3oak, 4oak, 5oak and flush of a kind, which allowed me to play each of those in moderation so I simply kept powering up the obelisk across the course of the run.
- I'm almost gold on all decks. Been wanting to do more edits to the images, though. It's really simple modding and gives me a reason to draw/edit stuff.

I started playing the new factorio dlc and then I remembered I suck at factorio. So I started playing viccy 3 and I remembered I suck at that too.
So now I am planning on playing some openttd after work because somehow I am good at that game
- I started playing the new DBZ Sparking! Zero after I broke down and bought it out of nostalgia for Tenkaichi 3 only to find I was seriously bad at it and forgot all my skills. But through a few helpful tutorials on youtube, some time beating the shit out of a practice dummy to relearn how to combo, and then slowly relearning the defensive game by just getting my ass handed to me over and over, I feel like I am actually getting decent again. Nowhere near as good as early twenties sweaty nerd me, but I feel less like I am flailing around mashing buttons now and more like the all powerful gods the characters are in the shows. It's been a fun time.

Battletech (2018) - it came out when I was totally burnt out on tactics RPGs, but I'm totally enjoying it right now
Not much else - I've played a little of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, but it's not quite grabbing me

Final dlc for Alan Wake 2 is out so I'm going to give that a try and hope it is full of tasty lore nuggets that crave for the control universe.
And next week we get the monster hunter wilds bets so that will be consuming my time for a week.

Been playing Satisfactory for a bit and it's clicking with me in a way that Factorio and Dyson Sphere Program never did. I think verticality is just a lot more fun for me, and lets me feel a little more architectural.
Foolin' around with Qausimorph some too - pretty good roguelike, don't know if it really goes anywhere yet, but it's enjoyable enough to do a run or two. A little more tonally edgy than my preference.
I have Banquet for Fools installed, but apparently it only has a few hours of content? It has a really interesting style and the qausi-turn-based ARPG system looks interesting, but I'm not sure if I should crack into it or wait.

Tried kof15. Game is like skullgirls levels of horny. Not really a fan of having to play 3 characters, but if fatal fury plays like this i might get it

After Portal 2 I started up Quantum Conundrum and remembered real quick that the game can be annoying. A lot of the puzzles feel like chores and aren't really fun.
I'm in shutdown/waiting mode so Instead of being functional, I hopped back on X4 and let it idle a bit to work on my substrate factory and then did some stuff on the PHQ. Got attacked by a pirate and he nuked my shields before I realized what was going on since I was tabbed out browsing Hexbear. My pilot flew to an adjacent sector before I could get blow it up so that was cool. 60k in repairs.
- Play Portal: Reloaded if you're looking for more fun puzzle games
  
  That's actually what got me on this kick. That is a very well made mod.

Got back into FFXIV to finally play dawntrail the big catgirl princess is a good kid

I have hit the object limit in satisfactory and I'm not even at tier 9 yet. I think my partner and I just like to build too big

F A C T O R I O I N S P A C E

I've been playing minecraft, some bedwars and trying to learn the 1.16.1 speedrun. Right now I need to practice my bastions and learn how to 1 cycle the dragon.

Nothing
But I wish I could say Fire Emblem: The Morrow's Golden Country

Ashamed to say I'm quite hooked to War Thunder... Playing soviet tanks hits the spot.
I really wanna do another Baldur's run and the Elden Ring DLC but I've decided I'm not doing those until I'm done with my thesis

I got halfway through Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty and now the game just won't get past the loading screen anymore so I can't finish it.
I was having fun too. The game is pretty easy and not at all like a Souls game mechanically even though that's a common comparison, unlike the Pinocchio game I still haven't played yet. Fitting with the theme, the first difficult boss was Lu Bu where the game really expects you to know how to parry. I'll try booting it up again in a few weeks and hopefully it randomly fixes itself after a Proton update or something.

UFO50 and Diceomancer, both are fantastic! Also some lethal company, plateup and remnant 2 with my friends. Want to try out the new factorio dlc but not sure if I want to sink the time it demands.

Played a variety of things.
Monster Hunter Rise, finished the base game final boss and continued doing some MR stuff, all solo. The final boss was actually surprisingly tricky solo because it seems to leave you very few openings. Really like that Sunbreak added the AI companions because all of my friends stalled out before the end of HR content.
Halls of Torment, trying to clear the Vault but haven't been able to. Got close on Shieldmaiden but ended up not being able to do enough damage to clear the hordes that were bubble-wrapping the boss and stalled out, then slowly died.
Satisfactory, kinda just playing with a friend when we're both available. Finished all the tech in Phase 2 and now it's just kind of a grind for the completed resources to get to Phase 3. Rather than properly building a factory for the inputs, I'm just manually moving them back and forth between supply crates. Might go for quartz while we wait because I think that's how you get the rollerskates.
Two more were random picks from my backlog:
Orwell, an indie game about being an authoritarian government surveillance employee who uses social media and phone taps to spy on people and frame them for terrorism. Pretty short, the game really suffers from being 5 Chapters where the first 4 are tutorials and the last one is a ramp in difficulty with a time limit. Overall I'd say not great and holds your hand too much.
Dawn of War: Dark Crusade. It's from 2006 and boy does it feel like it; I really need to find a mod I can install to zoom out more and remap keys because the click and drag map scrolling is fucked on modern resolutions and I'd like to use WASD rather than arrow keys. I'm bad at RTS so I started an Eldar campaign on Easy difficulty and completely stomped the SM in my first two battles but then got absolutely destroyed by the Tau when I tried fighting them. Who thought that giving a faction invisible troops as their default unit was a good idea lmao.

It's been another vanilla week for me. Team Fortress 2, Monster Hunter Frontier, and Dragon's Dogma Online

Debating going to my fighting game local again this week because I've been practicing a lot of SF6 but I have very minor symptoms (slightly sore throat, very lightly runny nose) and I know I really shouldn't go but I barely ever have the actual free time to attend, and first time I managed to go I somehow went undefeated and everyone was super cool and nice.
Man...

Prepping for a few shot in Savage Worlds I'll be DMing, and porting my homebrew I did for 5e to Savage Worlds. Just a better system, really.
Apart from that, some CK3, Rimworld, Rogue Trader, and Squad.