What have we all been playing recently?

I keep getting trapped in fresh Stellaris games because I enjoy the exploration and settling part but get bored and frustrated by how slowly the game seems to go after that point, even on highest speed. One of these times I'll actually stick with a game long enough to hit one of these Crisis points I hear about.......

 

finished a grind in rs3. 35 crafting and 35 smithing. to upgrade my necromancer set to tier 40. i forgot that tier 40 requires 40 defense on account of being too excited about finishing a grind. i now cannot wear my necromancer gear at all. not until i gain four more levels in defense. so i'm doing magic now i guess??? got some quests done and started another. i like what they did to rune mysteries and especially to imp catcher. imp catcher in osrs just kind of sucks ass and it's easy to see why no one but ironmen bother doing the quest the intended way. so a nice short deal with unique events is a much appreciated change from "KILL FIVE THOUSAND IMPS AND PRAY TO SARADOMIN THAT THEY DROP THE REQUIRED BEADS".

also it's nice to have found a clan? makes playing the game nicer since i can chat with people in-game easily. and people have advice and stuff for me while i play.

i think i'm gonna keep questing for a bit in rs3. quests are fun and the combat and quest rewards might get me the 40 defense i need to get back into my easy baby combat style of no thinking. i do like mage but i'd need to find gear upgrades for it. apparently the next set is bat wings so i can just pop down to taverly dungeon and grind out some wings to replace my current spider silk set. i may end up keeping the spider silk set though because i like how it looks. it can sit in my bank tab of fashionscape gear.

 

I beat the final boss of Ni no Kuni 2 and then went right back into the sidequest mines because I'm kind of obsessed now. I'm not remotely surprised it didn't do nearly as well as the first one, but I've enjoyed it much more on an unironic level (it's nowhere near as visually stunning, but the narrative construction of the main story is a lot better, and it plays much more smoothly as a straightforward action RPG than NNK1's real-time menu-based combat rendered semi-turn-based by cooldowns and animation locking), but also with a gleeful, cackling incredulity that this absolutely batshit bananapants game actually exists. For the last week and a half I've been regaling my Bijou thread, my Tumblr followers, everyone in my Discord gameblogging server, and also my sibling in real life with a running commentary of True Facts About My New Blorbo, occasionally at 3 AM.

 

One of my friends installed their housemate's copy of NNK2 on their laptop last winter as a way of gauging whether the original was likely to run okay on my laptop, and somehow both of these people neglected to mention at any point that this game has objectively the funniest premise in the world.

 

I was fundamentally changed as a person when I witnessed the moment like 5 minutes into the game where an anthropomorphic mouse guy in fantasy armor is about to stab a cute little catboy with a spear, and

Spoiler

Roland pulls out a literal fucking Glock and caps him.

anyhoo, for whatever it's worth, both of them run fine on my laptop, which was high-end when I got it but is 7 years old.

 

Yeah, that's about what I expected. My laptop is within spitting distance of Steam's recommend specs, but in practice that could mean anything from "runs perfectly fine" to "the gameplay is normal but the load times are hell" to "minimum graphics settings ONLY and your computer will sound like it's being tortured the entire time." Hence the friend doing the volunteer playtest, since their computer is older than mine we figured if it works for them it'll work for me.

(I actually did buy and install the original back then, but I still haven't touched it bc Animation Homework has not stopped happening long enough for me to invest myself in a full-length RPG)

 

Highlight from the backlog of recent IF I'm currently working through: ConfigurationUploader, a program for uploading configurations.

 

At first I was like, are you pranking us? Then I looked at the content warnings and concluded, if there is a prank here, it is elsewhere

 

Ha. Nope, this is a genuine interactive fiction rec from me! (I don't know that I'd recommend the software itself, mind.)

 

I have reached the year 2402... no sign of anything drastic, besides one of the other employees empires declaring rivalry with the Ancient empire hilariously underleveled for that fight (they have maybe 150k total fleet strength from what I can see)

Letting it run on highest speed while I play a turn based game on Switch so I can bounce back and forth. Soon. Soon I will finish once (1) game, whatever the outcome.


Eta: autocorrect giving me "employees" there, and me not catching it, is very funny to me. It's weekend, brain, we don't need to think work right now.

 

my best friend recently got hollow knight for their bday and I am therefore back on my bullshit. I actually went and bought it on my switch as well, so now I'm 75% through a run on easy mode mods and early game in a regular game.

this game is so fun but goddamn, I look at speedrunners or youtubers playing and feel like maybe my hands are actually grafted on from a gorilla or perhaps a lobster

 

started Ori and the Will of the Wisp after it was on sale on steam and GOD i forgot how much the first one already tore out my soul as i watched on (highly recommend it. bawl your eyes out for the best gut punch) and i am VERy much enjoying this one too

i just also suck at platformers so i am playing this on baby difficulty.

 

made it through White Palace!! I could physically feel myself getting better at the game the whole time. I have much better control over the character now (though I still don't think I could do a single section first try lol). and I missed a tiny little optional thing at the end because I didn't know it kicks you out, sooooo I have to do half of it again or it's gonna bug me XD

still not doing the path of pain tho. ...maybe later.

 

I beat hollow knight!! :D on easy mode but I still feel accomplished. got the 3rd least sad ending lol.

now to beat it normally. or to take a swing at Godmaster until I get bored of the grind :P

 

Just played A Paradox Between Worlds. I'm... still sorting out the feelings it left me with, honestly.

I think the most accurate way to describe it would be "more than the sum of its parts".

It's an extremely weird game; I say this in a tone of awed respect, but also as advance warning. It's a somewhat disorienting mashup of "eerily accurate period piece" and "anachronistic mix of eras". It took pains to represent my personal emoji use accurately, yet reduced my shipping preferences to a crude handful of options.

It's also the only work of fiction about the internet that has ever felt true to my own experiences on social media, rather than someone else's. And I think that's going to stick with me.

 

i've been really enjoying Balatro recently! it's a "poker roguelike" where you start with a normal 52 card deck and then make it weird. or as the steam page says:

would highly recommend for any fans of card games/deckbuilders, roguelikes, or both!

 

Skyrim, except with a mod that randomizes where all the doors go. :D

 

I replayed Portal because for some reason Steam was under the impression that I had only ever played it for 23 minutes ever, and this Powerpoint that you can see playing through a window has accidentally gotten much funnier over time:

Back when the game was new, the fact that the presentation Aperture made to bitch about how Black Mesa kept getting money instead of them was entirely shitty low-res default Microsoft Office visuals was a little bit funny. But now, it's a massively outdated version of Microsoft Office, and that's the most beautifully on-brand Aperture thing I can possibly imagine.

 

Currently working through the Splatoon dlc Side Order

 

Just got around to finishing Weird and Unfortunate Things Are Happening, a horror RPG which is worth the price of "free" just for how good the title is. More horror games should prominently feature administrative assistants channeling years of service industry rage into extreme violence.