What are you playing at the moment?

Currently playing Majora's Mask on Switch Online and after the first dungeon I am currently on the side of people who don't like this game. There's just too much busy work to do seemingly mundane tasks.

And heaven forbid you get lost, run out of time and have to Song of Time back to day one in the middle of a task. Because now you gotta repeat allll that dumb stuff you had to do to get back to where you were. I don't know how many times I had to follow that monkey to find the old lady in the lost woods all because I couldn't find a bean merchant in a hole that's in a garden full of other holes.

Fuck Majora's Mask.

I'm playing a lot of games simultaneously so I'm probably not gonna get around to finishing any of them:

• Slay the Spire
• Weird West
• The Gunk
• Sable
• Replaying BotW with mods

Plus the continual fixation I have with FFXIV. I'm waiting for a job to start so I'm trying to make the best of it.

Stanley Parable Deluxe, Rogue Legacy 2 and Cyberpunk 2077. Honestly not loving the first two, I feel like once you get Stanley Parable there’s not much left and Rogue Legacy’s art style just bugs me. Cyberpunk is surprisingly a lot of fun now that it’s patched.

I've been playing this visual novel that I bought months (or more than a year?) ago on sale on PSN. "Yu-No: A girl who chants love at the end of the world". In my defence, I did no research on it besides skimming the description on the store. I do like the way the story is set up. It involves a device that lets you go back in time ~2 days, which is how it justifies the typical VN thing of reloading saves and making different choices.

I was not aware that it is a non-hentai remake of an old hentai VN that has several distasteful elements. Mostly that the main character is a piece of shit "18-year-old" high school student (though they translate it as "college") who makes sexually suggestive comments to every woman he sees, including his homeroom teacher (who for some reason is dressed in a leather bustier and miniskirt). Also, he had a brief sexual relationship with a substitute teacher before the game begins, which can be continued depending on the path you're on. Also, another story path leads you into a sexual relationship with his stepmother. Where I'm at in the game, he's in an alternate dimension fantasy world where he's pretty much sleeping with every woman he meets. (Not that he's a rapist, it's more like the women just find him amazingly attractive and hit on him.) It's weird.

Aside from the story issues, there are also a few jokes about trans people which are bad. Also a large percentage of CGs in the game are just women in various states of undress, including gratuitous panty shots and full on nude shots (though, this is not-actually-hentai so the naughty bits are strategically covered).

ASIDE from all that, the translation is not perfect. I do understand a decent amount of Japanese, so I can often tell when the subtitle doesn't match the spoken dialogue. Usually just really basic stuff like getting pronouns mixed up. For example, the person is saying "You did that" but the translation is "I did that". It would be very confusing if you were just reading it not knowing what they were actually saying. I don't know how this stuff gets past editors/proofreaders.. assuming they had any.

Ornstein and Smough. One attempt. No Solaire. ...Fuck yeah.

Edit 5/8/21: And now I'm four achievements away from 100% Dark Souls 1.

I finished Super Mario 64 after decades and it's awesome to see how smooth the gameplay is, te level design holds attention, the songs stick to the head and even with old graphics the game doesn't look bad. This is one of those classics games that leaving the graphics aside is really good game even in today standards, awesome game.

Now that I have finished the game, it actually got a lot worse. I'm talking actual INCEST. Spoilers for the end of the game:

Basically, in the fantasy world, the main character (Takuya) ends up having a daughter (the titular Yu-No), but she grows into a full adult in about 4-5 years. That daughter is in love with him and convinces him to have sex with her (at least, it is heavily implied). She is doomed to sacrifice herself to save the world by banishing herself to the endless void between dimensions. The canon ending is that Takuya somehow finds her and joins her, and they are shown floating around totally naked and holding each other.

Alternate ending: It is also heavily implied near the end of the game that Takuya unknowingly impregnated one of the women he slept with in the fantasy world. That woman got accidentally sent to Takuya's home dimension, but 50 years in the past. She gives birth to a daughter and eventually dies. This daughter grows according to the laws of her mother's dimension, so apparently she matured fast and stopped aging (or ages very slow) so she is still a high school student 50 years later when she meets Takuya. So yes, this route involving a seemingly normal romance between 2 students was actually INCEST THE WHOLE TIME AHHHHH. Why!!!

To recap, the romances in this game were:
2 "normal" romances
3 one-night-stands (possibly 4)
1 romance with his substitute teacher
1 romance with his stepmother
1 romance which is 100% incest and he knows it
1 romance which is 100% incest and he doesn't know it, but by the end of the game he should have figured it out, but he chooses to ignore it

I need to play something wholesome now.

The Serpent Rogue. It's a nice little adventure (I guess) game about an alchemist. The HUD makes it look like a souls clone but there's barely any combat in it. The stamina bar doubles as your hunger with their being a nice symbiotic relationship between the two. Like leftover hunger being able to slowly replenish any lost health, etc.

Really mellow, although it can be a little daunting to get your bearings.

Lost Judgment
I'm basically streaming this game on Twitch right now.

Is it only me, but this game is even more long winded than Judgment or other Yakuza games? There seems to be many parts that are normally skipped / sped thru, even in soap dramas, but seems to be here. Do I need to watch Yagami spending couple of minutes on intercom just to get an interview with someone?

I like the combat, but I hate the stealth sections.
I dislike the school setting, I understand it's a real and hard subject to tackle with, but somehow it's peppered with superfluous parts
So far I'm liking the game less than Judgment or Like a Dragon, and I'm just in chapter 5 or so.

Keep playing Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Underrail.

One is a baldurs gate on steroids and other one a true modern fallout.

Trying to design a decent map in Cities: Skylines.

...I like trains.

I've been playing idle slayer On mobile phone Such a big-time killer best Auto runner game ever

I've been on a Switch kick lately because I had Covid...

• Beat Kotor for the first time.
  • Still holds up in terms of story and characters
  • Combat is terrible, so I just turned the difficulty down to easy
  • I am interested to see how they handle the remake
• Into the Breach
  • This is a game that is always in my rotation.
  • Finally finished my first run today and it felt amazing
• Dragon Quest XI
  • Wanted to give a JRPG a shot and this seemed like one that I could get behind
  • No further notes as I am an hour in

Slowly going through Elden Ring. Enjoying it a lot and it is by far the most I've played a From game. I intend to finish it and plan to attempt all the achievements. Really like the world building and enemy design. I think the BotW comparisons are apt. I could take or leave the obscurity of the quests. I think they've built an interesting history and pantheon with a lot of intrigue, it's a shame that it's so easy to miss a lot of it. I understand the argument in favor of organic discovery, I'm just not sure I'm sold on it yet.

Still doing occasional runs through Spelunky 2. Not playing daily, maybe once a week. Still enjoying it but not to the degree I was obsessed with the first game. I came close to an ending run once, probably not "the" ending, but couldn't finish off a boss.

A dream NIS release on Switch: Makai Kingdom/ZHP came out this week and its all I am playing right now. What a great bundle. I think its worth the 40 asking IMO.

I recently discovered Full Combat Rebalance 2 for The Witcher 2, so hopefully it'll make the gameplay less frustrating.

Or, I'll act like my PS4 exists and do something with it.

I'm replaying DMCV on PS5 (looks great) and am playing the Life Ends With You sequel which is pretty enjoyable for now but I worry that the fighting might get a bit repetetive compared to the original. In the sequel all the characters play in basically the same way, while every new party member brought their own gimmick in the DS game. I also can't decide which language I want to go with because some characters are really bad in the dub, but some are 100% better imho. And the fight quips are not subbed unfortunately.

When I want to relax I play the Great Ace Attourney collection.

Still playing runs of Curse of the Dead Gods on and off. The more I play this game the more I think they missed a trick by not having a Darkest Dungeon-esque narrator. As far as I know there's no mod that does that.

I started playing Rogue Legacy 2. I barely played the first game but this one is sucking me in with its rogue-liteness and the crisp looking art. I'm actually not very good at the game which makes the premise of this lineage of warriors fall apart. At a certain point I've been feeding so many heirs into the meat grinder that they might as well have been the freeze-dried prisoners from Void Bastards.

What I've been playing the most is Sifu. The theming and styyyyle of this game are absolutely phenomenal. It also runs shockingly well on a PS4. Playing it however is kind of a struggle. My chief beef with the game is just how tight the timing windows for parries/avoids are. I can't even count the number of times when I swear I timed my parry/dodge perfectly but still get hit! I'm using the tools in the game that the devs put there so I could avoid damage from the enemies they designed and the mechanics are proving to be unreliable. On top of that there are some times when the camera or character gets caught on the geometry in a way that really screw me. I'm so close to loving this otherwise amazing beat-em-up and will probably finish it but these are rough edges that are hard to ignore.

I keep coming back to play Minecraft cause it's limitless and I like building whatever I can.

Still Elden Ring. Wanna switch it up a bit (tried that last month with Ghostwire.. didn't stick after 10 hours or so- it's fine) but I keep coming back to ER. I never played an MMO, but Elden Ring feels to me what I imagine MMOs feel like to the people that play them. Like I can just drop in whenever and discover new shit, seemingly for hundreds of hours.

I did play Streets of Rage 2 on a whim the other day though! and got pretty far in one go, but I always eat it at the stadium level, LOL. This might prompt me to give Sifu a try... or Streets of Rage 4.

Ha, i also just played through Kotor (on PC) and yeah i think it's still pretty enjoyable and definitly feels, looks and sounds like an epic Star Wars adventure. Eventhough the lil minigames like swoop racing and turret sections are pretty bad, my lizardbrain still appreciates doing a different gameplay thing for a minute here and there. Combat wise, it was sort of fun to try to optimize your AOE force powers to hit as many enemies at once. And i sort of appreciated how the beginning and ending of the game has a decent difficulty to it. The middle-section of the game is something you breeze through just like Mass Effect though.

Anyways, i just started Kotor II for the first time now.

If I stop playing Elden Ring I will probably never pick up Elden Ring again so that's what I'm playing and will be playing for the foreseeable future. Allegedly I'm over halfway done but we'll see. It's good but not a personal all-timer and playing it shortly after beating Dark Souls for the first time has definitely blunted its impact. In the pantheon of Generational Open World Fantasy Games, I'd rank it above Breath of the Wild, about at the same level as Witcher 3, and below Skyrim. Love the combat, love my little horse, love the art direction, but don't particularly care for the overall design of the open world, the arbitrariness of the questlines, or the soup of Proper Nouns and Names Starting With G, R, Or M that passes for lore/a story.

Death's Door.
I got to the last great soul area, and I just couldn't like this game.
I will replay LA Noire next, and probably Ever 17, the visual novel, after that.

My playthough of Pokemon X is temporarily on pause for Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance.

Been playing Forza Horizon 5 and I just finished Series 8's Summer challenges for the most part. All I got to do now are the daily's which now have a 7-day time limit before the challenge expires. FH4 had a 3-day limit which wasn't too fun to worry about as a completionist. FH5 has been awesome overall, but I dread every PvP challenge cause of having to redo it. PvP challenges in this game isn't "tired from work, just need to relax" friendly.

Also started replaying a ton of GTA: Online on PC with my character I imported from the Xbox 360. I found guides to stay in a public lobby after losing connection to the other players and to block ports to keep others from joining. It has been my "watch the numbers go up" game since The Contract DLC came out back in December 2021. I barely had the in-game money to start it, but the DLC was single-player friendly and comes with helpful passive incomes. 6 months later I have managed to grind my way up into owning all the prime (sometimes unreasonable) real estate/vehicles and finished heists that I never touched.

That especially got me teary eyed. After buddies absolutely and understandably broke promises to join me on it, life getting in the way, and accepting that I should set my pride aside to finish everything on the easiest difficulty to account for randoms I ended up playing with I couldn't help but feel the sort of relief that Dan Ryckert did.

So yeah. Found my money making routine in that game. My account is way beyond the need for Shark Cards now. I'm just helping randoms by taxiing them to a randomly spawned Treasure Chest that changes location daily. I sometimes taxi them around to help them experience the Los Santos Slasher hidden quest. It's been a chill and happy time for me.

Playing through MGSV after having it downloaded through PS+ for years now. Before that I replayed Jedi Knight: Fallen Order and prior to that I've been playing Switch games for a while (Dragon Quest 11, Pokemon Shield, Hades, etc)

@onemanarmyy: Completely agree with you. It was really cool to see the seeds of Mass Effect placed in this game. Also gave me an itch to possibly pick up Mass Effect Legendary edition to replay them for the 8th time. Bioware used to be so elite at world building and characters.

Dammit, where were you when I was playing in January? lol Having someone to grind money with until I was ready for Cayo Perico would have made things less tedious.

I just finished Horizon Zero Dawn & the Frozen Wilds DLC again. I haven’t played either since they originally came out and wanted to refresh myself on it going into Horizon Forbidden West. So, despite just playing about 70 hours of that game, I’m going straight into FW and hope I don’t get burned out on it. Not much else on the horizon (no pun intended) coming out that I care much about, so I figure it should be a good game to occupy my time for a bit.

Due to having more important financial responsibilities that will most likely prevent me from playing Elden Ring for at least another month, I'm instead going to play the "We have Elden Ring at home" version of Elden Ring. ...aka Dark Souls III.

I've decided I want to work my way through the old CPC games I played (or at least owned) as a kid. Oh Mummy was the first one and I was surprised to see that game done inside 5 minutes. It plays fine for what it is. After 5 stages, it just loops. I forget what game it takes the inspiration from but you basically draw squares in a grid to uncover treasures, keys and other mummies.

Someone made a homebrew sequel for the Genesis which actually looks way more fully featured.

And yeah, still playing Elden Ring. I'm going for the bosses I missed and then maybe pushing for the platinum seeing as 42% of the players already have it. That seems like a high number.

I've finished LA Noire, it's still an amazing game. I want a LA Noire sequel, maybe take place in New York or London, or maybe make it more like Mindhunter.
I think I will play Astalon next, that metroidvania game.

@facelessvixen: Well I'm still on that grind right now. haha Been limiting myself to a single run of Cayo a night. Send a request if you need a heist buddy. I'm usually available after 6PM PST.

@innacces14: I'm three hours into the future which may complicate things, but Steam is the best way to get my attention.

I installed Lovers Lab sex mods to Skyrim VR 😳 The more subtle mods make the game more immersive, like integrating a "sex" option into questlines along with the usual intimidate/persuade/bribe. Or hearing random NPCs going at it at an inn. Or turning The Battle Of Whiterun into a violent orgy by casting "sex magic." Some things you just can't unsee, especially in VR. I could blog about my experiences but I'll probably get banned.

I'm playing Destiny 2. I have only played Destiny 2. I will always play Destiny 2. I might hit 10,000 hours this year.

Destiny 2 is love, Destiny 2 is life.

Been playing a lot of Genshin Impact and just finished the beginning story act of the latest patch. Got very lucky and rolled the newest 5-Star character Yelan twice during the same 10 wishes, which also unlocked one of her powers. She is a beast. Easily will be one of the strongest characters in the game once upgraded enough. I also got back into Returnal after falling off of it for a while and I'm enjoying myself. I finally beat the second boss and got the grappling hook. A really fun but challenging game. Will probably check out this Diablo Immortal now that its on PC with a beta. Many people are saying how its actually a good game. I liked the other games, including 3, and 4 is a long way off if it ever happens.

Finally got a PS5 last week, I didn't necessarily need one for any other reason than playing my PS4 library on a machine that isn't screaming in pain after 8 years of use.

I never bring it up because I mostly play out of habit at this point but I'm into the new season of Apex: Legends. The big difference is that I have finally migrated to the PS5 version which looks great. I've also been on fire in terms of play, it's almost as if better hardware performance means better gameplay performance. My second game on the console I had to kill everyone on the last 2 teams all by myself and pulled it off as Wattson (maybe my secondary-main to Gibraltar). I want Titanfall 3...

Finished up Sifu so I'm just pondering wrapping up the 13% of PS4 trophies I have left. I think ultimately I came around to really liking the game, though I think the devs should have done another pass on their implementation of iFrames. I think what I ended up disliking the most was having to avoid sweep attacks. I just don't think those attacks are telegraphed well enough to do intuitively and it makes it feel like you need to simply memorize attack patterns to a degree that I'm getting too old to do consistently.

The only exclusive I've played was Returnal. It's extremely up my alley in just about every way, but I expected that considering all the praise it was getting. It was only a matter of time before I could try it out in earnest and so far it's a big thumbs up for me and my taste.

Turns out I had to stop playing Elden Ring. I'm going to go back, since I'm very close to the end. But man...everything took a sharp, sharp nosedive around the Fire Giant. There's now zero sense of momentum left, and the only pleasure I'm getting comes from being relieved that I don't need to fight a particular enemy again, nothing from the actual act of playing the game.

My dissatisfaction with the open world also continues to grow. I get why people are blown away by it -- the art direction is superb and the lack of quest markers and breadcrumb trails is a balm for everyone who's sick of icon vomit. I also think it largely works as a rendering of the Souls formula on a bigger canvas, though I think its size moderately dilutes From's strength as level designers. However, as a game that was pitched to me as having one of the greatest open worlds ever, it's not delivering on that promise at all for my preferences. My biggest problem is that none of it feels like it exists outside of the player's perception--everything is placed solely for the player to encounter and not because of any larger logic of the world. Of course, all open world games are designed with the player in mind, but Elden Ring does nothing to obfuscate that fact, which for me makes most discoveries feel preordained to the practically the same degree as a stereotypical checklist Ubisoft game. Also the lack of any emergent systems or sense that any mob has a life beyond its placement as an obstacle gives everything the artificial quality of a fucked up theme park. For all the grotesqueness on display, it feels sterile, and I want to get dirty.

All that said, I really enjoyed the first 50 hours or so, which is far more entertainment than most games can dream of, so on the strength of that time alone it's a solid 8.4/10. Between beating Dark Souls and most of Elden Ring, I wouldn't say I'm a From convert, but I have a lot more respect and appreciation for what they're going for than I used to.

Anyway, now I'm playing Yakuza Like A Dragon and I'm loving it so very much. Ichiban Kasuga 2024. What a tremendous himbo.

I just started Citizen Sleeper based on Jan's description of it but all I'm learning is that while the world is interesting I think Disco Elysium performed it better, especially since the Game Pass version contains the super smooth voice acting. I will keep up with it but comparing it directly to Disco Elysium doesn't do it many favors.

eFootball. It took them nine months but it finally works in a way I kind of like. I'm going to go into more detail at some point but it feels like a simplified Ultimate Team.

There's less to keep track of and it looks like contracts last a year. Not sure how the economy will shake out but I play against AI for a consistent experience and I've got my money back within an afternoon of playing. Konami's still in apology mode so they might tighten that up at some point.

Good job on Konami for getting it there. Sports games need competition.

Still chasing various carrots on various sticks in GTA Online. Also been playing some short sessions of Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit remastered get get the most out of the 69 cents that I bought the game for. Nice. And still trucking along with Pokemon X.

Been playing Ghost of Tsushima: Directors Cut thanks to the new PS Plus. That game is pretty awesome. I thought I wouldn't stick with it because I felt burned out on standard open world games, but its beautiful scenery, fun combat, good 3D sound, and good period piece storyline has got me hooked. I find myself doing a lot of the side stuff, but never getting tired of it. It helps that there is a lot of stuff in place that makes the side stuff easily accessible and fun. And it runs buttery smooth on a PS5.

Pokemon Brilliant Diamond, made it to the Elite 4 and got my butt kicked on the second leader. Definitely need to level my Pokemon some more before attempting it.

Resident Evil 3(Series S) finally excited to play this on a next gen console and see how it looks with the upgrades. I played it on PS4 last year and liked it. Got it for Xbox One along with Resident Evil 2 for $23.

I'm just about to finish off the last of Hardspace Shipbreaker. What a fun game. It's bizarrely relaxing to play. The story for the campaign mode may seem over the top at times, but having dealt with people nearly identical to the obvious antagonist manager guy, it's also fairly realistic.

Against my best judgment I'm playing through Mass Effect Andromeda. There's way too much filler in it but the combat's kinda fun. Doing the various planet stuff is not actually that bad. The voice acting in it is largely bad though. With some of the characters it's obvious the VAs at least tried their best with the material they were given but for others the voice acting is almost monotone.

Mobile Legends: Bang Bang

The Great Ace Attourney Adventures collection on PS4/5. It looks great and I like all the characters, but so far (finished the first game) I feel like the games have steered more and more into being visual novels, and further away from being adventure games. The investigation segments contain very little investigating, and 95% of the court segments have been extremely hand-holdy compared to the first trilogy. I'm still enjoying it but I hope Capcom (if they ever make more of these) loosens the leash a little next time.

A thing to note - the first game doesn't actually conclude the current story and the sequel starts pretty much directly where the first ends, while these games usually have finished stories even if the sequels are connected. I'm glad I waited for the collection because I would have been pretty miffed if I'd bought the first game for full price without a proper ending.

Now I might just be a dog, but —
I decided to install the "lone wolf" mod for State of Decay 2 (which despite its many, many flaws is one of my favorite games ever) and am still finding ways to continue enjoying this game while waiting (hopelessly) for SoD3. It removes your community and has you trying to survive completely alone (sleeping mechanic instead of switching characters).
And if you combine it with the SoD2 Community Manager you can basically create your own character and adventure in the post apocalypse. Delicious~

Also, started Core Keeper which is a fantastic game if you're hungering for a solid mix of Terraria & Stardew.

I dont think a lot of people remember just how HARD the first three AA games were!