Games

Under Night In-Birth II [Sys:Celes] - Uzuki is here! I haven't been playing much since Combo Breaker, but now I gotta boot it back up to check out the funny girl with the big hat. She's an absolute blast to play, I just love big buttons. Streamed an open lobby night, have some highlights: 1 2 3 4 5

Splatoon 3 - Had a long session with our coach picking apart two replays from our last LUTI set, they ~~thoroughly exposed how incompetent we all are~~ gave us a lot of helpful advice on what our team needs to work on.

Persona 4 Golden - Still early in, finished Kanji's dungeon. My attention's getting split between too many other stuff but I will finish this thing eventually.

Mahjong Soul/Riichi City/IRL mahjong - Last two weeks have been rough at the local club, I am not doing so hot in league standings. Shoulda drawn better tiles.

Summon Night Swordcraft Story - Browsing through what to play next on my Miyoo Mini Plus, just felt like revisiting an old childhood favorite. Still waiting for the third game's translation patch...

Slay the Spire - Packmaster runs are second monitor content while I watch Youtube. Chill comfort game.

No Man's Sky!

I gave it another try and I'm starting to get into the flow of the game now. I will say it has a bit of higher entry barrier than you would expect, but I start to get why people love this game so much after it's countless updates.

Can recommend if you're into that space vibe where you just travel, discover, and build towards specific things.

• Steel Division 2. This is a World War 2 real-time tactics game. Hadn't gotten around until trying it.

• WARNO. This is a late-Cold-War real-time tactics game. Same developer, very similar functionality, different setting. I play both this and Steel Division 2 single-player, though both are really intended to be multiplayer games. Fortunately, the opposing AI has become considerably more-sophisticated since Wargame: Red Dragon, the preceeding game from the developer.

• Starfield. Wanted to get mods working correctly in Mod Organizer 2. Turned out that there was a bug in winevulkan's code that Mod Organizer 2 tripped at launch; if one has the Nvidia Vulkan drivers installed on one's Linux system, but no Nvidia hardware, it aborts (!status, line 305, winevulkan/loader.c, if anyone else is hitting this). Ensured that I could get Mod Organizer 2 working, then held off waiting for more Starfield mods to be implemented. Probably should report or patch the bug, but was too lazy to go track down the precise component in Proton's mess of components.

• Carrier Command 2. Another multiplayer-oriented real-time-tactics game that I play single-player. Think I've pretty much seen everything here; uninstalled. Maybe it'll be fresh if it sits in storage for some years.

• Played a little Noita. Action roguelite side-view game.

• FTL: Faster than Light. An older action roguelite, but felt like pulling it out again.

• Rule the Waves 3. Naval warfare real-time-strategy game.

• Cult of the Lamb. Action roguelite. Been meaning to get around to this for a while. It's fun, though I didn't feel that it was as game-changing relative to the state of games at the time as, say, The Binding of Isaac, another favorite action roguelite.

Once Human: Been playing this game since the release and honestly been loving it. I love survival type games with zombies being an ultimate part. Honestly I would say its a fun game for anyone who loves building bases, survive zombies and a good story.

Barely had time to play anything, but Guild Wars 2, Elder Scrolls Online, and Warframe I've at least been collecting the daily rewards.

Played some Wordscapes and Pokemon Go on my phone, but I'm recovering from a crash so I haven't really been feeling up to gaming recently.

I beat Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree. It's more Elden Ring, which can only be a good thing, but I didn't enjoy it as much as the base game due to some of the changes they made. The critical path of the DLC was plenty solvable without a guide, but there was so much of the map that I just couldn't figure out how to access because I didn't find the one way they wanted me to get there. After beating the final boss, I used a guide just to see how to get to those parts of the map, and I found out why it was so difficult. The kinds of passages that you'd use to get to those parts of the map would have been clearly indicated on your map in the base game, but here they purposely did not highlight them. A lot of the fun in the base game of Elden Ring, for me, came from the kinds of connections you made yourself based on what you saw on the overhead view of the map, but those easily identifiable things from an overhead perspective were purposely absent in the DLC. It's a shame, because it brought down my opinion of it. I had plenty of fun with the DLC and got my money's worth, but it's definitely a disparity between this and the base game.

I also felt like playing a metroidvania and had Shadow Complex in my backlog, so I knocked that one out in a couple of sessions. It was a simpler time where there was only one voice actor in video games, and his name is Nolan North. The game frequently does this thing where, even though it operates on a 2D plane, you can attack enemies in the foreground and background, not unlike certain parts of old-school Contra. It mostly works, which is cool until it doesn't work. The game wastes no time in giving you frequent cool upgrades, but kind of like Shadow of the Erdtree above, the map should have been better. Knowing that their map wasn't great, they frequently just showed you exactly the path you should take through the game world rather than letting you figure it out based on what doors you can now open, but those doors aren't well indicated on your map all the time, so they drew the path for you instead. This game was a good time for about 5 hours.

A friend and I are still making our way through V Rising. I have no interest in the kind of PVP this genre offers, so we're playing co-op PVE. The game is grindier than I'd prefer but otherwise pretty fun. As opposed to the quick pace of upgrades in Shadow Complex, here they take about 2 or 3 times as long as they probably ought to, but at least when you get to a decent boss fight or enemy camp, the combat is super satisfying.