What VIDEO GAME(s) have you been playing?

Terra Nil out today! Had a great demo.

Meet Your Maker released today on Steam, PS5, Xbox One. I participated in 3 different betas, and immediately bought it on release.

This is a sci-fi game in which you are collecting resources to rebuild this entity known as the Chimera. I am vague on the details because I could not give a fuck about the lore. What it really comes down to is you can build a base that harvests energy called GenMat. Other human raiders will attempt to raid your base and steal the GenMat, so you populate your base with traps and guards. This all happens in a passive fashion; you don't personally defend your base. It's also nice that if your traps kill raiders, you can collect resources from their corpses, and if they DO manage to succeed, you don't actually lose anything!

I have just discovered that you get to view replays of raider attempts, so you get to see how they died, how they succeeded, etc. This is incredible, and a real joy to watch people succumbing to your traps.

As you may have guessed, when you aren't building your own bases, you can raid other players' bases. The creativity on display here is staggering, and creeping through the twisty tunnels, trying to find the center without getting impaled is really tense. You can even bring along one co-op buddy, which dramatically lowers the difficulty and increases the fun.

I can't say enough good things about this game, it really has a lot to offer.

The kids got me Midnight Suns for Xmas- So I upgraded to an Xbox S on my birthday to play it -My thoughts:

I love it, and the parts I thought I would tolerate are some of my favorite things in it.

If you are a hardcore Xcom guy, you'll need to up the difficulty - The base difficulty is "I have to be really strategic so that I can finish this mission in as few turns possible to get extra goodies." If you want to play on "I have to be really strategic to beat this mission" then I would suggest initially starting the slider on hard, and then upping it once you get a squad tuned. I am not that guy. I played on normal.

There is no penalty for "killing blue slimes" - you can idle and do general missions and farm cards and stuff to trick out your roster for as long as you want.

I ended up really enjoying the viewpoint character - The lore and fluff around exploring the abby and light rp ended up being a enjoyable part of the game play loop - Go do a mission, come back and hang out with super peeps and explore the abby a bit. Go to sleep. Look at your loot. Tweak some gear / cards - Go on a mission. So much so that I am currently a little bummed because I blue slimed all my guys to max friendship and level, causing the the intervening character beats between missions to be fewer and farther between. The voice acting is great, other than I knew it was Matt Mercer as soon as my character spoke.

JUPITER HELL, many years after playing the bejimminy out of the freeware earlier design from the designer, DOOM: THE ROGUELIKE.

DoomRL (now "DRL" after getting a C&D letter) was a "coffeebreak roguelike," one that you could play in a coffee break -- instead of e.g. Nethack, where a game might take many days of coming back to the run after breaks. It's not quite a true coffee break, but I've won runs in 30 minutes. It eventually got tiled graphics, but when I was playing it compulsively, it had classic text graphics -- move your "@" around and kill stuff. It was noteworthy for couple of reasons. One is that it used the Doom soundtrack and effects -- doors opening, the classic riff at L1, demons moaning, shotguns cocking, etc. For a gamer of a certain age, this is nostalgia catnip. More interesting from a design perspective is that it was the first RL to really make ranged combat shine. Tons of ranged weapons; rocket launchers to blow holes in terrain and knock creatures around, chainguns for when you need as much lead in the air as possible, and so on. It also introduced classic RL elements like leveling up and character builds -- you could go path an upgrade tree that specializes in shotguns, for example, and unlock things like extra damage or (the god upgrade) the ability to reload for free whenever you move. Because it's a RL, it's turn-based. You can think as much as you want, which (again, for gamers of a certain age) is a nicer option than relying on a dexterity element that might not be as fast-twitch as it was when Doom first dropped, 30 years ago.

So I am pleased to report that JUPITER HELL is more of the delicious, delicious same. The graphics and sound are modern. It's still turn-based, but it uses a clever smoothing algorithm to chain animations together so it looks like you're executing them in real time. The dialogue is a deliberate, possibly cringe throwback to the Duke Nukem style of edgy wit. But it's still a great roguelike that has great upgrade paths, secrets, weird enemies, and most importantly, blowing away demons with heavy ordinance.

Agreed, Jupiter Hell is a lot of fun. And yes, the dialog is terrible.

... and half-price on Steam right now. Damn you both.

The latest thing my 'friends' wouldn't shut up about was Brotato on Steam. I can't play it with WASD and mouse, so I play it as a twin-stick shooter. Think Robotron, except you're a cartoon potato. There are 50 (I think) different types (ranged, melee, one that just absorbs damage and blows up). Fight through a wave, buy more weapons and skill ups, rinse repeat until you go through Level 20. You can also play it in Infinite mode, but I'm not good enough for that yet.

I'm also playing Age of Empires IV. It has tactical battle scenarios (ex: Battle of Hastings), and "beat the other guy by meeting objectives" mode. I got it for the second type of gameplay, and I'm getting my ass kicked pretty hard. I'm trying to avoid looking for hints so I can figure it out on my own at the moment.

Picked up HADES on sale and am so far not particularly impressed. It's pretty but kind of twitchy, and WASD plus mouse seems nonoptimal. Not sure what to make of the various upgrades. I'll stick with JUPITER HELL for now.

A while back, YouTube starting recommending that I watch some videos about the DOOM modding scene. That's the DOOM from 1993, and yes, people are still at it.

A couple of weeks ago, I finally took the plunge. Friends, things have come a long way. These are not just "new maps"... they change all sorts of stuff. The first thing you need to do is get GZDoom, which is basically an updated engine that will play classic DOOM but also all of the new mods.

But I'm here to talk about one specific mod, simply called MyHouse. Supposedly crafted as an homage to the author's dead friend (this mod has lore), it starts out as a simple tour through the friend's childhood home. It quickly becomes something so much more than that, and I'm not even done with it yet.

A download link is in the description to this YouTube video about the mod, which is certainly worth a watch if you have no intention of actually playing it. But if you do play it, I suggest you go in as cold as you can.

I have not been playing any video games lately, or even in the last year. But this article made me laugh:

hard-drive.net/hd/list/every-u-s-preside...9hkpOOgNdwSXmUP3l7UE