Gaming

I played a lot (1400+ hours) of The Long Dark up until a few years ago. I'm checking out the DLC content I missed, and it's very good to be back. The "new" content and maps are very good.

Also, Alan Wake 2 after Control is quite enjoyable, but I think I like Control a little more. The tv ads in AW2 are very funny though, compared to the creepy puppet bits in Control.

Got an itch(dot)io bundle of games that goes to helping French devs, so I've been playing a couple of those. Specifically Flipon and Blocks That Matter.

Outside of those, also got into Symphonia and it's pretty fun and so far has an amazing soundtrack. Also trying to make a level pack for Baba Is You, which is definitely harder than I thought it would be using the in game level editor.

Been playing Sleeping Dogs for the first time after picking it up for cheap on a GOG sale. I never played it back in the day and never heard much about it, but man, even 13 years later this is a good looking game. I guess I'm giving it a leg up by using DLDSR and RTX HDR, but still. It looks very impressive for its age. I can't believe this was a PS3 game! The streets are crowded and the city looks great. Though I will say, playing something like this hammers home even more what a marvellous piece of architecture and level design Night City is in Cyberpunk 2077. Hong Kong looks nice and all in Sleeping Dogs, but it doesn't have near the same character, the same variety and the same distinct but different districts as NC does.

The game has been very enjoyable, though. To a certain extent you might call it slop. And yes, it might not be Disco Elysium or Bioshock or Alan Wake 2, but not every game needs to be. You can't eat salad every day. Sometimes you need a pizza. And this is a pretty fucking good pizza. It's got all the trappings of a GTA clone you might expect, with a chinese flavour that adds some kung-fu to the mix and a boilerplate undercover cop story to make the tension tick along and let it at least pretend it's somewhat different. The pacing has been very snappy so far as well. Almost no downtime, as far as I can tell. After playing some lengthy CRPGs lately that really tested my patience it's been the perfect antidote - ideal brain-off gameplay, whether racing cars or beating up thugs (or singing karaoke).

I'm only about halfway so far, but from what I've seen so far I thoroughly recommend it if you like these kinds of games, especially if you can pick it up at a big discount - it was 80% off recently and at that price it's a no-brainer.

No man's sky, want to platinum the game on Steam. Factorio is next.

Been slowly playing through Doom Eternal, raytracing looks really good on that super shotgun! Fun game, just wish they didn’t pop up tutorials any time they thought a player might be a little confused.

Also played a tutorial for Wingspan and was a bit overwhelmed but it seemed interesting. I need to sit down and give it a good play through to understand

Started to replay Dishonored again to catch up with the story before playing death of outsider. Such a great series. .

Bad week this time:

I got a bit tired of Trails of Cold Steel 2, so to take a break I tried playing Wolfenstein 2, but it gave me motion sickness (not sure why, as the game is running fine and I tried increasing the fov, which usually works for me). I started looking for other games to play, but I can't find anything that clicks.

I tried CrossCode again, restarting it after stopping around a year ago at the first real dungeon (the mines).

I really like the art, the characters are charming and the premise is interesting enough.

The puzzles are alright, altho they've already started getting repetitive (I'm after the halfway point of the second dungeon). The combat too seems alright, but the enemies are really annoying to fight, as they all force you to wait to hit them, which I find really boring.

Overall I don't like it and will very likely drop it now. After like 10 hours the actual story hasn't advanced much and the MMO's story is not at all interesting. I tried doing a few sidequests as I had heard they were good and I felt I was underleveled, but I ended up being disappointed by what I found. Same for the exploration, mostly because it was unrewarding and the graphics lack depth, making telling apart different heights for puzzles and platforming really hard. I could probably keep ranting, but I'll end it here.

I played some shapez. It's fun, but some of the later designs are definitely a puzzle on how to make them. The sequel seems to be the same thing, but 3D graphics. Shoutout to the soundtrack by Peppsen, it's fantastic.

Then I started re-playing the OG Final Fantasy VII, since I just finished Rebirth. I played the New Threat mod after Remake, so I didn't really get how similar Remake is to the original game, and now Rebirth as well. Yes, the new games are a lot slower, and you get a bunch of fluff, but otherwise they are the same.

Just been playing war thunder. Played some AVP last night. It was scary!