Tabletop, DnD, board games, and minecraft. Also Animal Crossing.
3rd International Volunteer Brigade (Hexbear gaming discord)
Rules
I'm house/dog sitting for my sister in Las Vegas all week and I didn't want to bring a bunch of stuff with me so I set up ps2 emulation on my phone and it's a complete game changer. I'm switching between Lord of the Rings: The Third Age, Black, and Legend of Kay.
Bonus old dog picture:
good dog.
Wrapping up Clair Obscur. I was a little reluctant to try it because I'm not generally a huge fan of JRPGs and I'm terrible at dodge/parry timing stuff but I'm glad I gave it a chance. After some initial adjustment I found the middle difficulty manageable and the story/world was exceptional. I'm trying a few of the harder optional bosses now. Great game.
Balatro.
As long as I'm not laid off (should know in the next two days, send vibes and prayers comrades) I'll be getting Death Stranding 2
A few months ago I was terminated from a job because they shut down, with less than 24hrs notice! Hope your situation ends better
We've had a month to prepare (so I've got some job apps out) and, again, this is a very stupid thing where odds are they will rehire me next month or so.
Shit is just very degrading and real late capital hours.
Death Stranding 2
I bought a used PS4 to exclusively to play Death Stranding and really enjoyed it, if reviews look good I think I'll do the same with a PS5/DS2.
good luck keeping your job even tho working under capitalism sucks
Thanks. It's very stupid and details would dox me. The modal outcome is I get laid off then rehired in a month or two.
Needless to say, this is fucking stupid and will cause a lot of stress and sleepless nights. For nothing.
I keep winning games of Balatro on gold with empty joker slots because I cannot find the last ones I need for the achievement (I'm down to only 3 or 4) 😑
9 Kings came out of the demo and has been getting updates nearly every day, so that's also been fun. Still some balancing that needs to be done, though. There's obvious builds that will curb stomp any difficulty, while a lot of units and buildings are trash. Or they just don't scale at all.
I finally got all my models stripped after leaving them in a jar of acetone for like a year. Genuinely surprised I didn't ruin them lmao. Found out you can also strip Mage Knight models with acetone, which has worked pretty well. I'm going to try some non-toxic paint strippers next. I think they're vinyl models with acrylic or tempra paint, so they should handle that fairly well.
A new game club opened in my area that leans left, so I'm going to use this stuff for whatever they got going on down there. I might have to do some organizing and teaching, though. They're a bunch of baby """"leftists""""" with brainworms. They're pro-Palestinian, LGBTQ+ friendly, and support BLM, but I'm getting anarkkkiddie vibes.
I've been playing horizon forbidden west, I really enjoy the setting and aesthetic
i just started zero dawn on PC and im liking it a lot too. how different is forbidden west to zero dawn?
I find the story of the sequel worse but pretty much every gameplay aspect better. Though worth noting that you can stack multiple elemental statuses in the second one but only one can be triggered (most recent replaces the last) and this isn't made as clear as it should be.
I'm giving Valheim another try. It was rocky for me the last time I played and I killed the first... two, maybe three bosses? But I died really far from my home and hadn't unlocked the portal yet and it tilted me so hard I gave up. But I think with some degree of experience I can do better this time.
I've played a couple of times with a group & I think it starts off super well but I absolutely cannot stand the sailing. It's well executed looks nice and is slow, painfully boring after you've done it once and the wind/current is fidly enough that you can't just afk or split screen to help pass the time. Also the food mechanic, while initially very cool and well thought out, turns into a colossal pain in the ass. Used to log on and farm (because stuff grows in "real" time over a couple days to get enough food that the group could explore/adventure and we'd just burn through it all in a night. Felt like a part time job.
This is kind of where I'm at with that game. I get the Black Forest boss down just fine, but the swamp is usually where I give up. This time, I made sure to upgrade all my bronze-tier equipment to hell and back again, and it's less bad, aside from getting ganked by the occasional wraith. I've also made sure to keep a portal network going, and extra portal mats in my inventory more or less at all times so I can escape in a big damn hurry if I start getting overwhelmed. I'm also trying not to let myself get hyperfixated on taming and breeding two-star wolves before I even have iron gear. Now, finding onion seeds before I even have iron gear, on the other hand... 
Played the unbeatable demo and now sad i have to wait ??? months for the full game to come out
Giving Super Mario World a break to instead play some Donkey Kong Country. I need to play the sequels sometime too.
i beat all the deltarune and went into the files... i found an unused screen in chapter 3 and i don't know what it's supposed to be
Still slogging through Valheim, where I've been abandoned on my family's LAN server. I've been sailing around and trying to map out as much as I can, and just generally getting into places I really shouldn't be when I'm only in troll armor and eating Meadows-tier foods.
I did take a brief detour the other night to fire up Dragon Warrior on the NES emulator, because it was one from the bucket list. I owned it ages ago and never finished it. I remember getting up to the last dungeon, looting Erdrick's Sword, and then getting fairly close to the final boss before running completely out of MP and consumables. That failed run took something like two hours just to get there. It turns out that when I played DW1 as a tween, I was stuck in an infinite corridor where the stairs at the east end deposit you right back to the stairs at the west end. I was out of torches by this point, and couldn't see what in the hell was going on. Looking back, this is just shy of the end boss floor, but I would have had to backtrack two whole floors in the dark to find the correct staircase.
On the emulator run, I started off just lightly cheesing it with the occasional savestate (honestly, having to hike your ass all the way back to the King to save your game feels like a bit of a downgrade from being able to generate a password "save" on the fly in the Japanese version) and binding the emulation speed toggles to my controller to make the menus and slow-ass walk speed more bearable. That got me through the first hour or two before I realized just how bad the gold/XP gain tuning was. I got so bored that I finally just 100% fucking cheesed it with the FCEU hex editor, because fuck any game that has a "100+ hours of grinding and tedious menus instead of actual content" gameplay design philosophy, even if it was made in 1986 for console hardware. No amount of Akira Toriyama character design can alleviate pure tedium.
And even applying cheats was still a nuisance, because unlike several other JRPGs that came out shortly afterward, if you set your experience to a specific value that overshoots a level-up checkpoint, you don't get the level-up dialogue at the end of your next battle. It just sets your level to the new value, but doesn't bother giving you any level-up bonuses. So the only way to force-level yourself with cheats in Dragon Warrior 1 and still get stat increases is to set your experience to a value just shy of your next level-up checkpoint, fight a battle and win, get your level-up dialogue and bonuses, and repeat ad nauseam. I think I got to around level 10 or 11 the mostly-legit way (framerate speed changes, and may have save-scummed a handful of encounters with tougher enemies) before I gave up and started manipulating RAM.
So yeah. I "finished" OG Dragon Warrior as a break from Valheim. This says something about society 
I'm half wondering whether I should have just waited for the DQ I & II HD-2D remake that's dropping in the fall. Oh well, back to the Valheim gulag regardless.
Grinding balatro gold stake was starting to get to me so I took a break. Platinumed We Love Katamari Reroll+ Royal Reverie, tried to get into Frostpunk, almost platinumed The Stanley Parable but I still have to play for an entire Tuesday.
My balatro progress is good though. 83% of the way there! 100% collection, 100% challenges, 55% joker stickers, 80% deck stake wins. I keep getting really frustratingly unlucky runs though. It's a pain.
Been playing expedition 33, barely understand what’s going on but sure, turn based rpg why not
Got back into Divide and Conquer mod for Total War Medieval 2. Currently doing an evil play through as the Dwarves of Ered Luin
just finished Bionic Bay and Alan Wake 2 this week, both great! the platforming in Bionic Bay felt very unique, I wish it could have gone on a bit longer. Blue Prince with my partner has been real fun, but the progress is very slow. not sure what I'm going to move onto next, maybe Returnal?
@GuyWTriangle@hexbear.net have you been playing Nightreign single or multiplayer?