What are you playing right now?

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About 15-20 hours into Darksiders 2. Most of the time has been fetch quests, and the combat isn't nearly as tight as the first game even if Death has access to a lot more combos and two separate skill trees, as well as a whole new inventory and armoury management gimmick. Sure, the game is much, much bigger and there are more bosses, a greater variety in enemies though this is mostly just reskins, some enemies are unique to a zone.
The combat feels best when you're 1v1, the big bosses that don't summon adds are fantastic and you get rewarded for taking on harder bosses at a lower level. That is to say, that isn't the vast majority of the combat. 9/10 fights are a clusterfuck and if you go down the Necromancer tree, that lets you summon ghouls and crows to fight for you, it becomes even more of a clusterfuck.
The camera is almost as obnoxious in tight situations as in the first game, but then you get to a well-crafted platforming/free running section and the camera spins or pans with Death, making it feel incredibly smooth and intuitive of where you need to go next.
I will say, there's a lot more voice acting and storytelling to be had between Death and the various NPCs is entertaining, there's a lot more meat on the bone (or a lot of waffling, depending on how you see it) but the TLDR can easily be summarised as "go kill this thing" outside of the main quest.

I can't tell if Deathinitive is uglier than the original release or if my memories of playing the original on PS3 are tainted by nostalgia or not, but the game as a whole is arguably uglier compared to Darksiders 1 and Warmastered. The colours are more washed out, weirdly enough compared to a game set in a cityscape during/after the Apocalypse and humanity dying. It makes sense in the second zone, but not for the first and third areas IMHO. Hell, even DS2's Earth area is still the same style of colour palette as the first game and it's somehow more saturated than the other areas.

Of the two, I still prefer the first game. The sequel is bogged down by a lot of what I would consider bad gameplay, and a general sign of the cancer in gaming that was slowly seeping in around the early 2010's. A whole lot of travelling, a whole lot of backtracking even if you aren't finishing every side quest as soon as possible but you're waiting until you have all items unlocked, a lot of tiny, hard to see collectibles hidden in nooks and crannies, a lot of fighting the camera (though the first had this one as well).

I do want to emphasise that when this game clicks, it just works, and Death is a wonderful protagonist but I wouldn't readily recommend this to anyone unless you REALLY need to play the rest of the franchise.
A steep discount, and maybe playing the original version rather than Deathinitive even if I haven't run into any issues aside from the unlimited max FPS and vsync issue during the tutorial. No crashes or gamebreaking bugs yet.
 
Resident Evil 6
If this didn't have the RE name it would be remembered as one of the most fun games of the seventh gen. I'm playing it co-op with a friend and we've done the Leon campaign and the Chris campaign. Absolute kino. Only problem is the obnoxious QTEs that were so prevalent in 2012.
Completely agree on RE6. The campaigns are ok, definitely better playing with a friend. I've been playing mercenaries the last few days, it's probably up there with the most fun I've ever had in a shooting game.
 
Minecraft: Found a good seed with a lot of cool mountains that I am trying to turn into a nice base. Also trying to get used to the billion fucking items added over the years.

Tekken 8: A couple of ranked matches a day. Trying to relearn the game and maybe get a higher rank then last time.

Another couple of other things that I might try to squeeze in:

WH3: Somewhere between Stockholm syndrome and comfort food.

Morrowind: Installed OpenMW and the I <3 vanilla mod list. I replay the game every couple of years.
 
I'm juggling my Mewgenics playthrough (main focus) and my ywarly runthrough of EBF5. Real year for Newgrounds tbh.
 
Completely agree on RE6. The campaigns are ok, definitely better playing with a friend.
If we're ignoring the whole "RE" thing and just playing RE6 on the basis of fun gameplay, they repeat too many missions across the campaigns. Sure, it's a different perspective of the same event but even that doesn't excuse it IMO.
I do genuinely think RE5 and 6 are fine games but they suffer from wearing the Resident Evil mantle.
 
Continuing our thing of trying to find the perfect fighting game to play together, nephew and I have swapped from Street Fighter 2 Alpha to 3rd Strike.

So much about 3rd Strike is fantastic. The sprites are almost offensively well-animated and the stage BGMs are awesome. Dudley and Makoto are probably two of the most fun to play characters I've used in any fighting game. But I really fucking hate how this game handles inputs. I'm guessing it's incredibly strict and only wants absolutely perfect inputs. Nephew feels it too and it ruins the flow and the fun.

We can make about 15 attempts each at doing any of the half-circle or quarter-circle inputs, and we'll be lucky if even one of those attempts will register (and of course, it will only actually come out when it would whiff). We've both used multiple controllers, used Dpad and thumbstick, and even busted out the arcade fightstick, and on every device a 623 is somehow easier to bring out than a basic 236.

We could sit there in Training Mode with input readout enabled (if 3rd Strike has that) trying to get nanometer-accurate muscle memory for these perfect quarter-circles downpat, but even if we do, it kneecaps the satisfaction of playing because doing specials and supers feels like a matter of luck instead of skill. It's an extreme amount if sweat for which neither of us will find the result worthwhile.

We enjoy the Quarter/Half-Circle way of doing inputs, but neither I nor nephew are enjoying not having moves come out when we want them to. Considering reinstalling Killer Instinct or repirating Guilty Gear Strive. Mk11 was also really smooth to control because it can interpret way messier inputs than either of us make even while piss-ass drunk, but it's 120 fucking gigabytes (takes a full day to download just to play a couple matches).
 
In the middle of disc 2 of Xenogears. Sucks that they ran out of money chasing after Final Fantasy movie. But they could have had 50 more hours of the game. The story and dialog are still top shelf and one of the best stories in RPG.

Excellent choice. Xenogears is my favourite JRPG of all time without question, and it's so sad that Square nearly went tits up and had to rush this game out because Disk 2 had some of the coolest potential gameplay that was reduced to dialog and boss fights. The ending is still a banger and the overall story is fantastic and the combat both melee and in mechs is awesomely fun and cool looking for the time.
 
I'm mostly playing Pathfinder Kingmaker right now. It took me a while to get into the setting, but now I mostly like it, even though I have some gripes.

For example, the game is really obtuse about a lot of things. I couldn't figure out how to initiate the Valerie romance, so I looked it up only to find out that I was well past the point where I could have initiated it. Turns out I would have had to camp on a map, not the overworld, back in chapter I for a certain dialogue option to appear. I tried doing it with the Bag of Tricks mod, but that fucked up my save. I'm not complaining about that, that was on me.

Also, I feel the game is a lot more complex than it needed to be and kinda wish they'd stuck to the rules from the Core Rulebook and not get too crazy with the companions. Like, I have Pathfinder experience, but I still haven't figured out how the Kineticist class is supposed to work. Baldur's Gate, which I consider the gold standard for this kind of game, was pretty good about this.

Also, I appreciate that it hasn't gotten boring so far, but I think the game is just too fucking long. Sure, I could let the game manage my kingdom, but I feel I would miss an important part of the experience.

Also, my nigga Ekundayo is OP as fuck and I love it.

7,5/10, good game.
 
Playing through the dark souls games inspired me to replay Jedi: Fallen Order again and I'm having a decent time with it. Playing through on new game plus since the only real differences are cosmetic. Late game gets stupid easy when you enter a room where you can just force push most enemies off the surrounding areas. Boss fight against vader feels like you're out of your depth, just like it should. I recommend the game to any Star Wars fans who haven't checked it out before.
 
I'm almost finished with another playthrough of The Riftbreaker, after the big-ass v2.0 update that added co-op, rebalanced the whole game, and gave a ton of QoL. Very highly recommend, especially if you played it previously and thought it was too easy.

Screenshot_20260218_105509_Brave.jpg
It's sort of a mashup of genres: take They Are Billions, add a big helping of looter shooter/slasher, and a smidge of Factorio without the conveyor belts.

In The Riftbreaker, you play a military scientist piloting a powerful exosuit mech, teleported across the galaxy to Galatea37 to set up the foundations and secure resources for humanity to colonise the planet. It starts out very campy, with environmentalist messaging juxtaposed against you using a giant chainsaw to mince up plants and animals alike for feeding into biogenerators, but quickly becomes some very serious shit as the entire planet decides it doesn't want you here.
You start off very simply, doing short expeditions out of safety to research the xenos and collect simple loot, but it's not long before you're dual-wielding miniguns, nuke launchers, and lightning guns, flinging acid tornadoes around and burning new riverbeds into the landscape with an orbital laser.
Theres a few in-the-weeds things I could mention like all 3 research trees being rejiggered, but the biggest thing I'm glad to see is they've fixed the difficulty so the whole experience feels balanced yet bombastic now. It's hard to describe: imagine Russian Overkill for DOOM, but the whole game is now balanced around that level of absurdity.

The first run (pre-2.0), xeno attacks stopped being a thing I even paid attention to about halfway through. I barely touched the 3rd tier of equipment (of 5 tiers/colours) because I didn't need to - and I didn't even get involved in the Final Battle, just sat there idle while my defenses swept mobs effortlessly.

Now, xeno attacks properly scale up to absolutely ridiculous shit. Actual "They Are Billions numbers, so much so the game uses time dilation on top of NeoGeo-esque framerate slowdown. Kaiju sized mobs come with most waves starting around 25% completion, and the later stronger ones can destroy swathes of my base quickly if I don't intervene. They spew passive attacks on top of their normals like they're endgame Vampire Survivors player-characters. I can't deal with them well unless it's a combined effort between myself and my closest defensive wall bristling with weaponry. Once you hit around 75% completion, the monsters in your starter zone will also get buffed into "Ultra" variants, just to keep the pressure on even at home.

I am at endgame, have the Rift Generator ready so I can trigger the final battle, and I am desperately trying to research the top tier of all the weapons and equipment: after the 2.0 update, I feel like it's going to be very necessary. I triggered the Final Battle by accident last night, and before I reloaded the game I saw what looked like much cooler apocalyptic effects on the environment this time around.

About my only complaint with Riftbreaker anymore is that it's still very easy to reach endgame with big parts of 2 outta the 3 tech trees still unknown. You have to do codex scans on flora/fauna/anomalies to get those branches, but you don't know WHAT you have to scan, where to find it, and the game won't give you any hints.

If you want a sort of veneer of the "automation genre" that Factorio is part of, but the real meat of the gameplay is much more ARPG, The Riftbreaker might be what you want.
 
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Disk 2 had some of the coolest potential gameplay that was reduced to dialog and boss fights
If the dialog and how much of the story unfolded on disc 2, it would have been very meh. Plus I love the anime cut scenes in the game.

FFVII is one of my favorite games of all time. But Xenogears so far is one of the top RPGs as far as story and dialog go. And funny how Xeno was originally the story for FFVII
 
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Me and my friend finally beat the base game for DS3. Now we're waiting for days off to line up to play the DLC. So in the meantime I've been invading people to engage in honorable PvP. I'll invade, then when I find the host or their phantom summon I'll wave and say hello before dropping an ember for the host to keep in case they die. Then I step back and wait for them to ready up then we circle each other and duel to the death. I don't really mind if they heal, but I will 100% bum rush you if you're healing. So far the record is 3 wins and 4 losses. Not bad for someone who only casually plays these games.
 
Returned to enter the gungeon after a good bit to finish everything in the game and I still can't beat the fucking challenge mode. Gungeons a pretty hard game already but some of the added modifiers makes it straight up bullshit, some like gull's revenge, which rain missles every couple of seconds, and poison pursuit, where a line of poison is constantly following you, makes some bosses with long patterns near impossible to beat without taking damage, which is the only consistent way to get more health. Getting a hour into a run and getting high stress, which makes it so no matter how much health you have every hit brings to half a heart for 5 seconds, and dieing instantly despite my 9 hearts is just fucking torture. I've done literally everything else in the game and I won't lose to this.

I've also been playing death stranding which im enjoying. It is literally just walking but I can enjoy a nice "job game". When ever I play I either turn it off in 5 minutes or get sucked into it for 5 hours. Was very plesantly shocked by the weird half life crossover items.
It is extremely flawed though. It's impressive how quickly all mystery and creepiness immediately loses any sort of impact once you actually deal with it in game. Like in mgs its less controlling a character and more operating them like a forklift but it kinda works since your more often then not carrying 20 feet of packages.
Jesus christ the fucking story and writing, I've always defended mgs' writing but everything is so over explained and absurdly heavy handed that I'm started to wonder if I was wrong about metal gear. The degree that every one sucks you off for delivering packages while you are dead fucking silent just gets hilarious after a while. All the dark souls multiplayer stuff is a great way to integrate story and gameplay but everyone reiterates and over explains killed all the impact. I can't tell if kojima thinks I'm a drooling moron or if he's just gotten that bad.
 
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Trying to slowly 100% Spyro Reignited. Thankfully it's all "do this thing slightly out of your way" achievements and you can do them without 100%ing all gems, whereas Crash remastered is "DO EVERYTHING" which, fuck that. If I can write spyro off as 100%'d, it'd give me some more options for what controller slop games I reconsider.

Leveling away in TBC Classic. It's comfy enough if I turn my brain off and don't gauge how productive each my hours spent gaming are. I mean, I somewhat enjoy BF6 but there's not a lot of "gaming per minute". 90% of the time is spent running, looking around or being dead. Compare that to a singleplayer shooter and you actually get to enjoy killing things. Sand Land may be a forgetable game, but it allows you to play the tank fantasy without dying from 1 shot across the map like War Thunder.
 
I forget who but someone on here recommended I try Assassin's Creed Rogue after I replayed 4 years ago and I finally got around to it.

Yeah, pretty good. I hate that the box spoils that Shay, the man with the worst Irish accent ever, becomes a Templar since that doesn't happen until midway through the game, but it was pretty solid. I get why he turned away from the Assassins, we find out why the Homestead went to hell by the time we got there in AC3, and it was a lot of fun getting back in a ship and blowing up other boats for their resources and crewmen.

It's one of those games where I wish the campaign had been longer but that's really my only complaint. It delivered what I expected going in and I enjoyed myself. Solid recommendation, fellow farmer whose name I've forgotten. Sorry.
 
Well, I was playing Grim Dawn with a hardcore/permadeath character, but the way ground damage works in this fucking game, specifically how it ignores all resistances, did me in once again.

As per usual, I'm determined to never play another hardcore character ever again, and I'm definitely not going to change my mind for the 100th time on this one.
 
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