games

Humble had a bundle of boomer shooters and idk why but I tried super hard all week to not buy it until I caved on Friday.

So first up is Prodeus. Prodeus is a game that teenage me would have adored. It's what I feel like Doom 3 should have been. It's like one of the Doom wad mods like Brutal Doom cranked up to 11. It doesn't throw any movement tech at you like modern games so you can focus on the dumb "mowing down hordes of enemies" with your over the top guns and over the top gore/gib animations. Everything explodes. Blood and guts go flying and paints the floors, walls, and ceilings with red. It even has blood squish sound effects when mobs blow up. I will say it does get a bit monotinous after a while. I was hoping I was on the last level but just checked and I have 7 more to go.

I also wanna check out Turbo Overkill after. TO is sort of like if you take modern movement shooters with slide and jump tech and plop it into a retro shooter. But also when you slide, your legs turn into chainsaws. Idk, it's fast, crazy fun. It's dumb and I have enjoyed what I've played so far.

Ultrakill is finally in my library too. I played a bit and like it so far. Donno if I love it yet though. Gonna try and get through it though and see what the hype is about.

Other than that, I am still trucking along in Dyson Sphere Program. I have 2 spheres made now and am trying to ramp up my white science. I am stuck on a bottleneck issue so my max potential production is about twice what I am actually making. I think it's tied to my proliferator, but my prolifs need nanotubes that need graphene, and it's just been a mess. I've been working on it for a few days and donno what to do. I wanna get it fixed for when I ramp up to my goal of 5,000 science per minute. Then once I can get that going I wanna dump a sphere around a O type star and probably call it done.

Riven. I'm finally tackling this one, after trying it as a kid and not understanding any of the puzzles or what the backstory was supposed to be.

Doing different playthroughs of Total Warhammer 2. So far I've done:

• Repanse de Lyonnesse: I still hate Bretonnia, cavalry is bad
• Heinrich Kemmler: A tricky start due to everyone nearby hating him, but he gets unstoppable once you get some more ghost units with the buffs he gives them. Also there's just nothing like lining up a Winds of Death to get 200+ kills in one cast.
• Thorek Ironbrow: EZ auto-resolve to victory. Got lucky with some settlements meaning I didn't ever have to go to war with the Lizardmen and avoided the worst parts of Thunderdome. Honestly really liked his campaign of getting the artifacts.
• Grom The Paunch: Fun campaign mechanic with the cooking pot but the DLC units (pump wagons) seemed to just... suck? Ended up cheesing the late game with an "oops all Arachnoroks" doomstack. The campaign's final battle being to take Tor Yvresse (I think?) fell a little flat because I'd already taken it in the game world like 5 turns earlier lol.
• Wulfrik the Wanderer: Had to drop this one after every elf in the world declared war on me. Don't really know how to play Norsca, their units are pretty good but the economy sucks shit and I'm constantly rushing to put out fires which means I can't afford to send a stack to just raid Couronne or Marienberg or whatever.
• Count Noctilus: The special achievement for growing the Galleon's Graveyard takes way too long, but otherwise this campaign has been pretty neat. You're pushed to go straight into the High Elves and I did so, eventually getting the Sword of Khaine on the Count himself leading to some real shenanigans. Lustria seems weirdly stable, with no major players knocked out by turn 100, which is surprising.

I'm playing with some mods that generally make the game easier:

• Remove penalties to Public Order etc from difficulty (I want to play on Very Hard so there are more enemy armies but the modifiers to the player are tedious)
• Build minor settlements to T4 (just makes it easier to consolidate everything in one province so I don't have to shuffle things around as much)
• When a subfaction of your faction is eliminated you can recruit their lords, including LLs (just nice to be able to get more LLs because they're fun!)
• Double skill points (kind of makes the game herohammer but the AI gets it to so w/e)

Dragon's Dogma 2. I'm annoyed that they've made it arbitrarily difficult to make back up saves (probably for pawn economy reasons, I guess) because there are many things I need to experiment with, and experimentation is difficult when I can only do some things once, and other things require waiting for monsters to respawn or what have you.

I could just look up the answers, but that doesn't sound like fun.

Guilty grease strive. Aba mad annoying. Cant make celestial (skill issue i know). Milia got a new move and the combos are kinda neat.

Project Wingman. It's a spiritual successor to Ace Combat and I have no idea what's going on because I play it music blaring (the politics are probably incoherent) but it plays extremely well.

I'm just finishing Tax Paperwork Hell, U.S. Edition. Whoever made this game and obfuscated the equations for stat progression is a real fucker, TBH. Do not recommend.

Dragons Dogma 2, I'm just slowing exploring places and occasionally doing a side quest. Have refused to start the main quest at all. Found the Sphinx and that was cool.

Stardew Valley, the new update is very impressive and I only really did a farm once way back in 1.0 so getting all the changes is very fun. My girlfriend also plays it so we can chat about our farms.

Helldivers 2. It's fun to do a mission or two a day, I wish it was not locking all the new stuff behind battle passes or releasing them slower. Because keeping up seems like they expect 5 hours of gameplay a day rather than the 40 minutes I put in.

Balatro, just do a run or two a day, I'm up to gold stake on yellow deck and it's very hard so I'm switching to some of the fun decks I unlocked to see what they are like.

Stardew Valley, my wife turned me onto it when 1.6 dropped and I haven’t played anything else.

I finished Romancing SaGa 2 a bit ago. I was nervous to fight the last boss as I had read about how it was supposed to be one of the most difficult last bosses in the series and then I did it one attempt without any major problems. Maybe I just got lucky with attacks because mechanically I can see how it's supposed to be a hard boss. Overall I enjoyed the game but it's a hard one to recommend to people due to how unconventional it is.

I skipped RS3 for now and moved on to the SaGa Frontier remaster. It's fun but also a step back in complexity from the RS games and so it feels a little too easy sometimes. Also the limited rehashed quests gets old fast (ugh runes). Anyway I'm hoping to be done with this one before Emerald Beyond comes out. I'm abusing NG+ so I don't have to grind out every single scenario so I don't think it'll take too long.

Visual novels on itch.io. Lookouts is the best gay cowboy story I've read, highly recommend! It's free and you can play it in your browser right now (took me about 5 hours)

Just played a run of Suzerain's new expansion, Kingdom of Rizia. Was fun, did a reformer run successfully.

I just finished Ys VIII and Katana Zero.

Ys was very good, even if they upped the anime cringe compared to 2003-2007 Falcom games, it still had the best gameplay loop in the series. Searching for castaways and seeing your village grow in a deserted island while spamming your flashy animu skills and swapping between characters is just so fun.

The bosses are easy and the game allows you to pause and heal similarly to BOTW but I needed to relax this week so it was fitting. The music is also great as well.

Katana Zero is the most cinematic game I have ever played thanks to the great mechanics and level design, with a ton of action movie-like setpieces the one after the other. Too bad it's unfinished because I was hooked by the story but it's still worth it.

Still playing Dragon's Dogma 2, absolutely loving it.

Also picked up El Paso, Elsewhere which has been pretty fun, it somehow manages to have the cringiest soundtrack that is actually also sick as fuck.

Space station 14 pretty much exclusively. By far my favorite game. Other than that I've been studying for finals. It's terrible. lol

Last week I played the single player campaign in Warcraft III Reforged. It's still a great game. I played it a long time ago and have nostalgia for it. Feels good to revisit something that you played as a kid

Dune: spice wars. Pirated. It's neat, does stuff with a stale genre.

Stormworks I want to get back into but I've been too busy.

I just got a 3d printer too

I've played THE FINALS (lol) so much. Basically all weekend

Sekiro is one of my favorite games of all time. Only game i ever bothered to platinum and ended up going all the way to NG+7 charmless

The combat is truly sublime when it clicks

Slay the Spire. It's been an on-and-off game for me, and I'm currently in my yearly hooked-up phase with the game. Beyond amazing game and community.

Playing Syrian Warfare https://store.steampowered.com/app/485980/Syrian_Warfare/ I love RTS games and this is one is right up my alley brutally difficult I am playing on realistic and I got through the first 2 missions without reloading much but mission 03 is kicking my ass.

I have been playing quake and dusk. Dusk rocks.