Gaming

I'm finally at Disc 4 of Final Fantasy 8 Remastered. Tried playing this game several times, but never finished it. I decided to use all the QoL options (combat boost, 3x speed, no-encounter) to avoid being frustrated by the gameplay (junctioning, drawing, etc), and I've been enjoying the story, even post Disc 3 twist.

Baldur's Gate 3, naturally. I was enjoying it until I reached the zone border and I got a warning I was underleveled. I was like, really, Larian? We're doing this again?

My biggest complaint with Divinity: Original Sin 2 was that the level differences were so stark and the XP was so tight that it felt like the game was forcing me to comb through the entire map. Absolutely kills replay value, and BG3 is a game I'd really, really like to save something for a replay.

This ended up being a constant issue in D:OS2 but turned out mostly okay in the first D:OS after a really tight first act. I hope this ends up being more like the latter. Or there's some way to grind this time around.

I played the Pikmin 4 demo and had a ton of fun with it, but I have to wait for a sale to pick it up.

So instead o got Brotato because I saw it was $5 on switch, having a lot of fun with it! Will probably get Vampire Survivors when it comes out on switch, I hear it has more interesting maps than Brotato

Continuing the PSO2:NGS grind. Leciel is extremely fun, just the right amount of tension and challenge, and constant novel boss "twists". Yesterday we had a boss with breakable parts and a breakable bomb, as well as buffs to damage to breakable parts. The strat was to stagger him by breaking his legs then do a mad rush to break the bomb before it wiped the entire party.

Beyond that, continuing my journey through .hack//IMOQ. It's immediately clear how special this series is. Not just for being the seminal story about an imaginary game, and being fairly unique in actually looking at how people interact with games as a third place, and the queer potential of video games; but also for actually providing a playable version of the imaginary game. Including an MMO version of the MMO!

I really want .hack to come back. Log Horizon rules, and I like the more heroic, legendary, and optimistic tone and theming, but there's something really appealing at how realistic .hack is without being dark, gritty, or cynical. The sense of romance in the game's backstory is great too. All this weird background fabric about genius programmers singlehandedly changing the course of the world, people overhwelmed by emotions; meanwhile the spotlight is on real people.

BG3, this game is awesome!

After having beaten The Pathless yesterday I started playing Uncharted 4. I'm a couple hours in and I have to say, it feels a lot more like an interactive movie than an actual game. I'm hoping it gets more interesting

Playing Danganronpa v3 and FF7 Crisis Core Reunion, both on Steam Deck.

I started Danganronpa a couple weeks ago. And so far, it's definitely the weakest of the main trilogy. I really don't like any of the characters. They're all just too edgy, weird, and/or outright dumb. And not in a funny endearing way often seen with characters in the first two installments. I just finished the the second class trial; the twist there was pretty stupid. The first trial and murderer at least made sense and was unexpected. This second murderer, while also unexpected, just had the dumbest reason; totally unbelievable. That said, the game itself isn't terrible. And the story is just interesting enough that I wanna see where it goes.

I started FF7 Crisis Core Reunion last week and I'm still in the early stages of it. Don't really have any opinions on it so far. After finishing FF16, I was in the mood for another action-based FF game, so tried this out.

Continuing to play FF14; still in Shadowbringer expansion (SHB). I've been taking my time with it as I had to level up a Machinist so that I can take advantage of the experience gained from MSQs. I finished the Titania trial over the weekend. I am enjoying the level of difficulty with SHB; I felt like Stormblood was a walk in the park. Admittedly, I was massively overleveled through most of Stormblood, but even with level adjustments, it felt easy. So it's nice to see some challenge again.

Also I've gotten back into Eve Online after taking a few months off again. Idk; null blob fleet stuff is something to do, I guess.

Playing a lot of factorio with the space exploration and Krastorio mod. I've increased science costs 10x to slow the game down and force me to build properly. However after getting to space I spent 9 hours handfeeding machines to get the logistics bit research.

I told someone in one of these threads that I do a base tour. I think pre bots is a good milestone to make a base tour. I tired to make a short video but it's actually much harder than I thought, filming and talking is hard and editing is hard.

Battlebit Remastered

Waiting for ~~POE 2~~ ಠ_ಠ - the new POE league

Some Cities Skylines while I wait for Cities Skylines 2

Some Chivalry

Minecraft (as usual), just finished Wolfenstein New Orden again. Just started Breath of Fire (GBA version). Nonogram (picross, android). Maybe I'll get back to ToTK (what a drag, that game is huge). Not touching my huge backlog yet.

Yes, I'm a parent and patient gamer, how did you know?

Finished my first playthrough of valheim this week as a duo team. Yagulath and the Queen boss were pretty crazy. I'm hoping the Ashlands comes out soon, not really sure what to do with the game until then.

I'm at 86% main story progress of ff16 and the game is such a letdown after reading people hyping it up so much... feels like a chore at the moment but I'm so close to the end I'm just gonna power through it

I dug up my old 3DS in the past weeks, installed some custom firmware to play my backups of DS/3DS/GBA games. A bit of Zelda Minish Cap, some Metroid Fusion... But mostly I find myself playing various Pokemon ROM hacks lol.

I've been getting into "Pokemon Elite Redux", which is a difficulty/challenge game centered around each Pokemon having up to 4 abilities at the same time in battle. And there's tons of new abilities that make each pokemon uniquely useful. It's certainly challenging, even on the lowest difficulty. It's happened to me several times that I have to get together a whole new team to beat a single trainer. But, there's zero grinding involved, and there's SO many quality-of-life changes that it's super easy to get a whole new team squared up in just a few minutes. That makes it really easy to jump in for a few minutes when I can, without feeling like I'm wasting my time