What are you playing right now?

Rust. I both hate and slightly enjoy it as a solo.

I get bored very quickly with games as they all just feel the same with different skins/controls. May try Helldivers 2 and supposedly EDF 6 is coming out this spring, so maybe I'll try that too.
 
Insurgency: Sandstorm is getting better. There's only one way I can really find to play it, though, which is to find some position where I have a good line of site over a busy lane and pop people from cover.

I got some indies on sale. Cheap things. The one I've started is Turmoil. It's okay, but it feels like a flash game. A lot of things are like that nowadays. Used to be you could get very feature rich games online for completely free, people made them for fun. Now they want to pimp them for $10 - $20 (I don't pay that much). I'd compare this thing to Oiligarchy, but it's really nothing like that except in the most superficial sense of being a game from a 2D/geological cutaway perspective about drilling for oil.

It's fine. It's actually kind of addictive, but also kind of dull too, feels zombifying like a thing like Solitaire does. You dig pipes, have to cart oil off to silos, have to sell it. There's two firms whose prices vary (usually as part of long waves, it's not frantic) so you're more or less saving until your personal threshold (for me $1) is crossed. There's other gimmicks added but it really is about that basic. There's a campaign and it can get surprisingly hard, mostly I think because you can fall into a debt death spiral and if you become too poor you can wind up getting stuck to marginal land unable to win in the land auctions.

It's okay. As far as cheap ass indies I've bought recently go, I prefer Mini Metro (and I don't play that much either).

I wish someone would make a spiritual successor to Motherload. I guess that stupid robot cowboy game (Steamworld Dig?) might count. I had it on PS+ long ago but couldn't get into it.
 
Stardew Valley with the new update. ConcernedApe put out a 1.6 update yesterday.

He said it would be a small one for modders but of course he got carried away just like he did for the 1.5 update. Lots of quality of life improvements, new festivals, new dialogue. He also included a new farm that starts you out with a chicken coop and 2 chickens!

Think I'll take this new farm to perfection and spend some time finding all the secrets ConcernedApe has added.
 
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I started "playing" Astrologaster and it is a rare case of a game that's bored the hell out of me in a mere hour. It's not long but it's hard to imagine finishing it.

It's a "game" based on the life of Simon Forman, an astrology doctor/shitbag from Elizabethan London. Basically, a history geek thought this dude's medical practice was some crazy shit and deserved to be a game. The thing is, the game is almost nonexistent. So far it seems like what you do, every single time, is listen to the dialogue (which is, god bless, at least voice acted) and then make a diagnosis. You have the signs and a conclusion to draw, and you have several choices. You either get it right or you don't.

The thing is, there's no way to fuck it up. Now, don't get me wrong, I didn't really expect a detailed realistic astrology simulation, but these kind of games usually find some way to dramatize the task or make a minigame out of it. Could have some thing involving observing the sky, having to look up the meaning of signs (instead of feeding it to you). Maybe you don't get his personal interpretation until you do it.

Instead, I find myself glazing over all the astrological explanations (it's not really teaching anything) and just going for the interpretation it gives you upfront, which clearly fits what they want or not.

So how's the "humor"? Bland. Maybe it builds on itself, but I just haven't seen much of anything to interest me here. I'm mystified how this took off.
 
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I'm playing/replaying a bunch of PS1 and PS2 games I had or wished I had on an emulator right now. Currently the positive standouts on PS1 are G-Police, Future Cop: LAPD and Herc's Adventures. I really recommend "Herc's Adventures", it's a very well crafted and charming game. 2D open world action-adventure game with no loading times, shit-tons of secrets and good humor.
 
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Finished The Metronomicon. It's a combination of rhythm game and rpg; you have four heroes with three skills each, which you cast by hitting notes. You have your tanks/healers/dps, there's equipment, (mini)bosses, enemies have elemental weaknesses. It'd be too easy for rhythm game aficionados but I loved it.

 
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Just picked up Homeworld Remastered and Deserts of Kharak to quench my need for scifi and it's absolutely epic. It's hard to believe the og Homeworld game was made in 1999. Games back then were made differently. The gameplay, story telling, is sublime.
 
Been playing the Alone in the Dark reboot. So far, it's... not very good. Not terrible, but not good.
The game looks alright, but it has some kind of endemic stuttering issue that really destroys any mood it tries to build. It doesn't seem to just be my machine, since a lot of other posts I've seen mention it, along with some tech reviews. I wouldn't recommend anyone touch it until it gets a good patch (if it ever does.)
Other than that, it feels like a very paint-by-numbers contemporary horror game. Maybe it'll improve once I get further along, but the janky combat and the character blabbing out the solutions to puzzles (even on the "Old School" difficulty that's supposed to be all about you finding things out yourself) make it feel cheaply made and rushed.
 
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grim-reaper.jpg
>Boot up stardew valley
>Character name: Lord Bones
>Farm name: Lord Bones Spooky Boogie Farm
>Favorite thing: Guns
>Farm type: Wilderness
>Wait until night time
>See a bat on my farm
>Kill it with a scythe
 
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You know what I hate? When you're playing a shooting game that emphasizes using cover. You HAVE to stay in cover or you will get gunned down in like a second. I get it, it's all realistic and shit and I actually find cover-based shooters to be pretty fun.

BUT

THEN

They start giving you enemies that ignore the cover rule. They are inexplicably resistant to bullets, so much so that all they have to do is slowly walk toward you until they are standing over you and they can shoot you. And you can shoot them and shoot them and shoot them and they won't die for some fucking reason, even if you shoot them directly in their eye.

So because this bullet sponge is walking toward you and getting behind you and to the side of you, your cover is no longer safe. So you have to try to move, but of course this freak also has a heavy machine gun that NEVER RUNS OUT OF BULLETS. So the second you try to move he mows you down.

I HATE IT

So yeah, I've been playing Tom Clancy's the Division.
 
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Death Palette. It's a neat concept that isn't as well executed as it could've been, it feels unpolished. You come into the care of a cursed painting of a girl and have to paint things for it to interact with. If you mess up, it kills you.

It's kinda like a simplified version of Death Mark but with only one enemy and a much poorer story. It's not bad, if you like these kinds of point & click adventure/horror themed games it's worth checking out.
 
Started replaying Assassin's Creed Odyssey. Tend to stay away from most AAA slop. But I am a sucker for historical stuff, and there is a nice Zen like state to the busy work. Curious to see if this will hold up better than I remember.

Finished a vanilla legendary campaign in WH3. Played the Changeling and dear god was it a boring slog. They really didn't fix any of the issues with Tzeentch which is sad since I like him the most compared to the other Chaos gods. Can't wait for another "rework" to finally make the faction fun to play. WH3 has been an embarrassing shitshow and such a disappointment. I don't expect Thrones of Decay but be an actual good DLC.
 
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In the interest of giving it a fair shake, I went and played Millennium. I got about 150 turns in, which given the Age I got to and the relative pace, I'd say was about halfway.
Turns out, no, it really is just that mediocre. Wouldn't recommend it unless they do some massive overhaul and fix up a lot of issues, including performance ones oddly enough. It really should've been a $20 early access title with another year of dev time, rather than a $40 full release with a season pass.

I heard The Callisto Protocol got its Denuvo removed, so I'll probably pirate that too and give it a shot, because I guess I'm a sucker for playing through disappointing games right now.
 
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Recently got into a Touhou-Shin Megami Tensei mashup called Touhou Artificial Dream in Arcadia. It's basically old-school SMT with Touhou characters, setting, and chiptuneified music. Instead of negotiating with enemies to add them to your party you fight them in a short danmaku fight. Reading some of the Steam reviews it seems like it also adds QoL features to SMT to make it more enjoyable.
 
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I've been playing The Caribbean Sail, but I'm pretty aggravated with it. It's a knockoff of The Oregon Trail that's trying to merge that gameplay with the pirate game genre. Essentially it just turns voyages between ports into Oregon Trail styled travel. The problem is that while the basic idea is good and it has neat content, it's also so poorly balanced that the game might as well be unplayable.

Oregon Trail is supposed to be hard, but this is like the Dark Souls of Oregon Trail, except the very thing that made Oregon Trail hard was RNG fuckery and so there's no way around it. Your food drains so incredibly fast that you have to constantly play this very boring fishing minigame; in other Trail-likes (like Organ Trail) the hunting equivalent minigame pays off way better. Ship combat is just hammering the button as fast as possible and then you die or surrender and lose everything. There's mutinies and floggings, which sounds awesome, but any punishment at all seems to immediately trigger a mutiny. Why the fuck do I have a party of characters - five people crewing a brigantine - instead of just named officers and a pool of manpower? It uses Oregon Trail mechanics regardless of if they make sense to the change in setting.

It sucks because the basic idea is great, it's full of content, and it's also too fucking hard with no difficulty settings. You can't get across something like the Atlantic with a full tank of food. Needs way more ports, too. It would have to be very heavily modded to be functional.
 
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