i think i need to restart with fell seal and really think over classes and style, the combat is pretty much unforgiving on normal.... the last battle i tried i decided on some formation which allowed for the ai to stump all my characters into each other... and with the healer benched... anyway i'll go and retry if my new controller is in

and on that note, based on this lousy 4 month experience i say stay away from licensed xbox one pnp controllers, and especially if your not the lotus on the pillow type concerning your controller

I have a whole bunch of healers on my team, so even if I have to bench one, I still have other options.

I'm actually playing with the DLC, and there are a couple things that make things interesting with respect to character development:
* Instead of fighting battles, all I need to do is start a mission, save, turn off the game, then a certain amount of real time later turn it back on and the characters sent on the mission will have earned some AP. (Doesn't work for story characters.)
* The vangal you get fron an early story mission is quite good, becoming one of my main characters for a while (and is immune to injuries, which is nice), and you can get more monsters later. Monsters are actually more fun and interesting to use than in other SRPGs I've experienced (Final Fantasy Tactics and Disgaea).

On the other hand, with the DLC, monsters can sometimes be trickier, as enemy monsters can spawn with variants, which give them extra abilities and passives. (Your monsters can get variants as well, via the same method as the class system.)

sounds interesting, but really, i failed in the 3d and 4th mission of the start of the game, managed to win the 2d fight but, left with one down, the healer. Also forgot to hire another member, not to mention the whole job system feels at least awkward, not to mention the whole weapon system,according to the weapon stats crossbows can be used by rogues but bought one and the weapon did not appear in the selection menu for equipment ( maybe i needed to push left and right on the d pad ) anyway brought the prisoner to town only to find he's VIP, left town, failed miserably in the next fight, reloaded and tried to patrol the intersection thinking it would be better but it did not.

for my organized war mind the whole fighting system feels as very disorganized, chaotic even with hints of sadism, still 1C has a good enough reputation not to mention the weirdness has its own attraction leaving me with a feeling of wanting to learn this sillyness to see what comes from it.

the whole game is advertised as adult in playthrough and topics touched and i'm also curious to see if adult means written for youngsters who want to act adult or that there is an actual adult sense of challenge and story

I'm still playing Prey (2017). I'm not very far into the game (I think) - I'm just enjoying the exploration.

The RB on my Xbox One controller (V2) finally bit the dust. It looks like many online stores are asking premium prices for them nowadays. This article explains it a bit: https://www.trustedreviews.com/news/why-are-xbox-controllers-so-expensive-4040172
I still found one near the original price (54€). I guess 'bargain' prices aren't coming back until after the new version is released at the end of the year.

For now, I'll be playing with an old Xbox 360 controller again. It's been a while, and it surprises me how different the sticks feel.

Don't forget that you can change the difficulty mid-game if you need to. To do this, enter the troops menu from the world map (won't work from the screen where you deploy units before a fight), then press ESC (with default keyboard controls; it's the key that brings up the menu from where you can save if you're on the world map); you can then change the difficulty. From what I understand, if you turn off injuries any character who is injured will get cured of that injury.

To be honest, there isn't too much "adult" about the story that hasn't come up yet; there's demons later on, and something happens with that council, but those are perhaps the most adult things in the story. Well, there *is* the aspect of reanimating the dead as zombies that comes up later, and is something that you get to do before enemies can, which is interesting. (Only 2 classes can do this, one reserved to a story character and the other being a high-level class with a badge requirement.)

Games I am playing right now?

Well - Other than you can only play one game at the same time (obvious), the games I played last week are:

Trails of Cold Steel III
Dragon's Dogma Dark Arisen
Persona 4 Golden
Atelier Rorona The Alchemist of Arland DX
X4 - Foundations
Fairy Tail

And the Visual Novels:

Flowers -Le Volume sur Automne- (I would love to see these series on GOG)
Sakura No Mori Dreamers
Heart of the Woods (new voiced version)

Sadly the amount of visual novels on GOG is not really "overwhelming", so only one of them is from GOG. The games are about 50/50 between Steam and GOG.

I am looking forward to Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning very soon and X4: Cradle of Humanity, The legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel IV and Ys IX: Monstrum Nox later this year or next year. And, of course, Cyberpunk!

Well I was playing Grim Dawn with the Diablo 2 Region of Terror mod and man it is awesome but I took a break from that but I am going to be getting back into it.

However I am playing alot of Radomizers of NES games such as Dragon Warrior/Quest 1 and Castlevania 2 Simon's Quest. Basically a randomizer is a program that randomizes the location of the placement of items and locations in the game. There are Randomizers for several games. It adds a challenge to the game. Even the enemies that can appear in said games can be randomized.

A few games on GOG actually have randomizers. Specifically:
* La-Mulana 1 and 2 both have randomizers.
* Hollow Knight has a randomizer.
* I think the Bloodstained game might even have one built-in (instead of it being a third-party mod), though you may need to beat the game first.
* Timespinner (though it looks like you need to be playing a Windows version of the game for it to work).

* There's apparently a randomizer for Baldur's Gate 2, but all it does is shuffle the locations of certain powerful magic items; it doesn't randomize progression or any other gameplay aspects. (Would be interesting to see a deeper randomizer for this game, randomizing things like NPC stats and spell levels.)

I could also point out that some seeds will be more difficult than others, and some will likely be easier than the unmodified game (particularly if you get some powerful late-game ability or item early).

Interesting....


I'm playing Ultrakill,

it's crazy, it's fast, it has no limits or boundaries of safety, it has no knowledge of seatbelts...


Just how I like shooting games.



Which is very few of them.

I like these games, mostly with shooting, where the "meta" objective is the opposite of surviving, where momement is not hindered, it's swift, sometimes you can't figure out what happened, explosions are aplenty, boss are not Daunting but something bigger and harder to shred to pieces.

Not all games are insane like this ultrakill, but i'd consider in the same ballpark like: unreal tournament (1999), Titanfall 1, Killing Floor 2, Dusk, Shadow Warrior (2013), Shadow Warrior 2...

It’s been a while since I’ve had opportunity to play anything, partly due to busyness, but mostly due to the fact that, due to complications with my wife’s pregnancy, she had to go in six weeks early to deliver our twins. We were at the hospital for almost a full week, so I obviously had other priorities. We’re home now, and while our boys are still in the NICU, it’s nice to have something to distract myself from worrying about them.

I cleared most of Layer Three of the Lower Pthumeru Chalice Dungeon, but... well, I just struggled to maintain interest in the boss. Fighting Rom again just reminded me how much I dislike that boss fight, especially now that it’s in a smaller space. I made one go at it, got stun locked by a spider, and got destroyed by Ron’s long range arcane ice attack thing. I couldn’t muster the desire to attempt it again.

Instead, I went back to Orphan of Kos and made several attempts. I got readily destroyed, but I didn’t feel like I’d lost much skill by being away from the game for a week. I took a break and went back to Mergo’s Loft, which I cleared quickly. I died once to Mergo’s Wet Nurse (which is kind of embarrassing, if I’m honest), but had no difficulty the second time. For being potentially the last boss in the game (depending on the choice you make with Gehrman), Mergo’s Wet Nurse is just... dull. It’s not a bad fight, exactly. There’s just not much to it. She has a limited move pool, and while each attack can do a decent amount of damage, all of them are pretty easy to avoid. It’s kind of a low note at the end of the game.

I really considered going straight to Gehrman after this. I’d attempted Orphan a few more times, and while I felt like I could eventually beat him, I was recently loaned Sekiro and wanted to get to playing it. However, every time I returned to the Hunter’s Dream with the intention of tackling Gehrman... I just couldn’t do it. I knew it would bug me to no end if I left Orphan unconquered. I knew I could best him, and I knew it would feel so rewarding to do so. So I always returned.

I started getting to his second phase pretty consistently, and on three separate occasions I got him to about 10% health, only to die because I had run out of blood vials with which to heal myself (this despite using the Communion Rune that grants four additional blood vials). I never got frustrated or discouraged, but I didn’t want to keep spending time attempting this fight when I could be moving on to another game. I persisted, though, and at long last, after God only knows how many attempts, I defeated him (with 10 blood vials to spare, no less). I have never felt a greater sense of accomplishment in a game before. I felt like I had finally honed my skills to the point that beating him felt like a true exercise of my skill and not dumb luck. People aren’t joking when they say he’s the hardest boss in the game, and I take great pride in having defeated him.

I don’t have many more comments than what I’ve already said about him. I will say, though, that my biggest complaint with him is his second phase. The first phase feels so tightly refined and so well executed, that the second phase brings the overall experience down just a tad. It doesn’t make the fight bad, and I would consider Orphan in my top 3 fights of the game. It’s just that the second phase doesn’t feel as refined. His move pool is a little more limited, but he jumps and dashes around constantly. This makes fighting him come close to being a chore, and that’s worsens by the fact that at least three of his attacks consistently broke my camera lock. I wouldn’t mind him being so mobile if it didn’t also cause me to fight with the game’s already inconsistent camera. I found myself having to roll around madly several times just so I could avoid death long enough to lock on again. Overall, though, I thoroughly enjoyed this fight and the satisfaction of beating it.

If there was one more negative to this fight, it’s that any fight that came after just couldn’t compare. Gehrman was fun, but he was so easy in comparison that it almost felt anticlimactic. I beat him in one go, and I destroyed him at that. It also felt waaaay quicker, which makes sense since he had so much less health.

Not much to say about the Moon Presence. It’s kind of a boring fight, but after Orphan and Gehrman, I wasn’t complaining too much. My only disappointment in this moment is that I totally forgot about Laurence. I wanted to kill all the bosses, but I forgot about him entirely. Oh well. I’m sure I’ll play it again some day.

I’ve now started Sekiro, but I’ve only played the first five minutes or so, so I have no comments on it yet. That will be in my next post

Yeah Also Bloodstained Ritual of Night has one as well. It got it at the same time as the New Character. There was a 3rd party one but it got discontinued when the new built in one got released.

Finished The Sinking City. The detective parts were great (though they got repetitive by the end) but the survival horror aspect was kinda meh. Still a good game overall, and recommended for fans of the two genres.

Diablo 2 LOD
I beat Act 3, Now just entered Hell. I have to say playing as a Summoning Necromancer really made Mephisto an easy boss to beat, I just had to sit back and watch my minions take him down. I also installed a few of mods but most of them I didn't end up liking(or couldn't get to work in SP due to online-only functionality) besides D2SE and PlugY - which I'm running now with a couple of features like regenerate maps after every restart and some QoL stuff mainly.

I really wish Path of Exile wasn't online only, I really enjoy the game a lot but I get tons of lag a lot of the time(I'm on Wifi).
I was hoping to get Path of Diablo Mod working but that requires you to be connected to their {online} servers and it doesn't work well with Wine/Linux.

I was able to play about 30 minutes of Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, and I’m liking it so far. It’s definitely a different beast than the Soulsborne games when it comes to gameplay. The greater speed and mobility are enjoyable. I’m still getting the hang of the combat. I’m having to recalibrate my reflexes and attention to detail. So far, enemy attacks are a little more difficult for me to read, and after getting so accustomed to Bloodborne’s parry system, I’m having to really focus on the timing right for deflections. A Bloodborne parry generally has to be performed as an attack begins (like, the actually beginning of the attack, not the wind up), but a Sekiro deflection is performed right as an attack lands. I feared I would suck immensely at this because I never consistently parried in the Souls games, but Souls parries have to be timed differently to account for the startup frames of the parry animation. Sekiro’s deflects are almost instantaneous as far as I can tell, so it’s more a matter of timing the button press right when the attack is going to land. At any rate, I’ve already improved a little bit.

I haven’t progressed too far. I defeated the mini boss in the tutorial area and a mini boss in the Ashina Outskirts. The one in the tutorial area wasn’t difficult, but I died twice to the one in the Ashina Outskirts. The additional mobility is taking a little to get used to. I know that attacking and deflecting are the two best options during combat, because both damage posture, but some attacks cannot be blocked or parried, require a dodge or jump to avoid. Dodging is more familiar to me, but I’ve found myself jumping a lot in these situations, which does have the benefit of allowing me to for a stomp attack on an enemies head, but which is also adding a layer to the combat that is throwing me for a loop. I know it will just take time for me to adjust since I just came off a couple dozen hours of Bloodborne, but until that happens, combat is currently a mess of mistimed deflects and unnecessary dodging and jumping.

I’m enjoying it, though, and I like that From Software strayed even further from the Souls formula than Bloodborne. Don’t get me wrong—I obviously love that formula, and Bloodborne is still different enough from the Souls games to feel distinct. But Sekiro feels like a totally different game aside from the idols-not-bonfires, and I like that. I know I’m going to get the quality of a From Software game, but I don’t feel like I’m going to get burnt out by too similar a formula. The stealth may not be especially deep and the more open movement may not allow for as tight of a world as Dark Souls or Bloodborne, but I don’t feel like the comparison even needs to be made. Sekiro is so distinct that it feels like it is doing its own thing, and that makes it work better than if would have if From had tried to stick closer to the Soulsborne formula. Sekiro isn’t failing to do something the Soulsborne game did better; it’s doing something different, and I’m glad for that.

I’m excited to play more. Compared to the Soulsborne games, I have very little knowledge of Sekiro or its world or progression. This will be much closer to a blind playthrough than Bloodborne was. My goal is to avoid the wikis as much as I can. I might use then occasionally to help with NPC quest lines, but I’m going to avoid even that if I can. I want as pure an experience as I can get.

Just learned about CivClicker, so I'm playing that game for the time being (while not abandoning my other games).