Been having a few days of Northgard.

Just finished Encased. Went ahead and reviewed it here but the summary of it is that it starts as an okay Fallout clone and then gets less and less okay as it goes on and you see they ran out of money.

Before that I did my first ever replay of Bioshock Infinite and actually really enjoyed it. Going in with just the expectation of a simple FPS it lives up to that and is quite a good one. It's not at all a "Shock" game, which annoyed me the first time, but expecting only an FPS made it a good time. Gonna play the DLC for the first time tomorrow I think.

Recently finished:
-> The Outer Worlds: Spacer's Choice Edition from Steam (thanks, Humble!)

Playing these games a lot lately:
-> The Evil Within 2 from GOG.
-> HELLGATE: London (Steam Edition) from Steam.

Still some stuff I've still been juggling on and off:
-> Deus Ex: Human Revolution - Director's Cut from GOG.
-> Hard Reset: Redux from GOG.
-> Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishment from Epic (via Heroic).

Put aside, for now:
-> Yakuza: Kiwami on Steam.
-> NIER Automata: YORHA on Steam.
-> Far Cry 6 on UbiSoft Connect.
-> Lake on UbiSoft Connect.

Just played through Ringlorn Saga. A nice, though short, game that actually feels like similar games from its time. The ending mentions a sequel, and if they make it, I'm hoping it will be about twice as long. (Twice as long would still be shorter than most modern games.)

Also tried out Demon Lord, but didn't play that long because of the lack of a save feature, and the fact that you don't really have control during battles. Then again, that game was made in 7 days for a game jam. (The upcoming Demon Lord Reincarnation is essentially an update of this game, except that apparently the changes are significant enough that it's basically a new game; in particular, you can now choose what skills your characters use during battle, but you now have limited SP with which to use them.)

Path of Exile. I've been playing it for the last week or so and it's just so addicting that I spend my entire evenings playing it. Still, I think I'll cease and desist soon and play some single-player games as I just feel too bad about playing such an endless grind game.

Just started Demon Lord Reincarnated. I'm definitely enjoying the SaGa-inspired game mechanics, even though it took a while to learn a healing spell. (That healing spell is expensive and weak, but it does at least heal the entire party at once.) Also have one character who has a spell that hits all enemies.

The early game can be rather rough, as you start out weak compared to the enemies.

After I've finished The Outer Worlds, I got back to playing Doom64 again. This time I use my new XBox controller :)

Getting back to Prey after taking a break for a bit. It's a good game, better than most you see in recent times, but it feels bloated compared to its inspirations. I'm cleaning up some of side quests I've picked up and I feel like I'm ticking boxes off a list while not getting much in rewards and not feeling much urgency anywhere. It's kind of the usual thing with Arkane in that they do a commendable job with the core gameplay but fall down elsewhere.

I'm playing (or rather trying to play) TW3 again, I don't know how many times I've already played it but I'm doing it from GOG this time and the experience is being impossible for me. The game has been breaking more and more with each new update to the point that it crashed at the end of a game of Gwent.

Out of curiosity, I began playing Might and Magic 2 Japanese version on PC-88, which is vastly different from the original version.
This game was localized by Starcraft (don't confuse it with Blizzard's RTS), which was a very interesting company. They didn't only localize Western RPGs and adventure games into Japanese home computers, they also improved them a lot in graphics and sound.
A good example is the Phatasie series, compare the original Commodore 64 version with MSX and PC-88 versions in the following link.

https://www.mobygames.com/game/647/phantasie/screenshots/

Might and Magic 2 also changed in graphics, In the original only one monster in the first row was shown, but this version shows all of them.

I've heard that the Japanese Super Famicom version is *very* different from the original, though I haven't had a chance to see it player or attempt to play it.

Don't confuse this version with the European SNES version, which is like the original, except with so many bugs that it's probably the worst version of the game. It's apparently even possible to get to a point where you can no longer even load your saved game! (This version was planned for US release but for "an unknown reason" that release never happened; I suspect that the game couldn't get past Nintendo of America's QA.)

Time to return to another all time classic from my younger days, Fallout. Been a long time, let's see if my nostalgia to play it again serves me well!

I had totally forgotten this hidden gem. lol. Perhaps I'll play it someday.

As for the PC88 version, I moved on to these 5 towns by teleport portals, and of course, wrote these maps with a pen and a graph paper notebook. After my adventurers became level 7, I began exploring outside of the starting town, MiddleGate.

By the way, StarCraft, a localizing company, had a strange decision about the game, They translated event messages and shop descriptions into Japanese, but everything else is still in English. so this version is an amalgam of Japanese and English (the rate may be Japanese 20% and English 80%). I imagine an average Japanese kid who didn't know English at all bought this game, but couldn't figure out how to play the game, and eventually had to give up it. I guess this is one of the reasons why this game is not so popular in Japan as the previous one which was fully translated.

I do seem to remember many early Japanese arcade-ish video games, particularly those that don't have that much text, would not have any Japanese text. See, for example, Super Mario Bros. 1, as well as The Lost Levels (Super Mario Bros. 2 in Japan); as far as I can tell, there's no Japanese text in the Japanese versions (not counting Lost Levels 9-4, where some Japanese is written via the blocks in the level).

There's one Japanese game I played, Game Center CX 2, which is basically a bunch of sub-games styled after (mostly) 8-bit games of the past. And there, in the sub-games, you don't really see Japanese text, except for the adventure game (which is pretty much just text), and the RPG (which has a lot of text); those games, though, are entirely Japanese (though I think they lack Kanji).

(The first Game Center CX got released in the US under the title Retro Game Challenge; the second one did not officially get translated (I played an imported copy), though I've heard a fan translation exists.)

Going back to Might & Magic, the first game's NES port definitely upgraded the graphics (you can see enemies during battle) and added music, but it also added some bugs. There's one bug that can be used to transmute items (just look up a speedrun of this version, and not a "glitchless" or "no major glitches" one), but the one that's mainly worrying is the one involving Locust Plagues. Thing is, if one of them gets to attack:
* The attack will hit for 255 damage. (In other versions, this enemy only does 1 damage per hit, so at most 10 damage per attack since it gets 10 attacks per round; this large amount of damage is *definitely* a bug.)
* The attack will kill the unlucky party member who is targeted.
* Due to *another* bug, anybody in the party who hasn't acted this turn doesn't get to act.
* Start of the next round, the Locust Plague is faster than your party, and therefore gets to attack first.
* And, of course, it will attack and kill another party member.
* Repeat until party wipe, with there being nothing the player can do about this.

Currently playing various amounts: Warframe, Overwatch, Planetside 2, Dirty Bomb, Guild Wars 2

And some Life is Strange with my gf on the weekends.