What are you playing?

[maru]

I've been going through Persona 3 Reload basically since it came out. I've been doing it with a 100% single playthrough guide just because I can't see myself doing all this twice over and it's been really good. But strangely it feels a lot longer than other Atlus games? Like I'm projecting I'll finish this with a 50 hour playtime. Soul Hackers 2 was 45. I beat Persona 4 Golden in about 51. SMTV was around 60. And yet this sort of just feels like a much longer game. Is it simply a bit more repetitive? Am I less invested in the characters?

I think possibly so -- I love the themes of the game and the overall tone but I'm not sure I'll remember a lot of the slice of life after all this. One thing I like in games is bleakness. I like to stare a hopeless situation in the face and then put it away. It's an interesting form of play for me; it defuses my own life anxieties seeing how low my own stakes are.

Anyway, let's talk about what you're spending your time with.

[watermoon]

right now it's ring racers, and it'll probably be ring racers for quite some time.
currently i'm 36 hours into the game and still have one emerald left to go until i've got them all… on normal speed. i've spend the past hour or so just practicing that special stage while backgrounding the summoning salt nes tetris docu and i finally got it once. so now i just need to do it for real!
and then i get to do it all on fast speed, and then do all the time trials, and then start playing online and see if i can make a few friends this time too.
hopefully i don't end up attracting a colombian boyfriend this time, though i dunno, he was kinda sweet…

i made it through my grief stage and hit a point where suddenly everything clicked for me and… i might even like it more than srb2kart?
but i don't deny that it takes a certain kind of freak to get into this game. it almost feels like it's ideally made for people who are already familiar with the modded srb2kart experience and it keeps piling features on from there. but that also makes it fun for a certain sort of neurodivergent (me) who notices all the callbacks to those community mods and gets a thrill out of seeing them "officially" recognized.

[hepatica]

as of late..i've been playing through <a href='https://iopwiki.com/wiki/Reverse_Collap ... ame_Bakery' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>Reverse Collapse: Code Name Bakery</a>. i originally picked it up just for the admittedly silly desire to get a steam profile background it provided. but it was actually fun ?! i forgot how much i could like a tactics game.

its like.. well, ive only gotten to the second chapter. but it feels like "illegal incursion into the northern caucuses, madoka magica edition"

its been making me think about the kind of game i want to create in the future. i kind of want to create some kind of grand strategy game mixed with tactics, high level diplomacy, low level battles, strung along either through a linear or emergent narrative. just thoughts. but it feels like a turn based tactics game is the only way to really realize my ideal video game vision. i still need to create it though!

[meri]

i've been enjoying <a href='https://store.steampowered.com/app/2132 ... and_Steel/' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>rabbit and steel</a> a lot! it's rare that a co-op game captures me thoroughly. it's a bullet hell with raiding mechanics a la ffix or if you wish to extend it even further, world of warcraft raiding! the cutesy exterior had me a little weary at first, like "its going to be one of those cozy games" but i was pretty quickly proven wrong. there's a surprising amount of complexity and the feeling of finally beating that boss is a great feeling. i still haven't beaten hard mode. grab a friend

i've come back to <a href='https://store.steampowered.com/app/2088 ... ne_Dreams/' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>picayume dreams</a> again. what is there that's not cool about picayume dreams? i liked the mystery and the overall scale of the world. characters warped beyond recognition fighting in an infinite loop to... save earth? the game outscales itself once you beat it, so it's not something you're meant to play forever. beat the story mode a few times and savor it. get in an hour long flow state and kill millions of baddies. it's good stuff. it's picayume dreams.

i seem to have recommended two rougelites. i tend to come back to the genre after binding of isaac did a number on me. what is it about this kind of game that's so appealing?

[maru]

i seem to have recommended two rougelites. i tend to come back to the genre after binding of isaac did a number on me. what is it about this kind of game that's so appealing?

Do you ever ponder about your preferred styles of play? There's the obvious <a href='https://matthewbarr.co.uk/bartle/' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>Bartle test</a>, but I think in general it's about how these games tickle parts of our brains and what we do when we play.

I play a lot of Roguelites too, but it's because I like something in hand that soothes the body while the mind is occupied. Like EMDR, thoughts process while doing these gameplay loops, but all the same the sessions are discrete and it results in an overarching progression that allows for mixing things up.

I started playing <a href='https://store.steampowered.com/app/2128 ... _of_Achra/' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>Path of Achra</a> last night and it's utterly bizarre. It's nothing but the combat loop from Rogue games, pure stat progression from room to room in a sort of puzzle way. That said it's written in an absolutely esoteric, Dune-inflected prose that makes it a little impenetrable. I just do loops -- am I doing it right? What does this build, like, mean? It's all text for systems upon systems that then collapse onto me right-clicking to do an automatic action anyway.

[JennyDog]

Oh, the Bartle Test! It's been a long time since I've seen that brought up by someone else, Bartle & co's vision of MMOs as a sort of expansive wild west of human expression is a bit silly in retrospect (I think but have not read that a lot of literature was sort of hype for something that didn't quite exist), but there was something so wonderfully humanist about it by imaging this more ideal society. They also had an interesting study on gender in MMO but I'm having some trouble googling around with it (they noted a huge group of basically house wife MMO players who tended to be in their 30s).

Last thing I played was <a href='https://store.steampowered.com/app/501860/Slayer_Shock/' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>SlayerShock</a>, meant to be a sort of playable procedural Buffy the vampire slayer ImSim. It's a very 6/10 game that hits exactly what it wants to do, and there's something kind of fun around the fact that since a lot of the in game map space is proc gen soup, I especially liked how it reproduced the vibe of being young and walking around a big suburban space when there's nothing to do but wander, it's a taste like mellowed bittersweet.

Path of Archa reminds me of another tactics roguelike where you could move around a room and do tactics inside of it, but I can't recall the name -- had a sort of similar vibe. I used to be hardcore into <a href='https://frozendepths.net/roguelike/' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>Frozen Depths</a>, it's kinda novel to me a Complete and mostly feature complete roguelike.

Don't have something I'm strongly playing right now, I have had the feeling I should be trying more stuff.

[maru]

Oh, the Bartle Test! It's been a long time since I've seen that brought up by someone else, Bartle & co's vision of MMOs as a sort of expansive wild west of human expression is a bit silly in retrospect (I think but have not read that a lot of literature was sort of hype for something that didn't quite exist), but there was something so wonderfully humanist about it by imaging this more ideal society. They also had an interesting study on gender in MMO but I'm having some trouble googling around with it (they noted a huge group of basically house wife MMO players who tended to be in their 30s).

Could you expand a bit more? I didn't know a lot about the context here. For me it's just -- what do you get out of using this space? I grew up on .hack so it was sort of primed into my head that everyone wants to live in some shared world for a different reason. I don't know if MMOs converged on just everyone raiding. I don't think they did.

[rakuen02]

i have been playing The Finals! for those of you who do not know it is a 3 person per team competitive FPS made by a dev team consisting of a lot of old battlefield bad company 2 developers! as such the environments are entirely destructible but that isnt the best part. I have been playing competitive shooters since i was like 12 years old and i am now 24, and rarely do i find a game that occupies my mind and body in such a way. in the past i believed that csgo and tf2 were perfect games(i no longer think this about csgo) but when i was like 16 i realized i didnt really have fun 100% of the time with those games and i went into a kind of non-gaming phase. its only very recently that i was able to really truly seriously devote myself to my own mental and physical skills in regards to team based shooters. i do not believe i can communicate the euphoria i feel from playing this game, i am at all times experiencing near infinite depth and possibilities! the movement, gunplay, and various other mechanics play together so perfectly that i regularly enter a flow state i know part of this is because i have been yearning for such an experience for a very long time and not everyone else will experience this upon playing The Finals, but in the interests of maybe possibly sharing this feeling i would wholeheartedly recommend this game to anyone in need of a deep, competitive shooter to sink your teef into! i would compare my experience to progressing in learning a martial art(i practiced martial arts for many years as a kid but definitely not to the level of involvement emotionally and physically that i am now, given my age and maturity). triple thumbs up from me!!

[maru]

I finished P3R the other week. I wrote <a href='https://backloggd.com/u/marukoto/review/1640650/' rel='nofollow noopener' target='_blank'>a bit about it</a>, but to expound on it ... it made me feel sort of tired with its own stakes. I understand why P4 hit harder: it can feel relaxing when it's all just fun and you're defeating a bad guy. But P3 really wants you to think about the fact that your life is defined by the fact that it is finite: that it's really up to you what you do with it, but you shouldn't just give up or give someone else the reins. In a sense it's what I can find to be an otherwise boring existentialism — we got a lot of it in the 2000s! — but it lands better than I otherwise would've expected.

Anyway, not to get into anything necessarily that spoilery.

I bought Animal Well the other week, too, and started playing through it. I kept feeling this distance from it. Everything was well designed, and I disinterestedly would notice the thoughtful design and it would feel like nothing. Not fun, just like, ah, that's clever. But I would get bored, or frustrated, or whatever. And I can't tell if I just hate video games now or if I'm exhausted with them or ... shouldn't this feel good? Shouldn't I want to come back? Shouldn't it be hard for me to stay away?

I'm playing Fire Emblem Awakening right now and it's at least closer to that. I die a lot, playing through Hard Classic, and I reset and I try again, trying to master five minutes of gameplay across the span of hours, only to make one bad move and need to try again from scratch. RNG resets every time. Eventually the game gives you better weapons if it's been long enough since your last save. It gradually opens up.

Do you ever feel that way, though? That you just go through the motions of trying to enjoy yourself, and you see things that would've made yourself at a younger age feel excited and intrigued, but it all feels like nothing? Granted, when I was super young, I played a bit of Cave Story and didn't care about it at all. Whereas Metroid Zero Mission was intensely fun. Perhaps it's a constant thing for me — just hating quirky thoughtful games like that.

[chc4]

My TV broke eight months ago and then I put off getting a new one until like. three weeks ago. but I have a new one now which means I'm on an FFXIV kick again.

I've been playing it since like mid 2020 (thanks COVID) off and on. I cleared the main story campaign up to Endwalker, the most recent expansion, but still have the patch content in between it and the next expansion Dawntrail that releases the end of this month I have to get up to date on. I've played through the raids and alliance raids since I started playing again, which were all pretty run; FFXIV does a good job of teaching mechanics as part of the fight and executing them is fun. It's kinda like a rhythme game in that you want to be executing your job's gameplan of skill rotations while also making sure to dodge AoEs the boss puts down or walking in certain patterns to match mechanics, and the interplay of doing those together is satisfying. I'm looking forward to Dawntrail a lot.

I mostly play White Mage, with a side of Dancer, which is fun but also means when I fuck up and fail mechanics and die the raid wipes sometimes as a result which isn't great lol

[maru]

Good lord, I finally beat Fire Emblem Awakening. It took me so long — I would basically redo the same 3-5 minutes of gameplay for an hour and a half a lot as a stray member would die, I would reset, get back to the same spot and try not to make the same mistake again. I feel like if I played Conquest it would probably be even harder because I needed to use the grind additions to keep my lower level members at a fair place. There's a lot of ways to massively break Awakening, but I just haven't mastered my Fire Emblem cheese skills much. Besides using Nosferatu Dark Mages as tanks — they have insane Def for some reason. They're just OP in general.

Next up I think it's time for me to read some VNs. I don't know if I should tackle some of the smaller ones first before going to like 80 hour yuri-fests...

I've been playing a lot of Picross 3D lately too — it's really theraputic when you're just listening to lectures to tinker away at it. I was a little spooked at first because of the dynamic of "two groups of x" vs. "three groups of x" but I slowly internalised it and then got used to the pattern matching implied. I feel like you see the same few arrangements so often that you could make solving these fairly well-optimised for a TAS or whatever.

[sinku]

I've been playing Fallout: New Vegas again and having a really good time. My builds always trend towards energy weapons, but I think I will can my current save and start again with a pure unarmed build. And then, try to embrace survival over barter. A lot of effort was put into making hunting, gathering and crafting a viable alternative to bartering with lots of recipes for useful drugs and medicines and armors. I'd be voluntarily shunning guns and energy weapons and explosives just for the hell of it, but it would be fun make the scrappy early game even more tough.

The modding community is very lively right now. I'm most looking forward to Nova Arizona, an overhaul that would add territory east of the river with an ethos modeled after Tamriel Rebuilt. But, the whole meme about the style of FNV is very funny to me. I am consistently shocked by how obvious it is that it is a commercial mod. I think the reason Bethesda doesn't want to hand Obsidian the reigns of their license again is how horribly the launch went + the incredibly spotty quality of the product. In spite of that, though, its probably one of the most successful "mods" ever besides counter-strike or team fortress. The more I look at community mods and patches and overhauls for the game, the more obvious it becomes that most of them are removing rough edges from content recycled into the game from Fallout 3. Almost everything I thought was original is really just a reskin when I really thought back to when I played FO3. Maybe it would be different if they had another year to work on it. Even into the DLC releases things were shoddy. Some of the recorded voices really sound like they got somebody to use their desktop mic setup or something. for example, the shaman in Honest Hearts. You can like, hear the bitrate and room echo, it's so funny.

[sinku]

ive been playing caves of qud and a really stupid thing happened. I stepped on a clam thinking i would attack it, and it teleported me halfway across the world. so i stepped off and back on, guessing that it is some sort of method of travel. but instead of taking me back to where I started, I did this cycle of stepping on and off until I arrived at a place surrounded by like, frog people. they all grabbed me and killed me. what a total waste of time.

[maru]

I've been trying to figure out what I want to play next. You want to know my, like, full list? Here's everything I have onhand to go through that I like, own / bought / have onhand already:

- Umineko
- Chaos;Head and Child
- Kanon
- Clannad
- Steins;Gate and 0
- Yu-No: A girl who chants love at the bound of this world
- You and Me and Her
- Yume Nikki
- Tunic
- To the Moon
- Trap Shrine for some reason
- The Talos Principle
- The Silver Case (+ 25th Ward)
- A few smaller VNs I've been curious about: Winter Polaris, WORLD END ECONOMICA, Shadows of Pygmalion, Sea Bed, Return to Shironagasu Island, Misericorde, If My Heart Had Wings
- Fruit of Grisaia
- House in Fata Morgana
- Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origins
- The Caligula Effect
- Rewrite+
- Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance
- Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD (PS3!)
- Disgaea D2 (and 4, 5, 6)
- Drakengard 3
- Eternal Sonata
- Bioshock 2
- Atelier Sophie 2 (and the rest of the Mysterious series after that, as well as a few stray others)
- Final Fantasy V, VIII, IX, XIII, and XV
- Tales of Symphonia (I have it on Steam, but now that Retroachievements supports it, the GCN version with some HD patches would be superior)
- Corpse Factory
- 428 Shibuya Scramble
- .hack//GU Last Recode
- Pseudoregalia
- Resident Evil 4 (2005)
- Indigo Prophecy
- Phantom Brave
- Obduction
- Digimon Survive + Cyber Sleuth
- Dies Irae
- A futile attempt at reading Cross+Channel instead of learning JP
- a dumb Konosuba VN fuck you
- Alpha Centauri? Daggerfall?
- Final Fantasy Tactics
- Mana Khemia
- Ever 17
- tons of Pokemon ROM Hacks on my 3ds: Pokemon Unbound, Wilting Y, Inclement Emerald
- SMT4, Devil Survivor, Digital Devil Saga
- Jeanne D'arc and .hack//LINK for Vita

Stuff I wanna revisit:
- Caves of Qud (duh)
- The Citadel (I'm really bad at it)
- Code Vein
- Momodora
- Black Mesa
- VA-11 Hall-A

So uh, suggestions welcome I guess. Also if I buy a game, someone please fly to my house and slap me.

[biggs]

Short list of the titles that are currently queued up

• Flying Shark
• DOOM II (The new Nightdive update will motivate me to finish this)
• Giga Wing
• 1944: The Loop Master
• Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2
• Hebereke 2

I have also been dabbling in Street Fighter Alpha 2 until the Marvel vs. Capcom collection releases later this year.

My backlog has been outpacing the games I have been able to get through recently. Hoping to cut into that heading into autumn and winter.