Games

I don't think I'll beat that amount of dedication in a game ever again. I was a young teenager when I started playing this game which had eaten all my social life... Guess it is part of me.

Last week I felt some nostalgia and reinstalled the game after ~18 years without touching it. It's crazy that my character is still there on some server (even if no subscription was paid for all those years), more or less in the state I left it the last time I logged-out years ago. The guild has been erased, but the friend list is still there as a reminder of those past friendships, none of them logged-in of course...

Fun fact, my parents refused to pay for the game at that time, so I started playing on the account of a friend, from which I later bought the game second-hand. The login still contains his name, and I think that's the oldest login/password I have a trace for.

(Game is Dark Age of Camelot)

Kojima Productions now fully owns the intellectual property.

Did you know you can save Doretta's head in the Escort Duty missions? I make it my goal to always return home with her. No dwarf (or machine) left behind!

Deep Rock Galactic is my second-most played game on Steam, with about 546 hours. Which may not seem like a lot for you hardcore gamers, but with almost 3,600 games in my Steam library, it's impressive that I've put that much time into a single game. Their Halloween event just wrapped up this morning, so apologies for the Halloween decorations in some of these screenshots.

For the uninitiated, Deep Rock Galactic is an FPS bug-shooting and resource-gathering game, with dwarves as the playable characters. Except you're on a space station, mining minerals from Hoxxes IV, a scorched, tidally-locked planet orbiting the blue star Creus. Every mission, you board a drop pod and are dropped deep into the caverns of the planet to accomplish some sort of mining expedition.

You can have up to four players per game, and there are four classes to play as: the Driller, Engineer, Gunner, and Scout. You can play on a team with any combination of classes you want; you're not stuck with just one of each. There are also tons of cosmetics you can deck out your dwarf crew with. Here are each of the classes with my own custom cosmetics:

The Driller specializes in drilling tunnels and igniting alien bugs with his flamethrower:

The Engineer crafts sentry turrets to protect the team and can shoot platforms against the wall for easier vertical climbing:

The Gunner is the tank of the group, laying down heavy suppressive fire, and he can also shoot ziplines across rooms for the team to traverse:

And the Scout is the lightweight, able to travel quickly across the caves with his personal zipline and illuminate the darkest rooms with a powerful flare gun:

As you can tell, I've sampled all the classes, but I play almost exclusively as the Gunner. It's a running joke among my friends that I'm gold-obsessed (because I'm always making them harvest all the gold they can find in each mission), so I leaned into it and decked out my gunner in all gold. He even juggles a couple gold nuggets at the end of each mission.

There are nine separate types of missions to play, scattered randomly across 10 diverse cavernous regions within the planet.

You can either select random missions to play, or you can pick an assignment from the Assignment Board, which will have a series of specific missions you need to accomplish in order to achieve the assignment and collect its rewards. There is always a Weekly Priority Assignment and a Weekly Core Hunt, both of which have several missions to complete in order to reap the rewards.

There are several robots that aid you in your missions. First and foremost is the Mining Utility Lift Engine (aka M.U.L.E., or "Molly" as the dwarves refer to her). She's a walking mine cart, collecting all the minerals that you mine so you don't have to be weighed down during your missions. There is no limit to the amount of resources she can carry, so call her over to you and regularly empty your bags!

Then there's the APD-B317 (aka "Bosco"), who is a flying drone that helps solo dwarves with their missions. If you're not on a team, Bosco joins you. You can point him at minerals and he will automatically dig them up for you. Pointing at blank walls will cause him to illuminate the space for you. And if threats appear, like alien bugs, he will automatically engage them. Although he has weak firepower, so don't expect him to take on all threats on his own. You can change his appearance and color scheme on the space station, as well as upgrade his abilities, so have fun customizing him for your missions!

Finally, there is the Drilldozer (aka "Doretta" or "Dotty"). She appears only in escort missions, where you have to protect her (and refuel her) while she slowly ventures toward an Ommoran Heartstone.

Doretta will take damage from bug attacks, so make sure you hop on top of her and repair her damage as you go. Once she reaches the Ommoran Heartstone, she will begin drilling into it (when you're ready) and you need to protect her from waves of bug attacks, as well as several defenses from the Heartstone itself.

Don't forget to find and collect her head after the Ommoran Heartstone explodes open! She's still "alive," and I'm sure she appreciates being brought home.

Every mission has a primary objective and an optional objective, which can be seen at the top right of your screen while on the planet. The optional one is usually collecting a particular resource, but not always.

The main mission ranges from harvesting minerals or alien eggs, refining liquid resources, eliminating giant deadly aliens, and salvaging lost equipment left behind by dead teams. Every cave is procedurally generated, so you never play the same area twice. It's always a unique mining expedition.

Deep Rock Galactic has recently started doing seasonal content, and the seasons have brought more missions to the game, including industrial sabotage against a competing dwarven mining company, and deep scans, to pick up rare minerals buried very deep beneath the planet's cave structure. As well as various events to encounter within the missions.

The best part about their seasonal content is that you can always acquire all the season rewards, even if you're just starting the game today. Not only can all unclaimed cosmetics be found in various chests scattered throughout the game, but you can actually select which season you want to play and earn the rewards from that season. You're not forced to jump into the latest season. Which is awesome, because there are story missions connecting all the seasons together. You can play through them relatively quick and get caught up with what's going on with the in-game lore. Or just enjoy the unique events that only happen during specific seasons.

So grab a beer at the bar, dance to some jukebox tunes on the dance floor, kick some barrels into the launch bay (to annoy the bureaucrats in Mission Control), then go explore some bio-diverse regions of Hoxxes IV!

The Steam achievement in Darkchaser is quite interesting—one of them requires you to travel the distance equivalent to circling the Earth once, and another requires the distance from the Earth to the Moon.  However, I still want to complain: is anyone actually able to complete this? I know it's a game that requires you to run around all the time, and I've already played for 100 hours, but it's still far from enough  :D

Today's game is Uncharted 4. Nostalgically i believe this is one of the first game's i posted a screenshot of too. Playing through Alan Wake II reminded me of this game and how pretty it is, and i wanted to play through it again. This time i'm playing through on Crushing difficulty though.

It can be brutal at some points. Enemies took me down in three strikes and bullets tear through Nate like he's made of cardboard. Luckily i quickly adapted and moved from tanking the hits like a moron to actually rolling out of the way. With this play through I'm hoping to knock out a whole bunch of achievements too, so that means all the Collectibles and photo spots.

This game always makes me wish for Sony to release a port of the Nathan Drake Collection on PC (and maybe a Little Big Planet 2 Port too), especially because it's hard to get RPCS3 to run well with some games and even then it can be unstable sometimes in my experience. I'm hoping one day we'll get a port though, after all, we did get the Red Dead Redemption 1 Port after 10 years. So if that can happen i wouldn't rule it out with how Sony seems to be tossing PC ports lately.

Today's screenshot i took in the First Chapter. I wanted to give an action shot a try for once and this was the result. I like how it turned out, and i think the camera angle helped a bit. I also took a second on from a front angle but i feel like Nate's face came out dorky:

I was hoping this would happen with this remake. For my money, hers was the best performance of 2004. I'm a bit surprised it was her, only because I didn't think someone deep in the voice acting world would opt for the pseudonym. So many family animated movie voice casts are populated with comedic actors known for raunchy R-rated material, after all.

Source: https://x.com/NintendoCoLtd/status/1853972163033968794

This is Furukawa. At today's Corporate Management Policy Briefing, we announced that Nintendo Switch software will also be playable on the successor to Nintendo Switch. Nintendo Switch Online will be available on the successor to Nintendo Switch as well. Further information about the successor to Nintendo Switch, including its compatibility with Nintendo Switch, will be announced at a later date.

Also, what a day to be casually posting this haha

BEFORE DOWNVOTING ME, PLEASE READ: This is my opinion, you can disagree with it all you want, but it would be really nice to at least respect what I have to say just the same as I respect that people really enjoy this game

I played this game before I started Stardew Valley, I have never played either of them, the look and feel of Stardew did not really appeal to me. So I decided to try this game. Instantly love the anime style characters and graphics of the game, love the color palette, love the world design. It's beautiful. So that was what really drew me in...

They made the game way too easy so it's not even remotely challenging at all. There is so much unnecessary silly hand holding in this game. I wasn't expecting something sweaty and hardcore but seriously, anytime you plant a crop and harvest it for the first time you get the recipe for it in the mail. Like what? We can't even just go to a place and just browse for recipes normally, it's just given to you automatically in the mail for no reason.

Lots of things in this game are like this, as well. No effort put into getting anything, everything's just handed to you given to you or spoon-fed to you. This makes it very boring because you don't get to just wander around and explore and find stuff at vendors or look online or elsewhere to try and figure out how to do something. Even certain major things like crafting or blacksmithing... You can just do it right out the gate with no training, and no need to wait any time at all for the blacksmith to craft it.

There are too many similarities to Stardew, making it feel copy pasted. Again I played this game first, but I knew that Stardew was out there before this game was. So after playing this game and pretty much doing everything that there was to do, I decided to try Stardew Valley since that game is mostly complete and finished, this game is early access and will change... I was shocked to find out that they pretty much copied huge aspects of Stardew and didn't even try to do anything differently.

• The mine system and the elevators, they literally carbon copied Stardew Valley verbatim. You go into the mine and break rocks and then a ladder appears, then you unlock the mine level every five levels. They didn't even try to do anything different just copied it.

• The museum. Wow like... They just copied it exactly wtf? There's literally nothing different.

• Some characters are too similar to Stardew. Abigail, the purple-haired girl in Stardew is the most popular to romance. Who is the most popular one in this game? Juniper, another purple-haired lady. Celia, blonde lady, very similar to Haley. I could go on for about 5 minutes about this but I won't. Just look, too many similarities

• Seasons. Why are they the exact same? They didn't even try to do anything differently.

There's virtually no passion at all put into Fields of Mistria

Concerned ape, developer of Stardew, has a whole beautiful backstory about how he came to develop one of the most popular indie games in the world. It wasn't his first game that he developed, and it was extremely difficult, challenging, a very long-winded effort for him to develop the entire game, and get it to be state that it is in today. A true passion project and the more you hear about it and see the changes made to the game over time, the more you can understand how freaking passionate he was about the game.... This is nowhere to be found in Fields of Mistria! There is no intricate story of how the game was a labor of love, or how hard they worked to bring the game to life. All you can find when looking at their website is that it's developed by a huge team of people, and a huge amount of marketing hype, game streaming videos where they showcase the game. There's nothing inspiring, or beautiful, or gripping about the development of the game. It's just a generic indie game that looks really cool. To me, this was really disappointing. It just feels like there's some mid-sized gaming company behind this, and that's the end of it.

There's virtually nothing to find or discover on your own

Due to the insane amount of hand holding and early access status, and the fact that they just basically copied all the main parts of Stardew Valley, there's virtually nothing to find or discover on your own.

In Stardew, there are huge amount of things that I was able to discover on my own just wandering around or purely by chance, which made the game so much more exciting and enjoyable. For example, there was randomly this thing called Green rain, it's raining green, no explanation for it but people in town are like scared of it and huddled up in the local tavern, and Moss grows all over trees and stuff like that. Pretty awesome. There's also a spa that you are not introduced to You can just basically stumble onto it on your own and it restores all your energy.

Fields of Mistria has literally nothing right now that you can find or stumble onto by chance. Even stuff like a destroyed bridge, you get a quest and hand holding, you don't even repair it yourself.

Community team is non-existent

I barely hear of any updates from the community team. All I have seen over the past several months are marketing hype videos, streaming, updates but not on a platform most people use. People don't use x or Twitter or whatever the hell it is. So it's hard to follow the game's updates. They have an entire team of people listen on the website, but can't be bothered to actually connect with the community and actively work with them like Concerned Ape who makes Stardew does. I asked if it were possible for them to post updates on a platform that people actually use. Reddit? Meta's threads? Facebook? I mean they have a discord but it's a community discord, and they have nothing to do with it, they hardly ever react or reach out to anyone there. There's just no community presents at all other than trying to grab people's attention and get them to try the game. That to me sounds like a cash grab. Like, they don't really care about the people who have purchased it and are holding on for future updates, they just want to get as many people to get it as possible

Summary

I give Fields of Mistria a 4/10. It's lovely looking, but why would I want to play a low effort copy and paste of another game that came first?

TLDR:

• Graphics: Attractive anime-style visuals and color palette

• Lacks any challenge, overly simplistic. Constant handholding removes any sense of choice.

• Copy-Pasted Stardew Mechanics: Mining, museum, seasons, and characters feel blatantly lifted from Stardew Valley with almost no originality.

• Passionless Development: Feels like a corporate indie product with no genuine vision or passion behind it.

• Weak Community Engagement: Dev team’s communication is poor and scattered across low-traffic platforms, hinting at more interest in marketing than in actual player connection.

• Limited Discovery: Exploration is nonexistent; everything is handed to the player, stifling any real sense of adventure.

• Overall: Fields of Mistria is a 4/10. visually decent but ultimately a hollow, uninspired Stardew Valley clone. Nothing to justify its cost

I think Subnautica was the first crafting game I ever played, and I didn't really understand the genre, so I found it frustrating and slow. I prefer my games to have an ongoing story, and this... didn't. Not to say there isn't a story here, it just takes a backseat to the gameplay, which is exploring and crafting.

The game opens with you jumping into an escape pod. Something's wrong with your spaceship, the Aurora, so you're abandoning ship. As you fly away, you watch a massive explosion erupt from your former ship. The blast damages your escape pod and you're hit in the face with a metal panel. When you come to, your escape pod is on fire!

You jump up from your seat and grab a nearby fire extinguisher. Putting out the flames, you realize your secondary life support system and radio are both broken. You need parts to build a repair tool. You climb out of your escape pod to find yourself floating on a water planet, with the wreckage of the Aurora nearby.

In desperate need of resources, you dive into the ocean and start exploring. At first, all you can do is pick up a few resources found on the shallow ocean bed. But with the right kind of components, you can craft a scanner at the fabricator on your escape pod.

The scanner allows you to scan almost everything in your environment, collecting data from this strange alien world. It may also help you to unlock new crafting recipes. You find scattered wreckage all over the ocean floor, and scanning broken components will help you to reassemble their recipes so you can craft them yourself.

Once you've found the necessary resources, you can build a repair tool, which you can then use to repair your secondary life support system and radio.

Almost immediately, your radio picks up a message. Listening to it, you hear survivors of another escape pod. They're nearby, and under attack from a giant sea snake of some sort.

You swim out to their location, only to find the remains of their escape pod. You pick up a PDA left behind in the wreckage and download its data, which will give you the crew's log.

Your own PDA has been communicating vital information to you throughout your journey so far. Around this time, you may hear her say that the Aurora's drive core is going critical and is about to explode. You can actually watch the explosion from the surface, just make sure you're not swimming anywhere near it at the time.

From here, you're just responding to radio signals, exploring and collecting resources to build more and more advanced technologies, and eventually, you can build an entire underwater base to live in.

I didn't get much further than this, because this game is so incredibly slow for me. I enjoy the crafting game Satisfactory because all the resources I need to get started are right nearby, almost within eyesight of my landing pod, and I can scan for the location of more resources as I start to branch out. Plus, your hub gives you instructions on what to build, so you have some direction to progress toward.

Subnautica, on the other hand, just dumps you in the water with no explanation and expects you to just swim around and collect stuff until you figure out what to do with it. The first time I played this game, several years ago, I spent maybe 2 hours swimming in circles, unsure what I was supposed to do. Eventually, I realized that I needed to repair my escape pod, and then I started getting radio broadcasts.

But even then, every escape pod I tracked down was wrecked with no survivors. It was just demoralizing for me. I was hoping for some sort of plot, or an eventual rescue or something. But instead, I found myself just floundering about in the water for hours, not really sure what I'm doing or if this gameplay is going anywhere.

Not to mention, this is a survival game, so on top of trying to figure out what I'm doing, I was also trying to figure out how to find food and water to stay alive. And despite being a game about exploring an alien ocean, I could barely be under water for 30 seconds before I was drowning. It took an exceptionally long time for me to find appropriate resources to build more advanced oxygen tanks so I could stay underwater for longer. I couldn't ping for resources, I kept getting lost or turned around under water, and I could never find exactly what I needed to progress in the game.

I know this game is exceptionally popular and I rarely ever hear a bad thing about it. But I personally just can't get into it. I gave it a second chance last night, and I progressed much faster than I did my first time playing, but it was such a slog. I have no idea if it gets better later, but it's frustratingly slow and I just can't enjoy it.

Interested in seeing how this one turns out, haven't seen much information on this MMO beyond the fact that it's from the devs of RuneScape. Will be diving in later today, but just curious what anyone's thoughts are if you've checked it out.

I've done it, i've beaten Alan Wake II's Final Draft today. It was amazing, i was worried knowing (most of) the story would ruin the Final Draft for me, but it was just as amazing. I also did it on Nightmare mode too since i want to be able i claimed i did it, which was a fun challenge. One thing i appreciate about Remedy's Games is that their Nightmare modes isn't just a "Let's ramp the difficulty up impossibly high" like i feel most other game's are. It achieves a good level of difficulty that can be offset by being skilled at the game.

I Picked today's screenshot as i felt it was kind of appropriate for beating the Final Draft with how sort of Serene it is. Ik that's kind of a dorky reason but i just felt like it was appropriate.

I also wanted to share a landscape shot i took of New York in the game before wishing everyone goodnight, as i am in love with New York in this game:

An excellent online and open-source version of minesweeper. Notably, every game can be won with logic alone (no guessing needed).

I'd suggest playing this with the following settings to minimize tedium and maximize fun:

• grid: evil
• mode: autopilot (also, try with "normal" to see the difference)
• punish guessing: on
• subtract flags: on

Source: https://x.com/edmundmcmillen/status/1853503076952596771#m