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I played the new Chaos Gate. I'm a big fan of the original one (and how could one not. 2nd edition (tailend therof, but still), absolute all-time banger of a soundtrack, 40k X-Com, boltguns going "boom. boom." instead of "dakkadakka").

There's all sorts of things I don't like about the new one: why is everything purple? why is everybody a cartoon? Why are there American christmas lights on everything? Why do I have to put up with 'character' 'dialogue'? Why is the techpriest Johnny 5 rather than a dude with cybernetics? All that aside though it's pretty clever to take the 2012 X-Com and put a 40k hat on it just like they did with the old X-Com. Sure, the focus shifting from tactics to just 4 dudes with a ton of abilities is lame, BUT at least Grey Knights are plausible subjects for that sort of game.

I also like how they took the strategic layer from the new X-Coms and put that into the new Chaos Gate, be it as stripped down as it may be. The tactical game is ...interesting due to a mechanic that introduces a count-down and when ever that's up a wind of chaos goes across the map and there's a chance of bad things happening. Otherwise the system seems to be rather stripped down from X-Com (yes, somehow they managed). By one by taking away to-hit percentages, and apparently damage ranges. It's all very arithmetic and abstracted it feels like.

I'm just three missions in yet, but it might be fun. I enjoyed the 2012 X-Com, couldn't put up with the sequel though for longer than a few missions to be honest (overloaded with stuff).

so i played more HOIV with the new DLC, if people are interested in a review i may type one up.

Generally though it's a good DLC, with some flaws, some major ones and some major goods.

Personally it's a good DLC, bordering on great.

Also went achievement hunting, and did the "Lion roars" and both swiss ones that have you survive germany or eliminate it.

W00t slime rancher 2 trial beta thingy is out on game pass! Been looking forward to this release.

Decided to fire up an old classic.

"This is Mothership calling Kar-Salim."

Good choice! My favourite comms in the homeWorld Series is from Cataclysm. At the start your commander is all “be aware we are a mining vessel” and then in The final mission out goes the call “this is the warship Kun-Lan!” and awesomeness results

 Flinty wrote:
Good choice! My favourite comms in the homeWorld Series is from Cataclysm. At the start your commander is all “be aware we are a mining vessel” and then in The final mission out goes the call “this is the warship Kun-Lan!” and awesomeness results

In the final mission in Cataclysm, The Beast warps around the map frequently during the battle. The first time I played that mission, The Beast warped out of the area that I could move in, and then stayed there. As a result, the mission was unwinnable.



I did finish it later, but it sort of solidified my impression of that game as a bit buggy.

Kicked up, Wrath of the Righteous again with the Enhanced Edition (with some trepidation, since I read through the 'great' AMA answers of 'No' and 'Maybe later').

Gambled on subclasses and lost (elemental wizard does a weird thing where the evoker damage bonus is cut in half because of the way they calculate the 'half elemental damage becomes untyped'- they forgot to apply the specialization bonus to both halves, when gets half level, the other gets nothing; war blessing (and others) for war priests are still not in the game), so there's a lot of outstanding issues still after a year. I know I've reported the war priest thing as a bug multiple times in multiple ways, but as is, basic aspects of the class are still just missing. Its not a very good class, but still.

But instead of fixing year-old outstanding bugs, they added transmogs and photo mode for... some reason. Its not a large character model or high quality graphics game, so both of those choices confuse me.

They did add character pets to the character portraits rather than hide them with scroll down the UI which is an actual improvement. Except its a less elegant and largely worse version of the concept than pillars of eternity managed on release 7 years ago.

I have to really be in the mood to grind through the pathfinder system mastery required and trudge through the indifferent writing. For whatever reason they've promised more DLC (which is rumored to include the Shapeshifter, the worst class paizo ever wrote), and fix more outstanding issues (like giving a reason to use heavy armor), but I'm not sure I'll ever get to the end of this game. Its just more laborious on about every level rather than fun.

So I finally finished a game of Stellaris… and gods was it boring. I mean I love the game but the endgame got so dull. I ran the crisis at 3x strength and just absolutely smashed it. Next time I’ll put it to 15x just to have it be an actual galactic nightmare. First time fighting the crisis and well.

So then I played cultist simulator. It’s a great game. I beat it for the first time! The final ritual was very hard and I was so stressed out by the hunters and the evidence. I’ll take a break from it before I do it again.

Also hunt: showdown. Though I’m very worried about the inclusion of the bug.

 Valkyrie wrote:
Gave Hardspace Shipbreaker a go the other day, got it for free through Game Pass.

The premise is interesting and pretty unique; you work for an interplanetary corporation called Lynx which it seems is a thinly-veiled parody of Amazon, and your job is to break up old spaceships and sort the parts for decommissioning. There's a good amount of puzzle-solving involved in some areas; if you cut through a pressurised section for example then the decompression can injure you as well as damage components, which deduct from your overall profit.

The idea is Lynx have immediately given you a huge bill for your training and equipment, and you work to pay it off, but you are still forced to pay on top of that for your digs, fuel, food, oxygen, etc.

Pros: It's a good concept I haven't seen before and can be a rather forgiving puzzle game at first. If you chuck the wrong material into the wrong depository for example, that gets taken off your final profit but one or two mistakes aren't going to make a major dent in your takings. Very good graphics given it seems to be a rather small, indie company. The zero-g manoeuvring is also well done although that is a con at times as explained below.

Cons Some of the physics are a bit messed up and at times can be overly frustrating; your main tool is a gravity-grapple of some kind to move objects around, sometimes it just wants to propel you across the map and insta-kill you. The constantly having to keep an eye on your resources also gets tiresome, having to retreat back to your kiosk to buy more oxygen tanks every few minutes is boring after a while. The zero-g can after a while start to give you motion sickness; I'm very prone to that anyway so for a good few hours after playing I was close to vomiting at times. Finally in some areas the game is rather vague on what you had to do. I unlocked a new tool halfway through clearing a ship, and used the tool to finish the job. After this it wouldn't let me continue onto a new project, instead kept sending me back to the original one and adding £500k to my debt each time. After looking online I had to go back to the original training ship to use the tool I was already competent with, having blown the money I made from the original ship and then some.

After playing a bit more Hardspace, I've decided to shelve it.

The novelty of the idea and plot does wear off rather quickly when you're having to scrap the same ship over and over again. You could spend an hour scrapping a ship and your total profit would be around £10,000,000 after deductions for shifts, O2, repair kits, etc. Sounds like a lot but when you consider your starting debt is in the region of £1,300,000,000.

The inconsistencies of the physics also get tiresome. If you have a large carbon panel for example, sometimes the grapple will move it no-problem, sometimes it'll fly off into the nether and gets deducted from your profit. Other times it'll seem to be solid lead and impossible to move. Trying to clear smaller objects like computers and storage out of the ship is just a headache, as an object stuck inside the ship will simply move the entire ship rather than extracting the object.

Added to that is the increasing complexity. You started with a ship, then you had to learn how to safely disconnect the fuel, then you have to learn how to decommission reactors, then how to disconnect power generators, etc. Each of these will pretty much insta-kill you which adds another £500,000 to your debt at a time. While it sounds simple enough there doesn't seem to be any consistency; you can disconnect the fuel to make the lines safe but they can still blow up and kill you. You can find a switch to decommission the engines but the switch has no power, so it's useless (and there's no way to reroute any power, that just isn't a thing).

To sum it up, the novelty has worn off, not worth continuing.

Heh - I'm playing through it on easy mode for the lulz. Certainly removes the O2 problem, and probably reduces the damage issue as well.

I did the same thing on subnautica just to enjoy a reasonably pleasant zen experience without the added stress of resource management.

Just started on Assassin's Creed: Odyssey after it hit Game Pass. Enjoying it immensely. Seems to have more of an RPG feel to it, with character levels, equipment levels and modding and so on, than previous AC games I've played. Plus the ancient Greek scenery is gorgeous.

I'm unsure if i'll win my current xcom 2 long war of the chosen commander ironman run (i'm in the very end of the game). It's tough. I'll figure it out eventually maybe.

As far as games go i think i'm gonna try out Terra Invicta for the first time. Guess we'll find out how it goes. I heard it was ridiculously complicated esp. with all the different research you can do.

Has anyone played Foxhole? It looks right up my strata but I'd be interested to see if others have played and their thoughts.

Smashing my heads with planets nu.

Decades since I played vga planets before and getting creamed

Well terra invicta is a bit odd. Most of it is about grabbing some council members and using them to change the ideology of nations and take control of them or overthrow governments of other ideologies or a variety of things to gain power for your faction.

For instance in my game I took control of the USA through normal means and then pushed popular support in Russia and destabilized the nation to force a coup which led to me taking control of the whole nation and kicking out all the previous owners. Which really boosted space flight ability. Also I control most of the worlds nukes in this game now but I plan to not use them.

However this is only the early part of the game. The end goal is to fight off an alien invasion that enters the solar system.

Basically you maintain control of your countries, build up your space programs, build mining facilities in space and eventually build warships to fight off the aliens.

Black book. Lately I’ve got into it and it’s a cute little card game rpg thing where you play what I think is a russian which. You use the black book to do battle with deamons and go on adventures. It reminds me a little bit of slay the spire but in a completly different feel and setting. It’s very cozy and quite good for comming home from work all tired in the head. I do love old east European folklore and this game id full of it. I’d recommend it to anyone looking for a relaxing rpg experience with east European mythological flavor.

Resident Evil Revelations, just for the sake of it, but it is a poorly ported game, so an utter arse to play on PC.

 BrookM wrote:
Resident Evil Revelations, just for the sake of it, but it is a poorly ported game, so an utter arse to play on PC.

I recall quite liking RE revelations 2 on the Wii U (or was it switch?) but not so much the first one.

 Nerak wrote:

 BrookM wrote:
Resident Evil Revelations, just for the sake of it, but it is a poorly ported game, so an utter arse to play on PC.

I recall quite liking RE revelations 2 on the Wii U (or was it switch?) but not so much the first one.

Yeah, the sequel is so much better, it still has poorly implemented controls and an archaic menu system typical of these games, but it looks better and somewhat plays better at least.

Grounded. Fantastic survival game. Absolutely huge and disturbingly dark for its cutesy exterior.

Been playing more of Terra Invicta. I feel like Not_Online might actually enjoy this game somehow. It's such a slow burn until you get some decent ships and resource income. It's crazy because in my game the whole world was divided up into the 7 factions but only maybe 3 or so of us have been scary to face (including me, humanity front and i think the academy).

I own canada, usa, the eurasian union (sort of like a worse soviet union in terms of land), turkey, UK, Brazil, iran, a small bit of territory in saudi arabia and other small lands in africa.

Humanity first owns the EU which in this has a lot of the stronger euro nations all combined into it and they have india and maybe other areas.

The academy owns all of china with its massive economy as well as the main control point for japan and its super scary military which is about into the age after the robotics age but only because they dumped all their funding into army tech level, maybe making new armies and little else. Luckily the nation is divided up between 4 factions so the ruler of the nation has only access to one army due to the number of control points out of a max of 4 it can own. Also though it has naval ability nobody else would follow it so it can only send maybe one army after me provided it isn't being blockaded.

This game is an odd one. I feel like i'm learning new things every time i play it. For instance the mega nations with high military tech and good navies are probably best for doing the military work.

Whereas medium military tech nations are probably best doing something else entirely like economy or space travel.

Then there's the low tech, low income nations which i just avoid entirely. I might see if they can become valuable though if you can combine them into a massive super nation but likely not in the case of africa at least. There's maybe a few nations in africa that are ok and honestly latin america, africa and the middle east are usually unstable enough that it'd be tough owning them because they can be easily overthrown if they even have some value.

Funny story on the case of stability because the usa in my game has gotten such low gov't that it is now middling and is considered an anocracy.

Also nukes have been used in the campaign but i only used one in retaliation vs the UK before they were mine and they nuked themselves and then me to be fair. I also nuked africa like 3 times when the aliens were running through it but that's only because you can only really take them out via armies and their army strength was so powerful only nukes would stop em. Also it was africa which had a low economy anyway and they only got nuked in their own territory so i consider it a win. Pretty sure my atrocity meter went up though but i did what needed to be done as the aliens would've taken more and killed more.

Space battles are also pretty fun but i've mostly only had to face the aliens as i'm about the only one with a valid fleet. Humanity First has a ton of small ships but those things aren't too great.

Booted back up Devil May Cry 5. For whatever reason I never finished it and thought I'd change that before Bayonetta 3.

Back into Deep Rock Galactic, might as well try and unlock those new sidearms before the next batch of new kit is introduced.

More Cyberpunk 2nd play-through. I made the mistake of completing most of the gigs and side quests too quick and now have to wait around or sleep for Kerry's next quest but been searching Night City with a fine toothcomb and grinding to gain more skill levels all the while Hanako Arasaka herself is waiting at a bar for days, twidling her thumbs for me to finally deign to meet her lol. Just completed Kerry's...2nd quest? And had the selfie with the girl band and found that you can use Goku's strange stance when he's about to fight Vegeta during the DBZ's Saiyan Saga lol so that's fun.

Not playing anything at the moment, as I am in a holding pattern until tomorrow. This time tomorrow, however, I will be directly injecting Persona 5 Royal into my veins via Steam.

Treated myself to The Witcher III for a piffling £25.

Just doing the training sessions. Seems quite fun.

More Cyberpunk 2077, mostly continuing exploring the map, scouring the northern badlands right now. I went to visit River Ward and change my clothes and accidentally found this...





Creepy lol

Got back into Hunt: Showdown because its spooky season, and that game has a very spooky atmospheric experience. I've got a regular partner in my hunts, but we've been trying to get another of our discord regulars to try it out.

 nels1031 wrote:
Got back into Hunt: Showdown because its spooky season, and that game has a very spooky atmospheric experience. I've got a regular partner in my hunts, but we've been trying to get another of our discord regulars to try it out.

My friends and I have been playing an absurd amount of Hunt: Showdown at the minute. Love the game. Logged 24.4 hours in the past two weeks according to Steam. I've been experimenting more with different loadouts, using some of the whackier guns. I still prefer duos to trios, it's a very different style of play.

I’m doing solo drops half of the time. With a Long Bow as my main weapon and a Lemat as my side arm. Long Bow can be a one hit kill and its silent, plus ammo can be retreived. I’ve loved the Lemat ever since I saw The Man in Black use it on HBO’s Westworld.

Mainly play as an absolute vulture. Just killing mobs and collecting loot while others fight amongst themselves or the bosses. My last match I came up to the spider being killed and the duo who killed it were laughing about how they were the last folks standing and congratulating each other. I promptly murdered them and took their loot and the boss bounty. Booked it to the extraction point and went up like 15 levels. So much fun!