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After a few months of playing, with alternating intensity, I finished Elden Ring. Overall, my initial impressions haven't changed – the game is certainly good, but very derivative of Dark Souls, and I clearly still felt like I was playing a nice, but uninventive game. There were certainly some very exciting moments, including tense exploration and some boss fights. The world and monster design is also excellent and atmospheric. Unfortunately, the combat itself is tedious and repetitive (enemies varied visually and in attack style, yet I killed each one in roughly the same way), the progression is uninteresting, and the loot useless. If someone has never played a game in the series, they might be impressed, but I'd rather recommend DS3 or Bloodborne to such players.

After finishing it, I tackled another one I'd missed from a few years ago – Hades… and I don't understand the enthusiasm at all. After my first few attempts, I expected some variety – maybe environmental puzzles, maybe platforming, maybe something else. No, just a hack and slash. That's not a bad thing in itself, if the game were short. But having to play through everything from the beginning after only five or six attempts seemed terribly boring to me, especially since the procedurally generated levels and enemies have so little variety!

I'm no newbie to this type of challenge. In the 8-bit Nintendo, Contra or Mario or Adventure Island also had to be completed in one go, and when you ran out of three lives*, you had to go back to the very beginning. But now I expect something a bit different, and the fact that in Hades you gain power between runs makes replaying the first levels pointlessly uninteresting, because it gets easier and easier. It becomes going through the motions, not playing. In Contra, you had to stay focused the entire time

The characters (illustrations, dialogue) seem well-drawn and recorded, but the seams of this procedural nature quickly become apparent – ​​subsequent encounters and conversations are clearly random and completely incapable of faking any continuity of plot or relationships.

In summary, Elden Ring is derivative and a bit too repetitive for its length, but it has its moments and can be captivating and very engaging at times. Hades is pretty boring and after something like 12th samey attempts I left the game and I feel zero motivation to return to it.

*

I've been playing Hearts of Iron 4 every so often.

I basically have all this land as Imperial Japan and i've also grabbed afghanistan, british malaya and much of dutch east indies since then. Turkey also got capitulated and we pushed all the way into egypt against the suez canal region. We can't get past the suez canal and my attempts to send paratroopers into australia's northern region failed sadly to horrific results.

Dear lord take the Day night cycle out!

Great job

Played wh40k: dawn of war definitive edition with a steam friend today. He played sisters of battle and i played imperial guard for all 3 matches. The first match was 1vs1 against each other, the 2nd was 2vs2 with us vs chaos and tau a.i. on hard difficulty (which took some time but we won) and the final was another 1vs1 against each other which i also won.

Perhaps it's a little unfair for him since i used to play Winter Assault almost religiously as imperial guard many years back and the game itself got some tweaks in dark crusade and soulstorm just adds flyers (which i disable in multiplayer because they're lame). For what it's worth i never got great with dark crusade but i fought against the a.i. a bit to figure out some enemy factions. That may not apply as well to human players though.

Got the Mount and Blade Warband Mod Warsword Conquest working on my linux laptop.

I've only just started but I already love it. I mean there's something wrong with me because I can just play Mount and Blade endlessly. I did the Last Days of the Third Age last year and had a fantastic time, but I think I'm probably going to enjoy this one even more.

As is traditional when they give me the option, I'm an Orc. Saving up for my first boar.

Picked up DOOM: The Dark Ages a while ago on sale and finally had the time to give it a go. Bit worried it would be more of Eternal, a game that just didn't gel for me one bit due to the disjointed story and radical departure in gameplay mechanics.

This one is.. really good. A bit too twitchy at times with all the movement and blocking, but somehow it just works. You get to fly around on a massive dragon with holographic wings and jet engines and it just works. You get to pilot a massive 'mech and punch daemons into a pulp, it just works.

I've just found the super shotgun and it's like coming home.