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 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Nearly got in a strop with Diablo 2.

Duriel absolutely pasted me. Went recover, and for the first five attempts? It spawned me in with Duriel right behind me, and my corpse behind him. Basically had zero chance, as before I can react, he hits me with Cold, slowing me down. Two hits later I go squish.

Got there in the end though! I did appreciate that my damage on him remained, so wasn’t always a blank slate.

Yeah, Duriel is one of the big walls in the game. Tiny arena, he's fast as hell and then the slow from his hits makes evading him basically impossible. You can have your merc try and tank him for a bit but they won't last long.

And then his drops are usually crap on top of that. Like, one time I killed him and he dropped a single scroll of town portal.

Ready to start Act V.

Dunno if my skills are now Mad, or if the fancy update tweaked the difficulty. But I’ve more or less breezed through Acts1-IV.

Due to working on my precious Ivy Valentine statuette, I downloaded Soul Calibur 6 onto my newer laptop (I wouldn't have had to if it wasn't for DRM, damn you Steam!) and been playing it a bit. Love the game, it really is back to basics (almost literally as it retells the story Soul Calibur 1 it's a real reboot. But not Soul Blade, which I remember playing on PS1 years and years back, clocked it with Siegfried) and reminds me of my favourite of the series, Soul Calibur 2 with the character customisation of 3 (but not as insanely detailed as 3, which I hoped it would be, but hope is the first step on the road to disappointment, after all). Started new Libra of Souls campaign. It's such a shame the game didn't do that well financially because a sequel would've been awesome. The low budget is pretty obvious, with a lot of art stills telling the story rather than cut scenes, etc. Oh, well, enjoying the hell out of it, anyway.

Turns out I now suck at RA2.

Even against easy enemies in single player skirmish? I’m terrible.

What with everyone gaining access to Immortal Empires on Total Warhammer 3 the other day, it's pushed me to go back and finish a few campaigns in the 2nd game I had going. Also used the sale to nab the last couple of paid DLCs I hadn't got yet.


As an aside, does anyone know of a mod that lets you reset confederated lords skills? Because the computer makes some very strange choices sometimes with skill points.

So played more terra invicta. I have most of the Earth under my thumb now with the exception of some latin american countries (a lot of them built a nuke each and i'd rather not get my armies nuked) and now i'm having a weird grab of the African Union with the EU's military (which includes Turkey in the union). I can't help but find it weird it's like making africa unified through military force with a previous colonizing bunch of nations. I actually didn't do that on purpose but it's pretty funny and messed up to think about.

Also i cleared Uranus of alien fleets, fought a bunch of alien fleets and replaced my fleets easier than they replaced their's. I should be getting ready for another assault on the aliens but i'm not sure if i should go for keiper belt objects the aliens have or if i should go for Saturn. There's a massive bunch of alien fleets at jupiter, a small amount at neptune and an average amount in the keiper belt. The only reason i don't just assault the keiper belt is the aliens may send fleets at my uranus stations and i also may not be able to destroy the mines around them due to heavy alien surface presence preventing building land bases. You can't take them anyway but i don't want a pop-up saying i can't invade those areas with space marines stopping me and forcing me to orbital bombard the alien's main planetoid stronghold. Part of the reason i don't want to orbital bombard is the heavy defenses might eat my bombarding fleets alive.

Been playing a lot of X-COM: UFO Defense through OpenXcom lately, it's before my time but I'm having a lot of fun with it. I'm still firmly in the early game, with heavy plasma, laser rifles, and personal armour researched. I managed to kill my first Chryssalid, which was a nerve-wracking experience. I still can't help engaging in a spot of save-scumming though. Good game, I'm surprised by how much depth it has.

Continuing Terra Invicta. I sent a couple big fleets to the alien's main base in a Kuiper Belt object. Already wiped out 2 of their mining bases. Now i'm just waiting to re-fuel my fleets so i can fight off the enemy alien fleets.

I'm also continuing to combine Africa under the African Union and for some reason the alien's started another Alien nation in Argentina so i'll have to invade that and take it eventually or something.

Aside from all this everything is pretty much the same.

Just went back to tuck into Act V of Diablo 2.

And it’s eaten my Amazon character :(

Is alight, she’s back. Presume update wonk.

Mainly playing Stellaris on PS5. Still love the game. Still barely competent at it.

Bought Dispatch last night. Great game. It’s a story game about a superhero who’s forced into taking a desk job as a dispatcher for reformed supervillains.

I keep eyeing up Darktide but it would take ages to get over my motion sickness.

Ok i haven't played Terra Invicta in a while but last i played i united probably the rest of Africa that wasn't in another nation into the African Union. I also let go of Iran because it was costing me too much and i united a good part of south america into the South American Union.

I also destroyed a bunch of stuff around Saturn and destroyed some orbitals near Venus. However aliens sent some fleets from jupiter at me so i have to worry about that now.

Picked up Terminator 2D over the weekend and while its very good, its also incredibly short. 12 levels that all have a 5 minute timer on them and pretty straightforward sequences make it a pretty breezy playthrough on the standard difficulty. I'll probably give it another go on a harder setting as it looks like it might up the enemy reaction times to where they are more of a threat.

 Souleater wrote:
Mainly playing Stellaris on PS5. Still love the game. Still barely competent at it.

Bought Dispatch last night. Great game. It’s a story game about a superhero who’s forced into taking a desk job as a dispatcher for reformed supervillains.

I keep eyeing up Darktide but it would take ages to get over my motion sickness.

Dispatch looks so good. Hope to play it some day.

Finally got back to playing Rogue Trader. I'm up to the 2nd to last boss. I'm really looking forward to see how the ending goes with all the extra DLC stuff and that I got even higher Rep with some of the factions.

Metroid Prime, Beyond.

Only really played Super Metroid before. But I’m enjoying this one. Whilst FPS is hardly new to the franchise, it’s my first time. Glad to say the puzzle element remains, as does being able to explore ever more of the map as we find new toys.

Arc raiders
Helldivers
Destiny (now Star Wars)

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Metroid Prime, Beyond.

Only really played Super Metroid before. But I’m enjoying this one. Whilst FPS is hardly new to the franchise, it’s my first time. Glad to say the puzzle element remains, as does being able to explore ever more of the map as we find new toys.

I would definitely recommend the remaster of the first Metroid Prime as well and Dread is also definitely worth your time.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 LunarSol wrote:
Picked up Terminator 2D over the weekend and while its very good, its also incredibly short. 12 levels that all have a 5 minute timer on them and pretty straightforward sequences make it a pretty breezy playthrough on the standard difficulty. I'll probably give it another go on a harder setting as it looks like it might up the enemy reaction times to where they are more of a threat.

Bumped up the difficulty to hard and.... unfortunately this really makes the game's flaws wildly apparent.

Okay, so Normal mode is a cakewalk. Like, it is legitimately trivial to beat many of the stages without getting hit. Levels are really empty with a few enemies that are easily dispatched as soon as they appear on the screen. It does an exceptional job of recreating the film, but doesn't have a lot of tension even when being chased by the T-1000. There is an easy mode and I'm legitimately curious how they made it simpler.

So flip to hard and suddenly it feels like a proper game. Not only are levels well populated with enemies, but you often have to juggle multiple threats from different angles with a bit less health to power through with. This 100% feels like a properly designed game. The only problem? The checkpoint system is just kind of terrible. It exists, but you just have a couple lives to get through the whole game and it seems to force you to restart the whole thing if you run out. You can choose to not use them and reload the level save but its just... not a good retry mechanic. I assume this is a retro choice, but like... this kind of stuff was the hallmark of bad games back in the day.

Trailmakers, though not sure how long I'll stick around, as these open world creation games aren't really my cuppa.

And hopefully, more RV There Yet? soon as the devs released a new map for free, yis!

Playing Tomb Kings in Total Warhammer 2. These guys have a brutal learning curve. They're so fething squishy it's not even funny. A fart downwind is enough to roll over a squad of spearmen.

Things became a bit easier once I got my hands on a few squads of Tomb Guard, and Settra certainly helped in the regard, but damn it's a hard slog uphill. I'm currently ~50 turns in, and I'm half tempted to restart, have Settra load up on chariots and just auto-resolve everything.

I downloaded the new Unofficial Patch for Vampire: The Masquerade; Bloodlines, but it made all my old saves unusable, which is a shame, because I was close to finishing the game with my Camarilla bootlicker Ventrue :( Started a new game.

Just finished getting all the challenges and spirits for Super Smash Bros Ultimate.

And I been playing Avatar Quest For Balance, stuck on this part of Kyoshi village because I get damaged whenever I try to attack this rhino rider, which strikes me as poor design.

Having a nice Christmas break playing Surroundead

Grabbed System Shock remake from the Steam winter sale. Its certainly a game that requires a mouse & kbd, started playing it on a ps4 controller and it was way to fiddly!

Also bought Mechanicus, since it was only a couple euros, but no idea when I'll play it..

 Snrub wrote:
Playing Tomb Kings in Total Warhammer 2. These guys have a brutal learning curve. They're so fething squishy it's not even funny. A fart downwind is enough to roll over a squad of spearmen.

Things became a bit easier once I got my hands on a few squads of Tomb Guard, and Settra certainly helped in the regard, but damn it's a hard slog uphill. I'm currently ~50 turns in, and I'm half tempted to restart, have Settra load up on chariots and just auto-resolve everything.

When i was playing TWW2 with a friend in co-op (he was playing settra) he used his big scary cat (war sphinx i think) to pounce around all over the enemy and make them flee. It was hilarious but the unit caps do cause issues. His biggest problem was fighting against orcs and goblins and fighting the black orcs in particular. I think ushabti is the counter but i've never really played either faction. If i recall he said undead armies were generally weaker than normal armies with how they worked.

The funny thing about tomb kings is in Old World they're unbelievably strong because flying units, monsters with terror and swiftstride cavalry and chariots are really awesome. Sadly as a skaven player whose faction is in Legends rules and is horribly over-costed (thanks to no skaven-slaves) and has probably no access to swiftstride we've placed horribly bottom tier by a lot. I can still pull off some miracles with them but it's not easy.

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I ended up beating Terra Invicta as Humanity First. Once i had a significant fleet power above the aliens i managed to really push their fleet strength down and eventually win the game. It took about till some time in 2073 (about 51 years since campaign start) to get the final campaign objective finished. I was basically dragging myself to finish that game and i probably don't wish to play it again for another year now. The funny bit is one of my councilors died of old age rather than getting killed by any faction or anything and then i had my new councilor take up his spot and go on a suicide mission to finish the campaign.

---------

After all this i ended up playing a co-op game of Conquest of Elysium with a friend but i'm such a newbie to the game i need to be handheld a bit. It's an interesting little game even if it looks like it belongs on a computer from over 20 years ago alongside games like the old version of Runescape.

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Also played Dawn of War Definitive edition some more. Man tau are so broken to fight against when you're playing as imperial guard (at least vs a.i. opponents) esp. those stupid krootox. It honestly feels like they got even more broken since the old version of the game. Meanwhile i legit fought against dark eldar and won as imperial guard without much issue in my first try. Suddenly i'm reminded of the massive power gap whether in Dawn of War 1 or even in the tabletop that existed in fairly recent times. Gun-line armies shoot dark eldar off the board without much issue last time i played tabletop 40k even with a semi-competent imperial guard player or tau player vs a good dark eldar player. Also when tau do well everybody just feels pain.

I bought and downloaded the newish DLC for RimWorld "Odyssey", so began a new game.

Well Total Warhammer 2 has somehow gak the bed and deleted all my saved campaigns.

Made more progress in RimWorld, but what made me the most happy is the game now has quails! My father and I have a lot of quails that live around our area and we feed them morning and night. So, I quickly started to try have my characters try to tame them.

Playing Mechwarrior 5. My last Mechwarrior game would've been Mechwarrior 2 on the Playstation but it made a huge impression on me (that and the PC version that I played before the PS version on our crappy PC).

I sometimes get hit with the nostalgia for that game but always heard negative things about the later Mechwarrior games. I decided to see if 5 would work on my cheap linux laptop and it does, which is great.

Now that I've gotten over the first few missions, figured things out a bit and put low aim assist on (I'm playing with an X Box controller and I found the aiming really sluggish) I'm enjoying the crap out of it. Got a small Lance of 'Mechs and I'm perfectly happy with the broadly open world nature of the game hopping from planet to planet running my little mercenary company.

Really gives me the feel of the older game with updated graphics. Love that everything is still so chonky and stompy.

I'm gonna play it like I play Mount and Blade, just chug around until I get bored. But I saw a lot of negativity around the game online and I am glad I decided to have a go anyway.

MW5 is great, but has its share of jank and wonk hehe, it'll gets better (or worse) with mods, which is how we went through it. I miss my beloved Agincourt sometimes.