Bloons TD

didn't play/don't care/button - 11 votes

Had fun at the pogo event this weekend, walked ~80km in two days

Just finished organizing my home shinies too, though you can't see that on mobile, so you just gotta take my word for it

Been thinking about writing about the neurodivergent ways about how to get shinies including rng and how half of it is fun and the other methods suck, but who knows

Hardspace: Shipbreaker. Fun concept, cutting up junk spaceships and chucking them into the smelter with video game physics. Space has friction, to make it easier. Sometimes the physics mess up and half the spaceship flies off into the distance from the slightest impulse. The storyline makes me think of like ... a bunch of college kids who've never worked, in a socialism club putting on skit about unions. But it doesn't intrude on the gameplay much, there is only one "storyline" mission.

Tactical Breach Wizards

Bought it on a whim because the concept was funny.

It's pretty much a simplified XCOM: Chimera Squad.. which isn't a good thing because that's just a simplified XCOM

The main difference is that damage is mostly based on pushing and other movement effects. Makes it more like chess and less like statistics crunching.

Not very far yet. It's okay. Enough for me to want to finish it.

I've played like 15 hours of monster hunter wilds. It's basically a slightly better version of the game I played in 2019

Idk, surprised more of it's fans aren't annoyed. Maybe they expect the same game each time?

Terraforming Mars. Group played with a fan-made board with 91 tiles as opposed to the standard 61, using the Venus expansion. Ended up LOSING because I sold away a really important card in the early-game due to its cost which, in hindsight, I should've saved up for and used, as it really would have helped with my wood production or whatever tf the brown resource was called (played with the Soap Opera corporation, which means you get a lot of the brown resource at the start of the game, which I failed to properly utilize because of lack of said production). Although I didn't get last place, so I was doing something right! That something being that I was the biggest terraformer, gaining 17 VPs for my forest-city adjacency.

(Don't have any photos of the game, so here's a stock photo of the board we're playing on.)

Got a shitty laptop going and plqyed some civ 4.

Not much to say about it other than thay it ruined my sleep today.

Finished low rank in MHWilds last night.

The story is so bad. Your team each get 1 vague line hinting at a backstory but its never expanded on and they dont have much personality outside of that. They put all the focus on this little cute twink Nata

He grew up in a secluded village but he acts like he's never seen another human before. He has amazing lines like "people...sure are strong :D" because a bunch of arabs were celebrating that they lit a fire. He has this excessive wonderment at every fricking thing he sees and its tiresome. But thats not even the worst thing about him. He has PTSD from this monster Arkveld so whenever he sees it he spergs out

: REEE KILL IT

Which brings up another problem, our hunter is awfully hesitant to fight monsters but not in a "we're not strong enough yet" way they just dont want to fight these destructive dangerous monsters (until they do).

Nata reaches his final form when you find out that arkveld is an artificial monster that was created to be a slave. Nata starts saying that Arkveld is literally him and says you cant kill it because its just exercising its free will. Even when you find it feasting on a pile of corpses (it doesnt even need to eat) proving that its completely feral he literally says "Nooo you cant kill it over this because its the first thing it CHOSE to do!"

He is the most egregious example of an unlikeable character that the writers shove down your throat and make the focus of the story. Its some of the most incompetent writing ive ever seen: just shoving in tropes randomly without thinking about the context. I HATE NATA.

The game also has some technical issues, the performance problems everyone's heard about but also the party system is awful. The game shoves you in public lobbies with randoms, but the lobby is actually superfluous. You can see lobby members in base camps and join their quests but if you want to play with friends you need to invite them to a link party which will let them join the quests you post regardless of lobby. If you want a private lobby anyway you cant just invite people to it, they need to manually enter the lobby id thats a random string of 8 numbers and letters. So the REAL way to get a private lobby is to make a squad, ehich creates a permanent squad lobby that is always available, but squads are designed for grouping up with randoms so you dont think youre meant to use it with friends. So you have to make a squad and the only sort of privacy option is to make it so the leader has to manually accept applications but itll still show up in public searches.

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Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops on the PS Vita

BALATRO

I finished Final Fantasy VII Rebirth on the weekend. Overall, I'd say that my completion time was around the same as for Remake, but Rebirth has so much open world tedium that it felt way longer, and I think really worked to the detriment of the overall experience and completely wreck the pacing of the story.

And more on the story: as the middle chapter, doesn't really wrap up in any way that could be called satisfying. It fails to include enough of a self-contained story that can be brought to a satisfying conclusion over the course of a single game. In terms of gameplay, the final run of boss fights feels almost identical to Remake. And I think relative to Remake, it also suffers because none of the locales visited even begin to approach how interesting Midgar is as a setting.

Overall, it was a bit disappointing. The idea of waiting another 4 years for a conclusion does not exactly thrill me either.

Beyond that, the only other game I've been playing is Age of Mythology Retold with a friend. There's a (pretty janky) coop campaign mod that we've been playing through. That game continues to be really fun and I'm very excited about the new campaign/faction DLC that drops... today!

Another thing I'm excited about is the seamless coop mod for Dark Souls 3. Me and my friend had previously played through Elden Ring together, but the entire time I was thinking 'man, I wish this was Dark Souls 3'. The only problem is my friend doesn't have the game and the deluxe edition is still basically full price on Steam, despite DS3 releasing 9 years ago...

I played Trepang2 as it was in the Humble Choice last month. It's pretty fun but really suffers from not knowing if it's a FEAR successor or a boomer shooter with slomo. The weird namedropped Backrooms inclusion was weird and made me wonder if everything else in it was just a reference. Pretty fun though if cheap feeling.

The main thing it made me feel is an urge to replay the first FEAR which I did and then Monolith closed a day later proving once again the universe revolves around me. FEAR is still a perfect game even the "lol offices" complaint is only minor.

Bloons is the official game of middle schools everywhere

@Aevann did you ever pin this?

I've been using ShaderGlass over everything it's surprisingly cozy. It's a filter you can just put over any window and it makes everything CRT or other old game screen formats. I threw it over solo leveling and somehow made the show better. CRTs are just cozy.

Finally dove into emulating recent/modern arcade games on Teknoparrot this week, one of the trickiest emulators. 4 out of every 5 times a game works fine with some light research, but when it doesn't it's a pretty deep rabbit hole filled with surly, drunk Finns, removed links all over the place, and scrounging random corners of the internet for fixes and helper files, most of which trigger virus warnings. And a dozen or so games only work with a Patreon subscription. But still, pretty hyped to get things like Jurassic Park Arcade and Sega Race TV and Aliens: Armageddon working at home.

I BLOONS TD

why'd they make the monkeys so frickable in 6?

Blunez? I'm a Bloons girl.

Been playing AC Origins because I never finished it before. I like that this one has a better story than its successors and Bayek is an actual character. Still hate the RPG elements like a completely normal enemy beefgating you because he's three levels higher

Defence Grid.

So good, also a TD but positional on a grid map

Getting ready to take a little break from Stellaris until the big update and getting more into Dwarf Fortress