Happy weekend everybody. I finished a playthrough of XCOM 2 and now have started a new playthrough of Baldur’s Gate 3, as “The Dark Urge”. Hope everyone’s summer has been going well
I’m playing Cookie Clicker and have been playing Cookie Clicker for over a decade and have no plans to ever stop playing Cookie Clicker.
My death plans include a laptop shoved in a closet still playing Progress Quest until someone finally cleans it out.
Continuing my playthrough of Fallout: London. I’ll save my full thoughts so far for a future possible review. By and large, this is a full-scale Fallout spinoff. There are certain game design issues, and problems with some of the writing. Quality is varied, some of the game is fantastic, and other parts miss the mark. However, if you’re starved for Fallout content, this is the best release in many years.
If you want to give it a go, maybe wait for one or two major patches, there has been a hotfix but it’s still rough around the edges.
The biggest takeaway though is that it makes me crave Fallout 4: New Vegas’ release, and has me stoked for Fallout: Miami and Fallout: Cascadia, all 3 of which are under heavy and active development. It also has me wanting to replay New Vegas, but with a personally built mega-modpack.
Tips for Survival: sleep often, go to west rather than east when you first emerge, and consider focusing on Gunslinger or Rifleman for a build. Early game pistols are strong. Do not take Kamikaze without high investment in a full VATS build, because stacked with Survival you will die in a single hit frequently.
i looked at my save file and realized i had been playing that game for over a day. it’s so fun, genuinely the best mod i’ve played in a long time
I’m around 30 hours in too! I’m stubbornly sticking with survival mode, haha.
One thing I will say, I genuinely adore the “biome” aspect with the different districts. They each have their own flavors of raiders and flora/fauna, something the official Fallout games haven’t quite nailed yet.
Any Londoner probably appreciates the mod’s references far more than I can, but I have the main games for that, haha.
who’s your favorite faction so far? i’m a big fan of the Pistols. i don’t know if they’re considered a faction but i love the Thamesfolk too
I love the Pistols! Thought naming a dog “Anarchy” was a bit too on-the-nose, but otherwise a solid group with a lot of funk to them, and not portrayed as worthless or too idealistic to ever get anything done, as Anarchists are often miscategorized in media.
The Thamesfolk are a cool, unique faction that I actually really appreciate creatively.
Overall, I still really enjoy the Vagabonds, they are just a fun group character-wise.
I also really like the Beefeaters, genuinely scary.
the first time i fought the beefeaters it really felt like a life-or-death situation. i really like them and wish i could join as an evil character
i tried playing this a few times, including a few times today, but it crashes on me so constantly i just can’t be bothered with trying anymore
I have a high tolerance from being a huge fan of mods to begin with, I suppose. If you haven’t updated it, try that, if you have, best to wait a few patches.
oh… i didn’t know there was an update, that seems to have fixed it! at least i’m able to spend more than 3 minutes in the game without it crashing to desktop so far
Yep! They added Buffout 4, and fixed many bugs. Still only a hotfix though, there are a good bit of bugs left.
thanks for the info!
Been emulating a lot of PSP games lately, and also inexplicably on a racing game kick. I think cause they usually have lots of things to unlock, and unlocking shit makes brain go brrrrrr.
To that end, Burnout Dominator has been my mot played the past week, but also slowly playing the X Men Origins game, and have OutRun 2006 to start in a little bit here.
Outrun 2006 is so fucking good. Fucking love that game, just absolute arcade perfection
The burnout games are the most fun I’ve ever had with the racing genre. It’s so much fun smashing into everyone
Have you played Patapon 2 and LocoRoco 2 yet? Those games are the best! Not just on the console, but of all time
Naw, what are they and what system? I’ve got a retroid 3+ so it can run stuff up to wii smoothly enough for my tastes (once i have money I’d like to get the new model to squeeze more frames on DKC Returns)
They’re both on PSP. Patapon is a rhythm game where you play war drums to command a troop of little guys and LocoRoco is a platformer where you play as the planet to push around cute, musical blobs.
Btw I specified 2 because the sequels of these games make the originals look like rough drafts. Though the sequels to the sequels (Patapon 3 and LocoRoco Midnight Carnival) are completely different to the prior entries, and low-key worse.
LocoRoco sounds more my style, ill give it a download today! Ty for the recs!
Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord
Picked the game up again from a few months ago. After a few more days my paramilitary company grew enough to turn it into a kingdom, allowing me to pass edicts/policies, a few of which can greatly increase maximum party size. I have been running around with 410 of my closest boys and girls demolishing any size of army from castles and up to 700 man armies in open field fights. No multi-party army necessary. My enemies keep replenishing only to be destroyed while their armies are mostly recruits and level 2 pushovers. I have 3.3 millon denars. Just think how much I’ll be able to buy after the reval!
This is where my Mount and Blade campaigns usually end after getting a kingdom going. I wonder if the new “Kingdoms without fiefs are destroyed” rule helps the whack a mole.
Just beat Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia. I started after FE: Blazing Blade decided to have a level that seems to be luck-based in order to beat. It quickly became the only game I was playing, and I finally beat it today. It was a really great game, and it felt really fresh and different compared to many of the other FE games. Would highly recommend if you like tactics RPGs or Fire Emblem in general, it was quite the experience. In terms of story, it was better than I expected. It seems like a pretty standard plot, but it becomes a little more as the game goes on. If I had to give one criticism to the game, it would be some of the main antagonists. One of them is done very well, and the other is more of what I was expecting. Also some of the minor antagonists are really annoying, and you’ll know them when you see them.
Shadows of Valentia spoilers
There’s a twist that gets hinted towards throughout the game, and in higher frequencies towards the end, and it was pretty obvious. There is, however, a twist within the twist that I did not see coming at all, added a surprising amount of depth to the story that really had me thinking about Valentia’s geopolitics, considering Alm and Celica go through most of the game pretty ignorant of Valentia’s political intricacies.
The gameplay of SoV makes it hard to play other FE games afterwards imo. I really appreciate how refined it is: minimal inventory, few classes, small roster, no eugenics, no battle gimmicks.
Even though other games in the franchise are more complex, echoes feels the most tactical to me. Because more often than not, the optimal way to play other entries is to spam the strongest class with the best characters - chess if your pawns were queens and your knights were queens and your rooks were queens, etc.
Also this might be just me but I HATE the inventory management aspect of FE. I’m not playing these games to rifle through menus and go grocery shopping!
Giving Turtle WoW another go, got my bear druid Hexbear to 20 last night on HC mode.
Been playing there for more than a year and it’s great! Less reactionary than the average server since mods care and react quickly.
For anyone interested, ACAB (All Cats Are Beautiful) is a good guild to join on the PvE server. Good people there
Yeah I’ve played on a few private servers over the last several years and the baseline is usually “Well what’s wrong with fascism exactly? I thought Hitler was a pretty ok guy.”
Ay sick and welcome (re-welcome) to Turtle WoW! I’ve started leveling on the pvp server myself, enjoying it a lot so far
Last night I drank a bit to much beer and went on a bit of a gaming binge, played about an hour of Stardew, fifteen minutes of Brigador, half an hour of Workers and Resources and then did one Hades run. Overall pretty fun night but I hit the hay a little late and woke up mildly hungover.
Incredibly impressed that you can play Workers and Resources for only half an hour at a time.
My Republic is pretty built out at this point, so now I’m mostly tweaking things, like trying to produce more goods for export to pay off a loan I took from the Soviet Bloc.
I find the real time sink is when you get things started, once you got a decent layout for the main industry trees you can kind of let things run for a bit.
Edit: also fyi I’m playing on a pretty easy mode.
BRIGADOR MENTIONED
Fucking love that game, its a hidden gem of a title!
i’ve played through New Vegas Bounties (1, 2 & 3) in the past few days and it was kind of strange:
spoilers, CW SV regular violence
spoiler
voice acting existing, and being fairly good is bizarre. but it’s so much polish on what is inevitably a shallow and not very creative experience. the only format is ‘go here, kill guy’ occasionally spiced up with opportunities for speech-check nonviolence. then its punctuated with almost absurdist levels of edginess, yeah okay so there’s room for 100 big bad serial killers/rapists in this area with an average town population of 20. with two occupying armies actively running around.
II was kinda fun with a more open presentation of targets, having posters spread out made you travel to different areas get the quests, which half solved the back-and-fourth from the bounty office format of #I. but you still had to return to the office to collect money. there was a moment i thought II might get me scared a little, there was a cliche killer clown child murderer and i have mild coulrophobia so that most lazy spooky clowns freak me out. then i heard the line delivery of dime-store Cicero from Skyrim, cRazY rAnDoM writing, and just offputting ‘crazy sad clown made that way by sad (edgy) circumstances’ backstory you get with the nonlethal takedown. i swear these quests bend over backwards to give the child-murderers the sympathetic backstories then ruthlessly gun down the most normal criminals. i doubt its to be like pro child murder just “subvert” your expectations
#III is the one that crosses into simply bad, hamfisted “consequences of your actions” hooey as the main theme, a hideous new worldspace that’s a pain to navigate and i guess has multiple characters/side quests? i wouldn’t even know because the gameplay loop went back to ‘go to bounty office’ ‘go kill guy’ ‘go to bounty office’, you can’t see distant locations to go explore cause they’re all covered in trees so when the hell was i going to run into side characters and do stuff for them? the only place in the town the quest requires you to go to at any point, twice in fact, is the saloon. at the end there’s this broken cutscene with the shocking revelation of who the main villain was (dude you met earlier) and a very stilted railroad where he kills all your friends you never met from town & buries you alive. then classic Kill Bill third act you get out mow down betrayers etc. but the difficulty spike got unreasonable with the final fight, this regular ass man not even wearing armor has more health than the legendary deathclaw and magically hits just as hard with a pissant .357. a lot of the dialogue with this Marko character talks about how pointless and shallow your accomplishments are, and you even have the option to end the quest & leave without exacting revenge, there’s very little ceremony to the getting revenge and this is the germ of a clever idea. but making the gameplay clash so hard with that, not even letting you take his head off at range-a perfect anticlimax-it has to be a Duel where he can speech at you how anticlimatic this is followed by a fight better cheated through. guess what it wouldn’t be very fun to see Clint Eastwood cooly standoff and talk to the Bad Guy then the fight involves both of them getting shot 30 times instead of the faster draw prevailing
overall I & II are decent diversions for extra money & xp in a normal playthrough if you can ignore the edginess and sexual violence, III is a pointless and fairly buggy slog. I’m going to play the ‘conclusion’ quest ‘Better Angels’ next, it’s about a slave rebellion against caesar so it might be good, the first ranger you meet actually has this fantastic ‘i just work here’ energy but i swear if its all about abused women i’m gonna be pissed
now if you compare these experiences to the sex mods for FNV…
VOLCEL POLICE ARE ON THE SCENE WE"RE LOCKING THIS COMMENT DOWN 
The people’s VOLCEL VANGUARD are on the scene! PLEASE RESERVE YOUR PRECIOUS BODILY FLUIDS FOR STRATEGIC ACTS OF MASS REVOLUTIONARY CUMMING!!!
A bit on NVB III, it’s more enjoyable if you’ve played The Inheritance and did the optional content, as well as Russell. Those mods add content to III if you’ve completed them. III is still a bit of a downer, but it does tie up most of the loose ends.
it did a very poor job of establishing there was side content and the worldspace was just hostile to making me want to explore, the map is useless despite having big impassable obstacles, the trees obscure LOS on anything, and there’s 1,000 random hostile assholes wandering around. i don’t want to wander around a place where i have to fight a lil swarm of dudes every half kilometer, that’s just not fun especially when their inflated stats lets them 1-shot dome me with a cowboy repeater (so add the frustration that i have to crouch-run everywhere)
I mean the side mods The Inheritance and Russell, not side content in NVBIII, sorry. Those unlock content in NVBIII.
Same as last week, I’m about to make these threads boring as hell. Continuing SWTOR, trying to achieve a faux Legendary status by finishing the stories on two servers
My partner and I got into Diablo IV on Xbox because it is on game pass and can be played split screen. Probably more of that and trying out the Hexcraft server later
Total War: PHARAOH DYNASTIES. It’s good, folks. I don’t want to hype it up too much, but I’m pretty stoked for it. It has a lot of cool systems, some of which are pretty different from other total wars, like the resource system. From a technical standpoint, it runs buttery smooth, with large battles hitting over 100 FPS.
Plus I consider the Bronze Age just a super underused setting. I legit think this could become a top 3 historical total war for me.
Big Total War fan? I’d be interested to know how it compares to Warhammer 3 and 3K. I played a ton of Warhammer 2, Shogun 2, and Attila but kind of fell off when they killed 3K early (rip my baby) and started milking the WH3 DLC super hard.
I would say im a big Total War fan. My favorite historical Total War game is Attila, though the only thing I disliked about Attila was the performance.
Now, the truth is, I don’t want to recommend Pharaoh Dynasties just (YET) because I’ve only played it for a couple of hours. However, everything I’ve seen, heard, and read so far looks amazing. Keep in mind the game is very infantry-focused, but the infantry feels quite varied. Battles seem more fluid to me than in Total Warhammer, and movement and positioning feel more important. While Warhammers combat offers a wider range of options, Pharaoh feels deeper—like how rain can create mud that slows down troops. There are loads of weather and terrain interactions, and characters can die in combat or from old age.
Pharaoh also has a lot more systems and mechanics than Rome 2 or Shogun. You actually have to trade extensively with other factions to get the most out of the resource system. It’s also the most adaptable Total War game to date, with tons of pre-game options such as Ironman mode, the rate at which years pass, and lethality settings. In my opinion, Pharaoh is also harder than Total Warhammer 3 (and I’ve played Warhammer 3 on Legendary from time to time).
Take some of these observations with a grain of salt but I think Creative Assembly really cooked with Pharaoh Dynasties.
I will make a thread about Pharaoh Dynasties after I played it for one or two full campaigns.
If you have any questions feel free to ask
That all sounds great. 3K was my favorite because of the setting (it was really surreal to see Three Kingdoms memes on the English speaking internet), but Attila is a close second because of things like the family trees. The slow pace and more stuff happening outside of battles made it more personal. I like Warhammer a lot too, but like, I’m not gonna empathize with my orc warboss. I couldn’t care less if he dies on an emotional level. So having stuff like trade and diplomacy be important, which it was in 3K also, is a huge benefit. I’ve been hearing the positive buzz about it too but was skeptical because of how CA has been these last few years and because of how Pharaoh was received on launch, so I’ll probably look into Pharaoh as my gateway before they launch 3K2 (eventually… )
I’ve been doing a playthrough of Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous for a bit, and that will probably take awhile to finish. I’m doing a playthrough as a chaotic good Aasimar warpriest of Gorum. I’m thinking of going with the angel mythic path, but I might do golden dragon. I haven’t finished act 1, so I have some time to feel it out still.
Warning you now that Golden Dragon is very limp, you can really only do it in act 5 and it doesn’t get a lot of meat. Angel is fleshed out but I don’t like Angel and I think the devs agree tbh, Owlcat does not present lawful alignment very flatteringly in the long run. Azata get all the proper good guy moments imo
Snowrunner! I’m doing it IRL rn and when I get home this evening and get settled for the night, I’m playing actual Snowrunner
A coworker started bringing dominos to play at break. I hadn’t played dominos in over a decade. Then on Friday I picked up a chess board and improvised some pieces to play martian chess.
I’ve been on Pokemon showdown, playing VGC. Regulation H is such a breath of fresh air, they banned every single legendary and sub-legendary. The power level is a lot lower and less focused on absurdly powerful legendaries one-shotting everything.
It’s a lot like Regulation A except this time with Rillaboom, Incineroar, and the ridiculous Ursulana forms. If anyone has been curious about competitive Pokemon, now is a great time to give it a shot.
I tried an Excadrill-Tyrantiar team but it just lost to Incineroar. Two physical attackers and only one clear amulet is unfortunate. I’ve been having a bit more success with a Baxcalibur snow team, with Bax being my main setup and offensive mon and basically everything else to assist it. Hisuian Ninetails sets up snow and aurora veil, H-Arcanine and Meowscarada get rid of problematic matchups like Gholdengo, and Indeedee runs follow me to help Bax setup. Also I have trick room on Indeedee but never use it for myself, only to undo opponents trick room. It’s so satisfying to predict your opponent to setup trick room and take it down in the same turn.
