#games i played

[tawnyfool]

Games I Played | 2022

⁺ ˢᵒᵐᵉ ᶠᵃᵛ ᵠᵘᵒᵗᵉˢ

[a-wa-c]

Finished Half Life 2.

10/10 no notes, what the fuck happened to games man?

Like, hey here's an enemy that is annoying, now you get to use them as an army. HAVE FUN.

Hey, here's the Gravity Gun that you've had for basically the entire game, in the final act it can just straight up kill a bitch-ass-Combine soldier for the final chapter of the game. HAVE FUN.

We pit you against a Gunship or a Strider, but please have as many guided missiles as you like to kick the shit out of them. HAVE FUN.

Like seriously, if anyone has a better perspective on this than me, please tell me why I feel that games these days don't have section where you just have fun. The battle is the fun, not worrying about your ammo.

[shinysamurott9]

2024 Gametalk: Mega Man X5 Improvement Project

So I want to try making a thread or series of posts talking about all the games I play over this year. I'll start with this one, the Mega Man X5 Improvement Project

So I've played most of the main Megaman platformers via the Legacy Collections, haven't played BN completely, SF or Legends though. As anyone who has played the main platformers can tell you, quality can vary a lot, especially, especially with the X Series. Base X5 is definitely on the weaker end of the spectrum imo. It's not an awful game but it's a major step down from X4 and it has a lot of issues and poor execution. From what I've read a lot of that comes down to a significantly lower budget and little direction from Inafune beyond "Conclude the story".

I was aware of the improvement hack for a long while but I got curious about it a few days back and decided that I'd give it a shot, and frankly, I was extremely impressed. This game fixes, not every issue with X5, but a hell of a lot of them, along with a lot of miscellaneous changes. This includes, letting X use incomplete armours, Heart Tanks sharing between X and Zero, additional ways to get certain items, letting Zero get all Heart Tanks and all parts being obtainable with no worry about rank.

There's plenty of other notable changes like a proper retranslation to be more accurate to the original script and removal of RNG with the Shuttle, but the things mentioned above are the most important to me because let me tell you, they are absolute game changers when playing through. It allows you to be so much more flexible with the order you fight each boss, making the game so much more replayable, an essential element to Megaman games imo.

It really does feel like you can get a lot more out of the characters tool kits. The Gaea Armour is not just viable for X, but actually really good, because of some rebalancing, and the fact you're not locked out of using it until basically the end of the game. Many of the special weapons are given new functions. Like Dark Hold giving you Spike Immunity, F-Laser and Charged Tri Thunder being able to destroy the bomb in Duff Mcwhalen's stage, Zero's F Splasher being able to push Gaea Blocks and you can even re-enable the Fourth Armour’s Nova Strike if you want it.

There are some issues I have with the game though. Some of the original design decisions don't mesh well with the new changes, primarily the timer, which is made basically irrelevant by all the streamlining. It was never that big of a factor in a playthrough unless you wanted parts but now it's just kind of superfluous. A lot of the not great parts of the stages still aren't great. Duff Mcwhalen is still mostly an autoscroller, Volt Kraken still has the Bike Section, Zero Stage 1 is still a replica of Quick Man and the Shadow Devil still exists. The hack does what it can to remedy this like speeding up the autoscrollers, lowering the amount of energy items you need to get from the bike section to get the Falcon Armour Part and making it so you won't get caught on walls in Zero Stage 1. Shadow Devil still kinda suck though, especially as Zero.

I'm not gonna hold these issues against the hack or it's creators though as the ideal solution would be to completely rework or replace these elements with something better, which is definitely beyond the scope of a rom patch like this. What I will say though is while they did a lot to improve the Gaea Armour, in my playthroughs at least, the Falcon Armour felt really underutilised. It's entirely possible to get everything you would otherwise need Falcon for via other methods such as the more accessible parts, the updated Special Weapons, using Zero or some combination of these three factors. I literally never needed to use it on my second playthrough. This could be just down to my playstyle but in almost every situation, the Fourth or Gaea armours were strictly better in my opinion. I feel like if it had the ability to charge special weapons like X6 then it would at least be on par with the Fourth Armour. Maybe it would have more use in an X solo run but idk.

The complaints here are mostly minor. Overall, the hack is a fantastic piece of work, it improves on X5 in almost every aspect it can reasonably be expected to. I honestly think it brings X5 up to the same level as a lot of the better Megaman games. Maybe not as good as X1 , X2 or X4, but probably not far behind them. If you've ever played X5, like it or not, I'd heavily recommend this hack. I'd put it in A Tier easily.

Why did I rank it like it’s a tier list? Cause it is.

For the last year or so I've been progressively ranking all the games I've ever played. I thought it would be a neat way to look at everything. X5 Improvement ranks in A Tier between Pikmin 3 and Megaman ZX. I'll update it with each game i finish. Feel free to roast me for my taste in games.

[niceigloos]

gamez i played and beat this year

redoing this here bc twitter is too yucky now

in order of play :) cyberpunk 2077 (once at tha start of the year and again after the 2.0 update

shadows over loathing (multiple times)

west of loathing (also multiple times)

dragon quest XI

lunacid (pre 1.0)

disco elysium twice because it is the best game ever made

system shock 2 (no pics) (there wont be screenshots for all of these bc some of them i forgot to take any)

lisa the hopeful (no pics)

spider-man: miles morales (no pics)

lisa the painful definitive edition

lisa the joyful definitive edition

crypt underworld (my goty!! everyone should play this game!!!!) extra pictures bc i love it so much

bomb rush cyberfunk

baldurs gate 3

garten of banban 1 and 4

no one lives under the lighthouse

resident evil 2 remake (no pics) shadow of the colossus (2018)

spider-man 2

[darkherolovercroissant]

Games I played in 2022.

[amemenadiel]

Here I come back like some stars during Christmas or the New Year

Welcome back, this time I hope for longer in the new year 2024! What has changed during this time? A lot, but with this I want to start being active here for those who might get to know me. But before that, it would be good to show myself even better, so I have prepared small posts about what characterizes me, but not only that - I am going to write a few posts that are important to me and necessary to start that adventure with Tumblr. I hope that whoever comes here will spend a nice time ^^

[annamarabella-grumble]

My 7 Favourite Games of 2022

It’s so close to the new year now and I’ve been taking a little holiday from streaming, making new videos, and writing anything longer than my grocery shopping list, but there was one list I didn’t want to miss out on making: my favourite games of 2022. Since I started streaming every week in January of this year, I’ve played — and actually finished — a ton of games, and I’ve collected my seven favourites in this post.

They may be favourites for different reasons: having an emotional impact, a gripping storyline, or outstanding world building. Game mechanics tend to be secondary to my enjoyment of the story of a game, but there’ll be shoutouts to games whose developers clearly put thought into quality of life and what most respects players’ time.

Not all of these games were released in 2022, as I came to a few of them late, but I first played them all to completion in 2022.

Number 7: Gotham Knights

See, here’s the thing: I don’t care about 60 FPS, I really don’t. I understand that the PC version had some performance issues; I play it on the xbox series x, and it looks and plays absolutely fine for me. Second thing: I also don’t really care which version of canon or continuity any Batman game gets its characters or story from. Third thing: I enjoy the Arkham games as a viewer, not as a player myself. If you also don’t make either of these things your entire personality, keep reading.

What kept me playing the game was the mix of open world and linear storytelling. The main story, the additional rogue case files, and the Batkids’ own storylines gave the game a solid scaffolding to keep you going whenever you were tired of running after Freaks and Regulators and the Mob in near-endlessly procedurally generating chases and preventing small-time crime. But if you just wanted to dip in for a bit, especially to test out new abilities, the open world was yours to patrol for a night, wreck some shit, and go home.

Yes, that stuff gets repetitive, and if your brain isn’t wired in a way that enjoys that, I absolutely understand everyone who says they got bored of the main gameplay loop after an hour; that’s totally fair. For me, though, who likes checking things off a list and not having to think too much while cracking skulls? Perfect, I’ll do a hundred nights of patrol out in the streets of Gotham to collect shiny things.

For what it is, Gotham Knights is a perfectly solid and enjoyable game. As soon as you step away from a narratively linear game experience and into an open world, with online multiplayer mechanics to boot, the main challenge is keeping the player interested. Keeping up any narrative arc of suspense is difficult to do, and as a consequence, the final showdowns with the rogues can feel anticlimactic. The main final fight only happens after an exceedingly long section of sneaking and grappling through underground tunnels; in that same vein a lengthy chase through the sewers ends with a rather standard boss fight, too. Gotham Knights isn’t really about the set pieces. Still, there’s a large variety of locations and I like the neon aesthetic of the main streets.

I’ve played as each of the heroes over time, though I mainlined the story as Batgirl first, and I’m enjoying the variations in their abilities and fighting styles, while the mechanics are based in the same system to allow for an easy switch-over. There’s a ton of gear modifications to really bulk your character up, and it’s just fun to get together with a pal and run around mashing buttons. There’s less of a focus on the combo system from the Arkham games, which personally suits me fine.

Gotham Knights got the Batkids right, I feel. Yes, for simplicity’s sake there’s a strong, almost exclusive focus on some of each of their core characteristics to explore in the short cut scenes tied to memories around the city or the Belfry. But each of those is also tied to Bruce’s memory, and how he approached training and, for all of them except Barbara, raising them. (And even she would say that she got half her stubbornness from her father, the other half from him.) We get to know them in part because Batman knew them so well. And there’s a lot of heart in those moments. They were, for all their struggles to hold things together, a family, and that comes across really well.

In a game focused more on narrative or simply on only one of the main characters, those aspects as well as the rogue case files would have been more fleshed out and explored more deeply than Gotham Knights has room to do. But I appreciate the effort put into making Gotham City itself more lived in and vibrant than in previous games, though sometimes it still somehow manages to feel deserted? It’s odd. The real upshot for me was, though, that it doesn’t feel grindy. The presence of other case files suited for different level caps, and an emphasis on other contacts and side quests, makes it so you’re not just endlessly levelling up in order to be able to progress in the main story.

The game’s single greatest failing is that it doesn’t let me beat up cops wholesale, even though literally all of them will immediate open fire if they see a cape.

Number 6: Eternal Threads

Eternal Threads is a narrative puzzle game that completely took me by surprise during the summer. One long summer night without sleep turned into a treasure hunt of memories — and many of them sad, upsetting, or at least foreboding.

The story of Eternal Threads hinges on six housemates that all died in the same house fire. And you, the player, arriving from the future not to prevent the fire itself, but to save the six people trapped inside.

There’s a way to save all of them, and then there’s a way to help each of them resolve either past trauma or point them towards a solution for the challenge they see before them. You can stop once all are projected to survive, but you can keep going to find the best ending for all six characters. It does eventually feel like trial and error, trying to find the crux in it all that shakes the remaining puzzle pieces into place, but thanks to the narrative and all characters having relationships with each other that contributed to the mystery, and if you’re following those lines, it’s not just randomly turning over random pieces of the puzzle.

The visualisation mechanic felt familiar from playing detective games but with an added twist thanks to the visual timeline of events you can scroll through and tamper with.

Each of the characters led fully realised lives — some with tropes bordering on cliché, and sometimes the writing gets a little edgelord — but you come to care for each of them. I’ve written a detailed review of Eternal Threads, if you’d like to know more; including information on additional trigger warnings.

Number 5: The Excavation of Hob's Barrow

Hob’s Barrow is a stunning indie folk horror game inspired by English folk tales. I mean, apparently I’m cursed because every time I wanted to play the second half on stream, either I got sick or my PC stopped working somehow, so I had to finish it on my own. But at this point, that’s honestly part of its charm.

There’s things in that barrow Saxnot doesn’t want me to see.

Hob’s Barrow is a great blend of an emotionally affecting storytelling and classic point and click adventure games. Thomasina’s story is told in a classic framing narrative, along with flashbacks to her childhood, that keeps its final twist close to its chest. It’s a game that tells you from the outset, “you are doomed by the narrative” and then doesn’t stop for questions. There’s a solid mystery at the heart of the story, which is satisfying to unravel. And then, we ourselves unravel as we enter Hob’s Barrow, and everything we thought we knew was true is turned on its head.

There’s plenty of mystery and folk horror here, including references to the fair folk and the Lambton Worm, a real folk horror story. Thankfully, however, the game doesn’t rely on jump scares — they are present, but they’re not overused. Equally, its twist don’t rest on shock value. They’re foreshadowed well, and whether you piece things together with a bit of lead or just before it happens, they are shocking. Just not because they come out of nowhere, not because the game is more invested in tricking you, the player, than telling a compelling story. They’re shocking because they’re impactful, because there’s emotional weight to them.

The voice acting is incredible, as is the sound design and music — it’s delightfully Twin Peaks in places, which makes me very happy. (You can support the artist, The Machine, on Bandcamp!)

The protagonist’s voice actor, Sam Béart, in particular, does a fantastic job bringing Thomasina to life: from a troubled upbringing, to becoming a confident young researcher, to the tragedy and loss she eventually experiences.

Play this game! Play this game!

Number 4: A Little to the Left

There’s a full review of this game up on my channel already, so I’ll keep this brief, but I really cannot recommend A Little to the Left enough if you’re looking for a cozy puzzle game to while away a few hours with, and especially if you find putting things just in the right order satisfying.

The adorable art style and the way these puzzles fit together visually truly make the serotonin go brrrrr. Plus, when you’re done with the main levels, there’s a daily tidy to keep you engaged and exercise the little grey cells. The music is adorable, and it’s just so chill.

I have a more in-depth review here: 8 Reasons to Play A Little to the Left.

Number 3: Stray

This landing high up on this list won’t be a surprise to anybody: A+++ cat mechanics, no notes. The cutest cat game of all time, calling it now — with an absolutely devastating revelation.

Aside from being an adorable game about a cute cat, it’s also a powerful story about humanity, its foibles and strengths, and what’s left of us when, well. Nothing’s left of us. The world they forged outlived them in this story, and it outlived them so well that it’s as if they were still there, locked into Plato’s Cave, aka the domed city.

The Village is a place of light, because the humans that lived there used the light as an act of rebellion. They knew things were over, and they refused to live what little time they had left in the dark. The robots that lived with them, outlived them, continue to remember them. They don’t revere them as gods, they simply remember and take care of the things that mattered to them.

In this dystopia, the corporations that got them into this mess are long gone along with them. Perhaps, in the sprawling Outside, there is hope for new life. Give Earth to the cats. They’ll know what to do with it.

I have a more in-depth review here: 9 Reasons to Play Stray.

Number 2: Hades

Now, this game didn’t come out in 2022, and I was severely late to the party, but I picked it up for real and actually successfully escaped a few times over the summer, and I would like to thank everyone who psychically or otherwise bullied me into finally playing it.

If you’ve played it or, well, not lived under a rock since its release, then you’ll know why Hades is outstanding: the dialogue system, the voice acting, the soundtrack, the weapons and combat, the relationship mechanics, the roguelike…. ugh.

To borrow from the essay I wrote just after completing my let’s play of the game:

With Hades, I’ve learnt not to mourn the boon combo I lose when I inevitably die — I know I can make my own luck on the next run, and the next, and the next…

Zagreus’ complicated relationship with… well, everyone he’s ever met is by turns ready to pluck at your heartstrings, make you laugh, or ignite a blinding fury that will carry you through the next round on burning heels. In the Greek underworld, everyone’s queer and no-one is sorry (except they are so very, very sorry; sometimes, when you catch them in the right light). Everyone’s also punishingly hot, and it’s frankly unfair to make bisexuals play this game and expect them to get anything done without some sort of health warning.

You needn’t have spent your formative years soaking up Greek myth — though which of us hasn’t had something elgeebeetee happen to them whilst immersed in the adventures of Olympus, I ask you — to enjoy the story and the many characters’ idiosyncrasies and relationships.

I am perfectly content finding things out by the piecemeal method. Piecemeal is certainly all Father gives you, so settle in, folks, hope you’ve all packed your bags for the guilt trip. But don’t worry, you can make it all better by commissioning new rugs and furniture you’ll never once sit on because Zagreus. cannot. sit. still. Someone make that boy take a nap.

AND NOW WE’RE GETTING PART 2. BISEXUALS JUST KEEP WINNING.

Number 1: Cult of the Lamb

My GOTY is Cult of the Lamb. I love it, I’ve finished it and I still play it.

And here’s a variation of something that I originally wrote in that same essay about Hades, but which applies to Cult of the Lamb as well because both of them are roguelike games that I ended up loving after being scared of the genre for years — me being an absolute hoarder of stuff in video games.

The game acknowledges gains, motivating the player to keep going, ever on the quest for more, more, or simply to try out the new toys. This also lends support when you feel stuck, because you’re not being punished for not progressing in terms of region bosses defeated. Once you have, then, spicing things up through additional conditions and incentives means you still earn rewards for making it through again and again and again, giving the game the longevity it needs to keep players coming back for more to ensure that they actually see all the stuff that’s tucked away.

Cult of the Lamb is far from being as expansive in its story content compared to Hades. If you keep coming back it’s because you enjoy the familiarity of the main gameplay loop, or because you want to fully upgrade your cult base and deck it out with ALL the decorations. Or, because you’re cranking up the difficulty and using more of the drawback conditions on the fleeces; akin to Heat runs in Hades, to spice things up.

Speaking of decorations — and I shouted this out in my video review (Cult of the Lamb is my GOTY) — is that removing or editing buildings is so easy. In Stardew Valley, it’s a hassle, in Animal Crossing, it costs loads of money and it’s a hassle. In Cult of the Lamb, you can just pick something up and plop it down somewhere else, or remove it entirely, and it’s the work of seconds. Good news for all of us millennials who can’t commit to putting a new sticker on our laptops.

What were your favourite games you played in 2022?

[spitblaze]

[guy who doesnt watch shows voice] yeah ive been meaning to watch that show

[eridan-ampora]

baby animals move like theyre playing a new video game & havent figured out the controls yet

[bookpdf]

there should be more hours between 6 and 10pm. like even just two more hours. for my assorted hobbies & activities

[tawnyfool]

Games I Played | 2023 & some fav quotes Games I Played | 2022

[qrowpilled]

hate when you find a character whose so infuriatingly Your Type that its embarrassing like yeahg no one is gonna be surprised when i announce this is my new Guy Of The Month

[shinysamurott9]

2024 Games: Mega Man X6 Tweaks

After playing X5’s improvement project, I felt it was only fair that I give X6's a go as well. X6 Tweaks is a sort of like a custom tweaks patcher allowing you to alter several elements of the game to your liking, including how the characters play, certain specific elements of level design, elements of the game’s presentation and a lot of stuff being tracked under the hood.

Before going into that though I feel I should talk about my opinion on base X6.

I hate it.

I really do not like base X6. I have played a majority of the side scrolling Megaman games, not all of them but most of what could be considered main series games and I genuinely feel X6 is the worst Megaman game, of the one's I've played at least, I've heard many bad things about BN4. But with X6 itself I feel like there were a lot of good ideas and some genuinely fun things to mess around with, but between the massively inconsistent difficulty, poor executions of it's ideas like the Nightmare Effects, bad design decisions with things like the secret boss areas and all armour pieces being required to use an armour again and of course it's infamously bad level design. Any good or sensible idea X6 had, is ultimately either undermined, falls over itself or is lamented for being stuck in this game.

So what exactly does Tweaks do to fix these issues?

In short, quite a lot while also adding a number of miscellaneous additions for fun and QoL, but at the same time, not doing much to fix arguably X6's biggest issue.

With my playthroughs, for the overall important changes, I opted to disable the Nightmare Blindness, leaving the other nightmare effects on. Aside from that, I activated incomplete armours, made it so the Exit Stage button was always available, unlocked aerial moves like double jumps and dash, fixed the translation, added the custom mugshot graphics, and tweaked the damage tables to make a few things more tolerable, like the donuts.

These changes did do a lot to make X6 more tolerable which did allow it's better qualities to shine through. The game is a lot more open with your routing, probably at least in part because every stage needs to be revisited anyway. The armours are fantastic, I'd argue they're some of the best armours X ever got and with the updated script, I can at least appreciate what the story was attempting. The script does even have some stuff that is genuinely interesting or funny.

Nightmare Zero actually has lines that read like he is Wily, I genuinely did not know that til now.

MF actually pulled the "I got better" card,cannot believe this.

Zero canonically hates puzzle games lol

They even added unique dialogue for Zero in the intro stage and against Nightmare Zero should you use the cheat to unlock him from the start which is a fantastic touch.

Some other fun additions include letting you change the Ultimate Armour’s palette to any of the three from the PS1 Trilogy as well as a fixed version of the X6 colours to match the portrait and a colour palette for the Legacy Collection Ultimate Armour which I think was updated to make it look better.

Unfortunately, at it's core the game us still X6 and it's main issue, the level design is still very much a problem. Scaravich is still a random layout , leaving the armour, boss portal and heart tank up to RNG. Mijinion still has his really annoying secret area, and his main area still throws literally everything at you, and of course, Heatnix is still just donuts. Would you believe me if I said someone actually told me they thought this was not only fun, but better than an actual level? Course the Gate stages are still just as bad too, but hey you can actually beat them without parts now. Bringing Shadow Armour to Gate is actually a reasonable idea now, as one of the few changes the hack does make to level design is adding a platform to the infamous jump. An air dash for No Armour and Shadow Armour is also available.

Sadly, like X5 Improvement, the hack ultimately does very little to fix the overall level design and the more problematic sections. But to be clear, I can't really blame the hack creators for that as the only real solution would be to just completely scrap the existing levels and completely redesign them from scratch, something well beyond the scope of a rom patch. So overall while it is an improvement over X6, I'd really only recommend it to someone who's familiar with X6, the bullshit it throws at you and the ways you can cheese it.

I'd say it helps the stromg qualities of X6 stand out enough to get B tier, but a pretty low B if I'm honest

[oflights]

the main problem with this time of year is the irresistible urge to get fully into bed at like 5:34 pm and outside is like yesss, yesss do it, it's what you deserve yesss. like is it depression or is it just november

[happymeishappylife]

You can read my reviews of these here.

[pistashxo]

they should invent a corporate negligence that doesn't whisper things to you

prints