I’ve been playing a lot of video games the past several months. A welcome distraction? Sure. But they can also offer good laughs, tough dilemmas, and moments of transcendent beauty.
Well, I understand some of you also like video games. This being a full-service blog, here’s a thread to talk about them! I’ll start; here are some of the recent highlights from my living room:
- Wattam (PS4, PC) is the new game from the creator of the legendary Katamari Damacy (which was also recently remastered). You play as a variety of sentient household objects, with the goal of reuniting them with all their friends. Practically guaranteed to induce smiles and giggles, it’s perfect for casual gamers and people who just want some absurd whimsy. At five hours, it’s short, but priced accordingly. No particular skill required.
- Untitled Goose Game (PC, Switch, PS4, Xbox) was last year’s unlikely hit. The premise is simple: “It’s a lovely day in the village, and you are a horrible goose.” You traverse various stages in an English village, where you tick off a to-do list of ways to fuck with the residents. Everybody who’s ever known a horrible goose can relate. Also short, and also priced accordingly, this game does require minor skills with stealth and sneaking.
- Death Stranding (PS4), from legendary auteur Hideo Kojima, is not for everyone, but it worked for me. Part post-apocalyptic Amazon deliveryman simulator, part high opera dripping with clumsy symbolism, part collaborative commentary on the Internet and social media, part stealth/horror. It’s very hard to explain. Check out the linked review; watch a video. It was one of last year’s blockbuster releases, so it doesn’t need boosting, but I enjoyed it so it’s going on this list.
- From the people who brought you the original Fallout games, as well as New Vegas, comes a new property, The Outer Worlds (PS4, PC, Xbox). It’s a first-person RPG set in an alternate timeline where Teddy never busted the trusts. Abusive megacorporations control space colonization efforts, turning newly-terraformed moons into indentured labor camps. Kitschy and fun, but you’re forced to make difficult decisions, too. (The world is also awash in butch spacefaring lesbians, following present trends.)
What have you been playing lately? Anything coming up you’re excited for? People seem psyched for Cyberpunk 2077, though William Gibson is not one of them.
Kirk Spencer
I enjoyed Outer World’s. But every time I start to replay I balk and bail somewhere in the first 10 hours. Same thing happened with the Witcher 3 I picked up.
I’m one of those looking forward to Cyberpunk 2077, but I suspect that whatever is causing me to hesitate on W3 and Outer World’s replays will surface again.
Presently using Elite Dangerous as my digital diversion.
alikins
It’s been out for awhile, but Zelda: Breath of the Wild has been my go-to game for several months. My relaxation game is Stardew Valley. It’s a farming game, but it’s oddly subversive. I hate farming games, but this is quite enjoyable after the first couple of hours. Stardew also supports multiplayer so I can play with my kids. I’m playing both on the Switch.
lol chikinburd
Specifically anticipating Terraria’s final major content update (free; they rock) and Kerbal Space Program 2; otherwise anticipating surprises from studios and solo developers I don’t yet know anything about. 2019 proved that AAA needs to be set on fire, irradiated, and shot into Sgr A*.
ETA: I just looked and I have over 1200 hours in Stardew Valley, and am heartened to see it mentioned this high up.
West of the Rockies
I honestly misread “Butch spacefaring lesbians” as bushfaring lesbians, which kinda makes sense.
Major Major Major Major
How so?
@alikins: love Stardew. Harvest Moon meets Minecraft, updated for 21st-century mores.
jeffreyw
Missile Command
Asteroids
Lost interest when they came out with Mario and Pac-Man
joel hanes
Warning: spoilers for Outer Worlds
Context: Half-Life 2 was for a long time my favorite of all games, and my first loves were the Unreal and Quake and Wolfenstein and Half-Life and Halo franchises.
I tried Outer Worlds (I’d been looking for something to replace Fallout 4, which I’d been playing for literally years). Everything that FO4 does with subtlety, OW does crudely or garishly. Everything that feels infinite about FO4 is perceptibly limited in OW. And at the end of level one, you must either completely fuck over a small town of oppressed and beat-down people, or betray and fuck over a band of rebels after you have taken pains to earn their trust; there is no third path. I abandoned the game.
I tried Far Cry 5: too redneck, a Dukes of Hazzard dystopia.
I tried Metro Exodus: garish, unrelentingly bleak, humorless, and hard. Extremely limited ammo.
I tried Destiny 2 : amazing shooter, but it moves very fast for an old man like myself. If I had the twitch reflexes of a 14-year-old, I’d have gotten sucked in. I’ll try this one again, eventually.
Concluded that what I was jonesing for something Bethesda, and picked up Skyrim, which I’d never played. Avoiding reading about Trump has gotten me to level 30, and I’ll be playing Skyrim for at least another year. Enormous, beautiful, a musical score I really like, a truly open world (although all the dungeon crawls are pretty close to being on rails), a tremendous variety of enemies (much better than FO4 in this respect) — really really a great game. Because it’s been out for so long, Bethesda has patched most of the glitches for which they are famous, and there’s a big library of DLC enhancements and mods which one can buy. My only two kvetches: (1.) Skyrim does not have the constructive settlement-building aspect of FO4, which was one of my favorite parts of that game. (2.) The Skyrim inventory mechanism is atrociously bad.
Major Major Major Major
Not true! Most of the decision points actually have compromise options if you’re willing to dig a bit and have the right skill bonuses.
It’s funny, everything that bothers the crap out of me about Bethesda games (lack of focus, so very many bugs, mediocre graphics, hideous faces, sprawl) was blissfully absent in Outer Worlds, which has an engine that actually runs, and also stays on theme and is accordingly (relatively) short.
eddie blake
xboxer here, now rocking the xbox one.
titanfall 2 is one of the greatest, most kinetic FPS games i’ve ever played. it’s uncanny. whenever i need to kill a half hour, it’s frontier defense, attrition or last titan standing.
i spend a little bit of time with star wars battlefront 2 and am close to wrapping up ac odyssey, which was a brilliant, mind-blowing open world gaming experience. SUCH beautiful environments and building on great gameplay mechanics from black flag and origins.
next for me is forza horizons
eta: oh, yeah, totally waiting on cyberpunk 2077. played the rpg back in the day.
Frankensteinbeck
Waiting for Silksong’s release will drive me to murder. If anyone likes (moderately difficult) combat 2D platformers, Silksong is the sequel to Hollow Knight, and Hollow Knight was the indie (3 person dev team!) game that came out of nowhere and became the king of the genre due to its fascinatingly weird story, gorgeously weird art, and tight gameplay. Also you’re a bug.
Journey to a Savage Planet just came out, and I’m co-oping it with a friend. It’s hard to explain. FPS with a bit of platforming and a bit of combat. It’s on the pretty side. Mostly it’s just not-quite-Pythonesque silly. Quite fun. One example of its tone is that at the very beginning you’re asked to pick which photo is you. Most of them have a ‘worst photo this person has ever taken’ look. One is a dog. I took the dog. Now all the ‘running hard’ and ‘got hit’ and so on sound effects are barking and whining and panting.
eddie blake
@joel hanes:
skyrim’s pretty neat. i played it on the 360.
that aurora borealis effect was beautiful.
Major Major Major Major
Oh, Luigi’s Mansion 3 was also a delightful romp.
Major Major Major Major
@Frankensteinbeck: super excited for Silksong too (and Kerbal 2, speaking of indie releases I want to get a new computer for)
joel hanes
@Major Major Major Major:
Hmm. I googled and retried from old saves several times. I could not find a way to get the spaceship part I needed while continuing to send power to both settlements. I regard removing power from either settlement as fucking them over.
Is there a way?
Also, playing on a three-year-old PC with a midrange graphics card, I had recurrent framerate problems with OW, much worse than FO4, that I have not yet encountered at all in Skyrim.
Walker
Outer Worlds is bad. It is repetitive and shallow. You collect the same items over and over again and it is all just to sell at vendors. Combat is boring even for a Bethesda type game. You do the same things over and over. Most of the people just are not that interesting. The story and ecology make little sense.
The only thing going for Outer Worlds is the companions. They have some interesting depth to them. Even if they do feel a little Firefly-inspired (I called the first two companions Kaylee and Shepard Book for the whole game). They are the only reason to play.
The game I recommend from last year is Control. SCP (Secure-Contain-Protect) meets Max Payne. And I always like a good Remedy game.
joel hanes
@eddie blake:
I was on the hardware team that designed the main chip for the 360. Glad you got some enjoyment out of it.
Sorry about the red-ring-of-death thing, if you encountered it: shipping that was a management decision, and made the engineers sad.
eddie blake
@joel hanes:
dude, i LOVED my 360. i got about eleven years of life out of it, only upgraded because the tray became un-aligned and i hadda bang on the top of the case like it was a drum before any of the games could spin up.
now, though, i must say, the xbox one is pretty awesome.
(and i’m playing HD on a MUCH larger tv)
JWR
Don’t no one here play DOOM no more? Ah shucks! Aside from those 1980’s Disneyland computer games, DOOM was my first real video game experience, and it was fun! The creators had released their source code into the wild, so anyone could write their own worlds / environments / new monsters, in a thing they called a Wad.
After that, I got into an auto racing game for Playstation 1, which I ran on my computer using open source programs to run it. And boy, on a computer, the PS1 had incredibly crisp graphics. Not the 8bit graphics you’d see using a TV.
Aside from that, I haven’t played a video game since the early 2000’s.
debbie
I watched both loops of that goose game, and as someone who was repeatedly attack by Canada geese who nested next to the door of my apartment, I can tell you that it is far too cute and sweet. Those bastards literally go for your throat when attacking.
Walker
@joel hanes: If your jonesing for something a little more story-driven than Skyrim, Witcher 3 is hands-down the best RPG of this console generation.
Bruce K
Forza Horizon 4 has a lot of perhaps-not-appreciated comedy value to it. I demonstrated it to my brother (my description was basically “It’s Top Gear, the game”), and when I demonstrated what happens when you put a Porsche twin-turbo flat-6 into a ’63 VW Bug, he was howling with laughter.
On the down side, it’s easy to get sucked into the game and lose hours doing “just one more try to clear this race”.
Major Major Major Major
@joel hanes: I play on consoles and haven’t had any bugs in OW, but Fallout and Skyrim were always having vanishing objects, some inside-out faces, lots of things getting stuck, console crashing, and no way to mod away the aesthetic issues.
If you divert power to Edgewater, you can convince them to reconcile after you get rid of Reed.
MisterForkbeard
@joel hanes: You can remove power from the rebel settlement but also put them in charge of the main settlement by convincing the current mayor to leave.
@JWR: DOOM is still awesome. There was a new (really good) Doom game in 2016, and there’s another one (Doom Eternal) coming out in March. They’re also FINALLY releasing Doom64 on PC, which was the Nintendo 64 version of Doom and is considered to be the best Doom campaign that exists.
mrmoshpotato
@JWR: I have DOOM 3 for the original XBox. I should play some classic DOOM on this snowy day.
And then see how rusty I am at Halo.
joel hanes
I have one friend who plays far more video games than I, and I’ve been watching him play for years. The cream:
very old: the Painkiller franchise. Spectacular shooters. Very crude cut scenes, but otherwise simply an outstanding FPS, with some novel weapons, and some bosses that made my heart race.
old: Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. Very big, full of fun challenges (insane stunts). Outstanding music. I couldn’t deal with the misogyny, nor with playing as a thug, but for those who like it, this is a game with very high replay value.
old: The Just Cause franchise. FPS. That grappling hook/parachute combination just makes the game.
Currently my friend is very deep in a second start of No Man’s Sky, up to his neck in complicated resource dependency chains, and deeply obsessed. The game is too inhuman for my taste.
mrmoshpotato
@debbie: Yup. Geese are vicious bastards.
Amir Khalid
I recently found a Minesweeper site. It’s amusing.
lol chikinburd
@Major Major Major Major: Loot boxes. Scummy microtransaction business models that leverage near-addictive behavioral patterns to siphon money out of people. Or try to, until players see what’s happening and get fed up. And, oh my god, what Activision did to Blizzard (over and above the Blitzchung debacle, though Beijing’s malign influence threatens the whole sphere).
Even Paradox fell from grace — not that their million-DLCs business model qualified as “grace”, but at least it had been married to solid games, and then they release Imperator: Rome.
mrmoshpotato
@Bruce K:
So what happens?
MisterForkbeard
I’ve recently gotten into the Trails of Cold Steel series. The first two were made for Vita/PS3 originally and just got ported over to PS4. The 3rd one was made for the PS4 and looks much better, but they’re fantastic JRPGs. Basically: The devs know they can’t compete with AAA studios on graphics, so they spend all their time on story, writing, and music.
As a result, you have a game where combat and visuals are decent but not impressive, but every NPC in the game has a lot of interesting text and flavor. Totally worth the entire series if you want a JRPG, and it has a few prequels which feature the same excellent writing. The music is also fantastic. See article here: https://kotaku.com/i-cant-get-enough-of-trails-of-cold-steel-iiis-intense-1841540897
I also started replaying Jedi Outcase recently, which still rocks. My daughters are really into animals, so I picked up Planet Zoo on the PC. And they’re still really into Pokemon Shield as well.
Terminator: Resistance is my surprise from 2019. I thought it would be crappy. It was actually pretty great.
But the best game of last year is hands-down Disco Elysium, in which you roleplay a cop trying to solve a murder – but who’s lost his memory and had a complete personality breakdown. To the point of being super surprised by a ceiling fan in the opening scene. As you pull yourself together your personality and skills literally talk to you as a way to influence your view of the world. It starts off super weird and gets surprisingly touching and poignant the farther you get through it. It has a ton of text, so it might be good for these folks.
It also has an awesome soundtrack. Review for the whole sucker right here: https://kotaku.com/disco-elysium-the-kotaku-review-1839723176
ETA: Added a couple links
joel hanes
@MisterForkbeard:
You can remove power from the rebel settlement but also put them in charge of the main settlement by convincing the current mayor to leave.
Yes. I regarded driving them from their independent living back into that company-town saltuna hell as fucking them over.
I’m the kind of FO4 player that had 800 settlers in 29 settlements, really didn’t want to destroy the Institute, never destroyed the Prydwen although I prepared all the armaments to do so (and I really hate the BOS leadership) and spent months carefully choosing what to do in the Far Harbor add-on so that all three factions could live in peace.
Major Major Major Major
@MisterForkbeard: Disco Elysium got some amazing press but looked kind of unpleasant, at least to me. Haven’t played it and obviously a lot of people who have loved it.
MisterForkbeard
@joel hanes: I’m with you. I actually never finished FO4 because I thought the faction dispute was stupid and I refused to pick a side. Did the same thing as you for Far Harbor.
In the Outer Worlds, you need the spaceship part. It has to come from somewhere. The best you can do is get the community back in one piece, positioned to succeed, and giving the rebels the ability to make things better by putting them in control. It works, too – the corporations aren’t happy about it later in the game.
Best solution to a crappy sitation, I thought.
JWR
@joel hanes: I just watched the trailer for Skyrim, and holy cow!, games have definitely gotten more appealing visually. But this stuff doesn’t really interest me, and I don’t know why. Maybe all that DOOM satisfied my curiosity for battles and hunting for gems or whatnot. No wait, I do know. It’s because the hours I would spend on games is already taken up by my guitars. Silly me. It’s not enough time! ;)
MisterForkbeard
@Major Major Major Major: The beginning is really uncomfortable. Like, awkward and weird and because you have no idea what you’re doing you fail a lot.
But it’s really quite good. Uplifting, even – especially at the end if you’ve played as a sober, responsible cop. You just need to get through the beginning when you’re incompetent.
joel hanes
@MisterForkbeard:
Best solution
It’s pretty much the video game equivalent of the trolley problem: a repellent and completely-contrived dilemma. Rather than be unhappy with what I had to do, I abandoned the game.
OTOH, I had no particular problem with summarily wiping out every single raider in Nuka World. Scum.
JWR
@MisterForkbeard:
Ooo, sounds awesome! Maybe I’ll take a peek at that one, just for kicks and grins, (and blasting, and flamethrowering, and killing, and much, much more!)
ETA you mentioned Grand Theft Auto. Did you know that you could shoot out the side view mirrors on parked cars in GTA? Too much fun!
Martin
Outer Worlds didn’t land as well as I hoped. Good, but not Fallout 4 fun. Skyrim – yeah, can’t go wrong there.
Stardew is the bomb, good chill fun.
In the Terraria vein, I highly recommend Starbound. Base building, farming, exploration, mining, combat. Lots of mods. Has a bit of everything. Same developer as Stardew Valley.
Other console games I really liked – Dying Light is about to get a sequel, but I thought it was really good. Zombie parkour. Prey was great – you’re trapped on a space station and strange alien stuff is going on. First person shooter, quite light on the shooter side, more exploration, puzzler. Has a really cool vibe. Subnautica is also quite fun.
PC games – I like more strategic game/builders and survival games. Factorio, Rimworld, Project Zomboid, Oxygen Not Included, Rise to Ruins (interesting city builder/tower defense/god game), Dwarf Fortress. Will probably pick up Transport Fever 2. The Long Dark is quite good as a first person pretty hardcore survival game.
Manxome Bromide
The surprise hit for me lately has been “Tametsi”, which is basically a collection of specially designed Minesweeper boards that are incredibly intricate and difficult. Some of the boards easily took over an hour to clear.
I’ve also been revisiting some older games I’ve never finished. I’m working through Metroid Prime now, and despite coming out 18 years ago (!!) it still looks like it could have been released last month.
MisterForkbeard
@Martin: Dying Light was really good! Especially if you played co-operatively with other players.
I did like Outer Worlds a lot, but they were pretty clear that it was a budget Fallout game and that’s what it was.
MisterForkbeard
@JWR: Just warning, the new Doom games are super brutal. Really good, but nuts.
If you want something more old-school, look into Ion Fury or Wrath: Aeon of Ruin. Ion Fury is basically Duke3D remade with modern sensibilities, and Wrath is the same thing but for Quake. Both are really excellent for more retro players.
Or just pick up Doom64 when it re-releases in March. It’ll run on a potato of a PC. :)
joel hanes
@MisterForkbeard:
Far Harbor: what did you do about telling Jule what you learned? That one broke my heart.
joel hanes
@MisterForkbeard:
it was a budget Fallout game
Wasn’t priced like it when I bought it.
I’d have been a lot happier with the game had I paid $10 for it.
Bruce K
@mrmoshpotato: You can get it going as fast as a high-grade Porsche, but it’s so unstable that it’ll spin out if you sneeze. I did that windmill danger-sign jump at 150 miles an hour, and he was doubled over laughing.
Martin
@joel hanes: Just Cause sits in a category we call ‘fuck around games’.
Basically games that hand you a cool set of mechanics and presumably some kind of story, which you’re free to ignore and just go off and do a bunch of fun stupid things that make you laugh.
Major Major Major Major
@Martin: hadn’t heard of Starbound, and I see that like most similar games I get excited about, it won’t run very well/at all on any of my devices. One more reason to get that gaming laptop.
joel hanes
@JWR:
holy cow!, games have definitely gotten more appealing visually
Skyrim was released for Christmas 2011. I’m playing it on a whitebox PC I had built a few years ago. With more modern hardware, the actual game looks *much* better than the trailer.
That said, I thought that the Far Harbor add-on to Fallout 4 was really beautiful, and would often revisit Far Harbor just for the visual treat.
Crashman06
Probably a bit late to this thread but I’ll chime in anyway.
Very close to finishing up an X-Com 2 playthrough with War of the Chosen and all the expansions. Very fun and satisfying. Sprinkled in between has been a good bit of Subnautica, which is very satisfying from an exploration angle, plus it’s very pretty. After that, either Fire Emblem Three Houses or Divinity: Original Sin 2.
MisterForkbeard
@Major Major Major Major: Starbound is pretty great – sort of like a slightly prettier Terraria. I used to run a Starbound server, it was a lot o fun
JWR
@mrmoshpotato: Isn’t Halo one of those games that take a week to complete? I prefer the get in, kill ’em all, then get out games.
And I just watched the trailer for DOOM Eternal, and wowza! It really does look like DOOM, but with more violence and extra blood! But no. This is a really interesting thread, but my foot always hurts like hell, and I’ve too much else to do already, so…. NEW THREAD!?? (I only ask because I might start spending all day playing DOOM again.)
;)
eddie blake
@JWR:
no. you can finish the first halo in a few hours.
none of them take longer than say six or seven hours in single player.
multiplayer, of course, is a different beast
JWR
@MisterForkbeard:
You know, I might just do that! I recently looked into getting the original DOOM to run on this two year old computer and found some DOS emulators or somesuch, and I just didn’t want to take the time, or mess up this computer! But yeah, I am most definitely more into the retro when it comes to games.
JWR
@eddie blake:
Oh wow. Hours? I am surprised. (But I’m still gonna play DOOM anyway!) ;)
billcinsd
@joel hanes: I’m pretty sure their are Skyrim mods that allow you to build a settlement much bigger than just your Hearthfire house. I wish I could find the mod to destroy the Thieves Guild.
I have been playing Football Manager 2020 on the PC lately and am anxiously waiting for Paranoia to hit Steam. Recently on my PS4 I have been playing Greedfall, The Sinking City and The Golf Club 2019
billcinsd
@JWR:
GOG has some Doom games that will play on new/newer PCs — GOG is a great place to find retro games, cheap. I got Temple of Elemental Evil there
https://www.gog.com/game/the_ultimate_doom
joel hanes
@eddie blake:
you can finish the first halo in a few hours.
Slight correction: _you_ can finish the first Halo in a few hours. I could not.
But Halo did allow creation of one of my very favorite of all time gameplay videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9o8M4tLcU1g
J R in WV
@debbie:
Geese are like that, swans are even worse. Parents were on a driving trip on the East Coast, evidently Delaware has many former du Pont estates turned into public parks.They were driving up a long winding drive and passed a pond with swans. Stopped to admire the giant birds.
One big male came out of the water, running hard for their car, a small roadster — fortunately the top was up. Dad wound the window up with the magic button, just as the swan reached him.
There was a huge gob of swam spittle on the window as they drove away from the pond up to the estate home museum. It was still there when they got home. He barely made it, getting the window up, the swan would have hurt him if he hadn’t either got the window up or floored it our of there.
I still have that car…
Villago Delenda Est
Civ VI. Because I can’t get Civ V to launch.
JWR
@billcinsd:
GOG? Thanks for that link, (I’ve already bookmarked it), but how do those work? Do you download a game and it puts itself into a DOS Shell to run like a regular program on a new machine, or do they have an entirely new engine? But hey, at $6 bucks, I really might try Ultimate DOOM. Thank you again, ;)
eddie blake
@joel hanes:
that’s pretty amazing.
Martin
@Major Major Major Major: It’s pretty easy on hardware. It’s a 2D scroller, so no big GPU needed.
Martin
@joel hanes: It was remastered and rereleased in 2018, I think? That version looks quite a bit better.
Game holds up really well, despite Bethesda being bad at software.
Major Major Major Major
@Martin: my MacBook choked on Hollow Knight pretty bad. I had to turn a lot of the effects down. I can only imagine the sequel will be even more resource-intensive.
Crashman06
@Major Major Major Major: Hollow Knight was a great Switch game for me.
Major Major Major Major
@Crashman06: Switch was the perfect platform for it. It’s… a great system.
Trabb's Boy
Red Dead Redemption 2 may be the best game I’ve played. Utterly stunning world building, amazing characters and story line. Filled with fun surprises utterly unnecessary to the plot, just there to make the game cool. Probably not the best game if fighting is your highest priority, but if you love immersion and some seriously natty fur wear, it’s tops.
Cyberpunk 2077 looks less appealing with each preview. The one floating around for years, with Archive playing in the background had me drooling, especially since The Witcher was so well done, but it really does look more GTA 1983.
This is the second time I’ve seen someone say Death Stranding works in spite of itself, so I might have to try it. Metal Gear 5 was fantastic, but maybe despite the Kojima weirdness more than because of it?
Blizzard and Bethesda have both been taken over by the ‘shareholders uber alles’ crowd, and I fear the AAA off-line era is ending. Really nothing at all in 2019. It’s a lot harder to get into indie games that only last a few hours.
Ah well, many, many years of replay ahead.
Crashman06
@Major Major Major Major: It really is. Unfortunately I haven’t been playing it much lately because my analog sticks are drifting and I don’t want to invest the cash in replacing them yet. Makes precise games pretty hard to play.
miserybob
The Delivery aspects of Death Stranding were so much fun! I’ve never played a game before with such attention paid to its environment – you can trip over any rock, you can scrabble up any slope, ford any stream, provided you have the right equipment! The Combat system was terrible. For me it got unplayable later in the game as you had to fight bosses – when you have to fight the main baddie one on one by hurling luggage at him (all of a sudden the landscape is strewn with suitcases), I gave up. I may restart some day and just travel around making deliveries – that was fun!
I really loved Horizon: Zero Dawn, although it’s been out for awhile. Great combat, great story, amazing visuals, so much fun. It’s set in the Western US, so you can run into the ruins of Denver’s Mile High Stadium or Red Rocks while you blow apart robot dinosaurs with your souped up bows. It really reignited my love of gaming after many years away. The DLC add-on Frozen Wilds is large and fantastic, too.
For mostly mindless blow-upitude, I recommend Days Gone. Just ripping around post-apocalyptic Zombie Oregon on your modded-out bike napalming hordes of freaks is good clean fun. There were a ton of bugs early on, but it’s very stable now.
billcinsd
@Martin: Skyrim was rereleased Fall 2016. You still get mammoths grazing in the sky sometimes
billcinsd
@JWR: For ToEE, which I bought a few years ago, they sent the box with a manual and the disks. I think they may still do that. I have not purchased Doom so have no knowledge about how it runs
They use Dosbox to run the game. Many of the GOG reviews indicate that GZDoom may be a better way to run it
Major Major Major Major
@miserybob: for the boss fight you can also just tie him up with your climbing rope, though this is only apparent if you’re thinking metaphorically.
I didn’t mind the Death Stranding combat once I got the hang of it. Better than Metal Gear combat, and those hold up great.
Miss Bianca
Gotta say the goose game sounds like some good clean (annoying) fun.
JWR
@billcinsd: That’s what I was wondering, is it just a download, or are disks part of the bargain? I have several DOOM (and Quake), CDs but I doubt that would make a difference. But there are ways to run DOOM with free or GNU software. Maybe I’ll mess around with some freeware to run my old disks, just to find out if I’m at all interested in gaming again.
joel hanes
@billcinsd:
One of the things that often made me laugh in FO4 was to fast-travel, and then observe the brahmin falling from the sky, or derelict cars falling off ruined freeways.
I haven’t seen a flying mammoth yet, but floating rabbits and foxes have come to my attention. For me, these are not serious defects. The glitched major quests in FO4 that required console commands to get unstuck — those would cause me to call down maledictions on Bethesda were I playing on a gamebox.
Major Major Major Major
That’s what makes them major defects for many of us.
joel hanes
@Major Major Major Major:
Off and on, for a dozen years, I made my living by doing computer engineering for game boxen.
I do my gaming on a PC. The major reason being WASD/mouse instead of a gamepad, but there are a host of lesser reasons.
MisterForkbeard
@JWR: I am SUPER LATE returning to this thread, but if you’re worried about this go buy the game from gog.com (formerly “good old games”) – they pack the emulator and compatibility fixes into the game, so you don’t have to worry about it.
They’re good for a bunch of old games – Doom is maybe $10, but you can get ahold of the old x-wing games, adventure games from the 90s, etc. Lots of good things there.
EDIT: I can see others got to this before I did :)
MisterForkbeard
@JWR: Outside of a couple game, GOG does not give you any disks or physical stuff. You download the .exe and an installer, and the older games run under DosBOX in a known working configuration.
Sometimes they make additional compatibility fixes. Things like gzDoom may work better overall but can take some fiddling – the nice thing about GOG is that you know it doesn’t require any work.
joel hanes
@Walker:
Witcher 3
Thanks for the rec. I watched the trailer — it looks completely amazing. I have alerted my brother in law who most loves medievalist RPGs
MisterForkbeard
@joel hanes: The Witcher 3 has a bit of history (the Witcher 1 and 2) but they’re not necessary. It IS fantastic, though – especially once you get out of the opening tutorial area.
miserybob
@Walker: Thanks for the Control rec – I’ve been playing for about an hour. Pretty fun, so far! (And it’s on sale!)
Walker
@miserybob:
Make sure you read all of the documents you pick up. These really make the game.
Cameron
For anyone who isn’t aware XBox’s streaming service GamePass is also available on PC. At $15 a month it’s the best deal in gaming (especially for anyone who is still discovering what’s styles and genres they’re into)
For instance they had Outer Worlds at launch (so it didn’t cost me anything to find out how much that game bored me.)
They also have Untitled Goose Game if anyone is interested in trying that. Tons of indies, actually. Bloodstained, Lonely Mountain Downhill, Pathologic 2, and My Friend Pedro were all games I tried on gamepass.
They also have new and old blockbusters such as Monster Hunter World and The Witcher 3.
I recently cancelled Gamepass because I have a backlog I’m trying to get through. And anyway I really only got it for a couple games I wanted to try. Outer Worlds (which has been mentioned multiple times on this thread) and the real game of the year which, sadly, no one has mentioned: The Outer Wilds. Obviously the titles are pretty similar and, unfortunately, that seems to have hurt the smaller The Outer Wilds’ ability to gain recognition in the marketplace. Go try it though, it’s an absolutely incredible experience.